[Oo! Let’s Make a Game!] Episode 8: Building People!

identities

54:46 long & 50.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) finish developing the character-based situation for the game they’re designing — before your very ears! — then move on to discussing some ways that characters can be pushed to change away from baseline humanity

Rob’s during-the-show notes, the document containing the complete write-up of the relationship map, and Joshua’s ideas on the cloudkill technology.

– Rob does a staged reading of the lyrics to “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants
– We reflect on how much podcasting is like The King of Comedy
– Obligatory references to Vincent Baker, Radio Lab, and Paul Beakley (we also talk about Ben Lehman)
– COINTELPRO
– The film Jarhead
– The Wire, Generation Kill, and Battlestar Galactica
– John Dillinger
– Toxoplasmosis, Brilliant Gameologists podcast, and Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
– Hampshire College, the college Joshua graduated from
– Crank, which has a sub-standard sequel
– Mortal Coil
– My Life with Master
– Cloudkill
– A Scanner Darkly
– JiffyCon
– There are mysterious goings-on on the Facebook page for shock:

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants from the album The Spine.

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 7: Life During Wartime

ethnicRhinoplasty

58:34 long & 56.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) try out a new way of designing and recording. The show will be going biweekly and Joshua & Rob are going to start doing some design before recording, then discuss it. A great deal of headway is made making up the starting characters and mapping out some of their relationships.

Joshua & Rob’s pre-show work and formal/structured notes written during the episode.

– Joshua & Rob discuss fucking robots and the uncanny valley
– Jenn from Trapcast is happy to “see” us back
– The setup of the protagonists in a pentagram
– Each iteration of the game will have one of the five characters as protagonist
– Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures has rules for saying who’s the protagonist on a per-episode basis, and shock: does it on a per-scene basis; Rob presumes that The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-playing Game has something to handle a main protagonist with back-ups
– Seth Ben Ezra’s Dirty Secrets also has one main protagonist
– Vincent Baker‘s game Synthia
– Emily Care Boss has a game in playtest that adapts Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema (there’s a Story Games thread post that discusses it very briefly
– Stealing the qualitative fictional rule-setting from Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
– Joshua is reading Not of Woman Born on recommendation from Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
– Joshua and Rob argue over whether police are just another gang
– A discussion including the film L.A. Confidential and the TV show The Wire
– I spoil the 1991 remake of Cape Fear to make a point

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Life During Wartime” by The Talking Heads.

Incidentally, you can find more information about the header image for the blog post at this article about ethnic cosmetic surgery.

Feelings in Role Playing

feelings

There’s an experiment going on at #rpgtweory about RPG rules about feelings. I have feelings about them. But Ben and I were having a hard time expressing ourselves 140 characters at a time.

My original assertion, with subtleties edited out for brevity, was this:

Never write rules about feelings. Write rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them.

Ben didn’t buy it, and there was more to the idea anyway. Let’s discuss!

I Never Thought that Being Called a Yoni Would Be So Flattering

Too Fat to Be a Rockstar

In 2006, Remi Treuer and I played in a game of Mortal Coil with Judd Karlman, Brennan Taylor (the designer), Paul Tevis, and Steve Dempsey. In it, we played a band called Flaming Taft, circa 1972 as the punk scene in “New Amsterdam” was really getting rolling. My character, Fucking Jim (known as The Fucking Bassist), was the bassist, but he was really an electronic experimental musician at heart. In fact, all of the characters were really born to do something else than their part in the band. Well, everyone except the drummer, who kept the band together (you see what we did there?). Fucking Jim was equal parts Graham Lewis, Brian Eno, Conrad Schnitzler, John Cage and George Antheil. So when Remi told me he was going to use him as the basis for a character in his new webcomic about musicians, I was kind of excited. I told him if he had any questions about the character, I could tell him what the dude would do.

But then he end-ran that. The end result, Yoni, is much more me than Fucking Jim. Which is good. Fucking Jim was fucking Judd’s character because he liked the sound her heating pipes made at night, and that’s not the kind of behavior I really endorse.

Remi’s comic is called Too Fat to Be a Rockstar. It has excellent characters and I like the way they evolve. I like the way that the things they care about change and how they change in response. And I love Remi’s faces.

The Power of Ten

The previous post had a couple of seconds of this fantastic film and I had to go root it up, since maybe you haven’t seen it. It could even been that you haven’t seen it because you were born too late. It’s also relevant to Eppy’s link to Merzo, which shows the relative sizes of various science fiction objects, from Yoda and R2 to the Enterprise to a Dyson Sphere.

Music of the Spheres

This is by the same guy as A Glorious Dawn, John Boswell. Not only are these beautiful and sincere, but they address something that Robert Krulwich said in a graduation speech at the California Institute of Technology: we have to learn to tell stories about science. The underlying logical beauty of the process is not enough. Because there are other people with better stories, and the stories are what get people to think, to accept, to challenge, and ultimately to act.

It looks like we can have beautiful music about science, too.

OLMAG Episode 6: How to Start a War!

Check out that kid's face.

(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)

52:24 long & 50.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.

Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show

– Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
– Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
– We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
– Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
– Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
– In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
– Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
– Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
– Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
– A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
– Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
– We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
– Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
– No listener homework
– Working title: “Lifeless”
– We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.