A Romp Into Dawn of Thrones V2

A big special thanks goes out to Brooks, Clark and Richard for their patience and great stamina to pound through another version of my Twilight Imperium board game mod ‘Dawn of Thrones’.  I took no pictures unfortunately, but if I had, they would look a lot like the picture above.  The game went much better this time and we cut our TI game play time in half with the new rules.  For those board game geeks out there, I’ll be posting my V2 rules shortly after I’ve cleaned them up.  Thanks again to the players!

The Control Horizon

What is it about Mario games that allows them to span 20 years with their control schemes relatively intact and their concepts only slightly evolved?  Why is classic Mario more popular than the Mario traveling between worlds in Galaxy?

QBR (Quick Book Review) – Federations

Federations is a collection of short stories by various contemporary science fiction writers.  Overall, I found it greatly enjoyable.  While I was tempted to leave things at that, I guess a little more information would be helpful.  Its twenty-odd stories about various aspects of large galactic federations explore many interesting ideas, worlds, characters and cultures.  Not the hardest of Sci-fi, but a sweet spot between space opera and work that takes itself more seriously.

Feel Something! (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love FarmVille)

I have a rant I must rant.  It is about the diversity of emotion within games and how we can evoke something more than ‘smug’ superiority.

The Two Sides of Play

I’m sure others have said it better and said it more often but it seems to me that there are fundamentally only two sides to something, the light side and the dark side.  Derived from the day and the night, the eternal cycle gives us one of the largest fundamental dichotomies of our existence.  While there are nuances, structures and sophisticated forms, the fundamental idea of light and dark permeate so much of our art, story telling and play.  While obvious and fundamental to us all, it has been a bit of a journey of mine to explore this idea over last few weeks.

What a game is

Please forgive my academic indulgence:

Flow is a feeling of escape and timelessness

Experiencing flow is fun

Play is an activity in the pursuit of fun

A toy is an artifact to facilitate play

A puzzle provides goals to facilitate play

A game establishes relationships through play

Some puzzles are toys

Some games are puzzles

Fin.

GDC 2010 Thoughts

My GDC 2010 Impressions

Twilight Imperium – Dawn of Thrones Mod

Warning: Has nothing to do with Vampires, or even vampires.

Social impact of board games

I have what I would consider a fairly typical group of gamer friends.  These guys have grown up on D&D, board games and table-top games.  We all love games and have our own relationship to them.  Something unusual happened over the last few game sessions.  We abandoned the game we all loved and respected for a shallower version of the same game.  Our sin was liking the experience more but we took so much joy in the fact that we were all on speaking terms by the end of the night.  I have so much respect for the game that brought us so much misery, that I had to take a deeper look.

Emotion in games, I’m on the band wagon

While looking into compulsion, I found that I couldn’t avoid looking directly at emotion.  The above picture is from Heavy Rain, a game where the creators are trying to introduce more emotion into games.  I must admit that I was skeptical for a long time and passed it off as artistic indulgence.   Something came along and changed my mind completely yet I haven’t played the game.  Emotion isn’t the sign of indulgence but perhaps the complete opposite in a medium rife with shallow emotional connections to simply sensational experiences.  While I do not speak with any authority on the subject, I am passionate about it and want to learn to do it right.