http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics In which Mo explores the social pathology of roleplaying and begins to experiment with game design. Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:34:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As usual, Chris Chinn over at Deeper in the Game rocks my world with his post "A conveniently shifting line. Go read it. Grasping what he's saying there is critical to reading me. http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/77 (or, variations on an old theme.) So Brand and I have been playing Vincent Baker's new game In a Wicked Age. It's a load of fun, very intuitive, fiction forward and non-fiddly for those of us who like the system to get out of the way in the moment of play. ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/67 So in thinking about my last post in the series, it occurs to me that there are a lot of things that enable intimacy in roleplay. This post is about three of them. Art Ages ago, on Yud’s Dice, Brand talked about how the word art was a power word… “Art is a ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/64 Ian Burton Oaks is quietly, yet prolifically posting over at Games for the Mind about some interesting stuff. The place I'm going to point you to is his discussion of GMing in which he also talks about hippy games and their possible tendency to be "socket locked" (that is, hard ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/60 So here I'm going to talk only about the upper right block, the domain of the Impassioned Other, where I spend the most and best of my play. As I've mentioned before, I'm a strong masker. I maintain a distinct identity within the characters I play, but I have a ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/57 So Brand and I have signed up for Camp Nerdly, and have every intention of going to Gencon this summer barring, you know, random acts of India or whatnot. This is where I make my first confession: I'm a con virgin. I've not been to a single, solitary one. I was ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/56 This isn't the post I set out to write. But it's helpful in understanding that one, which I hope to write next, so I'm posting it anyway. I think that examination of the kind of gaming context you're in can really help to identify where you're coming from and help ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/55 So I thunk this tool up a while back, and am looking to develop it further. It combines the Blood, Violence, Sex, Money ties that Brand tells me are from Sorcerer Soul into a process not unlike Dogs Town creation. I tested it out on Dave Cleaver, and he came ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/54 It's been forever and a day, but here are the last logs for BitV: Session 5 Game Log Session 5 Game Log No OOC Session 6 Game Log Session 6 Game Log No OOC Enjoy! http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/49 I realize that this should be the next in the series of posts I've been working on, but it ain't. Rather, this is just something rolling around in my head on a Thursday afternoon... During Game Chef and since, I've read a whole lot of snippets of RPG's in development and ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/44 So, if you noticed than in talking about Cognitive / Impassioned play and I / Other that I plotted one horizontally and one vertically and sussed that I might one day be working them together, it's here that you get a cookie. :) Why would I put them together? Because I ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/43 Now of course, the place you find yourself on either the Cognitive / Impassioned scale and the I / Other scale is not a static thing. If you gamed 10 years ago and you're gaming now, chances are that there are a handful of things about game back then ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/38 Go read Brand's GNS and Genre Theory right now. All my stuff will still be here when you get back. http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/37 So, the second axis I wanted to have a look at is the place that you position yourself to drive your actions in the game. I'm going to talk about this a lot more in future posts, especially about the wording I've chosen to describe it: I and Other. For ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/36 I've thought for some time that one of the reasons we get so bollixed up when we talk about play styles is because although we often assume that we approach game the same way, we really, very much do not. I think there are a couple of things that we've ... http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/35