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Category: Gaming

WISH 65: Workin' for a Living

WISH 65 asks about jobs and gaming:

Does what you do for a living have any impact on your gaming? Have you had occupational details intrude on your descriptions of how something works? Have you ever dared a player to go “Hotwire a car, then, if that’s how you think it’s done?”

I’m a computer guy, but the answer’s really “Nah.” I’ve played Shadowrun, and I don’t really mind that decking is nothing like real computer work — it’s just an analogy for magic anyway, so I can take it at that level happily enough. I don’t mind if someone gets their hacking descriptions wrong, and I generally assume any modern-day game takes place in a slightly alternate universe.

Now, if you turned the question around, I’d have to say yes. I currently work for a computer game studio, and one of the reasons I got the job is because I’m an avid player of their games. So there’s that.

I also — don’t laugh — attribute some degree of my management skills to spending a lot of time playing Amber online. I know that may sound like rank gamer arrogance. Allow me to elaborate. I think that a lot of management is simply being able to pay attention to what people are thinking and feeling. Gaming doesn’t give you that skill, but it is a good arena in which to practice that skill.

If you’re an insensitive idiot, playing a leader isn’t going to make you any better at it. If you have a certain degree of social eptness to start with, though, it’s just like any other skill. Practice makes perfect. And how many opportunities do you have to practice leadership in a simulated environment?

It’s also a chance to practice sounding confident, and again, practice makes perfect. I don’t manage people by threatening to send their families into exile from Chaos, mind you, but I know how to be direct and reassuring. That skill carries over.

Monday Mashup #9: West Wing

In honor of the impending election season, and because — oh, wait, nobody demanded it. Well, our mashup of the day is The West Wing anyway. Depending on how you look at it, West Wing is either a brilliant show about a team of exceptional individuals working to maintain their ideals under the spotlight of Presidential politics, or it’s a self-indulgent epic about a bunch of unlikely White House staffers that takes place in an alternate reality in which liberal politics work. Either way, it’s got that snappy Aaron Sorkin dialogue and it’s kind of nice to pretend that our government is that idealistic.

Have at it.

WISH #64: Godtalk

Simple Game WISH question this week:

Name three gods or religions that have appeared in games you’ve played in. Were they good, bad, or indifferent? What made them so?

Off the top of my head, I can only remember one campaign in which deities played a significant on-screen role… no, wait, maybe two. OK, two.

First off, the easy one. Carl’s Babes in the Woods campaign is based on Bronze Age Celtic culture, but the gods are Roman, because the Roman culture in that world was the elves and they conquered everything. I played a cleric of the Traveller (Mercury), Cian, and his restless roguish nature was very defining for the character. Another PC was a paladin of Kore; at one point in the campaign, the gods argued about who would get this new champion, and she got to choose the god she wanted to follow. This sounds like a twinkfest unless you know Carl, in which case you’d be remembering that Greek gods get really petty when mortals deny them something they want.

Which is the key to why the gods worked so well in that game; they were a tangible presence in our lives without being overbearing to the point where player fun was diminished. They had personality. Probably the same reason we like Greek myth so much — they’re fun gods, even if you’d be wary about having a drink with ‘em.

The more complex one: Catholicism was important in UN PEACE, but probably only to me, since my character Paul was Catholic. It’s hard to say the gods were good or bad in that game, since they never showed up (although there was one person claiming to be an angel…). However, Carl did a good job recognizing that religion was an important factor in Paul’s personality and providing roleplay opportunities around that element.

Monday Mashup: Gamememe Mailing List

Since there are a few regular game writing memes out there these days — my Monday Mashup and Ginger’s Game WISH come to mind — I thought it might be nice to have an announcement list for people who want to keep up with them. Thus, I set up a list at Yahoo for precisely that purpose. Right now, every time I post a new Monday Mashup, it’ll send a message to the list. Ginger is setting Game WISH up the same way. The list is moderated, and there shouldn’t ever be any other traffic on it, so it’s just a few posts a week.

Go here to join if you’re interested. If you have a game writing meme and you’d like to use the list to publicize it and you’re using Movable Type (or some other trackback-enabled tool), let me know and I’ll get you set up. If the previous technobabble turns you pale let me know and maybe I can walk you through it.

Monday Mashup #8: Beach Boys

Your Mashup, should you choose to accept it: the Beach Boys. Yeah, the surfer legends, the face of 1960s surf music, the boy band of the decade — the Beach Boys. Without pushing in any particular direction, I’d say there’s potential for romantic scenarios, ecological scenarios, fun-oriented scenarios, or even auto racing scenarios. A lot of roleplaying is oriented towards the big deadly problem. The Beach Boys… are not. What can you do with the sun-drenched teenage hormonal wonderland evoked by “Surfer Girl”?

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy and you prefer the Smile lyrics, though, be my guest. That stuff is pretty cool too.

Dear Brother #10 (Intro)

The next three Dear Brothers are all writeups from one session. Only one of them is by Reese. Rob did the session in three parts. The first was a sideways trip to a pulp world in which we played Doc Lully’s Pulp Heros and explored the Hollow Earth; the second was a flashback to 1968, during which we played the Silver Age Knights of the Road, kin to the Merry Pranksters. The final segment was our usual characters, albeit in a situation they didn’t remember after the fact.

I’ve ambitiously adopted two new voices for the purpose of recounting the first two sessions. If they work half as well as Reese’s voice, I’ll be very pleased.

WISH #63: Value adds

WISH 63 asks:

What kinds of game-related things do you do when you’re not gaming? Do you write journals or fiction, create web-pages, make character images, or indulge in other outside game-related business? If you game regularly face-to-face, do you play by email or chat outside the game? Does your GM give you experience or character rewards for your efforts? And if you don’t do any of these things, what are your reasons for not doing them (disinterest, insufficient time, insufficient interest, etc.)?

Oh, man. This is gonna be long.

OK, this is kind of repetition for people who read my blog regularly, but what the heck. Yeah, I do a lot of out of game stuff, just for my own amusement. A bunch of it is on the Web, and I will take this opportunity to link ruthlessly, in roughly chronological order.

Going very old school, from the time I spent in Iowa City, I have Chela’s diary. It’s from an Amber campaign I was in. Fun game, even if the diary is an artifact of a much younger me.

Next, we have my UN PEACE page, a half-hearted IC Web page for Carl Rigney’s UN PEACE campaign. I gave up on keeping it up to date at some point. Man, the graphics on the Vantage Comics page suck. The individual comic titles are links, which is not at all obvious from the design. I put way too much effort into coming up with faux reality comic storylines, not to mention the comic creators.

The Honor Against the Wall page is the only one of these that I created as a GM; it’s for a short-lived L5R game that I wish I’d kept up. I’ll pretend it’s Rob Heinsoo’s fault for moving to Seattle. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Anyhow, it’s a much prettier page.

Lately, of course, I’ve been writing the Dear Brother letters for my disturbing character in Rob’s Unknown USA campaign. I’m very proud of them, which is I suppose why I’ve kept them up. I’m almost up to date, too. They go with the infamous Unknown USA Wiki, which has not only eaten my brain but seems to have eaten the brain of at least one fellow player plus the GM.

I do these things for games I’m really enjoying because it gives them weight. Reese is more concrete to me because of the material I’ve written. The wiki has had the additional, unexpected effect of clarifying a huge amount of in-game material. Hm, and I’ll expound a bit on that:

Our characters have more bandwidth to notice the little things in their lives. No GM can possibly describe all the small setting elements that go into forming a mood; we say the circus tent is scary, and provide a few reasons as to why, but it’s never more than an outline which leaves us to fill in the details of the fear. That’s an effective technique, but it’s very hard to simulate leaps of intuition, because they’re generated by those details.

The wiki provides a very quick-forming context in which multiple players can generate those leaps through a sort of brainstorming process. When you’re carefully filling in all the links between setting elements, you see things you wouldn’t see otherwise — it’s a method of tricking yourself into reviewing all the little hints dropped by the GM. Great stuff.

OK, where was I? I’ve never gotten experience points for any of this stuff except Chela’s diary, but that’s not really why I do it. I do it cause I like writing and I like making out of game artifacts that touch on the game. It’s a way of connecting to the setting, for me.

I sometimes RP outside sessions of an FTF game. It depends on the players and the situation. For example, Carl was running another game in the UN PEACE universe, and my PC had a romance with one of the PCs in that game, so we did some online RP around that. But it’s not something I do habitually.