Only a year or two after I started GM’ing seriously, I got involved in Interactive Fiction (often abbreviated as “IF”) writing with a cyberpunk adventure game called Orchestra. My crummy setting naming skills and limitations of the platform I was building it on notwithstanding, it received generally positive feedback from the people who came to play it, and the things that players recounted to me [Read the article]
The “concept of cool” does not necessarily have to cheapen our game worlds, but enrich them…
Have you ever played a game that felt like it was drawing you in from the very beginning? One that presented you with the things you needed to know in order to play without making you sit through dreary pauses, cut-scenes, and simple tasks?
Engagement is key whenever one designs an entertainment experience. As a writer, I can testify for the fact that something that is boring won’t get read. Great games are made by people that recognize this concept and apply it to its fullest. The core principle behind engagement is the idea that players should always be focusing on the current action or a future action…
Mindjammer is many things in one. It’s a space opera game that really has rules and mechanics for pretty much everything, all powered by the Fate Core system…
Choice. It’s something that nobody really considers to be a “bad” thing in gaming. However, it is also something that is fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of people in gaming…
One of the things I’ve often been asked as a somewhat experienced GM who’s run games with lots of players is “How do I get girls interested in my games?” It’s an interesting question, and one that can be really quite painful…
One thing that a lot of people who describe themselves as “hardcore” gamers lament is how the highest profile games always are the ones that are the least like what they want to see in the market. For instance, every Call of Duty release cycle, there will be a fairly large crowd posting vitriolic comments stating hat “Call of Duty is the cancer in gaming” or “not the same game again”. And every few years or so, the concept that this will come to some sort of apocalyptic climax for gaming comes up. It’s entirely false, however, for a number of reasons…
Creative Commons and the Open Game License were supposed to herald a new, open, era of gaming in which we see games being released to a broader audience for enjoyment and consumption but also for creation of content. However, one often overlooked fact is that many of these licenses wrongly provide a sense of protection that is not available within certain works, and also cause [Read the article]