We who love interactive fiction, story games, role-playing games, video games, and their myriad synonyms still have a lot of thinking – and, more to the point, talking; or, even better, creating – to do before we know what they’re about. The thought that games can also be stories, or should have anything to do [...]
A fascinating attempt over at Charlie’s Diary to unpack the background information and assumptions necessary to understand an extremely bizarre recent MMORPG phenomenon: URL spamming, written in the corpses of falling gnomes.
I recently attended a panel hosted by the International Game Developers Association on the topic of Writing for Fantasy Game Worlds. It was an interesting event, with three very different perspectives on game writing: Daniel Greenberg, who has served as Creative Director for Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and whose Tolkein lore would best [...]
This is a prototype for a role-playing game in which the players explore one another’s memories. It was conceived and created in a single afternoon, and has not yet been playtested. It’s inspired by the novel House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, by the novel Passage by Connie Willis, by my hypertext fiction work The [...]
Those who have run or played role-playing games (RPGs) may enjoy this summary of the Laws of Good Game Mastering booklet. It describes seven GM behaviors – The World Builder, The Duelist, The Plotmeister, The Master of Ceremonies, The Actor, The Director, and The Provider – and draws distinctions between them based on objective, behavior, [...]