Via a Story Games thread, I happened across a talk from Gen Con 2012 with James Ernest and Jason Morningstar. Ernest's notes are online, as is a mp3 of the seminar. Part of Ernest's point is here:

Randomness in game design can be broken down into three general categories relating to game design: Cosmetic, biased, and fair randomness ( Read more... )

Looking over my larp list from the last post, one thing that stands out is that half of them are light and comedic, suitable for pre-teen kids. I think there's a tendency in culture as a whole to view tragedy as more deep and interesting than comedy - particularly if the topics are highly charged and extreme. This is reflected in some of the ( Read more... )

Earlier this month, on the relatively new blog Gaming as Women, Darla Magdalene Shockley posted about some pitfalls of player feedback mechanics - drawing from experiences with Paranoia XP and Primetime Adventures - in a post called "Game Design and Sexism: Player Feedback Mechanics" . This was a controversial post, and by way of explanation, ( Read more... )

So some thoughts on the RPG community and subculture. This was inspired by some other discussions -- this time I'm putting links on the bottom, since I want to emphasize my positive message first.

What makes a subculture?

Gary Alan Fine, in his book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds , analyzed the gaming community in 1979 as ( Read more... )

So as a followup to my earlier post, "Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and 'D&D for Girls'".

Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress

I did read Shelly Mazzanoble's book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, now that it is actually out. Unfortunately, I lost my copy of it, so I'm not prepared to doing ( Read more... )

So I'd like talk about game-mastering as a social position.

Recent Discussion

One of the banes of Internet discussion is fragmented forums. On theRPGsite there was a thread started by poster "Gunslinger" called "Do Rules Heavy and Story Games have the same goal?", his thesis being "Both are built to minimize where the GM has final say over ( Read more... )

I'd like to talk about serious role-playing games a bit. There are several groups talking about serious games, notably the Serious Games Initiative which has regular panels at the Game Developers Conferences. As they describe themselves, The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges ( Read more... )

The September 2007 Issue of Cerise has been out for over a week now. Cerise is a monthly webzine intended as a resource by and for women gamers.

There are a bunch of articles in this one of interest, including:

• "Sisterhood is powerful: women-oriented gaming communities" by Andrea Rubenstein

Related to that, I also have a news article of sorts ( Read more... )

Via feminist_gamers, I noted Cerise: May 2007 and Call for Submissions. Cerise is a monthly "gaming magazine for women"(that covers video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing). (For those like me who didn't recognize it, cerise is a shade of red that comes from the French word for cherry.)

In the first issue (May 2007), the articles focus on ( Read more... )

I have been pondering some more about social contract and gaming. This is inspired a bit by some more theory discussions lately -- notably "Ingredients of a Good Gaming Group" on the IRIS Network, but also some other not-directly-related threads like "Acting out of character" on Story Games which talked about the line-breaking of having a ( Read more... )