January 18, 2010 – 10:05 am
By virtue of the magic circle, all games can be said to exist within a liminal space. But liminality is a mental state, you have to have the buy-in of the player to get them into the space. It requires that choice to transgress out of their normal space and into the new one. Otherwise [...]
January 15, 2010 – 9:15 am
A liminal space is an other space, one which exists within the world, and separate from them. I’m interested in these spaces and much of what I practice and am attracted to are about being in them. In a pagan ritual, we “cast a circle” which creates a space in the world and separate from [...]
January 14, 2010 – 11:56 am
No post today, it’s just my way of making Thursdays a little worse. Sorry about that.
I did put up a new post on the erotica blog, though, also about Thursdays. It’s not safe for work, which is why it’s on the erotica blog.
Tomorrow we return to Liminality, Games, and other stuff what enters my mind [...]
January 13, 2010 – 9:35 am
Here’s a thought that occurred to me as I was writing yesterday’s post.
If Tetris came out today, it’d be a casual game.
So, why isn’t it considered a casual game? It’s success on the Game Boy was a lot like other Nintendo successes since then, many of which have garnered them derision for pandering to a [...]
January 12, 2010 – 9:10 am
Transgression in its primary sense is the violation of a moral law or duty. It can also be more generally defined as “the action of going beyond or overstepping some boundary or limit”, according to one of The Free Dictionary.com’s sources. The primary sense, therefore, is a specific case where the boundaries and limits are [...]
January 11, 2010 – 9:05 am
You have a bunch of players, and you’ve got a world you know they’ll enjoy playing in? Awesome! And when they get there, they don’t care about any of that history or story, it’s just killing and loot, and you wonder why you bothered? Yeah, I get that. When I feel that way, I start [...]
January 8, 2010 – 11:05 am
Let me say up front, that I love designing worlds, particularly ones where I’m going to tell stories within them. Usually that means game worlds. My favorite game system of all time (that I never played) is Aria, which won’t let you create a character until you’ve created the world, his nation, his city, and [...]
January 7, 2010 – 11:05 am
So, yesterday I listed a bunch of limitations that my game has to contend with:
Looting required
Simple system or one people are familiar with
Generally short attention spans
Almost certain attendance issues
Needs some role playing for the GM
To which I need to add one more limitation that I’d forgotten about:
Fantasy setting
I also said that I found my answers [...]
January 6, 2010 – 9:03 am
I suppose in some ways this post will be obvious common sense. That begs the question of why I should write about it at all, but I think it took me a while to really understand it myself, so maybe this will be useful to someone else as well. As I described yesterday, I have [...]
January 5, 2010 – 9:00 am
My gamer roots are with pen and paper games. Oh, my family played the classic board games: Monopoly, Life, Connect Four. We later got Stratego and Risk and some more esoteric things — but that was after the pen and paper revolution. We played a lot of card games — Bridge was my father’s favorite, [...]