Fenris and Isabella from Dragon Age 2, in fighting poses.

Readings: Outside the Lines

November 29, 2011 / 3 comments

Holy crap, I’m back! And I’ve even had time to read things! Here are some of those things. First off, Kirk Battle brings his uniquely legal perspective to explain the difference between playing Magic on a tabletop versus a computer in a Kill Screen post called In Brief: Who Rules the Rules? He makes a convincing argument…

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The cover of the guide to the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.

Trapped in Amber

November 19, 2011 / 6 comments

Last time I checked in with you guys about Mouthwash, I mentioned that I was no longer sure I wanted to use D&D-style dice rolls to determine skill effects, but didn’t know what to replace it with. On Twitter, Stephen Winson suggested I look into a diceless tabletop roleplaying system based on Roger Zelazny’s fantasy series…

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The Wrong Ending

November 15, 2011 / 25 comments

So the blog’s been a bit on the sporadic side lately and, in all honesty, it probably will be until after Thanksgiving. My apologies! On the upside, something pretty grand has been happening while I was away. Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, with the help of commenter Ari, has taken some rough ideas in my…

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A screenshot from Mouthwash testing, showing a short and nonsensical dialogue between two characters name Roni and Maryam.

The Next Step

November 6, 2011 / 11 comments

Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and expressing her own emotions. She’s also capable of taking simple steps to meet those goals, provided she has access to…

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Error code from Java debugging, in which an NPC fails to find her own emotional state.

A Mystery to Herself

October 21, 2011 / 0 comments

Hey, so blog’s on hold this week after all due to personal matters. I’ll be back in a week or so. I’ll have a bit more to say about Mouthwash then, since I’ve actually made progress on the AI basics after a long stretch of brickwalling.  For now, I leave you with the observation that…

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Readings: Dynamic Systems

October 19, 2011 / 2 comments

Posting a day late due to some travel kerfuffles yesterday. For the record, and since I haven’t announced it before, here’s the planned schedule I have in my head: Readings on Tuesday, a Mouthwash update on Thursday (if there’s been progress), Short Reviews on Friday, and a feature every week but whenever. Next week will…

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Swimming Upstream

October 14, 2011 / 0 comments

Being slow with the blog for a while means my backlog of experimental games has grown even more overwhelming. Today I’ll be covering some games from the June Experimental Gameplay Project, theme “MASHUP,” so you can see how far behind I am. There’s nothing for it but to keep pushing forward against all odds! Squirrels…

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Readings: Lost in Transition

October 13, 2011 / 5 comments

I’ve been neglecting the old blog for a while, due to a combination of work piling up and not being able to get back into my old routine. But I’m back, hello! Here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I was gone. A Fate That We Deserve: Choice, Triumph, and All That Remains. This is…

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Moral Incentives and Story Structure

October 12, 2011 / 12 comments

There are a lot of ways you can classify the structure of a story, and many of them have been applied to games in one way or another. One that caused some discussion recently is based on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes stories in terms of the fortune of the protagonist…

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A microphone extends out in first-person view over an empty landscape.

Players Are Planners

September 27, 2011 / 0 comments

In a few recent blog posts, game critics have been tackling questions about where the borders of gaming lie. This all started with Michael Abbot’s post Games Aren’t Clocks, which argued against mechanics as the primary criteria on which to judge a game. This was quickly taken up by Dennis Scimeca in Games ARE Clocks, who proposed that…

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