Gareth – Page 149 – The Designer Monologues

July 27, 2010July 27, 2010

Update Post Is Updatey

So, um… yeah. Pretty much an entire month with no posts from me.

In my defense, it’s been a busy month. But yeah, I should try to do better. Twitter takes care of most of my “hey, check out this thing” needs, which formed a large part of my past posting habits, but I do have longer-form things to say, and I should be making more of an effort to say them here.

Work-wise, ICONS hit stores this month, and while I’m still waiting to hear initial distributor orders from my print partners, indications on the PDF side of things seem to point toward the game being a fairly solid hit for us. We released the first adventure, The Skeletron Key, and a nifty Java-based character generator application, The ICONS Character Folio. I had planned on having at least one more adventure out by now, but we’ve hit some slight delays (and really, perhaps my schedule was a bit too ambitious). We should have at least one more adventure out before GENCON next week though.

Yes, GENCON — looms large on the horizon this time of year. Slightly bummed this time around, as only 2 of my 5 friends from Cubicle 7 will be in attendance, but I’m sure that it will be a good time, as it is every year. Definitely time to top off the enthusiasm tanks.

Of course, every year, our industry manages to generate a big piece of controversial news which always seems to hit just in time to dominate bar talk at the show — and it looks like this year’s entry is the rumor that Wizards of the Coast will be letting the core 4E D&D books go out of print, in favor of pushing the new “Essentials” boxed games. I’ve got a bunch to say about this, but as the news has just hit (and really, isn’t really confirmed news at this point), I’m going to put my thoughts in order and post about this in greater length tomorrow. If true, it really does deserve its own post.

In other work-related news, releases for MARS and THRILLING TALES continued to move towards completion and release, although not fast enough for anyone’s liking, least of all mine. I really do need to hire more production help. Once the art and manuscripts are done, everything bottlenecks through me for graphic design and layout.

On the transmedia front, I was invited to participate in a web panel held by Digital Book World along with several other RPG industry folks — the panel was nominally going to be about “Learning from RPG Publishers” (as early adopters of electronic publishing, we have some insight into the challenges currently being faced by mainstream publishing operations), but unfortunately, we never really got to that topic. Instead we spent a lot of time talking about our industry, which is fine — but I was really chomping at the bit to get to the original topic. I pitched the idea of an article for DBW on the subject, which they’re interested in, so I may end up writing it for this site, and giving them reprint rights.

Development work continues on FAR WEST and VESPER NOVA. It’s so hard — I do a ton of work, but none of it is yet public, so I can’t help to feel like I’m not getting anything done, despite the hours that I’m putting in. Dedicated websites for both properties will be launched this Fall, though, so I’ll finally be able to “show my work.”

On the personal front, I took a week’s vacation to visit my family in coastal Maine, during my son’s summer visit to his grandparents. It was great to see him, and the whole family again — although the weather in Maine was horrendous: Temps and humidity both in the high 80s. Extremely unusual for the area, as would be noted by the lack of AC in the house. UGH. On the same trip, I also took the opportunity to visit The Minion at her first apartment (a summer sublease in Boston, while she interns for the Governor) — which made me feel simultaneously proud and OLD. How did I end up with a kid who’s turning 21 this fall?

Lastly, this past Sunday I got to experience a dream: I saw my team, Manchester United, play here. I’ve been a fan of United ever since I lived in NYC 10 years ago, and one of the local cable networks (YES, the channel owned by the Yankees) would show tape-delayed matches. They’re the reason I get up early to watch live football from England on the weekends, and I finally had the opportunity to see them as they were playing a “friendly” (read here: exhibition) against the local club, The Kansas City Wizards.

They played at Arrowhead Stadium, the local NFL site, which was the only area stadium large enough for the 52,000 people who attended (the largest soccer attendance in the city’s history). As cool as it was to see Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nani and other United players — perhaps even cooler was the fact that my local club (whom I’m also a fan of) played a scrappy, hard-fought game against the best team in the world, and — despite playing outnumbered for most of the game due to a Red Card late in the first half — managed to win, 2-1. Helluva game.

So yeah — busy month. I’ll get back into the habit of more regular posts, I promise. I the meantime, I leave you with a view of the pre-game warm-ups from our seats at the KC-ManU game:

July 1, 2010July 1, 2010

Henry Rollins

Laura and I went to Liberty Hall here in Lawrence last night to catch Henry Rollins on his latest spoken-word tour (is it even really necessary to qualify “tour” with “spoken-word” for Rollins any longer? He’s pretty much stopped doing music, right?)

At 8pm, he strode out on stage, far grayer than either the tour posters or his recent stint on “Sons of Anarchy” would have you expect, wrapped the mike cord around his hand a few times, took up his familiar one-foot-forward coiled-energy pose, and proceeded to talk, non-stop, for three hours straight. Without so much as a pause or a single sip of water.

He bounced from topic to topic, largely sticking to his recent experiences in filming “Sons of Anarchy” and then the 3-month travel stint that followed the filming and immediately preceded this tour, which took him around the world, from Saudi Arabia to India to Sri Lanka to Mali and more. He briefly touched on current events (Not to expect BP to have to pay any real consequence for the Gulf disaster because, as he pointed out, Union Carbide pretty much got away with killing 12,000 Indians in the 80s), American politics (“Barack Obama speaks in perfect 12-point Helvetica.”), and even our local shame, the funeral-picketing “God Hates Fags” Phelps clan (“The best way to defeat them is to give their kids a Ramones album.”).

All the while, he spoke of “staring down the barrel of 50” — Rollins is 8 years my senior, and I found a lot of his commentary around aging particularly topical for me (“I was creaking and popping in places that I will now creak and pop for the rest of my life — because at this age, those injuries? You get to keep those.”).

The night was fascinating, not just for the narrative (I mean, who doesn’t love a story of flipping off Burmese dictator Than Shwey to his face?), but for a look at the mental processes of a fellow creative who thrives when he’s busy and gets bored and depressed when he’s not.

Really excellent show — if you get a chance, go see him.

June 22, 2010

Irony, Thy Name is Gamer

A few days back, I tweeted about a blog post by former Adamant freelancer Malcolm Sheppard of Mob United Media: “Why You Can’t Have Nice Things.”

In the post, Malcolm talks about how the toxicity of the most vocal, negative segment of the online community (the segment most easily found, sadly) has chased away any hope of influence that the RPG community might have in the new media fields where you’d think they’d be valued:

“A couple of years ago I had this client — great guy, worked with him a few times. He’s a former tabletop RPG player and was really interested in bringing some of the ideas he loved from that into a new arena in the form of some cool online tools. We looked at the market at the time and determined that the service was pretty much tailor-made for roleplayers and that they were the most natural early adopters.

Once we got actual tabletop gamers from the “leading edge” of the hobby, he discovered they were so insufferable he changed his business model to stop attracting them. They were bad for business. They weren’t the gamers he remembered having fun with. They were assholes.

How were they assholes? My client used a bunch of methods to tag RPG players and monitor them moving through the system. This is what he found out about them:

Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.
They related to content in a cynical fashion.
They dissuaded other users from getting involved with the content.
They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).
They complained all the goddamn time.”

It’s unfortunate, because the RPG community would seem to be a perfect fit for a lot of where online entertainment is headed. But I’ve seen the same thing in my discussions with transmedia producers — there’s more of an effort to draw away the best (non-toxic) elements of the community and convert them into a base for their efforts, rather than any attempt to engage with the community as a whole — and it’s entirely because of the negative stereotype, reinforced by the loudest segments online.

This post by Malcolm generated a little bit of commentary (including some absolutely delusional garbage from the “Indie” crowd about how the resistance to monetization was due to the fact that gamers are “artists.”).

Until today, when it became the subject of a thread on ENWorld, which has spurred 4 pages (to date), and increased commentary at the original blog entry.

Of course, the majority of it is a whole bunch of knee-jerking about how there’s nothing wrong, how they don’t know anybody like that, how Bad Businesses are Bad, and other crap which entirely misses the point.

What he’s talking about is that the WORST elements of the RPG community, as represented online, is sadly defining the segment for people OUTSIDE the community — even in those areas where RPGers should be valued.

…and that’s a bad thing.

A direct quote from his closing:

“I would really like the tabletop RPG community to be at the center of roleplaying in all media, sharing their insights, but it’s not going to happen unless that center attracts.”

The result of saying that? A negative pile-on by the usual suspects… aided and abetted by professionals looking to buff up their populist cred. (like Erik Mona from Paizo, coming in to call him an “idiot” — seriously)

Irony, thy name is Gamer.