No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #156

Hello, everyone! While still working insanely fast on a project only tangentially related to games (and getting overly tired in the process), this week I somehow managed to gather a nice collection of links on the side.

In the way of legendary game designers, there are good news and bad news. The bad news is, Pac-Man's creator just died. No comment, except that he'll be remembered. On the other hand, Richard Gariott isn't only alive and well, but he was just interviewed by Polygon over his new autobiography. And I dunno about the book, but the write-up makes for pretty good reading.

For the game designers among us, Jay Barnson has a few thoughts on character generation in RPGs. And, well, show me someone who made the acquaintance of D&D and didn't immediately try to roll a character or ten, even before they had any way to actually play them. Sure, organic development has its place -- I went with that approach in my own roguelikes -- but the fix for unfamiliar options isn't removing them, or for that matter forcing the player to read a huge-ass manual upfront. Rather, make sure that:

  1. The process itself is fun and lets players express themselves, and
  2. no single choice is wrong once the game starts.

As for we writers, of games or anything else, Alexis Kennedy just published an excellent article about worldbuilding. And it's a lesson I had to learn myself the hard way, after my first few attempts at imaginary universes fell flat. In his words:

This does not mean that invented worlds don't need to feel consistent. Let me say that again, without the double negative, because it's important: invented worlds should feel consistent! But an invented world can be consistent and detailed and very very dull.

Which is exactly what happens when you build your world first, i.e. before the story. Which is very much putting the cart before the horses. Because you see, what he doesn't say is that for an audience to care they need something to empathize with. And people don't empathize with rocks. Give me some characters first; make me care about them, and then I'll care about their world by extension, even if their world is a tepid medieval village.

But I could write a lot more about that. Let's finish by pointing out the recent release of Twine 2.1. Which is a bigger upgrade than it sounds, so be sure to check the forums for issues ahead of time.

Have a very nice week.