Gameplaywright

Yesterday, we launched a crowdfunding campaign for The White Box on Kickstarter. The White Box is a game design workshop-in-a-box we’re publishing in cooperation with our friends at Atlas Games.

What it is is simple: It’s a book of essays about game design written by DigiPen game design professor Jeremy Holcomb, that comes in a box that’s also full of components (dice, meeples, cubes, chits…) useful for prototyping games.

What is represents is more interesting: A chance for us to promote our vision of people understanding, talking about, and engaging in the craft, business, and art of making games.

A moment of self-promotion here, to let you in on some neat things happening with some familiar titles.

Things We Think About Games has been available in PDF from the beginning, but when it comes to digital media, we always felt it would sing in epub and Kindle format. Reading’s an experience, how it’s delivered to you is important (that’s pretty much the whole philosophy of graphic design in a nutshell), and having a beautiful epub for you to peruse has long been a priority of ours. Fortunately, that time has come: Things We Think About Games can now be had in epub on both iTunes and Nook, and if Kindle is your thing, Amazon has you covered.

Or you can grab them all — PDF, epub, and Kindle — at both Drivethrurpg and Warehouse 23. Already own the PDF through one of those sources? The epub and Kindle files have automatically been added to your library!

Not to be outdone, Robin Laws’ masterwork of story analysis, Hamlet’s Hit Points, joins Things We Think About Games at both iTunes and Nook. And like TWTAG, if you’re a current or future Drivethrurpg or Warehouse 23 customer, buying the PDF gets you all three versions as well (not to mention the Big Beat Map PDF, which is flat-out the best possible companion to Robin’s incisive deconstruction). Even the Kindle version is fresh, as we’ve made a complete editorial pass on our source files, cleaning up a few things here and there to make this the best digital edition of HHP yet. 

Of course, we love the weight of a physical book in our hands too, so we’ve made sure print versions are available pretty much everywhere, including our own GPW store. And if you want literally everything there is to have with either of these titles, DTRPG’s print + digital bundles are the way to go.

Odyssey: Journey and Change - Journey and change.Odyssey helps you to tell tales of ever-changing characters on remarkable journeys.

Two things struck me as interesting in Panic’s recent blog post about showing off their forthcoming game Firewatch at a recent demo event.

The first is that it sounds like exactly the kind of game we dig around here at Gameplaywright: Rich in character, different from what’s come before, attentive to detail. So: Firewatch, you are on our radar.

At the GAMA Trade Show, I'll be running a seminar on the roles one finds staffing creative projects in the game business. What's the difference between a writer, and a game designer, and a game developer, for instance?

Reading a bit of commentary on the rumors about an Apple car recently, I came across a great passage that neatly defines part of what it is that a producer — whose role is notoriously difficult to codify — does:

When we walked into [auto designer] Giugiaro’s Italdesign offices, a surprise awaited us. When I thought of Industrial Design — Esthétique Industrielle in French — aesthetics first came to mind, industry second. But what Giugiaro showed us was the opposite: The industrial side of his practice was, for him, truly foremost. In his own words, his job wasn’t to design an award-winning shape for a car, his job was to design the process, the factory that would eventually excrete a continuous flow of vehicles.

From The New Yorker's recent profile of Jony Ive, "The Shape of Things to Come," a beautifully concise summary of the paradox facing those who make things and talk about them in public:

"It's Kind of Cheesy Being Green," a Medium article by Paul Ford, is about text message balloon styles in iOS, but it contains a section that talks with extreme insight about what product design is. It's required reading for anyone who publishes games for a living, or wants to. Because product design is different from game design.

A Series About GUMSHOE Design and Play

How I failed one of my favorite games and become a haunting ghost.

Illusionism is a family of techniques, usable for good or ill. Let’s talk about them.

A Series About GUMSHOE Play

When I was a kid, I used to grab the glossy jewelry-store ads out of the newspaper* every Sunday morning to look at the rings and pendants and things. They were like loot catalogs. I used them as inspiration or hand-outs for magic items in my D&D campaigns. I also liked to study and draw the designs I found in those ads.

If I brought one of those ads with me to school, to look at or draw about during lunch, I got mocked by other kids. Boys weren't supposed to like jewelry,** they said. But almost nobody liked me anyway so I just took it as part of the package of being unworthy. When I could think happy thoughts, I took it as a failure of their imagination. But a lot of the time, I couldn't think happy thoughts. Just the way that is.

In D&D, anyone can wear jewelry.

Today I'm writing up descriptions of loot and treasure and jewelry for my game Project Dark, so I can pay wonderful artists who know what they're doing to draw pictures of loot and jewels for make-believe thieves to steal in play. I get to make my own loot catalog and it's great fun.

*(This was back when newspapers were a thing.)

The specter of the railroad haunts RPG adventure design but rails can be a part of great play.

While developing systems for Project Dark and for Razed, I've done a lot of thinking about the GUMSHOE system and how it works and why — and why it doesn't work for some. I thought what it could use is some advocacy and exploration outside of any one particular iteration of the system. So I see this as kind of the 201-level course on GUMSHOE, delivered in a series of articles that'll all add up to one big essay.