May

31

Rejuvenation

Moments and Experiences
compass

Winter was a difficult time for me, this year. I was unemployed and in a pretty isolated living situation (in a cabin, up a mountain, surrounded by heavy snowfall, without a driver’s license). My game design energies oscillated from frenetic to exasperated, but just couldn’t find a balanced resting place.

Spring brought with it a lot of hope and opportunity. But unexamined hope and opportunity bring with them their own mania, if you’re not careful. I was dreaming big, but still hitting that blank page syndrome that I’d experienced in winter. The gap between my vision and my practice was widening.

So I made a pact with myself, one that turned out to be a really good one. If I sat down to my computer, or to the table with a notebook in hand… if I wasn’t actually writing and creating within five minutes, I’d get up and do something physical instead.  I cleaned my room. I went through everything I owned and got rid of a bunch of stuff; Salvation Army received an entire car-load of donations from me. I started a garden. I expanded the garden. I expanded the garden again. That garden’s now growing squash, pumpkins, zucchini, two types of beets, radishes, carrots, two types of cucumbers, lettuce, chard, tomatoes, scotch bonnet peppers, and about 10 herbs.

It was feeling really good to work with my hands, to see tangible results, and to know that I was doing something real and good. I decided that if the inspiration didn’t strike me, I’d just not return to any of my writing and design projects. Indefinitely.

And then something really cool happened. A burning need to continue working on The Quiet Year (my newest project) surfaced. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was important. It was vital.

Other projects have been resurfacing as vital, too. Recently, I published a setting hack for Perfect Unrevised, allowing you to play games set in New Phyrexia (a setting from Magic). It was a fun little afternoon project. It wasn’t something I’d even thought about before that day. But when it arrived in my mind, it felt necessary. It felt vital.

I’ve got a couple observations I’m taking forward, from all this. The first is that it’s easy to burn out without realizing it. This is especially true when all of your projects are similar – all creative design endeavors, or all physical labor endeavors, or all experimental music endeavors. Pulling back from your insular bubble helps you see what’s important and what’s not. Contrast is rejuvenating.

On the topic of rejuvenation, I’ve got two Buried Without Ceremony announcements, of a sort. The first is that I’ve begun talking publicly about The Quiet Year, a game of post-collapse community building. There’s a page for it on this site, and it’s worth checking out.

The second announcement, much more visually obvious at this point, is that I’ve redesigned the look of the site, including making up a new logo. The old one presented some difficulties as a brand logo (difficult to place on a variety of backgrounds, too textured), and I feel like I’ve outgrown the dandelion. So, a rejuvenated look. What do ya think?

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Jan

03

Perfecting It

Design Diary / Promotion

Perfect, Unrevised is for sale. This is one of the most exciting announcements of my life. Folks can pick up the PDF for $10, and preorder the book for $22 + s&h.

This moment has been a long time coming. I’d like to share with you how I got here, and link you to some reviews and AP along the way.

In late 2005, I started reading The Forge. I participated in one or two little design contests, before stumbling upon my big RPG idea in early 2006. Imagine a game where your character sheet only told you about the things you can’t do? Imagine if play was about finding out how to work around that?

That idea in and of itself didn’t prove to be very exciting, but it did lead to Perfect. Impatient and seventeen, I rushed to design and release the game as soon as was humanly possible. I was at Gencon with the game in hand that very same year – about 6 months after my initial idea.

That’s, uh, a stupid way to design a game. In May of this year, I blogged about some of the lessons I learned in that experience.

I published the game, and was initially really excited about it. I heard some really lovely compliments from Paul Czege, who was my game design idol. Ron Edwards played it,  and then played it some more. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it. Malcolm Craig played it too. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it.

Over time, the glaring hiccups came to occupy more and more of my mental real estate, and reports of people having “generally liked it” were less exciting. Some time in 2007, I pulled the game off the market. I was determined to refine it and re-release it once it had been, well, perfected.

I assume this process will take about three months. It takes over three years. The game receives about 100 playtests over this period, some led by me and some blind. I posted about one session here.

I almost abandoned the game several times, because the work of editing and refining turned out to be hard. Gasp! What a surprise!

It’s then that fans and supporters came out of the woodwork, to help push me to keep going. Gary Breinholt is one of those people. He playtested every iteration of the game I put out, for years, and always came back with critique and encouragement. I shared some of that process here, in 2008.

Finally, in the early Summer of 2010, I had something that felt complete, that told the kinds of stories I wanted it to, that was easy and compelling. Playtests started to soar. Feeling immensely confident – cocky even, I put the game up as a Kickstarter project, asking for $7,000 in funds to publish the game. I managed to raise an exciting $2,660… and am ultimately glad that I failed to raise more. The game design was done, but the physical product was still far from complete.

I worked with editor Josh Roby, who was fantastic. And then I spent months slaving away in inDesign. I learned a lot about graphic design in the process, predominantly that it is a much slower craft than you would think it is.

Come to think of it, I’ve learned something about all crafts: they take much longer than you’d think. Artistry isn’t something you can just vomit onto a page. It takes years of training, honing, doing, refining, re-examining, doubting, and trusting.

It’s been exciting to actually go through that process, and give every step its due attention. At the height of my wit, I named this second edition Perfect, Unrevised – a nod at the dystopian, history-erasing setting it exists within. But truth be told, this is the project that’s taught me the value of revising – the value of hard work.

I talk about some of the important mechanical changes here. The folks at the tremendously good Ninja Vs Pirates podcast explore the mechanics and the structure of the game, with me, here.

And now, finally, it’s ready. You can buy it if you want to. Wilper did, and he reviewed it the very next day. The review is really good and comprehensive, albeit short.

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Nov

23

New Project

Moments and Experiences

Because I am proud of it, I want to show you all my new stationary set. I made it!

[SlideDeck id='424' width='100%' height='100%']

I chose out that paper colour and envelope colour myself. I cut the letter pages down to size. I chose out, cut out and glued on those little nautical adornments. I hand-cut those envelopes and sealed their edges myself. I went out and bought a brown pen that writes really nicely and echoes the brown of the envelopes.

It feels really good to mail letters. There’s something triumphantly social about dropping an envelope in a mailbox, of besting the hundreds of miles separating you and your correspondent, that email just doesn’t seem to have.

The act of writing by hand is a very clarifying experience, as well – one that I feel like we might be losing, as a culture.

And so, this stationary set! It feels triumphant and real to me.

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Jun

27

What are story games? And why?

Telling Stories Together

Let this post act as a primer, for anyone who’s interested in story games. Too few people know what story games are. There is a huge wealth of amazing, creative, social people in the world. People I’d love to play games and tell stories with.

This post is an attempt to paint a picture for those people. If you’re one of them, welcome. Here’s this thing I do:

Stories are vital. They’re the reasons our hearts beat. They’re how we make sense of emotions, and fortunes, and the days of our lives. When we don’t take time to honor and cherish stories, we fall back upon only the necessary ones. The ones that help us cope, that reinforce our pre-made choices. We fall back upon the belabored and uncontested stories.

When we step outside of ourselves, and seek stories out on purpose, we hit a great diversity. There are things we hate, and love, and things that change us. We change some things in return. Exploring a story can fill us with awe. It can also be tiring.

Games are vital. They are playful, and engaging. They give us a chance to succeed, but also the freedom not to fret over our success. If you don’t win at a game, your life is still OK afterwards. When something takes the form of a game, it becomes instantly lighter and more playful.

So, marrying these two things, that’s a pretty obvious first step, right?

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May

05

Trust, criticism and traipsing

Telling Stories Together

As far as I can tell, there are two types of creative criticism. The first is preference. To look at a situation and say, “I would like this more if  X.” The second is approval. To look at a situation and say, “I think this is good, because of Y.”

As far as I can tell, one is harmful to the artistic process. That one is approval, and the reason lies in the negative space it creates. Approval suggests the existence of disapproval. Even worse than that, approval suggests the legitimacy of seeking external validation for your contributions. To unpack both slightly…

Approval suggests the existence of disapproval. It says, “This is good, because of Y.” It also implies, “If you didn’t do Y, it might not have been good.” This can cause creative paralysis: if you do Y again, it will be good again. If you try something new, it runs the risk of not being good.  It creates safety zones based on what we’ve already seen, and in doing so undermines the safety zone of the unknown. And the unknown is what we’re seeking, right?

Approval suggests the legitimacy of seeking external validation for your contributions. If you give someone approval, you suggest that approval is a useful thing. You also suggest that they didn’t begin with approval. You also suggest that the approval of their ideas is in your control. What do these three things work in tandem to create? A hierarchy.

But, don’t people really like approval? Yes. And if approval didn’t exist as a filter for what is good and what isn’t, wouldn’t our world be saturated by useless shit? Yes. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that approval should be part of the artistic process? No. Approval stunts creativity, creates hierarchies and embellishes fears. It creates a dependency which is not helpful to the artistic process.

Approval creates a dichotomy. Your contributions to our creative endeavour now have the potential to be good or bad. Those are your choices, and they are static. Preference is a language of improvement, of bridging the gap, of movement. It suggests that there is no black or white, just gray. It suggests that you are on the right track, and that there is room to grow, and that the expectation is on you to grow. It puts just as much pressure on you as approval does, but it gives you an avenue for achieving expectation (“how about adding a bit of X?” is constructive; “now do something else to earn my love” is alienating and scary).

Oh! Check this out: Approval builds safety zones around what has already happened, and undermines safety zones around what comes next. Preference builds safety zones around what comes next. It also suggests that, since no approval process is happening, you have intrinsic approval. It eliminates the concept of disapproval. There is only what you have done, what others hope to see next, and what you do next.

Now, some of you are going to notice that approval and preference are just different ways of framing the same thing, and some of you are going to notice that preference has pitfalls as well. And the wisest of you are going to notice that the type of judgment you’re expressing matters less than your words and your attitude. Whatever. None of these are particularly interesting avenues of exploration to me, so perhaps we can just skip them.

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