Imagination-as-a-Service: The “Under-monetization” of D&D

If the wi-fi is out, if the power’s out and there’s nowhere to go but you have candles, dice, notebooks and a copy of the core book, you can tell stories until it comes back on. As an aside, the Broken Hands Team actually already did that one evening while waiting for the power to come back on: no need to sit in the dark, but also no need for Netflix or video games or anything of the sort. That’s why the hobby is great – it’s analog, and it’s flexible. If games are art – and I would say that they are – then the medium for them is the social contract.

Commentary, Gaming, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 21, 2022tabletop gaming, Hasbro, Dungeons and Dragons, Horizon of ExtractionComment

The Art of Adaptation

In the McLuhanian read, an adaptation is just the old medium being placed in the new medium wholesale. To an extent, this is true: all adaptations are going to have baggage from their original version. The number of people who declared that they would leave the theater if the sound effects of Wolverine’s claws in the first X-Men movie didn’t match the “snikt” noise used in the comics was mind boggling. Of course, that was stupid. Because “snikt” is a nonsense word and English orthography isn’t 1:1 – if you don’t believe me, just google “ghoti.”

The Political Economy of Game Design (Odd Columns, #10)

More than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.

Synthesized Ludology: Notes on Game Design

I don’t intend this piece to be a pure review of what other people have said; I have written a number of things on a variety of subjects, and there are a few ideas I wish to bring in. Chief among them are the concepts of the “Paradigm-Syntax” dyad (which can be connected to the GNS or the MDA sections) and that of “Complex Pleasures” (which connects to the Eight Kinds of Fun.) I also have the compulsory commentary on Nostalgia and Genre that readers of this blog will know is coming.

The Why of a GM (a.k.a. Why I’m in Control)

I have been gaming forever, or near enough as makes no difference. My brothers and I dug up an AD&D core set back at the edge of my memory, 2000 or 2001, and knew we’d struck mithril. It was my father’s and it took us all of a heartbeat to drag him away from whatever project he was working on and get him to tell us all about it. It took us a week to get him to agree to build a campaign and another month or so to get everything ready.