ludopolitics

@ludopolitics@dice.camp

Asst Teaching Prof, CMU. Indie game designer, teacher, scholar, parent. ENG/中文.

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ludopolitics, to random

Last few years, I've been feeling that @megueyb + @lumpley's Apocalypse World and Avery's most recent half-dozen games (since Quiet Year) -- plus everything released since -- have left me thinking a lot about "responding to a prompt" as the micro-foundation of TRPG play.

I don't know if I can fully articulate it, or put it into a clouds-and-arrows diagram. And, in the end, it's not particularly complicated or insightful. But I think it helps reframe TRPGs (and all play?) in useful ways.

ludopolitics,

@benrobbins It's prompts all the way down, Ben. First prompt was the Big Bang.

ludopolitics,

@benrobbins For sure. I feel like your games fit into this structure well. What is a question in Microscope if not a prompt to respond to?

ludopolitics,

@benrobbins The first prompt is someone asking if you want to play a game? But your life is also full of past prompts.

ludopolitics,

Anyway, it's been useful for me. Maybe I should write it up for something?

ludopolitics,

It also potentially reframes the work of game designers and players in ways that I find useful.

There is nothing about "responding to a prompt" that requires a game designer. Players can just do it by themselves. But both game designers and players are engaged in the work of figuring out how to generate interesting & appropriate prompts + interesting & appropriate responses (for whatever "interesting" and "appropriate" mean for their play goals).

And that often leads to structures & processes.

annaleen, to random
@annaleen@wandering.shop avatar

Where do psyops come from? Find out in my forthcoming book STORIES ARE WEAPONS, now available for pre-order! Want a signed and/or personalized copy? Order one from the glorious Green Apple Books today! https://www.greenapplebooks.com/signed-annalee-newitz

ludopolitics,

@annaleen For sure! We read Simpson's "Science of Coercion" in my Comm PhD program as our introduction to the history of our discipline.

ludopolitics,

@annaleen So exciting! It'll be REALLY useful to have a recent, updated take on this thread -- the "hidden" history of weaponized Comm & Media Studies, basically -- and your thoughts on how it's continued in recent decades!

ludopolitics, to random

My next personal game-design project looks like it'll be re-theming, redesigning, and repairing a 1962 Gottlieb pinball machine. It's gonna be a lot of work to produce 1 single copy, likely the only version of the game that will ever exist. But it'll be magical.

ludopolitics,

@nickwedig @ifixcoinops Nice. Hi, Dan!

I bought this machine from Pinball PA and have chatted a bunch with the folks at Pinball Perfection, so I have just enough sense of what I'm doing to be dangerous. I'm also teaming up with my colleague who runs the Physical Computing Lab at CMU, which makes it slightly less dangerous but also slightly more likely that we might cheat and put an Arduino in it if we can't figure some things out. Hopefully not!

nickwedig, to random
@nickwedig@dice.camp avatar

My wife bought some cheap stuffed animals for a fundraiser for my child's marching band. All the animals in it are pretty normal, except this green tusked aquatic animal that no one can identify.

Another photo of the same creature from another angle
Another photo of the same creature from another angle

ludopolitics,

@rivetgeek @nickwedig Ah yes, the wild tusked froggater.

lumpley, to random
@lumpley@dice.camp avatar

Anybody else listen to the hearing?

ludopolitics,

@lumpley @JoshuaACNewman I wanted to listen to it but was teaching. Your $5 bet is not an argument I've heard before, but makes sense as a punt. Still, this Congress wouldn't restore his eligibility, right? Fingers crossed that happens.

genesisoflegend, to random
@genesisoflegend@dice.camp avatar

deleted_by_author

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    ludopolitics,

    @genesisoflegend @AlasdairStuart Yup. Quality and sales are not the same thing, for sure.

    thebrand, to RPG
    @thebrand@dice.camp avatar

    Coming in late on this. Gonna speed run this fucker.

    ludopolitics,

    @thebrand Diplomacy (1959).

    LeviKornelsen, to random

    When you fully accept that gamers are largely fundamentally competent at having a good time roleplaying, you realize that most design objectives OTHER THAN "save people work" and "get them excited" can be managed with a box of parts and a discussion of how to assemble them.

    But those two, hoo boy.

    ludopolitics,

    @LeviKornelsen I don't know, friend. I grew up playing Palladium games and we had the hardest time figuring out how to make them consistently fun.

    ludopolitics,

    @LeviKornelsen Fair, but I also think the practice of roleplaying can be opaque to outsiders -- maybe less so now that there's video examples. My students, for example, tend to have difficult figuring out how to play "serious" or emotional TRPG content, rather than playing for yucks.

    annaleen, to random
    @annaleen@wandering.shop avatar

    I have trained my media studies students to refer to Stuart Hall as "Uncle Stuart Hall" and I'm not sorry.

    ludopolitics,

    @annaleen Definitely want Stuart Hall and Benjamin to be my media uncles.

    ludopolitics, to random

    Are there White Wolf retroclones yet? There have to be, right?

    I made one several years back about playing mythological giants in a Wolfie style, but I haven't kept up to see if there are others now.

    ludopolitics, to random

    Oh no. I might actually be able to make Metatopia this year.

    Oh no.

    ludopolitics, to random

    I feel like the hardest part about making a game about minor nature gods is figuring out the setting. If you set it in the real world, then you bring all that baggage along. If you set it in a fantasy world, then you have to convey both the fictional setting and the spirit world of that fictional setting to the players. Maybe I can just have the players invent the world themselves?

    ludopolitics,

    @rivetgeek @nickwedig @linnaeus That makes sense. Basically the WoD / CoC approach.

    ludopolitics, to random

    I like the look of this cute "trindie" game from the UK about people in space doing little missions, set in the actual solar system.

    It feels like the kind of indie game my students would write, something solid and fun but relatively "safe."

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/murkdice/void-above

    ludopolitics, to random

    Oh no. This is a 1960s Japanese electric banjo available on eBay. Be still my heart.

    ludopolitics,

    @Tim_Eagon They vary a lot, especially because you have a lot of options for altering the sound. This one sounds something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_bB3J8kLH8

    ludopolitics, to random

    Dreamed about a Muppet film version of Hamlet called "Mupplet," where the only human is Hamlet. I assume Miss Piggy played Queen Gertrude but I have no idea who would play Ophelia. Janice from the Electric Mayhem?

    ludopolitics, to random

    Something must be wrong with me. I find myself surprisingly excited that White Wolf's inheritors (Onyx Path) are publishing a weird fantasy dungeon dive game based on an updated Storyteller system.

    Is this just decades of Exalted baggage rearing its head, or am I right in suspecting that The World Below sounds a lot more fun than any version of D&D?

    ludopolitics,

    @codingconduct I think it's more likely that they come from the same set of inspirations? Weird fantasy + anime?

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