The message is the medium, Marshall McLuhan said, and for a game design, the format it comes in contributes to how it feels. The days of issuing everything in a boxed set of multiple 64-page booklets were superceded by the single-volume 8.5"x11" hardback running hundreds of pages, and if you look at those games, there… Continue reading October challenge: format as flavor
Tag: agents of fate
October Challenge: quadrangular destiny damage
When fate gets snarled, who or what is to blame? The antagonists of the "agents of destiny" game are deliberately left undefined as to their actual identity, but they need a mechanical framework. There are three main approaches we can take here. The first is that they are an utterly passive condition, like an environmental… Continue reading October Challenge: quadrangular destiny damage
October Challenge: busting destiny in the chops
An agent of fate gets his or her assignments in ways that seem like random chance to everyone else: today's winning lottery numbers are the phone number to the anonymous dispatcher with your next case, or you stop in a used book store on vacation to find an envelope waiting in the front of the… Continue reading October Challenge: busting destiny in the chops
October Challenge: the hand of fate!
I haven't given up! Over the weekend, I was a bit under the weather, and my current technology setup requires me to go out of the house to post, so I stayed in and brainstormed a bit instead. If I'm to meet the goal of 8 games in 31 days, I can't really afford to… Continue reading October Challenge: the hand of fate!
October Challenge: three game prompts
As I embark on this mad task of creating eight short games in a month, let me share with you the first three suggestions* I received. Tore Nielsen provided me with two ideas: "A game that deals with the idea of an insidious/subtle reality taking over, and makes resisting it and going along with it… Continue reading October Challenge: three game prompts
Parenthesis Press 