Category Archives: Quotes

Lessons from designing role-playing game adventures

Design Theory, Games, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I was reading James Maliszewski's interview of Paul Jacquays*, and came across this bit:

10. Are there any lessons you've
learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to
be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one
solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other
solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your
players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D
space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into
complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside
3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and
work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create
spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large
open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable.
As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of
disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in
turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found
within. Designers need to do the same thing … engage the players'
suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game
situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your
players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the
adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally,
don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as
little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content
designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you
are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less
about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions
of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want
to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on
reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

I don't think it's too crazy a stretch to apply these lessons to design outside of a game context altogether.

*James Maliszewski is a somewhat-old-school RPG designer and author of the old-school gaming blog Grognardia. Paul Jacquays is a really-old-school game designer.

“The age of surplus pixels”

Design Theory, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I keep coming back to this short post by Russell Davies. (No, not that Russell Davies.)

By way of reexamining Being Digital and Pointcast, he says:

But we're about to enter an age of surplus pixels – screens sitting
there, resting, not showing much, perhaps the odd slide show, screens
that aren't the thing we're doing. In public spaces, in offices, in our
homes. iPads and iPad-killers are going to be sitting around our living
rooms, next to our desks, next our beds. And we'll soon want more on
there than our picture libraries Ken Burnsing slowly away to themselves.
But we're going to want less than most designers are inclined to
design. We'll need a restful, slow, quiet sort of
information/entertainment design. Stuff that's happy not to be looked at
that much. That'll be interesting.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and triggers a bunch of reactions, not all well thought-out.

  • I really, really like the idea of "restful, slow, quiet" design. I'd like to see more of it in the digital realm. I love garish and loud as much as the next person, but the eyeballs, they get tired.
  • What are the print equivalents of restful/slow/quiet design? What are the architectural equivalents? Is this a call for the digital equivalents of the arts and crafts movement?
  • (Is that why we're seeing so many fake wood-grain apps on iDevices? I'm not sure William Morris would approve: plopping wood imagery on silicon/glass/aluminum devices is hardly "truth to material".)
  • Dragging this post back to the subject at hand, my fear is that instead of restful/slow/quiet, we'll get twitchy/fast/loud, particularly in the form of ads/ads/ads. We've already got extra screens at the grocery store (ADS!) and the gas station (ADS!) and there's talk of adding some to license plates (ADS!).
  • The opposite of an arts and crafts approach to all the surplus pixels, then, is a cyberpunk-style dystopia where behaviorally-targeted ads follow you from screen to screen down the street jabbering at you incessantly until you go postal. So that wouldn't be good.
  • Which in turn brings to mind projects like this LCD TV zapper kit as one possible response.
  • A pretty safe prediction (based on our culture's track record so far) is that which types of screens you see will split on class lines. In the same ways it does already, money will buy peaceful and tranquil spaces for those that have the money, and the twitchy/fast/loud will dominate mass culture.

On taking your hobbies seriously

History, Quotes

At a ball in New Orleans in 1802, the ex-governor Vidal's son insisted on dancing "English contredances," which were easier, or perhaps simply more to his taste, than the French ones. When the young Vidal pushed his privilege too far, and angry shouting match ensued between his entourage and the French:

—Contredanse anglaise!
—Contredanse française!

The military guard, supporting Vidal, unsheathed their bayonets, rifles, and sabres and were at the point of opening fire on the dancers, who were armed with épées and ballroom furniture. The Americans, says an 1803 account of the incident, remained neutral, and, while the French and Spanish men were confronting each other, they took advantage of the situation to slip away with the women. Ultimately the situation was defused, and the French contredanse won the night.

— The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, Ned Sublette

That's one of the lighter moments in what is for the most part a very grim history of one of my favorite cities. Katrina happened just after the author finished research for the book; he wrote another, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans, that talks about his experiences there.