Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Fellow students of game publishing, the Game Design Studio is open once again. If you have rules that you’ve playtested, layout you want help with, concepts you want to clarify, come and enlist the aid of others while offering your help in return!

As last time, the doors will be open for a finite time. When useful critique has ended, we’ll shut down so everyone can head back to their home studios to work on their stuff some more.

Before you do anything, read the rules for presentation, please.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Peter Watts comes up with a super-punchy Shock material. In this one, he notes that placebos are getting stronger over time. And that the logical conclusion is the prohibition of modes of thought that heal one’s body. Hot stuff.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Captain Estar Goes to Heaven is an intense science fiction comic series, done over seven years. It feels like an 80s or 90s indie comic like Fringe, Grendel, or God’s Hammer. It’s about depression and trying to make the world as bad as you feel. Gnarly, Shock: style ending, too.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

As beautiful as this art is, I look forward to the day when it’s the content, not the mere obvious presence, of an illusion that makes us marvel. I think that’s part of what makes Moon such a great movie, in fact.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

54:46 long & 50.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) finish developing the character-based situation for the game they’re designing — before your very ears! — then move on to discussing some ways that characters can be pushed to change away from baseline humanity

Rob’s during-the-show notes, the document containing the complete write-up of the relationship map, and Joshua’s ideas on the cloudkill technology.

- Rob does a staged reading of the lyrics to “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants
- We reflect on how much podcasting is like The King of Comedy
- Obligatory references to Vincent Baker, Radio Lab, and Paul Beakley (we also talk about Ben Lehman)
- COINTELPRO
- The film Jarhead
- The Wire, Generation Kill, and Battlestar Galactica
- John Dillinger
- Toxoplasmosis, Brilliant Gameologists podcast, and Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
- Hampshire College, the college Joshua graduated from
- Crank, which has a sub-standard sequel
- Mortal Coil
- My Life with Master
- Cloudkill
- A Scanner Darkly
- JiffyCon
- There are mysterious goings-on on the Facebook page for shock:

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants from the album The Spine.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A very nice gentleman named Jeremy just set up a page for Shock: fans on Facebook. To be honest, I’m not sure what capabilities that gives anyone, but I’ll certainly become a fan of my own game. Meet me there!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

If you play with Lego, I bet you do this, too! It’s one of the things I mourn, actually: Peeron and Bricklink are scaring away all the internal descriptions of pieces.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

58:34 long & 56.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) try out a new way of designing and recording. The show will be going biweekly and Joshua & Rob are going to start doing some design before recording, then discuss it. A great deal of headway is made making up the starting characters and mapping out some of their relationships.

Joshua & Rob’s pre-show work and formal/structured notes written during the episode.

- Joshua & Rob discuss fucking robots and the uncanny valley
- Jenn from Trapcast is happy to “see” us back
- The setup of the protagonists in a pentagram
- Each iteration of the game will have one of the five characters as protagonist
- Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures has rules for saying who’s the protagonist on a per-episode basis, and shock: does it on a per-scene basis; Rob presumes that The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-playing Game has something to handle a main protagonist with back-ups
- Seth Ben Ezra’s Dirty Secrets also has one main protagonist
- Vincent Baker’s game Synthia
- Emily Care Boss has a game in playtest that adapts Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema (there’s a Story Games thread post that discusses it very briefly
- Stealing the qualitative fictional rule-setting from Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- Joshua is reading Not of Woman Born on recommendation from Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
- Joshua and Rob argue over whether police are just another gang
- A discussion including the film L.A. Confidential and the TV show The Wire
- I spoil the 1991 remake of Cape Fear to make a point

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Life During Wartime” by The Talking Heads.

Incidentally, you can find more information about the header image for the blog post at this article about ethnic cosmetic surgery.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

There’s an experiment going on at #rpgtweory about RPG rules about feelings. I have feelings about them. But Ben and I were having a hard time expressing ourselves 140 characters at a time.

My original assertion, with subtleties edited out for brevity, was this:

Never write rules about feelings. Write rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them.

Ben didn’t buy it, and there was more to the idea anyway. Let’s discuss!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

In 2006, Remi Treuer and I played in a game of Mortal Coil with Judd Karlman, Brennan Taylor (the designer), Paul Tevis, and Steve Dempsey. In it, we played a band called Flaming Taft, circa 1972 as the punk scene in “New Amsterdam” was really getting rolling. My character, Fucking Jim (known as The Fucking Bassist), was the bassist, but he was really an electronic experimental musician at heart. In fact, all of the characters were really born to do something else than their part in the band. Well, everyone except the drummer, who kept the band together (you see what we did there?). Fucking Jim was equal parts Graham Lewis, Brian Eno, Conrad Schnitzler, John Cage and George Antheil. So when Remi told me he was going to use him as the basis for a character in his new webcomic about musicians, I was kind of excited. I told him if he had any questions about the character, I could tell him what the dude would do.

But then he end-ran that. The end result, Yoni, is much more me than Fucking Jim. Which is good. Fucking Jim was fucking Judd’s character because he liked the sound her heating pipes made at night, and that’s not the kind of behavior I really endorse.

Remi’s comic is called Too Fat to Be a Rockstar. It has excellent characters and I like the way they evolve. I like the way that the things they care about change and how they change in response. And I love Remi’s faces.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

The previous post had a couple of seconds of this fantastic film and I had to go root it up, since maybe you haven’t seen it. It could even been that you haven’t seen it because you were born too late. It’s also relevant to Eppy’s link to Merzo, which shows the relative sizes of various science fiction objects, from Yoda and R2 to the Enterprise to a Dyson Sphere.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

This is by the same guy as A Glorious Dawn, John Boswell. Not only are these beautiful and sincere, but they address something that Robert Krulwich said in a graduation speech at the California Institute of Technology: we have to learn to tell stories about science. The underlying logical beauty of the process is not enough. Because there are other people with better stories, and the stories are what get people to think, to accept, to challenge, and ultimately to act.

It looks like we can have beautiful music about science, too.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)

52:24 long & 50.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.

Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show

- Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
- Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
- We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
- Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
- Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
- In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
- Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
- Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
- Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
- We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
- A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
- Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
- We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
- Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
- No listener homework
- Working title: “Lifeless”
- We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve always considered the phrase “Pictures can’t lie” to be charmingly naïve. This technology exists now, Photoshop has existed for decades, darkroom techniques have been around for as long as there’s been photography, and there’s always been recontextualization. “You provide the pictures. I’ll provide the war, ” is one of the most famous quotes in journalism, after all.

I have a bit of a “White Hat” view of this. Now an audience knows that they can be fooled. They have to figure out for themselves if they trust the source.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

There’s something weird going on over at The Forge. It looks like a spambot is trying really hard to be contextual to get around spam catching software. But if the spambot has to contribute meaningfully to conversations in order to not get caught, isn’t it just a member of the forum? Will we have to have a network connected laptop with us to go to cons with it?

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

55 seconds long, I don’t care how big

In this non-episode, Robert Bohl and Joshua A.C. Newman explain why they don’t have an episode this week. Suck it.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

There is no way to make a 2 year old girl happier than with a stumpy knit octopus. Thank you, VP.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

01:54:51 long & 110.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss how to pre-bake-in a situation for the game they’re developing. Many hearts were broken, unforgivable things were said, will they still be friends at the end of this arduously long show? Listen in to find out.

Joshua’s homework (Rob didn’t do his).

- We start of being enthusiastic about Idiocracy
- Rob skipped homework, Joshua didn’t
- Discussing input from Vincent Baker, Simon C., and Doc Holaday
- Charles Stross’s Accelerando
- Futurama
- Transhumanauts!
- John Cassaday and Warren Ellis’s Planetary
- My friend Blake, who had an interesting idea for a game
- The movies Cube and Saw
- Montsegur 1244 and carry: a game about war
- Ganakagok
- 100 Bullets
- Exquisite corpse
- Wildly various spider genetalia
- Twenty Bucks
- Psi Run (or, at least, its forum)
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- Mouse Guard RPG
- Do not look Vincent Baker in the eye
- Our homework: Vomit forth creativity on this project
- Listener homework: Give us some scenarios

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is Overlap by Ani DiFranco from the album Out of Range

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

01:06:30 long & 63.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss possible structures for a session of play, talk about how to structure technological and interpersonal relationships, and talk a bit about how mechanics might work. Lots of meaty game design here.

Joshua’s and Rob’s homeworks

- Listener feedback: Paul Beakley, Nathan Wilson, Simon C, Doc Holaday
- The book Starfish by Peter Watts
- Discussion of how many players the game should service
- Initialization, a word to be used a lot in the game
- Drop initialization phase created NPC?
- Primetime Adventures
- Spotlight characters, scene order, and whether scenes are about players or characters
- Are there too many scenes? Can you run out of interesting stuff before you run out of time?
- The roles that PCs play in spotlight characters’ scenes when they’re not spotlight
- The Wire
- Introducing new NPCs and new tech, tying Currents to them
- Talking about the tech web
- Separate relationship maps on each character sheet to reflect different visions of relationships
- What am mechanics?
- Joshua = power, Rob = meaningfulness
- Joshua promises a diagram
- Mind control!
- Personality Anchors, and we argue over it
- Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
- Rob keeps talking about “spotlight scene” when he means “spotlight episode”
- Anchors and immunity
- Vincent Baker’s thread where he’s asking for critique on Apocalypse World
- What to call the co-GMs?
- Homework: write up what a scene might feel like, which we’re probably going to do on the forum
- No listener homework

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is I Wish I Was a Boy by Angry Red Planet, provided by Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network.