Monkey Kings Play: a journal of games by designer Joshua A.C. Newman

Warrior of the Southern Heart Sculpture

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:13:21 GMT

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

I haven’t made any sculpture in years, and I’ve never used Sculpey to do anything but make little beads. So we’ll see how this goes. I’ve gotten a lot of help from the extraordinarily kind and knowledgeable artists over at the Concept Art fora.

Lots of pictures of this Warrior of the Southern Heart of Ashlesa 5.2, so look after the break. As with all art on the site from now on, you can click images to get a belargened slide show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Neil Blomkamp, Will You Marry Me?

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:55:07 GMT

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

I’m not sure why I avoid reading io9. I think it’s because I’m so frequently disappointed by science fiction media properties. But I keep winding up there anyway, in no small part because Judd Karlman sends me a link to the site daily, and it’s always something interesting.

Well, he didn’t send me this interview with Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 and several really excellent SF shorts. So there, Judd.

In it, Neill talks about the double-edged sword of large budgets.

In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, Blomkamp made it quite clear that he wants nothing to do with $100 million budgets and major studio releases. The reason for this, he explains, is that he wants to be able to tell his own stories in his own way, and that just isn’t possible when such massive amounts of money are involved.

But that’s just the beginning of the good stuff.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn’t come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that’s where the stimuli and influence comes from. But go back and look at something like [Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel] “The Forever War” – that is very much rooted in his experience in Vietnam, that’s where the stimulation comes from.

He even addresses my problems with District 9.

Neill Blomkamp, will you make me Mrs. Blomkamp?

Shock: review at Gnome Stew

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:01:15 GMT

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

Matthew J. Neagley wrote a nice review of Shock: over at Gnome Stew a couple of weeks back. People say nice things in the comments, too!

Carrie

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:51:12 GMT

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

(note that this and subsequent pictures can be clicked to see a lovely embiggening process.)

L’Arte Dei Rumori

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:23:03 GMT

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

Choose Your Adventure! [Oo! Let's Make a Game!]

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:34:28 GMT

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

51:04 long & 49 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss major changes to the game, spend a lot of time with feedback, and discuss how Jewish someone has to be in England.

We took some during-the-show notes. If you have Google Wave you might be able to take a look at the Wave we created while recording. For those of you without, you can check out the Google Docs transcription

- The Weird Jews Livejournal group that Joshua joined
- The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution
- The Alas, A Blog entry about the New York Times piece on England and Jewishness
- Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit
- The Starship Troopers and Robocop films
- Feedback from Doc Holaday, Luke Crane (sorta), Vincent Baker, Jj
- cat and man!
- We know who the game will always be about now!
- Larry Ellison
- Rutgers and Yale Universities
- Blackwater Worldwide
- Postmodernism
- On Mighty Thews, by Simon Carryer
- Frank Frazetta
- The Draconis Montreal convention

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 “Taffy Lewis’ Night Club” by Vangelis.

The Silk Road

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:48:53 GMT

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

An Afghani Jingle Truck

An anonymous friend of mine who works for the US Government studying contractors tells me:

“In Afghanistan, [shipping]’s not as big a problem [as between Kuwait and Iraq] because the shipping companies are mostly local and they know who to pay off. If you look at pictures of Afghan and Pakistani trucks online, you can see they are covered with jewelry and paintings, which serve to announce their alliances. They call them ‘jingle trucks’… that’s why convoy security isn’t as difficult in Afghanistan.”

“Holy crap,” I said, paraphrasing myself for this post, “That’s the Silk Road. Still.”

Lest we forget as creators of fictions, I will state this: systems, including Modern systems, are not perfect. They don’t make a homogeneous, Star Trek world. There are local needs that aren’t satisfied by distant, putatively benevolent systems of control. There are traditions that are kept, social mores that evolved for the particular requirements of that area of the world. They don’t change just because there are teleporters.

Warriors of the Southern Heart

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:58:29 GMT

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

A warrior's front hydraulic limbs, shell, and two views of an individual.

In the geyland called the Southern Heart lives a species called “warriors” by the explorers who first discovered them. They’re herd animals, living among twenty or thirty of their kind. They’re about 1m tall, to the top of their banners and eyes and about half as long. Their front feet each contain a circular mouth on the bottom, covered in raspy skin that they use to scrape minerals and microfauna off the ground. On the front of those feet single spikes. Their paired eyes are at the top of a tall tower at the front of their smooth, tortoise-like shells. Sprouting from their backs through a small hole in their carapaces are two tall feather-like banners in shifting, bright colors and patterns. Their hind legs are thick and strong, but the front ones are lithe and move in quick, snappy motions.

Warrior herds graze within eyesight of one another, no more than 12m away from each other. The twin banners on their backs are for herd communication. Each herd has a unique pattern that varies with context. The better the food, the broader the stripes, for instance, with herd members moving closer to individuals whose stripes indicate a better food source. They also sound the alarm, signaling predators and seeing other herds. The high eye towers allow them to see over other herd members while they graze, and quickly see changes in the environment and alert others to that change.

The muscles of the warriors, like those of most creatures of the Southern Heart, are hydraulic and work in compression, rather than the tension as most terran muscles do. Like many arthropods on Earth, they have very limited tensor muscles, gaining their real strength and speed from their hydraulic system.

When an individual warrior sees another herd, its banners suddenly change color into vibrant stripes that are clearly distinguishable from those of the other herd. They then charge into battle at a glacial pace, their thick hind legs pushing them forward and their front limbs working together to lift the keel of their shells off the ground. As they approach, the banners of the individuals change patterns subtly to indicate tactical openings they see. They coördinate themselves like this, inching themselves into position until they stand close enough to other individuals that they can strike with their barbed forelimbs.

But this battle is not for territory or resources. The barb on the creatures’ forelimbs are injectors of spermlike structures, carrying the individual’s genes into the circulatory system of the struck individual. It also contains a hormone that causes the struck individual to stop fighting and signaling, recovering over a few hours, recovering completely only well after the fight has ended. The spermoforms are carried by the recipient’s circulatory system to an ovary, where they gestate for several days, eventually to be born in a 2cm sack, its eye tower collapsed along its back. The mother helps tear open the egg sac and the newborn climbs onto the mother’s back, where the eye tower erects over a few minutes. While on its mother’s back, it begins mimicking the coloration of the banners in its own herd.

The shell hardens over a few days and the newborn begins grazing alongside other individuals. Over the course of a season, it will grow to full size, now part of its mother’s army.

If you have any questions about the warriors, the geyland of the Southern Heart, or anything else about Ashlesa, please put them in the comments and I’ll be sure to pass them on to the proper Ashlesologists.

Want to know more about Ashlesa? There are several articles on this blog. As exploration continues, more will be posted.

Octopuses Are Amazing

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:38:32 GMT

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

We all know cephalopods are interesting and amazing. They’re also brilliant and absurd. See this out outfoxing its predators by hiding in a coconut that it carries around with it for just such a purpose.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE I AM A COCONUT PLEASE CONTINUE ON YOUR WAY

Most absurd is the tiptoeing gait.

But most fascinating is the fact that they seem to have learned how to do it.

Puts the Oop in the Poop Oop Dee Doop

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:39:13 GMT

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

I’ve really always wanted to do just this, but been put off by the extraordinary work necessary. The result is even more beautiful than I’d have guessed.

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 9: Secret Powerz!

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:46:20 GMT

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

57:39 long & 52.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.

Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.

- Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
- Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 – 10:00)
- Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
- Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World
- Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki’s (aka “Slash”) board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
- We tried to use Google Wave, and there’s a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
- The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
- The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker’s Mechaton
- The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
- The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua’s “limbically”)
- The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
- Return of singularitarianism
- Return of the tech web!
- Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- DARPANET

Listener homeworks (2 of them):

1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you

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 “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel.

The Game Design Studio Opens Its Garage Doors Again

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:30:07 GMT

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.

Shock: Self-Healing Modes of Thought Are Illegal Drugs

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:05:00 GMT

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.

Captain Estar Goes to Heaven

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:52:49 GMT

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.

Five Minutes of the Best Illusions of the Century

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:37:48 GMT

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.

[Oo! Let's Make a Game!] Episode 8: Building People!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:28:05 GMT

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.

Shock: Fans on Facebook

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:14:54 GMT

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!

Feelings in Role Playing

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:22:01 GMT

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!

I Never Thought that Being Called a Yoni Would Be So Flattering

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:45:21 GMT

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.

The Power of Ten

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:03:54 GMT

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.

Music of the Spheres

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:21:23 GMT

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.

Bill Burroughs Would Love This

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:44:16 GMT

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

OLMAG Episode 6: How to Start a War!

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:44:49 GMT

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.

Pictures Can’t Lie

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:13:14 GMT

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.

Struggling Toward Sapience

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:51:08 GMT

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?