It’s no Radio Lightning, but Polish Radio’s External Service interviewed me this morning about Grey Ranks. And I found out we’ve been added to the bibliography page at a really good Warsaw Rising site. We sent the Warsaw Rising Museum (which Frederik Jensen just visited – he says it’s excellent) a copy and they are looking it over, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m hoping for a laundry list of errors and a lot of enthusiasm, but we’ll see!
There’s a thread over at Story-Games asking designers why they make games right now. It’s full of great reasons to make games, some of them perceptive, some of them funny, some of them sort of poetic.
I’ve always made games, as far as I can recall. In first grade I upgraded a pretty boring game into the magnificent and unplayable “Jesus tic-tac-toe” (you needed ten across!). After spending a feverish weekend playing Wumpus Hunt on my uncle’s brand new Kaypro II, I reverse engineered it for tabletop play. Another time I drew page after page of elaborate combinations of choose-your-own adventure and side-scrolling analog video game.
I’ve always loved to play, and to create new things, and to puzzle out conundrums, and to express myself with words and art and performance. My love for making games is a little obsessive and weird. I’m OK with that. I think play is important – I think it is a survival trait just as valuable as thumbs. I love to play and I love the clever, strange, kind-hearted and passionate people I get to meet and play with. I love the fact that I can make things with skill and pride that return some small measure of good to the world.
There’s so much goodness – my own joy in creation, my delight in play, my deep satisfaction in seeing others similarly delighted in my work, a profound sense of camaraderie and mutual support, and the rewards both material and emotional. Making games brings me all this and I’m very grateful for it.
Yesterday was Collective Con, which turned out to be a very chill house-con in the back of a game store and was roundly great. As it turns out, I got to run playtests of Medical Hospital and Dulse (a first!), hang out with some of my favorite people old and new, and then run some Dogs in the Vineyard.
I learned a ton watching Rafael Chandler chew the scenery in Medical Hospital (it was so priceless to see his arrogant surgeon start to cut a trauma victim’s abdomen open and then launch into a sanctimonious soliloquy about his golf handicap, punctuated by barked orders for sutures and clamps). Then Dulse, which is surprisingly solid. I need to take out one unnecessary rule and think about information design a bit, but it plays very well. Dogs is always fun, and I got to run an old town for three guys new to the game, including one who hadn’t played anything in six years. He liked it!
I just found out that Grey Ranks has been short-listed for the Diana Jones Award.
We’ve been getting a ton of email from people in Poland in the last few days, and here’s why. Piotrek Czarnieki, a reporter for Gazeta Krakowska, has been picking my brain about Grey Ranks, American roleplaying, and related topics for a while. It’s been a fun conversation. One exciting development is that he talked up Grey Ranks to the Uprising Museum staff, and they want a copy for their collection. I can’t wait to find out what Piotr wrote, as I understand about one word in seven.
Update: We’ve had twice as many downloads of our free sample .pdf in the last week as we had in the previous year.