Letters from Afar | 10-25-24
This week, I got very sick, got better, helped construct and hang a bifold door, and then took it down, made some modifications, and re-hung it. Tomorrow, I believe I'm building a garden box out of timbers, and will probably edit some audio and make some spaghetti.
aurahack via Days and Wonder: The Eephus Pitch, A Play Within A Play Within an MMO, and When Home Goes Read-Only
If you put zero effort in and immediately fill your feed with accounts, posts, and followers then the place seems lively and youâre encouraged to come back. But youâre not, like, really connected with any of those people, right? You might know some of them but you might not others. You didnât âfindâ them. You were pointed to them. To find it, you have to look for it, and to look for it, you have to care, and if you care, then youâre not coming back because itâs busy, youâre coming back because youâve created a connection.
I've been thinking a lot about the connections I have and the places they've come from as I find myself isolated. Cohost and its subsequent controlled demolition loom large. erica's piece here touches on the trouble of seeing the framework for a connection fall away, and not being sure how (or if) you'll seek out a new framework in its place.
nic via enceledean - Undo
An undo system would undercut that immediately. For both the player's actions, revealing new information, or fudging hazard rolls, an undo system allows the player to think... I could probably do that better, let's if there is a better way. ...and that's what I don't want.
A great breakdown of how and why you include - or don't include - a game feature that, on the face of things, might make a lot of sense to include.
nex-3 via House of Nettles - A Lot of My Friends Don't Like Star Ratings
By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems "irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out that what I thought of a given filmâor even whether I saw it at allâis roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my conscious mind!
As someone who loves movies, really likes quantifying things, and whose memory has become a bowl of stale porridge, this post really resonated with my experience. I love giving things star ratings. (Follow my letterboxd!)
Thomas Manuel via The Indie RPG Newsletter - Counting Debts in Urban Shadows 2e
And my problem with being a sociopathic bean-counter is not with the sociopath part (that comes naturally to me), itâs the part about counting beans. The symbolic or metaphorical resonance of debts is strong. Everyoneâs caught in the teeth of the debt economy. But at the same time, itâs so fragile. A debt isnât a big deal. You can cash it in for a moderate favour. Whatâs a moderate favour? Itâs not clear. But itâs definitely not a big favour. You can start with 3 debt on someone. That sounds like a lot. But Iâm not sure if it is.
Thomas's insights are always welcome. I owe Urban Shadows another once-over before I start cracking at my World of Darkness heartbreaker. Which I'm sure I'll get to soon. Surely.
DongWon Song via Publishing is Hard - On Waiting Out the Boom Times
In the last couple of years we have seen a contraction across the culture as major media companies have had to look at their bottom lines and ask themselves some hard questions. Are we actually making money doing this? Are enough people watching our shows and movies? Are enough people playing the games we're making? The answer, unfortunately, has been kind of not really. A bunch of folks in C-suites realized the emperor was doing the thing he does: standing butt naked on a pedestal hoping none of us would ever notice that subscriber numbers are different from profits. That attention is different from revenue.
I'm not an author - I've barely been a READER, until this past year - but DongWon's insights into how the industry is moving and evolving is always a good read. Sometimes it all sounds a little too familiar.
Clayton Notestine via Explorers Design - Playing the Corporate Baddies
Make the job seem easy. Freelancers know what I'm talking about. Make the job look stupid-easy. Other jobs require punks to beat the odds, navigate uncertainty, and tip-toe around politics. Corporations keep those hidden. They even keep themselves hidden through shell companies and subcontractors. Promise an obscene payout. Corporations burn money. Make their jobs pay two, five, or ten times as much as the little guy. They don't care. They'll find a way to not pay anyway. Put the screws on them. Evil corporations always find a way to make not taking the job costly. Withhold resources, threaten the punk's community, or make their goals seem like shared goals. That's how they win. Corporations make themselves mandatory by rigging the system.
I have started running Mothership and this posts's guidance has valuable.