The format of this newsletter will change between issues but you can expect:

• Links to things that have made me think or are otherwise significant to me. Might or might not have anything to do with games. Things that I simply really enjoyed will make an appearance.
• Short thought pieces — stuff that does not warrant a full blog post but still is cogent enough to be in a newsletter or just thoughts about certain ongoings in scenes that i’m interested in
• A design/writer’s log where I talk about what I’ve been working on and share work in progress things

I am entirely aware that these newsletters are usually either 1. by people with an existing audience who want to hear what they are thinking about or 2. more united around a strong theme, but I want to create a space for myself where I can expand on my ideas and share thoughts that are not directly subject to the whims of the manipulative platforms.

As for how often issues will come out, I would like it to be one every two months, but at least once a season would be good.

Links

Note: A link being present does not mean that I agree with 100% of whatever the author is expressing. I will sometimes put things here that I liked parts of and also have critique for. But rest assured, I will not be sharing anything purely incendiary.

The Cure to Nonchalant Energy (Grind fiction)

This is a video essay in a pure way where what I am getting from it is encoded in the editing, the visuals, the audio and the words. While it does not go very deeply into each work it discusses, the video is more concerned about defining the relationships between the different media that he has identified as being a significant touchstone of the “Grind Fiction” genre and it does that very well. It feels like it comes from a very personal place, and that comes through the love being shown for the subject matter as well as the format of the video essay. This one is easy to get engrossed in.

The dark forest theory of the internet

Keep in mind this is a post from 2019. The future we have arrived at is truly one where the internet is a ‘dark forest’, especially with genAI creating more noise to drown out real people. In many ways, I see the rpg design community as being organised like this. Either because of in spite of being a rather niche creative community, it feels like The Conversation is impossible to actually visualise because of how bad the public areas of conversation are. The siloing into different private conversations is good, I think, as it allows people to explore in trusted spaces and receive good feedback. But it really is that the main online public space is bluesky(?), a space that is problematic for how it incentivises talking past each other, which contributes to so much wasted energy. If I had it my way we would all have blogs and newsletters instead.

Watabou’s Procgen Arcana

Amidst the targeted war against a functional epistemic environment (and the tools being used wage said war), I look quite fondly on procedurally generated things. They occupy a similar space to random roll tables to me (I love random tables). Watabou has tools for generating a variety of maps ranging from city maps to floorplan maps. I really enjoy just clicking through them and seeing what variations the generator puts out.

HIMEHINA’s Cover Song Medley

Since they put this clip of part of last year’s concert out on their Youtube I have put it on so many times. They flow between each song effortlessly and I always love the attention they put into which parts they give to which of the pair.

A maybe: The allure of TCGs are…

Unlike most board games, TCGs are by and large played with no comprehensive rules text present at the table. The only physical manifestation of the game is the cards and those only have their own specific abilities and rules.

A single match of a TCG will not include every single unique card that exists for the game, it will not even come close to a significant portion of them.

I think this is what makes TCGs so absorbing — when we play them we conjure one instance/rendition/fragment/expression of the whole game through interacting with the cards that we have.

The fact that you do not own all the cards and have to acquire them through either opening packs of random cards or buying them one by one from another person or company contributes to this feeling. We know that all this game exists but the ‘whole’ is always out of reach. The game gains a kind of non-materiality. The people that you can play the game with become living anchors for the game in your life, the people who play but you do not know form a larger community that also makes the game real in a boarder context.

I am not sure of how to resolve this feeling of its allure with the innate problems with using gambling as a mechanic and business model.

A memory: Queue based matchmaking changed online FPS culture

Queue based matchmaking systems were part of the movement away from modding and customisation in FPS games. I think one way to see this is to look at the difference between Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch. TF2 was played mainly on community run servers that you had a good connection to and liked the specific ruleset of. You logged on and built a relationship with the regulars, conversations within the in game chat was actually a thing. If you got bored of the rules of a particular server you could always join another.

Enter Overwatch. There is one option for getting into matches: join the queue for one of the game modes designed and tuned by the devs of the game. If you did not like the game modes then you simply put the game down and looked elsewhere. In-game chat is worthless and people are just strings of names that you will never remember. If you wanted to meet other people who liked the game you would have to join a Discord server.

After Overwatch basically every high profile multiplayer FPS that has come out has adopted that live service model where you are unable to even play the game without connecting to the server. To be fair, there are some benefits that this model has brought — better anti-cheat, tighter gameplay experiences and so on.

Notably, modding and customisation are by no means gone from video games in general; the survive-craft-build genre and RPGs still have robust mod cultures. But it feels like the conditions for online FPS games have changed and part of that is this externalisation of the community aspects of playing these games.

What if: Character creation instructions were presented not as a step by step procedure

I run a lot of oneshots — especially ones where we make characters at the table, and something I have noticed is that we often do the character creation steps out of order. Of course, if there are contingent steps like rolling stats and getting a number which corresponds to a table giving you another detail about the character, those steps go in order. But I see very often that each player will find one particular step of the process and use that as a starting idea for their character. In an elfgame maybe that is having a class they want to play or rolling an array of stats that they let lead their characterisation. I think one thing I like about games that use playbooks is that it is a very good way to get everyone working on their characters from a basis in the material of the game itself.

So what if there was some other way of presenting character creation steps? When I was writing Rising Action, I said to myself on many occasions that I wish I could have the reader read all the steps of the character creation procedure simultaneously and have them pick a starting point for themselves. But perhaps maybe there is a feasible way of presenting the process as like, a palette of actions to take (some of which can be contingent on each other) in the order that makes the most sense for the player.

Dev Log

The first half of the year was spent working on The Retrieval Process – which it is less of a ttrpg and more of an activity? I think it does have gameplay, as well as opportunity for a mixed group of people playing as themselves and people who are roleplaying which is very fun. The idea for the game came to me absolutely out of nowhere and only became a game because I happened to be on voice chat with a friend who played it with me right there and then. Thanks Matt.

The second half of the year was less productive in the game writing side of things mostly because I was incredibly busy with other things in my life, namely getting into a Master’s program and writing my graduation thesis. Also I have not been able to find one project to focus on and had been experimenting with longer projects. The larger scope has not been helpful for actually getting things out.

I am not lacking for ideas and direction though, and now with a new year beginning I am going to form a plan for more structured exploration so that I can start working towards releasing more games. A thought that I have is to release parts of games that are in some way incomplete but still playable, which would let me work on longer projects but still be able to put things out there. Much to do and I am looking forward to maybe having more brain space for all of this next year.

i hope it’s not the end of the world will continue

I started putting this together out of a lot of feelings about wanting to write more and have more of my thoughts out there somewhere for people to read, but also being very down on social networks right now. I am happy to say that it has been a great outlet for short spurts of writing motivation and it has allowed me to pay more attention to the ideas/thoughts that I occur to me.

If you enjoyed reading through this I would be absolutely thrilled if you subscribed to this newsletter. I think this is a really fun form of communication and it is only really communication if someone else is reading along. I would also love if you shared your thoughts with me about the links or what you read here! Leave a comment or at me on bluesky.

i hope it’s not the end of the world will continue. In fact, I am going get started on the next one right now.