About a Pig

[robotnik2004]

Modesty shall not prevent me from noting that my game design General Mud, which I whinged for validation on discreetly mentioned back in November, won the coveted "High Ronnie" for the last round of Ron Edwards' eponymous game designing contest. Here is the link to Ron's very flattering feedback.

Until about three-quarters through, I figured it was merely a dialogue-based homage to Animal Farm, but it's not. Can the Soviet survive? Is the General's ascendancy a long-term curse to its downfall? Are bourgeois notions, in moderation, compatible with a secure economy? This should be taught and played in history classes.

I was especially pleased by that final line.

(I'm going to get even more immodest now and assert that there are actually some parallels between General Mud and neelk's terrific-looking Court of the Empress. But Neel being Neel and me being me, his design is elegant, cruel, and sexy, while mine is convoluted, twitchy, and mostly about a pig.)

Comments

[neelk]

First, congratulations!

Rereading General Mud, after having looked at Emily's link on consensus-based meetings, reminded me of Jonathan Walton's posts about the middle ground and how communities of practice form. That's kind of convoluted, but that's how you all have given me the idea for the most frightening idea for a horror game I can possibly imagine. You can think of Stalin and his inner circle as forming a really effective community of practice, where the practices they were engaged in were horrible and evil: they formed a learning community discovering how to really effectively engage in repression, tyranny and genocide. So, the ultimate horror rpg would be one where the players, by playing it, teach themselves and each other how to do just that. "Play this game, and you'll be a worse human being!"

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Oh, you so have to write that game up. Ages ago, I'd intended to post, here or at 20x20, 5 alternate settings for Paranoia - the first four were just mashing up the Paranoia ethos of backstabbing and treason and cheap death with other eras and genres, but the 5th was a game in which the (real life) players took turns denouncing one another for their (real or purported) crimes and perversions. There were a few vague mechanics, but what crimes and perversions the game was meant to root out were purposely left unspecified. It was an answer to all that talk about PTA making groups of gamers better friends - I wanted to imagine a game that would make people worse friends.

[peaseblossom.livejournal.com]

At some points I feel like the Pantellos game could have approached that; it didn't, but there was definitely some potential.

I've also played in WoD games that probably actually made me a worse person.

[neelk]

I don't really want to write that kind of game. I'd rather do the Vaclav Havel rpg than the Gustav Husak rpg, all things considered. (One of my wild ambitions is to take Havel's The Power of the Powerless and turn it into a really good rpg that captures the experience of what he describes. I have no idea how to do that, though.)