C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I wanted to design a game about Open Source and proprietary software for a long time. It was always difficult to get the theme to fit visually with the equipment. I think I finally hit on the right way to do it.

There is a new subgenre of game, which I'm calling "non-collectible collectible card games" or NC3s. Everyone starts with the same rudimentary deck. The game consists of building your deck during the game, by using cards from your hand to add a new card from the supply to your deck. Unlike Collectable Card Games, there are no booster packs-- once you buy the box, you own every card, and you're done spending real-world money.

Here's the idea I had for an NC3 game. You have a screen behind which to play cards that are in your proprietary control, to be resolved when the screen is lifted. Also, there is a central place to play cards collaboratively, with tokens to indicate who contributed them, so they can get credit.

You build projects on the table as chains of face-up cards that accumulate work points, reputation points, and money points.

If there are enough work points in a project, it gets a new software card.

If there are enough reputation points in a project, it can recruit a developer or a user from a variety of characters: Entrepreneur, Propeller Beanie, Community Manager, Benevolent Dictator For Life, Aunt Tillie, Iconoclast, Curmudgeon, Bastard Operator From Hell, etc. They have personality incompatibilities.

With enough money points you are tempted to buy a layer of Middle Management, Script Kiddie, Market Droid, Lawyer, Judge, or Legislatosaurus in your proprietary area. Each has various anti-competitive powers that are useful for things other than quality software. But if you do too much of that, then all the other players would combine their efforts against you.

There are also Lawsuit cards and Flame cards which you receive as penalties or attacks. They waste space in your hand and your projects, and react badly with various Person cards. :)

The game is over when the Person card deck is empty. If the common area has more Person cards than anyone's proprietary area, the player who made the largest contributions to earn reputation points is the winner. However, if one player has more Person cards behind his screen than any other screen or in the common area, he wins the Evil Empire victory.

I got permission from Eric Raymond to name it Cathedral and Bazaar, after his paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

I would like to open this process to collaborative development, but a game needs a single vision of what kind of experience the design is intended to achieve. It is notoriously difficult to balance the available strategic choices in games of this type, so it's already hard enough to make it fun without the added challenge of making it educational as well. It must be fun, through gameplay and humor. That may come at the expense of realism, but I'll do what I can. If anyone makes a suggestion, and it doesn't break the gameplay, and it's true enough to engender laughter, it will probably get in.

A poster in Ops at U-Con advertised seeking geeks to be interviewed, for an honors thesis about geek culture. So I emailed Rachel Yung at and signed up. If you self-identify as a geek, Rachel wishes you to do likewise. Here is a transcript of the interview.
( Read more... )

My playtest of Ingeniators at U-Con had six attendees, despite being a four-player game. There were two others who wanted to participate but had schedule conflicts.

One player, who was there with his son, disliked brainy games and spacial reasoning challenges. You always need to be careful to alleviate the feeling of intimidation that a casual gamer experiences with the typical mid-to-high-heaviness game. If you can reassure them past their initial palpable fear of boredom and humiliation, they will get comfortable. This player took an early lead, which helped a lot. The other players were familiar with games of similar weight.

I sought to answer these questions with a playtest. Did players...

1 ... catch onto the rules quickly?
2 ... develop strategies?
3 ... collaborate to achieve goals?
4 ... give each other advice for the sheer beauty of a clever solution?
5 ... achieve victory before too much time has passed?
6 ... not know who was assured of victory, until victory was near?
7 ... say or demonstrate that they're having fun?

The answers were all yes. As always, the playtesters made helpful suggestions. I'll try some more tweaking in future playtests, but Ingeniators is ready for me to draw illustrations of example plays, paint cover art, and show it to publishers.

I served as the head of Ops (Operations) for U-Con gaming convention this past weekend. I also made the program book, which was a hit. I made it so that you could cut and glue the front cover into a 20-sided die with the Earth on it instead of numbers. Laura assembled one:



Here is my Ops report.( Read more... )

I do not have Asperger's Syndrome, but occasionally I have an Autistic Moment. Several times in my life, I have mistaken the phrase "I don't know how I can be more clear" for a sincere request for a tutorial. I had to learn to catch myself before it is too late.

U-Con starts tomorrow, setup is tonight! I am in Ann Arbor for the duration.

In addition to serving as Ops and Reg, I made the program book this year. Here it is as a web-ready PDF (1.22MB), and a re-paginated PDF (1.19MB) that you can print, fold, and staple into your own booklet.

Ingeniators is playtested as far away as Iowa. Thank you Ben Phillips, John Frick, and Kris Frick! Here's a picture gallery.



All these playtests have resulted in great feedback and massive improvements.

I now carry t-shirts on PodDisc.com! Art by Jonathan Chaffin.

Fans of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog have made a prequel called A Horrible Turn!

I swear, in the last few months I've been exposed to more insults based on not being white, than in thirty-five years of life. I never heard disparagement of non-white skin colors in fundamentalist churches, in private fundamentalist schools, or at Pensacola Christian College. It was simply unheard of. But I'm suddenly hearing it now. How weird is that?

I heard "that's mighty white of you" something like a half-dozen times this year. I never heard that before. I didn't think I heard correctly. I got this deer-in-the-headlights look. So I mumbled, "wait, what? White = praiseworthy? Non-white = non-praiseworthy? WTF?" Then it was corrected to "No, I mean that's mighty Christian of you." I am not making this up.

And in a different setting, by different people: when did we start making jokes about the supposed flaws of blacks and jews? After saying "that's not funny", "no, that's seriously not even a little bit funny", the HURF DURF BLACKS AND JEWS didn't stop until I got up, said "I'm leaving" and grabbed my coat.

I guess I should have filled the awkward silence with a lecture about why to stop. I shouldn't tell somebody to change with no explanation, as if they have to obey me when they don't understand. Asking them for blind obedience and faith on this issue, even if they complied, would raise no consciousness and improve nothing. It would just make me a bossy, self-important killjoy.

I knew I had blown it when someone said they'd stop if it "offended" my "morals". I dislike "offended", and never use it. If someone else caused you a problem that you can identify, you would use the word for that problem, instead of the generic replacement "offended". Therefore no one gets "offended", unless they have no justification to establish harm has been done to them. When I hear someone is "offended", I wonder whether they are knee-jerk witch-hunters with a subjective personal hangup no better than anyone else's opinion, that stems only from their own triggery sensitivity and desperate need for validation from random strangers. Of course, that description is a complete exaggeration, but unfortunately the word has taken on a linguistic evocation. It is as if being "offended" is similar to a phobia; you know there's a structurally-sound glass floor on the observation deck, but the sight of the street under the skyscraper still makes you queasy. You are uncomfortable for no good reason. But if you claim that revealing the height to you has made you unsafe as a moral issue to be demanded, rather than uncomfortable as an etiquette issue to be negotiated, that means you're just "offended".

As for morals, there would be nothing immoral if I chose to hang out with, for instance, Beavis and Butthead. I would not hang out with Beavis and Butthead because they are not appealing. And the folks in question have all been appealing so far, except for this-- I don't know where the HURF DURF against random bystanders is coming from.

So now I had acted "offended" and it was about "morals". That perception meant my credibility was shot, and a persuasion opportunity was no longer available. *sigh*

So why did I jump up and act as the thought police? I was just so shocked, I didn't think it through. I didn't seize a consciousness-raising opportunity. It should have been the opportunity to be one of those friends, the ones who like you and are on your side but are able to call you on your shit because you trust them.

U-Con's television commercial will air this Saturday night sometime between midnight and 1:30a on TV20 Detroit during Wolfman Mac's Chiller Driver-In (http://www.nightmaresinema.com/).



You can preregister for U-Con until Tuesday Nov 3!

The exhibitors list for 2009 is posted and will be updated when more exhibitors are confirmed.

You can purchase ribbons and generic tickets during preregistration by searching for 'generic.'

Only 3 weeks until U-Con!

Staff, U-Con 2009
http://www.ucon-gaming.org

This journal entry is important for the same reason that the non-existence of Barack Obama's authentic Kenyan birth certificate is important. There is a proportion of the population that has a serious problem finding which side of a dispute bears the burden of evidence, and whether or not extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and where faith is an acceptable substitute for evidence. I suspect if we combat that mindset, their religious experience will not wither, but will simply be expressed in healthier and less destructive ways.

OK, I got the justification out of the way. One more disclaimer: I have very little interest in convincing deists or agnostics to change their minds. Their goals are allied with mine. I'm glad to hear why they are satisfied that God's existence cannot be proven or disproven. I would be happy to describe why I, personally, am satisfied that God does not and cannot exist, without needing to convince them to agree. And that's what I'm going to do.

What I do want to accomplish is to counter the tendency for agnostics to support principles of thinking such as "we can't prove a negative", which go astray and support our mutual opponents in the public sphere. (See the first paragraph.) Atheism is a mere academic exercise, but critical thinking skills are important to a broad range of issues, and need our support.

Many negatives are actually pretty easy to prove.

For one instance, square circles are contradictory. Preachers make claims of infinities about the biblical God that contradict themselves all over the place.

For another instance, "a coffee mug in my right hand at this moment" can be proven a negative truth claim through observation. The Bible describes the Christian God with some claims of intervention which, if true, would be observable, or would leave forensic evidence. Creation Scientists claim to prove their specific version of a Creator God all the time-- a Creator that even most agnostics regard as false.

The stories about Spider Man in the comics, like those of God in the Bible, take place on Earth, where we can go and look. Web-swinging in a major metropolis could not fail to attract attention, so if true, his stories would be almost as provable as those of God.

If we claim that god might exist somewhere else in the universe, then we might also say that Spider Man comics are true on an Earth in an alternate universe. (Possibly one in which God exists. Who knows?)

The problem is that it makes it sound as if the two options were on equal footing. The truth of Stan Lee's Spider Man story is wildly unlikely. There are all kinds of conceptual problems with radioactive spiders, and hanging from ceilings without the ceiling tiles falling off under the weight. Don't get me started about the spider-sense. Because the biblical description of god has serious problems, it is automatically on the wrong side of the burden of proof. I cannot justify believing in that unless there is overwhelming evidence in support. Showing an unsupported claim is both wildly improbable, and enormous enough that it would loom in the sky like Godzilla, means you get to tell the ironclad supporters that they are full of baloney. Disproving it would be just a garnish on the plate.

We have now achieved the same degree of certainty that we have about day-to-day life-- tentative, open to argumentation, but pragmatically it's in the bag.

To sum up the problems with "we can't prove a negative":

1. The term "god" is left broad enough to encompass the abstract impersonal force behind the big bang (which agnostics often mean) and the God of the Bible.
2. It makes it seem like both claims in a dispute are on equal footing of probability. In any dispute, one claim is usually more likely than the other.
3. Sometimes it requires a level of proof that nobody ever uses in day-to-day life.

That having been said. The non-interventionist, abstract First Cause of the Deists and philosophers-- that is a different story. Quite unprovable one way or another. I am quite agnostic about it. Unfortunately, almost no arguments between theists and atheists are about that god.

Are you a fan of the Discovery Channel's popular commercial? And its delightful parody by the webcomic xkcd? For that matter, are you a fan of the whole world? Well then, my friend, for you it has come full circle. Behold.

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Hey, stop, check this out! I have finally figured out the solutions to the issues plaguing what is probably the best game idea I ever had. I present Ingeniators. I will demo the prototype at U-Con.

From Games

For the time being, I'm borrowing meeples and builders from a Carcassonne set in place of the Key and Wrench pieces. When I have eight dollars of disposable income to buy Sculpey in metallic iron-black, silver, gold and copper, I'll sculpt my own set of pieces.( Read more... )

Rob landley is publishing a multi-part History of Penguicon. The first part covers its pre-history, and years one and two.

I read RaceFail09. Not all of it, of course-- who could? But I clicked through the link roundups, and the funny thing is that I found post after post of reassurance, hand-holding, tears, group hugs, and validation of feelings among writer-workshop wannabes. I also saw a lot of uses of "safe" and "unsafe" as a hyperbolic exaggeration of "comfortable" and "uncomfortable". After an hour of searching for the good and useful comments that we were all assured were out there, I found nothing educational, so I quit trying to get to the bottom of it. The only concrete criticism I found was on the topic of cultural appropriation, which confuses skin color with culture.

I also saw some white authors and editors on the other side of it feeling defensive. So a bunch of your readers think you're a racist. OK. I recommend some more emotional distance. Here, watch me: If cultural appropriation is racist, I'm racist. See how easy that was?

A few months ago I encountered Derailing For Dummies. This laugh-fest says, among other things, that white people shouldn't ask for more than the sort of anecdotes that support quack medicine. Why? Because evidence is white. Ugh. I'll tell you what: Here's some evidence of racism collected for you by the priviledged oppressors at OKCupid.

After I got done with that, I listened to The Folk Song Army (YouTube link) by Tom Lehrer, because it perfectly captured what I think of RaceFail. So I updated the lyrics.

Oh, we are the Novelist Army, every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares.
There are innocuous novels, yeah, but we regard them with scorn.
The folks who write them have no social conscience-- why, they don't even care if "black literature" is shelved with porn.
If you feel dissatisfaction, just write your frustrations away.
Some people may prefer action, but give us a novel any old day.

Today I came across Xtranormal, a text-to-movie site, and wrote a short film I call PersuadeFail. Here it is. Enjoy. Or fling spittle, but I hope you enjoy flinging spittle.


EDITED TO ADD: Apparantly my movie no longer exists on Xtranormal. I don't know why. It's just gone. I have the transcript from my movie below the cut of this LJ post.

( transcript )

Good grief, I love OKCupid's blog so much. They've done it again. They do so much cool data analysis and infographics about relationships and demographics, that you can't look away, even if you hate their service (and I don't, I think it's great).

Here they go again with their findings on How Races And Religions Match In Online Dating. One thing they found is further indication, if any were needed, that astrological signs make absolutely no difference at all.

Also in the "not news" department-- they found that the more seriously you take your position on the topic of religion, the more of a wallop you take to your popularity. The interesting part is, and I'm quoting:

even a man who’s “very serious" about his religion and has presumably designed his matching algorithm around this fact is still more compatible with the women who are laughing about it.

Until next time, dear readers, I leave you with this Mad Lib: "How’s it going? I’m a curious kinda awkward atheist whose favorite movies and video games all involve tatooed zombies in a metal band. I noticed that you mention the pretty good taste of vegetarian physics and probably awesome grad school literature. lol. Sorry!"

Code Monkey is a musical based on the music of Jonathan Coulton.

I showed up to the Festifools Fall carpool to find that the entire group is college students, with four teachers. I appear to have been the only one driving in from out of town or unaffiliated with the University. I looked at the registration list and saw my name in a column with the header "Student".

So I found myself in a minivan full of teen girls. I introduced them to the game "Are You The Traitor?" It was a hit.

In Grand Rapids, the teacher urged us all to do more than just carry the puppets-- to perform them. As always, I threw myself into the performance with all the gusto I could generate. I volunteered to be rigged to a very heavy clown puppet, with an articulated mouth I could operate with a string. Students carried the arms. I frequently tripped on the hem, but that was fine because it was in character. The weather cooperated beautifully. The crowds adored us and engaged with us. I was predictably exhausted and sore by the end, but it was a good kind.

I spoke to some of the teachers about my desire to make a puppet for Festifools this year. It's possible they will provide their workshop space, and the most common materials, if I provide the labor, design, and volunteers to operate it. I need two of you to volunteer to operate the arms on Sunday, April 11, 2010 on Main Street in Ann Arbor! Please mark your calendars and commit as soon as you can. This has a side benefit for us that I will tell you about later. For now it's a secret.

When we returned to the campus, I found my car had been ticketed. The organizer explained that she told us to meet there, not park there. I own no actual money right now, have almost no income, and don't qualify to receive unemployment, so we'll see what can be done about this. It was a dreadful, stressful end to an otherwise good day.