Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Ron Edwards
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Augustifesten 2023
This is a downtown festival held in Norrköping every year, mostly associated with food but which has accumulated all sorts of other activities through the years. Now it’s almost a local extra version of the Sweden-wide Kulturnatt in late September. It’s also an important anniversary for me, in two ways. First, Spelens Hus began participating…
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Närcon 2023
I’ve attended the third and last of the primary Swedish conventions for me this year, excluding the big one, Nordsken, which I might consider next year. Närcon is not specifically about games as such, being, simply, all about the fun, emphasizing cosplay and music. Spelens Hus Norrköping has an ongoing presence there, recently under review…
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July 2023 Q&A
I see much underlying unity across these questions, and I hope you can too. The central concept is situation in play, which certainly needs more practical clarity among us as it relates first to texts, and also to straightforward behavior. Oddly, too, it matches with the final question concerning explicit role-playing references in music, as…
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Can’t escape the zombies
Among several quick-play games or play-materials we brought to Närcon, I made sure to include Zombie Cinema. Different people find different games to ideal for introducing play, and for me, this is among my top three. It uses a board, but you don’t play on it in an ordinary board game sense. It’s a content-device.…
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June 2023 Q&A
Maybe I’m too much of a pattern-making story-making animal, but the questions this time really built a single coherent body of inquiry for me. I felt like I was addressing a single important topic from multiple angles of attack. I introduce the video with a warning, but I’ll say it briefly here as well: this…
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Yonder out yonder
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
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Once again with feeling
Lorenzo Bertini asked me for some discussion about Lines and Veils, specifically, and the general concept they’ve been folded into. (Context: Lorenzo is Claudio Freda’s partner-in-crime regarding their game in design Inquest; Claudio is present in the video as well for clarity and sometimes translation.) I’d asked Lorenzo first to check out Conversation: Safe spaces…
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Where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?
A lot of things came together last month in a fortuitous way. One of them concerns a social gathering for the local and state branch of the Miljöpartiet (Swedish Green Party; link includes language options), right where I play at Spelens Hus. It wasn’t a promotional event; in fact, it’s useful to understand that a…
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Dialing down the fantasy
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…