Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Emotions in play
The real participants’ emotions factor into play at many levels and at many points, sometimes as cause toward the fiction and sometimes as effects from it. Terms like immersion and bleed apply to some visible forms, but the social component of play carries emotional weight as well.
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Roleplaying Is an Emotional Contact Sport
So last night’s Burning Wheel game was a rough, instructive and ultimately rewarding one for me. To explain why (to myself as much as you), I’m going to have to go into some detail about what has happened so far. You can skip to the “Reflections” below if you just want the takeaways. Setting We’re…
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Hantverksklubben 21: Feelgood
Yesterday we finally managed a new session of Hantverksklubben, our ongoing experimental GM-less freeform group. The theme for the day was "Feelgood", and it was a … mixed success. The original post in Swedish is here. The text below is translated using Google with slight touch-ups, but the language might not be perfect. — Finally…
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Fun and games in the Book of Job
It seems to be my month for consulting on projects which have hunkered down in people’s notebooks for fifteen or twenty years, refusing either to get past a design hump or to yield gracefully into “not gonna do this game” status. The full name for this one is Variations on a Private and Lonely Hell,…
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Hantverksklubben 5: Horror!
So in this post I mentioned the fifth episode of Hantverksklubben, our ongoing GM-less freeform experimental group. Ron said he thought of breaking it out into a separate post, and I said I might as well make a new post about that session, since we didn’t have a Hantverk session this weekend. This session is…
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Let it bleed
Bleed as a term has arisen in and around the safety-techniques discussion of the past decade; I’m not sure who coined it or in what context. It concerns strong and possibly aversive or uncontrollable emotions that well up during play. If I’m not mistaken, at least sometimes it’s identified as undesirable or unsafe. Edoardo Cremaschi,…
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Gamefeel and Microsettings
Metatopia 2020 was an online event held on Nov. 5-8. This is an annual conference that focuses on small press and independent game designers. Panels covered a wide variety of topics, and the quality, as is to be expected, was varied. Two panels in my mind stood out. They touched on issues of interest to…
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Cthulhu called – was the keeper happy?
This was at a small convention some years ago (between 3 and 6, I would say), in the middle of nowhere, Finland. The game master and the other players were all strangers to me. There was maybe three or four players. I went in to fill the table, anyways, as I did with Savage worlds…
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Traverser
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a playtest of Paul Czege’s “Traverser.” In the game you are science fiction women soldiers, after the war, trying to integrate back into a new, post-capitalist society. You have quantum (time travel) powers, but using them erases or messes up important parts of your past. I just played…
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Circle of Hands – Play Gets Metal
This is a post of pure enthusiasm for our most recent Circle of Hands session, which had one of the most epic and just plain metal conclusions I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s Venture two, the players are my wife and two of our sons (18 and 16) and they’re already very much Into…