Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Hobby culture
Roleplaying emerged from a historical meeting-point among wargaming, literary enthusiasts, and counterculture in the 1970s, and it has interacted strangely with pop culture and commerce.
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Gaming, future, role-playing
I was invited to attend Conpulsion, a long-standing and proudly non-commercialized convention in Edinburgh. This year, the convention theme was “The Future of Gaming,” which led me to ask the organizers to reconsider whether I would be a good guest. I told them: I don’t think the activity celebrated by Adept Play, whatever you want…
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Fantasy Role-Playing in 1998 Germany
The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge) isn’t the oldest German RPG, but by far the commercially most successful and most widely played one that had dominated the market for decades. Covering the entire publication history and design development here would be far out of scope, but I still need to establish some context for those…
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Champions and Dinosaurs – Before D&D
As a change of pace, here’s some proto-roleplaying… Back in 1956, a guy called Tony Bath wrote a pair of articles in the Bulletin of the British Model Soldier Society. Titled “War Game of the Middle Ages and Ancient Times“, they contained the first published set of Ancient/Medieval wargames rules. Developed over time, these rules…
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Workshop: What Went Wrong
Here’s the beast: all the things I think we should collectively consider as the social and commercial platform for role-playing’s history … and content, and emotions. Distribution, political context, money matters, subcultural effects, and more: presented not as momentary justifications, but as a layered history with a deep structure of cause and effect. Many thanks…
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On not getting it out there
Erik Steiner is a PhD candidate at York University, studying the economics and marketing of role-playing. He’s apparently talked to a lot of people and eventually came around to me. Before you understandably anticipate a disaster, I’ll tell you the payoff: a great conversation and opportunity to articulate important ideas. Because, at his invitation, I…
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Why things are the way they are
Mark Wallace contacted me for conversation about role-playing mechanics and emotions or the resulting content, among many other people. He’s written and published a lot about creative developments just outside or underneath the acknowledged media; see The Mark Wallace Experience for examples and enjoyment. He began the conversation with a bigger, relevant question: why role-playing…
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Historical technique
I’d like to start some group effort toward institutional memory of the historical role-playing activity. Here’s the D&D diagram I’ve been using for years, which I absolutely insist must be used rigorously by anyone who wants to use those syllables in a conversation. It helps to keep the title from bearing every imaginable generalization, along…
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A little me time goes a long way
My job affords me a lot of downtime lately. With this sudden excess of time, I’ve started doing many creative things I love.
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Kulturnatten 2023
Kulturnatten is a major event in Sweden, during which any and all activities conceivably identified as Kultur throw open their doors or set up stalls and bandstands, and everyone roams around checking out whatever they want. I participated last year both at Spelens Hus and at the game design event at the city library, as…