Adept Play
The Pool is a content-customizable game by James V. West, composed of several sequential versions, first presented in 2002, published by his company Random Order Creations.
First Lincon video! With none other than James V. West’s The Pool, which is a signature game for this whole website. It’s also a deliberate comparison with James’ other, related game, The Questing Beast, as I played and posted about at IndieCON. Briefly: The Pool works from the logic, “What is happening, so that we…
I’ve been running a sequence of four game sessions working with James V. West’s The Pool. The mechanics of The Pool are lean and streamlined: Players start by creating a 50-word story introducing their characters. Traits and attributes are derived from those stories, and a players can assign points to those traits according to…
Justin gave me a list of questions or topics for this session, and I realized they made most sense in nested form. So I grouped IIEE and relationship mechanics into the larger category of Bounce and system diagrams (specifically their feedback or activity loops), then put the whole into the biggest category of design processes…
The topic is group preparation, when you spend some time together creating and customizing the setting and situation. Whether it’s a pitch, a series of rules steps,a suggestion-and-approval process, or anything like that – we hit it from a lot of angles and a lot of examples. Joining me are Ray, Herman, Ángel, Santiago, and…
From my participation in Designers on Stage, an event at the Instituto Politecnico in Milan, Italy, in early 2017. The camera on my slides didn’t do its job, so open the attached PowerPoint too to follow along and see them, in fact a somewhat better version of what I was showing. Please consider the intrinsically…