Review: Argyle & Crew

Argyle & Crew by Benjamin Gerber is a delightful role-playing game based on sock puppets. The game draws on some basic but sophisticated elements of childhood imagination and play to create a game of whimsy and great potential. I was immediately reminded of the work of Daniel Greenspan in the area of floor time, encouraging caregivers to think about the form and quality of their work with the very young. I definitely recommend this game to parents and others working with young children or looking for a diversion, but I also think many other gamers should get a copy of this game to mine it for several other inspirations.

Character creation, using socks or paper bags or whatever comes to hand, is a concrete way to proceed, but it also could inspire interesting ideas for adult gamers. The basic game is diceless, so elements attached to the puppet create opportunities for powers and storytelling within the game itself. I have been in a couple of gaming groups where we have tried to add character illustrations and other imagery to the game, but this routinely foundered on some players' self-consciousness about their own artistic abilities. Anyone reading through the short description of character creation in Argyle & Crew would realize that it's worth another chance. This method of character creation could also be elaborated into more sophisticated forms as well.

The game also includes insightful sections on saying yes to players and about working with conflict in a game group. I would hope that Gerber would share some version of them online or in his blog. Appendices include ideas for expanding the basic game into a dice version with additional ideas for more complex, adult play.

The Argyle & Crew game is currently available in pdf form from Drive Thru, but there is a drive to raise $3000 to fund the publication of the game in full.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out

Wow, two blog posts in one week! A new personal best!

This coming week celebrates Speak Out With Your Geek Out, a wonderful and widespread celebration of Geekdom unilaterally declared by Monica Valentinelli in her blog, Flames Rising blog. As a teacher and public gamer, my geek is out there most of the time, but I want to join her and many others in making sure everyone around me knows that I'm a gamer geek and happy to be one. I encourage you to join the movement as well. It's a good thing to do for those of us comfortable in our various interests and hobbies, and it will give permission to many others presently more shy about doing so.

In my day job, I teach Chinese studies, and my favorite find at Gen Con this year was a t-shirt from Gamer Concepts that reads, 扮演角色类游戏玩家, translating more or less as role player. Woohoo!

Have fun!

Dragon*Con 2011

I had such a good time at Dragon Con in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, this year, it took me most of the week to recover!

I was scheduled to run a HeroQuest Glorantha game every four hours from 9:00 am to 10:00 pm Saturday and Sunday and from 9:00 to 4:00 on Monday. Almost all of these had enough people show up to play, and I had a great time with friends old and new. In my couple of gaps, other than eating I was able to watch the whole parade and play in another GM's game of dark future and magic. Very cool and fun!

Other than that, I had little time to cruise around the convention, which spread across more than five conference hotels downtown. What I saw looked full of fun with more costumes than ever, ranging from classic to whimsical. Dragon Con now draws loads of men and women, families with many, many kids, and people of diverse backgrounds of all sorts. It's a weekend of acceptance and creativity, a celebration of our imaginations, variations, and common wish to play with our imaginations and have some fun.

The roleplaying crowd was mostly a middle-aged crowd, though I had several people in their twenties and a great player in middle school. My games mostly drew men, and only one had participants of other than European ancestry. Roleplaying at Dragon Con seems to have stabilized at about the same number year to year, filling half a dozen or so conference rooms with several score people coming to play in each time slot. Ongoing Campaign Games, mostly AD&D, draw about half the players, and Shadowrun gamers have their own conference room and schedule. Some players, like myself, came to the convention for games most of the time, but at least half of them were popping in for only a game or two in the weekend, spending the rest of their time enjoying other venues as well.

Less populous but present games other than the big ones and my own HeroQuest scenarios included Dresden Files, Call of Cthulhu, Conan, and Fudge. There were others, but I didn't get to hear them all mentioned before I was sent off with my own group each session. Players were enthusiastic, and GMs, even on Monday when we were all tired, were delighted to be able to run their games and spun tales of wonder and fun all around me over the course of the weekend. Dragon Con is not one of the largest RPG gatherings, but it provides a reliable setting for gamers from all across the Southeastern USA and beyond to come together to enjoy their hobby and one another.

And it takes place in the biggest party of Labor Day, so next year, come on down, y'all!

Have fun!

Upcoming at Dragon Con

Dragon Con is coming up on September 2 - 5. I'll be running HeroQuest games all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. My schedule is below.

If anyone wants to come by or come play, it would be fun to meet in person. I always get so many ideas when I run games at conventions since I am exposed to new people, questions, and manners of play. Come have some fun in Atlanta!

Event Title: Descent into the Depths

Saturday 9 am & Sunday 1 pm

Word has reached them Golden Emperor of Kralorela of a serious bookkeeping error in the Underworld, one that has unjustly condemned one of his most important officials to death and punishment. Go now and bring him back!

Event Title: The Lake Murders

Saturday 1 pm & Sunday 6 pm

Everyone’s heard about the grisly murders in the Lake District. Now they’re your case, but glamour and death do not make for pleasant work.

Event Title: Hunting Elephants

Saturday 6 pm & Monday 9 am

Seek out fabled Mount Ivory, said to lie deep in the jungles of the far south. Its ancient line of monks know secrets of martial arts and magic. Their students can gain great fame!

Event Title: The Emperor’s Ships of the Great Fog

Sunday 9 am & Monday 1 pm

The great imperial fleet patrols the misty shoreline of Kralorela and sometimes much farther out into the deep and mysterious sea fog.

Gen Con 2011

I'm just back from a long weekend in Indianapolis, Indiana, attending Gen Con, an awesome annual gathering of tens of thousands of gamers. I've been attending Gen Con on and off, mostly on, since the late 70s, and it's changed over the years, of course, but remains great fun and an important part of my games and education work.

Gen Con is huge. Somewhere around thirty thousand people attend over the course of four days. Events and exhibition halls filled the entire Indianapolis Convention Center and spill over into six or more neighboring hotels. The dealer's hall and the art show occupied the entirety of one of two cavernous spaces, while the other was filled with board, card, and war gamers. Roleplaying and the LARP events were mostly in the smaller hotel meeting rooms, which cut down on distracting noise.

Gen Con began on Thursday, but Trade Day, which for a small extra ticket price featured game demos and discussions of games in classrooms and libraries, preceded it. It seems to be aimed at educators and store owners. I had planned to attend this extra day, but a friend's illness prevented me from arriving in time. I hope to be there next year!

I haven't made it to Gen Con for several years, so I was struck, anecdotally of course, by some demographic shifts. There were more families and kids of all ages, and there were more activities for non-gamer spouses, including many crafts, and for kids, ranging from LEGOs to boffer wars to puzzles. There were more women and girls everywhere, involved in all aspects of the hobby, and there were more women running games.

My hotel, the Westin, was the home base for anime at Gen Con, which I had visited with my daughter in the past. While anime and manga hadn't taken over much more space, the convention itself had more anime enthusiasts than ever, and there was more costuming in general. Eager teens continue to inject their energy and youth into the hobby, as more and more of them seem to be also enjoying the gaming, and many gamers dabble in anime and manga as well. While still small, there were more people of color at Gen Con this year, and I was especially struck by significant numbers of Latino players.

My game focus, of course, was roleplaying, and this was dominated at the con by Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. Wizards of the Coast was promoting its Neverwinter setting, though as Michael Tresca has noted, Pathfinder is now more successful than D&D. Other popular RPGs were 7th Sea, Call of Cthulhu, Hackmaster, Hero, Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowrun, and Star Wars, and there were dozens of RPGs with a game or two. I ran a two-part HeroQuest tournament, set in a region of Glorantha that I have been developing, and a one-hour introduction to the same game. For every session I had players, some of whom had never played before and left having had some fun!

A highlight of the convention was running a Games and Education seminar on Saturday afternoon. It was well attended by about thirty teachers, parents, and game designers. We varied in our schools, levels, subjects taught, games enjoyed, and game use. There were several new teachers, which is very exciting. We discussed issues with convincing administrators and parents, implementing games of various kinds, and a few specific games like Pay Day for financial literacy and Forbidden Island as a cooperative game. It was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation, and we decided to continue and open it to others with a Facebook page. Thanks, Bruce! I plan to post some of my materials as soon as I finish this blog entry.

Finally, I picked up a couple titles from MacFarland Books, an independent academic publisher. I'll write reviews of Gaming as Culture and The Functions of Role-Playing Games as I finish them. I also bought a copy of Shannon Appelcline's Designers and Dungeons from Mongoose Games, a weighty tome on the history of the game industry. David Niecikowski and I met face to face for the first time, and he was gracious enough to give me a copy of his latest project, Game Design in the Classroom. I certainly have my reading material for the next few months! I'll share what I discover.

All in all, Gen Con was a blast! It's always a pleasure to see so many game enthusiasts gather in one place, and this year it continued to be a diverse and delightful experience.

Paideia School is about to start up for another school year, and I have Dragon Con here in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, so I'll be mighty busy for a while, but as I have indicated, there's plenty to discuss here, so I'll be back soon.

Have fun!

Planning for Gen Con

My summer camp games have ended, and while I'm planning for the coming school year and my own weekend game with my regular group of adult gamers, my game-brain is working on Gen Con. I'll be offering a few Heroquest scenarios, including a short one just to introduce the game mechanics, and I will also have a Games and Education seminar on Saturday, August 6, at 1 pm in the afternoon. I'll bring my ideas and information, and I hope many other people will share their insights as well. Blogs and online chats (like this one) are all well and good, but there's nothing like the insights that occur when we get together face to face.

It would be great fun to meet anyone interested in talking games and education, whether at the seminar or otherwise during the convention!

David

Summer Camp

I'm back from some early summer traveling and now leading a morning activity at my school's middle school summer camp called "Games for the Imaginative Mind." We may get into some game design and such or some writing later this week or next week, but the kids mostly want to play in a game. I have four boys and two girls, and I started them out nominating ideas for genres and settings.

One lad, who also likes to write, came up with high fantasy and zombie apocalypse right off the bat. There was an extended discussion of location, elements, and possible characters, and then I opened it up for a vote. The quietest participant, one of the girls, nominated zombie apocalypse, and everyone agreed that this idea interested them the most. We settled on World War II Sicily for our location, and they set to work on characters.

I said characters could be anyone form anywhere in the world that fit the early forties. We ended up with a local mafia don, his main lieutenant, a Canadian doctor, a Belgian pastry chef, a local auto enthusiast, and an expat Japanese baseball star. Wow. Thrown together by wartime circumstance, they find themselves together in Licata, on the southern coast of Sicily, on Wednesday, August 4, 1943. The last elements of the Third Infantry pull out for the north suddenly, leaving the locals to get back to their normal lives. The doctor has a badly mauled toddler and his mother at her home, and the Don seems to be in the first moments of a turf war with his old rivals. Where did that little kid go?

It's fun. They're creating up a storm, co-leading the game with me in wonderful ways. As one of them said early on, "We could write this as a book by the end of the week!" It does all lead me to take a look at how to add more of this kind of thing to my school-year writing program.

Definitely, to be continued!

David