2019 Games
Dec. 22nd, 2019 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corviThis is zhelana 's December year in review meme
December 08 → talk about games this year
Playing Video Games
The video game I played most in 2019 (like the two previous years) was Pokemon Go. My entire household plays together, and we enjoy an excuse to go out walking and explore the hidden corners of various islands together in search of imaginary animals. Here is my favourite imaginary animal I found this year. It is some sort of cheerful purple turtle-plesiosaur, named "Flentrop," after the pipe organ builder, because it looks like it probably goes HONK. (I do not know very much about Pokemon, but I know considerably more about pipe organs.)
Watching Video Games
The video game I watched other people play most this year was Mario Maker 2. In theory, people design their own Super Mario levels with Super Mario things like ledges, seesaws, monsters, elevators, bombs, cannons, and the like, and then upload them to the internet, where others can play them. In practice, a lot of people actually build intricate and bizarre machines out of the Mario parts instead:
Traditional RPGs
Sadly, I played in only one traditional RPG this year. My character was a mild-mannered bookish fellow with tidy clothes, round wire-rim glasses, and an Absurd Hat. The Absurd Hat was about a meter tall and resembled an elaborate cuckoo clock, including little mechanical birds that popped out and sang at inconvenient moments. I statted him up as a berserker. By prior agreement with the game master, whenever I, the player, wanted to use any of his berserker powers, I would tell the game master, and the game master would have one of the enemies insult or threaten the Absurd Hat, at which point the character would carefully remove his glasses, fold them up, place them in a hard-shelled case, and then go berserk. Not a complicated character, but rather fun to play.
A Nontraditional RPG
I played three games of Microscope, which I've owned for years but never had the opportunity to play before this year. Microscope is less "a game" and more "a set of parliamentary procedures." It's a formalization of a system where the players take turns defining events along a timeline, according to certain rules, with the end goal of creating an epic history spanning hundreds of years. It's a lot of fun because everyone's ideas get incorporated wholesale, so there's more depth and texture than you'd get just sitting down and writing a history yourself, all sorts of strange turns nobody would have come up with on their own, as people expand on each other's ideas.
In the first game (corvi and raverdog ), we destroyed post-apocalyptic Australia with an imperfectly self-replicating city. Good times! The self-replicating city also generated people-like objects to do city things in it. It was very bad at this.
In the second game (corvi and raverdog ), an evil empire using a "Dream Engine" that could access everyone's dreams set up a surveillance state. We wrote the braided histories of power struggles within the empire and the doomed efforts of groups of dream-cyberpunks trying to take it down (or maybe just make art and hide from the Dream Engine for a little while).
The third game (corvi , raverdog , and Kindle-No-DW) was cut short by lack of time. So far, we had a traumatic event that left many humans able to see ghosts, and also amnesia about the exact nature of the event. Ghosts could be luminous enough to exert light pressure to push a solar sail, and the game was shaping up into a solar-sail-space-opera, with unsettling mass amnesia and ghost elements, as humanity spread out across the solar system looking for answers and the governments of earth conspired to maintain control in the face of panic and dispersal.
(You don't really have an idea, when you start a game, what kind of history you'll make, butraverdog and I apparently collectively tend toward histories with mildly creepy premises and oppressive governments.)
This is an incredibly fungameparliamentary procedure. Each round sketched out a handful of intriguing premises I'd love to expand into whole stories. Look forward to playing a bunch more games in 2020. You should definitely play a gamehave a meeting with me.
zhelana 's December year in review memeDecember 08 → talk about games this year
Playing Video Games
The video game I played most in 2019 (like the two previous years) was Pokemon Go. My entire household plays together, and we enjoy an excuse to go out walking and explore the hidden corners of various islands together in search of imaginary animals. Here is my favourite imaginary animal I found this year. It is some sort of cheerful purple turtle-plesiosaur, named "Flentrop," after the pipe organ builder, because it looks like it probably goes HONK. (I do not know very much about Pokemon, but I know considerably more about pipe organs.)
Watching Video Games
The video game I watched other people play most this year was Mario Maker 2. In theory, people design their own Super Mario levels with Super Mario things like ledges, seesaws, monsters, elevators, bombs, cannons, and the like, and then upload them to the internet, where others can play them. In practice, a lot of people actually build intricate and bizarre machines out of the Mario parts instead:
- crashing things into eachother in the right order that their various collision sounds play recognizable music
- making a digital calculator that will add or subtract any two single-digit numbers and display the result
- designing short videogames in entirely different genres, like making mechas whose propulsion engines are wiggly mario monsters
- straight up hacking where people overflow the memory stack that tracks monster sprites to teleport things around impossibly
Traditional RPGs
Sadly, I played in only one traditional RPG this year. My character was a mild-mannered bookish fellow with tidy clothes, round wire-rim glasses, and an Absurd Hat. The Absurd Hat was about a meter tall and resembled an elaborate cuckoo clock, including little mechanical birds that popped out and sang at inconvenient moments. I statted him up as a berserker. By prior agreement with the game master, whenever I, the player, wanted to use any of his berserker powers, I would tell the game master, and the game master would have one of the enemies insult or threaten the Absurd Hat, at which point the character would carefully remove his glasses, fold them up, place them in a hard-shelled case, and then go berserk. Not a complicated character, but rather fun to play.
A Nontraditional RPG
I played three games of Microscope, which I've owned for years but never had the opportunity to play before this year. Microscope is less "a game" and more "a set of parliamentary procedures." It's a formalization of a system where the players take turns defining events along a timeline, according to certain rules, with the end goal of creating an epic history spanning hundreds of years. It's a lot of fun because everyone's ideas get incorporated wholesale, so there's more depth and texture than you'd get just sitting down and writing a history yourself, all sorts of strange turns nobody would have come up with on their own, as people expand on each other's ideas.
In the first game (
corvi and raverdog ), we destroyed post-apocalyptic Australia with an imperfectly self-replicating city. Good times! The self-replicating city also generated people-like objects to do city things in it. It was very bad at this.In the second game (
corvi and raverdog ), an evil empire using a "Dream Engine" that could access everyone's dreams set up a surveillance state. We wrote the braided histories of power struggles within the empire and the doomed efforts of groups of dream-cyberpunks trying to take it down (or maybe just make art and hide from the Dream Engine for a little while).The third game (
corvi , raverdog , and Kindle-No-DW) was cut short by lack of time. So far, we had a traumatic event that left many humans able to see ghosts, and also amnesia about the exact nature of the event. Ghosts could be luminous enough to exert light pressure to push a solar sail, and the game was shaping up into a solar-sail-space-opera, with unsettling mass amnesia and ghost elements, as humanity spread out across the solar system looking for answers and the governments of earth conspired to maintain control in the face of panic and dispersal.(You don't really have an idea, when you start a game, what kind of history you'll make, but
raverdog and I apparently collectively tend toward histories with mildly creepy premises and oppressive governments.)This is an incredibly fun
no subject
Date: 2019-12-24 02:45 am (UTC)