A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

02:43 pm - Gameshelf Casting call: "Action Castle"

Howdy, Gameshelf Players and other friends,

I'm looking for some folks who would be willing to play the extremely silly tabletop game "Action Castle" on-camera for the next episode of the Gameshelf. It's a one-shot party game that spoofs circa-1980 text adventure games, where the GM plays the text parser, and all the players take turns "typing in" commands to make the hero stumble through the map in an attempt to rescue the princess.

It's quite unlikely you've even heard of this game before, and so much the better. It's a one-shot deal, and the rules can be digested in a minute. The footage of the gameplay is going to fit into a segment of larger episode about how interactive fiction is perceived within gaming culture.

No shooting date or location is set yet, but I'd like to have this happen on this side of the Yuletide gravity well. The time commitment is relatively light - I'd estimate four hours on the day of the shoot, with no rehearsal necessary. If this sounds fun to you, please let me know. Thanks!

07:39 pm - Thoughts on "Put This On", and web video length

Excerpt from a recent letter from me to the Gameshelf crew:

If I may offer an aside, take a look at this:
http://putthison.com/post/231001982/episode-1-denim

It's an example of something I've been looking for for a while - a television-quality, web-based series on some nonfiction topic that isn't straight-up comedy (or games), but uses comedy to ease the topic along. In this case, it's a show about men's clothing. Seeing it makes me very happy.

The fundraising and sponsorship stuff evidenced is quite interesting, but it's the format that has me really on the edge of my seat. I watched the whole thing, and felt full - smarter _and_ entertained - and only ten minutes had gone by. And indeed, I'm not sure I would have sat and ate through the whole thing if the timer at the start had read, say, 30:00 rather than 10:00.

This show, and my experience of approaching it as audience, is the first hard evidence I've encountered for an argument I haven't properly had with myself: whether Gameshelf episodes should be shorter - a _lot_ shorter. I never really revisited the question of show length, even though I started considering the Gameshelf more of an internet-based TV show than a literal watch-it-on-a-television TV show. Seeing an excellent show like "Put This On", which aims way higher than typical YouTube fare, and yet still keeps to a YouTube-friendly length, is a strong argument in the make-it-shorter column.

07:44 pm - Wedding

Before I start talking about some other damn thing: warmest congratulations to my dear friends Jess (dictator555) and Nate-of-no-real-social-media-presence on getting married yesterday evening. I was pleased and honored to be in attendance for the relaxed and friendly ceremony out in Western Mass, which turned into kind of a con (of the fannish variety)... eventually nobody was left except a gaggle of gamer geeks staying up late, and many of us slept over. (The venue had a B&B conveniently attached.)

I just realized that this now means more than half of the seven players from the Diplomacy episode have gotten married since we filmed the game in early June. Wow. And they call that game divisive?

11:42 pm - Diplomacy - deleted scenes

Some bonus silliness for you.

10:20 am - Cut tags and time machines

Thanks for all the feedback re: cut tags on (non-LJ) blogs! I've instituted them on Gameshelf and am cautiously optimistic that the site's bounce rate has decreased as a result. It's still pretty crappy even so, but there's other fixes I've got in mind for that.

Bounce rate, in Google Analytics-ese, represents the percentage of people who stay on a site for five seconds or less - in other words, they load the site, say "meh", and move along. Some bounce is inevitable: there are regular readers who don't use RSS and visit the site between updates, and there are folks who breeze in from search engines and decide that we're not what they were looking for. Based on research, I'd like to get our bounce rate down to 50 percent. It's been hovering around 80-85 percent, which suggests that we're losing a lot of potential audience that should be more interested in us, but the site looks so boring that they have no reason to stay...

11:55 am - An experiment in coordinated assault

If you're bored at work today, please consider suggesting the Diplomacy show (http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/09/episode-7---diplomacy.html) as a link du jour to Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html).

(Yes, cross-posting from twitter / facebook. I don't do this every day! I thank you for your patience, as well as any flogging of my links you can spare.)

11:35 am - Wobbling back to (the rest of my) life

The thing about the Diplomacy show was that it had the weight of a thesis, for me. Even though so many other people were instrumental to its production, the invisible (I hope!) work of editing took up the vast majority of the raw labor involved, and that was all performed by Y.T. . So now that it's done, I wanna take a vacation. But instead, I have my day job waiting for me! For now I must settle for the celebratory dinner at a favorite restaurant that classicaljunkie treated me to a couple of nights ago.

It's hard, though. I want to spend some time removed, and recharging. I spent a little too much time yesterday obsessively reloading my stats pages on blip.tv, YouTube and BGG, and bouncing with delight each time I got five more views. Fun, but pointless. It's been a while.

04:58 pm - Gameshelf #7 - Diplomacy

Good afternoon. Please enjoy Episode #7 of The Gameshelf: "Diplomacy".

09:43 pm - Gameshelf #7 progress

Finished the first draft this evening, after putting another full weekend of work into it. Showed to it a focus group (classicaljunkie), and now have a bullet list of 17 fixes to make before release. This is good, but, goddamn I'm tired of this thing. This, too, is good. The burning sensation means it's working, etc.

The thing that's made this such an albatross is the lack of control. The gameplay was totally unscripted, and since I had no first-hand experience with Diplomacy going in, I had no plans for the show's structure once the cameras started rolling. This is not good. In my case this was 18 hours of raw, completely undirected footage of not good. It's at least tripled the amount of work I've had to put into this, compared to an "ordinary" episode. I will not knowingly make this mistake ever again.

I'm bummed because I really thought I'd be done this weekend. I'm not going to say when it will be done. I will surprise you. I just want this off my plate so I can move on, because I am excited to start applying everything I've learned to a fresh canvas.

01:47 pm - GameLoop afterword

Notes on a talk I led on game criticism, and a list of links I dropped in the middle of other peoples' talks: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/08/notes-from-my-gameloop-talk-an.html

07:20 pm - Gameshelf 7 Teaser

I didn't meet my original goal of publishing the Diplomacy episode by GameLoop, but I did manage to put a teaser for it together:

03:40 pm - A-----

Here's a letter I just sent to ephotodiscounters.com, reprinted for your amusement. I did not P.S. this xkcd, but now wish that I had.

Howdy,

I just received a green screen and lighting kit that I purchased from your store via eBay. First of all, it seems great so far, so thanks for your prompt shipment!

I have a suggestion, however. I see some potential danger in the spring-loaded telescoping rods that make up the frame's side-stands. When I first unpacked one of these, I took it to be an ordinary telescoping rod. So I was quite surprised when I flipped down one of its fastening levers, and suddenly the inner rod - tipped with a thin metal screw - shot upwards rather dramatically.

Because I was standing to one side of the device, I simply jumped a little, and then laughed about it. But then I thought: oh boy, with a clumsier person, this could be a lawsuit waiting to happen. And so, to you, I might advise including a note or sticker with this frame that mentions these springs, and advises caution when loosening the levers.

That is all. Thanks!

11:40 pm - Working on the next Gameshelf

Logged three tapes today....



Why is mrmorse wearing that hat? Why is rikchik poking northern France? All will be revealed...

12:42 pm - Backup grumble

To my adored TV talent, whom I have already emailed but just in case:

Tonight's Gameshelf shoot is CANCELLED. If you were planning on coming tonight, please don't, unless you happen to want to watch the taping of this week's "Dead Air Live". We had a scheduling foul-up.

Relatedly, I've lately been thinking about ways I could become less dependent on SCAT. This accident (not the first of its kind, for me) encouraged me to go ahead and purchase this setup, after it received the blessings of Joe-the-director as probably being OK for what I need. It will allow me to do one-camera green-screen shoots in my own home. This is good.

04:05 pm - I've been playing games

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

12:58 am - Costuming help request

Dear loanyweb,

Would anyone local to me be able to loan me a traditional German hat for the length of June? Am willing to put your name in an upcoming Gameshelf credit roll for it. :)

11:46 pm - BarCamp Boston 4

Highlight of the weekend was a last-minute decision to attend BarCamp Boston 4. This was the second "Unconference" I'd attended, after last year's GameLoop (which was, in turn, inspired by BarCamp Boston 3). I had a great time, learned a lot and met lots of cool people. Inspired to try proposing some talks myself, next time I attend something like this.

All attendees were asked to identify themselves with three info-tags. I chose Perl, Consulting, and DIY Television. I ended up leaning most heavily on the latter, unsurprisingly, as TV production's what currently on the upswing in my personal obsessionery. And lo, serendipity smiled upon me: I found myself talking to people who work with NPR and WGBH (Boston's PBS affiliate), just a day after deciding that public broadcasting represents a good first place to start my little research project into up-marketing The Gameshelf. Sent out a passel of followup email this morning, and have high hopes that it will lead to some interesting conversations.

Props to dariusk for helping these introductions along; a natural facilitator, he was a force of nature Saturday morning, all but bodily dragging people around the room in order to arrange them into ideal conversational pods.

I handed out lots of Appleseed cards, but usually with a sheepish well-heh-heh-this-is-my-day-job, and the scribbled addition of "jmac.org" onto it. It's time for me to design a personal card again, something I can use when I am not introducing myself primarily as a software expert, or Volity's president. My last design, pictured here, is nine years old, drawn while I was still living in Maine. While I still have a bunch left, it's been a while since I've carried any around. It tries to bespeak creativity and cleverness while being vague and jokey about it, which describes my 2000 self to a tee. I'd like to think I've earned a little more definition since then, and need a card that suggests it.

01:15 am - Feeling pitchy

Hello, my social network,

Tell me: do I know anyone who is involved in the TV industry, or who might be able to comfortably introduce me to colleagues who are? (Note: have already dispatched pigeons to the Gameshelf's crew members. Y'all are the second ones to hear this question.)

No need for me to be coy here: it struck me earlier this evening that there's no good reason for my complete ignorance about the world of commercial television. So long as I'm in the dark about it, I also lack reasons why I've never even thought about making The Gameshelf a part of it. I can imagine plenty of good reasons it's a ridiculous and dismissible notion - even ones that have nothing to do with the quality of relevance of my show - and wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that any or all are true. But I don't know.

What I do know is that when I turn on TV38 and I see The Phantom Gourmet, I point at it and say "I would not hate it if my show worked like this." And as it happens, I feel that my show actually is really relevant. I could totally make a pitch on the basis that we're entering an increasingly ludocentric world, and we need a TV series that intelligently examines the history, culture (hi radtea!), and criticism of games across all media. Something far broader and deeper than your typical G4 game-of-the-moment review show.

The two episodes we produced in 2007 were really awesome, and were I so motivated, I would feel perfectly comfortable cutting a demo reel around them. The thought of shooting a whole honest-to-god season of The Gameshelf with a budget, even a very small one, makes my toes tingle. It's a fragile fantasy right now, but now that it's bit me, I've got to know more about it.

11:48 am - Addendum: The fate of last spring's game shoots

A quick note to those who participated in game shoots for The Gameshelf last spring: I've decided to sink the idea of a whole episode about locally designed games, because it just wasn't coming together. Instead, we're going to put a short local-games feature onto upcoming episodes, and to kick it off I'm going to dip into all the footage we shot last year. So, look for yourself to appear eventually there!

11:44 am - First casting call: Diplomacy

I am looking for folks who are interested in playing Diplomacy for The Gameshelf. We're going to concentrate on fun, and making great television by turning it into a kind of one-shot reality show. I plan on joining as a player, though I have never played before. (I shall host a "rehearsal" of a full or partial play-through before the shoot, though.)

This is going to be a a marathon shoot. Diplomacy can take up to six hours to play, and I intend to capture a whole game. With prep and other overhead, players might end up hanging around for as long as eight hours. Location TBD, but probably someone's house. Possibly mine. (Not your house, if I haven't already asked you about it.) We'll have a dinner break. Really, it'll be like a gaming party, except with far more A/V equipment poking around than you may be used to seeing.

Unlike every other shoot, players won't be seated and micd under hot studio lights while on-camera. Instead, they'll have the run of the house (including the yard, if it's a nice day, and if there's a yard) and it's going to be up to the camera jockeys to keep up with them. This is to encourage players to gather into groups for conversations out of other players' earshot. We'll probably have to live with crappy audio for these parts, but that's life.

I will need at least five guest-players, and an "understudy" or two wouldn't be unwelcome; I'm led to understand that Diplomacy just isn't Diplomacy with anything other than exactly seven players. (Your humble hosts shall take the other slots.)

If you are interested, let me know (via comment, email, or other method) what weekend days between May 22 and June 28 work for you. I'm in contact with my crew, and can settle on on a date quickly, but want to pick one that works for everyone.