Heading up to Edinburgh Festival Fringe this weekend. If you are a Fringe friend, I'd love to see you there! I don't plan on performing, but I'll bring the comedy notebook just in case.

My thing with ed tech is looking at whether the very expensive private schools have it in their classrooms. The answer is nearly always “nah they just have smaller class sizes and more teachers”

It's been a while. Apologies. Not a lot of RPG stuff going on for me since expo, mostly focusing on getting PhD thoughts into writing. Working on a code talk for next year, about cognitive science, code, and communication - found out @kevlin.bsky.social already covered a chunk of it. Lots of ideas.

The format of the AI adverts i'm seeing: 1) Here is a thing you should be able to do but the deadline is ridiculous. 2) Good job AI did your job for you because you sent them a presentation you'd already written.

UKGE Friends, if you're around tonight I'm in the vicinity of the Ibis Styles if you want to meet up.

I'm curious. What would you like to see me attempt to adapt? Either using the approaches I'm developing for my research, or in general.

The second day of #MythGames2025 had more intriguing papers. Not gonna lie there were some bits where I didn't understand the terminology and theoretical concepts used, but I still came out of it with a lot to think about. The developer Q&A at the end was a great end to the day.

I find this question inspiring, personally. Given that nobody ever has to use a single rule that I write, can I write rules that sometimes someone will choose?

A great morning session of #MythGames2025, really looking forward to the next one.

Putting together my playtest data summaries has led to a 510 line python script and a 230 line LaTeX class file. The division of responsibility between the two could be better, but it's not that awful. Considering throwing it up on GitHub in case others need to generate/summarise questionnaires.

Haven't been posting much, I know, but I haven't really been doing a lot outside of playing video games! Will be at UKGE, but sadly aren't performing this year. If you see me there feel free to ask me about my first round of PhD playtesting. I may have charts!

This quote from Defunctland lives in my head rent free. Literally how I feel about making art.

This week on Dice Exploder I’m talking Shadows in larps with @elindalstal.bsky.social - what if you’re not playing a character in a larp, you’re playing as some other entity, concept, or piece of the setting? Sounds a little like GMing even…

Who’s been putting off filling in that government consultation on AI then? Because you took one look and realised that fucking thing was designed SPECIFICALLY to put you off? Don’t worry, there are three online guides to help you: The Association of Illustrators theaoi.com/news/the-cop...

If you're a UK-based creative you may want to fill out the consultation, if you haven't already.

Kudos to @developconference.com for having a little page after the speaker submission form where it tells you when you can expect to hear back from them. As someone who gets really anxious when I don't know when a reply might come, it's nice to see it in text!

🔮 Time again for our usual #SelfPromoSunday! 🤺 Your quest is to appease the all-powerful Queen Daddy. 🙏 Only offerings of hype, promos, & links can appease her! 🎲 Let's see your #TTRPG, #Queer, #Punk, & weird stuff! 💞 Remember to repost this & each other!

Now I'm sorta-recovered from the chaos of the last few months, time to get promoting this again! I'd really love to showcase some of the wide variety of frameworks and approaches through which games can be viewed. Reposts would be much appreciated! I am awful at promo.

In our Queer Play workshop yesterday we made games in @v21.bsky.social's Downpour, with the prompt of queer objects and "making our own home." You can see the archive of @sssharc.bsky.social queer games here: downpour.games/event/hiss

I've applied to run a panel showcasing a few of the myriad scholarly methods used to analyse games. I'm looking for analysts! It'll be at UK Games Expo, 31st of May or 1st of June depending on scheduling. I'd love a real mix of approaches, and of people. docs.google.com/forms/d/1pMh...

Got some very odd ideas brewing for my home game. Looking at possible ways to do procedurally generated/simulated "content", with generated rules and subsystems. The latter is something I've done a tiny bit of before, going big on this will hopefully give the whole thing a wonderfully Strange feel.

Back from ConTingency. Had a great time, however it was rather stressful doing the research playtests. Not too satisfied with *Black Hound of the Whitters* from a creative standpoint but the NPCs went down great. *Amulets of the Ancient Sages* is overall a rather solid game, but hard to teach.

They've made me want to scream trying to get the typesetting right, and I'm bleeding from the paper cutter, but the cards look pretty good. #LaTeX

It's been a bit of a slog but the LaTeX card generators are getting there. Hopefully I'll have some proper outputs tomorrow.

Forgot to mention that we were in the New York Times![*] . . . . . [*] kids supplement

Send us pitches! Give us your most off-beat idea! I will go to bat for something unique and unexpected

It's hard to pick from the many amazing concepts I've seen in the work of @jennamoran.bsky.social Legends of the Wulin alone has the River and Lake and the choice dynamics it offers, the Loresheets, and choosing your External Style for the round.

Things I should not do: Book the Garrison in Sheffield for a game designers social/jam/discussion weekend thing. I do not have the time to organise anything else right now, but I am curious what other designers would be interested in. What activities, events, themes, or foci would interest you?

Does anybody know of any weird short stories about, or featuring, the Morrigan?

Board Games and TTRPGs are pretty accessible if you have a few people to play with. If you're thinking about giving it a shot, here's the handout for my workshop where I get groups to make a TTRPG in an hour: docs.google.com/document/d/1... It's constrained to fit the format, but it's a start!

If you are in Bristol and want to hear me talk about sex you are in luck. I will be giving a talk called "What Every Medievalist Should Know About Medieval Sex and the Law" at the CMS Research Series on 27 February from 16:00-17:45. Arts Complex Research Room 6. Yay!

Learning a bit of LaTeX for laying out my generated surveys, and I think I might use it for the cards for my boardgame too. It's a bit of a rabbit hole, but I think it will pay off - I'm planning to write all the cards in a spreadsheet or similar, then use python to generate a tex file, then to pdf.

The birdbath was festooned with tiny hats she had felted, knitted, or sewn. Soggy felt and mouldering wool, splashes of bright colour in the morning sun. "Do they ever wear them?" I asked. "No, but it's the thought that counts."

Imagine advertising for an anti-designer: Someone who has the opposite sensibilities to me, a rival, our battle will destroy and rebuild the game a thousand times, only gold shall remain. (To them, I am the anti-designer)

I'm reading a book about D&D and queerness as part of a book club and I found it so unsatisfying I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a 1 page RPG about gay book wizards Uh, let me know if anyone wants this to be a polished Itchio release I guess?

So, instead of doing a whole new system for Black Dogs I've decided to create a scenario and specialisation for GUMSHOE, @pelgranepress.bsky.social have made the SRD document really usable. I'm currently writing up the blurb for ConTingency, but the gist is it's set in 1840s-ish Norfolk 1/2

Year 5! Analog Game Studies and @GameInLab are proud to announce #GenerationAnalog2025, online, July 16 - 17. **PUNK** is this year’s conference theme, exploring games and punk attitude, rock, style, spaces, art, and more. For more information: analoggamestudies.org/generation-a... #CFP #StayAnalog

Impro, Keith Johnstone's influential book on improvisation for theatre, has four parts. Most of the improv I've done ignores the fourth part: Mask & Trance. I've done a few of the exercises and found them really fruitful, so I'm doing some more reading and preparing a session for my birthday party.

Might need a way to annotate some observations when looking for the schema expressed in a text. Something like a level of concrete/abstractness: River, meaning the category of "Rivers". River, meaning some example of the category. River, meaning the specific river connected to each schema instance.

are you.... Compatible With Roleplaying?

At some point I will probably revisit the "procedurally generated game doc" concept. Witch Game Generator was a lot of fun and forced me to really get to grips with the PbtA-style moves I used. What else could be done with it? Note: this wasn't an "AI" thing, it uses hand-written grammars.

It's been slow going this last week. Finally managed to get my head together and start my analysis of the Black Dog folklore book. Have some nice notes so far, but haven't quite found the game in the material yet. I have some suspicions on what it might be, possibly some time hopping.

I got a copy and am hoping to get to play it soon!

Massive thanks to @macguffinandco.bsky.social and @rolistespod.itch.io for agreeing to playtest my early boardgame prototype yesterday. Now where to find some 25mm blank card tiles...

#Dragonmeet folks, what are you up to this evening? Gonna grab some food but aren't sure what to do after that.

Just ran an impromptu Troika session at Dragonmeet. Had loads of fun, and the players seemed to as well. The adventure seed they gave me was "a birthday party for a fish", and things escalated from there.

Can't sleep. Was nice to see people. So very bored.

As much as I am looking forward to Dragonmeet, I am also looking forward to the week after, for which my timetable is far less demanding. New FFXIV alliance raid. Finish Atelier Sophie 2. Catch up on Wonderful Precure. Some light housework.

#ttrpg creatives! We are expected to wear many hats. Score yourselves out of five: 💭 Creating scenarios 3/5 🎭 Running games 4/5 ⚙️ Creating systems 5/5 📝 Writing games 4/5 📐 Producing a book 1/5 📢 Promoting a book 0/5 🤝 Networking 1/5 My current task is to change my scale, so the 5 and 4s become...

I have a tendency to think of (collections of) character attributes analogously to members of a type in a program. What might I design differently if I viewed them as a set of design affordances? Or perhaps Topoi for rhetorical arguments? Maybe the difference would be too subtle, it wouldn't matter.