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Effective Playtesting Rituals
Every community of creators should have a regular playtest series. This is true whether it’s an ad-hoc community of independent creators, an academic research group, or a large corporation. If there isn’t a playtest series, you should start one. This post is for you. I have been involved in several recurring playtest series. I first…
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Lifesteal on a Technicality
I am playing Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Like any big modern game, it is a sloppy mess of systems, for which the balance and neatness of design doesn’t matter as the point is the joy of the complex systems smooshing together. Many characters can take actions to add the “Lifesteal” modifier to attacks. Traditionally, Lifesteal (or…
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“Billiards, but they’re People”
I just finished nearly a whole month of travel, the last bit of which was in Latvia where I participated in a week-long game jam in a castle. Fellow game dev Charlie Behan made a great mini-documentary of the event. I’ve done a lot of game jams, and with this one, I needed to get…
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MetaMovie’s Alien Rescue
This afternoon, I played in the high-end VR LARP The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue. This was a ticketed show, with multiple live actors, some audience that could speak (like myself), and some audience with free-floating avatar cameras, called “eyebots” with in-world lore. The recording is on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1807898598I chose the alias “In Clutch”, as I…
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Talk @ Roguelike Celebration 2022
This upcoming Sunday, Oct 23, I’m doing a talk at Roguelike Celebration, a conference about the creation, appreciation and analysis of roguelikes; that odd genre of game incorporating procedural generation, permanent consequences (often called permadeath) and maximalist systems. In 2020, I did a short talk on Procedurally Generated Technology Trees. This year, I’m talking about…
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The Aluminum Cat Documentary Released Now!
When you make an interactive show, it’s hard for the audience to tell just *how* interactive it is. This is part of the rare magic of any participatory theatre; even Keith Johnstone said don’t bother trying to convince your audience that a show is improvised, because they’ll never believe you. So we at Escape Character…
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Player Character Bios in Participatory Media
Originally published in Escape Character’s Newsletter. Question: What’s the best way to hack someone who’s never LARP’d[1] before to get into character? Our goal here is to have the player buy into the stakes of the show before they cross the threshold [2] into the space of the show. In Escape Character’s projects where the…
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Telepresence Immersive Theatre with Mice instead of Voice
This past year at Escape Character has been quiet, but very busy. Me + several collaborators have been iterating on telepresence interactive theatre. We have written and debuted three scenarios and are in the middle of writing our fourth. We’ve put on in-person shows in San Francisco, Toronto and London. We just started remote invite-only…
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Wonderful Projects I Did With Microsoft’s Kinect
RIP the Kinect. Literally changed the direction of my research/career/life/art. Gave it more DEPTH. — Dustin Freeman🚁LAX (@dustinfreeman) October 25, 2017 Microsoft has ceased manufacturing the Kinect. Here’s some projects, art and research, academic and industrial, that I could only have done with the Kinect. The Role of Physical Controllers in Motion Video Gaming, 2011:…
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Game Mechanic Compression Ratio
After attending a conference on roguelikes over the weekend, I was talking with friend Randy Lubin about how players move from learning rules to playing a game. We discovered/invented this really cool concept: Game Mechanics Compression Ratio: the ratio between the initial instructions for a game once understood cognitively, and the complexity that they create…