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Biography of Jeff Tidball, currently Principal * Writer and Game Designer at Left Justified LLC, previously Partner at Gameplaywright LLP and Partner at Gameplaywright LLP.
"An unholy mixture of helpful guidebook and jabbing provocation, [THINGS WE THINK ABOUT GAMES] will earn its right to rattle around your brain. It is essential reading for designer, critic, and straight-up rank 'n' file gamer alike." ¿Robin D. Laws, creator of HeroQuest and Feng ShuiWill Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball think a lot about games. At their commentary website, Gameplaywright.net, they think out loud about what it means to play games, make games, sell games, and love games. They are gamers.Here, with fellow game designers and notable game players, they think out loud on paper in the first Gameplaywright book.THINGS WE THINK ABOUT GAMES collects dozens on dozens of bite-sized thoughts about games. From the absurd to the magnificent, the demonstrable to the dogmatic, this collection spans both the breadth of games¿board, card, roleplaying and more¿and the depth of gaming, offering insights about collecting, playing, critiquing, designing, and publishing.
Historian Johan Huizinga once described game playing as the motor of humanity's cultural development, predating art and literature. Since the late 20th century, Western society has undergone a "ludification," as the influence of game-playing has grown ever more prevalent. At the same time, new theories of postmodernism have emphasized the importance of interactive, playful behavior. Core concepts of postmodernism are evident in pen-and-paper role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons. Exploring the interrelationships among narrative, gameplay, players and society, the author raises questions regarding authority, agency and responsibility, and discusses the social potential of RPGs in the 21st century.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies,...
A game designer considers the experience of play, why games have rules, and the relationship of play and narrative. The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. Games have existed since antiquity; 5,000-year-old board games have been recovered from Egyptian tombs. And yet we still lack a critical language for thinking about play. Game designers are better at answering small questions ("Why is this battle boring?") than big ones ("What does this game mean?"). In this book, the game designer Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play--how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, Upton develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail.
What Does "IRL (In Real Life)" Really Mean in Today's Digital Age? It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness--who we are and where we fit in the world--can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social m...
Board Game Publisher "Better than a real job" Eric Hanuise (Flatlined Games) Understand The Board Game Industry Start Your Own Publishing Business The tabletop games market has never been as large and diversified as today. Yet, there are few books that focus on the business aspects of publishing tabletop games. In this book, Eric Hanuise, founder of boardgames publisher Flatlined Games, shares his experience learned from years of publishing: - The whole publication process, from the author's prototype to the finished game on the retailer's shelves - The different jobs available in the industry - Setting up your publishing company - Contracts with authors and artists - Manufacturing board games - Safety and legal obligations - Distribution and logistics - Retail, direct sales and crowdfunding - Fairs, conventions and events Written by an actual publisher, this book will help you figure out the tabletop games industry. No matter whether you are just interested in how things work or you intend to set up your own board game publishing business, you will find answers to most of your questions here.
The world is yours to save or lose.A decade ago, a band of occult investigators battled against the summoning of an ancient and monstrous evil.They failed.Now, you must piece together what went wrong. The campaign begins wherever the PCs hail from, and then quickly moves on to an asylum and an overgrown plantation estate in Savannah, Georgia. Their investigation then takes them to the sordid streets of Los Angeles, and from there to Bangkok, Malta, Mexico City, the Yucatn jungle, and Ethiopia, which the PCs may visit in any order, as they hunt down clues and try to destroy the avatars of a terrible god-thing.Investigate ancient crypts, abandoned estates, and festering slums. Explore choked jungles and the crushed psyches of your predecessors. Follow in their footprints, and make new ones of your own. This time, there wont be another chance.Eternal Lies is a massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball with Jeremy Keller. It is now available as a hardback book or PDF, or you can get a reduced-price digital bundle from the store with the soundtrack album.