(Eek! I wrote this a few nights ago but forgot to set it to auto-post. So it’s a bit late. My bad!)

This past weekend was Gamestorm 2012, which I like to call “Portland’s Annual Gaming Convention in Vancouver.” You can read about the convention in my post history and on its own website, so I’m just gonna skip on ahead to the highlights.

For me, the biggest and most awesome parts of the weekend were the two first-ever public playtests of Motobushido. I finally got to put my newest creation in the hands of total strangers who had never heard of it before. The results were pretty powerful: after two full sessions of play, I walked away not only with pages of rules tweaks and updates, but with some damn fine gaming memories as well. I found it interesting to see how the same basic scenario idea was so drastically altered between the two different groups. I’ll definitely be fleshing that one out a bit more and including it in the core book.

Aside from those demos, I really spent most of my time at the Indie Hurricane booth in the Dealer Room. I met some great new local gamers, and had some good discussions about gaming-related ideas that opened my mind to new perspectives. Some thanks and acknowledgements:

• Many, many thanks to Hans Otterson for the rides to the convention.
• Even more thanks to Joel Shempert for making the Indie Hurricane booth run smoothly, and for putting the whole effort together.
• Thanks to the guy at the FaceEater booth for finally teaching me how to play this game. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more games with my local pals.

I walked away with some cool swag from the GM Gift Room – namely a copy of Feng Shui, which I’ve been meaning to grab for some time now based on the recommendations of many. And of course, after the con, there was much sleeping.

I’m really eager to build some new semi-regular game-nights with those of you that I’ve just met. Let’s make this happen, folks!

A fine read just got posted over at Gamers with Jobs, and it echoes my own beliefs on the dearth of human interactivity at PAX.

The problem is that PAX brings together people who think they share the same passion, who believe they are all part of a collective culture that they have defined individually. Then they encounter each other for three days in lines, in restaurants, in panels, and in game rooms and discover something intensely alienating: they can’t stand each other.

In the “Lasting Impression” subsection of my two-parter PAX 2010 recap post, I lament this very issue. Socially, PAX is the convention-grade equivalent of a deck-building card game. At its core, the convention is like a whole mob of people playing solitaire in the same room, and only within the PAX “expansion sets” (mostly the non-video-gamey hidden side rooms) do you really partake in any level of actual human interaction – aside from the booth people who are trying to sell you things, anyway.

If PAX is representative of any so-called “gamer culture,” I have yet to absorb any of it in my two years of attendance, both as con-goer and vendor alike. The majority of its attendees seem to share many personal traits, including a deep enthusiasm for the things they love and (frequently) nigh-worship, but what they predominantly lack is any developed personal medium for the transmission of thoughts about these traits and passions. The identities exist and are proudly portrayed via costume and fan-wear, yet few of them actively share those identities with one another.

That being said, I’ll see you again at PAX 2011.

For part two of my look at my PAX 2010 experiences, I’m going to mainly focus on tabletop gaming, and some deeper observations about the convention at a meta level.

The Tabletop Gaming Experience

In stark contrast to the Big Media Sensations of the Expo Hall and its surrounding environs, the tabletop gaming sections were focused, subdued, and full of intense interpersonal connection-driven energy. Everyone was talking to everyone else about the games they were demoing, and it was obvious that most of those doing the shilling were knowledgeable about and affectionate towards their games of choice.

This atmosphere of mutual enjoyment was the main reason why I kept finding myself drifting back towards that cramped room on the third floor after each of my progressively-shorter rangings back into the larger fray. I kept seeing the same pleasant faces lit up with the joy of their current game, kept hearing the same awesome voices raised in moments of imaginative excitement. Despite various moments of personal exhaustion and disconnection, the energy in that gaming room kept bringing me back to myself. That was where I wanted to be, in the end, and where I felt I most belonged. Read more

Last weekend Three weekends ago (this has taken longer to write than I initially expected), I attended the gargantuan beast of a convention that is the Penny Arcade Expo, or simply PAX. To use an adjective some feel is watered down by internet overuse, the convention was quite Epic. Not as Epic as last year’s experiences, but I personally feel that things of Epic descriptive quality frequently come in multiple grades of the term. In the next several hundred words, I will do my best to tell you all about it.

Since this post was getting way too big, I’ve broken it into two parts: Video Games, and Everything Else. Read past the cut for more. Read more

This past Gamestorm, Jake Richmond and I won second place in a design contest. The contest was a “Junk Drawer Design War” – the organizer brought six identical bins filled with identical parts, most of which were salvaged from other board games. Each team of contestants had an hour (or two? i don’t remember) to create a game based on some or all of the included parts. Teams could trade with other teams for more parts.

Our game was called Laser Mummies.

The following rules are those we came up with on the fly during the design contest. So, without Further ado… Read more

I’m running three games at this weekend’s Gamestorm convention. If you’re interested in signing up, click here.

(cue the slow bass drum and Mr. movie Guy)
Wisconsin. 2009. Early Summer…

A boy who struggles to quell his inner sins and reach a more glorious light…

A girl who bears his child, born from a love that can never be…

An athlete who cannot deny the truth of his Self…

An outcast who torments herself as punishment for not fitting in…

A boy whose imagination would be his greatest undoing…

A martyr who would defy the world and stand up for her beliefs – and her love of another…

The chaos of fate threw these teenagers together, to claw their way out of The Jesus Camp Massacre.

This past Gamestorm (GS11) was host to many wonderful moments of gaming, and I am proud and delighted to say that one particular game rises above all others of my recent memory in sheer awesomeness. That session was the Jesus Camp Massacre, a demo game I ran of Cannibal Contagion.

This post has taken me a long time to get up for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I keep coming back and re-editing and re-writing it. It has to be perfect – the session was just that awesome. So now, several months later, I’ve decided to re-write it one last time, and come hell or high water I will be posting this AP review today. I’ll warn you all now: This review will likely offend some people. Read at your own risk. Read more

One of the most unexpected joys of this past GameStorm was a pick-up game of Quad on Saturday night. Started initially as a way to pass the time while waiting for rides home, this game turned out to be one of the several comically hilarious moments of the con.

It all got started after the fabulous-amazing Jesus Camp Massacre session of Cannibal Contagion. After leaving the scheduled gaming room, I ran into Nick and Gilbert, and we all three had about an hour to kill. I blurted out “let’s play Quad” without thinking, and a few moments later we had started on in. After a few minutes of deliberation over what number-generator to use – for some reason they were both hardcore against using dice right then – we settled on a deck of cards. The built-in random scenario generator quickly laid out the basics:

• Setting: Ancient Earth (we decided Egypt)
• Location: An Institution (we decided a Temple of Training)
• What starts it all off: A natural disaster (we decided on an Earthquake) kills all the priests in the temple leaving only two survivors

The characters were created quickly enough, each being only a small list of good and bad Merits. One was a fairly inept acolyte conman, the other was a Pariah being beaten for the crimes of heaven or some such. I like to call them Harold and Kumar, as their dynamic was equally hilarious.

Once the core scenario’s conflict was established and the characters introduced, we quickly went to town. Nick and Gilbert were both experienced story-gamers, and thus took to the game’s mechanical concepts quickly. Within a few minutes, the mechanics were in play and more conflicts were introduced. I think for the purposes of the Pick-Up style of game play, the simple mechanics worked very well to move the game quickly along.

The temple guards took both the characters into protective custody, and one of them quickly managed to convince the guards that he was the Chosen One and the other character was his faithful Companion. A series of Sacred Rites of Testing were then undergone, which included eating (and stomaching) terrible foods, surfing the back of alligators while blindfolded, an epic game of Madden BC-199, and more. My favorite of the trials was definitely the game of Five-Card Draw, played with giant stone slab cards carried on the backs of teams of slaves. Each time a card was discarded, the stone was smashed to bits and the slaves carrying it were thrown to the crocodiles.

And there was much death by crocodile in this game. From Nick’s character’s lost arm to the gobs of sacred virgins they fed to them post-coitus, the crocodiles played an unexpectedly crucial part in the session. In fact, at the very end, when Gilbert’s character castrated himself to prove that he was in fact the REAL Chosen One (claiming the title by default, as he prevented Nick from winning), he was then fed to the crocodiles to appease the angry gods.

Within the span of an hour, we had run a pretty damn awesome game session, consisting of at least a dozen hilarious conflicts and a large handful of scenes. For me, the hardest part was actually coming up with the Seven Sacred Rites, but once the game started moving along, those came pretty easily too.

All in all, a damn fantastic session, one which all three of us have laughed about many times since.

Now that I’ve had more time to reflect on the past weekend, I’ve made a short list of regrets from the convention.

First off, I forgot to pick up several things that I wanted: the Yeld whitebook, the Crossroads 2nd edition whitebook, the Spectre of the Beast document, and Dine n Dash.

Second, I didn’t actually get to play anything at all. I ran four games, but was a player in none. I think next year I’ll split my time more evenly. I really badly look forward to this Friday Night’s game, so I can roll some dice and take some names, ryargh!

Finally, I didn’t get to shake Jonathan Tweet’s hand and thank him for creating the wonderful game that is Everway. Ah well, maybe next time!

That’s it, really. It really was an otherwise fabulous weekend.

WOW IT’S OVER. *sleeeeeeeeeeep*

Okay, now that that’s done with, I’m here to talk about GameStorm 2009, and how it was awesome. I spent the entire recently-past weekend at this local game con – some call it “Portland’s Best Game Con in Vancouver.” This was my third year in a row going, and my first year actually attending for the majority of the weekend.

My initial forecast at the beginning of the weekend: “I’m going to be fucking tired of gaming by the end of Saturday night.” I am plum-tuckered thrilled to state that I was absolutely, horribly wrong in that prediction. When it was all over, I wanted to game even more than I already had. The weekend was fabulous, in every way. I met great folks, played great games, and have some gaming memories to last a lifetime.

Rather than go step-by-step walking through the events of the weekend, I decided that this time, I’d make it a visual piece, a detailed collage of swag and memories.

click for a bigger image

Read more