Greatest Hits of the Skotos Articles
Shannon Appelcline has posted a fantastic hit list of the best articles over the last six years from the many regular columns over at Skotos.
I don’t point to them merely because my own The Case for Art made the list; in fact, I post this because I think more people should be reading the stuff at Skotos. It tends to get overlooked, because it’s a smallish mostly-text-game company, but they’ve been quietly running one of the best ongoing publication sources for game design theory for a really long time now.
In particular, I want to call out the series by Travis Casey and Shannon himself. Shannon has, over the years, developed a real critical vocabulary for talking about games, that is internally self-consistent. That’s a rare thing. Check out his reviews over at RPGnet as well (Skotos and RPGnet are part of the same family).
I haven’t read all the linked articles in this “greatest hits,” yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to it.
Skotos almost always (it sometimes slips my mind) heads my list when I tell people where to look for actual design resources. (I’ve debated mentioning it when I do presentations on VWs, but I don’t think it’s pertinent; my object then is to say, “Hey, look at this! It matters!”)
Wisdom recommends that I review those articles… it’s been quite a few years since I kept up on Skotos (a particularly slow period and a fading interest caused me to stop checking for new articles). I wonder if they have an RSS feed.
I recently set up RSS feeds for the site and for all the individual columns.
This is the main one:
http://www.skotos.net/articles/index.xml
There are several RSS feeds:
For all Skotos articles — http://www.skotos.net/articles/index.xml
For Shannon’s column — http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_/TTnT_.xml
Each series also has a separate RSS feed.
Shannon is overly modest about promoting his board and card game reviews at RPGnet, and his weekly board games column at Gone Gaming http://www.erzo.org/~shannon/gaming/board-games/gonegaming.shtml
You can see all of Shannon’s RPGnet reviews at http://www.rpg.net/reviews/search-review.phtml?reviewerName=Shannon%20Appelcline — over 286 to date. Take a look at the board game review of one of your favorite games, such as Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico or Settlers, and read down the the game design analysis section — you’ll see really good stuff there.
Thanks for the compliment! And if anybody would like to see more articles, I’d be happy to do them for a small amount of money…. 😉
Thanks. Aggregated them so I can be lazier about following the articles. Naturally, this laziness will make it more likely that I’ll read them! =P