As just about everybody has noted, Greg Costikyan’s grand experiment to bring indie gaming to the center of the gaming world has launched: ManifestoGames.com. A lot of old indie game faves are here, from Crimsonland to DROD, plus a bunch I have never heard of before. Check it out.
So yesterday morning I moderated this panel. The folks on the panel were a distinguished bunch: Bill Fawcett, who dropped anecdotes about when Gary would use NPC thieves to rob his party blind — yes, he meant gary Gygax; Justin Lloyd, who started developing games sometime in the Pleistocene; Mike Stemmle, who’s a lead on Star Trek online nowadays, but of course is best known for his work on LucasArts adventure games; and Scott Campbell, who among other things was lead design ona little RPG called Fallout.
The audience was, as expected, a lot of WoW players. But more than that, it was also a group that had been playing MMOs for a while, and a variety of them, it seemed. The ostensible topic was “why are these games popular, and why is WoW king,” but the issues raised were what i thought merited blogging about. Semi-coherently, at any rate, since I was at a suite party until 2:15am last night.
Well, “preliminarily injuncted” anyway. CNet reports that this time it was Louisiana’s, on the by-now familiar grounds that games are protected speech, there’s no solid evidence of harm to minors, and the terms were all left vague. Pretty much the same grounds that all the other laws have foundered on.
So I finish dinner, then I wander about the hotel lobby here at Worldcon, and see a sign saying “Gaming Registration This Way.” So of course I follow it. At the end of a series of posters I find a room where there’s some kids playing something loud, a few scattered tables with Carcasonne and german board games, and one very eager guy waving me over.
What he thrusts into my hands when I get there is a card game called Palabra.
After a day of meetings and six hours of driving.
I parked, registered at the hotel, and went straight to register for the con. In the space of five minutes I saw Joe Haldeman and Harry Turtledove.
It’s so big that I am unsure where to go or what to do now. Find food is probably a decent answer.
