I hate when recipes tell me to enjoy as an instruction. Like, I love the written fluff before the recipe, but if we're in the recipe itself I need no-fluff all-instruction. Enjoy is not an instruction!
oh no I'm feeling the urge to make an anthology zine again someone stop me
I was super excited to see that this year's @goldencobra.bsky.social theme is "Connection and Community". I feel like I mostly make social technology games, so this is my jam.
Here's a game I made a few years ago to help end the year with purpose.
kierancutting.co.uk/blog/a-game-...
The cover of an 8 page zine called "The Roasties, or surviving the cold dark months with your friends". There is a picture of a pile of roast potatoes on the front.
The cold dark months can be hard. Your friends with seasonal depression are about to really struggle, and you're going to find it a lot harder to leave the house.
That's why you need to start playing The Roasties. Because there's nothing roast potatoes won't solve.
xenolight.itch.io/the-roasties
A comment from user frymynoodles on itch.io saying "Holy shit. Absolutely incredible work."
Right now, the ?game? described as "holy shit","absolutely incredible work", and also "I don't understand this" is part of a FREE bundle with 146 other zines. That's crazy! You could have so many zines!
(go ?play? Chaos Magic omg)
xenolight.itch.io/chaos-magic
We have a FREE bundle of 147 zines from 63 creators (including us 🧡), and you can get it all through September 14th!
itch.io/b/3247/free-...
Thank you so much!!!! I would LOVE to hear any of your thoughts!
Completely fascinated by this piece.
I love the way it invites you to do deep exploration – both within the text and outside the text – without actually *demanding* anything of you.
Thank you so much Rowan! I would LOVE to hear more about your experience of it, if ever you want to share in DMs!
Me, Caleb, and @kierancutting.bsky.social have been working to evolve Meal Deal from research through design artefact to a something we might sell.
Find Caleb and enjoy the latest(ish) version! Sadly kieran and I can’t be there this year.
Og version is here: oliverbates.itch.io/meal-deal
We’re at the Corn Exchange in Leeds today - come pick up some books we recently brought back from the land of the paper-freaks and the book perverts
To do high quality recruiting and testing! It feels like the main way right now is often “be in a lot of Discords and ask nicely “…
I definitely will, thanks for offering. We just had a bit of a brain wave recently when we realised how even our own playtest recruitment standards weren’t up to our research recruitment standards. In a design scene that is made up of a lot of hobbyists and small projects, it’s going to be hard …
This is great! It’s early days for us right now so we’ve got a lot of questions to explore, but I’m sure you’ll see me post some more about them soon. Thank you!
Is that right?
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Because we’re an organisation that does a lot of other stuff too, we don’t necessarily need every use of the service to be paid, the service just needs to pay for itself overall!
Thanks so much for your response!
We’re also exploring different payment options (free up to a certain size? payment after crowdfunder?)
Completely hear you on being on the same page for design intent. Sounds like that might be:
- an ability to screen for certain kinds of players
- an ability to constrain feedback to targeted qs
Players/testers: how do you currently sign up to test a game? Why do you volunteer to playtest games? What would make the experience better for you?
#games #ttrpg #gamesdesign
We're thinking about developing a playtesting recruitment service, bringing together our expertise as researchers and games designers.
Designers: would you use it? What are your current struggles with recruiting play testers or getting playtest feedback?
#games #ttrpg #gamesdesign
I loved reading this! It really chimes with my own thoughts about games that design for 'frame-shifting', utilising multiple points of interaction to increase buy-in, and the value of object-based interactions for opening up new imaginative experiences
fractals.coop/blog/designi...
Speculative praxis
@kierancutting.bsky.social giving the last talk of the day, ‘Rituals for building futures’
This new version is portable, for an unlimited number of players, and can pop up anywhere. Let me know if you’d be interested in hosting or playing it!
A photograph of a conference programme describing the Museum of Lost Futures. The text is available at https://links.fractals.coop/Multiplatform
Today I’m speaking at Multiplatform on our work using games as part of “speculative praxis” - using creativity to experimentally act towards creating more possibilities (for a better future).
Then, later today, I’ll be hosting an exclusive pop up of A NEW VERSION OF THE MUSEUM OF LOST FUTURES?!
THE POOP IS POOP, THE TEARS ARE TEARS
A double page spread from the zine. On the left hand side is a screenshot of a YouTube video, and around it are comments. They're from my videos I made when I was 17 and unsure about going to Oxford for a summer school.
It's a story about my own life, told with the help of the His Dark Materials series, an Oxford Summer School, the YouTube videos I made at 17, and Philip K Dick's ideas of orthogonal worlds.
#psychogeography #zine #philipkdick #hisdarkmaterials (are these useful hashtags? I'm sure we'll find out!)
A panoramic photograph of some green fields in Oxford, with some colleges in the background. In the blue sky, the words to Shakespeare's "This Other Eden" speech from Richard II, and William Blake's "And did those feet in ancient time" sit, as if the landscape was whispering them.
My design skills weren't as good in 2021 as they are now, so I didn't feel like I could really capture what I was trying to do back then.
A
I came back to it recently after finishing Chaos Magic and it all sort of fell into place.
It's another pretty media-centric piece...
Another launch from me today, just before Easter!
Originally written at the height of LOST FUTURES but never released, Dreaming Spires is a psyschogeographic sort-of-true story about healing by revisiting the parts of ourselves that we cut off.
xenolight.itch.io/dreaming-spi...
Oh hell yes
It's devlog Monday! SCREW THAT needed a little bit of context adding to the little game. oliverbates.itch.io/screw-that/d...
#indiegames #devlog #solorpg #ttrpg
Free print at home copies of Meal Deal can be found on @itch.io here oliverbates.itch.io/meal-deal
