Inevitable is a board game, set in a slapstick dystopian future.
Inevitable is a work of commentary, satirizing the contemporary landscape of corporate and political power.
Inevitable is a device which uses what Matthew Kirschenbaum would call the "procedural granularity" of complex rule-systems to produce robust narrative experiences in a deep imaginary world.
"Inevitable is a game of layers within layers; the product of analysis, deconstruction, reconstruction, and meta-analysis. [It] overtly and covertly works to thwart you and subvert the board game experience overall." —Jonathan Leistiko, the game's co-designer.
So... what is Inevitable, really? It's something that I began designing a long time ago—the earliest sketches I own of Inevitable materials are from 1988. It's something I have continued to tinker with, on and off, throughout the years: it enjoyed heavy play and extended development with my college crew circa 1991-1993, and then went into a re-development process in 1999-2000, right after I finished up with graduate school. Now it's alive again, and slouching towards a commercial release. It has a dedicated website and you can follow it at Facebook.
Is it playable? It is playable! I just playtested it again this Sunday.
Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. (These recent playtests have reminded me often of game designer Jesse Schell's "Rule of the Loop," in which he declares that "The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.") But tinkering incrementally with a long-running piece of design feels strangely satisfying at this point in my life.
Not long ago, I wrote the following on Facebook: "As someone who does not have children and who does not particularly like babies, one would not think I would be a good person to illustrate a baby book. And yet I think I did a surprisingly good job."
Yes, it was an improbable turn. But my collaborator Amy L. Clark had written a baby book, and needed some illustrations, and I've been trying to draw more, so... we came together on it.
She wrote passages like this: "Eventually, you became a child. Most people are so busy being children that they end up being young people for a long time. There are important things to do during a childhood, some fun, some scary, some mysterious, some which require practice, many of which make a bit of a mess. You _______ and once you ________."
and I accompanied her passages with illustrations like this:
See four other illustrations (and the accompanying text) here. Copies of this baby book are not presently for sale, but if that changes you'll of course hear about it.
i made this, part one: "know your polyhedra" six-button set
OK, so this is the part where I start talking about things I've made, like I promised.
First up is my recently completed six-button set, "Know Your Polyhedra." Anyone who has done much in the way of tabletop gaming should instantly recognize the commonality between these six dice geometric solids:
They come in a nifty little packet with a hand-numbered inlay card:
Mostly I just wanted to show these off, but if you're enough of a math nerd or a gamer geek that these make you itch with desire, I'll shoot a set your way for $5.95—less than $1 per button! Just pop in on my humble Etsy storefront. The proceeds are going into the coffers of another gamer-related project that's in the pipe... but more on that later.
It's a worthy sentiment to keep in mind during the current crisis. For me, it's a way of trying to turn what feels like a depressing indicator of failure—unemployment—into a source of creative ferment. It's a daily practice, that transmutation: it requires work. Sometimes I can manage to stay excited for the entire day and other times I hit the doldrums. But things are getting made. And I'm ready to start talking about some of them. (Some are still secrets.) So over the next few days I'll use this blog as a showcase for some things I made. And I want to know: what are you making? Show me.
A new year means it's time, once again, to crunch the numbers on the reading log.
This year I only completed 23 books, which represents a shocking dip, about half my usual average (last year I read 51, and the year before that I read 58).
What's responsible for the dip? I think I can blame a couple of factors.
1. The New Yorker. I enjoyed a New Yorker subscription this year, and read nearly every issue from cover to cover, all the way down to the art listings and the reviews of restaurants that I don't ever intend to patronize. This ate up an enormous amount of reading time that might otherwise have gone to books.
2. Marvel Comics. I called last spring the "season of comics," but last fall is when I created a pull-file at a comic book store (Cambridge's fine Million Year Picnic) for the first time in my adult life. The amount of reading represented by a weekly handful of comics is small compared to a weekly New Yorker, but they did occupy a non-trivial segment of my reading time.
3. Dissatisfaction with contemporary literature or perhaps just a feeling of being out of touch. Ten years ago, I could have listed at least ten living fiction writers who were producing interesting, rewarding work. Today I could make a similar list, but it would contain almost the exact same ten writers. (Take off David Foster Wallace (RIP) and add Zadie Smith?) It's likely that sometime in the past decade a new class of world-class fiction writers has begun to emerge, but I'm a bit bewildered as to who, exactly, they might be, and I haven't read an exciting debut novel from anyone in a long time. (I'm all ears if anyone wants to shoot a suggestion my way.)
Trends and highlights: most of the eleven novels I read this year were science fiction novels. One could perhaps argue that this is indicative of some escapist impulse, although novels like Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Richard Morgan's Thirteen, Ian McDonald's River of Gods, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy deal with at least as many thorny contemporary questions as anything mainstream lit is producing. Max Brooks' World War Z, on the other hand, doesn't really deal with much in the way of contemporary issues, but is a shockingly detailed and well-realized feat of the imagination, and ended up surprising me by being one of my favorite books of the year.
I also read a lot of stuff dealing with games and game design, including Raph Koster's clever and accessible Theory of Fun. More interesting, however, was Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's monumental Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a near-comprehensive overview of what games are and how they work. Clocking in at close to 700 pages, this is a book I'd been dipping into since its publication in 2003, but this year was the year I decided to complete it. (A rather dense selection of my notes can be examined here.) This was easily the best book I read all year.
The following authors wrote books I read for the first time in 2009, and also wrote books that I read prior to 2009: Warren Ellis, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, and... that may be it.
10. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me Restrained minimalist compositions which periodically descend into shredding noise. Read more | Listen: "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant"
9. Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport I prefer the less polished raw energy of their 2008 debut, Street Horsssing, but this follow-up is still an undeniably fine selection of anthemic psychedelic stomp.
8. Mountains, Choral This outfit, made up of former Apestaartje personnel, has released three fine albums of pastoral drone this decade. This newest one stayed in heavy rotation for me this year.
7. Sunn O))), Dimensions and Monoliths The boundaries of the Sunn O))) project have grown broader with each release, absorbing more and more material like some kind of black metal Katamari. This album finds them experimenting with keening choirs ("Big Church") and transcendent horn playing ("Alice"). It's not always successful, but when it works it expands their scope breathtakingly.
6. The Antlers, Hospice A staggering song cycle about death, loss, and grief. Best way to hear it is by yourself, in a slowly darkening room.
5. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes This album filled the slot that was filled last year by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head's Glistening Pleasure, and in 2005 by Architecture In Helsinki's In Case We Die: indie-pop music, made by young people, charming, charismatic, polished, and addictively sweet. A slightly shameful pleasure, but also a true and abiding one.
4. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix This is the great indie-pop album of the year: upbeat, energetic, yet also somehow grandly sad. Read more | Listen: "Lisztomania"
3. Gregg Kowalsky, Tape Chants The idea of creating music by playing recorded matter on 6-10 cassette tape players simultaneously may sound a bit like someone trying to update Philip Jeck's turntable installations and performances. But Kowalsky's project is really its own thing, with conceptual underpinnings that differ completely from Jeck's, and just one immersion into Kowalsky's invitingly smoggy low-fi drone makes it completely clear that this is a soundworld that must be appreciated on its own terms.
2. Dan Deacon, Bromst The eleven pieces that compose Bromst mostly sound like the soundtrack an old-school videogame that you might have experienced in a dream: all velocity and candy color. But just when you're ready to dismiss them as whiz-kid geekery they open up into something lovely, possibly even holy. Listen: "Red F"
1. Jónsi and Alex, Riceboy Sleeps Beautiful ambient tracks from this side-project of Sigur Ros vocalist Jón Birgisson. Each track arranges acoustic instruments, voices, crackle, loops and hum into a kind of billowing fog that permeates directly to my brain's pleasure pathways.
