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I love watching Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games seep into the public consciousness. (Well, maybe not so much when South Park did it, like here or here.) The more we see the games depicted — even when depicted with its most nerdy roots — the more people begin to internalize the idea that these game […]
Outside my fancy and lucrative writing career, I’m also a professor at Ball State University where I’m the director of our Digital Media Minor, an online-only program that teaches students digital story development and design. We’ve spent a great deal of time searching for ways to make the program less individualistic, which is a problem facing […]
Last week, I wrote a post entitled “RPGs Get Creative” that focused on various ways role-playing games had become something more than just tabletop games. The storytelling and community aspects of those games lend themselves other creative fields, such as plays, television programs, and improvisational theater. In many ways, the idea that D&D and role-playing […]
It’s Day One at my 18th (or maybe 19th) South by Southwest Interactive Conference and Festival. A bit later today, I’ll head down to the Austin Convention Center and begin wading into the abundance of human creativity. With that as my backdrop this week, I thought I’d share a few stories about creativity, role-playing, and […]
Like in many other such groups, the Great Lakes Regulators players formed such strong bonds with one another that their meetings began to spill offline. In 1998, Merchants Guild players who lived in Austin started meeting every other month for lunch. While the lunches were originally meant for discussion of in-game activities, they eventually evolved into […]
To commemorate the launch of our early-bird ebook special, I thought it would be fun to recount how Dungeons & Dreamers became a book. I moved to Austin on Christmas Even in 1995 without a job, a plan, or any prospects. The story of how I ended up in that situation is for another time […]
As we moved closer to completing the book (spoilers: it’s done), I found myself gravitating to my Red Box D&D set, which sits just off to the side of my office desk. As I lament that I don’t have nearly enough time to write stories anymore, I also find myself missing the joy of immersing […]
I’m addicted to Goodreads, and not simply because I’m a writer. I love so see how people tag and classify books. So far Dungeons & Dreamers has been organized into 76 different shelves, but most of them can be groups into big buckets such as Internet, Games, or History. I’m not really interested in those […]
One of the best parts about writing the book has been the way it’s forced me to think about games. When you write, you spend your days trying to see the story. You lay notes across the table, you rearrange your ideas, and you look for the patterns to emerge from the chaos. Once you get […]
Chrono Trigger is an upcoming book by Michael P Williams. It’s… all about Chrono Trigger, looking at parallels between Crono’s world and ours, a study of the institutions of the game’s world (its laws and religions), how the game’s characters fit (and defy!) genre conventions and, yes, a poke at the aches and pains of […]
The folks at LARPCraft, who have created several LARP game tracking systems, have a new game: LARPCraft: The Risen If you’re not into the whole LARP scene but still want your zombie RPG fix, Square Enix Unleashes Zombie-Themed Card Battle FPS RPG Deadman’s Cross. Or if you’re down with LARPs but don’t care much for zombies you […]