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Author: Graham

Powers of Four: Setting

Published by Graham on October 18, 2018

One of the first things I did when my HDD quit after seven years was choose which games to reinstall. I decided that Skyrim was on the list. I have on various occasions tried a second playthrough but for some reason August was a better time than others. I think one of the reasons why I got back into a video game from 2011 is that Tamriel is an extremely rich setting, and the writing is detailed but not overbearing. For example, I chose not to care about the civil war quest line at first because I remembered more about it from my most recent attempt at a playthrough. I thought I was bored with that part. But then I tried to explain to my wife the differences between the Empire and the Stormcloaks and found myself having to take a lot of time to do it properly. Once I got into talking about the facts about both sides I found that there was something to care about even if clearing forts is a little tedious. Despite a little bit of corny dialog, the setting is highly consistent and does not engage in much absurdity. Other games with different kinds of settings, like Great Ork Gods, crank up the absurdity because it’s fun. This is something I and the storyteller from my recent campaign identified as one of the key choices to make.

Sure, the placement is glitchy and the object (body) really should have been removed upon reload, but I feel like this is a good representation of how the Stormcloak Rebellion went for Ulfric in this playthrough.

One of the goals I have as a DM is to run a campaign, not necessarily a super-long one, but something more aptly called a campaign rather than an adventure where people love the setting so much that they want me to run something else in the same setting and/or seek permission to run something in that setting themselves. I don’t expect it will ever compete with Forgotten Realms as a setting, but it would melt my heart if someone could ask for a setting by name rather than “the same world as your last campaign.” One of the things I will be watching closely is the consistency/absurdity balance. As the person running the show I will need to keep the group interested while also considering what I want to build, which will definitely skew towards the consistent. I really don’t appreciate when I or someone else really wants to do build up a world that exists in our imaginations beyond the field of view of the player characters, but others insist on making it into a farce of pop culture references and self-parody. It’s fine to do those things as long as that’s the kind of game the group has agreed to play, but it’s something I find harder to enjoy than when it’s baked into the game from the start. Going from consistent to absurd usually doesn’t work well for me.

However, as much as it is jarring when it gets dark and serious in a setting where I expected something more along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I find it preferable to the reverse (going from consistent to absurd). There is one time that stands out to me where something shed a lot of its absurdity; I actually enjoyed it a lot. I was a player in a Risus campaign which started as a fandom mashup of stuff our group liked, but as we probed into the penal system of a very “enlightened” civilization we came to the horrifying realization that in their desire to eschew traditional prisons they invented a new kind of psychological torture. This wasn’t originally the intention, but if I am going to have intentions about this sort of thing, I hope to be able to strike the balance as well as it was done in that campaign.

As much as I enjoy Skyrim, I can see getting into something more absurd again as long as it’s the kind of game that my group wants to play at the time. Whether by meticulous planning or by skillful improv, it’s something that I think is really important to consider in some way.

Four Characteristics of a TTRPG

Published by Graham on September 25, 2018

Picking up from two weeks ago, I had mentioned that the World of Darkness campaign I was playing in has gone on indefinite hiatus. I sat down for tea with the storyteller who was running that show to talk about what happened and why. I wanted to try and put some names to the thoughts and feelings we were having, and we came up with four characteristics of a tabletop RPG which separate the kind of game that our different players want to play. It’s not intended to analyze every aspect of the TTRPG experience, but to provide some language we can use when talking about being more intentional about choosing those games. The four we came up with were:

  1. Setting
  2. Agency
  3. Characters
  4. Decisions

Setting: It’s more than aesthetic preference. Some people just don’t care for playing pretend in medieval Japan and would much rather go to space. Some settings also lend themselves to differing levels of agency and characters: it’s not impossible to do survival horror in a high magic pseudo-Arthurian setting but it’s not easy to pull off. Likewise, heroic power fantasies are not often draped in the low light and cigarette smoke of a noir setting. The other thing to consider is how much absurdity vs. consistency people enjoy: Monty Python and The Holy Grail, or Lord of the Rings? Even if you love your friends, they might not be suitable players for that OSR dungeon crawl and that’s okay. I am here to say that it is okay to tell your friends that zombie apocalypse is not your jam.

Agency: One of the reasons I have a little bit of trouble with enjoying survival horror type games is that I love when my choices matter more in the fictional world than they seem to in the meatspace. It’s not enough that there seems to be a revived interest in the kind of thoughts Lovecraft had about race in the real world, now I have to pretend that ancient monsters are on an inexorable warpath to drive humans insane and kill us all? I’d much rather be a dashing rogue who at least tries to shoot Cthulhu in the face and keep his composure while doing it – and at least have an outside chance of being a little bit successful.

Characters: Robin Laws’ Player Types describe what kind of players come to the table. In my discussions with the storyteller from my most recent campaign, we decided that distinct from the player type, there are also character types that certain players tend to play while others like to mix it up with different types of characters even if they mostly represent the same player type. We identified the following:

  1. A fantasy version of the player themself as a whole person
  2. Pretending to be something the player wishes they could be, but aren’t
  3. Playing a part of the player’s personality, but magnified to become a defining trait rather than a smaller facet
  4. Taking a theme and running with it as a part of a carefully crafted narrative

Not all tabletop RPGs are very good at accommodating every single one of these, therefore it’s inadvisable for people who are itching to play a character integral to a big plot to go dungeon crawling. Discussing what you want to play with the DM/GM/Storyteller is a good idea and both parties should be willing to take “no” for an answer: whether that is accepting that a character concept is not suitable for the game that is being run, or declining to play that game. I have kept myself out of at least one campaign based on the fact that my two best ideas for characters were wildly incompatible with the type of game that was being run.

“And then Stanley chose the red door.” How choices are presented to players has a big impact on how much players will enjoy the game.

Decisions: What kind of choices are offered to players and how do their decisions affect the plot? We identified four distinct styles. Simply offering “good” and “bad” choices don’t make a game interesting. We know that good guys win, bad guys lose, England prevails is boring if not problematic. The simplest way to avoid this is to present situations where two good choices have different costs, or two bad choices offer different opportunities to mitigate the damage. Rather than “slay the dragon” it is “do we convince the dragon to go burn someone else’s town or do we use foul forbidden black magic to become powerful enough to destroy the dragon?” Of course, getting thrown two bad options with no third way or deus ex machina to fetch a “win” might frustrate some players. If the DM is excited to create that kind of dilemma then they need players who are into that sort of challenge.

The second style is to offer bad and worse choices, where the players cannot know which is which until after the consequences are set in stone. This is generally how it has gone in the horror type games I have played. This is especially frustrating to the power gamer sorts who love to win, but also to many other player types who are invested in their characters.

The third style is like a puzzle. There is a solution to be found that moves the plot forward and satisfies a win condition, and your job is to find that solution. This works well when players go into it with the right expectations. The trouble is when the player who loves this style goes into a game more like the second style described above and expects that there are answers to find and a correct way to do so. It just gets all the more frustrating when everything goes to hell.

The fourth style looks kind of like a fishbone diagram. There is a plot and it moves forward. Your choices affect the flavour of the outcome, but that outcome is assured. I have come to dislike the term “railroading” as it seems to get tossed around whenever a player’s zany idea gets a flat “no” from the storyteller/DM/GM. I generally don’t like games where it’s really someone else’s work of fiction but where I am given trivial decision-making power. I would much rather just enjoy a performance than have my input tacked onto the side of it if that’s what it is going to be. That I can derisively refer to as railroading. But unless the DM/GM/storyteller is VERY comfortable with improvisation, this style starts to emerge if things are going too far outside the expected narrative and I don’t mind a little bit of this if it is done responsibly.

So we’ve got all this descriptive stuff, how does this help me choose a TTRPG?

Looking at this from my own perspective as a player, I can do most types of setting except for the bleakest of the post-apocalyptic, generally play a part of myself, and enjoy a high degree of agency. If that’s the game someone wants to run, I can consider committing to it. I am not sure I can commit to doing Lovecraftian stuff where agency is minimal; if that’s what a good friend wants to run then I wish them well but won’t try to force myself to play the type of game I am just not into and hope that it won’t be taken as “I don’t want to spend time with or play games with you.”

What’s next? Full Steam ahead resumes its regular run next week and will appear at least once in October. Then my next four posts will be a deeper dive into each of these four characteristics. Now that this is becoming a series where I keep expanding each point into four more, should I come up with a name for it? Powers of Four? Suggestions are welcome in the comments section.

One Similarity Between Rappelling and TTRPG

Published by Graham on September 10, 2018

I hope everyone enjoyed “The Month of Adam.” As promised, I am getting back to writing about the meaning and experience around the games we play with others. This summer, my regular World of Darkness group has entered an indefinite hiatus. I’m not here to pick apart the minutiae of personality differences between us that may have been contributing factors, but to propose a theory of why we’re not still playing that campaign on a weekly basis and what can be done to try and avoid future collapses.

Before continuing I would like to state that it is difficult as a DM/GM/Storyteller not to think “this is my fault” when things do not go well, even if everyone tells you it is not and you know at an intellectual level that it is not. Knowing that the Storyteller for this campaign is likely going to be one of the first people reading this post, I would like to be clear and explicit that this is not a dissection of something he did wrong.

I’m also not here to claim that the Geek Social Fallacies are the only reading a person should ever do about group dynamics, but I have found to be very useful general guidelines to use when explaining why something is the way it is in social circles that I am a part of. Today’s GSF is #5, that everyone must be invited to everything. I have noticed over the years that “the group” has formed around common interests and bonds of friendship which is not a bad thing. But in seeing what happens when “the group” can’t be divided when interests diverge, it becomes clear to me that a burden is placed on the people who want to organize a tabletop campaign. A prospective DM is put in an awkward spot when they want to run something that isn’t everyone’s jam. On the other side of the screen, players get pulled into campaigns as a matter of loyalty rather than pure leisure. Rather than seeing tabletop RPG as a monolithic hobby, perhaps we would do better to see it as being a broad category under which different games exist. If I was the sort of person to organize excursions for people to go on a five-hour X-TREEM rappel adventure, then I would not likely be inviting most of my tabletop group and I don’t think anyone would really mind too much. So, too, should it be okay for me to run a hack-and-slash OSR dungeon crawl for some people and not feel compelled to invite people who dislike that and want epic character arcs when they play an RPG.

We can still be friends even if you don’t invite me to do this.

So, I think that what we can do is be more intentional about it: players need not play every game that is on offer, nor should the prospective DM be shy about inviting some people and not others. The reason why we play with our own groups more than just heading out to the local game store’s D&D night is that we want enough stability to tell a bigger story than what can be run in 2 hours with random strangers. But that’s not enough to sustain wildly different desires for different kinds of play. Maybe we should be more accepting of that, and put more energy into social occasions that are not centred around the current TTRPG campaign so that whoever is not invited to that can still feel like their friends aren’t ignoring them.

Okay, so now that we’ve got the social side sorted out, how do we “be more intentional” about the gaming part? I’m going to be addressing that next week in my post about the four characteristics of TTRPGs that can help guide our choices in which ones to play and which ones to take a pass on.

The Cave

Published by Graham on July 31, 2018

I always have a little bit of trouble at the board game cafe. Should we play the game we all know so that we can be sure? Or should we try a new game to take advantage of this vast library? A few weeks ago I opted to go for the latter and try out The Cave, a “cooperative” game which is about exploring a cave. I have to admit that the rules were a little much to understand on the first reading, but once a person gets into it, the turns start to go faster. The concept is that you are exploring a cave and collecting tokens either by being the first to find a good photo spot, the first to descend to a lower level, the first to make a tight squeeze, etc. The game pieces are visually appealing, but the play of the game left me wanting for something.

Individual “teams” discovering new tunnels all alone…

I found that the game doesn’t really encourage “teams” (the word the game uses for each individual player) to interact with each other much at all, and that success is easiest to achieve by being lucky on the draw of unexplored tiles. At my table there were one or two occasions when one player would scoop some tokens left behind or not yet reached by another player, but for most if it we all started discovering our own tunnels. I found the only real obstacle to racking up points was getting a bad draw: even if it’s not a complete dead end, drawing a piece that makes it difficult to navigate your current tunnel can be a more subtle obstacle. Nothing in the play of the game suggests that it would be advantageous for any teams to work together, so we are just left hoping that our draws match the kind of equipment we happen to have packed.

While I think it’s a fine idea to play a cooperative game based on cave exploration, I think that it’s probably better if players have some kind of incentive to cooperate. I will probably give this game another one or two tries to give it a fair shake, but right now I am feeling like I could have insisted on Carcassonne or 7 Wonders despite the fact that it’s not a terribly novel experience and doesn’t have the same promise of being a completely cooperative game. As frustrating as it is to see a resource you need in 7 Wonders too far away to trade for, at least I know how player to player interaction will go. Or maybe I should just dispense with the pretence of being there mainly to play games and just have delicious local ice cream with some friends on a hot summer night…

August 2018 is going to be Full Steam Ahead’s “Month of Adam.” I will still be here moderating comments and generally keeping the behind-the-scenes part of the site running, and will be returning in September with some great new content. Until then, please continue to enjoy Alastair’s excellent series.

Not Being That Kind of Jerk at the Card Table

Published by Graham on July 2, 2018

Yesterday I was at an annual Canada Day BBQ when someone pulled out a copy of Cards against Muggles. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this game. At first it appears to be Cards Against Humanity, but saturated with Harry Potter references. Having already decided that I never need to play Cards Against Humanity again I was already predisposed to take a pass on any game called Cards Against ____________. I have no problem with the format, but the idea of playing a game where people compete to be the most shocking in their “ironic” racism, rapism, ableism, homophobia… have I missed any? If so, can someone please pass me a marker and the blank card? If I want to be something more than a jerk then this is a game I cannot play.

I try not to be a jerk about jokey card games.

Cards Against Muggles, to its credit, is crude without a lot of the stuff that makes Cards Against Humanity bad. Sure, I have heard more speculative jokes about the sexual exploits of the Weasley family in the past 24 hours than I would care to ever again, but it was something I could hang around the edges of without feeling like there is something fundamentally wrong with what we, as a group of people, are doing. Most of it was simply an endless barrage of references, a few of which I recognize, but mostly stuff I know to be related to the fandom but have no personal knowledge of. This is what I imagine it’s like to read Ready Player One if you didn’t grow up white and nerdy. This is something that I could, if I was really desperate to play a card game, play. I declined because I found cheeseburgers and side conversations to be far more appealing. In this, however, I still have a responsibility to refrain from being a jerk. I’m not a Potter fan, and that’s okay. Some of the people at the party were huge fans. That’s okay too. For the same reasons I can’t abide playing Cards Against Humanity, I have to let people enjoy Cards Against Muggles without complaint from me. I don’t want to be the kind of jerk that dehumanizes other people for fun, but nor do I want to be the kind of jerk that presumes to judge people liking what I don’t and not liking what I do. I want to be the kind of person that does a reasonably good job of holding those two things in balance, and I want to be the kind of person who does his own small part to make this what being a “Canadian” is about.

gf in local

Published by Graham on June 19, 2018

(My apologies to any email subscribers who received a draft version of this post earlier this week when I forgot to finish it before it automatically posted.)

Sometimes, when playing what I call large and expansive recreational games, I wonder how much potential they actually have to live up to my expectations. A few days ago, I was out ratting (that’s EVE-speak for using an imaginary spaceship to shoot hordes of NPC pirates, equivalent to “farming mobs” in other games). An enemy player appeared in local (a chat window with a list of all pilots in system). I warped my ship to my team’s space station, which is a common move when you see an intruder in your space. Ratting and hunting ratters is a game of cat and mouse: they win by catching me, I win by scurrying away too quickly. I make it back to the station and tether, which essentially means I am invulnerable. He starts talking in local. “Fight me,” he says. I tell him that I will not fight him in my ratting vessel (which are almost always ill-suited for combat with other players) or my salvage vessel (unarmed) so I go fetch something more suitable from the next system over. Now flying a nimble assault frigate, I warped to the same station. I tethered up, approached the enemy cruiser, and then broke tether by opening fire. We fight for a while, then a friend in my alliance stumbles across the fight and opens fire as well. I would have told him to back off if not for the fact that I saw in local that there was another alliance mate of the guy I was fighting somewhere close to us. There was to be no pretence of space-bushido here. So I won, not because I am am especially talented pilot, but through (ab)use of the tethering mechanic and unfair odds that I didn’t bother to make fair out of paranoia that doing so is taking bait for a larger trap. That, my friends, is EVE at its most basic essentials. We both write “gf” in local, which stands for good fight. Some people might find this strange, but not people who play this game.

The next day I attended the weekly session of World of Darkness I play with my friends. We went totally off script, but ended up bringing a split party together onto the same narrative thread, no rails in sight. This is the tabletop gaming that I like to think is so good and interesting, rather than it being a tangle of out-of-character debates about arcane rules that makes me wonder why I think so highly of the game. There have been times, in many different campaigns including some that I have run, that I feel like the esteem I hold for the tabletop RPG is misplaced. Not last week.

World of Darkness is often hard to pace when you have a plot arc in mind but players are more interested in negotiating their dice pool for each and every action (me, guilty of this myself? nahhh)

So what’s the point? Some games can suck up a lot of time and not produce measurable returns. I don’t think, though, that this means we should eliminate recreational games from a healthy life balance that includes other activities just because there is no instant gratification. While it may be true that Yahtzee (or, as my wife’s off-brand set calls it, 5-dice Game) always produces a winner, it’s never going to be satisfying in the same way as having a great night at the WoD table or a fantastic example of the “gudfight” that capsuleers spend so much time seeking. Not even when I have the disgusting luck of multiple Yathzee rolls (five of a kind) in a single game. It’s there… and then it’s gone. It’s a game, but not a story. I happen to think that making new stories is just as good a way to spend a midsummer night as sitting on the patio enjoying some cold ones, or cycling, or whatever. That’s what I need to remind myself the next time I feel like I spend too much time listening to other people discuss their dice pools or spinning my ships in citadels and not enough time working or writing or designing or…. any of those other things I can maybe stand to do a little more of, but should not pretend like I could be doing it all non-stop.

Site update: in case the unscheduled break wasn’t a clear enough sign, I’m having a bit of a hard time keeping up right now. I have a few more posts in progress, then I am going on a semi-vacation from active blogging for a month. A generous donor has decided to supercharge Alastair’s Steam-Powered Hope initiative which means Almost Infinite will be running 100% Full Steam Ahead, every week in August. I will still be monitoring things behind the scenes and moderating comments, and then be back in September with what I hope will be more of the content I want to be creating rather than falling into the habit of steam-of-consciousness posts about whatever I happen to be playing, just to get something published for the week. There will be more applied game theory and philosophy posts after the break. Thanks for reading.

Working On Avoiding Fallacies Three and Five

Published by Graham on May 29, 2018

Social time. Escapism. Fun. When I play recreational games it’s usually in the hope that those aspects of the activity will lead to reduced stress. But this weekend, I had a hard time focusing on the game on our regular tabletop night and had to say no to a bonus game run by this blog’s favourite guest author.

I wasn’t out at work or sleeping in bed or something so obviously excusable like that. I ended up going out on a fleet to help my online space guild stake a claim on more imaginary solar systems. I know I shouldn’t feel bad about it, but it’s hard not to think that there must be something wrong with my priorities when I have time for them and not for my friends.

The reason I say I shouldn’t feel bad about it is because I know better. The Five Geek Social Fallacies were posted in 2003 and remain an important reference for when I might be falling for one or more. I know it’s not necessarily sound scientific psychology, but I have adopted those five fallacies as guidelines for what kind of negative thinking to avoid. Today it’s three and five that I have to read and reread. It’s OK to do something that requires less mental energy than more tabletop RPG adventures with friends. It’s OK not to grab every available tabletop night to the exclusion of space friends. I know these things at an intellectual level, but it’s still a challenge to feel it sometimes.

The Quiet Con

Published by Graham on May 7, 2018

This weekend (Friday evening May 4, 2018 to Saturday night on May 5) was the first spring iteration of Edmonton’s IntrigueCon. I had a great time playing some 5e D&D (and running it for the first time) and playing a flavour of World of Darkness that I hadn’t tried before. As much fun as those sessions were, I have to say that the most interesting game to talk about wouldn’t be any of those. It would be the one that involved no dice rolling and drawing a map on the paper table covers.

The Quiet Year is a game that uses nothing but pencils, paper, a few six-sided dice, and a standard deck of playing cards in addition to the rule booklet. There were no grand maps of the city of Waterdeep at this table nor any carefully arranged dungeon maps. Although there are a few rules to pull the game along to its conclusion in an orderly fashion, the rules have very little impact on the success or failure of the fictional civilisation being rebuilt.

The first thing we did was set the scene by drawing a coastline, a river, and some mountains to frame the area.

This is how it works: a society has suffered a catastrophic conflict with “the Jackals” and have four seasons to rebuild until the “Frost Shepherds” arrive to mark the end of the game. What the Jackals are (literal canines, gang members, aliens) is not specified, nor is the precise cause of the fall, nor what the Frost Shepherds are. This means that this game can be played out as a science fiction adventure on an alien world, as a medieval high fantasy, or anything else a person might come up with. In our case, we went with a fairly plain post-apocalypse theme.

Extremely well-drawn golden idol
The discovery of this expertly-drawn golden idol buried in the clay near the river bank was a result of drawing a card directing the player to discover an omen of some kind.

On each turn, the players draw a card and play out the corresponding events from the booklet. This may direct players to choose what shortages or abundances of resources there are, or do something specific with the map. There is often an OR choice on these events and there is nothing regulating how many times the players can choose the good (or at least less-bad) event over the worse one. After playing the card, the player may make their own choice of starting a discussion, adding something to the map, or beginning a project of their choice. Again, there is nothing stopping the players from making oh-so-convenient resources readily available, that fill the gaps in resources, and that are close to an idea plot of land to build a village on.  Players may also start a crisis for the community with forest fires and poisoned rivers. It is entirely up to the players at the table whether this is a legend of prosperous pioneers or a tragic tale of woe and misery in the twilight of human civilization.

Dice are used as counters for how many turns it will be until the project is complete.

As the game progresses, players add projects to the map and use the dice as counters: projects may take up to six weeks (each turn is one week), and this timeline is set entirely at the discretion of the player placing it on the map. The only limiting factor is that there are a set number of project dice to be deployed at any given time, so players are occasionally compelled to choose between starting a community discussion or adding a new feature to the map instead if there are too many projects active.

This is what we had created when the game ended. The clear conclusion is that none of us are taking the plunge into making a living as a freelance illustrator.

The whole experience was a lot different that the tabletop games with wargame ancestors. This was as much of a collaborative storytelling experience it could be while still being a game rather than a writers’ circle. Looking back on how much stress I was experiencing in trying to get my dungeon set up and getting players set up with suitable characters for D&D, I really see the value in a game like this where there is no preparation required and no storyteller/GM/DM to have expectations of. In being so minimal in its restrictions on players it really allows something interesting to develop at the game table. As excited as I am to run another 5e scenario at IntigueCon’s main event in October, this is the game I am going to remember for being something different.

Going South In New Eden

Published by Graham on April 30, 2018

I met up with a friend of mine the other night; the friend who suggested to me that if I was going to write about any MMO I should give EVE Online a whirl rather than WoW, etc. He was shocked to find out that I was still playing it and profusely apologized to me. I told him that it was OK. There have certainly been times where I considered moving on for good. The battle of  9-4RP2 is one of those (that’s the overhyped “million dollar battle” that people were excited about in late January). I came home from work that evening knowing that something big was going down, started up the game and didn’t stop for about five hours. My wife was worried about me and wanted to know if I was okay. I assured her that this was an exceptional event that would not be happening again. I would make sure of it: if it ever looks like a five-hour TIDI-fest is going to ensue then I am going to feel the need to attend to real life and log out. The lack of fun and monstrous waste of time was exactly what I am not looking at in a game.

It was not long after that when my alliance departed the so-called north (the battle mentioned about happened in Cloud Ring, while we lived mainly in Branch as a part of the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition) to move to The Spire. There we were to join the Drone Control Unit (DCU), a subset of the mighty Drone Region Federation (DRF). That did not work out so well. By the time we arrived they were already starting to break under siege. As a result, a lot of the fleets were also not a lot of fun. We would receive pings with all kinds of superlatives related to how important it was to form a fleet as large as possible. Some of these would be hours of waiting for nothing. It wasn’t TIDI, but it was grueling. And it showed in our enthusiasm. I recall one particular evening I joined a fleet with about two and a half hours before I planned to leave to attend a social event. It took an hour to form up, then we did lots of flying through gates, then docked up and waited some more. Eventually it was time to leave, and so I dropped fleet early. I did not regret it, as I later found out that they waited at least another hour before walking into a trap. Still not the kind of stuff that makes a person be interested in playing the game.

This is a third-party site’s conceptual map of the EVE Online universe. The cardinal directions I describe are arbitrarily assigned based on up/down/left/right on this map. More at http://evemaps.dotlan.net/

Due to widespread dissatisfaction with how things were going, my alliance announced that we were leaving and moving even further south (a good move considering the DCU imploded very shortly after this was announced). We departed towards Detorid/Immensea/Tenerifis. If you look at Sov Maps the south appears to be a dog’s breakfast of little territories quite unlike the empires of the Imperium/Goons in Delve or GOTG and PL in the north though the ascension of the Winter Coalition has made it a little less fractured at the coalition level (in EVE the groups of players from smallest to largest are corporation, alliance, coalition). We are no longer under the protection of a powerful coalition. We are on our own now. And yet I enjoy this game more than ever. Any day of the week has us going out and meeting up with some smaller groups for some pew-pew spaceship combat. Everyone so far has been a good sport. We win some, we lose some, and it’s actually fun. I don’t miss the security of the north or the unfulfilled promises of empire in the east. Small gang warfare is something I can enjoy as time permits. When it comes to screen-based distractions, that’s everything I could ask for. I am glad that things are going south for me in this game. No need to apologize for that.

The Swap

Published by Graham on April 21, 2018

Sometimes I like games with big possibilities and boundaries that are sometimes hard to see. That’s why I have spent more time in EVE Online than I ever thought I could (more on that next week). But there are other times where I am in the right mindset for some interactive escapism but those big games just aren’t as appealing as I would expect. For example, last week while out on a roam in EVE online somebody forgot to refuel the clone bay where I would normally respawn after getting blown up. Faced with 45 minutes (or more) of taking the long way home, I just could not bring myself to spend that much time on just getting back to where I need to be. That’s when I decided to swap the big game for something a lot simpler, at least until things could get straightened out.

The Swapper is a simple game in a wonderfully dark science fiction setting. It is, fundamentally, a 2D puzzle game built around one neat mechanic: the player can deploy clones and “swap” to any of them provided their beam is not blocked. The player can only control one body at a time, but all of them move in unison. Once I got the display and control settings to a usable point (needed to be running in compatibility mode in order for the mouse to move) I found myself quickly immersed in both the story and the puzzles along the way.

The player’s “gun” is used to deploy clones and swap to them. Red lights block swap beams while blue lights (not pictured) block clone placement.

It is a strictly single player game, and apart from the clone/swap mechanic it revolves around, nothing in the gameplay itself really screams write a big thinkpiece blog post about this. But maybe that’s exactly why it really hit the spot when I picked it up: I did not have to depend on other players to do things. I did not have to spend more than five minutes learning how to play the game. It was an easy alternative path to the escape from reality that normally comes from pretending to be in space. I highly recommend it to the Portal crowd: challenging yet not impossible puzzles, good narrative, and no shooting to kill (assuming that we don’t count the clone bodies consumed to break falls). I do look forward to getting back to some of the “bigger” games, but am certainly glad I gave this one a try.

Alastair is taking a break for a few weeks, but rest assured that he will be resuming the Full Steam Ahead series when time allows. Next week I will be providing an update on how things are going for me in New Eden, and the following week I will be playing and DMing some D&D at IntrigueCon’s Spring Mini Con.