Wednesday 14 March 2012

Questions and Answers

My next essay for my MA is about characters in roleplaying games, be they tabletop, live action or digita.  I am interested in what people look for in their games, how they play them and if they play different sorts of roleplaying games in different styles.

I posted a survey out using Survey Monkey on Tuesday morning (well, just after midnight) and so far as of 18:00 Wednesday I have 337 response, which is absolutely fantastic.

It's getting some really interesting responses and I can't wait to collate them and examine them in more depth.

People like me (I think) like talking about their hobby but I hadn't anticipated so many people would take the time out of their schedule to answer in the comments boxes I included (I deliberately suggested people skip them if they didn't have time and thought that most people would) but there have been a large amount of comments given in all of the questions, which is wonderful and fascinating to see people's responses about something which they clearly feel passionately (as I do) about.

I look forward to sharing some of the results (it's all anonymous and so on) and sharing what people have said. 

Thanks if you've filled out the survey so far and if you haven't... well - I'd love you to.  It can be found here

A special mention goes to Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who lectures at the University of Chichester and writes on all things games, and to Ian Knope at Having a LARP for posting this on for me.  Also of course to anyone who has shared this and that I don't know has passed it on.  Please do, the more responses the merrier!

Friday 2 March 2012

De De De De De-de-de-dah... boom



March 2nd.  I even missed the pinch pinch first of the month opportunity (that's probably bullying or harrassment though so for the best avoided).

It's pretty amazing to believe that we've finished our design lectures for the year and on;y have a few weeks left of theory classes.  We spend our third term on dissitation / project work so much of my formal teaching is over.  I was last at 'school' quite a few years ago so being back again has been an interesting experience.

My essay for this term is going to be something about building characters / identity / affect or some combination thereof.  I'm still working on the title, but I know that's the thing that is intertesting me on the theory side at the moment.  I'm waiting for Game Feel to arrive, although my mountain of books has enough to keep me going in the meantime! I've been particularly enjoying the First / Second / Third person books (that's a link to one of them, the others are all there too) as they have been addressing some of the practical aspects of what I am focussed on - creating good games.

We had a pitch to 4 industry professionals and three of our lecturers on Wednesday.  This was a nervous week.  Mediatonic, Creative Assembly, Super Massive and a gentleman ex EA and very well connected were all there and they all gave fantastic feedback for us all, it was a great experience and the whole class pulled it out of the bag really, which was great to see.  My personal effort was called "When It Was Over" and I was reasonably pleased with it.  I learnt a lot from the pitch itself and from the process.  The next stage is to finish the deign document for it and make a prototype of some of it in MMF2, so that's going to be coming over the next few weeks.  I made a little trailer / mood board for it, which if you were interested you could watch it below - the intention was to give a feel of an adventure set on an island after the world collapses.  Naturally I don't own the rights to any of it etc etc.


All in all I learnt a lot from the pitch and the project leading up to it, so that was good.

Things happen in ironic ways and this week at my job in my 'other life' (I work as a production manager for a training / theatre company) things have been more hectic than ever.  We get people pull out of work for us at the last minute every so often for auditions or other stuff, but in this last week 3 nights this has happened which leads to late nights working at the office rather than on my MA stuff.  It happens, it's just been particularly unlucky!  It's made it all exciting and a challenge so I am, I have to admit, excited that it's over and looking forward to the weekend now!

In other news I've been working on another project which has started well, and am enjoying it very much.  There we go - that's a little bit of mystery for you!



 And now... back to work.