2013 Nominees For Hobby Gaming's Top Prize 29
An anonymous reader writes "The thirteenth annual Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming has five contenders: Wil Wheaton's "Tabletop" YouTube video series; the massive history of gaming book Playing at the World ; the Metatopia gaming convention where designers pay for access to alpha gamers; the romance-genre card game Love Letter ; and the RPG Dog Eat Dog in which players explore the dynamics of colonialism. When it comes to this award, typically all of the nominees are worth checking out."
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I found it intriguingly interesting, but judging from its website, it doesn't allow for homosexuality, since only men may court the princess. Lame. And why did princess Annette lock herself in the palace anyway? Is she sexually frustrated or something?
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You can pretend that an asshole is something that should naturally be used for sex but you can't make believe a little plastic character in a game is whoever you want it to be?
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I found it intriguingly interesting, but judging from its website, it doesn't allow for homosexuality, since only men may court the princess. Lame. And why did princess Annette lock herself in the palace anyway? Is she sexually frustrated or something?
assuming your being literal and serious it's not really an issue. The game does come with a great deal of story there's a bloody chapter of fiction in the little booklet and detailed character descriptions. That said the story is superfluous to the game itself. It's fun but it in no way affects the game itself. You can see this in the numerous Love Letter custom mods. Last month someone made an animal crossing version [reddit.com]. The princess and the romance don't actually come into the gameplay.
That said there's noth
Let me get this correct (Score:3)
Metatopia gaming convention, where the developers pay to access alpha gamers and where alpha gamers pay to access alpha products. Sounds like whomever is throwing the convention is raking in all the money.
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You think arranging a convention is free?
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It's genuinely enjoyable. I suggest the "Formula D" or "Gloom" episodes to get a taste of the experience, but when I found the series I binged and watched them all in a single afternoon. And then went out and bought $150 worth of games. It's been fundamental in my efforts to start a real-live gaming group, since the reaction to new episodes of TableTop has absolutely been one where one of my friends shows up with the thing from the most recent episode at our next outing. King of Tokyo and Once Upon a Time w
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I agree that TableTop has been rather influential. I would however suggest maybe Pandemic [youtube.com] or Ticket to Ride [youtube.com] as a starting episode. I found Formula D to be rather dull game by that video.
TableTop's success could be attributed to Wheton's celebrity but regardless of how I thin
Our Hobbies are Actually the Same (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hobby Gaming" -- I understand the desire to make the distinction between video games and games that are not video games, but "Hobby Gaming" sounds like a futures market for hedging bets against folks with hobbies... Gaming their Hobbies.
I've always considered them all to just be games. I mean, I frequently paper mock-up the video games to see if they'll be fun and work out some logic kinks before creating an actual digital prototype. Many turn based strategy games start their lives resembling "Hobby Gaming", even in a playable state before being implemented in cardstock & pewter, or digitally with a video game engine. When I was a kid I would dream up new enemies and levels for Mario and tape together dozens of sheets of graph paper on my wall... I would take a paper cutout and "play" the levels -- "You put the string on where his feet are, then you can only jump as high as the string is long" Some of these paper levels had "teleporters" (go to page 4 [13,42] ), or rules that listed you couldn't go backwards... That was when PC game making was somewhat of a black art. Learning the the voodoo coding rituals without any instruction was hard (before the Internet), and I guess I didn't learn about how other folks came up with "game designs" so I used a paper based rapid prototyping system (and still do). In a FPS, each room can be "rendered" as a top-down 3rd person game on paper, and a string used to determine a "line of sight", or a grenade throw distance. You can get a good handle on approximately how the movement will flow through the level in about 5 minutes rather than spending hours in a 3D modeling suite... Need to reconfigure part of the map? Scissors and tape are faster than redrawing the lines.
What some call "Hobby Games" or "Video Games" are all just "Games" to me. Here's a GDC video about the action platformer Shadow Complex [gdcvault.com], Skip to 10:40 to see how the first "build" of the game was basically just made with digital graph paper, and just like a table top game they manually had to move the pieces to play it in that state... and it was fun! (so they say; I can only vouch for the end results, which are pretty fun). Computers can just move the pieces for you and keep track of more rules than a non-digital game can typically afford. That's the way I see it, anyway.
I think Table Top series should win. It's great to see what some of the various games are, and how they're played before picking them for game night. It's gotten some of my digital only gamer friends to broaden their horizons a bit too.
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Tabletop RPGs are different though, there's a human element in the GM that computers can't mimic.
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Annoyed by award shows (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you can come up with as good a name as Diana Jones then good luck with your awards.
what does that even mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hobby Gaming" its gaming, its a freaking hobby, your not getting up at 6am to drive an hour to game every single day for years on end ... you game to relax with your buddies as a fucking hobby!
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This isn't gaming's top award. (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiel_des_Jahres [wikipedia.org]
Spiel des Jahres is board gaming's top award. Geared towards Euro-style games, Speil is like the Hugo of game awards and winners print gladly print the logo on their boxes. (Somtimes excessively, like Ticket to Ride which has the Spiel logo on every side of the box.)
I've never heard of this award show, so I bet the submitter is in the marketing department of said show.
In other news (Score:1)
Apples won this year's Fruit Award, coming slightly ahead of oranges.
OGABAS (Score:1)
I place my bets on Otto Schmidt's OGABAS system. (Oh My God, Anything But A Six!). Later this month I'll play his "Jayne's Frightening Ships" at an invitation-only Mini-Con, (no vendors.)
thanks a lot! (Score:1)
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Now I've lost an hour watching Wil Wheaton's TableTop. Seriously, it was delightful. Funny thing is I saw his picture on the website (my first time seeing him in a while) and wondered why I was looking at Fawkes--a character, I was surprised to find out, he played in The Guild.
wait till you get to the "Ticket to Ride" episode.. that one is just.... well let's just say delightful. I'm not sure I've ever laughed at anything that hard on YouTube