Program Manager, MIT Game Lab
Making and playing games about complex systems. Helping MIT students do likewise.
People > Tools
Luddite
“The answers to all our questions are in the wind and the trees, the rocks and the water”
Games … history … post punk … hip-hop … cats … birds … bicycles
| Work | http://gamelab.mit.edu |
Great schedule of speakers at this fundraiser for #ROMChip on Feb 22:
https://donate.romchip.org/schedule.html.
My highlights:
- screening of Kinoautomat w/ @molleindustria
- @HollyNielsen playing Dragon Age: Origins and talking about narrative design (and hopefully history?)
- @colleenmacklin rave up with Rez!
We also played Feierabend - a worker placement where home is your factory and the play space is an amusement park, a fitness area, and a vacation area - you need to strike in order to gain more vacation time to better relax yourself than your opponents' teams of workers. If it weren't directly satirical it would be yet another game that says it's one thing, but the mechanics are still stuck in the same game we always play. In this case, that's okay!
Finally got to play Striking Flint yesterday. It was excellent! Played with 5 players - there's enough split of role abilities that while my co-op Alpha personality bubbled up a bit, I felt like I had to ask people about what they could do -- I couldn't just dictate the board. I loved the table talk as well - it felt like we were being tactical about dealing with the historical agents "You can take out these cops and I'll deal with the scabs over here”
Today at 10am EST, Mikael Jakobsson from MIT Game Lab talks with Striking Flint and Heading Forward designer John du Bois about his work in #boardgames.
More details (including Zoom link) here:
https://calendar.mit.edu/event/playing-workers
(sponsored by MIT Morningside Academy for Design)
It's spooky season so I've been dutifully watching my what not to do when dealing with a witch movies, satanist superhero origin stories, incel documentaries, and false advertising thriller but instead timey-wimey bullshit flicks.
But: Criterion's witch movie list is pretty dope this year. Looking forward to finally re-watching The Witches w/ Anjelica Huston!
Name a game you think about a lot but have never had a chance to play for (reasons). Here's mine:
You're a Fucking Butterfly (Tim Hutchings, 2017?) is a larp for 10-52 players. "You will swear, berate, and bluster your way around the meadow. These ferocious butterflies take no shit from no one as they seek the perfect mate with whom to tear this joint down."
https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/products/youre-a-fucking-butterfly
