Lessons Learned at Glitch Con

I decided to do one final post about Glitch Con where I examined the various things I learned and realized over the course of the weekend.  I already touched on a few things in my other two posts, but I didn't want to go into too many details in those posts because I had already rambled way too much.

The first lesson I learned was that if you hang around cool, wonderful people all weekend you can totally mooch food.  Haha, just kidding.  But seriously I barely had to spend any money for food the whole time I was at the con because some very generous people bought large amounts of it and shared.  I don't know who exactly was responsible for it all, I know Mike bought pizza one night, but I do know that the next time I see some folks (like Mike, John, Ro, Art, Rob) I owe them some food on me or at least some booze.

Secondly, I feel like the weekend in general and the interactions I had completely validated my idea that I love nerdom and gaming, it is my passion, and I am going to pursue making a contribution to it.  Basically I feel okay with the idea of saying that I want to design games.  I have spent the last seven years since graduating college pretty much being aimless.  I have tried to pursue various paths and choices at times, but have never followed through because they just didn't appeal to me on a deep and passionate level.  The only things that have ever really excited me and brought me real joy as far as something that I do have been learning, playing, sharing, and designing games.  Well that and storytelling, but that is kind of tangentially wrapped up in the first to a large degree.

I've already addressed how John's statement about why he does game design inspired me.  I also feel that I have gotten a lot of great support and feedback on both my blogging and my first forays into game design from the people I play with and the various others I interact with through NWARPG.  On top of that, I have realized that while I have no real desire to do any sort of 3D animation stuff using my degree; the general creative and design skills I gained while getting it, as well as the various creative people I'm now friend with because of my four years in a creative degree program, really gives me a good foundation for helping me make both fun and well designed games.

The third lesson I learned was the importance of emotional investment.  Emotional investment is a very powerful tool and a very difficult task.  Think about what you're trying to do here.  You have to convince a group of people, most likely smart and opinionated people, to care about, feel for, and invest in something that doesn't exist and that they blatantly know is not real.

Intimidated yet?

I know I am.  I see myself as an emotionally stunted person on some levels.  I can find it very difficult to feel empathy, and regularly doubt my actual capability to experience the full gamut of human emotions.  So ya, a very scary prospect to think about having to create emotional investment in others.  Luckily there is tons of help.

For starters, thing about all the books, movies, TV shows, games, etc that have really drawn you in.  Think about specific characters you have become invested in.  Use what you see there.  Analyze why these stories and characters engaged you and mine the hell out of that for great methods and ideas.  Look at your own emotions and see why you feel certain ones in connection to certain things, if you feel self aware enough to do so.  Why did I immediately gravitate towards House Fox in Houses of the Blooded?  Because they are all about passion and romance and beauty, things that I long for and do not get in my life.  My real life emotional needs created the connection to the game.

There were also a few other specific points that I learned over the weekend concerning this.

1.  Give people the freedom to take the risk of becoming invested.  Why do we guard our emotions?  Because risking them often leads to being hurt.  Therefore if people feel safe to take risks and try being vulnerable in your game, they'll be more willing to invest the emotions needed to do so.  If they don't feel safe they'll clam up.

2.  Dropping out of character/looking at your character sheet kills emotional investment.  This is probably subjective to each individual, but it is definitely true in my case.  The most emotional investment I've experienced in games has been when I'm barely acknowledging the mechanics and I haven't looked at the character sheet in ages.  Having to shift my mind over from the fluff to the crunch really kills this.  So in general you want to have less crunch if you want more character.

3.  Be willing to draw help and inspiration from some unlikely sources.  John made a joke at the beginning of one of his panels that is was about how pro wrestling relates to role playing games.  He then turned it into a serious point.  He posited that there were no finer examples of getting people to passionately invst in something that they know is fake than pro wrestling and soap operas.  Now honestly, would you ever have thought to look for game design help in either of those?  Or what about the tricks used by magicians, con-artists, and grifters?  I bet you could mine their skill sets for tons of ways to get people to think and feel what you want.  After all, "game design is mind control".  (Another Wick/Sorenson quote)

4.  Reward the hell out of the emotional investment.  Everyone loves positive reinforcement, so give it to them.

Another lesson learned can be awkwardly put like this:  "You have to do it to claim it, but if you do it you CAN claim it."  This was something I took from one of the writing panels, but it applies to game design as well.

Basically it means that if you want to call yourself a writer/game designer/whatever, you've got to write/design games/whatever.  Not talk about writing, not plan to write, not always start and stop unfinished projects; but really truly WRITE.  Churn out the prose.  Finish what you start.  Get your stuff out there.  Write, write, write, and write some more.

It is hard work, but if you want to claim the title you have to do it.  But guess what?  If you do it, you CAN claim the title.  You don't have to be a NY Times bestseller.  You don't have to have a 10 book deal.  You don't have to win awards or be internationally recognized.  None of that is needed to be a writer.  All you need to do is write!  The same can be said of game design and being called a game designer.

Finally I learned that nothing quite equals the community and camaraderie that springs up around shared passions and loves.  Get your mind out of the gutter!  :p

I spend a lot of time with the people I work with.  I talk to them a lot, we share the same day to day experiences, we have some common interest, etc etc.  But at the end of the day I felt closer to the random folks I encountered at Glitch Con than to the familiar faces of my co-workers.  Why?  My co-workers aren't nerds.

They aren't geeks or gamers.  Maybe they can understand and appreciate my love of nerdy things, but they don't share it.  While it may be presumptive to think so, I believe everyone I saw at Glitch Con shared my deep and abiding love for nerdy things.  We might not love the exact same stuff, but we are in the same ballpark, and we sure are both passionate about these things.

Nerds are a heartfelt and passionate people, and that creates a wonderful bond between us.  I truly feel at home when I'm surrounded by my fellow nerds, and in the pursuit of my nerdly obsessions.  It is a feeling that I don't get anywhere else, with any other type of people.  Which makes it extremely special when I can experience it, and very sad when I can not.

I love being a nerd.

A Look Back At Glitch Con 2012

Over the course of this past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Glitch Con 2012 over in Bentonville.  This was a fan run and oriented convention that focused on Sci-Fi, Anime, Steampunk, and Gaming.  For those of you who do not know what this means, it was basically a big gathering of hundreds of various fanboys and fangirls of all types and ages.  We all came together over the course of three days, Friday through Sunday, in order to hang out, buy and sell awesome products, listen to various experts and celebrities in our beloved nerdy fields, dress in crazy costumes, dance, laugh, talk, and play games.  It was an amazing experience and three of the best days of my life for quite some time.

Let me run you through a quick overview of what I did and saw during the convention.  A few of the things I did and the lessons I learned will merit posts of their own, which I'll get to soon.  But for now I'll try to capture as much of the awesome as I can without making a novel long post.

On Friday I arrived in the early afternoon and started things off by having a look around, purchasing a few books, getting them and some more than I brought signed, and just really getting a feel for the place.  I grabbed a few gaming books from John Wick and a couple of paperbacks from Kevin J. Anderson.  I loved spending time with both of these guys over the course of the weekend, but more on that later.

After that I went to my first panel entitled "Creation of LARP" which was run by the aforementioned John Wick.  LARP stands for Live Action RolePlaying for those that don't know.  In the panel he talked about the LARP games he has designed and played, including Houses of the Blooded and the Legend of the Five Rings LARPs (both games that he created btw).  He also talked about his opinion and views on LARPing in general and how to design a good game.  There were some good things there that apply to any type of RPG in my opinion, like allowing players the freedom to take risks, encouraging emotional investment, and realizing that the other players are an audience.  I enjoyed the talk and it made me very excited about the fact that I would be able to do some LARPing at the con.  In fact I kinda threw out my plans for the rest of Friday in order to do just that.

After the panel I joined a group of about 20 or so folks in the LARP room, which was basically the outer living room area of two joined hotel rooms, and the emptied out bedroom of one of them.  These were John's room btw, and I felt it was quite awesome of him to host the games in what amounted to his personal area for the weekend.  I'm going to do a separate post on the LARPs that I played in, both the L5R one that night, and the Houses of the Blooded one the next night.  For now I will just say they were tons of fun, and the Houses LARP was the single best gaming experience I have had in years.

After the L5R game I had the privilege to play test a new card game that John is developing.  It is called the Houses of the Blooded Card Game, and is obviously set in the game world for that game (which I'll do another post on probably).  The game was very fun and employed some mechanics that I loved.  Since it is in play testing and it is now my property I am not going to divulge any real details here.  I will say you get to play one of the six noble houses, that each one has a wonderfully unique thematic feel, that the game feels like it should based on the inspiration, and that House Fox is best.  John will be bringing the game to the public via Kickstarter at some point, and I'll be buying it definitely.

 After a late night playing that card game I went home, crashed for a few hours, and then came back to the con mid-morning to run a game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.  I had four players, and made up a fun little scenario where Dr. Doom used the Sinister Six (my version of it) to steal some items from safety deposit boxes and help his crazy, evil plans.  The heroes (Iron Man, Storm, Spiderman, and Colossus) took down the Sinister Six, and even managed to defeat all the Doombots that came in to try and help, including the one that was actually masquerading as the Dr. himself.  It was quite a bit of fun for me, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it.  John Wick even added a bit to the end by asking if Dr. Doom had called anyone a cretin, to which I responded by having the real Dr. Doom show up and do that very thing.

After that I went to my first writing panel with Kevin J. Anderson titled "Things I Wish A Pro Had Told Me".  His co-panelist was his wife, Rebecca Moesta (another author).  They talked about some of the various tips and advice that they wish they could have received early on in their career.  They told us things like Heinlein's Rules of Writing, and ways to be professional.  I enjoyed listening to these two very talented writers and was definitely feeling a bit of fanboy-ness towards KJA.  After that I went to a great panel about Game Design with John and followed that up with a panel on Media and Literature with KJA, Moesta, John, and another author named Richard Knaak.

After that panel it was time for another LARP and some more hanging out with John, his wonderful wife Ro, and a group of his other friends, who were all cool folks that I was super happy to meet.  Seriously one of the best nights I could have ever hoped for.

Sunday morning brought me a bunch more panels to attend.  The first one I went to was "Collaborating in Writing" with Wick, Moesta, Anderson, and a romance writer Claire Ashgrove.  The panel was a bunch of anecdotes and stories about the subject, and was great.  I followed that up with a panel on "Exciting Seconday Characters" with Anderson, Moesta, and Ashgrove.  Very informative, and I learned that KJA almost killed off one of my favorite characters back in the day, and thankfully his wife stopped him.

The next two hours I sat around and listened to John talk.  The two panels were titled "L5R" and "Collectible Card Game Design".  He talked about the L5R world and shared stories of designing it in the first one, and then talked about card games design and his upcoming HotB card game.  He also shared some fun general stories and talked about how Pro Wrestling related to Roleplaying Games.  After that he and his folks were pretty much done with the Con, so I bade some absolutely amazing people goodbye for now and went upstairs to the gaming room for a few board games before I left.

As I said over the course of this post, I had an amazing time and the convention was wonderful.  I was able to get a lot of great advice and information for some awesome people in the fields that I love.  I learned a lot about game design, writing, and storytelling.  I made some new friends, and had some great new experiences.  The con was very well run and had tons of great content.  They are moving locations next year and are going to have even more room, so I'm looking forward to that.

But I think the biggest and most important moment of the whole thing came during one of John's panels.  I can't remember which one it was exactly, but someone basically asked him why he got into game design, and he said "A lack of desire to do anything else."  At first that seems a bit joking or flippant, but it really resonated with me.  I am never more excited, happy, or alive than when I am playing, designing, teaching, and building games and stories.  It is something I have loved doing for years.  I have never really taken it seriously as a possible career path until just recently though.  After all it isn't something that you'd normally think about as a job, and as John also said "there is no money in game design."

Now I know I can't do anything crazy like quit my job tomorrow and start trying to make a living as a game designer.  I'm fairly certain that unless I become very lucky I will always have to have some other form of employment.  I'm working on figuring that out.  The realization that I love explaining things to people, learning things, and telling stories makes me think I should very seriously look into teaching.  But beyond that I now feel that I'm truly okay with the concept of trying to make games for people on a serious and professional level.  That and writing.  I may never become a best selling author, but I love telling stories and creating worlds and characters, so I'm going to do some sort of writing.  I've got a whole lot of ideas, some of them are even in progress right now.  I'm certain it will be a bumpy road, but it is wonderful to feel like I'm actually on a road instead of just wandering aimlessly.  I look forward to the journey.

One last little note, I befriended John on Facebook, and these posts get cross posted over to there.  So, while I do not really expect him to read this, if for some reason he does I just wanted to say "Thank You."