I'll be in Vienna Monday through Saturday, November 12 - 17.
Do I know anyone there? I'll be at a science summit all week (yay -- more about that soon -- big new science game is happening!) but will have some time for fun, if I know anyone in the city?
Also, I need to go cookie rolling and would appreciate any advice on the best cookie in Vienna!
Email me at my first name @ the name of this blog dot com!
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Do I know anyone in Vienna?
Posted by Jane at 9:52 PM 0 comments
Labels: vienna travel cookie rolling
Monday, November 05, 2007
"Gamers Have Skills - Let's Tap 'Em"
I have a full-length Op-Ed in the Christian Science Monitor today. The topic: harnessing the power of gamers, naturally... from Halo 3 to World Without Oil!
Excerpt:
Halopedia is currently the fourth most active wiki on the Wikia network, with almost 4,000 articles and counting. In fact, three of Wikia's top five most active wikis are dedicated to creating shared knowledge about digital games.
These gamers' collective knowledge-building projects represent one of the most important aspects of contemporary video game culture, but also one of the most overlooked. Despite stereotypes of antisocial gamers who prefer to consume rather than create, most video-gamers are in fact engaged in a highly collaborative effort to exhaustively understand their favorite games. The video-gaming community is, quite simply, engaged in intense and highly successful "collective intelligence."Read the rest of "Gamers Have Skills - Let's Tap 'Em."
Posted by Jane at 9:02 AM 0 comments
Labels: alternate reality gaming, collective intelligence, videogames
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Alternate Reality Society
SF0 is my favorite game these days, besides Werewolf. I call it the world's first Alternate Reality Society -- we're talking about a 24/7, 365 real-world MMO that emphasizes face-to-face gameplay, making, crafting and hacking, and creative intervention in public spaces. It also has a really great, functional interface that allows you to submit, organize and annotate all kinds of mobile evidence of your gameplay. Their social network features are really fun and functional, too.
I spent a large part of Chapter Seven ("Powers and Superpowers") of my dissertation This Might Be a Game writing about the SF0 game, in its earliest incarnation. If you're interested, download the full text and do a PDF search for SF0.
These are the three missions we completed Friday night. Clicking on the links above will take you to our mission reports, with stories and photo sets, for each.
Something Very Good
INSTRUCTIONS: Go to a street corner of your choosing and wait for something fantastic to happen.
Seeing Beyond Sight
INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Blindfold yourself. 2. Go out in public and make your way in the world. 3. Photograph things you notice - while blindfolded.
Object Annotation
INSTRUCTIONS: Pick a local public object that you enjoy and leave a note on it describing your feelings in great detail.
SF0 is brilliant and I'm so happy it exists. You can play it anywhere in the world, and if you're not playing it yet, I encourage you to sign up -- and make me (I'm "avantgame") a friend! (Or a foe... if you dare...)
Posted by Jane at 9:50 PM 5 comments
Labels: alternate reality gaming, avant gaming, sf0
Monday, October 15, 2007
Chess, Ping-Pong, or Torture?
I've never met another digital games researcher as interested in this topic as I am, but I'm convinced that the World War II era is a treasure trove of brilliant and highly revealing, if sometimes disquieting, historical anecdotes about when and where humans choose to play games to achieve specific psychological and social benefits.
For example, I can't recommend highly enough George Eisen's "Games Among the Shadows -- Children and Play in the Holocaust". It really opens huge insights about why quality of life inside a game is higher than quality of life outside of a game. The Holocaust is perhaps the most extreme imaginable scenario for comparing the experience of a game-world with the experience of a real-world, but I believe so much of it applies to ordinary, contemporary everyday reality as well.
But that's not the main topic of this post. Here's the new piece of treasure I found this weekend.
Frank Rich's Sunday opinion piece introduced me to a powerful new piece of gaming history: the use of games (as opposed to, say, torture) after WWII to create affinities between interrogators and Nazi officials taken prisoner by the U.S.
Rich describes
a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard.
(Read the full opinion piece: "The 'Good' Germans Among Us".)
Wow. I love, love, love this revelation. It's a perfect, serious example of using gameplay to create shared affinities among people on opposing sides of a real-world scenario.
Why is this important? When I talk about why so many gamers prefer their quality of life in virtual worlds or multi-player game networks, one of the points I always drive home is that playing a game with other people creates an overwhelming experience of a shared world view, a common perspective and POV. Staring at the same chess board, thinking in the context of the same chess rules, pursuing the same goals -- even as competitors, the players are at heart collaborators, sharing and co-creating an alternate reality (the game reality) together.
And, as evident in Kolm's story, that dynamic of sharing, that common platform for experience together, can lead to collaboration beyond the core activities of the game. That's the power that the interrogators were drawing on by playing games with their subjects. And that's the power that games today can use to drive collective action, diplomatic exchange, global development, and more. This is precisely where the Nobel Peace Prize for gaming is going to pick up momentum -- our growing understanding that playing a game together is a powerful force for creating affinities that drive collaboration.
Posted by Jane at 3:58 PM 5 comments
Labels: alternate reality gaming, game studies, wwii
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Will You Have Fun With Me in London Next Week?
I'll be in London Sunday afternoon September 30 through Thursday morning October 4.
Just a few things on my schedule currently -- mainly, a keynote on collaborative mobile gaming for Mocollywood on Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully a few of the coolest folks in the world -- the London werewolvers -- are working on a game for Wednesday night as well. (Update: It looks like it's on! If you're interested and a savvy Werewolf/Mafia player, email me for time and location...)
As for the rest of my time, I'm not sure what to do with myself! Any ideas -- or more importantly, any willing co-participants? ^_^
I've never been to the Tate, strangely enough, so I might do that... or I might hop on a train somewhere out of town to do some cookie rolling (in Oxford, maybe?) since I cookie rolled hob nobs in London already (in May 2005). I'd certainly be interested in any suggestions or company for some out-of-town cookie rolling!
Ping me at my first name at the name of this blog dot com if you're in London next week and have ideas or time for fun! Yay!
Posted by Jane at 8:23 AM 4 comments
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Fun Face 2 Face Time on 9/21 in San Francisco!
On Friday 9/21, I'm going to be a guest on the Heather Gold show, a very cool, very out-there hybrid talk-show baking-event performance thingy here in San Francisco.
I beseech you to come!
I am expecting it to be a pretty memorable occasion and am looking forward to the after-party as a good opportunity for face 2 face time with fun people (like yourself!) This is part of my new Must Socialize With People Other Than My Dog on Friday Night life plan.
The show is $15 and you get entertainment and baked goods, I think. It's free if you bring something that you baked or if you're a starving artist/student. (You can buy online or at the door; email Heather in advance claiming baked goods status or starving-ness!) Full deets below:
Next Show: Does Art Change Anything?
Our 2007-2008 Season Opener!
When: Friday, September 21, 20078:00–9:30
pm, afterparty 9:30 - 11:00 pm.
Where: Luscious Garage at 459 Clementina Street San Francisco, CA
Join Heather and otherworldly beatboxer + live looper Kid Beyond (Coachella), queer writer and activist Kirk Read (How I Learned to Snap, Sex Worker's Art Tour), and ubiquitous game designer Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future) who makes games that take place in “real life” as they discuss whether or not art creates tangible social change. And if it does, how?
Posted by Jane at 9:56 AM 1 comments
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Cruel 2 B Kind Is Now 100% DIY
For the first time, we're making our super secret database of weapons public. We've added a brand new, behind the scenes puppet mastering guide. And we've replaced our Host a Game application with instructions for how to go ahead and host it yourself.
This new do-it-yourself version features a much more ad hoc, lightweight technology infrastructure: you, your email, and your cell phone. Unlike previous versions, which were entirely automated through our mobile email-based Web app, you now will have to have a few people skills and not mind adding up player scores yourself. The downside of this is that you can't mindlessly run a game, or play it yourself if you're the host. The upside is you will learn l33t puppet mastering skills and can run a game any time, without syncing up with our system or worrying if your players know how to use mobile email.
The new website also features the amazing Cruel 2 B Kind feature from Current TV, which is ideal for showing new players how to kill with kindness.
Ian and I are so proud of this game. It's been played in more than 20 cities in 8 countries on 4 continents so far, and now that it's 100% do-it-yourself, we know it will spread farther, faster. So have at it, assassins! Menace with compliments, attack with helpful gestures, and slay with serenades!
Posted by Jane at 7:48 PM 3 comments
Labels: alternate reality gaming, c2bk, cruel 2 b kind, diy
Sunday, August 26, 2007
My Secret Burning Man Game - Please Help!
I have a confession. I am a Burning Man widow.* And therefore, I have designed a Secret Burning Man Game.
If you or anyone you know is going to Burning Man, I need you to play! So please spread the word.
The game is simple. There's only one mission, and it's called "Jane Says Hi."
How it works: If you see the man in this picture -- he is six-foot-three, will be at Burning Man for 10 days, usually wearing an orange jumpsuit, sometimes wearing goggles and/or a white muslin head wrap, and possible hanging around a bunch of people with TV cameras -- please go up to him and say "Jane says hi."
Or, if you want to get creative, please find this man and tell him "Jane says {... anything nice. }"
He has no idea we will be playing this game. He will be confused, at first -- especially if you are the first person to accomplish this mission! Therefore you may choose to smile mysteriously, or to explain about the game, or make something up.
I'm not publicizing this secret game. I'm just going to blog about it right now, and then leave it be. I am basically counting on a few folks reading this who know a few folks going... well, it's a long shot, but I've got my fingers crossed. So if you're reading this, you may be one of the few people who can make this game work. It really may be up to you to spread the word that the man in this photo MUST be found at Burning Man and the secret message "Jane says hi" MUST be delivered. So please help however you can!
If the message successfully reaches this man, I will blog about how it happened and all the folks who helped. So feel free to email or comment if you join the secret Jane Says Hi game.
UPDATE: As of August 30, 2007, no one has found Kiyash yet and delivered the cryptic greeting! He has however been spotted camping out directly next to the (prematurely burned) Burning Man, to narrow down your search. Meanwhile the game is very much afoot....!
* The Background: My husband Kiyash left yesterday for a 10-day gig on Current TV's awesome live news team, Burning Man Free TV. It's an amazing opportunity, so yay and all that. But with minimal access to email and VOIP, Kiyash will be out of touch, and I miss him! And so I thought up this strange little game to see if I could find a way to play with him, even remotely. I am really, really curious to see if it works! Fingers crossed!
Posted by Jane at 9:11 AM 8 comments
Labels: burning man, games
Friday, August 24, 2007
I invented the cookie goggles.
More photos from my cookie rolling installation (with alfajores) in Barcelona are in this slideshow.
As you can see, I installed a period... which means, I have reached the end of my first sentence in the essay!
Only several hundred sentences to go...
Posted by Jane at 3:04 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
I heart the guerilla drive-in
mobmov (short for mobile movie). It's the perfect combination of introversion and extroversion. For the most part, you're in your own car with close friends and family. But before the show starts, and during an intermission, you get to mingle around and meet folks and share candy and pet each others' dogs. Interaction lite -- just enough to feel social without having to be "on" all evening.
Invented by the talented and awesome web developer Bryan Kennedy and pioneered in Berkeley (woot), mobmov is basically a ongoing series of flash mobs to watch independent and cult movies in cars, in oddly underutilized public spaces. For example, in the photo here, we are at an empty parking lot on San Francisco's demilitarized Treasure Island.
Kiyash and I have been mobmoving since summer 2005, and I'm so happy that the mobmov community is still thriving -- and in fact, getting bigger all the time.
Read more about mobmov in the great SF Chronicle story here or check outmobmov's FAQ!
Also, I am always looking for this kind of good, clean, slightly geeky fun. Please always feel free to invite me and Kiyash to anything like this you organize or know about!
Posted by Jane at 10:14 AM 1 comments
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
If I had a secret diary...
... I would write in it tonight. Not because I have anything scandalous or intimate to report. I just feel like talking out loud to myself. And a secret diary really listens in a way that blogs, Word documents or even ordinary journals don't.
Instead, without a secrety diary, I'm lying in my hotel room bed, on the 12th floor of the Grand Hyatt, typing on my laptop and looking out over the Convention Center neighborhood of Washington D.C., staring out into a kind of void. It's the void formed by my not engaging with the city -- by my visiting for just two nights and seeing only conference meeting rooms, my hotel, and the 3 blocks that separate them.
It makes the city streets just 12 stories down look blank and far away.
In the past month, I have been in 9 different hotels in 8 different cities on 3 continents. One of them,in Spain, is pictured here. I have managed to cookie roll in 3 of those cities, and hopefully tomorrow DC will be a fourth -- the next word is "They", but I have no idea what a good, authentic, local DC cookie is yet. I scouted today, but nothing jumped out at me. This is the closest to local engagement I have come with DC so far on this trip. Of course, having run graveyard games here in the fall of 2005 makes it feel closer. I've actually considered taking a cab out to Historic Congressional Cemetery tomorrow afternoon just to play a few solitaire rounds of Tombstone Hold Em myself. And I would love, love, love to cookie roll there. Before this trip, there were also the annual high school road trips for national Model Congress, but somehow that feels like it must have been a different city, because I was only 15, and 16, and 17 then and wanted to be a lawyer or congresswoman when I grew up. Thank god I got distracted by Tony Kushner and other rhapsodous, cerebral theater.
Sometimes I do better at engaging than I have on this particular trip-- going out in the evening, making time to meet up with people. But here in DC, I'm at a conference in a field that is very different from the fields I usually intersect with, and I literally do not know one other soul among the 3000+ attendees. After giving a talk today, I kind of know some people -- to the extent that we exchanged business cards, although I haven't really processed those connections yet.
There's nothing sad or awful about this blankness of travel. It's actually fairly interesting when you can step outside of it and observe it. I rarely have the total quiet that I have tonight, the quiet of a private room where no one is going to talk to me and I have no where to go and for the next 10 hours -- before I lead another conference session. For the next 10 hours I have no real agenda except to try to sleep. And I am away from the distractions of my "real life" in Berkeley.
Except the more I travel, the more traveling becomes my real life -- so I know I need to start filling it with more than marathons of bit torrented Degrassi episodes. It will certainly stay like this for awhile. I just finished making arrangements to give 3 consecutive talks in Orlando, Detroit, and San Diego on 3 consecutive days. Next week, I go to Seattle before a brief reprieve and then it's back to London. And there just aren't that many The N shows to download. But for the time being, I'm jet lagged therefore not sleepy yet even though it's 12:47 AM here, and waiting for sleepiness is its own special game.
Here's the thing. When I first started this blog, it was designed as a work-free zone. If you go back to the earliest entries, you'll see they're all about hikes Kiyash and I were taking on the weekends, and my experiences at weird art and experimental game events I was going to. I tried not to mention my own work at all -- I wanted a space to tell stories not bound up with the stress of work, or the ambition of getting serious ideas and theories across. But then I got an audience for the blog, somehow, what you would call a professional audience -- people interested in my ideas and theories and projects who knew me professionally and wanted bloggy insights in addition to random life reports and well -- I started writing about work stuff and big theories and all of that.
Well, I don't have a secret diary, and if I did have a diary, I probably wouldn't keep it secret because I really don't like keeping secrets. Other than big secret game projects, which if I were working on one now, I wouldn't be able to admit it here and would deny if you asked, and that's certainly the last I'll ever say about that for months and months and months.
But I do have a blog, and according to Technorati and Alexa, the daily traffic has died down a bit to the point that I think it's a good idea to go back to a Work Free and Serious Idea Free zone for awhile.
Tim O'Reilly has good ideas, and one of them is this: he proposes that the best way to learn about what's really cool and interesting and that most people don't realize is cool or interesting yet -- but that will soon matter to a lot more people, say a few years down the road -- is to ask interesting people what they're excited about outside of work, what they're concerned about and experimenting with outside the domain of their jobs and industry. I want to spend time in that mental space for awhile. I have this intuition that writing about non-work stuff is going to open up a space for a lot of important signals, things that really do matter that will eventually get folded back into my game work.
So for now, welcome to my not-secret diary, in which I will resume the original plan of talking out loud to myself.
Posted by Jane at 9:31 PM 5 comments
Thursday, July 12, 2007
We're fine! = y hola de Santa Cruz de los Seros
Hiking for 2 weeks in the mountains of Aragon. 25 km/day and lovely summit hikes.
Back in the U.S. on July 20!
Posted by Jane at 2:00 PM 0 comments
Monday, July 02, 2007
What alternate reality gaming really looks like...
I do think this photograph effectively documents the aura of alternate reality in which I am constantly suspended. Perhaps not quite as effectively, however, as this photograph documents the secret mask of genius of my good friend Artur!
Posted by Jane at 12:53 AM 2 comments
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Cookie Rolling "Melting Moments" in Sydney
For Sydney, I rolled yo yos or melting moments, my absolute favorite cookie in the world. I have been waiting 4 years to eat another one since my first trip to Australia in 2003. I literally ate about 100 yo yo cookies during my 6 week stay then. So far I have eaten 7 in my 2 days in Sydney, which puts me on a similar pace. ^_^
As you can see, I cookie rolled immediately after delivering two back-to-back keynotes, so I am still dressed in my heels and suit and lugging my laptop around in a backpack. Heels on slippery rocks in the rain on unstable bluffs, even with a fence, made it feel like quite the adventure!
But -- I need your help! Please check out this final shot of my cookie rolling word. Can you read it? What do you think it says? Melting moments were a very difficult medium for writing, the cookie is incredibly crumbly so I had to try to carve out the letters in the cream in the middle. It was fun and funny, but I don't know if it's legible! Please check it out and comment here or on flickr with your guess of what the word is. Thanks!
Posted by Jane at 2:19 PM 8 comments
Labels: avantgaming, cookierolling, sydney
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Still think it was a game?
Was this not a game?
(Thanks Marie!)
Posted by Jane at 7:57 PM 2 comments
Labels: alternate reality gaming, worldwithoutoil
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Do I have any friends in Barcelona or Sydney?
I am wondering -- do I have any friends in either city? Maybe we met at a conference or through a game or we've exchanged emails but never met...
Anyway, if you are reading this and you are in either city during that time period, and you are up for a drink or for coffee or for showing a first-time visitor some cool fun place I wouldn't likely stumble onto myself, or even for throwing a Werewolf game, please email me! I'll be cookie rolling both cities, too, yo yos in Sydney and I have no idea what yet in Barcelona, so if you don't know me but want to come roll some cookies with me, that's cool too.
(email me at My first name at avantgame dot com)
Yay!
(This photo is from a trip to Hong Kong in November intended to illustrate how *happy* I would be to find out I have a friend in Barcelona or Sydney!!)
Posted by Jane at 1:49 PM 5 comments
Labels: cookierolling, friends, travel
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Lol dogs
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Think Negative! Play Negative?
John Gravois has an excellent essay in Slate today about The Awesome Power of Negative Thinking. An excerpt: Karen Cerulo, a professor at Rutgers University, wrote a book last year called Never Saw It Coming. In it, she argues that we are individually, institutionally, and societally hellbent on wishful thinking. The Secret [and so much of popular psychology] tells us to visualize best-case scenarios and banish negative ones from our minds. Never Saw It Coming says that's what we've been doing all along—and we get blindsided by even the most foreseeable disasters because of it.
In her research, Cerulo found that when most of us look out at the world and plan for our future, we fuzz out our vision of any failure, fluke, disease, or disaster on the horizon. Instead, we focus on an ideal future, we burnish our best memories, and, well, we watch a lot of your show. Meanwhile, we're inarticulate about worst-case scenarios. Just thinking about them makes us nervous and uncomfortable.
I'm excited to see such a well-researched critique of our cultural obsession with positive thinking. One of the first things I learned when I joined the Institute for the Future six months ago is the importance of capturing all plausible futures, including the less-than-optimal ones. (I'm now a research affiliate and resident game designer at the non-profit think tank.) The only thing we know for certain is that not all future developments will be desirable ones. To make good decisions in the present, we need to imagine, understand, and evaluate a whole range of future scenarios. Not only the best-case scenarios that pose the most exciting opportunities, but also the the worst-case and mixed-case scenarios that pose the most challenging dilemmas.
As Gravois points out in his essay, we need only think of "the Bush administration, which has been roundly condemned for planning the Iraq war around a set of best-case scenarios.... 'We will be greeted as liberators' was good, but 'Mission Accomplished' was even better. Visualize, guys, visualize! A little negative thinking might have gone a long way in all those situations."
Indeed. I am coming to realize the importance of thinking negatively about these kinds of really big picture, world-changing issues. Global politics is a good place to start. So is the environment and oil dependency.
I may not have explicitly realized this when we first started the project, but it's so obvious now: World Without Oil is at its heart an experiment in negative thinking about the oil dependency issue. Historically, in this respect, is the first game to engage a public collective intelligence (over 35,000 players currently) in explicitly negative thinking about a major social and political issue. (The military and other crisis-response agencies have doing it privately for decades, of course, in things like "war gaming" and "crisis simulations".)
World Without Oil's rather earnest embrace of non-wishful thinking is what really makes this project so risky--and, I think, so important. We're more than two weeks into the live game, and so far a lot of the player-created content is documenting a rather dire alternate reality. You can see explicit fear, pain, and suffering in their creations -- even some apocalyptic undertones. In the first two weeks of play, the game has received over 1000 blog posts, videos, podcasts and other submissions -- and a lot of it is like this letter about separated families in California, this video about rolling blackouts, this blog post about a crumbling IT infrastructure, this voice mail message about taking refuge outside of cities, this video about getting stranded abroad by folded airlines, this video about closed and empty grocery stores, and even this email about civil war.
The latest headlines from the World Without Oil "reality dashboard" mirror the dark aspsects of the reality that the players have imagined and collectively documented. They report: "FUEL RIOTS: Violence Erupts in Seven Cities":Furious mobs smashed windows and set fire to cars across the nation after disclosures that a number of oil company lobbyists were present at last week's closed door hearings on the proposed National Mass Transit Initiative. The Bill's defeat in the House, followed a day later by the announcement of yet another record breaking quarter for 2 of the nation's largest oil companies had left a sour mood in cities struggling without adequate public transportation.
Is there any real benefit to an alternate reality that identifies more problems than it solves? Shouldn't this kind of game try to produce solutions -- and not just detail the myriad and diverse aspects of a potential crisis? This is a question I've asked myself as I've watched the game unfold.
But Gravois' essay and Cerulo's book reveals the importance of telling a compelling story about potentially negative outcomes. Just the act of imagining something other than our desired solution can be a major turning point, a breakthrough. In the case of World Without Oil, players are vividly imaginging something OTHER than the hoped-for scenario in which U.S. easily weans itself off of oil through a combination of alternate fuels and reduced consumption, without any disruption to our country's way of life or any real breakdown of society.
It's not all negative, of course. But the negative is necessary to change the conversation; out of negative thinking, a different - and more realistic - positive effort can emerge. Perhaps the most rewarding part of puppet mastering World Without Oil so far has been to watch the players start to find pockets of optimism - potential ways out - of the "think negative" scenarios they have helped to construct. They have fully embraced a rather dark vision of a future oil shock. Now they are beginning to focus their efforts on generating responses that make the best of the worst-case scenario.
You can really start to see this in action, for instance, in this beautiful web comic about creative transportation "by any means necessary" (it's the seventh in a series of comics by the same player). Or in this fascinating journal entry about the comforts of a new kind of government rationing (the 12th in a series of fictional journal posts from the same player). I adore this series of photo-blog posts about a whole family doing guerilla gardening in their neighborhood. (Just one of many player groups living at least part of their real lives as if the fictional oil crisis were true.) It's really an amazing process to watch overall, and one that I'll look forward to seeing play out over the remaining two weeks of the game, which concludes live play on June 1.
Posted by Jane at 3:09 PM 4 comments
Labels: future forecasting, negative thinking, never saw it coming, worldwithoutoil
Monday, May 14, 2007
Do you drop spot? (plus: Go get this right now!)
Do you drop spot? I do! A drop spot is a kind of alternative mailbox -- hidden in plain sight.
Drop spotting is just plain awesome, and I love it. It's a lot like geocaching, only:
-no GPS coordinates or GPS device required!
-less rooting around in remote areas!
-more visual clue-iness!
-and usually less driving involved to get there.
So instead of creating geocaches in the wilderness or out-of-the-way place, drop spots are hidden in plain sight, often in crowded urban environments. I learned about it last December from a very cool, smart undergrad in ITU-Copenhagen - drop spotting is very global!
Here's why I bring up drop spotting now. Drop spots are becoming an increasingly important part of World Without Oil.
One WWO hero in Illinois is doing guerilla gardening and is using Drop Spots to mark the sites of the secretly stashed seeds. He writes:
According to John Jeavons "how to grow more vegetables", the bare minimum it takes to grow a subsistence diet is 4000 square feet per person. My yard total has less than 2000, and now I can't use the best parts of it without getting evicted. So what am I doing? I'm planting my food wherever I can. I've dropped a few fruit trees around town, in public spaces I walk by daily. I dress them up with mulch and the like to make it look like the decorative ones the city puts in. So far noone has notices. I got some "volunteer" tomatoes that grow like wildfire at my mother's, and spread them around town. I hide seed potatoes in the carefully landscaped city flowerbeds. I've found where the wild onions grow and spread them. I blow dandelions in the wind, even though I'm not eating them yet. This is called "guerrilla gardening", and it's very civic minded. In some ways I reclaiming the Commons, making public land productive for the citizenry. Anyone who wants to can help themselves to the food when it's ready, I'm planting enough to accommodate."
A WWO hero in Kentucky is using a Drop Spot to trade life tools to help others get through the oil crisis. She writes:
This Drop is on Preston road, right under I-64 and across the street from the "Green" parking lot. There is a patch of wild bushes/trees, concrete, another patch (where the drop is located), concrete and then a final patch. You shouldn't have to actually step into the patch, I placed it about 2-3 feet in and covered it up with some leaves/branches. It's a plastic "gallon size" ziplock bag.
And for all of your San Francisco area readers who might not be playing WWO yet, this is your chance to get involved. Emil, one of the original WWO team members, writes:
i've set up a San Francisco drop spot for exchanging essential goods, notes and anything else you can shove in this strange little stash. hopefully only fellow world without oil heroes will use it. i've kicked it off by leaving one of evie's favorite books (you know her as mpathytest). the chapter 1 explanation of how we got into this oil mess was, well, mindblowing. and the rest of the book should help any wwo hero think of some ways to innovate our way out of this crisis. if you pick up the book, leave something else behind for me or other wwo heroes. cool.a few hints for finding the spot: it's at ground level. it's about halfway between bluxome and brannan. it's on the east side of the block. if you see a statue of a saint or a monk watching over you from behind a gate, you're in exactly the right spot. no digging required. just stick your hand in and reach to the right.
If you are reading this in the SF/Bay Area, GO GET THIS SOMA drop spot (near the CalTrain) RIGHT NOW! It's your perfect window into the game. Jump through it! Go!
What are you waiting for? The world needs saving, and if you live in San Francisco, you are the person to do it.
Posted by Jane at 10:54 AM 3 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, dropspots, sanfrancisco, worldwithoutoil
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Is it ethical to play during a time of crisis?
I honestly never thought I'd live through this kind of turmoil in the U.S.
Burning cars, vanadlism, looting. EVERYWHERE.
Even here in Berkeley. 3 women were attacked and robbed yesterday at the biodiesel refueling station. It's come to that. It's not enough to fight over oil, now we're fighting over alternative fuels?
8TSOC's Week 10 Update pretty much sums up the current state of the domestic crisis for those of you reading this from other parts of the world. Not that you're necessarily better off, what with the Australian secesssion conflict, the Chinese warships in the Straits of Malacca, the rebel forces in Nigeria... well, all I can say, seriously, is: WTF, World? WTF!!
If you're like me, you're probably reading this at home, hunkered down in front of your computer, because you're basically in hiding. You don't want to deal with the reality of all of this. You don't have the freaking gas to go anywhere anyway and are afraid to use your bike because you'll probably be mugged for it.
For most people, it's hard to live like this. It's REALLY hard to get any work done. It's hard to go about the everyday business of life. Let alone any play.
Here's the thing. I think we need to play. Well, yeah, of course you knew I was going to say that. For years, I've been saying that pervasive games are a powerful way to exert influence on spaces, to change public behaviors, to alter reality. So now I'm feeling like I shouldn't be at home cowering behind my laptop. I should be out in the real world, playing in the now ubiquitous empty parking lots, gathering people together. Maybe if we start playing together, we'll remember how to live together.
I know what you're thinking. It doesn't feel reasonable or ethical or productive to play during this kind of total societal breakdown. Part of me feels that too.
But maybe the opposite of all that is true. Maybe to rebuild our institutions, we need to play together. And maybe we need play to make it safe to go outside again.
As you know, I've been teaching ubiquitous game design at San Francisco Art Institute this semester. Through that class, I've met a lot of amazing young game designers. And so last week I asked them to help with this. I've asked them to design some real-world games for people like us to play in this new world without oil. I asked them to design physical games that we could play together in public, keeping in mind the fact that we basically can't depend on driving anywhere and are dealing with so many different kinds of everyday chaos.
Several of my students have masterminded one. It's an adventure walking game, and it's called LnC2k7. (Bonus points if you can post in the comments a correct translation of the name!) And I have to say, it is brilliant. I went out and played it last night. It was definitely weird to be playing during crisis. But it felt right. And we met so many people as we played, and that felt right too, talking to them, not being scared of strangers but friendly again. In a way that we were before all the oil was lost. You can download the rules here. You can see photos of other people playing it here. Or you can just start by calling this number: 1 888 349 6448.
So here's the big announcement. When we have some more of these games, I'm going to hold a public game festival. That's right. In the middle of this crisis, we are going to go to a park, or an empty parking lot, and we are going to play. Games. Big games. Playground games. No technology, no boards. The games we used to play when we were kids, in the streets, or at recess. This will happen soon. Probably in just a couple of weeks. A playground festival for a world without oil. You heard it here first.
If you want to help, play the games we come up with, or make up your own games. Be brave to play them, out in public, in the midst of the chaos. Let the games put a little structure, a little sociability back into the world.
Post here a link to anything you create, and I'll make sure other netizen heroes find out about it. (While you're at it, follow that link and sign up to be a hero yourself, okay? There are 1342 of us so far and counting.)
(No idea what I'm talking about? Go here immediately!)
Posted by Jane at 3:41 PM 11 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, berkeley, worldwithoutoil
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Play Now! World Without Oil is LIVE!
Stop whatever you're doing. Take the next 30 seconds to sign up as a citizen hero for World Without Oil.
WWO is a game for good -- the first alternate reality game to tackle a real-world problem. Gamers to save the world? Hell, yes!
The game is live as of yesterday, and I hope you will check it out. It runs until the first week of June. There are all kinds of ways to participate -- you can read the fictional characters' team blog, you can browse real-character player-submitted blogs, videos, audio messages and images. If you're inspired to really get involved, you can tell your own story by submitting your own original content imagining and documenting YOUR real life during an oil shock. You can send us URLs, emails, or call our game hotline (1.866.WWO.TSOC)
If you want the fictional backstory on the game to help you imagine what to create, you can start here. And if you want the REAL backstory on the game (warning: ARG spoilers!), you can check out these quick project facts.
And finally, a great background article on the game.
Posted by Jane at 4:38 PM 4 comments
Labels: alternate reality games, alternaterealitygaming, collectiveintelligence, worldwithoutoil
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The C2BK Video is here! Watch the game now!
Watch a 5-minute piece on Cruel 2 B Kind (see what it looks like in action) here. (This video was produced for Current TV by Kiyash Monsef.)
Posted by Jane at 10:52 AM 6 comments
Labels: cruel2bkind currenttv
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Cruel 2 B Kind: LA, Seattle, Toronto, and more!
In the next month alone, you can play Cruel 2 B Kind run by local PMs in LA, Seattle, Toronto, and Gotenberg - and we're adding more games every week, so keep checking the C2BK schedule! (Of course, you can just host the game yourself, anywhere in the world, anywhere there is cell phone coverage.)
This makes me happy. A real ubiquitous game isn't a performance that happens once or twice, in a particular context, and never again. It's run multiple times, in multiple social contexts, in multiple built environments, at different times of day and night, with different numbers and styles of players. We have finally crossed that threshold, I believe.
*(Okay, not all over the world yet. We need games in the Southern Hemisphere! If you live south of the equator, host a C2BK game and make C2BK history!)
Posted by Jane at 4:21 PM 1 comments
Labels: big games, cruel2bkind, ubiquitous gaming
Friday, March 30, 2007
To the man who stole my favorite things
Dear 30 year old thug who jacked my suitcase on the train last night,
I woke up still feeling very sad and sick about the loss of my things. Sad, because those things had tremendous personal value to me. Sick, I guess because that's what it feels like to be a victim of crime, sort of violated, and because other people saw him steal the bag and didn't stop him.
Kiyash drove me to the train stop where yougot off and we found some of my things stuff in a trash can and other things scattered on the sidewalk like trash. Not all of my things, not even most of my things, although I was relieved to get back a few of my things. But you took a lot of things that mattered.
You stole the stack of business cards I collected at Etech this week, many from people I met playing Werewolf and would really like to know and talk to again. Maybe the people I met at Etech will read this and email me instead (jane at the name of this blog dot com) so they don't think I am blowing them off.
The suitcase was full of clothing I picked for a week's trip that I was really excited about. Favorite things. Favorite shoes, favorite jewelry, favorite dresses, favorite makeup. My favorite things.... I guess it's not such a hardship to lose favorite things. As Kiyash said, "you're safe, that's the most important thing. "It totally is the most important thing. I guess I am feeling mostly sorry for myself in that third-person way, the way you would feel sad for a close friend. I can see myself third-person style picking out all my favorite things to pack, not knowing that I would be using them all for the last time. Like feeling sad for a character in a short story. "Self-vicarious-empathy", perhaps.
I have no idea what you are going to do with my my black patent leather heels, favorite black shift dress, my MAC cosmetics, a stack of World Without Oil postcards, Institute for the Future business cards, and a bag of Etech swag.
I guess I will keep my out eye in Richmond for a cross-dressing thug tech geek promoting alternate reality games.
I do wonder who you are and what your life is like that you have to resort to stealing bags off trains. I realize I am very lucky that I am not living that life. You hurt me by stealing my things. But I couldn't possible take it personally, really. Yes, it's a pain that I have to spend my day going around replacing everyday things like cell phone chargers and contact lenses. But it's fine, because I also have a dog and a husband and work I love and enough money that I dont' have to steal things.
I gave a talk at Etech this week about the science of happiness, and the different classes of happiness, and how alternate reality games have been helping people experience the world differently by learning those classes. The very strange thing about having my favorite things stolen last night is that I feel ARGs have taught me to see what happened in a different way. Not as a personal interaction between me and the thief, but rather as an exchange in a bigger system involving massively multiple people who COULD have been affected. I appreciate that the man who stole my bag was going to steal someone's bag, and perhaps the other people's bags in the system (the train) were more important to them and their week than mine was. I was returning from a trip; it would be much worse to have a bag stolen at the start of a trip, in a strange city, with no belongings whatsoever. And maybe other people's bags had more important or irreplaceable stuff than mine. Maybe I'm in a better position than the other people with bags are to deal with this, to replace lost items (I'm not completely broke) or to get emotional support after being robbed (I have a great husband who was waiting to meet me at my station.)
So by letting my bag serve as the Stolen Bag, I was saving someone else the grief of losing things. So at least a little part of me is okay about it. I appreciate the opportunity to be the one to take the hit here. I am framing this experience as an opportunity to prevent other people from having suffered, and accepting that maybe I was the best person on that train to have their luggage stolen. This is totally a way of thinking that relates to MMOs for me.
P.S. Also missing: the small diamond on my antique art nouveau engagement ring. I still have the setting, which dates to 1896. It looks very strange with the diamond popped out, a big empty setting. I am glad I will have the chance to refill it someday. I am sad about that, but Kiyash said not to be too sad. And I agree. Losing material things, even sentimental ones, just isn't that big a deal in the big picture.
Posted by Jane at 8:12 AM 18 comments
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Live from Etech - my keynote on Happiness Hacking
I just finished my Etech keynote "Creating Alternate Realities - what the new game designers know about improving quality of life." Yay! It was a totally new presentation, created this week from scratch, and so I was a bit nervous about debuting it. I am happy that it was very well-received.
Here's the abstract:
This talk will explore what the new game designers know about improving everyday quality of life, and how non-gaming companies can become a part of the solution. Alternate reality game designers are solving problems that other technology companies have yet to discover. Cutting-edge collaborative, reality-based games are addressing a whole new set of social needs and personal desires, individual challenges, and collective wants. But games are not the only way to meet these needs and desires. In this talk, McGonigal explores how other technology products, services, and brands can capitalize on the key signal - a desire for a life more worth living - that is coming out of the most innovative game genres.
My slides are here. I'll have a webpage with links and references up on my Avant Game site on Friday. (Here it is - references for Hacking Happiness!) In the meantime, here is the text from my four favorite slides to give you a sense of the stakes and claims of the talk!
3 things you need to know about me:
1) I’m a hacker. I hack the real world to be more like a game. (that’s what I mean by creating alternate realities)
2) I think a lot about the future. What are today’s game trying to tell us about tomorrow?
3) I’m an existentialist. I identify with Sisyphus. My primary goal is to reduce human suffering.
The future forecast (Think: 2012)
Quality of life is the primary metric for evaluating everyday technologies
Positive psychology is a principal, explicit influence on design
The public expects tech companies to have a clear vision for a life worth living
To succeed, a brand, product or service, must increase real happiness – the new capital
Do our technologies pass the “deathbed test”?
“Though we must live our lives forward, happiness is gained by assessing it backwards. Only on your deathbed can you see your life complete and so judge its happiness.” – ancient Greek wisdom
How will the time spent with our technologies look in retrospect, when our users are on their deathbeds? What kind of life will they have enabled, afforded, or supported?
An ETech’07 call to action:
Invest a portion of your time, energy and resources towards understanding and innovating happiness. It’s the new capital.
Make your technology not only feel good (more pleasure), but also do good (more engagement)and expose good (more meaning).
Build your brand's culture around quality of life.
Together we can hack our everyday reality into a collective life worth living.
Hack Happiness!
Posted by Jane at 11:51 AM 5 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, args, etech, etech2007, hacking, happiness
Sunday, March 11, 2007
The Top 10 List is In! Game Studies Download 2007
The top 10 academic research findings about digital games are now available for your review.
This list was compiled by Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo, and myself. Our criteria:
-novel questions are asked
-surprising results are found
-direct relevance to the design and development of digital games
Topics covered this year include the importance of humor in dark or violent games and opportunities to design death better in multi-player games.
Posted by Jane at 9:23 AM 1 comments
Labels: gamestudies, gdc, gdc2007
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
The Future of Collective Play (report on GDC keynote)
Yesterday I gave my Research + Design keynote at GDC on the topic of "The Future of Collective Play."
CNET has a great summary of the talk in "Future games to harness gamers' collective wisdom".
Rather than posting complete notes from the talk here myself, I'll just excerpt from the intro and point to the online slides in a day or so from this blog:
Today, I’m going to talk to you about the future of collective play. By "future of collective play", I mean two things: first, the new kinds of collaborative games we might pioneer over the next decade, and second: the real-world future we might build for ourselves by playing more collectively.
Last fall, I left my position as lead designer at 42 Entertainment, a commercial game development company, to become the resident game designer for the Institute for the Future— an independent nonprofit research group based in Palo Alto. As a result, I am now officially the first person in the world to claim in my daily job description that “I design games from the future.” But, what exactly does it mean to design games from the future?
At the Institute, we develop long-term future forecasts to help companies, government agencies, and private foundations make better decisions today about the uncertain future. We create detailed, plausible, and internally consistent scenarios of how important emerging trends today might intersect and play out over the next decade. So, as the Institute’s new resident game designer, I spend a lot of time these days thinking about two questions: First, how are the specific kinds of games we choose to design and to play today most likely to impact our future culture? And second, what kinds of games will we need to play in the future in order to learn whatever social, technological, and organization skills emerge as the guiding principles of global culture?
Today, I’m going to argue that over the next ten years, a particular kind of digital game-- the massively collaborative puzzle genre known as alternate reality gaming -- will become increasingly important as both a way to imagine and engineer a best-case scenario future. Alternate reality gaming will also assume the role of a central cultural activity teaches and trains us to be successful and ethical actors in a global, networked culture--particulary as that culture is increasingly chaotic, democratic, commercial and cooperative.
So the problem I want to consider today is this: Can a computer game teach collective intelligence? I believe the answer to this question is absolutely, yes—and moreover, I believe that collective intelligence is the single most important thing we can be teaching through serious games as we attempt to build a better future, and to prepare for its uncertain challenges. Of course, this problem begs several additional questions: namely, why should we care about teaching collective intelligence? Who should be taught CI? How, exactly, does an alternate reality game teach CI? And, finally, what kind of future will we shape by playing alternate reality games?
[Come back in a couple days for the slides for the rest of the talk!]
Posted by Jane at 6:51 AM 6 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, args, collectiveintelilgence, gdc, seriousgames
Monday, March 05, 2007
Erasing the delta: Games that alter reality!
Here are my notes for my first Game Developers Conference talk, as part of a serious games summit panel on “Erasing the Delta - Games that Accomplish a Specific Task” The theme of the panel is about moving away from games that just prepare you to do something (learning/training games), or help you think about something (simulation games, persuasive games) and games that actually enable and indeed require you to do that thing, or to produce that thing, simply by playing them (games that work).
(Fellow ARG travelers Brian Clark and Brooke Thompson were there -- yay! we are so totally going to alter reality through play...)
(UPDATE: There's nothing that makes me post-talk happier than when multiple different communities take away ideas they're excited by. So I'm happy to see, for instance, some great responses to the talk at MTV, ARGN, and Destructoid!)
My spiel follows:
Erasing the Delta Gap is really about two different practices:
Making a new kind of serious game: Games that are designed as functions with an end result that is a measurable difference in the present state of reality. Serious games now are viewed as “resources” (for education, training, instruction, simulation) or “platforms” (for messages, persuasion). We must start to create serious games as “generative processes” or “solutions to problems”
Redefining what we define as a “serious impact”: We must move away from “preparation” and “knowledge” and “skills” and “rhetorical effect” as our only serious impacts. We can also consider for example “improved quality of life” and “better health” and “improved social organization” and “future resources produced”. In these terms, many games are already closing the delta gap, particularly in the area of health -- if we think of something like “reducing human suffering” as a serious impact (games for pre-surgery sedation) or intervening into the obesity epidemic (physical activity games) or, in the future, things like serving as a live suicide prevention resource (instead of calling 1 800 suicide) or facilitating global security through youth cooperation and co-immersion
So: What is the role of Alternate Reality Games in erasing the delta?
The new opportunities for ARGs to do work is best understood as a movement through different definitions of “realism” in gameplay
Realism in ARGs
1st wave ARGs: they’re so real! Real Life (embedded in real, working life): operational, everyday technologies, intimate
2nd wave ARGs, they’re so real! Real World (moving into real-world spaces): social, physical, face to face, everyday spaces, public
3rd wave ARGs, they’re so real! Real Impact (starting to solve real-world problems, for example: global relations/world peace, massively multiplayer science, quality of life, learning): intentional, effective. Games that alter reality!
Two factors that make this third wave possible:
Our culture is becoming more ARGlike (CI culture, participatory Web culture/2.0, creative commons, science commons)
Our culture WANTS to be more ARGlike (the spirit of massive collaboration saving the world)
Examples of ARGs that start to erase the delta:
Past - Tombstone Hold ‘Em – putting live bodies back in cemeteries, creating a public culture for a dying public space
Present - World Without Oil – generating a massively collaborative map of potential, citizen responses to oil shock; constructing a database of lower-consumption practices that might prevent that shock from happening
Future - Massively Multiplayer Science – games with real scientific data embedded in them, and gameplay to collect, analyze and process the data in massive parallel
Posted by Jane at 1:03 PM 1 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, args, gamestudies gdc, seriousgames
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Massively multi-citizen science is almost here
Can a game developer be nominated for a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences by the year 2032? That's my plan, which I presented this past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
You can download the slides from my talk, or read the related research paper (hot off the press!), or peruse some related links, on my AAAS webpage here. (Or see what Newsday took away from it here.)
My goal over the next decade is to support the development of a massively multi-citizen science through massively collaborative games (think: alternate reality games with real-world data embedded inside.)
So in the near future, when the most creative, collective-intelligence gamers are grinding away 10, 20, 30, or more hours a week, they're grinding on real scientific research problems wrapped inside a yummy fictive or fantasy shell.
Yes, I am calling for a truly popular scientific research practice that engages the global public in hands-on, brains-on collaboration, via sites Citizen Science and Amazon's Mechanical Turk and through immersive, story-driven play. Amateur participation + a creative commons for science literature + the stickiness of a well-designed game and well-told story = radically interdisciplinary mash-ups accessible to lay people and productive of real scientific insight.
Sound crazy? No way. This is seriously possible, and plausible. Here's three reasons why:
1) Science practice itself is increasingly leaning toward a kind of collective intelligence, amateur participation. You can read about it in the incredible Institute for the Future report: Delta Scan: The Future of Science and Technology, 2005-2055.
2) Meanwhile, there is no doubt -- as I argue in my new 50-page case study for the MacArthur foundation -- that alternate reality gamers are doing real CI investigations that would fully prepare them for real-world collaborative research. Their gameplay is already fundamentally a CI scientific effort to undertand fake (fictive) data. I'm just proposing that we shove some real scientific data in there, while they're at it.
3) And perhaps most importantly, as Sean Stewart - the original and most esteemed alternate reality storyteller around - has famously said: "I do NOT assert that [alternate reality gaming] is the first, or greatest, example of massively multi-player collaborative investigation and problem solving. Science, as a social activity promoted by the Royal Society of Newton's day and persisting to this moment, has a long head start and a damn fine track record.... We just accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment."
So, yes, If this sounds interesting, get the slides. And here are a couple of other sites to get you thinking: "Fostering Scientific Habits of Mind in the Context of Online Play" and MacArthur Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning.
If you want to propose a data set, scientific problem, or research focus for a massively multi-citizen science game, or if you want to be notified when there's such a game to be played, email me at jane @ thenameofthisblog dot com.
Posted by Jane at 7:54 AM 11 comments
Labels: alternaterealitygaming, creativecommons, science
Monday, February 19, 2007
Play With Me: March 2 San Francisco Game!
You can sign up now. (You have to register by noon on March 2 to play.) What are you waiting for? Sign up! It’s free, it’s outdoors, it’s crazy, and there might be cupcakes! (Okay, there WILL be cupcakes!) What more could you ask for?
Well, okay, here’s more: I’ll be there live puppet mastering, with a few surprises for keen-eyed players. (So if you spot me wandering the streets and attack me, you might get a little bonus fun…)
For all you experienced C2BK players out there, here’s a secret scoop: This new remake of Cruel 2 B Kind is extra awesome. It’s extra awesome. Here’s why:
- It’s called the Booty Variant, and it represents everything we’ve learned from running the game in London, Boston, New York City, and more. We watched you play, we learned stuff, and we made the game more fun.
-It’s easier technology: You can play with any cell phone, using normal text messaging. And there’s a lot less messaging than in older versions, so the play is focused more on the streets and less on your screen.
-It’s more strategic: Your team has 3 weapons to choose from at all times, so you get to decide exactly how to kill each target. You also get to show off the weapons you like best and ignore weapons you’re not so keen on.
-It’s less obvious: Instead of everyone starting the game in teams of two, players can now choose to start the game solo, or in teams of two, or three, or more… so it will be a lot less obvious who’s playing and who’s not playing.
-It’s sillier: Each player brings a piece of “booty” to surrender when killed. Anything goes when it comes to the booty - yummy candy, weird haikus, cool old books, crazy stickers, lucky socks… you can make your booty whatever you want. There’s only one rule: no sentient creatures! Players get to keep all booty they’ve earned at the end of the game.
-It rewards good game play better: When a player gets killed, they surrender their booty the player whose attack impressed them most. So players who are doing an awesome job killing with kindness rack up more booty, and therefore more points. No more slouching at the back of your pack… you have to be in the frontlines, assassinating your ass off!
Posted by Jane at 8:43 PM 3 comments
Labels: argfestocon, biggames, cruel2bkind