Paul Czege on such topics as game design, fatherhood, roleplaying games, self-awareness, crowdfunding, and creativity.
The Ides of Discussion #2
This morning I'm mostly thinking unpleasant thoughts about my taxes, and the difficulties of entrepreneurism and the gig economy, but thankfully other thoughts and quotes are more inspiring and motivating than frustrating:
"Readers often misunderstand and confuse memoir with autobiography." -- Dani Shapiro
183 Days and the boundary between player and character.
"Twin engines of storytelling are curiosity & empathy....We talk a lot, in writing/performing circles, about the vulnerability of being a storyteller, but not about the audience's vulnerability." -- Jessica Price
How social media and roleplaying games are opposites--participating fully with one is via constructed identities and with the other reveals our true selves--and which is which is not what most people think.
How about you? What would you like to talk about? What thoughts are inspiring or motivating you?




I think the idea of re-cottaging of industry (with some significant overlap of the gig economy) is really starting to interesting to me. People used to spin thread or make horseshoes at home, and sell the excess in the market. Etsy and kickstarter are helping people to do that again, while traditional assumptions about work-qua-work (70s and 80s assumptions, really) are fading away. I work from home, typing on a keyboard that I soldered myself. With a computer and word processor, I've re-acquired some of the other means of production.
Mainly thinking about this as I filed self-employed taxes recently, which are unduly harsh. It's clearly a punishment for being somewhat off the grid.
I've been thinking, like most days recently, about work, money, and the systems around them. It seems to me that the systems are broken and certain things are systematically overvalued. But the things I think are overvalued are also things I hate and am bad at and the things I think are undervalued are things I think I can do well, so how can I know whether or not I believe those things for self-serving reasons? Regardless, it seems like non-traditional approaches like "the gig economy" have many of the same problems as the conventional arrangements, if not worse, so it feels like something is out of whack with the universe.
Also I've been thinking about the 200 word RPG contest, whether I'm going to go through with submitting my satirical idea for it, whether people would get the joke, and whether it would be better or worse if people did or didn't get the joke in different ways. It's got me thinking about politics, the way people engage in politics on social media, and how I feel about that.
What's inspiring or motivating me: a friend of mine wants to try designing tabletop games together ("but not RPGs"). So we've had a couple of brainstorming sessions. I got inspired by the idea of a game about a cat burglar. I spend all my free moments thinking up themes, formats and mechanics for such a game. Have come up with at least three playable versions of the idea so far, each flawed in it's own way.
I'm less interested in whether or how she pulls off the heist, more interested in the the who's and the why's.
I think I need to get clear on who this cat burglar is and what it is about her existence that I'm trying to explore. And then come up with a game format and mechanics that will accomplish that.
The Dani Shapiro quote is from here: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/dani-shapiro/#_ It's part of what has me thinking about 183 Days--which bills itself as a LARP--and the whole "tabletop LARP" scene. My likely unpopular line of thinking is that a "tabletop LARP" is just a tabletop RPG that thinks differently about the boundary between player and character, sort of like how Shapiro says memoir uses its subject differently than autobiography.