I want to play a game involving helium balloons. Maybe a reverse scavenger hunt? Each team would have a dozen balloons, a list of targets (’man in red shirt’, ‘child with ice-cream’), and the first team to give all their balloons away to appropriate targets would be the winner.

My concerns with this:

Score verification. To make sure people don’t just let the balloons go, there’d need to be a way to make sure that they’ve given them to appropriate recipients. The obvious solution to this is photographs: give your balloon to someone in a red shirt, take a photo of them, bring the photos back at the end for judging. However, it’s presumably harder and more awkward to give a balloon to someone and persuade them to be in a photograph than it is to just give them a balloon; and this is probably especially the case with children, the group most likely to appreciate random balloons. Asking someone whether you can give their toddler a balloon and take a photo seems likely to be awkward.

Annoyed passers-by. What if there’s only one person in a red shirt, and they don’t want a balloon? They could get every team, potentially every team member, trying to foist a balloon on them. Making it possible for passers-by to be more than scenery seems like a good thing for a game to do, but annoying them incessantly with balloons is less good. The ideal playing space would be somewhere like the South Bank, where there won’t be too many people in a hurry to get to an autopsy, but even so.

I’ll go down to the South Bank with some balloons and try to give them away, to see how it goes, but: any solutions? Any different ideas for a big balloon game? It’s worth noting that deliberately letting go of balloons may count as littering, depending on where it’s done (though it sounds like it’s okay in the UK as long as they’re biodegradable balloons, released in numbers under 5000, and don’t have string or tags attached).

I want to write a computer game whose client is web-based–that is, you install the client software on your website and play that way, competing or collaborating with other players who are listed by domain name. (Xorph.com versus example.com GO!) (Actually maybe your opponent can be any domain that doesn’t have the game installed! Hmm.) Obviously this would be open-source, and cheating would be prevented by having some master server somewhere that keeps track of the numbers.

As exciting as this is, though, I can’t think of any particular advantages it has over the standard all-in-one web game model, where you sign up for an account on the master server directly and don’t have to install anything. You can even change the skin of most webgames yourself by installing a custom stylesheet in your browser. Can you think of advantages? Do those advantages lead to interesting ideas about what the game could actually be?

Spoon by ~Morriperkele on deviantART

There’s this Andrew Bird song, “Tables and Chairs,” about looking forward to the holocaust. My favorite lines in it:

“‘Cause listen, after the fall
There will be no more countries, no currencies at all
We’re gonna live on our wits
We’re gonna throw away survival kits,
Trade butterfly knives for Adderall”

Which in turn reminds me of the snippet in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” in which the protagonist–stuck in a post-secession Texas shantytown–scrounges a leather jacket off a corpse in a gulley. He ends up leaving the jacket hanging from the knife he finds in one pocket and taking the fifteen ampoules of antibiotics in the other, which are priceless, or anyway worth enough to buy him passage out through an Army cordon.

How do you play the postapocalyptic bartering game? Is it a deck of custom cards, or a markerboard on which people can asynchronously scribble new inventory and offers? Is the goal to amass wealth, and if so, how do you manipulate relative worth to prevent everything from staying zero-sum? Is the goal just to stay alive from day to day, and if so, what are the risks involved in scrounging for new items?

I’ve talked about Journey to the End of the Night already, but what I haven’t talked about is any of the other games that Gideon Reeling ran that weekend, because we didn’t get to play them. The description that intrigued me most was that of A Small Town Anywhere: message-passing, paranoia and a relatively short time limit. Sounds like a Dispatch game to me!

We could probably investigate to find out what their actual setup was–there’s an email address right on the page–but I want to try working it up from first principles, as an exercise. Say you’re one of 20 villagers with a dirty secret. You have some dirt (or possibly just clues to dirt) on other villagers, which you want to expose, while preventing anyone from exposing you. You have an “idiosyncratic postal service.”

How does exposure work? What role does the post office play? Do you actually know other villagers’ secrets, or just clues to them, and if the former, what’s to prevent you from blurting it out immediately? Does this run on a point system, or is the last unexposed person the winner?

Looking through some spurious-comedy Google Master Plan whiteboard photos, I couldn’t help but wonder if some sort of rules-based game was going on. It’s clearly being drawn in different inks and handwritings, it has dead-ends and branches, and the captions say things like “The Google OS is eclipsed by the implications of GoogleGoo and nanobots”

It probably wasn’t a game. But I want to play it. What are the rules?

I want to play a game called Fix. I don’t know what it’s about! I don’t know how you play it! I know that I have a need and you have a need. I know I can’t get what I need, but I can get what you need. You can get what I need, and so can she. I don’t know if we play with cards or chips or dice or M&Ms. I don’t know whether we play at a table or covertly at a boring party, with speech or text messages or secret signals.

How do you play Fix?

Instead of working on my book, like I should be doing, today I wrote a game called Shoot The Messenger. My goal is a game based on paranoia and miscommunication, where part of the game is figuring out whether the current round is cooperative or competitive. It’s also the first game I know of that incorporates online translation services. I think it still has a couple loose ends, so let me know how you think it can be improved.

I want to write a very small roleplaying game, inspired by Kevan’s The Things and the equivalent BlogNomic dynasty, which I never thought got a fair shake. The game will not be called “The Things.” Instead, it will be called “The Things?”

I want to write an odd roleplaying game, in the following ways:

• There is no Dungeon Master (viz. the name of the blog).
• There are five pre-generated characters, one of whom each player must pick. You must have exactly five players to play. You can’t play the same character you played last time.
• The game is designed to be played, start to finish, in three hours.
• There are monsters in the game–probably. Whether the Things actually exist, in any given game, depends on the players’ choices and on their luck.

I’m going to start dumping info into the game page now, but I want your ideas, either in these comments or on the game’s talk page. Given the above criteria, how can we make this a fun game?

• Premise One: I’m interested in exploring the space between board games and RPGs, not so much in the way lots of games with Quest in the title have done so (although I liked those games) as in welding a collaborative-competitive creative dimension to the concrete elements like a graph and a card-driven economy.
• Premise Two: Several people have tried to write a role-playing game about playing a role-playing game, but I don’t think any of them were successes. Part of it is that when you actually role-play satire it’s not that much fun–you’re acting out the annoying things you’re satirizing and that gets old. Part of it is that a bunch of guys around a table is not a very exciting thing to imagine.
• I realized after a while that with a lot of traditional RPGs–D&D, Shadowrun and especially Palladium–I had the most fun before the game ever started, in the process of Making My Guy. Some people would say that the solution to this is to play different games, which is true, that’s one way to have more fun. An alternative solution is to isolate it and make it a game in itself.

So I want to write a game that’s structured like an RPG, with a group of players and a GM working through the process of character creation. Each player has a goal (”Build the character with the most Combat Power,” “Build the character with the widest array of options,” etc), which he or she tries to achieve by bending the system, bribing the GM and working with other players to buy game-breaking splatbooks. It’s possible for more than one player to win; it’s not possible for all players to win. The GM is not a player, but a set of dice-driven arbitrary decision tables.

I’m trying to decide, though, whether I want this to be a self-contained system–ie, you have some sample elements and make the rest up as you buy them in-game–or whether it should be played with all the real RPG junk you and I and our friends have amassed. Is it worth trying to build an abstract version that can draw on either your imagination or extant books? Or would it be more fun (and focused) to couple the rules tightly to a set of preloaded components?

With a couple of friends, I write scripts and send them to people in the hopes that they will pay me money to continue to do so. While discussing what to do next, the idea cropped up of a nomic panel show.

The more I think about the idea, the more it appeals, in some fascinating but ultimately self-destructive way. Two immediate problems present themselves - firstly, how do we compress a nomic worth the name into a standard twenty-five minute slot? Second, how do we make it entertaining for an audience? I’d love to come up with some method of making this work - maybe an initial ruleset, a la BlogNomic’s infinitely self-sustaining system (but what manner of thing would be necessary? Any ideas for inital rules?), or cross-episode continuity, or something else entirely…

So. I want to create a nomic panel game. Please, either help me achieve this or help me get better.