A Fresh Look @ My Hobby Objectives

So way way back on 20th August 2013 I posted this on my Hobby Objectives.

This is what they looked like almost 3 years ago and where I think I'm at with them.

1. Sustainable and regular gaming.
   Think I've got this covered.
2. Play more with more.
   Again largely got this covered.
3. Home based gaming.
   Hmmmm... not quite happening other than on rare occasions.  Will it stay as an objective 3 years on? Not quite.
4. Play something new at least one in every six gaming sessions.
   I think I achieve this every gaming session now, particularly with board & card games.
5. Visit more game shops.
   Not really managed this and not sure I feel the need to drive it as an objective.

As per my post on the RPGLifeUK TweetUp at UK Games Expo 2016 I think I need to revamp / rethink some of these as in reality I've either demonstrated that I'm doing some of these with little or no effort due to circumstantial changes OR they just no longer apply...

So if I was writing these now they'd look something like this -

1. Balanced gaming.
   So right now I've got the regular gaming largely in the bag but I'm heavily leaning towards Board & Card Games and whilst's that's been fantastically rewarding... I want to get some RPGs back onto my gaming agenda and I also want to play Battletech : Alpha Strike on a more regular basis. So really what I want is balance to my gaming hobby.  How do I achieve that?
2. More gaming overall.
   So this is how I achieve 1 unless I re-start RPGs at DWARF Fridays but right now I can't see that.  So how do I do it? ENT Fridays. One of the challenges with DWARF for RPGs is the slot length on a Friday.  ENT has the capability to host RPGs on Friday nights for approx 4 hours and I see that as a way of scratching that itch. DWARF Fridays will probably default to board games with us playing Pandemic: Legacy and likely some Battletech : Alpha Strike added for good measure at both ENT and DWARF.
3. More involved.
   What do I mean by this? Well, I think I'm pretty involved in my local / regional hobby through clubs (previously ORC, DWARF and of course in the past couple of years with ENT) and of course having KoA helped define that to a certain extent. However if there's something that I've wanted it's to be more involved or more precisely "involved" in the hobby as a whole.  How do I go about that? Well that's what I need to define but I suspect it's going to be a combination of things.  There's more definition needed here.
4. Event Attendance
   Similar to 3 in that it's about being more involved in my hobby. This however is a more direct response to the #RPGLifeUK tweetup where if I took anything away it's that I need to attend more events / cons / whatever.  2016 won't be terribly good for that I suspect as work is going demand a lot of my free weekends between September and the end of the year but I'd like to go some way to tracking this objective in 2017.
5. Organise Events
   So this one does relate to 3 to a certain extent but it more focused. Bottom line here is I want to organise and deliver an event or series of events which would showcase the hobby. This will likely have a combination of micro and macro entries but in the end what I want to do is enable growth of the community through events.

So that's where I'm at now I think.  It's a decidedly different set of objectives to those I set out with when I started this blog but I'd suggest far more of an evolution than anything else.

The next step is to start delivering against them.  Let's see how that plays out.

UK Games Expo 2016 - Teaching with Games Seminar

So the seminar was billed as - "How are games used to teach and learn? Games Jams, boardgames sessions and design are increasingly used in universities around the UK to help the next generation of games developers explore gaming. Come and find out how games help us learn, what academics are getting up to in various universities around the country, and where you can learn games design! 

Dr Esther MacCallum-Stewart is joined by Douglas Brown, Brian McDonald, Patrick Morrison and James Wallis."

Well, did it live up to that?  Kinda sorta...

The seminar covered two key things -

• Game design whether it be video, mobile or whatever has it's foundations in board game design.  If you can design a board game then you have the building blocks for any sort of game.
• Game Jams are cool (more below) and give attendees the opportunity / challenge to create a game from scratch over roughly 48 hours.

What it didn't cover was the use of games as an tool for education as it was focused on the use of tabletop games as a design method as part of an educational programme.  No biggie, I still got stuff out of it just not what I wanted or went in to get.

The topic of using games as a tool for education is what "Teaching with Games" suggests it would be about.  Granted the description doesn't spin that way and does lean more to the game design aspect.  I would have liked to have heard something for the former but was happy with what I heard ultimately anyway.

Core element of the seminar that I took was the power of Game Jams.

So what is a Game Jam then?  Well it's like a lot of "creative bubble" events. You enter with nothing more than a desire to create something and leave with an idea developed and physically represented by a prototype.

In the 1st Chapter I ran 24 Hour Comic Book Day and 24 Hour RPG / Game Chef events at the shop.  These are essentially Game Jams by a different name.  Arrive with nothing, take some keywords and formulate an idea either on your own or in a team then turn it into something tangible.  Sites like 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters specialise in distributing that kind of content in games at least.

The Game Jams that the panel talked about tended to 48 hour events (long enough to crash and burn then recover to achieve something) which is different from those I've hosted and I can see the advantage of that.  Especially in the case of 24 Hour Comic Book Day which is 24 pages in 24 hours, a much harder task than you'd consider on the face of it.

So having taken away the Game Jam guidance they gave I think I see their inherent advantage over the one's I hosted in the 1st Chapter.  Not least of which is the 48 hours involved as the number of times someone "won" a 24 hour event was few and far between.  Giving them 48 hours enables that reset and try again opportunity plus of course it also means you're more likely to come out with a pretty decent prototype game and associated components!

For those interested in holding a Game Jam here are some links -

Global Game Jam

Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/GlobalGameJam/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/globalgamejam

Website (with UK filter) - http://globalgamejam.org/2016/jam-sites?country=GB

Scottish Game Jam

Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/Scottish-Game-Jam-136412446403315/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/scottishgamejam

Moray Game Jam Website - http://www.moraygamejam.com/

Glasgow Caledonian University Game Jam - http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsroom/news/article/?id=110100

BBC News Coverage - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-35438716

Plus Game Jam Central - http://www.gamejamcentral.com/

If you do host one or are interested in doing one, let me know!

UK Games Expo 2016 - RPGLifeUK TweetUp

As per my previous post about RPG Life UK I met up with some twitter folks to talk about RPGs and other stuff.

Tweetup Part 1 - Hilton Thursday 8pm

For something that was largely a random collection of twitter folks this went better than it probably should have.  Ok, so we didn't really get into any kind of debate about the UK RPG Scene or anything like that other than to conclude early on that there really wasn't one.

The group chat seemed to only last for about 15 to 30 minutes but after that we largely split off into different groups to chat about all things hobby and not just RPGs.  Also had the benefit of chatting with a retailer post the retailer event to get the inside “scoop” on what was coming out.  Some cool stuff was talked about (Mystic Vale I'm thinking of you) but nothing ground breaking or market changing etc.

There was one particularly interesting snippet from the overall conversation - "There are lots of RPG conventions in the UK so we don’t need any more."

Ok so this wasn't what was actually said but it was how I interpreted what was being said.

We didn’t really get into this in the tweetup but I've been reflecting on it since the tweetup itself and I suppose my underlying thought here is that it’s not actually reflective of the UK.

It may be reflective of England but then that’s probably not a surprise given the relatively healthy state of the English RPG con scene.
It is also probably a reflective position as the diversity of RPGs people were interested in and able to talk about at the tweetup likely has a causal relationship to the diversity of the cons where RPGs are played in England.  A lot of the games people talked about were small press and relatively obscure (to me), including a decent selection of home designed systems.  All of which is great but serves to remind me that I’m not gaming enough, or specifically not RPGing enough to enable any form of diversity in my RPG gaming.  Something that I need to resolve or accept.

Tweetup Part 2 - Beer Bus Saturday 2pm

A few extra / new faces this time and it was a more general meet & greet.  Managed to chat with Adam from RPGKitchen about Game Jams / Game Chef (I’ll include content in the post I’ll do on the seminar) which was a lot of fun.

Again it was a pleasure to chat with folks who have a similar interest and for want of a better word “belong”.

Conclusions?  Well other than I need to do more of this sort of thing I also took away a number of outcomes that I will endeavour to achieve.  Let's cover that in a future post though as I think reality it's as much about a re-visit of my hobby objectives as it is anything else.