Game Definitions

I read On game definitions by Oliver Laas this week, which can be found in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. It’s a short essay in the relative scheme of things, 13 pages. But has a lot of deep insight.

Rather than focusing on ‘games’ Laas instead focuses on their definitions and how they work in different ways to achieve certain ends – I hope I’ve parsed the essay correctly as I’m about to explain it LOL.

Drawing on Wittgenstein’s idea of games as having family resemblances (as I also did in my mythmaking mechanisms talk) Laas argues that definitions are not fixed and absolute but depend on their purpose. A lawyer defining a game for legal reasons for example will approach the task it differently from a game designer.

Some definitions list examples of games, while others try to find the necessary conditions that make a game possible.

Laas argues that definitions are not just neutral descriptions but arguments that people use to support certain viewpoints. For example, some people define games in a way that excludes video games from being considered sports, often because they want to maintain a traditional view of sports as purely physical activities.

The essay then explores three common ways that people define games. The first is called a “real definition,” which tries to describe the true nature or essence of a game (Huizinga, Morgan etc). The second way to define games is through “explicative definitions,” which aim to clarify the meaning of the word rather than claim to describe its essence (Suits) and lastly “persuasive definitions,” which are used to push a particular viewpoint. A good example is OG atari video game designer Chris Crawford’s work on games, which states that they must meet a set of conditions.

The definition you choose shapes reality. Returning to Esports as an example, whether or not you consider it a “real sport” has financial and social consequences. 

There’s also some power analysis mixed in too. Like, asking who gets to decide what counts as a game and whose interests are being served by a particular definition. There is no single answer to the question “What is a game?” because the answer depends on the situation.

On The Blog:

I’m still getting the old episodes of the pod online. Only 8 more to go!

Jan 2025 | Photo 365

Photo-a-day for the month of Jan 2025. Start of YEAR 4!

Permanently Moved

Survive Until 2025

https://permanentlymoved.online/

2024 is leaning over into 2025 in a way that makes everything feel precarious.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/09/2501-survive-until-2025/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Met up with Cullen Miller from SPAWNING and spent the day with him on Monday
• Put another 4k words into the current big writing project
  • Did a major restructure of the document and feel a lot better about the flow now
  • It’s revealed what i’m missing and where a whole bunch of other ideas need to go
• Big launch for PROJECT ENTRY!
• Call with the team behind a certain virtual influencer art project
• Delivered a thing that has been hanging around since last year.
  • no new work in the pipe
• But its fine, because I have a MEETING next week.

Terminal Access

I highly recommend watching Bratton’s 90min lecture A Philosophy of Planetary Computation: From Antikythera to Synthetic Intelligence to the Long Now Foundation last week. Really interesting, a lot to chew on. Brings together and lands over a decade of his thinking.

Reading

Still re-reading Autobiography of a Yogi. Still reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Still chipping away at Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh.

I went back Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead this week too. But mostly I just blasted though both audiobooks in the Urdesh duology in the Gaunt’s Ghost‘s series/Warhammer 40k universe. Bit crazy to listen to both back to back. But it is what it is.

Oklou – Blade Bird | NTS Session

Oklou was a real hilight of Unsound back in 2018, and I loved the 2020 EP Galore. Her new debut album choke enough came out the other day and it’s all I’ve been listening too since it dropped. The track blade bird and it’s video filmed and recorded at Streatham Ice-rink for NTS radio is wonderful. Blade Bird is the album closer and a lovely track.

I really enjoyed this interview with Oklou about the album with cracked magazine:

“I’m actually a bit sad to acknowledge this, because it’s been my inspiration since I was able to go online on my own, but I’ve gotten tired of the internet,” says Marylou Mayniel, as she absent-mindedly sucks from a magenta smoothie through a paper straw. “My YouTube algorithm has become so bad now that I don’t discover anything any more. It’s not just YouTube – the daily energy I get from X is terrible. Instagram is the same. I’m bored.” 

Remember Kids:

The post Game Definitions appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was recently interviewed by Dirk Songuer for his book: Fieldnotes from the Metaverse which “documents the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse” and the interview is now online.

We had a great conversation about identity in techno-social systems and the metaverse as medium. Naturally, we also discussed in detail the core thesis of my own book: that Dungeons & Dragons is the most important Social Technology of the 20th Century.

How D&D allowed players, for the first time, to step into the simulation (or the metaphor) of another world, and how in turn this shift influenced the creation of the Internet, virtual worlds, and our understanding of the Metaverse.

It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It was a great chat that covers a lot of my thinking and position on various topics that Dirk was interested in exploring for his own book. It’s also a bit of an honour to be included in the interview list, alongside Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Julian Dibble, Dan Hunter, and Edward Castronova – some real legends!

You can read the full interview here.

I’ve included a few quotes below:

Dirk Songuer: You also mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, and how it shaped the way we think about identity within these worlds. What do you mean by that?

Jay Springett: The innovation of Dungeons & Dragons as a social technology is that, for the first time, we were able to come down from the bird’s eye view of war gaming, chess, or other types of board games, and step into the simulation (or the metaphor) in the first-person. I often think about the amount of cultural vertigo that this must have caused in the 1970s in people discovering the game for the first time.

As Emanuel Derman says: “All models are metaphors” and people stepped into the metaphor or model, as in world model, or simulation – I’m using those terms somewhat interchangeably.

And these games people were all over at MIT at the time, meeting at the MIT Strategic Games Society. People like Mark Swanson, who then designed several D&D campaigns. Or Tim Anderson, a famous computer scientist that co-created Zork. These were also the first people that looked at things like the SQL database whitepaper. They’re thinking about multidimensional systems, keys, identities, and identity as a cluster of ordinals. And so, in 1976 we got Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther, and then by 1978 we got MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) by Trubshaw and Bartle.

I think that’s the major insight about Dungeons & Dragons’ influence. You step into a metaphor, which immediately has these implications for how you understand the computer system

Microsoft built a global real time voice network in 2005 but there were absolutely zero governance mechanisms whatsoever. And as my friend Ben says, the experience of his first 10 years on Xbox Live was “character building”.

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Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures (Beyond and Within)

First up is the most recent Solarpunk anthology, edited by Francesco Verso from Future.Fiction, release by Flame Tree Pubishing

In this near future anthology, Solarpunk explores the many ways individuals and resilient groups can fight gentrification, expropriation, abuse and loss of identity, starting within local communities, ultimately to embrace the whole world.

This beautiful hardback edition features printed endpapers, high-quality paper, and a striking foil cover. To my knowledge, it’s the first Solarpunk anthology in hardback—perfect for showing off on the shelf. Bonus: it includes stories by friends!

Solarpunk brings stories without borders, from across the world: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, the UK and USA. Authors are Jerri Jerreat, Ken Liu, Thomas Badlan, Ciro Faienza, Brenda Cooper, Renan Bernardo, Jennifer L. Rossman, Sarena Ulibarri, Gustavo Bondoni, Lucie Lukacovicova, Ingrid Garcia, Andrew Dana Hudson and D.K. Mok.

I am slowly trying to catch up / fill out my Solarpunk Library.

A Darkness Returns – Raymond E. Feist

I’ve just looked how deep I am into the Raymond E Feist books and this is book 34. I’ve been reading this series for most of my life. I still remember borrowing the first couple off the bass player in my band and reading them the summer before university as we drove around the UK on my first ever tour. I happened to be in Waterstones and grabbed a signed copy. I didn’t realise until I got to the till and properly looked at the cover.

KILL TEAM – Core Book Ed.3

The most exciting addition to the library. 3rd Edition of Kill Team!

I haven’t had a chance to play yet since regular gaming nights are on pause while a friend moves house. But from what I’ve read, I’m really pleasantly surprised with the rules. This edition is a major improvement over the last one, which felt like wading through a legal manual.

The language is much clearer, and specific mechanics—like cover rules—have been cleaned up significantly.

Interestingly, this edition lacks narrative campaign rules and feels more like the central component of a modular system. I suspect Games Workshop is taking inspiration from modern game design, adopting elements from MMOs or live service models. Despite maintaining the same fundamental ‘physics’ as the previous edition, it feels fresh and forward-looking.

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August 17, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Wargaming 🎲 | World Running 🌐

The games designer seeks to influence the structure of thought. Manipulating the kinds of thoughts the player thinks while playing the game.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/17/2419-shaping-thought/

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Shaping Thought

Do you know about micro mouse competitions? Teams build robotic mice to solve a 16×16 maze as fast as possible.

While the competition has been around since the 1970s, the concept of a maze-solving mouse dates back to 1950.  

Invented by Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, the Theseus mouse—a mechanical object—would, through trial and error, learn the shortest path through a maze.This invention wasn’t just a curiosity; it was the first artificial learning device of its kind, inspiring an entire field of artificial intelligence.

This episode isn’t about mazes per se, but I lead with this idea because Shannon said something profound: it’s the maze that solves the mouse. Not the other way around. This notion is crucial because it applies to any techno-social system. The environments we interact with—whether digital, physical, or cognitive—shape our actions and behavior more than we realize.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his book Games, argues that agency is the primary medium of any interactive media.

The ‘art’ of game design, then, is ultimately – the poetic manipulation of agency.

If we combine this idea with Shannon’s notion that the puzzle that solves the player, we arrive at a key concern of the world runner. The construction and maintenance of cognitive architectures in worlds of all kinds. 

Let’s start with a simple type of puzzle that requires thought rather than movement: Sudoku. The rules are straightforward—complete a 9×9 grid with the numbers 1–9, ensuring no repetition in any row, column, or 3×3 box. Because there is only one correct number for each square, your agency within the Sudoku world is very limited. As you fill in the numbers correctly, the puzzle essentially ‘solves’ you. Guiding your actions almost mechanically toward the solution.

A similar but more complex example is a crossword puzzle. The rules for a crossword are also strict: a grid of blank squares with words arranged horizontally and vertically, intersecting at common letters.  However, solving a crossword isn’t purely mechanical; it requires discovering the correct words based on clues provided. Agency is manipulated at a higher level of abstraction—you must think like the puzzle’s creator. To solve it, one has to re-shape their own thought process and model the mindset of the setter – who is often trying to mislead or challenge you.

At the other end of the spectrum are solo RPG journaling games—a topic I’ll be exploring in depth in issue 12 of Start Select Reset. A solo RPG journaling game is a narrative-driven role-playing game where a single player creates and explores a story by writing journal entries based on prompts, random events, or game mechanics. It’s a form of play that allows for deep personal reflection and creative expression.

In a SoloRPG, the game space is almost limitless, as the substrate is the unconscious mind of the player. Unlike Sudoku or crosswords, there’s very little mechanical manipulation. Instead, the game focuses on shaping the psychic environment of the player—their mindset.  

The designer seeks to influence the structure of thought. Manipulating the kinds of thoughts the player thinks while playing the game.

When we look at techno-social systems, whether it’s Sudoku, workplaces, train stations, social networks, or journaling games, they can generally be classified into one of two types: Contractive or Expansive.

Contractive & Expansive worlds

A contractive world is one where the level of agency decreases as the world unfolds. Every move or decision you make reduces possibility within the game space, bringing you closer to an end state or win condition. Crossword puzzles, chess, and airports are all examples of contractive worlds. Agency exercised reduces the number of available options, guiding you toward a specific outcome.

On the other hand the mechanics of expansive worlds allow for more possibilities to emerge as you interact with the system. Dungeons and Dragons, social networks, improvisation, online MMOs, and SoloRPGs are all examples. In these environments, the possible possibilities grow as the world unfolds.

The real world is expansive, but certain ‘worlds’ we move between inside it can be contractive. For instance, once you’ve entered the world of a train station, your possibilities contract until you get off the train at your destination.

Open Worlds

However, we must not confuse expansive worlds with open ones. Open world games like Fallout or Zelda give you a vast world to explore and interact with from the start. You can build things, create things, and so on. But as you explore the world, you encounter mechanisms that restrict your possibilities. As you complete quests and level up, the possibility space within the world contracts, propelling you toward the game’s win condition.

This is why open world games on completion dump you back out into the world before you started the final quest. The end of the game is the end of the world. The physics of a contractive world demand that if you fully explore its possibility space, it has solved you, so it ends.

Shaping Thought

We’ve come a long way from the maze solving the mouse, but it explains how we learn to navigate worlds and the cognitive frameworks we develop in them. It also raises ethical questions about world design. As the more expansive a world is, the more it relies on shaping the thoughts of those who inhabit it. The design of worlds, and the cognitive architectures they create, can profoundly influence how we think and act.

As Dame Marilyn Strathern wisely said “It matters what thoughts you think other thoughts with.”

The post Shaping Thought | 2419 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

When wrote my first post about the new edition of D&D a few years ago, I planned on writing a running series on the announcements and developments of the edition. But alas, the series never fully materialised. I have a half-drafted post covering the protracted licensing drama around the OGL and the core rules, which I’m sure I’ll post at some point – but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I’d like to compare the recently announced main and alternate covers from Wizards of the Coast for the new ‘One’ edition of Dungeons & Dragons. These covers provide a useful springboard to discuss the schism over play style and game interpretation that has been present in the game since its inception.

This split is exhaustively documented in John Peterson’s excellent 2022 book, The Elusive Shift from MIT press. The essential question boils down to: Is Dungeons & Dragons a combat simulator, or an engine for telling stories?

The two cover illustrate the play styles perfectly:

The first image is all about action and heroism, with vibrant colors and dynamic poses depicting a tense battle against horrors out of the frame that we can only imagine. In contrast, the second image has a more relaxed vibe, with a circular layout and softer colour pallet. Showcasing a peaceful moment between characters and a friendly, golden dragon. The intense lighting and dramatic poses in the first picture create an exciting, high-stakes atmosphere, while the gentle lighting and calm poses in the second give off a serene, reflective feel. These two images capture the wide range of experiences that the audience imagines take place in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

However: These two images illustrate the fundamental split over what Dungeons & Dragons is for

Is it a combat simulator – a mechanism for resolving actions, statistics, and probability in a coherent enough way to term as “playing at the world”? Or are you “playing in the world”, using the system’s physics to sequentially generate narrative and drama?(See my talk on Making Mechanisms for more on where narrative comes from inside of systems)

But here’s the thing: while these two covers illustrate the two approaches to play, there’s something that keeps nagging at me.

Imagine you are a young person only familiar with D&D via shows like Critical Role. You go by feel with your purchase, using only the vibes that the covers convey. You are basically looking at two completely different games.

The game on the left is clearly a fighting game. And that is exactly what you’re going to find when you open the book – pages and pages of rules to resolve combat.

But the one on the right?

Narrative play might have emerged during the late 1970s amidst East Coast players familiar with the work of Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone, but as far as I’m aware, there are no rules in any edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks that discusses rules for narrative, story, etc. At all.

There’s a long discussion about this on Systems are Beautiful blog back in 2019. 

What does D&D do with its rules? To answer that, just look at what the rules govern. The domain of the rules imply the values of the system, so the more a game stipulates on a particular thing, the more the game becomes about that thing. Rules are suggestive of the game’s expectations of its players. While players theoretically have unlimited freedom, in the practical case the rules have a way of pointing players at particular solutions to their problems.

So it should come as no surprise that the most important thing in a D&D game is fighting. It’s readily apparent just from the content of the books. Over half of the page count of the Player’s Handbook from any edition is dedicated to class abilities and spells. Add in skills and feats (just more abilities, really), equipment (modifiers to abilities), and the general rules of combat itself, and you’ve easily got three quarters of the book or more. Now take into account the sections on adventuring, a Dungeon Master’s Guide that talks about making dungeons or other suitable locales, huge sections on magic items and other loot (often the largest part of a Dungeon Master’s Guide), and rules that dictate how much stuff your character can realistically carry with them, and it’s crystal clear what D&D wants you to do. The game is most at home when players are killing things and taking their stuff.

More importantly, the more you aren’t telling that story, the more you really aren’t playing D&D.

It’s hard to write rules for story, we can only create systems that do a better or worse job at ‘sense making‘ the events that emerge from them.

PBtA in the above refers to ‘Powered by the Apocalypse‘. A system created in the 2010’s. Its major innovation was to cast player actions as ‘moves’. Which creates a physics different to worlds powered by D&Ds ruleset. I’ve never played a PBtA game, but I have read the rulebook – because I’m a nerd. Because ‘moves’ and actions are resolved by the player, the DM (or MC in the games lexicon) doesn’t role any dice. The worlds physics is created on the fly by the player and their choices rather, than kept coherent by the DM and the rulebook a la, D&D.

What this results in is the MC asking lots of questions of the players rather than stating facts about the world.

The MC also names everything so that all NPCs gain a semblance of substance… but never so much that he gets to hesitate to get them killed, maimed, destroyed at the players whim.

The game’s fuel is the MC’s questions to the characters (not players).  Those questions (and answers) build the world and shape where the action goes.  Many (if not most) of these questions should be embedded in the MC’s moves or in response to players Moves/questions (i.e. turning player questions back to the group).

Chatty: You’re reading this awesome review, What does it remind you of? What does it make you feel like?

Exactly like that.

If you want to play D&D as a narrative engine, a la Critical role, it is solely incumbent on you to meet the right kind of players – as otherwise you’ll be completely off the map, outside of what the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook actually provides you. To the point where you might as well look for a different system to play entirely.

I don’t want to say the alternate cover is dishonest; in fact, it’s been received really well online by many players in the community.

But if I, as a teen or tween, wanted to play a game that involves the production of a well-structured story involving drinking tea with a dragon with my friends around the kitchen table and got given the new ‘One’ Edition of Dungeons & Dragons for Christmas, I would find myself …. disappointed.

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I started writing up my thoughts about the news and details we have so far – through the lens of a World Runner and it got a bit long. My day job is about worlds, worlding and the metaverse. I hope my public ‘notes to self’ here are some benefit to the wider TTRPG community, and also virtual world designers etc.

I can promise you there are more insights and original thinking in the post below, than I could find in several hours of watching what passes for ‘commentary’ on this topic on Youtube.

World Running commentary is marked in Grey.

Asides and meta commentary are marked in Green

One D&D

Before we dive in lets dispel any illusions readers who aren’t total nerds may have.

D&D is absolutely fucking massive.

Forbes reported back 2020, that Dungeons and Dragons had passed 50 million players.

The company claims that over 50 million people have played Dungeons & Dragons to date and that 2020 was the seventh year of consecutive growth for the game.

Fortnite in comparison (the media darling of the metaverse) only has 45million players.

Also worth noting are the demographics: The overwhelming age bracket of Fortnite players is 18-24 age range – 2/3 of players, or 62.7%. Fortnite also skews 72.4% male. D&D therefore is played by way more (and different types of people).

In their 2020 annual investor report (P4), Hasbro announced that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) had its best year ever. Generating $816 million in revenue. (This figure includes D&D and other IPs managed by WoTC. Including that other nerd-tastic juggernaut Magic: The Gathering.)

As I’ll discuss in more detail shortly, it’s also important to remember that D&D is nearly 50 years old. When you sit down to play a game of D&D you are participating in a social technology that is very mature.

Anyways, here’s the trailer for the next iteration of D&D:

World reveal

Let’s start with the title. World reveal! this stands out to me immediately.

The world in question isn’t so much the setting or lore of D&D – but the wider system – the ‘world of D&D’ as meta object. 

That meta object consists of D&D includes (off the top of my head): WotC as the IP owners, the game rules, the players, the source books, the wider D&D compatible publishing ecosystem, but also the huge fan media ecosystem: podcasts, youtubers, and livestreamers, etc. Managing a franchise like D&D must be a hugely complicated task from a world running point of view.

For nearly a decade, millions of players around the world have enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. You’ve shared your adventures at the gaming table with us, as well as your feelings about what you love most about the game—and what you think can be improved. And we’ve heard you.

One D&D is the codename for the future of D&D and includes:

It’s also good to know that ‘One D&D’ is the working project title/code name. I’m wondering what the eventual term will be? I hope they avoid words like ‘platform’ (and even world tbh). A lot of audience testing is going to be needed for the final name.

D&D Fifth Edition

The explicit call out of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e) is useful to orient around if you only know of D&D in the abstract. Growing up in the late 90’s I played a homebrew melange of AD&D 2nd edition, and experienced 3e and 3.5 editions. I’ve never played 4e and but have about 30/40 hours of experience with 5e. But I am a promiscuous RPG fan, I’ve never felt wedded to one game or ruleset.

5e was a significant moment in the history of D&D. Launched in 2014 to coincide with the games 40th anniversary. Rules were streamlined and tightened up across the board. A big focus was placed on making the games rules more accessible for new players. As they say in the trailer the big focus in the 2020’s is making the game more accessible for DM’s.

75,000 play tested 5e before launch in 2014. The total numbers play testing the new D&D beyond/one before its release in 2024 will be an orders of magnitude higher.

New D&D Rules

D&D Rules: We’re updating and expanding the rules of the game, and we’re looking for your feedback to help shape them.

5e rules, sensibilities, and general level of accessibility has been the rock solid foundation underpinning D&D’s dramatic growth in the last decade.

The video states that 5e was the ‘last edition’ of D&D. The updated rules, features and expansions will be a tweaked but not dramatically different. In fact all material released for 5e will also remain compatible with D&D moving forward.

New supplements, rule tweaks etc will all be online. WotC will still be producing books and collectible ‘objects’ but the primary focus of the games reality/rule set will be the digital version.

D&D is now being handled as a dynamic meta-object or world by WotC. No longer bound and book ended by the concept of ‘Editions’. I wonder if Games Workshop will ever take the plunge and announce a *final* version of Warhammer 40k

A World Runner must be cognisant of the nature of time in a world – both Cronos and Kairos. How is time managed?

In a wargame, card game, board game etc we usually find the concept of Turns (Cronos). In realtime graphical virtual worlds, we currently find the concept of narrative eras or Seasons (Kairos) I.E games take place in the narrative context of xyz.

Editions however are diffrent. An edition of D&D, a board game etc are Total Containers. Editions contain ‘everything’ that is true about the world they defines its nature, its Reality.

The ‘world’ of D&D for the last 50 years has been one of editions. Players have ratcheted though one edition to the game to another. Reality is updated and changed. For example: A new edition may bring a new set of rules, that change to the way things get resolved under certain conditions.

A new edition of a game is a bit like updating gravity or physics. It’s still the same world, the same game. Only now it’s different.

Moving away or beyond the concept of editions changes the fundamental nature of D&D’s physics. Reality can still be changed, tweaked. But no longer can it be updated wholesale.

This new approach suggests that WotC have learnt a lot from the Magic the Gathering franchise. Most cards from 30 years ago are still valid – tho some cards have been removed from competition play for balance and mechanical issues (Like breaking the game in certain combinations).

Worlds managed by World Runners without the ‘tick tick’ of editions to change whats true about reality must approach the world with diffrent set of skills. The world must be gardened. The world is no longer a complete object that can be known, designed and controlled. Instead, it must be managed like a bonsai. The world runner must be watchful, hopeful, and make considered inventions with an eye always towards the long term flourishing of the world.

Too many small tweaks made consistently on an ongoing basis however also make for an unpredictable and unstable system. I wonder if new content will be released frequently, but rule tweaks and updates to character tables will only happen every 6 months or something.

A world with no temporal edge or boundary are the opposite of what I call wind-up worlds : Worlds that produces narratives via the unfolding of predetermined ‘mechanical’ characteristics inherent in their system over time.

I don’t have a snappy name for this. Suggestions in the comments please!

D&D Beyond: The digital toolset joined the Wizards of the Coast family in 2022, and we want to make it even better.

D&D Beyond was/is an official digital rule/toolset for 5e Dungeons & Dragons. Originally incubated by Fandom.com, the app and ecosystem was acquired by Hasbro earlier this year (2022) for $146.3 million.

Since 2017, D&D Beyond has helped to power DUNGEONS & DRAGONS tabletop play and deliver the brand’s eighth consecutive year of growth in 2021. Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions.

The first thing that came to mind about the acquisition though a the lens of World Running earlier this year was that WotC have essentially acquired an analytics platform. For the first time (beyond play testing and feedback) the makers of D&D now have insight in to who, what and how people are playing D&D. This is a pretty big change to the nature of ‘the world’ from the designers point of view. The worlds edge, ie the boundary or limits to what is known about the meta-object-as-world of D&D has been expanded beyond anecdote.

As the IRL world has changed, so has the way the D&D is played. Whilst I’m a sucker for a piece of paper/character sheet, everyone now has a computer with them at all times. We have tablets and other digital tools that we can bring with us to the table, and the world, when we play.

D&D Beyond’s acquisition is a key piece of infrastructure for managing the ‘meta’ of the world of D&D. With the management of D&D moving towards a sensibility more akin to ‘gardening’, the ability to keep players rulesets tweaked and updated in real time is a great boon to managing the dynamics of a system with 50million players.

It’s very clear that WotC are going after both Roll 20 and Tailspire with this move to digital first rulebooks and game management.

Both my posts about how individuals navigate code-spaces and the way platforms capture value are relevant to WotC going after Roll 20 and Tailspire. They basically came out and said this in the press release:

more than 80% of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS fans having already played the game virtually in 2021, aided by online digital platforms such as D&D Beyond, this acquisition accelerates the game’s ability to penetrate new markets, gather valuable consumer insights and provide players with the best DUNGEONS & DRAGONS experience on all platforms.

TLDR: If so many people are playing our game in this way, then we would like them to play it on our platform. There is a lot of value out there to capture.

I’ve written perviously about how D&D and table top games are Permissive IPs. WotC have a very good relationship with fan content and licensing their brand out. The full integration of D&D Beyond in to the reality of playing D&D suggests that there could be a real oppertunity for WotC to embrace Power Fandoms and really foreground players ‘doing their thing’ in the world of D&D.

Permanently Moved

If you like this post check out Permanently Moved (dot) Online the weekly podcast 301 seconds in length; written, recorded and edited by me @thejaymo

Digital D&D

Digital D&D Play Experience: Announced during Wizards Presents, D&D Digital is an immersive tabletop space that is in early development.

WotC announced they are using EPIC games’ Unreal Engine to build a fully graphical table top simulation of D&D.

The 2020 Hasbro investor report says that WotC has been making a huge investments in digital capability. This is obviously the output of some of that investment:

Oh boy people have kicked off.

This Kotaku article does a great job summarising most of the objections in one paragraph.

services like the upcoming “D&D Digital” are starting to look more and more like video games, at what point are we just playing an MMO or something like Diablo? Will the service calculate all the math? What room does it leave for house rules? Will this new digital toolset require a cutting-edge GPU to run? What monetization efforts will Wizards implement, and how will those impact the experience of playing the game? How much technical skill is required to set these virtual environments up? Can we just automate the role of a Dungeon Master and have an AI system handle all the challenges? You know, like in a video game?

Before we come back to Digital D&D and why its important for the metaverse I want to briefly talk about:

D&D Is a Social Technology

Dungeons & Dragons is a social technology.

D&D arrived during the 1970’s. A decade of absolutely wild aesthetic, cultural, and political and social innovation. It’s crazy to me that Soul Train, Punk Rock, Computing, Pinball, D&D/Roleplay, and Studio 54/Disco are all concurrent. The 1970’s were an accelerated flowering of creativity that was squashed and flattened by the forces of neoliberalism.

For nearly 50 years D&D has been container (or blueprint) for managing how people (working towards a shared goal or ambition) should interact and behave with one another together around a table.

D&D represents an innovation in the fast construction of a shared set of social norms and grammars understood by its participants.

I think that 100% of all meetings at the office would benefit from D&D like social grammars. A meeting’s chair is a DM. Managing who gets to speak, when, and for how long is fundamental to human conviviality.

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium – Studies in Gaming by Schallegger 2018

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games. It’s one of the BEST books I’ve ever read. If you want to understand what ‘the fuck is going on‘ with the post post-modern world. Check it out.

One of my favourite books about RPG history is also by Peterson:

The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity

In Elusive Shift, Jon divides players who encountered the first edition of D&D rule set in mid 1970’s in to two kinds camps: Story People and Games people.

This dichotometic distinction between player types still exists throughout the hobby all the way into the present. Essentially, the two types of play styles are defined by the context in which the players encountered the social technology known as D&D:

War Gamers vs Science Fiction Fandom / ‘Drama Nerds’.

D&D of course emerged from wargames: The simulation of reality with tokens moved spatially on a map or board with dice animating the resolution of events within the simulation via chance.

The other part D&D’s lineage emerges from the 19th Century Prussian wargaming practice of Kriegsspiel. Characterised by high realism, an emphasis on the experience of decision-making rather than on competition, and the use of an umpire to keep the rules flexible. Kriegsspiel is a kind of LARP, or military play acting that would be easier understood today by who practice Improv.

See my World Running discussion with Dr Alex Fradera on the nature of worlds, trust and improv.

D&D play style comes down to one question. Are you playing with the world (Story people) or against it (Games People).

D&D and the Metaverse

The D&D team are at great pains to explain that the are not building a video game. They are building a virtual tabletop experience they repeatedly refer to as a ‘Play Space‘.

I believe that the Metaverse is a Medium.

The World Wide Web has (unfortunately) been a 30 year long distraction from the business of worlding. Throughout the 1980’s pioneers went online via screeching modems to spend time collaborating, coordinating and exploring worlds together. The context and social technology they used to do so was D&D and TTRPGS

This ‘Play Space’ has more in common with the history and lineage of MUD’s than video games.

WotC have chosen to use a ‘tilt-shift‘ style camera technique because it make things look ‘small’. They want players to feel like they are interacting with miniatures on a virtual table top. I think you’ll agree it’s highly effective.

D&D digital is a play space, a code space a virtual place.

I don’t see any difference between D&D digitals virtual table top and Zoom. There’s no difference between D&D’s play space and a discord channel or group chat.

D&D’s play space is a fantastic evolution on the ‘Code Space’. In 2020 I took a tour though diffrent ‘spatialised’ group chat programs: like gather.town or Brach when I took a close look at the Roblox IPO.

The key innovation, the thing that is most interesting from a world running perspective is just as we use the Room as UX metaphor we can now use a Table Top as UX metaphor too.

D&D digital’s play space will transform the way that people interact online. Instead of sitting on/in a zoom call playing D&D. Players now have a relative location with one another, in a code space. In a world.

One of the key things about building this kind of spatialised code-space for online facilitation and interaction is that whatever WotC build. It will have have a huge downstream influence on the rest of TTRPGs, gaming and quite possibly the whole world.

The new virtual play space, the simulation, will become just as part of the game as the written rules are. I hope WotC release a white paper explaining their thinking around the various moderation tools, design decisions etc. What controls/levers the DM’s, players and NPC’s will all have to shape and change the world?

In fact I think WotC should join/form a metaverse standards body, maybe with Yurgalabs, Epic games etc.

D&D’s digital play space design documention should probably be open sourced.

At the very least there should also be a fully modable white labelled version of the play space engine that players and gamers could make their worlds in. Just as D&D birthed a million indie RPGs, so could their new play space tool.

If D&D truly is an evolving social technology with 50 years of heritage, then it would behoove WotC to work on UX and UI tools to prevent problems like the inevitable cacophony of players yelling over on another through your headphones on a zoom call.

Throughout the two years of the pandemic, our zoom fatigue etc I was surprised that better ways of having and managing conversations didn’t emerge faster – if at all. D&D has a real oppertunity with D&D digital to change the grammars, manners and mores of our society.

What I’ve been describing above: D&D’s play space is a world. A simulation where reality has rules similar or radically different from our own. Unlike the rules system of D&D, the play space will need to have physics etc. D&D digital is a reconnection to D&Ds roots in wargaming.

This approach of course is perfect for ‘Games People‘.

‘Story people’ however are pissed. From their point of view the thing that makes D&D special is the story telling potential that the world of D&D facilitates. The thing that ‘Story People’ love the most about RPGs is Theatre of the Mind gaming.

Story gamers worried that this new digital play space will hinder imaginative play.

Check out the biased language that shows up in D&D fandom when ‘Story People’ get talking about the way the game:

Other DMs—who some might consider to be “purists”—elect to throw out battle mats and miniatures in favor of an imagination-only approach to D&D.

This is called the theater of the mind because everything takes place in the minds of the DM and players. There are no physical representations of what’s happening in the story.

How exactly is D&D played in the theater of the mind? What are the pros and cons of theater of the mind? Let’s take a look.

Theater of the Mind, Explained

Playing D&D with the theater of the mind means you’re playing without any visual representations of what’s occurring in the game. Instead, everything is in the imagination of the players and the dungeon master.

LOL people who play without tokens or miniatures are purists. As someone with aphantasia but also has very very vivid memories of playing TTRPGs, it blows my mind that people play D&D without miniatures!

Without a spacialized play space, D&D is just be people sitting around a table having a chat….. Pretending … Imagining things.

Total chaos. 

Anyways.

The biggest challenge D&D has always had has been satisfying both Story and Games people. A virtual simulated play space does favour the games people of course. However, it is up to the story people to make this new way of playing D&D work.

It’s up to the people who tell stories from within the D&D ruleset to develop the social manners, grammars and mores for interacting with one another in the metaverse. Just as story people developed successful protocols for sitting around a table together to play the game in the late 1970’s they need to do so again for next level zoom calls.

Other Observations

Camera Controls

The defining medium of the 20th Century was our ability to look at the world (and experience it) though the lens.

I really hope that D&D digital’s UX/UI suite comes with a comprehensive set of camera controls.

The language of the lens: its focus, aperture etc allow the operator to communicate intangible emotional cues to the viewer.

Whilst the tilt shift camera is amazing for creating the sense of depth and table top vibes, players should have control over how they are presented to others visually in the adventure/play space.

Just a Zoom or Google meet automatically embiggens the person speaking, I assume the D&D Digital play space will have a camera that moves or cuts between players.

Players should be given control over the location of their model/characters camera. Players should be able to move the camera around their character, pull focus, select focus, set depth of field etc .

They should be able to place their character’s camera to make them look heroic, or move it over the shoulder to see the wizard cast a spell down a long hall way etc.

It’s 2022. Every person alive has some understanding and cinematography and the moving image as visual medium. Players in the D&D play space should be given the ability to express themselves though the eye of a lens.

I do hope I’m making sense here. I really do think a robust set of camera controls in D&D digital would allow Story People to visually tell stories in an integrated cinematic way. The lens is a story telling medium just as words are.

Microtransations

There are lot of people worried that D&D may become a subscription based model.

With further micro transactions for new rules, new campaigns, or new digital character models. I hear them. And I get it, I understand. I hope they will take their cues from MtG online rather than Fortnie/Roblox/Minecrafts microtransaction model.

BUT.

Consider just how huge D&D already is as a Permissive IP.

D&D as an IP requires players to do their own thing within the toy box the rules provide. The more people are playing D&D (in whatever variant) the better it is for D&D’s IP in general.

Just as we have officially licensed partners selling campaigns and rules presently on DriveThruRPG – I can totally imagine a virtual object and campaign marketplace connected to D&D digital. With both official and user generated content.

Last year I wrote about how HUGE the 3D printing and virtual object file ecosystem is for wargames and tabletop roleplaying games. All the virtual miniatures created in the last few years for 3D printing could be imported in to a D&D digital platform no problem.

Just as the rulebooks are physical, as well as the ongoing worlding of the digital versions – i hope we will be able to own/print/use the same heroic character model both on and offline.

Quantification

A large chuck of one early chapter in Elusive Shift is dedicated to XP (Experience Points) and the arguments about it that played out in the pages of gaming groups’ fanzines across the country. How should XP be distributed? Is it by fiat? DM’s discretion? Can one player from a D&D group in Indiana bring their level XX character with X0000’s of experience points to the table when they play with people in California?

What is the point of XP? Are you playing pinball trying to get a high score? or is just a ledger system representing time and effort spent *in world*?

The segment of Elusive Shift that covers these early arguments is both highly entertaining and very interesting. Well worth reading.

With D&D’s perviously decentralised player base converging around centralised D&D Beyond and D&D Digital services. I wonder if XP will become more and more harmonised across the player base?

If so, then XP becomes and interesting sub medium within the meta-object of D&D. XP becomes a currency separate from other in world tokens like Gold or gems or whatever.

Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age

Lastly if you’ve read this far, first of all thanks, secondly I’d like to recommend another book:

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom – Ed’s Hedge, Grouling, and Kapell 2021

I must admit, I’m still reading it. But its REALLY REALLY good. I’d live to leave you with this short pull quote from the chapter “Gameplay Experiences Meet Digital Affordances”.

The post Metaverse & Monsters | Thoughts on One D&D appeared first on thejaymo.net.

My mate Andy and I finally got our lives together enough to get a game of Kill Team in this week. The first of the year.

I wrote about my initial impressions of ruleset last year. Having got all the basic mechanics out the way previously it meant that we could get down to the fun bit – actually focusing on the story unfolding on the kitchen table. IMO when you play a table top game narratively and have a firm grasp of the rules, all the dice roles and various tables, stats etc receded and just become mechanisms for powering the simulation the story unfolds in.

The lad on the right above is a demolitions expert. But still haven’t decided if I’m going to run a medic/spotter/or a comms specialist long term. When they are released, I’m gonna spend 35 quid on some more guardsmen models so I can make up all options for a WYSIWYG veteran guardsman kill team.

After playing a few games, I find the reliance on the Leader key word to or issuing orders – only benefiting models within range – a little tricky. If your sergeant gets killed your up shit creek. And if you want to split the squad into 2 fire teams, you really need a comms specialist.

This was evidenced when in the second game my sergeant was brutally cut down by a Necron Flayed One in hand to hand combat during the second turning point of the mission. The only way I could earn victory points was with the leader sitting on the objective so I lost by default.

The ruleset produced some some some really cinematic moments however.

With one wound remaining, this injured guardsman limped around the corner to face two tinboys draped in the flesh of his fallen comrades.

Despite his injury resulting in +1 to hit with his flamer, I rolled an entire hand of crits and he absolutely burned the shit out of them both.

Unfortunately, still alight with burning promethium fire, the remaining Xenos warrior leapt in to hand to hand combat with one wound. As the guardsman went down still singing praise to the Emperor of Mankind, he killed the Necron with his bayonet.

Trust me nerds, it was absolute SCENES

I’m really not sure how to fight Necrons yet. Their Gauss Blaster’s are absolutely brutal if you get caught out in the open between objectives. I really can’t belive you can take 5 Necron warriors and 5 flayed ones, that has got to be FAQ’d at some point.

Having played a few games now, I’d update my review to say that I wish GW had included some wound tokens in box. We’ve been using tiny dice, WarcCry has some grate counters included with the game they should have gone with something like that.

Moving on from waffling about nerd shit…

Women of Rock

Since the new year I’ve been working my though the archival interviews on the Women of Rock Oral History Project on Youtube.

Some highlights so far have been:

Brenda lee

The queen of rock and roll! She has some really interesting points about knowing your context and history. IE: Whose company are you in when you are singing rock and roll?

Alice Bag

This interview with Alice Bag of the Bags is really cool. She’s always been an inspiring figure to DIY punks everywhere but this interview has made me want to pick up her books when I get the chance.

June Millington

It was really interesting hearing about June Millington’s early life and how she got into rock music in the 60’s. So many bands owe her and the whole of Fanny so much. Rock Bottom Blues is one of the best rock songs ever written imo.

The whole channel is fantastic, I was watching the Peaches interview the other night, there’s interviews with Shirley Manson, Ginger Bianco from Goldie & the Gingerbreads and Goldie herself Genya Ravan. So good.

So much content out there on the internet.

Photo 365

Been a little busy this week so I’ve been getting out and about after dark for walks. I tend to walk the same/similar routes as there are only so many loops you can walk after 2 years of lockdown and 6 years of living on the same square.

Whats been cool about leaving the house with the objective of taking a photo is the change in ‘way of seeing’. Something you walk past everyday suddenly becomes a photo opportunity just because of the sky/light conditions are just right.

One of the main reasons for taking a photo everyday this year is to try and re-flex the critical eye. I’ve always taken a lot of photos, I bought my first film camera – an Olympus OM10 – with my 16th birthday money. I’m really hoping that doing this 365 dials my eye back in.

The ability to compose a banger off the cuff and shoot it with my phone is the goal. lol

Permanently Moved

Some Things to Get Done

I woke up this morning with no idea what I was going to talk about on the show today. As it turned out, ambitions for 2022.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Had some really fun calls this week.
• I got my 3D Depth Camera working with Unity. I can’t say this part of the project is fully complete tho as A. My ambitious for this haven’t yet been met
  B. I’m now suffering from ‘it worked yesterday syndrome’

• I’ve switched to Unity this week after 6 months of learning Unreal Engine. Which in all honestly is a whole thing. I’m not sure how I feel about the switch. But due to the larger indie community the amount of support and tutorials at the end of the a google search will be more beneficial in the long run I think
• I’ve started writing a what might turn out to be a massive post for Dimensino.
• Reviewed several friends documents this week. Stoked over what they are all up to.
• Helped Ryan over at garbageday.email with some DNS stuff.
  • If you too have a Substack and want to get your custom URL working without the www. hit me up lol.
• Still thinking hard about getting part time/full time roll of some kind somewhere.

Dipping the Stacks

Carbon Capture Can Be Part of the Climate Solution

Fossil fuel companies tout carbon capture as a way to shore up their own profits. But the technology holds the potential for good — helping us to save the planet, and ourselves, from ecological catastrophe.

Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy – Rolling Stone

History is screaming at Democrats to both rescue the economy and save democracy from a meltdown. They’re doing the opposite

Gen Z Has Arrived At the Office—And It’s Freaking Everyone Out

The good news is that Zoomers aren’t nearly as entitled on the job as millennials. The bad news? They could really use a hug

This article is insane bait, going in on everyone.

Mysterious footprints suggest Neanderthals climbed a volcano right after it erupted

But just who left these tracks? It’s impossible to say for certain based on an assortment of dull shapes pressed awkwardly in time-worn volcanic sediment.

The American Room. Behind the nation’s closed doors, with… | by Paul Ford | The Message | Medium

It’s daytime. The wall is an undecorated slab of beige. That is the American room.

Reading

I reading Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. It’s definitely a text I’m going to be return too. Pouring over and reflecting on paragraphs in isolation. It’s been a heady meal all in one go. Planning on re-reading/returning to The Cloud of Unknowing next to contrast it against Devine Love’s very form and imagined audience VS The Cloud’s instructional form.

I moved straight on to Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History by that cool goth historian off the TV Dr Janina Ramirez. Apparently she made a show about Julian of Norwich in 2016. I’m going to try and find it once i’ve finished the book.

I’ve made it 25% though Dawn of Everything. Much like Graeber’s Debt I think this book will have a long tail of deep influence in pop culture. The two books taken together will be remembered as some of the most important popular works of the early 21c.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Martha Skye Murphy

New artist to me. A friend recommended Martha Skye Murphy to me the other day and I’ve been enjoying the back catalogue of singles immensely. My favourite track is definitely 2021’s Stuck from the Concrete Ep

The lead single Concrete from the EP is also wonderful. Breathy, reverb drenched, sometimes processed vocals float over landscapes of sound. It’s so carefully constructed. Listening to the production of the tracks brings to mind the sonic equivalent of hanging weights on a Calder-esq sculpture. Each new element effecting the balance and ‘poise’ of the whole work.

Really so pleased to have been introduced to Martha Skye Murphy. I think the work is best suited to making time to listen to the EPs as complete works. The Concrete EP is lovely to stick on and go for a walk. I’ve been enjoying it whilst walking along the Thames in the 4.30pm failing light of the January sky.

Remember Kids:

The post Cinematic Moments appeared first on thejaymo.net.

With all the discussion about Metaverse I’ve instead been obsessed with thinking about the reverse: ‘printing out the internet‘.

I saw my first FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) 3D printer about a decade ago. A janky homebrew RepRap in the corner of a cold concrete London maker space cheerfully spooling out an iPod Touch stand.

Seeing it operate in person, I was skeptical about some of the wilder claims being made by proponents of decentralised manufacturing at the time. But my friend Mark had just made the documentary The Man Who Prints Houses and I have remained optimistic about the technology in the longer term. It was interesting (for example) to see my old school’s design department spring up as a fab lab during the UK’s PPE crisis last year.

Watching the noisy machine squirt one layer of melted plastic out after another a decade ago I knew that this technology would change at least one industry:

Table Top Wargames.

A Maturing Technology

Just weeks later I bookmarked a piece in 2012 from The Guardian about British tabletop war game manufacturer Games Workshop issuing DCMA take downs to The Pirate Bay and 3D file sharing site Thingiverse.

3D printing is an emerging technology, but it has attracted a passionate community of hobbyists who design and build a variety of objects. Some are designed from scratch; others are generated from 3D scans of existing items.

The community recently had its first run-in with copyright law when tabletop battle games company Games Workshop issued DMCA takedown notices against Thingiverse, a site where “makers” share designs.

Games Workshop spokesman Kyle Workman said: “We are very protective of our intellectual property, and our legal team investigates each issue on a case-by-case basis.”

Asked whether the company might ever consider selling its own digital 3D designs, he said: “That would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment.”

I’ve been following 3D printing and Tabletop Miniatures ever since.

2010-19

It’s worth fast forwarding though the last decade of 3D printers, to give a sense of just how quickly the technology has matured. Throughout the TwentyTeens 3D printers improved rapidly. A key focus being resolution. I.E. reducing visible layer lines and increasing detail levels in the print.

Whats fascinating about 3D printers as a consumer product category is that their history can almost entirely be tracked via Kickstarter.

B9Creator were the first out the gate in 2012 with their (for the time) high resolution FDM printer. I’ll admit the $2,375 price point was not very consumer friendly, but much cheaper than any commercial/industry alternatives at the time. It also showed that there was a nascent consumer market for this technology.

Unsurprisingly it was a smash hit.

Later in 2014 FDM printing was joined by a sister technology: SLA printing (Stereolithography).

Unlike the kind of 3D printing you may be imagining where material is laid down by a nozzle squirting hot plastic on to a base plate (Fused Deposition Modelling), SLA printers use a laser projected into the bath of UV sensitive resin though clear glass from underneath.

The laser light will semi-cure photosensitive resin from the underside of the vat. Meaning the model is printed from the bottom up with a base plate rising from a bath of resin rather than additive top down.

Two years after the B9Creator Formlabs launched their first ‘affordable’ SLA printer in 2014 at a backer price of $2499.

Developments continued quickly with MSLA printers coming on scene – reducing costs further.

MSLA stands for Masked Stereolithography. Replacing the expensive laser arrangement at the bottom of the resin vat with an LCD panel. This panel then essentially exposes a stencil of the object one layer at a time as the baseplate rises.

It’s probably worth situating SLA and MSLA printing as a consumer technology against in the industrial timeline. Patents on SLA printing expired in 2007. Around the same time, the smartphone revolution bought the cost of LCD screens with ever increasing pixel densities and brightness output down making MSLA possible.

We can for our purposes of this post skip over the next half decade. Suffice to say that things improved every year. It’s worth checking out this 2018 discussion on the state of 3D printing hosted by the Youtuber 3D Printed Tabletop if you want to understand this ‘middle period’.

If a resin printer cost $2.5k in 2014 – what can you get for your money on Kickstarter today?

In October 2021 the ELEGOO Jupiter was funded to the tune of $4.7 Million dollars. At a discounted backer price of $740.

The printer boasts 6K LCD screen resolution and has a print bead size of 12.8″. Meaning you can print absolutely massive a models / objects or lots of models all at the same time).

This machine in all respects is an absolute monster, very impressive.

But we should instead turn to its older, smaller, more important cousin.

2020

The Elegoo Mars 2 launched in 2020 at a $300 price point. Cheaper than a games console.

It’s to my mind one of the most important pieces of hardware to know about right now to get a sense of where 3D printing is going in the coming decade. (See Signals section)

Since most of this post is about wargames miniatures specifically; it would be remiss of me not to note that the hobby/industry had an absolutely massive year in 2020. I wonder would could have happened to cause people to have lots of free time, spent largely indoors, and find painting little plastic models meditative and relaxing? 🤔

That said of course, wargaming is still a nerdy enough hobby to get you publicly ridiculed for admitting being a fan on the UK’s biggest television chat show. No matter how famous you are.

In one of those surreal months (which I assume also happens in other product niches) almost all the wargames Youtubers I follow received the ELEGOO Mars 2 Pro for sponcon review in 2020.

Many of them had never used, owned or thought about owning a 3D printer before. Turns out almost without exception – all love them loved it.

Luke from Geek Gaming Scenics in the video above for example makes it clear that using the Mars 2 convinced him that 3D resin printing was a viable consumer technology. He now makes videos on the subject all the time.

The ELEGOO Mars 2 is currently £250 with a discount voucher on Amazon – though I have seen it on-sale for as low as £180 (~$250) !!! High resolution 3D printing is now in the home for less than the cost of a last minute return train ticket from London to Nottingham.

It’s worth returning to that 2012 statement from Games Workshop.

Asked whether the company might ever consider selling its own digital 3D designs, he said: “That would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment.”

In just 8 years the ‘nearly impossible‘ has become ‘completely possible’.

2021

If 2020 was the year that 3D resin printing arrived then 2021 was the year the 3D printing and table top wargames ecosystem exploded.

In May of this year I took a screenshot every promoted story I received on Instagram advertising 3D digital files of toy soldiers for home printing.

As you can see from the image there’s: Patreon’s, Kickstarters, Online Stores, and more.

Want a model for your historical wargame? A Dungeons and Dragons game? Replacement pieces for Monopoly? Lost a piece of your model plane? It’s all now right there at your fingertips to download and print at home.

Of course, if you don’t want to buy lots of models, or just have a single model in mind and can’t find exactly what you are looking for – you can find a model closest to what you want and kitbash a bunch of models together in Blender (more on this later).

OR you can head over to heroforge.com and design your own model in your browser and receive a week later it in the post.

@justmakesstuff

I must at this point shout out Justin Coquillon AKA @justmakesstuff. Justin, kindly gave an hour of his time over Zoom in late August 2021. He spoke to me all about his 3D printing, tabletop wargaming, digital kitbashing hobby.

Look how cool his models are! All kitbashed digitally, printed and painted at home.

Amongst the things we chatted was about how he got (back) into painting table top miniatures during lockdown 2020. “I was getting into painting larger things like busts and stuff, and I had a few friends online who would occasionally, for the cost of resin, send me a larger scale print.“

He got his 3D printer in February 2021 [it was] “182 pounds when I bought it, I’d been looking at them and they were 300, 350, just few weeks before”. Initially he was just focused on the printing things. 3D printing is almost a whole hobby by itself. Lots of details have to be attended to and the learning curve for quality prints is one of experience and practice.

As his hobby continued Justin fell back into the Warhammer: “I’d been buying models on eBay for cheap and snapping the heads off, stripping the paint and then buying a pith helmet and heads from Anvil Industry and sticking them on. I’d worked out that with a good batch of models off e-bay and buying the heads, was about £1.50 a trooper.

Then I realised ‘oh’ I have this thing I bought to print busts and large models with… Maybe I could print some heads.

So I found a set of heads online and that was a game changer. Then I started to find that there were whole modular infantry kits (…) So I just started exploring those. It’s very much just a mix and match. I’m just mashing a couple of STLs together most of the time.”

Big thanks to @justmakesstuff for his time and insights on our call.

3D printing at home at the level of quality the consumer printers have reached has opened up so much possibility for model makers, kitbashers and artists of all kinds.

The cost of printing models however (given the price of the printer) is still something up for debate given the cost of entry. But one bottle of resin is about the same price as a box of 10 models from a major manufacture the overall cost savings compound pretty quickly!

Market Places

Discussion in my part of social media this year has of course been dominated by NFT’s and the apparent ridiculousness of JPG sales.

Meanwhile quietly, market places to buy and sell 3D digital objects have been maturing. cgtrader passed its 1 millionth user a year ago.

Market places for digital .obj & .stl files for 3D printing are essentially the same market places that serve the video games, advertising and VFX industries. Whilst different hubs/sites cater for different users, most files are can be used across multiple contexts with some finessing.

Head over to cgtrader, 3D export, TurboSquid, Cults 3D, or Thingiverse, and browse around to get an idea of the scope of whats for sale or free download.

The latter are more oriented to the printing market, selling pre-supported STLs for printing. The former provide high, medium and low poly versions of digital objects for virtual environments and prodcution.

CGtrader is a market place where table top miniature designers can sell access to their work alongside artists who create kitbash spaceship collections that end up in Netflix TV shows.

Myminifactory

Then there is the UK’s myminifactory.com. Based in Brick Lane, London, UK.

My Mini Factory caters exclusively for table top miniature designers and the audience(?), consumers who want to print their work.

MMF is not only a marketplace focused on 3D printing tabletop miniatures a store front.
It also provides integrations to manage Kickstarter pledges and the infrastructure to distribute/claim 3D files after a campaign ends.

I also believe they have a Patreon integration as well as offering their own subscription services directly on the site.

MMF is a powerhouse in the 3D printed miniature space. It’s an important ecosystem and IMO represents the fullest expression of whats going on in this space.

I remember speaking with a member of the MMF team way back in 2013/14 at a social event. I have been totally blown away by where they are at 2021. I’d love to go visit their office at some point and chat about where they see all this going.

Creator Economies

There seems to bee three main ways that artists currently make money in the 3D printed table top community. Similar how most people trapped in the #supportnet make a living too.

Kickstarter campaigns to fund an entire miniature collections, Patreon’s that drop files for new models every month fleshing out a collection / army of models, or selling digital files directly.

• Kickstarter campaigns generally fund single (or group of) artists to produce a complete collection of around 30 unique models. Rewards will range from access to a subset of complete total, the whole collection, or offer discount codes for previous models made by the artist(s). Some campaigns will partner with 3D printing workshops (see scaling up below) so those folks without printers can order printed models. 
• Patreon. These of course provide more stable income for the artists. They are usually priced at about $15 a month. Supporting a creator will mean access to a release of 5-10 STL files monthly moving forward. Some artists will also offer access to the complete historical collection of models by them after one month (which is a stonking good deal). Or immediately at higher levels of support.
• Lastly, of course you can sell single model files directly on MMF or similar.

It’s interesting to see the types of licences that these artists uses on their files. If you work in NFT / Smart contract space its worth thinking about too.

Some files are licensed as creative commons, with attribution, no derivatives, others are licensed with derivatives, non-commercial. Others are licensed as all rights reserved, but with specific allowance for derivatives if it’s for home use. Others say no derivatives at all. 

In addition to license types, there’s a whole rabbit hole of the types of files on offer.

Most 3D printable table top models if bought by my mini factory or patrons come ‘pre supported’.

Whilst objects are printed layer by layer (either by MSLA or FDM), some parts of a model may droop without material holding them up during the printing process. Pre-supported models essentially mean that scaffolds are added to support the model which can then easily be removed after printing.

Some models – especially super high detail ones for use in virtual environments – are designed without printing in mind and come without scaffolds. These models will require the person printing to add them themselves. I understand that this is more of an art than a science. But free tools like meshmixer from Autodesk will get anyone 90% of the way there with just one click. 

What’s interesting to me is that there is a huge market for digital objects at all.

What a world we live in where artists can make a living from designing toy soldiers for people to print at home.

Youtubers like Lukeswayoflooking document their whole design process and serve as inspiration for others to give it a go.

The skills required to learn Blender or Maya etc are all transferable from the virtual to the printable.

As the creation of virtual objects and worlds is becoming a key element of online entrainment. From Vtubers, to Roblox, people are growing up in a world where the skills required to manipulate the virtual are just accessible, simple and available. I think about Myspace’s low key introduction of HTML and CSS to a whole generation and wonder what the world of the Metaverse is actually going to be like.

Nothing like Mark’s metaverse vision I’m sure.

Return of Small Studios

With the rise of Patreon and crowdfunding, indie TTRPGs and table top wargames are being created, made and released and played by more people than ever before.

We are almost coming full circle. For almost all of table top wargaming and the history of toy soldiers, the design and production of models were done by boutique, small scale miniature manufacturers. In early days of Dungeons of Dragons this was especially so.

As an aside, if you haven’t read Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games or any of Jon Peterson’s books on the early history of D&D – I can’t recommend them enough.The importance of boutique miniature manufacturer’s catalogues and newsletters/zines has a whole fascinating history of its own.

We are, I think, after a few decades of big names selling rulebooks and miniatures as complete sets/systems, returning to the kind of miniature manufacturer agnostic world.

For example: The recent smash hit game Gaslands is based around kitbashing post apocalyptic hot wheels cars bought from the pound shop. There are also loads of 3D printable parts online designed for the game sold under an interesting licence .

Gaslands designer Mike Hutchinson recently released another game called A Billion Suns.

Like his previous game, it launched without miniatures. But people were encouraged to model/print their own. Hutchinson chose to licence people to design and sell models for the game under the condition of becoming an ‘Interstellar Merchant‘

Becoming an Interstellar Merchant

Becoming an Interstellar Merchant is easy: just support the Planet Smasher Games Patreon at the relevant $4 a month level. You are a Friend of Gaslands for as long as you are a current Patreon backer. I’ve also added a “Friends of Planet Smasher Games” discounted bundle tier if you wish to produce and sell accessories for any of my games.

https://www.patreon.com/planetsmashergames

Becoming A Billion Suns Interstellar Merchant does not constitute a licensing agreement for the A Billion Suns IP. By becoming A Billion Suns Interstellar Merchant, your accessories are not “official”, but it basically means that we’re cool, you are free to use the brand name “A Billion Suns” in your listings and keep any money you make from selling your accessories, and you can advertise through the official website, Facebook groups etc.

Interstellar Merchants

Check out all the awesome Interstellar Merchants here.

There are now also rising companies like One Page Rules. OPR release all their rulebooks for free as PDFs. They have also begun to partner with 3D artists to release printable STL files for OPR’s game factions.

OPR at first glance seem to skirt very close to the wind / line when it comes of trademark and copyright vis a vis Games Workshop’s IP. But from interviews with the creator he seems confident that space space battle brothers, robot legions and wormhole demons is sufficiently generic sci-fi to not get legally blasted from existence.

OPR is also interesting to me as a contemporary business. Essentially a company with a Website comprised of three links:

• A Patreon
• A Google drive of PDFs
• A My Mini Factory link

Talk about lean.

Scaling Up

The cost of manufacturing has always been the barrier to entry for games in this space – injection moulding and even small scale silicone casting doesn’t come cheap.

But as explained above, we are in a whole new world. Not only can consumers print the game’s rules at home, but also the models too.

Alongside the advances in 3D print technologies, there have also been big advances in small scale silicone mould and small batch manufacture. In addition to Tabletop Wargaming companies, the market for machines that can do small batch quantity manufacturing has also been driven by a similar explosion in popularity of the Board Gaming.

There is currently huge demand for relatively small batch production and manufacture capacity for resin parts. It make sense for models and figures, token and laying pieces to be made locally given the challenges that creators face in securing small batch production of boxed games, or miniatures in China even before the pandemic.

I’ve been reading cardboardedison.tumblr for a while and it regularly links to useful advice and breakdowns for creators in this regard.

SIOcast

There are now machines like Siocast which also has been advertised to me on instagram lol. The advertising algorithm clearly thinks I’m interested in small scale manufacturing fo wargames models and its right – I am!

SioCast Master moulds are made from 6 – 8k 3D printed resin parts at 0.01 layer resolution and production quality moulds are made using a silicone elastomer.

SioCast is essentially a small scale injection moulding machine that uses a thermoplastic. Producing high quality models in a fraction of the time that resin printers would. Whats more the thermoplastic used by SioCast machines is recyclable.

Whilst high quality 3D printing at home with resin is now possible – with the resolution of the parts/objects they can print increasing every year – it hadn’t occurred to me until I saw the SioCast machine that large volume/scale manufacturing in this space using 3D printers would still be slow and expensive (if only for the amount of time it takes a 3D printer to run AND the amount of print failures can occur regardless of how experienced one is.)

It is really interesting to me anyway that a line can be drawn from the RepRat’s promise of distributed manufacturing, to a small scale injection moulding machine that can fit in a garage, or maker space. 

In addition to this sort of small scale studio manufacturing with SioCast, there is also a growing cottage service industry. For example companies like Forsters Foundry offer 3D printed models from partnered artists in the UK.

Digital Kitbashing

I’ve already mentioned heroforge.com. The tool that lets you to design your own custom table top model in browser for your next D&D campaign and have the printed model shipped right to your door.

During the summer this year I wanted to try kitbashing some models for myself.

I’ve been learning Unreal Engine and Blender since the summer. I’ve also been playing with Adobe Medium learning to natively sculpt in VR.

Inspired, I wanted to try and kitbash my own models. So I downloaded some cc-nc-sa licensed Monopose skeletons and some cc licensed medieval weapons from Thingiverse.

Once I had a rough grasp of Adobe Medium I set about kitbashing some models of my own. Importing the files into Adobe Medium was all very simple and the process of cutting up and reposing models in VR is very intuitive.

In the two videos below you can see me messing with the weapon for the Skeleton warrior.

Each video was a separate session. Here’s some more in progress images because who doesn’t like documentation?

I talked about this in a podcast, but teenage me has had his mind blown.

The idea that I can make my own models, kitbash 3D files in VR, tidy them up in Blender and then get them printed out has been a revelation. I KNOW if I was a teenager right now with plenty of time this is what I’d be doing with my life. I’d be locked inside 3D modelling software sculpting, making and kitbashing every weekend and after school every day.

Actually tying it out has opened up not just what’s possible, but what is possible for ME to achieve myself, in my own home, with very little experience at all. I’m incredibly lucky and stoked to have all this at my fingertips.

It turns out however that after about 10 hours of following basic Blender tutorials on youtube, its much quicker and easier to do this short of thing there rather than in VR. But thats not the point.

Combined with the ongoing Puppet Project, 2022 I think is going to be a very DIY / learning / practical skills year for me. I’ve really interested in making / doing some shit!

Signals Beyond

Beyond tabletop miniatures and board game tokens I also want to note that consumer MSLA 3D printers like the Mars2 are also becoming new lynchpin technologies for the DIY manufacture of Printed circuit boards.

One of the biggest bottle necks for the design and prototyping of hardware is the time and expense bottle neck around having a PCB made and returned. A drone project team I worked with a few years ago were using RushPCB for their boards in the UK who offered a 24 hour turn around time from payment to shipping.

I should note that the example video above of using a MSLA printer to prototype PCBs at home/in a lab only demonstrates 1 circuit layer (in contrast to up to 32 in commercial prototyping). I am extremely interested in how PCB and 3D printing is going to evolve in 2022.

A hugely important development in the Open Hardware / Arduino scene.

I’d like to speak to anyone experimenting with putting exotic UV cured materials into 3D printers. There are so many epoxys as resins out there who knows whats possible when used off book.

Printing Out The Internet in the 2020’s

• Extending the trends beyond table top wargames and boardgames: The collectibles business in general is going to be in for a tough ride in the next decade.
• As these technologies evolve the borders between digital / physical / metaverse are going to be quite porous.
  • Cosplay and custom costume jewellery is an area I may look into next year.
• I already have written about the Iron Vertex creator guild for vTubers. But…
  • Demand for virtual objects is going to continue to increase.
  • Demand for custom virtual gear, worlds, and environments is going to increase.
• Printing out the Internet is going to be a really weird creative space.
• Miniature agnostic war/board/games supported by community creators/fandoms is going to grow. Real big IP’s may come from this space.
• How long until major companies that produce miniatures and collectables end up having online file stores?
  • NFTs, authentication and file signing is a really interesting space here for semi-DRM. prof of file ownership etc.
• I need to buy a house just so I can have a 3D printer LMAO.
• I expect 2022 will be a year for really big copyright battles over 3D printed virtual objects.
  • Maybe ripped right from video games? or perhaps direct film assets.
• Popular Front’s 2020 Documentary about 3D printed guns in Europe is nuts.
  • The cost of Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) is rapidly falling. Expect to hear a lot about 3D printed metal parts in the 2020’s
  • I wouldn’t steal a car but I might download and print parts for one.
• 3D printing beyond consumer technology is rapidly evolving. Combined with developments in Synthetic biology things are going to get very weird. Skin, body parts, organs, etc

Printing out the internet is also a subject i’m interested in general.

In 2022 I’m going to start a physical newsletter sent via snail mail 4 times a year to people subscribed to thejaymo.net at £5 monthly and above.

The post (3D) Printing Out The Internet appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This week I had my first full game of Kill Team. I should be playing it every two weeks now on the regs and I can’t wait.

The rules are nowhere near as clear as the new 40k Edition. So the first turn of our first game went by.. slowly. The line of site and terrain rules are baffling written. But one you realise that the game is supposed to simulate lil dudes charing about in a close combat killzone it makes way more sense.

I can totally see how a game of Kill Team 2021 can last 20-30mins once you know what you’re doing. Hoping to get up to about 3 games in one evening.

It was super fun, and the rule set allows for some really cinematic moments. Far more so than the previous edition did as ’40k lite’.

I can’t wait to play more games and get really into the weeds of the games mechanics. I have a feeling that Kill Team 21 is going to get even better once the simulation is out of the way.

I think I might spend some time building my own list in the next week or so and orderup a boat load of models to convert a KT up with. For the first time in my life, having played this game I’m thinking of going to a Warhammer tournament. 😬

New Pixel 6 arrived. It’s a big step up from my launch day Pixel 3 which was on its last legs.

I have no complaints at all about this new phone. Battery is easily lasting 2 days under my usual sub 2 hours of daily use when I’m working form home.

I’m sure that the people complaining about battery life on the pixel 6 all use their phone’s an unhealthy amount.

The new camera is fantastic. I’ve yet to play with all the new modes and features, but when I do I’m sure I’ll take a banger. I’m definitely going to do a photo-a-day/365 project in 2022. I’ll probably post the daily photos I take as a weekly post? Probably as a separate post the weeknotes. When again, posting them daily feels like a better use of the blog as medium.

Still haven’t seen Dune.

Was supposed to go to the iMax but I couldn’t bring myself to go, so I bailed and wasted my ticket. I don’t want to be complicit in the any culture war bullshit around it. Not gonna play.

Permanently Moved

What Happens When the Queen Dies?

The reality field produced by the British State will come crashing into contact with the State of Britain. 

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Spreadsheetin’
• Gearing up for Nanowrimo 2021
• Explaining to clients that the metaverse isn’t VR.
  • Facebooks rebranding to Meta, and using that fucking terrible CGI concept video to explain the metaverse has set the public imagination back 5 years at least.
  • Anyways TLDR If you think Facebook rebranding as Meta is bullshit, you should probably learn about and get into Web3.

Dipping the Stacks

How Nostalgia Can Hide Dark Political Realities ‹ Literary Hub

Across the West, politics in the 21st century has been dominated by two features: nostalgia-based populism and identity politics. Not only has liberal democracy, with its pleasant mix of consumer culture and rights-based individualism, failed to triumph, in many places it’s in retreat, while the hope for a technocratic political culture based on reason, science, and expertise is increasingly forlorn.

An Oral History of ‘Счастливы вместе,’ the Russian Remake of ‘Married… with Children’

Of course, we changed the name. In the Russian version, Happy Together is more positive, and we did that because we couldn’t literally translate the name Married… with Children. In America, the saying “married with children” is like a stamp in your passport — it’s a social classification.

The Muslimness of Dune: A Close Reading of “Appendix II: The Religion of Dune” | Tor.com

My Arab friends wonder why it’s called science fiction. Dune, they say, is religious commentary. The thing that has often been aimed at it is that it is philosophical fiction, rather than science fiction.

What we can learn from “_why” the long lost open source developer · GitHub

“_why is our Picasso, or perhaps Dali,” says Software Architect Eleanor McHugh. “He would write beautiful code, code written just because it could be done, rather than to solve a particular problem. He wrote code because it was fun, and the code was justified by its own existence.”

Back To Windows – Transom

Apple has been on a downward trajectory for years. To borrow a phrase, Apple has given up. They are no longer a technology company, but a fashion company that specializes in phones and timepieces. Build quality has suffered and time spent at the Genius Bar has ballooned. The price is driven up by dumb features like digital touchbars. They are weighed down with bloatware. The obsolescence is planned.

Reading

As a gesture toward the season, this week I listened to the audio book of Sepulturum by Nick Kyme. Part of the Warhammer horror series. It’s more of a novella, two main plot points of view that explodes into a huge cast of characters only to funnel back down again as the horror occurs.
I think it’s one of Kyme’s best stories for Black Library. Really grimdark. The writing style he employed in this story really suits him.

I’m still reading the Letters of J R R Tolkien. Just a couple of letters every night before bed. My favourite type/theme of letters included int he collection are the woe is me exchanges with his publisher. He seems in constant state of agitation about everything. Proofs, Poor quality map reproductions, the cover, the font etc. So funny.
The letters sent to early readers/fans responding to questions about ‘the world’ are the most fascinating – and the main reason i’m reading the book.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

My Koss Pro4aat headphones dies this week – I may need to hold a funeral for them. Just under 12 years of daily service. 1000’s of hours of use. The right hand headphone has died, and these Koss headphones aren’t very serviceable.

Not having a set of studio reference headphones in the house has kinda put me off listening to music some what. I’m thinking of getting a pair of AKG K702’s and using a slimline cable, but the don’t have a closed back, can’t really wear them out and about.

I honestly don’t know what to do now… Any recommendations out there for a pair of studio reference headphones – comments below!

Anyways. I’ve listented to this album a few times this week

Naya Beat Volume 1: South Asian Dance and Electronic Music 1983​-​1992

This album collects lost and under appreciated tracks from South Asian music scene. All the tracks hover around cosmic disco and electro and its FANTASTIC.

Musarrat – Hosh Nahin Hai Ji Mujhe

I love the bouncy drum line on this track. So catchy. Been singing it loads.

Sheila Chandra – The Awakening

This is the opening track, and I think it might be my favourite. Fantastic album so good, a real window into a different time and place.

Remember Kids:

The post First Full Game of Kill Team appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I ain’t changed a bit. What a fricking nerd..

Been a whole lotta nerd shit this week. Went round my mates on Monday to get the “killzone plastictown” underway ready for the box set arriving. Scrimbad has since been sending me regular updates from the paint table.

I’m really excited for this new version of Kill Team.

2018’s Kill Team (KT18) Second Edition was basically 40k lite. It had a solid ruleset and made for an interesting small scale game, I played it a bit but the folks I played with were in north london and by the time I joined the group were basically operating their own fork of the game to cover all the house rules.

Following the inclusion of Combat Patrol in 40k 9th edition last(?) year, KT18 felt a little redundant as a product line. Apart from the whole: Buy one box of 20 models and get going. A fact that I know is a tantalising prospect for some of the 30something geeks that I will be attempting to convince at the BBQ I’m going to later today.

Its main competitor is Stargrave which given its model agnostic ruleset is a slightly different beast.

I did a first pass on KT21’s rulebook last night and it’s a whole different game. Alternate model activations and proper tit-4-tat melee combat. It seems like Games Workshop have tried to create the best 40k skirmish game it could. I have the core rulebook for Necromunda but I’ve never played it, KT21 feels a happy mid point between that and 40k. No where near as simulation heavy as the gang war game, and way more detailed than KT18’s 40k lite.

One small thing: GW’s decision to use symbols – ▲, ●, ■, and ⬟ – for distances corresponding to 1, 2, 3, and 6 inches in the ruleset is baffling. I’m going to need play a bunch of games to get my head around it. Luckily, I’m going to be playing KT21 regularly now. Once fluent in the games Mechanics and Grammars, it’s apparently about 3 games in 2 hours. Which seems like a lot of fun and way cheeper than going to the pub.

Going round friends houses to play this fortnightly also has the added bonus that the only awkward social interactions I’ll need to deal will be my own and my friends.

We are considering setting up a stand alone hobby blog to document all our games, and possibly post our own custom scenarios and house rules. I have a whole lot of chaos cultists on sprues that are crying out for a set of rules.

I’m having some issues related to my chronic disability. I’ve been on the waiting list for an outpatients procedure at the local Hospital for nearly a month and no letter yet. I’m going to ring my consultants office next week to see if it can be expedited at all. I’ve been uncomfortable since June.

Permanently Moved

The Prompt in Interactive Fiction and AI Art

Sketching out some ideas around the relation between the shared indistinguishable surface of interactive fiction games and using GAN’s to create art.
What comes out when I put this thing in? 

Thanks to the folks who sent through kind messages about last weeks episode. Really appreciated each of them, motivational.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I owe people emails, and replies. I’m so so sorry, despite appearances above, I have some stuff going on.
• Salvaged 5k words of writing I did in 2019 have been staring at it since
• A post tomorrow, but i’m going to be on panel at Futurecon next week, and Ars Electronica later in September.

Dipping the Stacks

The Life-Changing Magic Of Having “Good Parents”

Sometimes well-meaning, generally good parents still minimise their children’s emotions. “We can be dismissive of children’s emotions because they seem childish — we have our adult way of doing things and we think we’re more evolved,”

The surprising story behind the making of ‘Captain Planet’ | Grist

“Captain Planet!” he allegedly exclaimed to Pyle. When she asked who that was, he responded, “That’s your problem.”

The Truth Behind the Amazon Mystery Seeds From China – The Atlantic

It was hardly surprising that the station, upon hearing that a local man had not only planted mystery seeds but now had fully grown plants laden with mystery fruit

J.R.R. Tolkien 1964 interview (Subtitles) – YouTube

J.R.R. Tolkien interviewed by Denys Gueroult for BBC in 1964 (released 1971).

Genvid raises $113M for massive interactive live events like Project Raven | VentureBeat

Instead of being a game that you’re playing by yourself, it’s with millions of other people concurrently live.

Reading

I finished reading some Warhammer this week. Dead Sky, Black Sun by Graham McNeill. I started reading it in early July, back to back after finishing book #2 in the series “Warriors of Ultramar”. The Ultramarines series is supposed to be a fan favourite, but I have a suspicion that this fact might have more to do with the books being published in 2003 than anything else.

Still reading a chapter of ‘Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail” before bed. Like I said last week, It’s a wonderful book about writing. Full of stuff I wish I’d known when I was a kid.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Sugar Horse – The Live Long After

I tagged Sugar Horse – The Live Long After in my pinboard as ‘Doom’. But listening to it this week from front to back, it’s certainly more than that. Tracks like The Great British Death Cult drop in and out of melodic segments intercut with heavy riffs sent though what sounds like a Boss Metal Zone MT-2. Kinda reminding me of Romeo is Bleeding or something. Then theres atmospheric build tracks like Phil Spector In Hell. The title track The Live Long After sounds like a heavy version of Band of Horses – The Great Salt Lake with its reverb drenched vocals.

Then there’s tracks like Shouting Judas At Bob Dylan..

Doomy, groove. Love it.

james grew – Postscripts EP

james grew is a 3 piece Midwestern Emo band from LA. They sound like its 1999.

EP opener ‘at least you got away’ is a driving mathy punk track with some amazing little licks. Vocals remind me a bit of Pop Unknown occasionally. Points added for the ‘gaps’ love that shit.

It’s just a really solid all round Emo EP. At times Sunny Day, American Football, and Gloria Record. Charming and solid. I bet they have unpredictable live versions of these songs.

Remember Kids:

The post Kill Time appeared first on thejaymo.net.

28 Mag

I’ve been busy with work this week. But I did get chance to finally sit down and read Vol 2# of 28 Mag in its entirety.

Long time readers will know I’m a ‘little’ bit of a Warhammer fan. About 3 years ago my cousin told me he was back into Warhammer and immediately, so was I.

Of course when heading back in to the hobby as a grey beard in my mid 30’s I looked up all the old games I used to play on the inter-tubes. Checking out all the online communities that have continue to thrive with passion and love for old out of print table top war games. Very quickly I came across the hashtag #INQ28.

INQ28 started as an online community dedicated to playing the old 2001 Games Workshop 54mm miniature based Role Playing Game – Inquisitor. But due to the short life of the product line, very quickly it became played with the more traditional 28mm scale models.

Since then, the term / hashtag has been used to encompass alternative rulesets, or models made in the grimdark style based on the themes and and ideas of the original game. It is also more loosely applied to models made and converted for narrative games (my preferred type) and of course models made / converted and painted in the ‘Blanchitsu’ style. If you don’t know who the artist John Blanche is, lets just say he is as responsible for Grimdark as hr giger is responsible for scifi- horror.

Moving beyond this short history lesson, let me tell you about 28mag Vol 2.

28 Mag (Vol 2) is what happens when a passionate community come together to document their work and create something for others who are just as passionate.

Vol2 comes in at a weighty 186 pages. Featuring 48 Contributors wrangled by a team of 8 Volunteers.

The Magazine is chock full of concept artists, miniature photography, terrain making, sculpting guides, interviews and articles on rules and narrative game play.

Honestly, there is something to inspire and learn on every single page of the zine. It’s layout and design is also highly readable and very contemporary. A far cry from fanzines of old. The artists included are fantastic, and you can feel their enthusiasm for the setting both in their work and the spiel provided. And models featured. Well.. Go look for yourselves.

Even if you aren’t into table top miniature, I still highly recommend checking out the https://28-mag.com/ and its two issues thus far.

I feel there is a lot that could be learnt by other online communities and fandoms around the value of creating/producing documents like these. Many hobbies now live entirely online. Unless the community has an obsessive archivist a lot of content and amazing material is going to Succumb to bit rot.

In fact, I would love it if 28mag one day did a physical journal collecting PDFs into one big dead tree book. Perhaps 3 issues collected together or something and then crowed funded as a limited run.

I’m still reading the mighty tome that Is Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games by Jon Peterson. A great deal of his research relies very heavily on lithographed fanzines and newsletters. The more of that book I read, the more I suspect just how valuable ‘printing things out’ will become as we move into the future and historical investigations begin into our present.

Anyway if you are curious head over to https://28-mag.com/. If you like what you see, they have just launched. a Patreon. Garnering 58 patrons in just a matter of days (inc me).

Lockdown Week 2

Well. How is everyone doing? I must admit that this week in particular I have felt very blessed to live somewhere with a south facing balcony and garden.

Mr Robin and Mrs Robin who nest in next doors dilapidated ruin of a shed are back. It was nice to see them hopping about looking for bugs as I was sweeping up leaves earlier this week.

I’ll be speaking about meditation and prayer on a rune soup premium members stream tonight from 9pm UK time.

Permanently Moved

The Run Out

S03E12

Landslides and Avalanches, The Run Out, Accelerationism, Post Post Modernity. 

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

I’ve had quite a lot of nice feedback about this episode. I think the Run out has a lot of utility. I cut a section on the 2000 year run out of Christianity, and the 200 year run out from the french revolution.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Workin’ on fixing an institutions project management visibility and knowledge management. 1 day down 5 to go.

I’m thinking about a new approach to my book Land As Platform. Perhaps i’ll release medium form essays on the web domain ?

Dipping the Stacks

Watch Sparks’ Ron Mael Show Off His Hand Sanitizer Collection

GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary – YouTube

Jared Leto has started a CULT on an island and his followers call him ‘Prophet’

Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Are Filling Vacant Roles in Colombia’s Ecosystems

Reading

I’m Currently reading The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. It’s the story of young women who were highly skilled instrument and watch dial painters during the first world war. Long story short the paint they used contained radium – So it would glow in the dark. They licked their brushes to get them to a fine point between painting the dials. Very very bad things happened to them. and it took them a long time to get justice.

I’ve actually had to put it down a few times, not because its bad – quite the opposite. It’s brutale. The author Kate Moore writes very passionately and manages to bring the voices and personalities of these dead women alive. Along with this wonderful writing however, also comes the pain and suffering.

Music

The only thing I’ve listened to this week is Half Waif’s new album Caretaker. It’s not an album you can have on in the background. It demands your attention and rightly so.

Halogen 2 is my favourite track off the album:

Remember Kids:

The post 28 Mag appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 21, 2020

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Wargaming 🎲

S3E07

Space Marines are psychopathic lunatics who like to call each other brother a lot. 

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Warhammer 40,000

I’ve been holding off on making this episode for like 2 years. But today is the day. I’m going to nerd at you about Warhammer 40,000 for 5 minutes.

Before I begin though:

*Insert a mental image of one of those all registered trademarks are owned and property of Games Workshop disclaimers or whatever.*

I have been obsessed with the universe of Warhammer 40k since I got the 2nd edition boxed tabletop miniature war game for Christmas in 1994.

I had already read my Tolkien, Robin Jarvis, Alan Gardner and what not, but nothing prepared me for what this game was about at the age of 9. It corrupted my understanding of what a sci-fi universe ‘could be’ forever.

In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, there is only war. 

So grim dark in fact that the whole genre takes its name from that tagline on the box.

And that war is Humanities last war. 

This war costs the lives of countless billions of human soldiers of the Imperial Guard. They march gladly into the meat grinder with fanatical religious fervour In the name of the God Emperor of mankind. They are fighting for the survival of the species against the alien, the mutant and the heretic.

The God Emperor of course sits upon the Golden Throne. Deep under the imperial palace in the Himalayas. For 10,000 years the Emperor of Mankind has been trapped in unending psychic torture. His life sustained by a massive life support machine that utilises ancient and advanced technology. During those 10,000 years of agony, his physical body has withered to a corpse. 

He is attended by Tech Priests of the Cult of Mars. Passionate cyborgs who believe the flesh is weak and the Emperor is the living embodiment of the Omnissiah or the Machine God. Unfortunately for everyone, after 10,000 years of being wrapped up in the theology of technology no one really knows what is going on with the golden throne or how it works. 

What they do know however, is that to keep the Emperor’s soul alive 1000 psychic humans need to be sacrificed every single day. Their psychic life essence sucked out to sustain the bag of bones upon the carrion throne. 

Meanwhile, the Emperor guides the psychic beacon or lighthouse known as the Astronomican. More psykers are sacrificed next door by psychically singing songs of humanity into The Warp. The psychic dimension parallel to real space. Until they become burnt out husks of chard bone. 

The Astronomican is a light in the Warp. A mirror dimension of pure energy adjacent to our own. That energy is fuelled by all the emotions of all sentient beings that have ever lived. Time, space, and matter are irrelevant there. It is the world of nightmares made manifest.  

To cruise around space humanity conveniently has evolved mutants called Navigators. Humans who can see the currents of the Warp and navigate it guided by the emperor’s psychic beacon. To travel between the stars in 40k is to plunge oneself into the realm of literal nightmare.

10,000 years ago the Emperor launched the great crusade from terra to reconquer the previous human empire that existed during what is now known as the dark age of technology. The big man knew about the nature of the Warp though but didn’t tell anyone. Instead he insisted everyone be really rational and atheist.

Around this time he created 20 OP beings known as The Primarchs to serve him as sons, generals and convenient plot devices. Unfortunately lying about the existence of demons doesn’t really protect anyone and these infant Primarchs were spirited away by the four Chaos Gods.

After this disaster the Emperor creates Games Workshops poster boys:

The Space Marines. 

Badass genetically uplifted super soldiers clad in power armour. Genetically programmed to obey their Primarchs due to an implant known as the gene seed. Eventually the Emperor finds his sons one by one and inexplicably gives these emotionally damaged genetic superbeings their own legions to conquer the galaxy in his name.

Anyways, to cut a long story short, there is a big civil war when the Emperor’s favoured son Horus turns against him in what is known as the Horus Heresy. 60 something books later the Emperor strikes Horus down but is mortally wounded. Moments from death he is installed on the afore mentioned Golden Throne to drown in psychic pain for eternity.

Everyone keeping up so far?

Good

As I mentioned Space Marines are genetically uplifted super soldiers they literally humanities own Angels of Death.

Space Marines are essentially what happens when you take prepubescent boys from brutal hell planets, and make them fight each other to the death for the chance to become one. If successful then they go through puberty being hypno-indoctrinated whilst having 22 new organs implanted inside of them. Eventually they become 2 and a half meters tall with the physique of MMA fighters crossed with Biffa bins who literally know no fear.

Then they become warrior monks who fight with spaceguns AND swords. They fly around in huge enormous space cathedrals and only care about honour and doing their duty. Space Marines are for all intents and purposes psychopathic lunatics who call each other brother a lot. 

They aren’t a human trained to be a weapon, but a weapon with a human soul.

Speaking of souls, in the 41st millennium all technology has what is known as a Machine Spirit. Even the lowly lasgun has one. Humans now make weapons with machine souls for the defence of humanity.

AI is bad because it turned against humanity at some point in the Dune series. Instead complex tasks that need doing are done by lobotomised humans called Servitors who are stripped of their faculties and have their brains put to work operating gun turrets, delivering drinks, opening doors or whatever. Imagine if all the droids in Star Wars were replaced with the drooling cyborg corpses of criminals.

The vast galactic empire is run by the Highlords of Terra and the bureaucratic machine known as the Administratum. Imperial bureaucracy is so bad armies may be dispatched in response to a distress call only to arrive and realise they are over a century too late.

At some point due to the fact that fully half of the Emperor’s sons became literal demons, everyone ditched the atheism of Imperial Truth and started worshiping him as a god because faith in him somehow protects humanity from demons. 

The Imperium is a theocracy run by the space catholic church known as the Ecclesiarchy. Who praise the Emperor and keep the existence of demons secret from the galactic population with the aid of the Inquisition. Who will sometimes murder billions of people on a planet to keep that fact a secret.  

Humanity is at war with many foes, Aliens like Orks, essential green skinned barbarians modeled on 1980’s football hooligans, Space elves, space robots, space bugs, space gundams, space demons, and of course with itself. The space marines and members of humanity that have fallen to the dark gods of the warp.

The whole thing is a gigantic grim parody of what space opera should look like and it cracked my head open on that Christmas day. The whole universe is grim and depressing as hell.

I still find it a welcome palate cleanser in contrast to real world current events.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Warhammer 40,000 | 2007 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Had quite a sociable week last week. Spent one afternoon hanging out with my cousin and his wife in their place in Stoke Newington. Josh and I played a game of Games Workshop’s Shadespire.

I played as Gloomspite Gitz the Night Goblins (All hail the Bad Moon). The game is quite fun. I really enjoyed playing my first game of it. The goblins had more complicated rules so it was a little slow going learning it. I think if I played as them again I’d do a bit better tactics wise.

Hung out with a few friends on Friday. They brought their Shiba to the pub. He’s a good boy but also a menace.

The weekend was the Surbiton festival in the square outside my house. So 10 steps over the road all weekend was Beer, good vegan burgers etc. Its nice that after a decade or so Surbiton is forging a community via yearly events.

Permanently Moved – Never Tried To Put A Cat In A Box

“Mr Schrodinger I thought, had obviously never tried to put a Cat into a box before.”

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Dipping the Stacks

Good vibrations: I purified myself in a sound bath | The Outline

Locations Can Be Characters Too : Women Writers, Women’s Books

Whence comes nihilism, the uncanniest of all guests? | Aeon Ideas

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right

The Ministry

Still moving forward with the first draft of the book. Though i’m finding it difficult to hit the world count. Im not in a nanowrimo kind of mood with the sun shining outside. Instead i’ve reduced my daily target but also re-opened some old projects and i’m grinding them at 300 words a day. So making progress on multiple fronts.

I’m also happy to announce i’ll be speaking in The Hague at @Border_Sessions in early June. My talk is titled // Solarpunk And The Great Unfolding: Building Keystones Of Continuity

Reading

I’ve started re-reading ‘What is a dog’ by Lorna Coppinger and Raymond Coppinger

And Kenneth Olwig’s new book also arrived which I’m excited to dig into.

Music

Holly’s new album is out and I’ve had it on repeat since it dropped on Friday. Also the new Tim Hecker album.

Remember kids:

The post Cat In A Box appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Photo Courtesy of Kieran McCann

It’s Not Very Nice That

From 21 Feb – 27 Apr 2014 the Light House Gallery in Glasgow had an exhibition of current politically engaged graphic design and politics. The #Stacktivism logo was included which was nice of them – the logo was a collaboration between myself and my friend Andrew Brown

“With new ways of being political along with new media
 and modes of production at their disposal, contemporary designers navigate a space of increasing social unrest which has seen the eruption of civil insurrection in the UK, the revolutionary fervour of the Arab Spring and the furore following the Wikileaks revelations. The exhibition will examine the resurgence of political practice among designers since the mid 2000s and will consider their motifs and motivations, exploring the potential problems and possibilities of this diverse set of experiments.”

The noted internet utopian and my friend Micheal Oswell (Graphic Designer) gave a talk on the opening night. I thought it was good :  You can watch it here :: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/7238669/events/2778543/videos/42918142

Read a review of the exhibition by Grafik.

Nuclear Poker

Hexayurt & SCIM creator Vinay Gupta just released a card game called Nuclear Poker in collaboration with Ian Willey. This edition is limited via game crafter as it was a fund-raising effort to build a mini quad dome for this years EMF camp.

“Nuclear Poker is a fun game about the end of the world. Don’t worry, it usually happens only every three or four hands. The rules are a bit easier than Gin Rummy. A hand takes about ten minutes, sometimes less.”

The SCIM graphics (that were also designed in collaboration with Andrew Brown) Were included in the fancy Defcon3 edition of the game: (its in the middle at the bottom of the spread)

You can buy it here

The post Nuclear war.. It’s Not Very Nice That appeared first on thejaymo.net.