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01:05:25 long & 59.9 MB big

This episode is the first in a new endeavor by Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), wherein they create a new roleplaying game before your very ears! Over the course of the next howevermany weeks, for one hour each week, Joshua and Rob are going to design, develop, test, and publish a brand new roleplaying game from start to finish.

In this first episode, we talk about what the show's about, and decide what game we're going to design. Linkworthy stuff we mention:

- Joshua's earlier game, which makes you cry, Under the Bed
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Primetime Adventures
- R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
- The Penny Arcade series Automata
- Luke Crane's Burning Sands: Jihad
- John Wick's Houses of the Blooded
- HBO's Deadwood and Rome TV series
- The Mob Justice RPG
- Emily Care Boss of Black and Green Games
- George Carlin on "servicing the account"
- The Shockwave Rider
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- Sons of Liberty
- Neill Blomkamp
- PALEO-FUTURE
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- COINTELPRO
- The <a hrref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion]Project Orion[/url] engine
- Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- Eclipse Phase
- Charles Stross's Accelerando and Singularity Sky
- Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon
- The Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse
- The Cyberpunk RPG
- The question of whether squids have brains, revealed
- The game may take place over the course of the technological singularity
- Bruce Sterling
- An episode of my other podcast where I talk to Ron Edwards about finding who the protagonist is in play
- Ron's game Spione
- The Blomkamp film District 9
- The Big Three game design question
- Gardner Dozois edited Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
- GURPS Transhuman Space

The intro and closing music for this episode is "Gotta Whizz" by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal.

I will listen to this by the end of the week. I think this will help me play and understand Indie gaming better. Well I hope.

That's very kind of you, but all we do in this episode is decide vaguely what we want to design. However, there is something fairly fundamental to indie game design: once we agree on the flavor, we start to talk about what it's about. "Aboutness" is a big feature of indie game design.

downloaded

I enjoyed this a lot.

As the sort of person who craves this sort of creative conversation, this was really fun to listen to. I'm the sort of person who was making a reading list, and taking notes throughout. Now I have a few new books to read, as well as the knowledge that GURPS books give references.


As for the squid thing. I think you missed the point. No, given that they're very different creatures, with our current understanding, we couldn't implant a human brain into a squid...but that's not the point! The point was to explore the IDEA of putting a human brain in a squid. Maybe we copy the brain to a self-ordering neural chip that can simply interface with the ganglia? Afterall, we'll need something similar to that when we interface a chip with the lower half of our brain that controls our bodies.

In fact, that's how it could come about. Maybe the chip was designed to overcome the fact that our neural pathways are unique, by being able to re-order it's self to interface with any body...and THAT is when things get interesting. People suddenly realize they can take this chip, slap it in a dog, and BECOME a dog. The chip works too good, and people start using it for all sorts of weird stuff. Maybe two people can be implanted in one body, having to share it?

This gives you a 'what if the world were just like it is, but with this ONE new technology' starting point.

this is going to be one of those shows where I'm screaming at the recording the whole time. I love it. Keep it up.

Bishop: I'm glad you enjoyed the episode so much.

Joshua was right (at least, Wikipedia says so); squids have brains. However, more importantly, he was talking about putting a computer inside a squid, so my complaints largely go away.

I dl-ed the episode and put it on my mp3 player. Will be listening while driving around tonight and going to bed.

Human brain in a squid? That's preposterous. I'd have never said such a thing. No, I was talking about a community of simulated baby brains living in a community inside a computer that was inside a squid.

Geez.

We now have a good-and-functioning-propertly feed url.

well, my only point was that the idea was discarded because of ACTUAL SCIENCE. That should never happen.

Also, It led me to think about the book Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling, where it's centered around a character who's gone through an experimental procedure, which is deemed a failure in the end.

I was thinking that, if you made these characters a part of a failed experiment in a post-cyberpunk setting, you could get away with a lot in terms of trans-humanism. Maybe your characters are just part of the first trials of people, who can swap bodies, before the whole thing was written off as a failed experiment.

Now, you've got this small population of players, singled out as outcasts, in the middle of the singularity. I'd even stick them in some government housing or something, just to set the scene.

As for the podcast, I love that it's about the process of creation. I think making things is always more interesting than the final product.