Finished! Trine 2

I normally don’t post about computer games, and think of the “Gaming” section of my blog as being about tabletop RPGs. However, both Mrs. Jiwaku and I have enjoyed Frozenbyte‘s Trine 2 quite a bit, so I’m going to make an exception: By “quite a bit,” I mean the degree of enjoyment, not the amount of play: it’s taken us  ages (and I mean, months on end) to finish the game, but that’s because we’ve rationed it to sessions of about an hour at a time, of only occasional frequency. Still, it’s been great fun playing together, and working out how …

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TEFL RPGing Aplenty

So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through… Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed up with a goblin and a dragon to beat his nemesis, then teamed up with a mysterious capoerista girl (yes, capoeira has made its way into the game) and the goblin village’s witch to take on the dragon …

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A Serving of Links

A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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Dread: Saigon Falls

So, the other night we played through my new scenario for Dread, titled “Saigon Falls,” with my housemates here in Vietnam. It was an interesting experience for a few reasons. For one thing: we were playing imaginary characters living in our real (shared) house. That was odd, because a lot of the story took place inside the house, and the geography of the house played a part in a lot of scenes. It was interesting secondarily because the characters were modeled on the previous occupants of the house we’re staying in, a group of frathouse morons who apparently had huge, …

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With a Side of Kimchi: How the Issues Played Out

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series With a Side of Kimchi: My First Brush with Fiasco

Note: This is my last post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here, but you can also see the whole series (in reverse order) on this page.  If you’ve read this far in this series, you have probably come to your own conclusions about how well the playset (and the thinking behind it) fed into the game as we played it. All in all, I think it worked quite well. In …

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With a Side of Kimchi: Our First Playthrough–Part 2

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series With a Side of Kimchi: My First Brush with Fiasco

Note: This is the fourth post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here. In my last post on this series, I left off just after the Tilt part of our playthrough: that is, at the moment when things start to go wrong, the Tilt section of Fiasco. Well, we pressed on without taking a break, because we were short on time. I would have preferred a short break, like the rulebook …

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With a Side of Kimchi: Our First Playthrough–Part 1

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series With a Side of Kimchi: My First Brush with Fiasco

Note: This is the third post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here. Also, apologies for the delay. I had a lot of grading to do last week, and some other responsibilities to take care of. I meant to get this posted sooner, but anyway, here it is now! So far, I’ve discussed what led me to Fiasco as a game, as well as preliminary thoughts on scenario design. Then I …

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New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

My essay is titled “Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency,” and it deals not only with my own experience using RPG-like systems in language teaching, but also how RPG-like approaches to interaction might be just what’s needed to fix Korea’s utterly broken TEFL paradigm… and maybe to instill a deeper sense of agency in young people whose literature, education, and upbringing seem specifically to stifle that sense. But I’ll add that it’s just as much about my return to gaming as it is about the stuff mentioned in the title… and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in there, too.

The WyrdCon Companion ebook is free to download from here.

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With a Side of Kimchi: Playset and Design Philosophy

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series With a Side of Kimchi: My First Brush with Fiasco

Note: This is the second post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of my recent brushes with gaming is the idea of design. I don’t mean game design, because after all in the last two games I’ve tried, Dread (written up here) and Fiasco, we’ve used rule systems designed by someone else. And those rules systems have worked …

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