Octopoly
Game Design Skill Tree
by Mark
Jason and I have run into this disagreement a couple of times now, both on and off the air. This week, Jason shared on the show that he doesn’t consider himself a game designer. He said something along the lines of, "I’m not going to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jason, and I’m a game designer. A podcaster, sure, but not a game designer.’" I don’t believe that’s true! Jason has designed at least three games: Jason vs Mark in our one-page game, our first attempts at designing games, Supermarket Game from our "3 Pitches" episode, and now his version of Nightmare Smashers, complete with rules, a prototype, and some exceptional stick figure art that has served as the test game for our design and playtest processes.
On some level, I understand where Jason is coming from with his stance on being a game designer. He—and we—tend to compare ourselves to giants in the game design world. We’ve studied Stonemaier Games, watched all of Will Wright’s Masterclass episodes on game design, and interviewed Leone, who just launched her first game, much in the way Jason laid out the vision for the scope and objectives of The Misplay. I think it’s fair to say that we have a long way to go, and our path to where we want to be is not linear, to say the least. But every step, every show, and every meeting we have with the team is a step on our journey as game designers.
I hope Jason will come around to seeing himself as a game designer. We don’t have to be giants right away, but we’re adding skill points to our game design skill trees.
Recording in the Dark
by Jason
There's something funny we haven’t quite found the right moment to talk about, but we think it’s time to share. Recently, we moved our recording studio (yes, Mark, “such that it is”), and the new space has a peculiar feature: the lights are on a timer. After a certain amount of “inactivity”—which apparently includes sitting still and recording—the lights just shut off. And it happens a lot, about every 10 minutes.
At first, we tried tossing things to get the lights back on. That didn’t work. Then we took turns getting up to reset them, but eventually, we just stopped bothering and now record in complete darkness. I can’t even see Mark, who's only a few feet away. Honestly, there could be a whole supercut of us shouting into the dark as the lights blink out.
But the shows keep coming, so when you’re listening, just imagine us sitting in a pitch-black room, trying to record without being able to see each other!
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