thread: 2005-10-17 : Confronting the Reality
On 2005-10-17, luke wrote:
That was a fun night. Much needed for me. It's not often that you get to see a game designer in his natural environment. I was plainly amazed by how calm and accepting Vincent was of the chaos of family life—how he managed to seemingly glide right through it, while remaining in control of it AND while remaining sane enough to talk with me about whatever the hell was on my mind. Screw game design, THAT is hard.
The hospitality of the Baker pad is humbling. Thanks all—Em, Josh, Vincent, Seb, Eliot and especially Meg for making me an honorary member of the family for the night.
The "designing rpgs is hard" comment should be put in some context. So I'm sitting there at the dinner table. The debris of a delicious dinner strewn out in front of us. We're all warm and satisfied. We've been chewing the fat, talking idly about stuff. And I'm thinking, "I've got Vincent here! When am I going to get another chance for this? We should talk about GAME stuff." So I'm all like, "I've been trying out these little designs for other games here and there for the past year, but I keep going back to Burning Wheel. It's so comfortable and easy to design for BW. It's all done. It works. It's there. Designing other games is HARD."
And suddenly, we had consensus.
-L
PS Of course, across the course of the night Vincent tells me about the many brilliant irons he has in the fire and I'm thinking to myself, "Well, it's definitely harder for some people than it is for others!!"
