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In light of recent discussions, I wanted to jot down a few things that come to mind when what I think about SFWA has to offer game writers, because there’s actually quite a bit.
SFWA’s got plenty of other efforts in the works, but I’ll wait till they’re tangible before beginning to toot those horns. When they manifest, there’ll be even more reason to join. For now, this actually seems like quite a bit to me, and as I noted, for those game writers who dabble in fiction, there’s even more compelling reasons to join.
I’ll be at Gen Con at the beginning of next month and will be hosting a town hall open session for questions about SFWA and game writers there.
#sfwapro
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I am part of the Writer’s Symposium this year at Gen Con and looking forward to it. Last time I went to one, it was in Lake Geneva, and a whole lot tinier, I believe, than nowadays.
One lure is the chance to talk with my brother Lowell, who is (is it possible?) a bigger game geek than I. You may be familiar with his Age of Ravens website, which talks a lot about RPG history, design, and gamemastering.
The SFWA Board and the Game Committee are continuing to discuss how to best tweak the qualifications.
Marc Tassin has very kindly set up a town hall event at the con, where I can talk about the decision, listen to your feedback, and take questions. Here’s my schedule overall; if you’re interested in the game writing decision, please let me know if you’re going to miss the Town Hall and would like to set up a time to come and talk to me. I’m currently writing up another blog post on what SFWA offers game writers, because there’s quite a bit.
Here’s my schedule; I’ll be updating it as it fills up. Unless noted, an event still had tickets last time I checked.
Thursday
9 AM – attend Writers Symposium Opening Ceremonies
1 PM – Writer’s Craft: Writing Stories in First Person
2 PM – Short Fiction: Where to Start the Story
6 PM – Writer’s Craft: Story to Idea Workshop No tickets left
7 PM – Town Hall meeting about SFWA
Friday
9 AM – Writer’s Craft: Novel Writing 101 Very few tickets left.
10 AM – Character Craft: Hearing the Character’s Thoughts
12 PM – Signing
4 PM – attending a panel
7 PM – Attend friend’s reading and dinner after
Saturday
9 AM – attending a panel
12 PM – Lunch meeting
6 PM – Character Craft: Building Them Up
8 PM – Author Hangout Event
Sunday
9 AM – Read & Critique Session C
11 AM – attending a panel
12 PM – Private event
1 PM – Closing ceremonies
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So this morning one of the items that’s been hovering in the wings for a couple of weeks now finally went out, which was the announcement of the game writing qualifications. Since there there’s been a lot of stir and some questions about it. So here’s some answers.
Q: Hey, I’m a SFWA member! Why didn’t I know about this earlier?
A: I’m not sure. We publicized the vote before and when it happened, we had a SFWA chat hour devoted to it, and we’ve been talking about it on the discussion forums for over a year, I think, including calls for people to serve on the committee and make recommendations.
Q: Where did these qualifications come from?
A. From the Game Writing Committee, which researched the question first of whether or not we should put the issue to vote and then what form the qualifications might take. We included some game writers on the committee (its members are Jennifer Brozek, Steve Jackson, Richard Dansky, Rosemary Jones, Noah Falstein, and Jim Johnson with Matthew Johnson as the Board Liaison); the SFWA Board used their overall recommendations as the starting point.
Q: What are the qualifications?
A: Here you go. You can find them here too.
Games in any medium may be used for qualification so long as the game has a narrative element, is in English, and in the science fiction, fantasy, horror or related genres.
Prospective members working on games may qualify by showing a sale or income in one of three ways:
By making at least one paid sale of a minimum of 40,000 words to a qualified market, or three paid sales to qualified markets totaling at least 10,000 words. Game publishers may be designated as qualified markets using the already established process and criteria used to qualify fiction markets.
By showing they have earned a net income of at least $3,000 from a game that includes at least 40,000 words of text (not including game mechanics) over the course of a 12-month period since January 1, 2013. Income can be in the form of advance, royalties, or some combination of the three.
If no word count is possible, such as work done for a video game, prospective members can qualify based on one professionally produced full-length game for which they were paid at least $3,000, and with credits to no more than two writers clearly shown on the work.
Note that money from crowd-funding campaigns can be used as part or all of the required income once the game has been delivered to backers, but the amount that can be claimed cannot be more than the net income from the number of games produced and delivered to backers (calculated by the number of backers multiplied by the minimum tier which receives a copy of the game.) Work done for salary is not eligible.For membership questions not answered above, please contact Kate Baker, SFWA Director of Operations, at operations@sfwa.org.
Q: Why don’t game instructions and mechanics count?
A: Because we consider them nonfiction.
Q. Why don’t multi-book contracts count?
A. Actually, they do. They are not considered “salaried” but often given with contracts w/ advances.
Q: Why have you excluded work done for salary?
A: That was built into the original set of requirements and in talking to the committee, it seems to me to be an oversight. Looking back through discussions, the original thinking was in practice salaried writers are unlikely to qualify because of the rule against works by more than two authors.
So are we re-examining this in light of the many people pointing out the issues with it? Yep! The Game Writing Committee, the SFWA board, and a couple of staff members have all been mailing and talking back and forth about it most of the day.
Do I think it will get changed? *shakes magic 8-ball* All signs point to Yes — but I cannot say definitively. We’re discussing things right now, and I’m pushing to tweak that part.
Q: Why did you put this out if it wasn’t perfect?
A: Because this is how we make it perfect, by putting it into action, seeing how it works, and adjusting accordingly. It’s what we did last year when admitting indies and that also remains an ongoing process. If you’re a SFWA member who wants to help with that process or a non-member who wants to provide useful feedback, mail me at president@sfwa.org.
Q: Will there be a gamewriting Nebula Award?
A: Not at the 2017 Award ceremony, but stay tuned for further developments…
Q: Do you, personally, support gamewriters joining?
A. Dude. I’ve been playing D&D since I was 11 and that was the ancient, original set that came out right after Chainmail. I worked in a book/game store for close to ten years. My bachelorette party was a Call of Cthulhu scenario that turned out to be Paranoia by the end. Of course I support this. I love gaming, and a good game is a work of art. I’m really looking forward to what this change brings.
ETA: I tweaked a couple things to make them clearer. I cannot say what the Board discussion will result in, but we are certainly paying attention.
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This essay originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of Imaginary Realities.
In 1999, one of the Armageddon MUD coders, Morgenes, put in a command that has no effect on a player at all. It doesn’t get you gold (or obsidian, in our mud’s case), doesn’t raise your skills, doesn’t open the mystic portal to the realm of Waterdeep, or anything at all like that. Yet it was a change that would end up becoming one of the most popular (and most copied) commands ever on the mud, with at least one thread on our discussion board devoted to lavish praise of it from players and staff alike.
The command was ‘think.’ Its syntax is simple. The player types think ‘Woah, hey, did I just see a coin lying in the road back there?’ and gets this back: ‘You think ‘Woah, hey, did I just see a coin lying in the road back there?’ Easy, no? And at first glance, somewhat pointless.
To explain the immense popularity of this command, one needs to understand that Armageddon MUD is more than role play intensive. It’s role play required, and players who fail to stay in character or interrupt the flow of the vast interactive story that staff and players are spinning together usually mend their ways fast. Or are asked to leave the story, usually not in a particularly polite manner. Armageddon’s had the reputation of having the rudest immortal staff on the net for a long time, and while that’s changed considerably, there are, I suspect, staff members who still cherish that attitude to a degree. Players who aren’t staying in character find out fast that it’s not appropriate, or appreciated, on Arm.
Given this, think has proven invaluable to the players whose actions might be incomprehensible to the staff. If a staff member happens to be monitoring a player, and glimpses a few thinks here and there, they know what’s going on and why, precisely, that crazed Krathi is sitting out in the desert. She’s waiting for a vision, which she might choose to supply of her own accord via think, or with which a staff member might help. Why did that elf suddenly take off running? He thought he saw a mantis, gythka staff in mandible, approaching his hiding place. Think not only helps the player solidify what it is she’s doing, but lets the staff know what’s going on as well.
Beyond that, the command’s entertaining and helps the player flesh out the character. Is he thinking ‘Did that templar just look at me?’ If so, he may scurry back into the Labyrinth to hide from the unwanted attention. Perhaps while that wily gypsy is trying to sell her a luck charm, the player’s sitting there thinking hard on how to sell the gypsy out to the dreaded Blackmoon. Personal beliefs, spiritual beliefs, reactions to other characters – all of these, and more, get played out via the think command in a way they never were before. One of my favorite moments was monitoring a conversation between a pretentious noble and the commoner they were upbraiding, who while keeping their eyes downcast was thinking of the multitude of ways that noble could be humiliated.
I’ve seen other benefits as well. At least one character has accidentally typed talk instead of think, and found themselves saying aloud what’s in their head, leading to assorted and interesting results. It slows down some of the fast typists, who otherwise tend to overwhelm other players with the multitude of their emotes and speeches. Some players use it while sleeping, to create intricate and sometimes lurid dreams. We’ve some plans to tie think into the psionic skills on the mud eventually, though that’s a far and future notion. But the benefit to the role playing of the mud has been tremendous. I’d urge other role playing muds to at least…think about putting this command in.
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This essay originally appeared in the June 2001 issue of Imaginary Realities.
While finding new immortals for a MUD, MUSH, MOO or MURPE generally isn’t a problem, finding ones who will be a lasting and productive part of the team is. The first couple of weeks for a new staff member on a multiplayer game are the ones where the most mental adjustments are made, and the actions of other staff are often a crucial factor in whether or not those staff stick around. Armageddon MUD provides a good example of how this process can be made as painless as possible for both new and established staff members.
New immortals on Armageddon have undergone a fairly selective process to get there. When a gap is perceived, I post on our discussion board what the gaps are and who is being considered to fill them. In considering candidates, we look for the following:
At this point, I usually feel out the various candidates to see if there’s any of them who would not want to be on staff. Some people prefer to play, and do not wish to come on staff since the mystery of the game would be lost for them. If they’re interested and I haven’t seen past examples of their writing style, I might ask them to write up two or three possible small plotlines and send them to me as a sample. Other staff members post their impressions of the candidates or email in reactions to me, and in a week or so, we come to a consensus about which candidate(s) to approach.
Once that’s done, we set up the new immortal so they can start to read through our documentation, see what’s happening on the immortal discussion board, etc. Then they can log on and begin poking around, usually with another staff member walking them through the basic commands, questions, etc.
People come onto the Armageddon staff at the level of Storyteller. Storytellers run plots and clans, animate NPCs, build (etc). There’s a bewildering medley of options and expectations for a new immortal, so we assign a primary and secondary mentor, usually staff members who have been around for a while and who can answer questions. A lot of time they’re pointing people to the documenation.
We’ve got a lot of documentation, to the point where some new immortals have described it as daunting. But much of that documentation is devoted to helping the new imm: building and procedure guidelines, information about features in the world in the form of Who Is/What is pages and histories of the major clans and noble houses, tutorials for creating objects, NPCs, rooms, and documents. When a new immortal appears, I point them towards specific documents (the immortal discussion board, the guidelines for new staff members, the staff contract, and the mission statement) that I prefer that they read before logging on for the first time.
My feeling as far as new immortals go is that acclimating is much, much easier if they have some definite things they’re supposed to be doing. These should not be overly daunting. Running a clan, for example, requires a lot of organization and coming up to speed, so something smaller, such as helping with one aspect of a clan, or writing NPCs for it, may be a much better initial project.
Additional projects might include: asking them to come up with two or three mini plotlines to run, right off the bat; asking them to work with a plotline already in progress, which has already been planned and sketched out by someone who needs assistance running it; working with npcs in a particular area in order to get a feel for it; filling in gaps in the documentation. Generally, I try not to make these projects building an area, unless it’s a very small project that fits inside another one, like a couple of houses or an oasis.
Giving new staff feedback on what they’re doing is important, but during the initial stage this is not so crucial as is making sure they have resources and teachers who can help them get up to speed on things as painlessly and quickly as possible. Towards this end, make sure they know the rest of the team — I post on the immortal board to let people know who’s coming on board and what they’ll be working on. It’s good if the new staff member posts an introduction themself, with information like what they’re interested in working on, what their areas of expertise are, how they started playing the game, experience with past MUDs, and so on.
It’s also important that new staff know what’s expected of them, in terms of work and conduct. Documentation can help enormously here, but again, it’s having people that can explain things that is the most valuable resource.
In short:
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by Cat Rambo (Sanvean of Armageddon and Krrx
This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Imaginary Realities.
Lately, I have been contemplating how clans fit into role playing muds–particularly in getting players acclimated to the mud and helping them survive in that environment. The following conversation takes place between myself and a staff member of Armageddon mud who revamped a defunct clan, the T’zai Byn, and transformed it into an active and well-loved clan. The Byn is perhaps one of the best clans for new players, as well as an experience praised by the vast majority of its participants. (This is the first of three musings on the nature of clans, and what being in/running one means to a player/immortal, with the second discussing a cultural clan, where players begin the game having been born into the clan, and the third outlining some conclusions and problems with clans on role playing muds.)
Sanvean: First off, why were you interested in reviving the Byn, and what sort of clan did you want it to be?
Krrx: Probably the key thing is that I have a passion for the concept. It started when I played in the T’zai Byn a few years ago. I enjoyed playing in a fighting unit where you and your comrades faced death regularly, and had to work together to survive. While I have had very enjoyable times in other clans, I would still rate the Byn as the highlight.
Sanvean: What was the first step in getting them restarted?
Krrx: I outlined what the clan would be–what role and ‘flavor’ it would have. Of course, this was all documented. As the concept developed, the documentation changed. The documents today are quite different from how they were at first. I had ideas about what I wanted the clan to be like, but they didn’t ‘fit in’ as well as they could have with the game world. Nessalin had a big influence on how the clan turned out. The Byn are a lot more low class than I first planned, and the documents reflect that.
Sanvean: How did Nessalin change your intentions?
Krrx: My original vision was of an elite mercenary unit, with a lot of ‘high class’ things. Nessalin encouraged me towards a low class, gritty, down-and-dirty vision of the clan, which fit in better with Armageddon’s overall flavor.
Sanvean: As I recall, you were worried at first that they would not take off.
Krrx: Yes. When restarting the clan, it struck me that to achieve its goals effectively, the clan would have to have strict rules, and that people might not be able to handle it. One example is the regulation where members are not allowed into the ‘rinth, and are not allowed to leave Allanak unless certain criteria are met. The ‘rinth and the wilderness are two areas where a lot of new player characters die, because they insist on wandering in dangerous places alone. It thus makes sense, both in character and out of character, to have rules that limit going to those places.
Sanvean: Speaking of rules, one of the things you have done very well is making the Byn self-regulating. Did you plan on that?
Krrx: To an extent, yes. There are two points here. The first is that I have recruited clan leaders very, very carefully. The second is that because they are trustworthy players, they will help enforce the rules anyway.
Sanvean: When you are looking for players who will make good player character leaders, what do you look for, then?
Krrx: The key things I look for are: (1) out of character trustworthiness, (2) a very high standard of role playing, and (3) regular playing. Of course, it must be appropriate in character that the player character move into leadership. I can elaborate on those points if you like.
Sanvean: Please do!
Krrx: First, out of character trustworthiness. I have put a lot of work into this clan, and I will not put in leadership anyone who does not respect the work I put in, and is not willing to do likewise themselves. Another reason for this criterion is because I am not on-line 24 hours a day. If something happens, I need an honest, trustworthy viewpoint to rely on.
Sanvean: How do you know you can trust them?
Krrx: Trust is not something that can be guaranteed, but I do my best to screen players. I look at past player characters that the player has played. I chat to other staff members about them, particularly if the player played a player character in their clan. If someone is trustworthy, they tend to show it in the way they play the game.
Onto the second point–a very high standard of role playing. Armageddon is a role play intensive mud, with a very high overall standard of role playing. While many players entering the clan do not have this standard, it is a requirement for leadership. If people see leaders role playing well, they will tend to do likewise.
Sanvean: Good role playing seems to mean different things to different people. What is your definition?
Krrx: Good role playing? Thinking and acting in character. Immersing yourself in the role of your player character, and not just playing it like a robot in some shoot-em-up.
Onto the third point–regular playing. This does not mean leaders have to play Armageddon for 6 hours every day. I do, however, expect them to appear in the game fairly regularly. You can not lead if you are not around to lead. Common sense, really.
To sum up, one theme is that I have set limitations on the clan, with the idea that playing within those limitations actually gives players more freedom. It is why we have the law in real life. The law prevents idiots from ruining life for the rest of us. At face value, the law seems restrictive–you are not allowed to drive if you have drunk too much alcohol, for instance. But it is restrictive because: (1) it is logical and sensible, and (2) it protects the greater good–people generally do not like to get killed by drunk drivers.
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One of the desires expressed at the very first Armageddon player-staff meeting I ever attended was a yen to move away from “a hack and slash economy,” where players made their income by selling the gear off NPCs (and the occasional PC) that they had killed. How, one immortal noted, could the world be realistic when there was no coded reflection of the material underpinnings of it? How to create this economic reflection was a question that remained in the air for several years, and it was not until discussion of implementing crafting code came up that such a move seemed possible.
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One of the sad truths of the mud world is that there are never enough coders. Builders aplenty, brimming with fresh idealism and plans for entire zones, appear (and sometimes disappear) at the drop of a hat. But coders are the unicorns of the mudding world, seldom glimpsed and ardently pursued. We are lucky enough to have three dedicated coders on Armageddon MUD: Morgenes, Tenebrius and Tiernan, as well as a few other staff members willing and able to wade through the bugs file and tinker with things upon occasion. How, then, does an administrator keep these rare beasts happy? The following four steps may help.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(fantasy, flash fiction) The second thing I asked my fairy godmother for was a cookie, the kind my mother used to make. At first she didn’t understand me. “I told you, I can’t do that sort of thing,” she said. And then, “Oh, a cookie. I see.” She snapped her fingers and handed it to me.
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