GenCon Findings — 2011

This past week­end I attend­ed Gen­Con, the major gam­ing con­ven­tion in the US. As usu­al, I am look­ing for inter­est­ing and unusu­al role­play­ing games, espe­cial­ly ones that have ele­ments of hyp­no­sis or mind con­trol as part of the char­ac­ter designs or in the oppo­si­tion. This year, I found three such games.

“Dungeons & Dragons” — The Hypnotic Side

When Dave Arne­son showed Gary Gygax the new game he and his friends were play­ing, it prob­a­bly did­n’t occurr to either that they were on the brink of cre­at­ing not only a new game but an entire­ly new type of game, result­ing in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new gam­ing industry.

Dave Arne­son took the tra­di­tion­al minia­ture game, where minia­tures rep­re­sent­ed groups of indi­vid­u­als and start­ed using them to rep­re­sent indi­vid­u­als. He also added the ele­ments of char­ac­ter class­es and expe­ri­ence lev­els, allow­ing for char­ac­ter spe­cial­iza­tion and growith. This was a rev­o­lu­tion, in that play­ers could project them­selves into the char­ac­ter, devel­op­ing them over time and play. Since both he and Gary Gygax were avid mina­ture ship game play­ers, he shjowed Gary his game and togeth­er they cre­at­ed Dun­geons & Drag­ons.

“GuildWars”

His­to­ry: In 2005 I won a copy of the online game Guild­Wars with­out real­ly want­i­ng it. There­fore, I didn’t exam­ine the game for a month or so, fig­ur­ing I didn’t have time for an online game, but the box art­work and some of the things I saw about it online con­vinced me to take a fur­ther look. Lit­tle did I real­ize what I was going to get myself in to.

“Pomegranites Full and Fine” by Don Bassingthwaite

[amtap book:isbn=156504889X]

Set in the Toron­to of White Wolf’s orig­i­nal “World of Dark­ness” game cam­paign world, this nov­el is of two women, one strug­gling to for­get her vio­lent past and one try­ing to escape her vio­lent present. The fact that the first, Tan­go, is a Faerie Changeling who is pressed into search­ing for her kid­napped friend ( and fel­low Changeling ) Riley while the sec­ond, Miran­da, is a Sab­bat Vam­pire involved with a Satan­ic cult leader com­pli­cates things.