Justin Pickard

[BoRT] Free Territory

Following Thursday’s post, this should be able to kill three birds with one stone a grenade.

Firstly, it’s my response to February’s BoRT challenge:

February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Secondly, it’s part of that whole alter-urbanism thing – my (slow, progressive) attempt to catalogue all kinds of feral, rogue, and wild cities.

And it should appeal to the literary sci-fi set.  I’m taking Mile Zero’s plans for Iron Council: The Game … a design based on the novel by everyone’s favorite socialist – China Miéville.

I’ve read Iron Council, but it’s been long enough now for the specifics to have faded into fog, leaving me with the taste and shape of the book’s mood.  Perfect.

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[BoRT] Books & Game Design

In the last week or so, I’ve applied for a couple of jobs and internships that are – one way or another – to do with the creative side of the games industry. Not (necessarily) limited to computer games, but types of games and game structures that mesh with my academic/research interests in narrative, technology, and place.

As such, I need to get my shit together.  Start laying down some of my thoughts down on paper the internet.  Through a tangential link-grab from Juliette Culver, I stumbled on the nifty Man Bytes Blog and his Blogs of the Round Table project.  Which is awesome.  Wasted a significant chunk of the last week reading some brilliant responses to the question – “What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?”

Responses were varied and stimulating, envisaging:

• Wodehouse’s Drones Club stories as a fast-paced card game
• Solaris as an enigmatic MMOG
• Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as … Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province – a creative and rather wonderful mix of Cluedo and Broken Sword
  
• The Crying of Lot 49 as a collectible card game
• House of Leaves as a classic text adventure
• Jane Austin for the Nintendo Wii (Pride and Prejudice: Adventures Among Polite Society in the Village of Longbourn!)

And, perhaps most excitingly for me, China Mieville’s Iron Council as a German-style boardgame – more on which tomorrow.

The Pirate Bay on Trial

So, as the trial against the folks behind Swedish file-sharing index The Pirate Bay kicks into a higher gear, I thought it might be a good time to flag a something I’ve found useful in attempting to contextualise the legal wranglings.

Take a look at Jonas Andersson’s article, For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign (pdf link) in the most recent issue of open-access journal Culture Machine.  Although the whole issue is worth reading, Andersson’s article is both thorough and timely, filling many of the gaps and flaws in my own reasoning.  A couple of extracts follow, under the cut.

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Sterling on alter-urbanism

I was re-reading Bruce Sterling’s year-old State of the World, 2008 Q&A over at The WELL – in a lets-see-how-on-the-money-he-actually-was kind of way – and came across a couple of extracts that seemed relevant to the whole alter-urbanism discussion:

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

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