The Transcript
So like this sounds really good fun to play?
You know, it’s not necessarily a given. Right? So sometimes you say like, I want to play this now it’s sold. Okay. We’ll just go and play it.
It was really funny. Well, doing this playtest with the students, I had not run a game of any kind for about it’s at least a decade, 10 to 10, 12 years.
And it was really funny getting back into it, even with my own game. But actually it all came back and I was like, oh, hang on a minute, this is much easier. This game I’ve created is actually quite good at making my job really, really easy. I felt a certain burden of responsibility that the students had signed up to do this on their own time.
I’m one of their lecturers, so I don’t want to look like a complete idiot in front of them, not having the faintest idea what I’m doing. And I, I was I was really surprised. I was like, oh, I’d forgotten how much fun this was, right? You know, doing this kind of thing was great.
It’s always if you’re running your own game, I always think it’s just terrifying because if you’re running a game you’ve bought, you can go, oh, this game’s bad because of this thing in it. We don’t understand. This is badly written or this was poorly presented or I couldn’t find this bit in the book. But if it’s your own game, you don’t get any of those kind of excuses to to just grease the wheels, you know?
Yeah, yeah. But the writing I think is really important. And this is where we’ve been, we’ve been doing a lot of work in the background in the taking. The the games have been both heavily rewritten, but I think you and I did bits of conversations and with Morgan and Gregor as well, where there needed to be greater clarity in the text because originally these games, you know, came out of this mid 2000s indie small press scene where there was lots of assumptions about what happened, and the language.
And the games are now, I think, much clearer, and, more accessible to someone who perhaps isn’t familiar with a game such as this. You can pick it up and read it and go, oh, I know how to play and or run this game. And that’s been a really satisfying part of this entire process of creating the new editions is making them better in terms of that level of accessibility and the engagement that people can have with them.
I know my own contribution has largely been to go, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that is. You know, but that’s the useful thing, isn’t it, to have some of that. I don’t I don’t get it. Which, you know, that I’ve made lemonade out of my own inability.
But yeah. No, I think that’s really, you know, so I go I mean, that’s really sorry. I keep talking over you, Jon.
That’s really useful. I keep saying to students when I’m marking essays or giving advice about essays, right. For an informed but non-expert audience. Right? Yeah. Yeah. This kind of physician heal myself kind of things like, like I need to pay more attention to that of writing for a non-expert audience in writing about the procedures and mechanics and the way, the way these games games play.