#17: What does attending an online convention feel like?
#17: What does attending an online convention feel like?
There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. – William Dean Howells, The Night Boat
No joke here. Just a nice quote.
I. Attending Metatopia 2020
Metatopia, for the first time I believe, was completely online this year - which meant I could attend. This is my after-action report.
At the most mundane level, the convention consisted of a discord server and a couple of twitch channels. (There was a calendar / event website in the middle called Envoy Gateway but it was very fiddly and didn’t serve any purpose that I could see.) The twitch channels streamed three days of panels - some recorded, some live. The discord server was a neat list of channels for text chat divided by topic - game design, panel, etc. There were also a handful of voice/video channels for those who were, you know, into that weird stuff. And that’s about it.
And it was very nice!
Everything seemed to work. Which for an event that’s online for the first time is a big deal. The organizers were also really friendly! Everything was recorded - so you didn’t have to worry about missing anything. It was very indie RPG game design heavy. There was a little about boardgames and a little big about play - but mostly it was about the art and business of RPG design. (Panel highlights below.)
For an online event, there was a decent amount of socializing. I was generally too shy to really participate but I did join one of the ‘Lean Coffee’ calls. These were hosted by Rob Donoghue, one of the founders of Evil Hat, and based on an Agile meeting format. (Please don’t ask me what Agile is, I just pretend to know what these words mean.) And the format was really interesting. Essentially, you have a digital board (we used a kanban board on Miro) and everyone in the meeting can submit topics that they want to talk about. You just type it up on a little post-it note. It could be anything - one of ours was the length of combat scenes, another was how to focus on design when your life is busy. These notes are all collected within the first five minutes and posted on the board. And then people have three votes that they distribute among the topics. Once voting is done, you discuss the topics in order of highest votes. Each topic goes for 5 minutes (FIVE! MINUTES!) before the host gets a quick thumbs up / thumbs down from everyone if they want to continue. If there aren’t enough thumbs up, then you move to the next topic. It was a really simple way to let the agenda come naturally and cut down on awkward silences.
It’s something that I’m going to use if I ever have to organize these sorts of ‘conversations between strangers’ type events. People braver than me sat in voice channels and just chatted with whoever showed up. I’m not there yet but maybe next time!
The panels were… panels. They’re one of my personal bugbears. As a format, panels are uniquely and deeply susceptible to vagueness of purpose. My experience with offline / in-person panels is that most of the time I come out of them feeling like I got maybe 5 minutes of useful information. A one-to-one interview is usually much, much better in that regard at least. The conversation has the space to go into details. In panels, it often feels like everyone only gets enough time to superficially engage with a question. Not that you can’t do a good panel. You definitely can. It’s just harder, I think. Doesn’t stop me from attending panels though.
On that note, here’s a list of the panels from Metatopia that might be of interest to readers. Some with notes from me, some without.
Game Design
Designing Outside Belonging: If you’re interested in Belonging outside Belonging games, this panel is great. All designers who have worked with the system multiple times just answering questions about it in a straightforward manner.
Forged in the Dark Designs: Same deal. Clear questions and laser-focusing on one system is clearly an excellent strategy. If you’re interested in FitD games and want some insights, here you go.
Others: Designing Games That Don’t Centre Violence, How To Be A Good Playtester
Business of Games
Don’t Kickstart Your Game: It’s a bit provocatively titled but there were a number of insights into how an overly successful kickstarter can really backfire and sink a a nascent business. Example: Physical stretch goals that push the weight of your game to a new postal tariff and now every single backer has become an unbudgeted cost that eats into your profits. The more backers, the bigger the hit.
A lot of the other panels are directly aimed at people who are just starting. So if you are, there’s panels on PDF publishing, how to read a contract, how to commission art, publishing your first game, selling adventures, etc.
Cultures of Games
Games, Gamefeel, Vocabulary: I really like the central question here. I’m exactly the kind of person is who is excited by “what do we not have a word for?”. It didn’t really deliver on that promise … but Jacob Jaskov talking about ‘appeal factors’ was very interesting. Essentially, like I said last week, genres aren’t very useful sometimes. Appeal factors are a new way of talking about what about a book actually interested you. Also, John Harness in the twitch chat talking about AO3’s tagging system as a way of inspiring tags for itch.io was really interesting and sent me on a rabbit hole. Wasn’t even part of the panel but I’ll blog about it at some point in the future.
Other ones of note: RPG Design in France, RPGs & English as our Vehicular Language
II. Links of the Week
News
Role, a VTT geared towards indie games, is now open for early access. you have to pay a one-time fee of 5$ for the whole early access period. It’s got some interesting features including a no-code character sheet builder.
Resources
Sandy Pug Games wrote about starting a RPG co-op and all the advantages. It’s a chaotic, compelling read. It’s something that I’m very keen on figuring out over the next year.
Chartopia, the random table website, has a discord bot that lets you roll on those tables directly. Super useful because you can add any tables you want to the site.
Articles and Reviews
A ‘Let’s Read’ series on Mongoose’s Traveller.
Colour of Magic is a game designed for ‘Character-driven GMing’.
A review of Brindlewood Bay, where you play old women solving cozy mysteries with some weird supernatural stuff going on in the background.
Indie Game Reading Club talks about Cartel, a narco-fiction RPG and what it means to play a game like that now.
More notes about colour in RPGs - including colours in alien civilizations, and other absolute delights.
III. Small Ads
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