Gen Con Online 2023 – Day 2

Another mixed bag of online content today.

2 p.m. my time, 9 a.m EDT is ‘The Great Gooey Gameshow’, described as “An interactive gameshow played with a massive 3D dungeonscape. Be amazed, entertained, and…support charity!”.

The first wave of guests

In the photo, there is the compere/DM on the left in front of a wheel-of-fortune, a table of four guests who are replaced every half hour, and a witch called Wanda to keep things running smoothly. On the table is the aforementioned dungeon layout the players will be using. The guy in front is occasionally called upon to move the camera that’s looking down on the miniatures as the adventure progresses.

As you can also see, there’s an audience plus the online contingent (people like me) using Discord’s chat. The audience have voting signs with A/B/C/D on them to help the players make decisions during the game (with Discord voting added in too).

The Indy audience

So seems to be a good combination to keep people interested. I’m not really sure what the charity aspect was (I must have missed that bit) and every time the guests were rotated Wanda would pick a long list of audience member names from a bucket to get free stuff from an off-picture table of merchandise. By the end of the two hours, I did wonder if there was anyone left in the room that hadn’t been called up. The Discord people were also invited to join in a raffle.

Luckily, only 25 people entered for what turned out to be ten prizes which meant a decent chance of winning. Admittedly, I don’t expect there will be much on the GooeyCube website I can directly use for running games but I’m sure there will be a lot that can be used for inspiration and it’s nice to win something.

The on-stage event trundled along like most celebrity-heavy events do. Lots of celebrating the achievements of the good and the great, none of whom I knew. For example, the man below who gave us Magic: The Gathering and saved D&D: Peter Adkison. So gaming is my hobby (or one of my hobbies) but I am not IN the hobby.

The left-hand seat was given to members of the audience and I love the screen grab below:

That event finished, I jumped over to Zoom and Matt Davids talking about ‘Storytelling in the Terminator’ for an hour to half a dozen people. I will now have to watch the movie all over again for things I had never really noticed.

Matt recorded the talk so it will be on YouTube at some point if you are interested and has some good discussion of techniques such as setups and payoffs, exposition during action, and exposition through audience surrogate. I also learned Harlan Ellison sued for plagiarism of his Outer Limits story ‘Soldier (probably common knowledge to big fans of the film).

First game of the day was ‘Necropolis’, a short two-hour Call of Cthulhu 4-room adventure in the desert.
Shaun Rice had a nice delivery style and we played on a simulated map on Roll20.Net which really helps with engagement as having stuff to look at and a character to move are key. As it was just two hours, there wasn’t much you could actually do beyond investigate, beat the baddy, and escape but there was enough there to have a good game. Nice use of Syrinscape for ambient music and sound effects.

After a break, some card and dice games on Tabletop Simulator. The first game, ‘The Crew : Mission Deep Sea‘, suffered from one player dropping out as they didn’t realise they had to buy the Simulator software in advance and another having a network at their home that seemed to be up and down like the Assyrian empire. The Simulator has a little red ‘ping’ number against each player’s name and as soon as it maxed out at 999, we knew the player in question was going to be disconnected and have to re-join. The game itself was a trick-taking card game with increasingly hard targets against a completely unrelated diving underwater background for flavour. Basic examples of targets would be to ‘lose the next 4 tricks’ or ‘win a trick containing a red 3’. As is common with better games, it was easy to play but hard to win.

The second game was one I had played a physical form of some time ago – ‘Clever 4ever‘. It’s like Yahtzee in that you roll dice, pick the ones you can use, and re-roll the rest. The difference is that there is a whole higher level of decision-making on what you do with the dice you pick to get victory points, rerolls and extra dice. Fundamentally simple but maybe a little overwhelming when you try and take in all the options available to you. Thankfully, the Simulator version calculated the victory points for you.

Back on to Zoom for another talk by Matt Davids. This time the subject was ‘How Writers Can Use A.I. Ethically’ and an audience of thirty people. I expect Matt deliberately picked the two talks to feature artificial intelligence. As a writer, Matt has many concerns and questions about the introduction of AI into his field (although Skynet may turn out to be more of an issue). Biggest takeaway for me was “don’t copy and paste”. Firstly, you cannot copyright something written for you by AI so anyone can then legitimately copy your work for free. Secondly, your work needs the human touch so, as he put it, “don’t rob the world of you”. There are obviously many places in writing for AI – the best spelling and grammar checkers use it; text formatting can be made easier; AI is the search engine we’ve always wanted. AI will be built into Word so we need to get used to having it around.

or “Change is the only constant” or “There is nothing permanent except change” or “The only thing that is constant is change” or “Nothing endures but change” or “Change alone is unchanging”.

I can see why Matt was unsure what Heraclitus had actually said.