Eddy Webb's Blog, page 12

My GenCon Schedule

Once again, I am making the trip down to Indianapolis in August to roll dice and talk about games with several thousand of my closest friends. If you’re looking for me at the show, here’s where I’ll be!

Thursday, August 15th

1pm-4pm: Running “Shooting Fish,” an adventure for the upcoming Firefly RPG. (Location TBD — check at the MWP booth)

Friday, August 16th

11am-12pm: Q&A w/ Onyx Path (Crowne Plaza: Victoria Stn A/B)

2pm-3pm: Onyx Path Publishing Signing (DriveThruRPG Booth)

3pm-4pm: New World of Darkness (Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Bllrm C)

Saturday, August 17th

1pm-2pm: What’s Up with White Wolf and Onyx Path? (Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Bllrm C)

2pm-3pm: Flames Rising Signing (DriveThruRPG Booth)

4pm-5pm: Classic World of Darkness (Crowne Plaza: Victoria Stn A/B)

8pm-9pm: Game Designers Pro-Wrestling Get Together (TBD)

 

 

Blogging Penumbra

Two quick notes, but both related to blogging:

I did a guest blog on whitewolfblogs.com, talking a bit about how the hell I fit into the whole CCP/Onyx Path/White Wolf thing these days.
Also, Berin Kinsman did a very nice follow-up to my blog post about being a professional.

Check them both out!

How to Pre-Order “Watson” in the US

Since the reveal of my cover for Watson is Not an Idiot, a number of people have asked how to pre-order the book in the United States. I asked Steve (my publisher), and here’s what he said.

To ensure the independent bookstores have a chance to compete with the big boys, we set them up first, so the large stores tend to pick it up a few weeks before publication. Any of your friends can get the book early from our shop.

So, if you’re wanting to pre-order, you have a few options.

Right Now, If You Have A Mystery Bookstore: If you have an independent bookstore near you, you can go there and see if you can pre-order Watson is Not an Idiot.

Right Now, Online: If you prefer to order online, you can go to the MX Publishing USA website to pre-order: Watson Is Not An Idiot

Wait a Bit: The book launches in late October, and I’ll be collecting all the links on my “Buy My Work” page. This includes Kindle links as they go live (which, I expect, will be available for pre-order in early October).

Update

I asked MX Publishing about whether Watson will be in the iBook store, and here’s the response I got.

Oh yes you will. On 30+ stores in iBooks in fact. You’ll also be on Kindle, Nook and Kobo (plus a bunch of library systems too). The ebook verisons I hope will come out before the paperbacks.

What is a Professional?

As freelance checks start rolling in, I recently paid my membership dues to the IGDA (I had been part of the Writers special interest group for several months now, but I hadn’t had the spare $48 to put in my membership dues — whoops). I also decided to apply for membership to the Horror Writers Association, and was pleasantly surprised to see my application accepted within a couple of hours. During all of this, I got a lot of well-wishes, but also stumbled across a couple of side discussions (related to the SFWA, actually) about how membership in such organizations constitutes being a “professional.”

And that got me thinking a bit.

For years, my definition of professional was simple, and similar to that used for athletes: a professional gets money, while an amateur doesn’t. Over the years, with the rise of self-publishing and Kickstarters, there’s been this change to imply a certain amount of quality control to professionals. Nuances of “getting paid” vs. “making money” have been bandied around, and for a while I fell into the trap of trying to draw such lines myself. I mean, I’ve been a professional by my own definitions for over a decade now, and there’s a certain comfort in drawing the lines to include me and exclude those whose quality I dislike. But that’s arbitrary, pointless, and ultimately mean.

So instead, I started thinking about what professionalism means to people. It’s a fuzzy topic, and it gets fuzzier as business models evolve, but I think people generally have some mixture of three concepts when they think of someone as a professional.

Financial

The first factor I eluded to above. Many people equate financial income for artistic work to constitute professionalism. And, at some level, it’s hard to argue with that — if you’re making money, or even (dare I say it?) a living by performing art, there’s a certain clarity to the situation. “I am a professional writer, because my primary job is writing.” It’s very binary function is appealing.

And yet, for years writing wasn’t my primary job, but rather a secondary one. Was I not “professional” during that time? Also, I have sometimes posted free things on the Internet — are they not professional? When I wrote the Holmes essays, were they amateur until I compiled them into Watson Is Not An Idiot? What about if I take a low-paying job for a friend?

The point is, “a professional gets paid” is a stickier question than it first appears.

Artistic

The next factor is explicitly nebulous — artistic quality. These are the kinds of arguments that unfairly get lumped into the “self-published/indie” vs. “published via another company” distinction. It’s a yearning for some sort of gatekeeper, a level of quality assurance that a third party company can and will vet bad quality products and keep them from reaching the light of day.

This one is easier to refute with examples, but harder to dismiss. While you can certain find examples to both arguments, and point out the decreasing creativity in established areas to balance out the decreasing quality in indie circles, but the reality is simple logistics – a company has more resources to use on a product. But I do think a creative who works for other clients is forced to try new things and consider ideas he wouldn’t before, which helps him grow. There’s just something about working with someone outside your own head that’s hard to replicate.

So, working for a client can make your work of higher quality, but it’s not an inherent quality of working through a gatekeeper.

Conduct

And finally, there’s “professional bearing,” or whether someone comports themselves as a professional. And in this case, it’s all over the board — I’ve met some of the more professional-acting people in the fanfic and mod communities, and met some childish assholes who make way more money than me.

What’s worse, there’s no single metric for professionalism. I was blown away to learn that, for example, some RPG companies don’t have comprehensive outlines for their products. I had internalized this as a “professional” mode of work, but in reality it’s just my own work process. Same with online behavior — some of the more vocal and opinionated people online I know are still intensely professional in how they conduct themselves.

Does being nice and speaking well mean “professional?” I would argue that Chuck Wendig is intensely professional, but he has strong opinions and strong language, and isn’t afraid to share either. Is it an unwillingness to comment on the business you’re a part of? Michael Stackpole is a professional by just about any metric you can think of, and he is extremely open about his perspectives on the industry he works in.

So What Is A Professional?

Well, I consider myself one, both as a narrative designer of games and a writer of horror. That’s why I finally plunked money down to two organizations — to help me continue to grow in those fields. But I wonder sometimes if the decision to be a professional isn’t someone else’s, but mine alone. I think if more people felt they were professionals, whether other people agreed or not, things would be better off.

Cover for “Watson is Not an Idiot”

The cover for my new book, Watson is Not an Idiot, has been revealed! It is a collection, revision, and expansion of my “Tour de Holmes” essays through MX Publishing, a fantastic publisher of over 100 Sherlock Holmes books.

Pre-orders are already available through Amazon.co.uk. The US store should be up soon as well — once it is, you’ll be able to find pre-order links on my “Buy My Work” page.

If you are Facebook user, I suggest you check out the “Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle Books” group. I’m what is called a “content creator” there, and it’s the best place to get information on not only my book, but all of the others that MX Publishing releases. It’s not required — I’ll likely duplicate anything I post there to my own social media sites — but if you’re interested, it’s a nice way to support my publisher.

Two new projects revealed (and some blog maintenance)

The past few weeks have been more than a little insane, to the point that I’ve been using my two-week work vacation to catch up with the overflow (although I have been diligent about making sure that it’s only in the mornings, so I can still relax during the day, because vacations are important). I have had so much going on that I needed to start using Trello to track all my projects, and that’s all on top of getting a new co-worker up to speed to help out on the World of Darkness MMO. But a couple of my personal projects have recently been announced.

The first is that I am one of the Shaintar All Stars, working on a sourcebook for the Shaintar fantasy RPG using the Savage Worlds system. I’m going to be working on Guidebook 9: The Malakar Dominion, which is a nation of political intrigue. I’ve talked about my opinions on fantasy before, but I like some of the stuff Sean’s doing with his game world, and I’m hoping I can help expand on this compelling topic.

More exciting for me is that Watson Is Not An Idiot has found a publisher! It’s going to be released through MX Publishing, who has a catalog of over 100 Sherlock Holmes books. It’s been incredibly exciting to work with them, and I’m really pleased with everything thus far. I’ll hold off for now, but expect to hear me talk a lot about this book in the coming months.

Finally, as a result of this and some consideration of how I use this blog, I’ve decided to reorganize it a bit. Now all my entries fall into four categories: “Games,” “Writing,” “Sherlock Holmes,” and “Bloggery” (which is the miscellaneous category). These are the three main things I write about, so rather than trying to maintain an archaic and bizarre organizational scheme, I thought it better to just call out the three “sub-blogs” I have. I’ve also added links on the main page so that you can easily see posts on each of those topics. Let me know what you think!

Also, as a quick post-script, I’ll be on vacation visiting my mother from Wednesday to Saturday, so don’t be surprised if I don’t have my usual lightning-fast response time.

The (Video Game) Death Penalty

My wife and I both work in video games as a career. While I am a writer and designer, she primarily works in QA. And yet, we both have very different tastes in video games (although we both skew towards liking older games). Recently, she’s started trying some newer games, such as Bioshock Infinite and League of Legends. And she’s dying. A lot.

Naturally, this has been frustrating. She feels like she is bad at video games, which seems a little crazy considering that she plays them regularly as part of her job (and actually won an in-office competition once!). But I’ve sympathized with her, because her frustrations have reminded me of some hard lessons I’ve learned over the past several years. As video games change and evolve, how we relate to character death changes, and how players perceive that death is something we as designers need to be reminded of.

“Video game” is a collection of sub-genres. Avid gamers know that first-person shooters like Bioshock Infinite have almost nothing to do with free-to-play social games like Farmville. And yet, from an outside perspective, we talk about them as a collective whole. Further, we often assume that affinity with multiple sub-genres is the norm, and treat “gamers” as a collective audience. And increasingly, I think this is a disservice. I’ve been playing video games since the 80s, and yet I’m still not very good at FPS games. Hell, computer RPGs are some of my favorites, but I’ve finished precious few of these 20+ hour monsters. I’m just learning about heavy PvP and “eSport” style games.

The reality is, it’s very hard to be good at “video games,” but many gamers are good at particular sub-genres. As a culture, one of the disservices we do by lumping all such games together is imply that skills should translate between genres, which it’s just not true. And yet we also do this to ourselves, feeling like because we did really well in The Last of Us that we should be able to do well in Saints Row IV.

This seems like a digression, but it’s important. Dying feels like failure, and the more we lump all video games together, the more that failure in a non-optimal genre stings.

Death is no longer a failure state, but a game penalty. Back in the 80s, once of the main video game outlets Michelle and I both had were coin-operated arcades. If you died, that’s a quarter gone (and, since we both were raised in lower income families, that quarter meant a lot). So when I die for the fourth time in your PS3 game, there’s a small part of my brain that’s wracking up how much imaginary income I’ve lost. My propensity for old school RPGs and adventure games hasn’t helped much — if you die, you better hope you had a save game.1

But in reality, this hasn’t be really true for a couple of decades. Nowadays, a lot of games use death as a measure of player education: there’s little to no penalty to trying again and again until you master a particular skill. In fact, games like Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden take this to the logical extreme. Many modern games have autosaves and savepoints that are so close together that death is barely a bump in the road. Others (such as many MMOs) impose a “death tax” that is mainly just time — you have to wait for a number of seconds and/or return to your previous location to continue. These aren’t failures so much as mild penalties. And we can learn from penalties.

This is a hard mental block to overcome, and the nuance between “failure” and “penalty” gets lost when you’re playing through the same section for the sixth time. But for me, I’ve slowly managed to move my mindset from “Fuck this game; I suck at it” and quitting to “I need to take a break” and walking away for a little while.

The “death penalty” can and should changed based on genre. The intersection between the two then becomes interesting: character death and what kind of penalty it leverages can and should change based on what style of game you’re putting together. In shooters, the death penalty is mild but distinct, because you want to kill the other guy before he kills you. For single-player FPSs at least, you’re learning the skill to clear a stage or master an encounter before moving on, so death needs to be a firm slap on the wrist, but not so penalizing that you won’t reload the stage and try again. If you don’t get that design, though, it just feels like you’re getting murdered again and again, like a gory Groundhog Day.

Michelle has since moved on to Lego Lord of the Rings, and seems to be having a better experience. It’s a game about exploration and trying things. The death penalty is exceedingly mild — you lose some points and go right back to where you were — and if you get stuck, you can just go somewhere else. The game isn’t about mastering skills or patterns, but a more freeform experience. If it were a stronger penalty, the player would be less likely to try things that look dangerous, and much of the point (and fun) of the game would be lost. Certainly a kid-friendly license like Lego also implies a lighter “death penalty,” but games like the NES DuckTales was also very kid-friendly, and yet it had a much harsher punishment curve. (In fact, the misnomer of casual/social/kid’s game as “easy” is probably a whole different blog post.)

In fact, one of my most traumatic experiences was playing Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation 1. I got all the way up to the end, realized that I was too low level to actually win, and had saved over all my old save games so I couldn’t go back and level up. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Final Fantasy games ever since. ↩

Expanding my social media empire

In an effort to try and divorce “Eddy Webb as writer and game designer that people might want to know about” from “Eddy Webb as dude who likes to talk about Transformers that flip people off,” I’ve set up professional Facebook and G+ pages that will focus on information about various projects I’m working on, as well as acting as a feed for this blog (which generally focuses on my writing, hobby game design, and video game work anyhow). I don’t yet have a separate Twitter account, but I’m still considering that as well. The links on this blog also point to the “official” Facebook and Google+ pages. Direct links are here:

Eddy Webb, Writer (Facebook)

Eddy Webb, Writer (Google+)

Please Like or +1 those pages if you want to stay on top of the various projects I’m working on, or just want to hear me babble about writing or game design!