The Gaming Philosopher

Introduction Shooting the Moon by Emily Care Boss is a game I've had in my possession for a very long time, but which I'd never played before. (I think. I may once have started a game with Jasper Polane, but if so, I don't think we managed to finish it.) Last Friday, I got online with Sam Ashwell and Emily Short to finally play this thing. Both of them had played it before. Emily once, I think; and Sam quite often. Like Breaking the Ice , Shooting the Moon is a game about love. (At least it claims to be a game about love. See below.) Whereas the former game shows two people coming together, the latter gives us two Suitors fighting over the Beloved, who is also pursuing a dream of his or her own. Creating characters: the rules Character creation is where the rules of this game really shine. It is very much a group activity, so much so that we did most of it before we chose who would play which character. (We finally decided that I would play the Beloved.) The ...

Another week, another Breaking the Ice session using Google Hangouts. This time I played with Sam Kabo Ashwell, prolific author of interactive fiction and reviews of works in that medium. We once played a game of Gloom together, which is almost a role playing game; but that's the limit of our shared gaming experience. However, we are both veteran RPG players, and years of contact in the online interactive fiction community have given us a good idea of each other's tastes in fiction. Character creation We therefore jumped into the game without much ado. Sam had read the rules once, but long ago. That wasn't a problem. Breaking the Ice works well as long as one of the participants know the rules. As a switch we chose "being an immigrant" (Sam being an Englishman living in the U.S., and I being a Dutch guy living in the Netherlands). I would play an immigrant man, he would play a non-immigrant woman. Sam's web of words contained: orange, [hothouses,...

This is the second part of an actual play report that began here . Remko and I got together on Google Hangouts to play the second and third date of Sjoerd and Doortje, using Emily Boss Care's game Breaking the Ice . At the end of last session, Sjoerd and Doortje had had a great date that lasted far into the night. (They ended up with 2 points of attraction, and the compatibilities "they like hanging out in nice bars" and "they understand about each other's unhappy childhood".) Doortje's conflict ("feels guilty when she claims time for herself") and the fact that she had a small child didn't feature in that first session, and I was determined to change that. Second date We started the second date by narrating how Doortje, unwilling to leave her baby alone for another night, had asked Sjoerd to meet her some afternoon in the Vondelpark , where she would come with the baby in a pram. Sjoerd didn't object, although he was less than h...

I'm finally getting back into role playing. I've been doing far too little of this for far too long, and it feels great to be back in business. Back in 2005, I played my first online RPG sessions ever, using IRC, with Remko van der Pluijm. We played Breaking the Ice , and I wrote up an actual play report here . So what better way to get back into role playing than by meeting up with Remko again -- who is by now a very good friend of mine -- and play Breaking the Ice again, this time using web cams and Google hangouts? Breaking the Ice is an RPG for two people written by Emily Care Boss and published by Black and Green Games . Two characters, one controlled by each player, have a series of three dates; by the end of the game, they either stay together or stop dating. I concluded my original actual play report as follows: This game is brilliant. There are no two ways about it. It is an ode on human vulnerability. [...] In this game, you do not overcome obstacles by stren...