Observations of the Fox

I'm looking at the other people running with this hashtag... I see things like "That time I won the Ennie for this"..."the time I won two Ennies for that"..."this particular high profile game that's sold tens of thousands of copies"..."the kickstarter I ran, which earned tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands"..."that critically acclaimed rpg that people still talk about"... ...yeah. Here... the best I can say is maybe the 750,000+ page views here on the blog... or the free game FUBAR which has seen several thousand downloads (but not even 50 paid downloads to be considered a copper best seller on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow)... Maybe my most notable achievement was not appearing on anyone's "people who helped you" posts yesterday...or "biggest influences" posts earlier in the series. My greatest achievement seems to be my ability to obfuscate myself.

I often look at the various game awards and wish that my work might receive some kind of "important accolade". I guess it's just an ego thing, something that crosses the minds of most artists and designers. We want to be recognised, immortalised, remembered by the community of our peers. But sometimes a form of recognition comes from unexpected places. You may be aware that I'm doing some research for my "Walkabout" game by engaging with local Aboriginal elders. Over the last couple of days, I visited out nation's capital, Canberra, with these elders and an unusual twist of fate occurred. On the night that we stayed in Canberra, I was doing some drawing for a personal project. My artwork has been commented upon by various members of the elders, and I've been given pointers about how to ensure my recreations of aboriginal work are appropriate, culturally correct, and have even been given full permission to use certain symbolism in my work. I can...

I've woken up this morning to see that the blog has reached 100,000 views (specifically 100,032 when I looked). So my prediction about it occurring his month was right. Thankyou everyone.

Simple answer, when it's nominated for the ENnies. It's been pointed out by Rob over on 1km1kt that there are no truly free products nominated for the ENnies this year. Everything nominated in the category is simply a stripped back version of a rule-set being used as an advertisement for a paid system. As someone who produces free games, I naturally think this is disgusting. There are dozens of truly free games produced every year, and some of them have some great production values. An award ceremony shouldn't have to resort to advertisements by major publishers to fill out their "FREE" category. I could rant for pages on this, but I'll leave it here.

It's Game Chef time of Year again. One Theme, Four Secret Ingredients (from which you must choose two), then 10 days to produce a fine-tuned gaming hot rod to compete among the dozens of of entrants. I've done Game Chef a few times, I usually just make up the numbers. Maybe my games a bit too pedestrian in some respects, maybe they're just a bit too long winded (my entries are usually twice the page count of the average entry). Or it could be that I'm still not a "recognized" name in the independent gaming crowd. In an attempt to remedy this, I've submitted FUBAR into the mix for the 2010 Indie RPG awards .