Lunch with Steve; Elves; Auctions

[shannon_a]

Had lunch with Steve M. today. It was a spur of the moment thing. He needed to come into Berkeley to pick something up, and we'd been meaning to get together since December, so it seemed like a good combination.

Steve has been very cool these last several years, since he started working with Issaries. Whenever a new HeroQuest book comes out, he brings me a copy, and we get lunch. Greg has me on the comp list, presumably due to my work on the rules 'lo these many years ago, but Steve could just mail me. The fact that instead we always make a lunch of it means that Steve is the only person I've really kept in touch with since the days that I was more deeply involved in both RPG and Glorantha communities, and that's incredibly nice.

He also brought a contract for the elf book I'm working on, and I signed off on it with a deadline of the end of April, which means that I hopefully will have enough incentive to get it done now. Given that this book has been in various states of progress for 10 years, that'd be nice too.

Once upon a time I was supposed to be taking writing time on Wednesdays, but that really fell off at the end of last year when I got the more "serious" and computer-related projects done. Now it's time to try and start doing that work again, perhaps this week, but if not, definitely next.

This'll also help me with my Skotos column which has been somewhat flaky since about last November--the same time since my writing has overall fallen off. Definitely, if nothing else, I'm going to work on that this Wednesday, with the choosen topic being "Auction Mechanics as a Central Axis of Strategy Games" which builds on some thoughts by myself and others that many game mechanics are actually auction mechanics (I think dougo might have actually been one of the earliest people to say this, in response to my article on auctions last year).

Comments

[shannon_a]

Looking back at the title of this entry I thought at once, "Now there's an idea for a game."

Auctioning off elves.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

You're right, an elf auction sounds like a fine idea for a game.

What's this elf book you're working on? Not a Glorantha thing, then?

[shannon_a]

It's Gloranthan. It'll be *the* elfbook for HeroQuest. It started out as some mythological ideas about 10 years ago, many of which have already made it into the in-game descriptions of elves, but most of it is still exclusively on my various computers.

thought for the day

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Rock Paper Scissors is a simultaneous auction with non-monotonic currency.

Re: thought for the day

[shannon_a]

Good call.