HERE is another good article by Fred Hicks. He was self-taught in layout, and now is well respected as a game publisher.
Here are his tips in brief:
1) Use a High Contrast Cover Title
So, here’s the first one: A high contrast cover title is absolutely key when packaging your book. Your title/logo can’t be allowed to blend in to the art. It needs to be readable from halfway across the store
2) Upper-Third Positioning For Your Title
Contrast isn’t enough to make sure the title of your book gets noticed. You also need to position it in the proper place on the cover.
3) Use A One-Inch Inner Margin
Here’s the rule: use a one-inch inner margin when setting up your page layout.
4) Keep Your Text In The Goldilocks Zone
you should set up your body text style (at least) such that you can fit between 1.5 and 2.5 lowercase alphabets on a single line.
5) Avoid Flow-Breaking Background Textures
You need to remember that the point of a page is its text. Decoration is fun, it can do a lot to reinforce theme, but it starts working against you the moment it approaches the same noticeability as the text itself.
* * *
HERE is a peek behind the process of making digital maps for Risus products.
20 June, 2018
Artists vs. Entertainers (According To Fred Hicks)
HERE is a really cool essay on the difference between artists and entertainers by the clever and congenial Fred Hicks.
I have discussed some of these issues with my most beloved creative partner (whom I also happen to be married to) on and off over the years. But Fred does a great job of polishing his idea of the differences and needs of artists vs. entertainers.
* * *
Update: after reading this essay to my wife, we discussed it further. Here is a little more about what I think of Fred's assessment.
I agree with him about 90%. But I do think that there is a point of disagreement between his definition of artist and art goes thus:
An artist’s priority is on the art, which also defines the end-point of the creative effort. Once the artist creates the artwork, their job is done. Happiness with the result’s quality as they perceive it is paramount.
Importantly, money and an audience doesn’t enter into it (and can’t, really, in the pure form of this stance).
I believe firmly that because of the reality of what kind of creatures human beings are, we are deeply relational. The way that an artist relates is by making art, and bringing together truths about reality as they relate to each other through their artistic media. If a piece of art fails to communicate relationally, it has failed as a piece of art. Great art therefore is art that many can relate to one way or another. Art without an audience is dead.
On the other hand, art beholden to the whim of the audience, particularly an audience that does not understand, or does not value truth, is also debased from it's purpose.
My wife on the other hand thinks that, in order to be successful, the art must accomplish the artist's purpose at the most basic level. This is much closer to Fred's idea, but she suggests that creative work that is done with the intent to find a solution to an artistic problem may not be art (it is nascent, but not complete), but rather is process. In the hands of a master, it may well be beautiful and finer than the work of a poorer craftsman, but it is not yet art.
So I would synthesize this to suggest that art must:
...be born of a creative process... accomplishing what the artist intended to do... that communicates some kind of truthful relationship about reality... in a way that the receiver can comprehend.
My two cents.
But I really think Fred is darn sensible on this piece of thinking.
I have discussed some of these issues with my most beloved creative partner (whom I also happen to be married to) on and off over the years. But Fred does a great job of polishing his idea of the differences and needs of artists vs. entertainers.
* * *
Update: after reading this essay to my wife, we discussed it further. Here is a little more about what I think of Fred's assessment.
I agree with him about 90%. But I do think that there is a point of disagreement between his definition of artist and art goes thus:
An artist’s priority is on the art, which also defines the end-point of the creative effort. Once the artist creates the artwork, their job is done. Happiness with the result’s quality as they perceive it is paramount.
Importantly, money and an audience doesn’t enter into it (and can’t, really, in the pure form of this stance).
I believe firmly that because of the reality of what kind of creatures human beings are, we are deeply relational. The way that an artist relates is by making art, and bringing together truths about reality as they relate to each other through their artistic media. If a piece of art fails to communicate relationally, it has failed as a piece of art. Great art therefore is art that many can relate to one way or another. Art without an audience is dead.
On the other hand, art beholden to the whim of the audience, particularly an audience that does not understand, or does not value truth, is also debased from it's purpose.
My wife on the other hand thinks that, in order to be successful, the art must accomplish the artist's purpose at the most basic level. This is much closer to Fred's idea, but she suggests that creative work that is done with the intent to find a solution to an artistic problem may not be art (it is nascent, but not complete), but rather is process. In the hands of a master, it may well be beautiful and finer than the work of a poorer craftsman, but it is not yet art.
So I would synthesize this to suggest that art must:
...be born of a creative process... accomplishing what the artist intended to do... that communicates some kind of truthful relationship about reality... in a way that the receiver can comprehend.
My two cents.
But I really think Fred is darn sensible on this piece of thinking.
Astonishing News From The Woke: There Have Been Women In Gaming Since The Beginning!
In the linked post I am woke to the following astonishing new information... somehow most gamers have failed to understand that there have been women involved in gaming and game design since the beginning (!)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107122403431806926287/posts/bPrzvgAN8s9
* * *
After reading the post, I digested it for a bit and some questions come to mind:
1) I am extremely tired of these yobbos trying to gatekeep my various happy places.... No more inane purges of things that are supposed to be my escape and coping mechanisms.
I sympathize with the problem of purges of thought from "yobbos" gatekeeping places I go for relaxation, imagination, and fun. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of gate-keeping is actually done by the SJW faction. They certainly don't seem to be woke to that.
2) They [ those who oppose SJW activism in gaming ] want those wonderful people [ the SJW faction ] to be fewer and with less public ideas, except for those they view as "right".
The "right" view seems to be overwhelmingly the SJW view, and it is enforced aggressively in social media by the SJW faction who strive to make dissenters fewer in public.
3) Hopefully, efforts like this [ the gaming history essay ]will keep the women who helped move the hobby forward from being erased from our hobby's history, present, and future.
We are seriously to believe that there is an actual effort to erase women from gaming history? This is a golden renaissance for women gamers and designers compared to thirty years ago. Are we to believe that women are being endemically marginalized?
4) Only commenting about the attempted shitstorm makes me feel complicit.
And here is where the eye rolling begins. Does my criticism of the scourge of 20th century facism and communism make me complicit in it's evil? He uses that word... I do not think it means what you think it means. I find this all too common with the worldview demanded by the SJW orthodoxy which is astonishingly "flexible" with definitions, language, and truth.
5) When I have the whelps start rattling on abut how women and feminists ruin D&D I enjoy pointing out that my mom got me my first box set because she was tired of me getting into hers.
Again with the orthodox SJW flexible thinking... women and feminists are not the same thing. One is a sex and one a political body of ideas, neither of which is monolithic. Many women are not feminists and for very well thought out reasons, and not all feminists agree with modern SJW orthodoxy either. Neither is dissent monolithic. Some people really do dislike women in gaming. Many, many more do not. I like to game with the women in my life when possible, but I am not interested in the slightest to game with proponents of the relativism, marxism, and political machiavellian leftism that grounds the modern SJW orthodoxy. Hypocrisy and illogical thinking shoved in my face repeatedly while I want to play a story is not fun.
6) JY
Why are you boosting his non-signal like this? It's just Pundit yelling at clouds.
It's literally nothing but Pundit on Twitter and B posting about it here.
BB
+JY: Get out of this thread, before I get pissed off enough to block you.... Also, fuck you for pissing on me wanting to tell a true and (I think) interesting story.... Reply to this and I'll block you on the spot. Just go away for a bit.
And here is another all too common trait among the SJW orthodoxy: hysteria. JY is not disagreeing with BB, he is denigrating the value of the individual BB is angry about. Yet BB in a hysterical fashion goes immediately to attacking JY rather than clarifying the proposition, discussing rationally why JY thinks what he does, and resorts to immediate gate-keeping and marginalization. That looks a lot like the intolerance and hate that the SJW orthodoxy incessantly condemn.
7) MJ
+BB I believe the correct and proper response to naysayers and nitpickers here is a wide smile and a distinct "Fuck You."
...yup... more gate-keeping, intolerance, lack of thought, lack of questions, lack of interest in problem solving. More hypocrisy.
8) It's Pundit who is taking shit, it's Pundit who is to blame. How exactly is anyone supposed to put a stop to it? It's not like anyone agrees with him, the only discussion is over choosing to ignore him or call him out.
The thornier question is this: suppose I disagree with Pundit... but I also disagree with BB? Evidently it does not matter why, as BB seems uninterested in anyone questioning his orthodoxy and he will summarily judge and execute their input if they don't agree with him. It seems that calling out Pundit is OK and obligatory, but that measure cannot be applied to BB.
* * *
I remember when I started playing TTRPGs back in the summer of 1980. We did not have any girls playing in our group right then; my little sisters were too young to really be interested, and while my oldest brother did invite his female friend from the physics club, she declined. It certainly never occurred to us though, that the girls weren't welcome with the boys. Over the years, I have found great fun with the work of women like Margaret Weis and Laura Hickman (of D&D's Dragonlance fame) for making characters that I cared about in a story that felt like it had stakes that I could be interested in. I loved black game designer Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020 and never really got to play it as much as I wanted to. In high school, I was pleased to invite girls to game with my group, and it never seemed to be an issue to me to first join a Vampire: TM game run by a friend of mixed Brazilian heritage because he told dangerous stories that nailed the WOD. There were games I did not play and people I did not play with over the years, but that was largely due to aesthetic choices about setting and system, or the attitudes of the people involved. I really never questioned that any woman or person of any color who wanted to join in the story telling should be included. Maybe I was grossly lucky, but... I really, in nearly four decades of gaming, just never found endemic discrimination problems getting along with anyone who wanted to play as long as they were not a jerk to me and others at the table...
...until very recently when I enthusiastically plunged head first into the small press / indie / post-forge game design community.
The first thing that I found was how easy it was to get overwhelmingly intoxicated on the creativity of the games and the design philosophy and the wonderful new ways of telling thoughtful stories. I didn't for a moment care the sex of the person, the color of their skin because the new ways to tell stories were just so cool.
The second thing that I found was how much intolerance, closed-mindedness, and outright hatred was practiced toward anyone who fell outside of a particular political worldview, or even bothered to question those views. This tribe composed the New Puritanism within the gaming hobby, and torches of text and guillotines of blocking were very active indeed. To be very clear, the occasional jerk who was genuinely sexist or racist could indeed be found from time to time, but they were summarily burned or cut off. What I have seen far more is the insistence that this group of jerks is representative of vast numbers of people who happen (by no choice of their own) to be born with a particular set of junk and a particular skin color. What I have seen in the name of tolerance, is a libertine frequency of intolerant invective thrown at that group in general, or the invitation for them to be seen and not heard, and preferably not seen very much. What I have seen in the name of justice, is that dissent of any kind be disallowed no matter how civil. What I have seen in the interest of inclusion, is a particular preferential treatment of specific groups over others, while the work itself comes second. What I have seen in the interest of enlightenment is a demand that the New Puritanism never be questioned, and never, never, never... question itself.
I see the heartfelt cry that we come to games to relax, escape, and be refreshed only to find some ugly attack on us. I feel that too. I came to the indie scene because of the heady creative space that it was, and have now found myself frequently marginalized for being a rebel against the New Puritanism. Is it OK for me to like Sophie Lagace's War of Ashes and Shoshana Kessock's Blood on the Trail even if I don't think all their ideas about reality are correct when filtered through their politics?
Can we bear to talk, and bear to question ourselves as often as we question those we disagree with, and treat them as human beings first even as we defend our ideas? Can we bear to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, someone might disagree with our politics without hating our sex or race? Can we say, "I don't agree with you on this idea... but I can share a meal with you, and treat you with dignity as a human being and we can still play a riveting game of D&D, or Catan, or Forbidden Desert"? Is it possible to ever go back to the days where we could sit at the table and care more about whether Estra Zo could pick this lock before his rival Luven Lightfingers than whether the person rolling the dice is the right sex or color?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107122403431806926287/posts/bPrzvgAN8s9
* * *
After reading the post, I digested it for a bit and some questions come to mind:
1) I am extremely tired of these yobbos trying to gatekeep my various happy places.... No more inane purges of things that are supposed to be my escape and coping mechanisms.
I sympathize with the problem of purges of thought from "yobbos" gatekeeping places I go for relaxation, imagination, and fun. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of gate-keeping is actually done by the SJW faction. They certainly don't seem to be woke to that.
2) They [ those who oppose SJW activism in gaming ] want those wonderful people [ the SJW faction ] to be fewer and with less public ideas, except for those they view as "right".
The "right" view seems to be overwhelmingly the SJW view, and it is enforced aggressively in social media by the SJW faction who strive to make dissenters fewer in public.
3) Hopefully, efforts like this [ the gaming history essay ]will keep the women who helped move the hobby forward from being erased from our hobby's history, present, and future.
We are seriously to believe that there is an actual effort to erase women from gaming history? This is a golden renaissance for women gamers and designers compared to thirty years ago. Are we to believe that women are being endemically marginalized?
4) Only commenting about the attempted shitstorm makes me feel complicit.
And here is where the eye rolling begins. Does my criticism of the scourge of 20th century facism and communism make me complicit in it's evil? He uses that word... I do not think it means what you think it means. I find this all too common with the worldview demanded by the SJW orthodoxy which is astonishingly "flexible" with definitions, language, and truth.
5) When I have the whelps start rattling on abut how women and feminists ruin D&D I enjoy pointing out that my mom got me my first box set because she was tired of me getting into hers.
Again with the orthodox SJW flexible thinking... women and feminists are not the same thing. One is a sex and one a political body of ideas, neither of which is monolithic. Many women are not feminists and for very well thought out reasons, and not all feminists agree with modern SJW orthodoxy either. Neither is dissent monolithic. Some people really do dislike women in gaming. Many, many more do not. I like to game with the women in my life when possible, but I am not interested in the slightest to game with proponents of the relativism, marxism, and political machiavellian leftism that grounds the modern SJW orthodoxy. Hypocrisy and illogical thinking shoved in my face repeatedly while I want to play a story is not fun.
6) JY
Why are you boosting his non-signal like this? It's just Pundit yelling at clouds.
It's literally nothing but Pundit on Twitter and B posting about it here.
BB
+JY: Get out of this thread, before I get pissed off enough to block you.... Also, fuck you for pissing on me wanting to tell a true and (I think) interesting story.... Reply to this and I'll block you on the spot. Just go away for a bit.
And here is another all too common trait among the SJW orthodoxy: hysteria. JY is not disagreeing with BB, he is denigrating the value of the individual BB is angry about. Yet BB in a hysterical fashion goes immediately to attacking JY rather than clarifying the proposition, discussing rationally why JY thinks what he does, and resorts to immediate gate-keeping and marginalization. That looks a lot like the intolerance and hate that the SJW orthodoxy incessantly condemn.
7) MJ
+BB I believe the correct and proper response to naysayers and nitpickers here is a wide smile and a distinct "Fuck You."
...yup... more gate-keeping, intolerance, lack of thought, lack of questions, lack of interest in problem solving. More hypocrisy.
8) It's Pundit who is taking shit, it's Pundit who is to blame. How exactly is anyone supposed to put a stop to it? It's not like anyone agrees with him, the only discussion is over choosing to ignore him or call him out.
The thornier question is this: suppose I disagree with Pundit... but I also disagree with BB? Evidently it does not matter why, as BB seems uninterested in anyone questioning his orthodoxy and he will summarily judge and execute their input if they don't agree with him. It seems that calling out Pundit is OK and obligatory, but that measure cannot be applied to BB.
* * *
I remember when I started playing TTRPGs back in the summer of 1980. We did not have any girls playing in our group right then; my little sisters were too young to really be interested, and while my oldest brother did invite his female friend from the physics club, she declined. It certainly never occurred to us though, that the girls weren't welcome with the boys. Over the years, I have found great fun with the work of women like Margaret Weis and Laura Hickman (of D&D's Dragonlance fame) for making characters that I cared about in a story that felt like it had stakes that I could be interested in. I loved black game designer Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020 and never really got to play it as much as I wanted to. In high school, I was pleased to invite girls to game with my group, and it never seemed to be an issue to me to first join a Vampire: TM game run by a friend of mixed Brazilian heritage because he told dangerous stories that nailed the WOD. There were games I did not play and people I did not play with over the years, but that was largely due to aesthetic choices about setting and system, or the attitudes of the people involved. I really never questioned that any woman or person of any color who wanted to join in the story telling should be included. Maybe I was grossly lucky, but... I really, in nearly four decades of gaming, just never found endemic discrimination problems getting along with anyone who wanted to play as long as they were not a jerk to me and others at the table...
...until very recently when I enthusiastically plunged head first into the small press / indie / post-forge game design community.
The first thing that I found was how easy it was to get overwhelmingly intoxicated on the creativity of the games and the design philosophy and the wonderful new ways of telling thoughtful stories. I didn't for a moment care the sex of the person, the color of their skin because the new ways to tell stories were just so cool.
The second thing that I found was how much intolerance, closed-mindedness, and outright hatred was practiced toward anyone who fell outside of a particular political worldview, or even bothered to question those views. This tribe composed the New Puritanism within the gaming hobby, and torches of text and guillotines of blocking were very active indeed. To be very clear, the occasional jerk who was genuinely sexist or racist could indeed be found from time to time, but they were summarily burned or cut off. What I have seen far more is the insistence that this group of jerks is representative of vast numbers of people who happen (by no choice of their own) to be born with a particular set of junk and a particular skin color. What I have seen in the name of tolerance, is a libertine frequency of intolerant invective thrown at that group in general, or the invitation for them to be seen and not heard, and preferably not seen very much. What I have seen in the name of justice, is that dissent of any kind be disallowed no matter how civil. What I have seen in the interest of inclusion, is a particular preferential treatment of specific groups over others, while the work itself comes second. What I have seen in the interest of enlightenment is a demand that the New Puritanism never be questioned, and never, never, never... question itself.
I see the heartfelt cry that we come to games to relax, escape, and be refreshed only to find some ugly attack on us. I feel that too. I came to the indie scene because of the heady creative space that it was, and have now found myself frequently marginalized for being a rebel against the New Puritanism. Is it OK for me to like Sophie Lagace's War of Ashes and Shoshana Kessock's Blood on the Trail even if I don't think all their ideas about reality are correct when filtered through their politics?
Can we bear to talk, and bear to question ourselves as often as we question those we disagree with, and treat them as human beings first even as we defend our ideas? Can we bear to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, someone might disagree with our politics without hating our sex or race? Can we say, "I don't agree with you on this idea... but I can share a meal with you, and treat you with dignity as a human being and we can still play a riveting game of D&D, or Catan, or Forbidden Desert"? Is it possible to ever go back to the days where we could sit at the table and care more about whether Estra Zo could pick this lock before his rival Luven Lightfingers than whether the person rolling the dice is the right sex or color?
12 June, 2018
Dangers Of AI To Humanity
THIS is an interesting article discussing the danger of AI to humanity.
Not because terminators will come exterminate us out of hate for the meat species, but because humans (and their morals) will be irrelevant to AIs.
Not because terminators will come exterminate us out of hate for the meat species, but because humans (and their morals) will be irrelevant to AIs.
SJW Hypocrisy In Game Design
Here is the text of a post by a game designer regarding the
production of a project. I like the designer's work, but... talent in
game design does not mean clear thinking in politics.
Are you into tabletop RPGS?
Have you ever wanted to work on a game?
Are you a member of an underrepresented group in TTRPGs (Person of Color, Woman, Non-binary, Trans, Queer)?
If you answered yes to all three, we’d like to hear from you!* We’re looking for artist and writers to help us finish Orun!
*This does not mean we don’t want to hear from straight white guys, but it does mean you’re a straight white guy and you’re sending in an application, you’re going to have to work twice as hard to impress us half as much.
So here is the problem. Civil rights, when it was a movement for good, recognized that there were talented people who were not white men, who were more competent than the white men who they were competing with in the workplace. The logical thesis was that external factors (like race or sex) should not be factors in working but rather the quality and skill of the work. The better writer or more crafty game designer should be preferred over the one who is less skilled as a writer or crafty as a game designer. One should not get preferential treatment because of the color of their skin or the composition of their plumbing.
But here is Social Justice stepping in! Here we have a naked example demonstrating that SJWs don't care about quality or skill more than they care about identity politics. They are in fact more racist and sexist than those they revile, because that is the first criteria on their rubric... not the quality of the work. This is a game that I have no interest in at all because the attitude about it's production is racist, sexist, and secondarily concerned with the game itself.
Are you into tabletop RPGS?
Have you ever wanted to work on a game?
Are you a member of an underrepresented group in TTRPGs (Person of Color, Woman, Non-binary, Trans, Queer)?
If you answered yes to all three, we’d like to hear from you!* We’re looking for artist and writers to help us finish Orun!
*This does not mean we don’t want to hear from straight white guys, but it does mean you’re a straight white guy and you’re sending in an application, you’re going to have to work twice as hard to impress us half as much.
So here is the problem. Civil rights, when it was a movement for good, recognized that there were talented people who were not white men, who were more competent than the white men who they were competing with in the workplace. The logical thesis was that external factors (like race or sex) should not be factors in working but rather the quality and skill of the work. The better writer or more crafty game designer should be preferred over the one who is less skilled as a writer or crafty as a game designer. One should not get preferential treatment because of the color of their skin or the composition of their plumbing.
But here is Social Justice stepping in! Here we have a naked example demonstrating that SJWs don't care about quality or skill more than they care about identity politics. They are in fact more racist and sexist than those they revile, because that is the first criteria on their rubric... not the quality of the work. This is a game that I have no interest in at all because the attitude about it's production is racist, sexist, and secondarily concerned with the game itself.
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