Play Tracing: Recent Episodes

Anthony Ronda

I talk to the engineers and toolmakers who make play possible, whose stories are at the fringe of game development and game design, but whose work is at the front lines of play.

View Details

Referenced in the Episode

  • motestories.com - The home of the Mote app
  • whatismote.com - Learn more about how Mote works
  • MUDs - Multi-User Dungeons, a staple computer game genre of the 1980s and 1990s. Multiplayer text-based virtual worlds that allow for roleplaying and submitting text commands to act on the world and other players.
  • Narrascope 2020: Building Narrative Chat - Doug's virtual talk which is mentioned multiple times for its breakdown of the mechanics of the narrative engine, for talking about narrative pipelines and "queering language," and for being a great introduction to breaking down the structure of an English language sentence
  • Games Designed for Mote - Storytelling games in PDF form that can be played anywhere, in any medium, but were inspired by the text-based storytelling opportunities that Mote enables
  • Isinglass on Portland Radio Project - a theater non-profit founded by John and Doug, whose mission was to create and pilot programs to promote a healthy theater arts industry. John and a few members of the Isinglass team do interviews about their projects.
  • Social Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing on Wayback Machine - Social Shakespeare was an effort to use the emerging performative space of social media as a theater stage. This ties into Doug and John's overall history using technology to tell stories together.

Where to Find Doug and John

  • John's Twitter
  • Doug's Twitter
  • Mote Discord server

Spotlight

  • Doug - Inform 7 (is now open source!)
  • John - Backwards and Forwards by David Ball
  • Anthony - Multiverse

Music Credit

  • Afterghosts by MJ O'Neill

View Details

Referenced in the Episode

  • Melbourne Global Game Jam and JamCast - Katelyn and her co-conspirators have designed a way to broadcast game jam participants' progress to screens all over their host university. JamCast's up-to-date repository on GitLab appears to be mid-migration, so here's the older GitHub repo.
  • CBLoader - Katelyn's first foray into reflection and DLL injection was a Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition character builder application. With her additions, DMs can push homebrew items and character options to the players' computers.
  • The Guild - A living D&D4e campaign with over 200 active members.
  • pennydreadfulmagic.com - A comprehensive place to find decks, sign up for league play, and so much more, as discussed at length in the podcast.
  • pdmtgo.com - The website that started the fan format, which Katelyn admits may still be online to honor the community's humble beginnings.
  • PennyDreadfulMTG on GitHub - The GitHub organization where the Penny Dreadful team collaborates (notably Tom Baker, whose work is mentioned throughout the episode). Most of the codebases we mentioned today are here.
  • Cards that cause encoding headaches - Katelyn says that six of these cards are the bane of her existence.
  • Scryfall - A popular Magic card search that supports filtering by the Penny Dreadful legality list.
  • MTG Goldfish - A popular Magic card deck posting and searching website, as well as a source of card prices. Goldfishing is testing your deck by itself rather than versus another deck.
  • MTG Top 8 - A comprehensive web database of all top 8 finishes at competitive Magic tournaments around the world.
  • Gatherling - The Vanilla PHP fan tournament web app where Penny Dreadful hosts three events per week.
  • Iwazaru - Katelyn's Discord bot designed to gently help community members change their language to be more inclusive.

Where to Find Katelyn

  • @silasary on Twitter
  • The Penny Dreadful Discord server's #code channel

Spotlight

  • Katelyn - Magic Set Editor
  • Anthony - lazerwalker/BoatAttack

Music Credit

  • Afterghosts by MJ O'Neill

Magic Slang We Never Explained

  • Momir - An officially sanctioned casual format of Magic that requires every card in your deck to be a basic land, and allows players to cash in lands for a randomly-selected creature. Playable in Magic Online, Magic Arena, and on your kitchen table with mobile phones and blank index cards.
  • Mono white banding - Magic has five colors, and mono white means it only uses white. Banding is a card ability from the earliest era of Magic that's notoriously hard to wrap one's head around. The fact that the cards are rarely played anymore makes them tempting to use against opponents who might misunderstand the rules of banding.
  • net-decking - Playing with a deck you copied off of the internet, rather than built on your own.
  • Ponza - a deck designed to destroy its opponents' "mana" sources, purportedly named after deep-fried pizza.
  • Sligh - a particular type of aggressive deck popularized by Paul Sligh.
  • Dirty Kitty - a deck with an effective combo: sacrifice creatures for mana, get a free card draw whenever a creature is sacrificed, cast more creatures. The deck's pilot will eventually draw a card that deals damage equal to the number of cards cast. The deck name? No idea.
  • Eggs - An artifact card that can be sacrificed (cracked) for mana or cards. A deck which requires the pilot to crack lots of eggs for a winning combo is called Eggs, as Katelyn mentioned.
  • Tribal Wars - A fan format in which one third of the deck must be creatures that share a type. Tribal is commonly used to mean "a deck strategy that emphasizes creatures of a certain type," like Goblins or Elves.

View Details

Referenced in the Episode

  • The Forge VTT - A place to host your Foundry Virtual Tabletop server, with lots of extras and convenience features
  • KaKaRoTo.ca - Youness's personal blog, which is mineable for lots of information on his career of hacking the PlayStation 3
  • MyCE interviews - Two 2011 interviews where Youness talks about the PlayStation 3 hacking scene while it's still fresh, and comments on Sony's lawsuit against George Hotz
  • "With >$1 million raised, Humble Bundle games go open source" Ars Technica
  • Beyond20 - a browser extension to effortlessly link D&D Beyond with Roll20, Foundry VTT, and Discord
  • "Wat" talk - classic takedown of JavaScript by Gary Burnhardt
  • The League of Extraordinary Foundry VTT Developers Discord server - an open source community of programmers
  • Foundry Hub - a fan blog and add-on module database for Foundry Virtual Tabletop, who collaborated with The Forge on a specification for module metadata

Spotlight

  • Youness - Hackathon Starter on Github
  • Anthony - Level Design Toolkit

Music Credit

  • Afterghosts by MJ O'Neill