Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #MAMG22
Most recents (3)
To close out #MAMG22, I’d like to discuss how to design a sapient species and its cultures (plural, important) for speculative media, specifically from a cultural consulting and cultural design perspective. 1/24 
I made up this advice to help clients’ orcs, aliens, alien orcs, etc. a) avoid harmful RL tropes, and b) set players and fans up for good interactions at game tables or fandom spaces. But they also led to more interesting, playable species in a game/narrative design sense. 2/24
If you like really tropey fantasy races, I probably can’t help you here, but you know how to make those already—just do the tropes. You’re set. Speaking as your cultural consultant, though, maybe be careful with the tropes, especially “evil races”: jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/1/13… 3/24
1.#MAMG22 Fallout: New Vegas takes the player to the post-apocalyptic wastelands surrounding New Vegas—the desert, the hills, the neon lights guarded by robot sentinels, the forces of the NCR stretched on Hoover Dam, and the looming menace of the fascist Caesar’s Legion.
2.#MAMG22 Fallout games truck in neo-medievalism & Americana—retrofuturistic 1950s sci-fi Americana crumbling under the radiation, and the knights of the Brotherhood of Steel, in their plate man, paladins armed with laser gatlings, reminding us of the core fantasies of genre.
3.#MAMG22 The DLC “Honest Hearts,” though, takes the player out of the New Vegas Wasteland into Zion National Park, inhabited by a number of groups that the Fallout Universe describes as “tribals,” at term as problematic as you can imagine, & features extensive rock art.
Hello everyone, I'm here to talk about board wargames and how they can provide valuable insight into how the historiography of the Middle Ages has been adapted for an audience of history enthusiasts outside of the well tread grounds of movies and television. #MAMG22 1/12
Historical wargames designers put a lot of research into their games, but they are often limited by what materials they can access, and even when they can access academic materials current scholarship may not answer the types of questions they are asking. #MAMG22 2/12
This can force game designers to turn to older scholarship that does address the types of questions they’re asking, and then games based on that scholarship can in turn affect the kinds of questions new designs seek to address in turn. #MAMG22 3/12
