Last night I found something that I was completely and totally outraged about: +Luke Crane has made a game based loosely on 1980 - 81 Dungeons & Dragons game. How did I miss that?
The game is called Miseries and Misfortunes and it is incredibly easy to pick up (not only because it's free). I've already made a character and now I'm really wanting to play this bad boy. I'm trying to talk my wife, who is a history savant, into running the game because I want to play it so damned badly! You guys have got to check this thing out!
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Last night also found me working on editing together the Let's Forget the World and Be Friends PDF. The editing for this project has been more complex than the last one as I'm attempting a few different methods to what I did with the last one. Nothing major: a few spelling corrections here, a grammar error there.
But let me tell you, what makes doing a project like this so rewarding is getting to really explore how these guys think because there's a difference between reading something someone writes online and then you move on and actively pouring over a document to make sure that it's what +Mark Van Vlack or +Sean Bircher actually wanted to say. I can't tell you how much my respect for everyone involved in this project has grown through this process (which is hard to fully express since I really like all the cats). I was really blessed that these guys agreed to write this project with me and I can't thank them enough for lending their talents to it.
Awesome people all around.
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On a more somber note there were some people behaving badly at last night's Ennie awards. By their own admission they began the ceremony heckling the event and then got up and walked out when +Zak Smith and +James Raggi won their first award for Red & Pleasant Land. This small group then went on twitter and attempted to create the impression that their decision was echoed by a majority of the attendees at the ceremony; however, after investigating into what happened it appears that roughly ten people left and that no one really noticed their leaving or poor behavior until they began posting on twitter later.
I want to tell you that their behavior offended me. Not the walking out, that part didn't bother because people leave things all the time - especially award ceremonies when they've got nothing at stake. What bothered me was the heckling of the awards themselves. Look, I get it, they don't mean anything to you; but this isn't about you. +Russ Morrissey organized this show, the judges narrowed down the categories after getting inundated with submissions, over 20,000 people voted, and a group of hard working volunteers put that ceremony together and got things running smoothly all night. By acting like a jackass in the back of the room you were being disrespectful to every person who helped in that process. What's worse though is that you showed your asses in that moment to every nominee in the room and told every single one of them what you really thought of their hard work.
Without a doubt the behavior of these individuals was inexcusable and the fact that several of them I consider "good" people makes it cut even deeper for me. I hope that for the majority of this group that this was an isolated incident where poor judgement and exhaustion overtook common decency and a basic respect for their fellow gamers.
Time will tell.
