Stuff that I have written.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Japanese edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is out now. Masaya Matsuura was kind enough to write a foreword for this edition, and I thought I’d share it here. I met Matsuura-san for the first time at GDC this year, where we were the joint presenters of the “First Penguin Award” — Matsuura-san because he was last year’s winner, and myself because I do this online game thing sometimes, and the winner was Dr. Richard Bartle.
Well, the Front Line Award winners have been announced, and A Theory of Fun lost out to Audio for Games: Planning, Process, and Production, by Alexander Brandon, which sounds like an eminently practical book, unlike mine. 🙂
I got this missive from Bartle
With qualms that my poetic art’ll
Diminish the blog —
Perhaps make it bog —
Take it over in whole or in partle.
Continue reading »
And they are very nicely done indeed. Different, to be sure: as you saw before, the cover is red (going for a color per country, I think) but that’s actually the slipcover. Turns out you can remove that and get the cover proper, which is stark white.
They also split some of the cartoons across pages, which is sort of odd, but in most cases it works without losing anything into the binding.
As with the other translated editions, there’s text here and there that I have no idea what it is. In this case, aside from Masaya Matsuura’s foreword (which he has told me he’ll supply an English version of sometime soon), there’s also text at each new chapter, under the chapter title. I don’t know whether they put extra commentary there, whether it’s maybe something Masaya wrote, or whether it’s just the first paragraph from the actual chapter, or what…
Masaya’s foreword has photos in it of us together, which is very cool. My favorite bit, though, is that the angel penguin is on the spine. 🙂
I only did two poems based on aquarium fish, and really, one of the fish was an amphibian. The african clawed frog we had almost seemed like a robot — he lived just to eat. Eventually, this caused his demise, when he inadvisedly attempted to swallow the head of a kuhli loach. Kuhli loaches, like other loaches, have blades somewhere near their head, or sharp barbels, or something. Enough to do some damage, at any rate.
