ETAO Podcast, Episode 95.
Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack by default? (Brian would argue that it means intentionally not drawing in the player into the game’s fiction—which takes an usual quantity and quality of design discipline).
Here we talk about all of that, as well as about design, linguistics, artificial intelligence, the kinds of conversations people of faith might be more used to having, and believe it or not, even an interesting angle on the ageless games-as-art debate.
You can get Wild Honesty on Steam and Itch.
You can also follow Brian on Twitter.
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• Here’s that lovely Spry Fox talk, Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships.
• TableTopics, for the record, is one of the tabletop conversation games that I’d encountered before and kind of bounced off of. (This is not a review of TableTopics, however).
• Here’s the conversation that got me thinking about Keynes recently.
• Sure, I’ll link to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing again. What am I gonna do, not link to it again?
• And here’s Disco Bear!
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“All The People Say (Season 3)” by Holly Hyperion.
“Be Honest with Me” by Gene Autry and Fred Rose, performed by Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, Gordon Mac Rae with the Don Juans, and Fred Lowry.
“Bossa Antigua” by Kevin MacLeod, as heard in Wild Honesty.
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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.
Everybody's Talking at Once 