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Friday, November 30, 2012

Dorkland! Roundtable Doubleshot: George E. Williams and Jason Morningstar

Another double shot of my baby's love, or in this case Dorkland! Roundtables.

I spoke with George E. Williams (also known as Loki). You may know him from the Planewalker gaming site, or with his work as a freelancer on some cool Pathfinder material. We talked about his gamer origins and some of our favorite ways to prepare and/or eat alligator. This is the point at which I would say "it was a fun talk," but that is starting to become a bit of a cliche in my writeups of these Roundtables. I am enjoying the reveal of the things that make us similar as gamers, but I am finding those bits and pieces that make us unique from each other to be even more interesting to discover.



I think most of you know who Jason Morningstar is, after all Tabletop did do an actual play of his game Fiasco, and there are many, many more people who watch them than me. Up at that link some people play a game of Fiasco (although according to Jason in our interview they do get a few things wrong, but that's OK too), which is interesting to watch. I admit that I've seen Fiasco at some stores around town, but I haven't played it myself. It does look like it could be fun. He also talked about the origins and development of his latest (at the time of this interview and post) game Durance as well.

This was an interesting interview. We talked about a lot of Jason's games, but we also spent time talking about his interest in LARPs (Live Action Roleplaying, just in case there's someone who reads this blog and doesn't know what that means). LARPing is another one of those things that I have never done, but find interesting, so the conversation was of interest to me. I should look into finding some people involved with LARPing for future Roundtables.



So, at the beginning of this post I talk about discovering the differences that we have as gamers. I think that those differences is where the interesting stuff all goes on. Some would have you believe that there is this monoculture of geekiness, or even of gaming, but I think that these interviews start to show something different. Yes, there are points of similarity in us all...many of us entered into gaming through some of the same games, or we have some similar interests, but as time passes those similarities start to drift and become less and less important as we find our own voices. Nothing is as important as finding your own voice, even if others don't like it.