Alternative Uses of RPGs

1
Alternative Uses of RPGs

• Greg Costikyan

2
Who am I?

• 30 commercially published games
• RPGs Paranoia, Toon, The Price of Freedom
  (flinch), Violence The RPG of Egregious
  Bloodshed
• Online game mobile pioneer (MadMaze, Unplugged
  games)
• Currently work for Nokia Research Center/Game
  House

3
Tom Peters Business School in a Box

• Designed by Eric Goldberg (Dragon Quest)
• Dungeons Dragons for the Executive Set
• Licensed by Tom Peters, best-selling business
  book author (Thriving on Chaos, In Search of
  Excellence, etc.)
• Interactive roleplaying case studies
• It is 1969, and you are a team at Ford planning
  for the Pinto

4
Tom Peters

• Each players job is defined (marketing, design,
  manufacturing, etc).
• Overall business objective
• Each has a personal objective/attitude (e.g.,
  You are retiring soon and dont give a crap.)
• Faced with a defined series of decisions that can
  be made in any order.
• Real world time passes with each decision.

5
Tom Peters

• Random events as time passes (e.g., Hughes
  Aircraft buys AMC)
• Played via discussion around a table.
• Ultimately, decisions and events cross-referenced
  in a system of linked paragraphs (ala
  choose-your-own ending books) to determine
  business outcome.
• Didnt sell worth a damn.

6
The Ivanhoe Game

• Multiplayer, interactive literary analysis of a
  text
• Players take rolessometimes of characters from
  book, sometimes external to the book
• Role is supposed to externalize players own
  attitudes and prejudices and give greater insight
  into how these affect analysis
• Roleplaying through posts to a wiki or blog in
  character

7
References

• Tom Peters Business School in a Box
  http//www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0333
  577442/104-9641131-7023142?vglance
• Ivanhoe Game http//www.speculativecomputing.org/
  ivanhoe/