"...so I've been...continually frustrated by my efforts to take these ideas of what cyberpunk is in my head," I was saying to my wife, "and translating them into some sort of gameable --"
She reached over and tapped me on the chest. I shut up.
"You're trying too hard," she said.
And transcendent realization showered upon me, like an upturned bucket of trout.
I was giving my wife a condensed version of yesterday's blog post (Condensed...! Don't you envy her?) when she just kind of pointed that out. She knows me. Right? 'Cause, you know, we're married.
But...yeah. I think I've been doing this thing backwards. It's like I've been trying to take this nebulous, hazy notion of what type cyberpunk game I want (in terms of plots, mood, theme and setting, not rules) and have been trying to solidify it into something palpable. Well, no, it doesn't solidify, because it's a damn haze.
What I should be doing instead is taking the more concrete -but still metaphorical- structures of standard adventure gaming (like these, duh) and wrap my cyberpunk touchy-feelies around them, which is what auras do.
How stupid do you have to be to overlook such an elementary thing?
I hereby propose that we begin measuring cluelessness in rotwang!s, where 1 milirotwang! is "Honey, where's the vacuum cleaner?", 1 centirotwang! is "Why is my VCR blinking '12:00'?", 1 decirotwang! is "That girl in the short skirt keeps winking at me...what's her deal?" and 1 rotwang! is...
...well, this post.
