Just how much of a selfish, greedy bastard am I? This much.

My thirtieth birthday is coming up at the end of this month, and some people have hinted that I’m hard to shop for, so I’m trying to make it easy. Give me money. Click the donation button below and give me a couple of bucks I can use to get myself something nice.

Some years I’ve ducked out on my birthday. Some years it’s just slipped by. In general, I don’t get all that excited about it, because that only leads to anxious greed and an inevitable letdown when you don’t get that rigid airship or trip to Prague you were secretly hoping for. This year, though, is the three-oh, and I’m still here, and that ain’t nothing. So here I am being greedy on the Internet. Loathe me. I understand.

One recent birthday, a bunch of friends surprised me by flying into town for two days. Probably the best birthday present I ever got.

Given enough starter money, this year I might be able to spring for airfare and registration for the Penny Arcade Expo (aka PAX) in Seattle, which is the last weekend in August. That would let me see a famed city I haven’t seen in twenty-five years and meet up with friends I hardly ever get to see. Or maybe it’d defray the cost of a party I might have here in the ATL for the handful of local folks who remember my name. Or maybe I’ll get the car fixed, have a nice dinner out, or pay off debt. Who knows? I offer up this donation button with no representation that it is for anything other than giving me money to do with as I please.

The point, here, is that my house is already full of books, and I can eek out the cash for a new book every now and then. What I don’t have so much are trips to distant cities, meetings with friends, and chances to wax geeky in person with my colleagues. Those would make good gifts.

Still, if that doesn’t cut it for you, the button to my Amazon Wish List is still in the sidebar to your right. You do what you want.

So, seriously. Just how selfish is this? I can hardly believe it, that’s how selfish this is. How tacky is it? All of it. It is all the tacky there is.

The first Gameplaywright Press book, Things We Think About Games, is now available for preorder. Have a look at the book’s page for details on ordering, Gen Con availability, and our “First Twenty” special for the first twenty orders that come in online.

Actual physical copies of the book should be in our hands in the middle of the month, and we’ll start signing and processing preorders then. Thanks, already, for your interest in the book and for bearing with us as we get our sales and shipping engines turning for the first time.

Click to read more about the book

Some things are happening, and they’re happening soon. The first copy of our first book at Gameplaywright Press is here: Things We Think About Games. Right now all we have is the advance proof copy, but it looks good and printing is proceeding. We expect to have copies at Gen Con Indy, and direct-sale orders begin soon.

This is the part I’ll never get over: A couple of weeks ago, this book was a picture on my hard drive. Now it’s a physical thing, here on my desk. So weird.

Meanwhile, I’m heading off to Wofford College tomorrow to teach a bit at their brilliant-looking summer-session program: SharedWorlds. The nervous are starting to twinge and twitter, as I’ll be in pretty sterling company with the likes of world-class fantasist Jeff VanderMeer setting the tone. There are numerous X-factors still surrounding the material I’ll cover, as I’ll be teaching what the students want to learn, but I expect to look at elements of player agency, level design, and defined actions in imaginary worlds as shared spaces. Though I’m excited to talk out some ideas with students, I’m just as eager to hear what they have to say about interactivity in game worlds now, and see what they think about believability and verisimilitude in imaginary worlds.

Plus, I may just run a couple of simple pick-up RPG sessions for people. This is the good kind of nervous.

You know, I thought I might get a letter or two about that last piece I wrote for The Escapist. (See “The Dealer Doesn’t Play”.) Maybe I’d hear from a reader with a question, or maybe a former coworker who didn’t like my insinuation. (Not an insinuation, really, but an outright statement.) Something.

The commentary actually generated by the article is mostly light chit-chat about games past, which is fitting and typical. For a lot of people, paper RPGs are a thing of the past. Maybe they are for me—it’s too soon to say. But some part of me operates on the notion that commentary and discussion is the goal of all creative output, that the article is a failure if it doesn’t generate a lot of after-talk. Maybe it’s enough for the piece to be read and enjoyed in the moment, but I think I’m not alone when I say that I’d rather the article come back to the reader a few times over the next few days.

To get a sense of how writers obsess about nuance, read this angry letter from Giles Coren, a food critic for The Times. He’s upset over a back-breaking straw, an edit made to one of his reviews without his consent: a cut indefinite article. An “a.” How many of his readers were tracking Mr. Coren’s record of ending on stressed syllables, do you think? Irrelevant. The writer was, and it was important to him.

Mr. Coren’s review has successfully sparked after-talk, though, even if a good deal of it is from him. His letter to his editors is about nuance and rage, dwelling over fine details and foaming with curses. Poise is tossed for power. In response to a cut “a” he fires off a lot of “fuck.” It’s wonderfully honest writing, wrinkled with the kind of typos that come with angry fingers. It’s good stuff. Rankled, petty, good.

It’s not just what he wrote that matters, but what he meant. He’s hoping to leave the reader with something, maybe something that lingers, and he’s put a lot of weight on that goal. He wanted to insinuate beyond what he said.

The only substantive material cut from my article was cut by me. If I hadn’t cut the piece down, it would’ve been madder and meaner and more likely to get me email. It would’ve fulfilled my goal of after-talk, at least better than the piece does now. (Presuming it had been read—I have no reason to believe anymore that the audience at The Escapist overlaps with that of pen-and-paper fans like RPGnet’s and White Wolf forums’.)

An earlier draft of the article didn’t insinuate much, and said more than it should’ve. It was more bitter than nostalgic. It was likely to succeed at getting me email, if it had been read, but I would probably not have been happy with the messages I got. No one wants a cease-and-desist letter, right?

The trouble, for me, is knowing how to gauge the success of an article after it’s been loosed into the wild, without telemetry back from the readership. Ultimately, this is because I do not trust my own opinion of my own work (for good reason?). Mr. Coren seems to trust his opinion of his own work, but even that comes with perils, as we can see. I don’t want to be so attached to every nuance of my work that my satisfaction cannot endure the dings and adjustments that come with the realities of real-world publishing, but neither do I want to be so distant from others’ opinions that I do not care what readers think. There’s a middle ground, but the balance cannot be struck. It must be constantly adjusted and maintained.

My newest article, “The Dealer Doesn’t Play,” appears in this week’s issue of The Escapist, alongside several great articles. This time out, we look at some of my experiences as a demo-monkey back in the day, running RPG demos for Last Unicorn Games and Wizards of the Coast, and wonder if there really is a way to get a job in the gaming business that doesn’t whittle down the opportunities you get to actually play. Read “The Dealer Doesn’t Play.”

Don’t miss the magazine and all other Escapist content at www.escapistmagazine.com.