Don’t believe me? How about a Betty White and Tracy Morgan buddy dramedy where Tracy raps? Or a period family drama starring Milla Jovovich, Brian Dennehey and Albert Finney in which Milla Jovovich is in the Vietnam war?

By the way, those are some of our less-bad ideas so far.

So head to the website and listen to me and Alex describe our bad movies while our long-suffering producer Brooke Fox tries to rein us in. You can also subscribe through iTunes. We’re also on Twitter, should you wish to tell us your terrible movie idea.

Every story starts the same: “Happy birthday, Robot!” From there players take turns being the Storyteller. When you’re the Storyteller you roll dice, keeping some and giving others to the players on your left and right. You then write a sentence to keep the story going. You can write as many words as you have dice, but you get the word “Robot” (or “Robot’s”) for free. The player to your right then adds to your sentence using the same rules, only they get the word “and” for free. Then the player to your left adds even more to the sentence, their free word being “but”.

It’s both very silly and very entertaining. As an example, here’s the story Eli, Misty and I created last night.

Happy birthday, Robot!

Robot went flying and had fun but zoomed down quickly.

As he fell, Robot began to sing and dance but landed on a trampoline.

Robot bounced up into the sky and broke apart into tinier robots.

One tiny robot commanded the others and yelled, “Back to the sky, buddies!”

Tiny robots raced skyward (and how!) but one crashed into an eagle.

And that robot fell down into a trampoline pit.

Robot broke through the trampoline and fell to the hot lava below.

Robot buddies raced down and fished him out of the lava but one fell down.

The other robots helped him out but the hook came off.

All the robots became best friends.

Fun times had by robots!

(The hook that came off, in case you’re wondering, was evidently from where the other robots fished the one robot out of the lava.)

You can get a PDF of the game for $10 or a beautiful booklet of it for $25. If Happy Birthday, Robot! sounds a little too child-like for you because your heart is shriveled, you should instead take a look at Solis’s Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Solis is raising the funds to publish the game, and if you donate you can get all kinds of cool stuff plus the warm feeling of having helped something cool come into being.

And charity is the reason for this post. So far, I’ve made hats for Arkansas Children’s Hospital, toys for foster children, bears for Mother Bear Project, booties for pregnancy support services, hats for the homeless, and a few adult hats for a friend of a friend who is headed for brain surgery sometime soon. I have loved every minute of it but all of this takes yarn, lots and lots of yarn.

This is where you come in! I need yarn. So I’m asking if you are a crafter, to clean out your stash. Ask your friends and relatives if they want to clean out their yarn closets. If you already watch Freecycle in your area, keep your eye out for yarn and snag it if it comes available.

New yarn is best for donating to hospital situations and worsted weight works best for the kinds of project I do. But if you have older yarn or different weights, I’ll take those as well and make it work. I got an excellent windfall last year from Freecycle via Danielle of baby weight yarn and that’s what at least half of the hospital hats were made from.

My goal is to continue to turn out hats, scarves, shawls and toys for disadvantaged folks. If I can use up some yarn that needs a home, even better! Email me if you have yarn or other thoughts and ideas.

Addendum: I should have given a shout out to my yarn store of choice: Knit Unto Others in Arkadelphia, AR. Stephen’s mom spends most of her days there with the owner, Claire. The shop is fantastic! Full of lovely yarn and lovelier people and as the name claims, they are all about keeping people warm and snugly.

The highlight for me was undoubtedly the IF Demo Fair, which showed off various experiments with interactive fiction’s form, content, and demonstration. Of those, Aaron Reed’s “what if i’m the bad guy?” had the biggest impact on me. Like Emily, I found myself unable and unwilling to play through it in its entirety, in part because of it being in a public space and in part because of the content. “I gave up playing it” may not sound like high praise, but in this case it is.

I took part in a panel on Setting as Character, where we talked about how, in many games, the setting is part of the character. I was joined by Dean Tate, who was a designer on Bioshock and Bioshock 2 and thus had a lot of experience designing graphical worlds; Rob Wheeler, who, like me, has done a lot of work on setting in interactive fiction (see, for example, our two related but different takes on writing IF room descriptions in the IF Theory Reader); and Andrew Plotkin, who is all about cool settings.

There were other IF-related goings-on. There were panels like the Non-Gamers Gaming panel and Nick Montfort explaining Curveship, his IF design system that focuses on narration. There was the Speed-IF, in which participants wrote a short game in a matter of hours — see A Scurvy of Wonders for one such example. And then there was the point where a lot of us wandered into Chinatown in search of non-convention food.

To sum up: I had fun, there was a lot of IF stuff, A++++ would attend again.

You start with a playset, a list of relationships, locations, needs, and objects. The playsets evoke a particular feel, such as a small southern town or mobster London, and are the Lego blocks out of which you will build a story of messed-up people doing terrible things. You roll a bunch of dice and use them to choose elements from the playset to create the story. Everyone has a relationship with the players to either side of them. They range from family relationships (siblings, parent and child) to romantic ones (current spouses, former lovers) to criminal ones (gambler and bookie, embezzler and accountant, drug supplier and dealer). Each relationship gets an additional detail like an object (“photographs, possibly incriminating”), a location (“the ball field”), or a need (“to get rich through the death of an elderly person”).

This setup phase is a blast in and of itself, and starts setting up the dominoes that will fall one after the other as the game progresses. To give you a feel for how the setup helps guarantee mayhem, here are the relationships we had in our game:

• Richard “Dick” Williamson and his wife Kiki, who have a secret side-business selling marital aids “for educational purposes” in their little Alabama town.
• Kiki and her old friend Junior are secretly selling illicit Viagra from the back of Junior’s panel van he also uses as his mobile pawn shop.
• Meanwhile, Junior is palling around with his drinking buddy and parole officer, Ronnie, who is a mall ninja with a penchant for saying, “Say, have I shown you my new baton?” He spends a lot of time telling Junior about how he wants to get laid by his childhood sweetheart (not played by a player) and not telling Junior that he has erectile dysfunction and has never had sex before.
• Dick works for Mary Beth, owner of Vantage Services, a medical claims processor and the largest business in town. Dick’s had a crush on Mary Beth for the longest time.
• Meanwhile Mary Beth and Ronnie are making extra money by processing fake medical claims for several of Ronnie’s parolees, who are in no position to argue with Ronnie. That’s slow money, though, and Mary Beth and Ronnie are looking to get rich faster. And wouldn’t you know, Ronnie knows a guy who’s dealing in illicit Viagra….

Right away we’ve got a love triangle, two sets of people competing for the same drugs, and a whole bunch of lies that need to be covered up. As you might imagine, it only got worse from there. As the game played out in two acts, including a twist in the middle (known as the Tilt) that made things go from worse to worst, everything snowballed to the point that Mary Beth and Ronnie planned to steal Viagra from Junior and Kiki to sell it at the local old folks’ home, not knowing that Junior had topped the Viagra off with similar-looking pills of rat poison. In the end Junior was dead, shot after accidentally hitting Ronnie with his panel van and interrupting Dick’s attempt to beat Ronnie to death with his own baton. Kiki ran off but was arrested for drunk driving, though in jail she met the real man of her dreams. And Mary Beth, master manipulator and schemer, got off scott free and was rewarded with a windfall of money.

You’ve probably noticed that the game, like the movies after which it is modeled, tends to be fairly unsavory. It lends itself to mordant humor, and its stories are set in a universe where the undeserving are often rewarded while everyone else’s lives are left in shambles. It’s also a more demanding game than some RPGs, requiring collaborative storytelling, free-wheeling improvisation, and a willingness to roll with the changing story. But the reward is great, as our game of Fiasco, like the others I’ve read about, was hilarious in all the wrong ways.

Bully Pulpit Games has released thirteen free playsets to keep the game interesting, and have provided a free sample of the book to give you an idea of what you’re in for. The PDF only costs $10, or for $25 you get the PDF and a printed book. Even if you don’t play Fiasco, the book is worth reading. If you do play Fiasco…well, I imagine you’re in for a wonderful time making your terrible characters meet horrible ends.

Even then, though, his real interest was in making games that told stories. In 1992, dismayed by the direction in which the computer games industry was going and frustrated by a lack of progress on true interactive stories, he gave The Dragon Speech in which he declared that he was leaving the games industry to pursue his dream of interactive storytelling before charging out of the room.

For the last twenty years he’s been working on this problem. He released the Erasmatron system in 1997; in 2007, he released the updated Storytron system. I’ve not been impressed with either, and not just because he considers interactive fiction a dead end. He has taken a reductionist approach to modeling human interaction, boiling it down into variables to be tracked and formulas describing their interaction and then attempting to create an emergent story from those variables and formulas. My experience mirrors Emily Short’s: I have yet to find a story built entirely from such a pile of numbers that has the power of a more deliberately authored story. As Crawford’s own Erasmatron showed, procedurally generating entire stories is hard.

Earlier this year Chris Crawford turned sixty. When he did, he wrote a meditation on reaching this milestone. Most striking to me was his willingness to face his mortality head-on through the concrete metaphor of beads in a jar and his clear-eyed assessment of how successful his life’s work has been.

Thus, when my sixtieth birthday struck, I found myself bereft of achievement in my most important undertaking. I have always felt a calm self-assurance that I am right, that I have developed ideas that would surely conquer the world if I only gave the world enough time to recognize them. My sixtieth birthday shouted loudly that my ideas had most definitely failed to conquer the world. It certainly looks as if I am a washed-up failure. I don’t really believe that — I still believe that I’ve hit upon a solid approach to interactive storytelling and that someday the world will appreciate my work. But with each passing day the evidence of my failure mounts.

I do not know if I could make such a ferocious, unflinching critique of my life as Crawford has done of his. I have not agreed with his approach, and am not one who is in awe of his ideas, but I am in awe of his willingness to give up safe choices and iterative development and instead run headlong, screaming a battle cry, in a two-decade-long attempt to slay his chosen dragon. Crawford’s ideas may not have won me over, but as the trajectory of my own life begins to curve downward, I could do far worse than to be won over by his tenacity.

And here are a few of my favorites: