The International Festival of Independent Games Is Weird And I Am There

At Indiecade....

So are you a game developer?

Um, well, kinda, I wrote umm...well ok have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?

Yeah.

Well I actually wrote a book...
_

There was a lot of that.

Also: snacks.

Then one guy told me about a video game he wrote where you play the pilot of an unmanned assassination drone and another guy told me he wrote a video game about having a cart.

There was a red carpet which was remarkably like the Adult Video Awards carpet except they asked me about my D&D book instead of asking Mandy about boobs. Also probably there is not now a thread with 900 people complaining about how Mandy's dressed in the photos taken on said carpet.

Then there was Felicia Day who I am told by Mandy and Izzy is an important game person and she told jokes on a stage and introduced more game people.

There was a lot of bantering and cheering for things I think were games I never heard of like someone would say "Trains!" and then people would be all YAY TRAINS! And I guess that there is a game called Trains, about which I know nothing except it appears to be somewhat unambitiously named.

There was a lot of "Have you heard about 'Blink'?" No "Smop?" No "Smiggle Wars?" No... Well I worked on Smop last year and this year I am doing Smiggle Wars II. Ok.

Then there was awards in categories...

Visuals
Game Design
Story/World Design
Audio
Interaction
Special Recognition 
Impact

Technology

And Vornheim gets the award for...

Technology.

Technology?

According to the site: 

The craft of game development is inseparable from the medium in which it exists. This award honors the use of the medium to create an expression that simply couldn’t have been possible otherwise. A iPad game that leverages multi-touch input as an integral aspect of the experience, or a game that builds upon a computer’s processing abilities to make a digital work that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, this award honors bold and unexpected experiments with the affordances of the medium that transform technology to magic. 

Well alright then.

You heard that right, buddy: MAGIC. 

So, Vornheim:

Lost the OSR's 3 Castles award to Stars Without Number, lost the Diana Jones award to LARPing Swedes, lost the Ennies to a bunch of dungeon tiles, and beat a bunch of video games using 3d rendering, lasers, projections, touch screens and Kinect hardware for a technology award.

Also, they tell me: the vote was unanimous.

I gave a brief acceptance speech wherein I apologized to all the computer programmers and offered to switch awards with them.

Go figure.

p.s. Buy the book it has magical powers.