Blog Archives
It Also Means Goodbye Earth
For all their lightness, party games are tough to design. Probably because comedy is hard enough to create deliberately, let alone when you’re helping others create it out of thin air. It isn’t just a matter of setting up jokes. There’s careful timing to good humor, a cadence, empty spaces, gaps. It’s no wonder so many party games stick to mimicking Apples to Apples.
Heather and Christopher O’Neill’s Aloha Earth goes the other direction, and although the result isn’t quite as well-trod as having everybody play a card, the formula is still a familiar one. This time, one player places a prompt on the table. Everyone else tries to get that player to laugh. There’s a little more to it, but not much. That’s both a strength and a weakness.
Please F— the Teleporter
According to Star Trek, teleportation deconstructs you at the atomic level, beams your particles elsewhere, and then reconstructs those exact same particles in exactly the same format. You’re fine. You’re you. You aren’t obliterated every time you request an emergency teleport to the bathroom. Never mind all the times teleportation goes wrong and creates an evil clone or merges a redshirt with a booger monster. Those are… not what happens with teleportation.
Propaganda. Starfleet’s working overtime to keep you from knowing the truth. Every one of those starships is staffed with an army of unknowing buffer clones.
Ian Zang’s Please Fix the Teleporter is a five-minute game about the harsh realities of teleportation. Theoretically, anyway.
SPACE-BIFF! 