This summer, as part of our activities with the Residual Media Depot, Alex Custodio and I are modding several videogame consoles while closely documenting our work. The goal of this project is to create a series of succinct, approachable modding guides that detail the tools and techniques needed for hardware modding. Game Boy Pocket Backlit LCD Installation Our first modding project involved...
My book review for Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons is now live at Press Start! Press Start is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for multidisciplinary game studies. You can read the full article for free, but I’ve also included a short excerpt below: No disrespect toward Jon Peterson’s prior work, but his latest foray into the history of...
Today, Mammoth Island Games debuts its Adventure Club! Each season of the Club offers a bevy of postcard-sized, system neutral, TTRPG adventures. The current season theme is Islands and features five entries. After Hearth & Blade and The Elephant in the Room, my brother and I shifted our focus toward smaller TTRPG projects. This is for three reasons. First, scoped-down TTRPGs allow us to...
I am happy to announce that a journal article I co-authored with Mia Consalvo has just been published in Games & Culture! Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators is now available as an open access article, and represents months of research we conducted on Dragon Age and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. The paper is one of many outputs of...
The One Page Dungeon Contest is a yearly competition where aspiring game designers create a role-playing-game dungeon within the space of an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Dozens of participants compete with one goal in mind: to create the ultimate single page adventure. After having competed for a number of years, we’ve decided to offer our 4 previous entries for free on the Mammoth Island Itch.io page...
After years of on-and-off development and 18 months of open beta testing, the Hearth & Blade core rulebook is now released! Folks can pick up a copy (PWYC) on the Mammoth Island itch.io page. Hearth & Blade is a campaign setting and homebrew ruleset for the first edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Explore Yavmir, a frozen realm steeped in rich Slavic folklore. Delve into ancient...
This past summer, I had the privilege of working with Alex Custodio and lee wilkins on a trio of Game Boy workshops, leading up to our Solar Game (Boy) Jam on August 26th. The work was completed as part of the Milieux Solar Media Project, which explores the affordances of solar energy for digital communication systems. The three workshops invited guests to tinker with different aspects of the...
Last week, Alex Custodio and I had the opportunity run a workshop titled Volatile Memory: How to Replace Your Game Boy Cartridge Batteries, which we put on as part of an exhibition at Concordia University. We invited folks down to the Makerspace to learn about videogame maintenance and showed them how to swap the battery on a Game Boy cartridge – extending its lifespan by allowing certain...