It's time for Little Game Chef again! Graham Walmsley, Eero Tuovinen, and Jason Morningstar are returning judges. Whether this is good news or bad news sort of depends on how much you enjoyed the competition last year. Regardless, we hope that you will participate and challenge yourself!

THEME
The theme is comedy.

INGREDIENTS
In your game, include three of the following ingredients.

● Bond.
● Holiday.
● Starfish.
● Recall.

LENGTH
Please keep it short, as the judges will stop reading when they get bored.

SUBMISSION RULES
All entries will be anonymous, so please strip any identifying data, including your name or contact information, from your game. If you submit a game that identifies you, it won't be read. That doesn't mean you should disguise your writing style: just take your name out and anything else obvious.

Please only submit one game. No, we've got no way of knowing, because it's anonymous, but seriously, just one. And one file only per game, please: if it's not in your main file, it won't be judged.

When you're finished, upload the finished game, in a PDF of less than 2Mb, at:

www.grahamwalmsley.net/littlegamechef

...before Sunday 4th July, 23:59 GMT. If you submit a game after that, by the timestamp on the uploaded file, it won't be read.

CLARIFICATIONS

● Use the ingredients as a jumping-off point, a spark for the imagination. We won’t be going through games to check you’ve used the ingredients you claim.
● Work alone.
● Don't design publicly: just upload your game when you're finished.
● You're encouraged to look at the other games, and give people feedback, but there's no obligation.
● As you long as you upload your game by the deadline, you're welcome to participate. You can enter at any time during the week. You don't need to register or anything.
● The judges will read each entry (subject to boredom, see above) but don't necessarily expect constructive feedback or thoughtful commentary from them.
● If Eero, Graham and Jason can agree on an overall winner, there'll be an overall winner. Otherwise, there'll be some announcement of winners, but not an overall one. We're deliberately not making too many promises, here, in case we have to change things later.

OTHER STUFF

● Your game text need not be funny. We want mechanics that facilitate comedy, not necessarily games that are funny to read. We will definitely stop reading game texts that try to be funny and fail.
● Please do test the uploading in advance. Full instructions are on the uploading web page.
● After winners have been judged, the uploaded games will be deleted. If you'd like your game hosted, you'll need to do it yourself.
● If you lack the ability to create a .pdf file, we suggest either using Google Documents, which will create them for you, or creating a text file and converting here: http://rst2a.com/
● Do talk about this on your blog or similar, but please don't post advertisements on other forums (we've posted on all the forums we want to post on). Let's keep it small.
● Treat Little Game Chef as a challenge to design a game within two weeks, rather than a full competition. Although the competitive aspect is fun, it's really about kicking around the idea of comic mechanics and putting together a game under constraints.
● Don’t even think of getting your game ready to sell at GenCon. Go and playtest it instead.

Thanks, and good luck!

JUDGE'S STATEMENT: EERO

Humour is a tricky topic for a roleplaying game. My specific interest is in creative interest and passion: it is possible to create comedy that is passionate as drama or other creative art, but this is not common - much more common is absurdism, sketch comedy and punnery with little thought sacrificed to the creative appeal of the endeavour beyond the most immediate reading amusement. Paranoia is the seminal ideal of comedy roleplaying game in this one regard: it manages to be comedic while having a serious message and an appealing, challenging setting that can be handled frivolously or most seriously without skipping a beat. I am interested in games that manage to be funny without being trivial, and in games that broach new techniques for how the light-hearted distance used in comedy is created. We have seen carefully prepared GM sketch shows, we have seen ludicrous player character routines both prepped and improvised, we have seen subtle irony - what else is there? Is there something beyond Paranoia, Dying Earth, Elfs, Shab-Al-Hiri Roach, Toon, kill puppies for satan, Ninja Burger and all the other comedy games I could name if I stopped to think?

I'll judge the games based on their flair with the ingredients, the impact of the approach to the central concept of "comedy" and how promising they seem as game products to be developed.

Does "Bond" means "Bond, James Bond"? Or is it just the English word "bond"?

Respectfully, and with complete understanding of your perception, there is much more to Ninja Burger (2nd Edition, at least) than straight-up parody. In many respects I think the 2nd Edition of the game shares a lot philosophically with Tales From the Floating Vagabond and Hol, games which are completely over the top with ludicrous central concepts, but which still allow enough room to play it either completely silly, or completely straight.

I don't say this to get into a battle about the merits of Ninja Burger, but to bring the other two games into the discussion, as I've had a lot of fun playing them in the past (despite varying degrees of brokenness with their respective systems).

Michael, you might well be right. I don't know it well.

Lester, I did warn Jason about "Starfish". (Mind you, I'm British, I can see double entendres in anything.)

I did make a prolapsed rectum procedure for Medical Hospital. It requires a sock. Not sure if that'll make the final cut, but it is a thing.

Humour per se is a difficult subject. But yes, humour in games generally will come from one of three sources: an inherently funny or parodial concept, humour written into the manual's text, or from the players themselves. The most rewarding, but arguably most difficult of the three is the last. If you've a bunch of unfunny players, it's very difficult to make them otherwise using rules and regulations. On the other hand it's possible to make funny players unfunny by the same process. It does make me wonder sometimes if brokenness in a comedy game's mechanics is necessarily a bad thing...

-Ash

Things I've found funny in play are usually random, spur-of-the-moment things that are introduced in a mostly-serious context. A character who does something ludicrous and unexpected, for example, or someone improvising an NPC who just becomes a figure of fun for no reason. How do you plan for the unplanned? How do you make people not expect the unexpected?

Posted By: GrahamLester, I did warn Jason about "Starfish". (Mind you, I'm British, I can see double entendres in anything.)

It's actually references to financial instruments like "bond" that causes the problem.

So if James Bond is out, what about Doc Holiday? Or if you do them together?

(Actually, I already have an idea that involves neither of those two. But just asking...)

You can pretty much ignore our preferences. Jason will hate a James Bond game. I will love a James Bond game. Write what you want to write.

Actually, it'd be quite funny if you wrote games to annoy Jason. Write a heavily GM-ed, crunchy James Bond game and you'll get my vote.

James Bond + holiday + um...starfish = a story of self-discovery.

"Recall" immediately made me think of Ed Norton's character's job in Fight Club. And Toyota.

Nevermind. I forgot we weren't supposed to talk about our games.

Hrm. I may do opposite game chef again this year.

Fishstars

Guys, guys. The opposite of a starfish is clearly a manta ray.

yrs--
--Ben

I would think Scalies are the reptile furries. I'd go with Finnies for the sea-life except that I'm sure most of them are more into cephalopods than fish as such...

Besides, the opposite animal of Starfish is really Platypus. (Platypus is the opposite animal to almost anything.)

I am so in.

Posted By: Eero TuovinenDon't forget the cultural roots of "comedy" as it's understood in the cinema of today - comedy has not always been like it is today, and the word has had different meanings that still inform certain subgenres. There are more than one way to skin the cat, and I for one wouldn't mind an approach to comedy that were less "hah hah" and more "oh, how delightful!".

Oh, man. I'd love to see Shakespearean comedy or British drawing-room comedy. That'd be fantastic. I'd love a Shakespearean game, but I would be so, so critical.

By this, I mean "I'd love to be surprised with an interesting form of comedy" rather than "Do those two things I just mentioned".

Posted By: jeffr(Platypus is the opposite animal to almost anything.)

= win. <3

Every platypus with a keytar is a billed thing with a keyboardy-thing and is also a broad-flat-tailed thing with a guitary-thing, but not every billed thing with a keyboardy-thing is a platypus with a keytar, nor is every broad-flat-tailed thing with a guitary-thing a platypus with a keytar.

keytar keytar keytar

keytar

Posted By: Eero TuovinenAh, yes. I see it so clearly now. This game design has my commendations.

Comedy and [insert genre or tone here] seem like very different things.
But, in fact, there is a sweet spot that hybridizes them, that makes both more than their base.

It is rather like a guitar beaver and a keyboard goose.
Together, hybridized, they form something much better.
A keytar platypus.

Thus: hold lightly to the idea of comedy, and you will create beautiful things that exist in interesting intersections.
Just as one holding lightly to the concept of a beaver will create beautiful patypi.

I don't know. I'm not sure I can top Johnstone's amazing diagram there.

Not really. But you could always hack Poison'd, then pretend it was a whole new game, _{like Vincent did with Apocalypse World}.

That Johnstone guy is funny, somebody should make a game out of him and the starfish and the platypus and a comedy routine of some sort.

No, I'm not promising favorable judging to it.

I think it looks for a PDF extension and a size of less than 2Mb.

It also detects whether games aren't quite funny enough. That could be the problem.

Edited to add: I've just created a tiny PDF from Google Docs and successfully uploaded it. So I'm still not sure what the problem is, but it doesn't seem to be a fundamental error with, say, PDFs created in Google Docs.

So, yes, try again later. Failing that, try creating a new Google Documents to see whether that works. Failing that, aaargh.

Also, I'm delighted to see two entries uploaded already. Wonderful.

Posted By: Ice Cream EmperorI think a game mechanic based around venn diagrams would be fairly awesome.

:-O Whoa! Awesome idea; if wasn't working on 4 other games right now, I'd start doing something with that... oh hell, I probably will anyway.

Progress is going well on my entry. The game design is effectively there; I'm into the actual writing of a draft that is more than just point for notes. The challenge for me is likely going to be finding an internet connection that will allow me to submit on time; starting tomorrow, I'm heading to a cottage with the wife and kid, and there's no internet out there.

I sort of wish I'd been paying attention to this a week ago when it debuted. I probably don't have time to do this right now. Or right, now. But if inspiration strikes...

Also, Dave, creative constraint. I would never have made The Roach if it weren't for Accuser, Companion, Wine and Entomologist.

Thanks, guys.

I dig "made to order", but the extra step of "interpret the ingredients however you want" breaks that for me. It's too far removed from a real order.

"You're making this for the Starfish company, whose brand is based on Holiday games and toys, and they want a game that fits in naturally with their catalogue," or even, "Your employer wants a game about Product Recall," would be fine by me. I suppose that'd produce a pretty different sort of competition...

As is, I'm quite happy to be forced to work with "comedy". Jason, when you made Roach, was there also a contest theme, or was it the 4 ingredients you mentioned and nothing else?

I don't want to give the impression that I'm upset or anything. Just probing the possibilities, in case you 3 guys decide to do this again in the future and are open to format tweaks.

I sort of wish I'd been paying attention to this a week ago when it debuted. I probably don't have time to do this right now. Or right, now. But if inspiration strikes...

Will, just a quick reply to this. I'm not really replying to you, specifically, but taking the chance to make a point.

There's absolutely no pressure to do a game "right". That is, there's no pressure to make a finished or polished game. Because you can't. You just can't do that in two weeks. You can add a bit of polish, maybe playtest it, but it'll be nothing like finished.

So we only expect alpha games. Little sparks of ideas. First rough drafts. Nothing finished at all.

And if anyone wants to do that before Sunday, there's definitely enough time and you're very welcome.

Posted By: J. WaltonThe Game Chef theme in 2005 (the Roach year) was "historical" and the ingredients were "pick 3 of these 5: Accuser, Companion, Entomology, Invincible, Wine."

This is why people are always getting the Roach and Bacchanal mixed up.

FWIW, carry and Roach came out of the same contest. I used Accuser, Companion and Invincible. It's not like the ingredients lead to similar games, and I sure as hell wouldn't have written carry the way I did without them (or even at all without the contest).

So..uh...get off my lawn! Damn kids with their hipping and their hopping and the baggy pants.

There are just under 24 hours left (check the submission page for the exact time). There are fourteen entries so far, which is a good number.

Do let us have any last minute entries.

That's it! Have a look at the games submitted. There are twenty of them.

Thanks to everyone who entered or nearly entered.

We'll be back shortly with some sort of announcement or feedback or something. Remember, only one can win! Unless we can't decide on a winner! Then more than one can win!

Posted By: GrahamThat's it!Have a look at the games submitted. There are twenty of them.

Cool!

The Starfish Ambassador is my favourite out of the one's I've looked at so far.

Also, incidentally, one of the entries includes the author's name on every second page - eep!