There is a veritable treasure trove of articles in the archives of this site. They come from such luminaries as John Wick, Seth Ben-Ezra, and even Gary Gygax. I suspect many of those on the site today are unaware of these--and more's the pity, because although I wrote over two hundred articles published here myself (not counting blogs and forum posts), that is not half of what is available in terms of role playing information.
I intend to remedy that, to some degree. My Game Ideas Unlimited series was published weekly here for four years, and each Friday, or roughly Friday, I am going to resurrect the next in series and invite comment and discussion. Hey, I'd love to promote the works of some of these others, but that's not really my place, so I'll let them do that.
We will begin at the beginning. On the first of June, 2001, Game Ideas Unlimited: Introduction became the first article in this series, the first of five series started over the course of that next week in Gaming Outpost's effort to build on its success with excellent articles from industry professionals. It is, as it says, an introduction--to me, to the series that would follow, to some of my other work. I've done my best to clean up the old links (including the links in the linked articles, when they are here on this site), and invite you to join me, either as a bit of nostalgia for what we were doing almost seven years ago, or for the first time in an adventure in role playing game ideas.
As I said, your comments on that article are welcome.
--M. J. Young
Now this is an excellent idea, MJ. Bringing out buried treasure for museum display, so to speak.
Is there a way to get to the articles without having to pass through a discussion thread? I can't find one. From the main page I can get to blog posts tagged as Article-related, and on the Discussions page I can get to threads that are Article-related, but nowhere can I find an Article page. I even tried typing http://gamingoutpost.com/articles/ and got a 404.
Try here:
http://gamingoutpost.com/category/article/
Of course, browsing isn't the greatest right now because most of the articles aren't tagged. But you can get to them there, and you can also search for "game ideas unlimited" in the search box at the top of each page.
I linked it from my blog, too, and now I've started linking the end of each article to the next (the link is on the words "Next week" at the end of each article, and will take you through the first six months).
I should be tagging them, too; there are just so many, and so much to do with them all.
--M. J. Young
I notice that anyone can add tags to forum posts, but only those who can edit an article or blog can add tags to it. I thought I'd mention that, in case you were making suggestions to the design team.
--M. J. Young
I still can't get to anything more useful than page after page of blog posts that are tagged for articles. Any chance of setting up a page to get to the articles directly? Anything I could do to help?
Llarry, going to the articles archive I linked to above should do it, but you're right that a ton of MJ's blog posts are showing up there. MJ, when you write them, are you picking the article or blog category?
I always select "Blog". It may be that once or twice I have forgotten to select anything, but I've never selected "article".
Llarry, I would note that if you go to the Archives section, you can select the month/year you want to browse and get to the articles that way. Game Ideas Unlimited started in June 2001 and ran almost four years. There were a couple of Seth's Dreaming Out Loud columns earlier than that, and Wick and Skarka both had game design series before that. One of them was called Game Designer's Journal (it was referenced as GDJ), but I don't off the top of my head which that was or what the other was called (it was probably Wick's; I enjoyed that a bit more than Skarka's).
--M. J. Young