🔺Let's Start 2022 Off Right.

News from your local Games Scene and a Community Spotlight on SPC's Long Haul 1983

Hi! Welcome to the first newsletter for the Triangle Interactive Arts Collective!

Upcoming Events

• Thursday 12/16 7pm -Holiday Meet & Greet - come hang out on gather.town, a proximity-based video chat platform in a 2D virtual world​

• Open Community Coworking every Wednesday afternoon (2-5PM) at the Frontier

January Events

• Triangle Game Club Discusses game of the month: INSCRYPTION (Late January, might be virtual)

• Playtest Night at Meeple's Brew in Cary (TBD)

• Community Coworking every Wednesday afternoon at the Frontier

What’s Going On At Coworking?

• Mostly we've been all just doing our regular jobs and in the downtime, talking about games, the collective, and upcoming events.

• Kirk has been discussing his prototype for a car-mechanic garage worker-placement game. Will Kirk take the once-in-a-lifetime pun opportunity to make a board game with an "engine-building mechanic"? Time will tell.

• Michael's been working on a weird puzzle game and sharing opinions about what he thinks the best way to learn Unity is.

• Elijah has been studying up and learning some new programming skills - We witnessed a total "hello world" moment on the shared screen in the coworking room and literally all got up and cheered! It was awesome.

• Vince swears he isn't working on anything, but I heard a rumor some sort of music-related game might be showing at MAGFest 2023? (sorry)

Community Spotlight - LONG HAUL 1983 by SPC
I have never played a solo pen-and-paper RPG before, but it is always the kind of thing I thought I might be into. Turns out, I'm really into it. TIA Collective group member and new resident of NC, Sean Patrick Cain / SPC, has created something wonderful in the print release of LONG HAUL 1983.

Find all of SPC's internet links here: https://linktr.ee/seanpatrickcain

As I set up the game booklet, a deck of cards, four dice, and a character sheet, I imagined I'd probably savor this experience of role-playing a long-haul trucker. I recalled my own childhood experiences on US Interstates, usually headed to a campsite somewhere down the road. After taking a wrong turn once, my dad excused his mistake saying "It's not all about the destination, but savoring the journey along the way". This memory in particular was bouncing around my head as I read through the introduction and rules of LONG HAUL 1983. 

What I ended up finding on this journey was surprising emotional depth that went beyond a simple road trip adventure or end-of-the-world thriller. I felt pangs of dread, beauty, longing, and admiration for small moments of nature and music over the course of a short playthrough. My (initially) loosely-defined character came to life with surprising nuance through short prompts and improvised in-character voice memos left to a friend on the other side of the highway. I journalled with fervor, documenting mundane details of the road and my character's descent into madness. I often recalled locations from my childhood roadtrips and saw them in a new light, out of new eyes, and with a deadly threat of my own invention looming behind me on the road.

The game gives the player an enormous amount of room to improvise, to set their own boundaries, and to define the kind of experience they want to have. I wondered to myself if it was flexible enough in its design to play through it as an apocalyptic road-trip comedy in the style of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". It probably is.

The included ambient audio and event-driven music playlist perfectly set the mood and led to my favorite moment while playing this game. I honestly think even attempting to write about this in the spotlight is just going to sell the experience short. Ask me about it in person!

There's this deep sense of space that pervades everything in Long Haul 1983 - from the visual composition of the typographical layout and fonts, to the content of the game rules and instructions themselves. SPC will often encourage the player to take a deep breath as a step in a series of instructions (in between drawing cards or rolling dice). I respected this instruction every time it was asked of me. A required part of the daily cycle of the game is taking time to reflect, much like the long stretches of highway can cause any driver to do when on them for an amount of time over 30 minutes - I loved this. This space to reflect and explore your role-played emotional state is what makes the experience really shine.

The game, giving player such space, requires that the player carve out the proper amount of room (physically, temporally, and emotionally) to play, improvise, and sink deep into this experience. I think back to the heartfelt audio logs and journalings I made, the moments where I imagined something beautiful I saw along the road, and the sense of connection and trust I felt towards an imaginary vehicle. My wrong-turn-making dad would be proud, because I really did savor the journey along the way. Sorry, it's cheesy, I know, but I really enjoyed Long Haul 1983 and highly recommend checking it out.

Sean planned, printed, sold, and shipped the first physical copies of Long Haul 1983 in November and has been sharing about their process along the way. Check out the My Experiences in Selling Stuff twitter threads, detailing SPC's first venture into printing, selling, & shipping a book. I'm definitely taking notes. Thanks for this, Sean!


Thanks for reading and hope to see you at an event soon!

<3 Michael