Allen Varney, writer and game designer

Articles

I've written regular columns for four national magazines (Collect!, Dragon, The Duelist, InQuest) and over 150 articles and reviews in two dozen more magazines.

• "The New Improved Beast": Werewolves in history, literature, and the movies.
• "Turkey's Underground Cities": Based on my visit to Turkey in 1992, this 1994 article outlines the history of the vast subterranean cities carved by fugitive Christians beneath the Cappadocian plains starting in the 3rd Century CE. Real-world dungeons! (Published in Dragon magazine #201.)
• "Cthulhu Lives!": A 1995 InQuest article on horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), creator of the Cthulhu Mythos.
• "Space Opera": This unpublished 1997 article chronicles the history of the slam-bang planet-smashing subgenre that culminated in Star Wars.
• "Movie Munchies": A short humor piece from Video magazine about "food films" (Babette's Feast, Like Water For Chocolate, Tampopo) -- the ones that make you hungry.
• The Acme Novelty Library: A 1995 assessment of the work of brilliant cartoonist Chris Ware.
• "Silicon Hollywood": A rundown of the rather rundown computer gaming industry as of Spring 1998, written for non-gamers. From the first issue (Summer 1998) of the umpteenth doomed relaunch of Amazing Science Fiction, then published by Wizards of the Coast.

My Escapist articles

The complete list of my Escapist magazine articles includes over 50 articles. Some good starting points:

• #3: "Gamer Nation": An entire country that makes your Counter-Strike clan look like wimps: South Korea.
• #5: "Lifegame 2020": If life is just a game, in 2020 we'll be playing 24/7.
• #14: "The Conquest of Origin": Origin created worlds. EA shipped games. EA won.
• #21: "Game Design in the Transfigured World": In the next two centuries, roleplaying ideas will transform society. Game designers can help.
• #34: "Attack of the Parasites": Casual portals all look alike -- and soon, so will their games.
• #40: "Wal-Mart Rules": One giant company controls your games -- but for how much longer?
• #49: "Red Blindness": China will soon be the #1 gaming market, and the US has no clue how or why.
• #66: "My Hindu Shooter": Making a non-violent first-person shooter turned out to be a bad idea.
• #68: "Red vs. Blue Makes Green": Rooster Teeth's machinima hit draws imitators -- including (eventually) Hollywood.
• #72: "StarForce Must Die": The gaming community is deleting the world's most hated copy protection -- but what about the attitude behind it?
• #75: "Boutique MMOGs": Under the radar, but bigger than EverQuest. (See also this blog post, "Your own MMOG?")
• #81: "Uwe Boll and the German Tax Code": Why people keep giving him money to make movies.
• #82: "Buzz Games": In prediction markets, you're not just the player, you're the product.
• #84: "Dunbar's Number": The number of players you hang out with is all in your mind.
• #88: "The French Democracy": A machinima smash raises questions about art -- and copyright.
• #99: "Biz Sims": When companies play games with themselves, it's all business.
• #101: "Blowing Up Galaxies": For Star Wars Galaxies players, Sony Online's SWG NGE was DOA. (See also this Escapist blog post, "Crying Freeman," about how blame for the entire "New Game Enhancements" fiasco fell on one hapless underling.)
• #103: "The Korean Invasion": Asian MMOGs find the West is hard to win.
• #109: "London in Oblivion": Game engines for architects? Architecture for gamers? Why not?

"Blast From the Past" columns from Collect!

For three years (1996-99) I wrote a trading-card column for Tuff Stuff Collect! magazine. These 600-word pieces used some 1960s or '70s trading card set as a jump-point into pop-culture history. (Copyright ©1997,1998,1999 Tuff Stuff Publications. Posted here by permission.)

• The murder of Superman (a good first choice)
• The 1976 CB radio fad
• The Monkees
• The original Mercury astronauts
• King Kong
• Universal Studios monsters
• Kustom Kulture, the California car-customizing movement
• Disneyland in its earliest days
• Dark Shadows, the 1960s Gothic horror soap opera
• The fading glories of NASA's space program
• "Famous People": a meditation on celebrity and fame
• Charles Addams and his Family
• The 1970s disco craze
• "Gross Makes a Comeback": Not a column, but a 1998 Collect article on Comic Images' Meanie Babies trading card set, parodying the faddishly popular Beanie Babies. Meet "Garbage Pail Kids" artist John Pound and learn just how -- involved -- he gets when painting characters like Upchuck the Duck and Snotty the Bull.

Austin Chronicle

Published in 1997 in the weekly culture/arts newspaper The Austin Chronicle:

• Good Games for Adventurous Imaginations, a gift-buying guide.
• 1997: The Year in Gaming.
• Reviews of Dilbert Corporate Shuffle and Lunch Money.
• Gaming at Worldcon: Not Just for Geeks, describing the gaming track I programmed at the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio.
• Technomancers, 1997 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Media Festival preview.

Fiction

In addition to the sharecropped gaming novel Cast of Fate (TSR, 1996), I've published a few stories in Dragon magazine and various gaming products. In recent years I've felt less attracted to write fiction. Merely surfing the web stretches my mind today the way fiction once did. I may yet return to some long-dormant fiction projects, if and when a crowdsourcing model makes the idea interesting. Meanwhile, some older work:

• "In the Swift Workshop": Science hero Todd Speed reopens his long-abandoned laboratory. At the May 2001 Turkey City writers' workshop in Austin, SF writer and host Bruce Sterling said this story is "trembling on the edge of a major breakthrough in the field."
• "Following the Elephant": This comedic fantasy novelette, set in 14th-Century Thailand, derives from a historical incident. To find a suitable site for a Buddhist temple, the king of Lan Na Thai sets a sacred white elephant loose, hoping it will give him a sign from the gods. But an ambitious young monk has other ideas.
• Piercing A Veil: A complete sharecropped fantasy novel set in the Earthdawn universe. Purchased by (now defunct) FASA Corporation in 1994 for a line of novels based on its (now deceased) Earthdawn roleplaying game, but never published in English, Piercing a Veil tells of a magical plague on the city of Merron, the contentious magical guilds behind it, and the enigmatic creature they obey. The retired warrior Alban Peyl, who lost his arm ten years ago, is drawn into the conflict when his lost arm suddenly returns.
• Ultra-Violet (Chapters 1-7): An unfinished novel, a scramjet-paced fantasy about a boy who journeys up the colors of the rainbow, and each color is a different techno-magical land. Think Wizard of Oz for the 21st Century, times seven. I still like this idea and hope to return to it -- in retirement, if not before.
• "Craverlane Bend": Not only an otherworldly fantasy of the trans-dimensional city of Agon, but also an allegory of my many years in the adventure gaming hobby.
• "Bollix at the Hamster Race": First in what was to be an extended series of Wodehousean SF comedies about socially inept freelance uber-hacker Jeremy Kidwell and his virtual actor, Bollix. Find out how a major software company decides to test a new Internet protocol by racing hamsters.
• "Chance Music": A comic historical fantasy of the chance-derived aleatoric music experiments undertaken in the 1950s and '60s by modern music composers like John Cage. Written for the November 2003 Turkey City writers' workshop in Austin, Texas.
• "Rational": A short parody of the work of a well-known Australian writer of hard science fiction. This story appeared in the fanzine Nova Express, Vol. 5/2 (#18), Fall/Winter 1999.
• "Goblin Tax": A 1980 half-hour radio comedy script about four fantasy roleplaying gamers who discover a parallel world that is more, and much less, than they imagined. In 1987 the long-running Minneapolis science-fiction radio show Shockwave did an excellent production of "Goblin Tax." The same producer, Jerry Stearns, staged a live performance of the play at MarsCon in Bloomington, MN, May 11-13, 2001.
• "A Christmas Phone Call": A short-short modern fantasy that I sent out to friends as my 1991 Christmas card.

Contact info

allenvarney [at] gmail [dot] com; Twitter: @AllenVarney