Update #21: Meet the Artists: James Stowe & Jonathan Hill, Kickstarter-Themed Version

Note: This is a copy of Update #21 from my Kickstarter campaign.

Meet the Artists: James Stowe and Jonathan Hill

If you like RPGs and webcomics, have I got a site for you: SidekickQuests.com. James Stowe's online comic features a small band of sidekicks in your typical RPG fantasy world. What's fun is that occasionally there will be little indicators showing what the character "rolled" for a particular skill, which is then translated to how the action plays out in the comic, as in the sample page below:

On top of that, he's also been developing an actual RPG as well! So James has some experience in combining his illustrations and game design, skills that are also useful in a project like Emperor's New Clothes. Although Emperor's New Clothes is designed for older players, James' illustrations make me want to do a kid-friendly version, too. Well, maybe that can be my next project after I recover from this one.

Jonathan Hill is an illustrator and cartoonist. He illustrated Americus (written by MK Reed), which is about a small town and the controversy surrounding a fantasy fiction series. The story in Americus mirrors the real-life controversies around the Harry Potter series. For this graphic novel MK and Jonathan created their own heroine, Apathea Ravenchilde, and when characters read the books, Jonathan's illustrations bring the stories to life.

Although there are only small excerpts of Apathea Ravenchilde within the graphic novel, MK and Jonathan had developed a lot of the characters and settings anyway. So they created a guidebook to the world, making it look something like a D&D manual written as a textbook for adventurers. (I bought a copy. It's fantastic.) What I love about it is the lengths they went to in order to create an artifact from an imaginary world inside their imaginary world.

You can see more of Jonathan's work at his website OneOfTheJohns.com.

Kickstarter-themed Version

Yesterday I talked about expectations and execution, and the way Emperor's New Clothes is really a collaborative project, that it has evolved due to your input. So here's another themed version inspired by all of the dialogue surrounding Emperor's New Clothes.

Like the Pixel Lincoln crossover version, this is simply a reskinning of the game, with almost all the same gameplay (and one fun change). But as I've said before, simply changing the theme, without actually changing gameplay, can make a tremendous difference in how a game feels when you play it. It's hard to explain exactly why, but imagine playing Zombie Dice with just regular six-sided dice. You could do it, but it would be too abstract. My kids wouldn't like it, and I bet you'd never have a blockbuster hit.

So for this version of the game, instead of a vain Emperor and clothes nobody could see, the game reflects the Kickstarter campaign itself. You've got two Swindlers, myself and Game Salute, and instead of an outfit it's a board game. The Emperor has been replaced by Backers, and the Child will be played by Ken Grazier of Geek-Craft. (By the way, I did meet Ken in person at PAX East and we bonded over a game of Sentinels of the Multiverse. He presented me with a peace offering of custom buttons, and I gave him a set of ROOS PennyGems.)

Here are the rest of the characters:

• Jester = Kyle Scheele of Ridiculo.us
• Minister = BoardGameGeek
• Knight = Kickstarter
• Lady-in-Waiting = Amazon
• Seamstress = Game Reviewers
• Fisherman = Byron Campbell of NerdSpan
• Farmer = Non-Backers

You'll notice there's no Mother in this version, because nobody stopped Ken from posting the spoiler. Instead, we have the Troll: I won't name anyone in particular, but the troll is played by Internet trolls. Here's how he works: anyone who interacts with the Troll in any way (after the roles are revealed) loses 1 dignity, and the Troll scores 1 point for each dignity discarded this way.

You'll notice that this adds some interesting nuances to the game and although it's not a perfect analogy, it's a modern twist on the classic tale.

And what better artist for a Kickstarter-themed version than Adam Rebottaro of Greater Than Games, a company that has had tremendous success on Kickstarter? Adam is, of course, the artist for Sentinels of the Multiverse, a cooperative comic book superhero game which has run several successful campaigns for the base game and expansions. They also have the distinction of being the first project I've backed which delivered the reward before the estimated delivery date.

I met with the GTG guys at PAX last weekend and pitched them on my game, and although a Sentinels crossover wasn't in the cards, I think having Adam involved is still a pretty sweet deal.

As with the Pixel Lincoln version, there is no extra cost involved with this version; when you get your backer survey after the campaign closes, simply pick the Kickstarter version option.

Update #19/20: Meet the Artist: Gene Luen Yang, Poll: ROOS and TROO Bits

Note: This is a copy of Update #19 & 20 from my Kickstarter campaign. Due to an error, the first part got posted but not the second, and Kickstarter doesn't allow you to edit updates after half an hour has passed. So the second part got posted as Update #20.

Meet the Artist: Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang is a writer and cartoonist whose comic books often (but not always) deal with Asian American identity. He's won a couple of Eisner Awards and has both illustrated his own comics and written comics illustrated by other artists. Later this year he's publishing a two-part work called Boxers & Saints which looks at the Boxer Rebellion from both sides: the protagonists in one book end up being the antagonists in the other. I thought that was a fascinating way to tell a story, one that offers multiple perspectives and interpretations of a common experience.

Gene's illustrations are more stylized and the bold lines and graphic qualities are almost iconic, which makes them great for a board game. Gene also has fun putting his own spin on iconic characters, as you can see from these Chinese opera versions of Captain American and Iron Man.

One comic that Gene wrote (but didn't illustrate) that really struck a chord with me was The Eternal Smile, a collection of three interconnected stories illustrated by Derek Kirk Kim. The third one, "Urgent Request," is about a young woman named Janet who strikes up a romance with a Nigerian prince over the internet. While it seems at first that it's going to be some sort of cautionary tale about internet scams. Gene manages to make into something so much more, a hearfelt story about the power of make believe.

For more about Gene, you can visit his website GeneYang.com.

Poll: ROOS and TROO Bits

Hi, we're getting closer to our "Double Your Fun" stretch goal where we double the number of most of the components (not the boards, for instance) in each game. One backer made a good point: he would like to try Emperor's New Clothes with a wide range of players and asked if, when the components are doubled, if he could get one set of ROOS bits and one set of Typical Regulated Operator Optical (TROO), conventionally colored bits.

I checked in with Game Salute, and it would be tricky to have a bunch of different options if we hit that Double level, if some people wanted all ROOS bits and some wanted TROO bits and some wanted half and half. The easiest solution would be for everyone to get half and half: in fact, that would mean that you get exactly what you're pledging for right now, plus a free set of the other type of bits at no extra cost. But I'm wondering if there are a lot of backers who would prefer to have all of their bits either conventionally colored or ROOS. If it seems like a majority of people want all of one type, then we'd go with just those two options at the end, without a half-and-half option.
The disadvantage to having half-and-half, of course, is that you still run into the same issues of running out of resource cubes and having to make do with other markers, or else mixing up your ROOS and TROO bits. (In which case you'll probably need to rely on a non-gamer to help you sort those apart.)

We are also considering offering extra packs of Bits as an add-on, so you can just increase your pledge and throw in either ROOS or TROO bits along with the PennyGems and T-shirts. Game Salute will provide more details about this before the final funding is complete, but that way even if we don't hit the Double Your Fun goal you'll still be able to get both types of bits without having to pledge for two copies of the game.

Speaking of which, if you are interested in getting multiple copies of the game, this works the same was as the add-ons. Simply hit the "Manage Your Pledge" button and increase your pledge amount by whichever version of the game you'd like to add. For instance, if you're currently backing at THE EMPEROR early bird level for $70 but you'd like to add on a copy of the compact version, increase your pledge to $95 ($70 for the deluxe, $25 for the compact) and leave your reward level selection at THE EMPEROR. If you've already pledged for at least one copy of the game, we'll honor the early bird prices for the add-ons even if those early bird slots fill up.

So, which would you prefer in your box: all the same type of bits, or half and half? Let us know in the comments!

Update #18: Meet the Artist: Lee Moyer, A Note About the Art, Designer Diary: Great Expectations

Note: This is a copy of Update #18 from my Kickstarter campaign. A few updates, including this one, were written the weekend before because I was going to be camping during the last week of the campaign. I realized as I was posting these copies that the Designer Diary for this date (at the bottom) actually never got posted.

Meet the Artist: Lee Moyer

Lee Moyer is, simply put, amazing. He's been doing digital art since 1989, back when the only computer I'd used myself was an Apple II, and his portfolio includes major corporate clients, posters, comics, roleplaying games, and even a Kickstarter-funded board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, which is how I first came across his work. (Yes, I'm very late to the party. Thanks for having me.) I met him in person at PAX while he was promoting The 13th Age. He's quite versatile and a look at his portfolio will show you that he's accomplished in a wide range of styles.

Above are two of Lee's pieces—on the left, a poster for the Northwest Children's Theater presentation of "Art" by Yasmina Reza; on the right, Alice in Wonderland from his 2013 Literary Pin-up Calendar.

I approached Lee about Emperor's New Clothes on a whim; I really admired his artwork and hoped that my coverage of Doom had softened him up a little bit. But I needn't have worried: Lee's an incredibly approachable guy, very friendly, and was enthusiastic about my game. We spent a few hours kicking around ideas and he gave me some great advice. Unfortunately because of time constraints we weren't able to have him design the logo but I'm still very pleased to have Lee involved in other parts of the project.

After his own Kickstarter, Lee also wrote a white paper about Kickstarter that I personally found informative and have referenced on occasion. Visit LeeMoyer.com for some samples of his work, and click the "Journal" link for his blog.

A Note About the Art

A few of you have expressed that the number of artists we've got working on the project is a little overwhelming. I know how you feel! It can be hard to get everything I need from everybody on a strict schedule, but all of these folks have been fantastic and (for the most part) on time with their submissions. That's also why I wanted to have things completed ahead of time, so that from day one you could see the results right away rather than having to wait for final artwork before you make a decision about pledging.

As you've already surmised, the cover art was a collaboration for which all of the artists contributed equally according to the specifications I sent them, and the end product didn't require too much tweaking to arrive at its final form—it's essentially the same as what appears on the game board, though of course the cover doesn't have a scoring track on it. If you take a closer look at pages 5-12 of the Print-and-Play files, you'll notice that the artist's name is included on each card for which they provided the illustration. That way if you have a favorite card you can easily tell who's responsible for what you see.

Designer Diary: Great Expectations (or, Executing the Emperor)

I have a good friend who was sick for a long time and was unable to travel or have much face-to-face interaction. So he started what he called his Hypothetical Birthday Party, where he emailed friends from near and far, asking them to attend his party by writing descriptions and sending photos of what they would bring to his party. Being hypothetical, you could bring anything you wanted, no matter how difficult to prepare or impossible to procure. Although these parties weren't "real" in the sense that you couldn't physically partake of all of the fantastic dishes and drinks contributed by all the party-goers, they've become a tradition that many of us look forward to. My friend was able to have a non-hypothetical birthday party this year, but he still held the hypothetical one too, and it was well-attended. The question that arose is whether the real could possibly live up to the imagined.

Whether it's a birthday party or board game or book or movie, there can be a difference between your expectations and the reality. In some cases the reality ends up exceeding expectations, which is always awesome. However, when you're making something, particularly something creative, there's almost always a gap: the reality falls short of your expectations.

Why is that?

Well, to put it simply: you can imagine perfection, but that's pretty dang hard to achieve. It's why people are so often disappointed in the movie after they've read the book and already pictured what everything and everyone looks like. It's why video game graphics, no matter how powerful consoles get, will never beat the resolution of a text adventure game.

Years ago I read a book called Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It's about creating art, mostly in the traditional sense, but I think the lessons apply to nearly any creative process. The book talks about this gap between ideas and execution, and argues that not only does the gap exist, but that it should. Because if everything you make turns out exactly the way you imagined it, then you're limiting your imagination to what you know you are already capable of. Artists and creators should be pushing the limits of what they can do. We should be testing boundaries, trying new things, taking risks. That's how you grow. And it's also how you make "mistakes" that actually lead you in new, exciting directions.

Here are just a few quotes from the book that really stuck with me:

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.

People who need certainly in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy of how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.

That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss—the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. The irony here is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you're right on the edge of being able to imagine.

So that leads me back around to executing my Kickstarter project. When I first started working on Emperor's New Clothes, I had a vision of what it would look like, how it would play, even how the Kickstarter campaign itself would look. I thought about the cards, the logo, the cover art, the gameplay, the story.

Parts of it turned out the way I imagined, other parts fell short, and still others surprised me. Of course, Emperor's New Clothes is not a singular vision: I started the ball rolling, but to make it a reality I needed to share my vision with all of the other people you see listed in the credits section, the artists and designers and folks at Game Salute. But everyone pictures things a little differently—what I see in my head may not be exactly what you see. Until we all become telepathic, there will always be something lost in translation—but that also means that each person brings their own unique vision to the project and that can lead to very cool results.

And last but not least —arguably most important—is you! What is art if it is not observed? What is a game if it isn't played? What is a Kickstarter project without backers? By backing the project and giving feedback and arguing about it on Twitter and BoardGameGeek, all of you have shaped Emperor's New Clothes as well. It isn't something that popped fully formed out of my head, but something that has evolved and shifted thanks to you. Whatever the end result of the Kickstarter campaign itself, I'm grateful for that. It's been terrific (and terrifying) to see my idea take shape this month.

It's hard for me to know whether Emperor's New Clothes, in the end, will live up to your expectations. With so many different people, everyone has a slightly different vision of how things should turn out. No matter what I reveal at the end of this week, I expect that some of you will be delighted and some of you will be disappointed. But I hope you'll love it. I hope that you will be as excited about and as proud of Emperor's New Clothes as I am, because I think you and I have created something pretty magical together.

Of course, that's my expectation. What are yours?

Update #17: Post PAX, Meet the Artists: Laura Lee Gulledge & Avery Monsen, Special Pixel Lincoln Announcement, Kickstarter Exclusives

Note: This is a copy of Update #17 from my Kickstarter campaign. 

Hey, everyone! Sorry for the radio silence, but I've been at PAX East this past weekend with the Game Salute folks and it's hard to post updates when you can't get a computer with wifi during a gaming convention. I had a great time showing off Emperor's New Clothes. Thanks to all the folks who stopped by to check out the game or chatted with me about it! It was a lot of fun to show people my prototype in person, and I got a lot of good feedback. Every time I played the game it felt a little different and I even made a few minor tweaks here and there to help balance the roles.

You may have noticed that our funding level dropped again over the weekend. I put in a comment about it in the Comments section on Thursday but wanted to address it here also. I checked in with Game Salute and it was another large pledge who pulled out, and I think it caused a chain reaction with several other backers deciding to cancel or reduce pledges as well. I asked Game Salute to look over all of the pledges again to see if there were any more that look like they were obviously spoof pledges, and it looks like the others are probably legitimate, with the exception of the remaining $500 Narcissist pledge, which may or may not be real. (Of course, there could be any number of other pledges at smaller levels that may cancel before the end, but those are impossible to identify.)

It does mean we've dropped below some of the stretch goals, but I'm hoping we can pick up some steam in this last week to get those PennyGems and the TROO bits option. Stay tuned! Spread the word!

Meet the Artists: Laura Lee Gulledge & Avery Monsen

Laura Lee Gulledge was introduced to me by another artist. I hadn't seen her work before but I had come across her name in connection with her upcoming graphic novel, Will & Whit. When I looked through her gallery, I really loved the way she played with ideas and some of her images really stuck with me, like these here. You can find out more about her work at her website.

She also has a brilliant comic called Sealed which is all about Tupperware. No, seriously. Laura Lee strikes this balance between mockery and admiration of the plastic lifestyle, which her mom sold when she was growing up. I find myself in a similar position, wanting to offer both critique and praise for things like the board game industry, so I appreciate her skill in navigating that narrow path. (Note to parents: the comic is cheerful and fun but has a very small amount of sexual content that may not be appropriate for kids.)

Laura Lee says: "I grew up in an avid board-game-playing family, so I find this a fun concept. It sounds like something that the Improv Everywhere guys would possibly be interested in playing." (Which is an awesome idea—if I had a publicist, I'd put them on that right now.)

Avery Monsen is an actor and a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a sketch comedy team in New York. More pertinent to this project, he's responsible for the drawings of dinosaurs, milk jugs, sheep, and socks in the best-selling All My Friends Are Dead, a book of morbid humor. (And of course there's the sequel All My Friends Are Still Dead, and an unrelated book titled I Feel Relatively Neutral About New York.)

I loved the non-plussed expressions so many of his characters have, and I think you'll agree we put that to great use in our game. Sure, the Emperor is naked and he's been humiliated in front of all of his subjects, but the parade continues on. You can see more of Avery's work at his website AveryMonsen.com.

Special Belated Goof-Off Day Announcement

We hit 1,000 Likes on Facebook! So we have a special post-PAX announcement: a Pixel Lincoln Theme Crossover Thing! Last Friday, March 22 was National Goof-Off Day, so I'm told, and it was also the start of PAX East … and a beautiful partnership.

One of the things that has happened with a lot of Kickstarter projects is crossovers. Sentinels of Multiverse and Devastation of Indines, Machine of Death and Story Wars, Pixel Lincoln and Boss Monster … it's a lot of fun when characters from one game show up in another one. I was hoping to do more crossovers but for many of the games the timing didn't work out and we never managed to make all the arrangements. But at PAX East I met Jason Tagmire from Pixel Lincoln and showed him my game. I played a round with him, his brother George, and Marty Cobb (who did the artwork for Pixel Lincoln). They all really loved the game, so we're gonna dress up Pixel Lincoln in the Emperor's New Clothes!

In case you don't already know what Pixel Lincoln is, it's a 16-bit side-scrolling adventure deck-building card game, starring our 16th President fighting off bad guys using meat-based weapons like a chicken cannon, like the one you see below. (Here's my GeekDad review of the game.) It's currently in production and is expected to release this summer.

We're not rewriting any rules or anything here—it's a simple character replacement with all of the mechanics remaining the same—but I do think that changing the theme can often change the feel of a game significantly. (Remember what I said about storytelling?) Yes, it's a bit bizarre putting our 16-bit 16th President into a classic story about some fine threads and a couple of con men, but I think it makes as much sense as Lincoln fighting luchadores and puking turtles with a trusty beardarang. (We've just replaced the role cards; the action/event cards will stay the same.) Despite being at PAX, Marty and I were able to finalize all of the artwork that will be used for this version of the game.

Here's how the characters will map out:

Emperor = Pixel Lincoln
2 Swindlers = Luchadores
Child = Totally T-Rex
Mother = Rose
Jester = Booth
Minister = Laser Shark
Knight = Sir Cares-A-Lot
Lady-in-Waiting = Bandatron
Seamstress = Foxgirl2005
Fisherman = Hip Hop Alien
Farmer = Puking Turtle

When you fill out your backer survey at the close of the campaign, just choose the Pixel Lincoln option and you'll be able to play the game using this cast of characters instead of the classic characters. The Pixel Lincoln cards will be printed with the same ROOS technology as the standard set, so you can expect the same level of detail that you've seen on all of the cards already. (Note: Pixel Emperor Lincoln's New Clothes may not be the final title but it sounds pretty awesome, right?)

The original Pixel Lincoln Kickstarter campaign is over, but Jason is currently running another campaign for the Pixel Lincoln Bicycle Playing Cards—and if you missed out the first time, there are reward levels here that include the whole deck-building game as well. Check it out!

Kickstarter Exclusives

Now, I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of exclusive content—things that are added to a game that can only be obtained in the Kickstarter campaign but not later. For a completist, it means that if you missed the campaign then you will never be able to own the "complete" game. On the other hand, I do understand that it's nice for Kickstarter backers to get something extra. Well, in discussing our project with Game Salute and Wysiayg Press, we came to the difficult decision to do a very limited print run of Emperor's New Clothes. Most of the money from the campaign is going toward fulfilling rewards and the Kickstarter and Amazon fees. Wysiayg isn't actually making any money off this project: they're just willing to let us use the ROOS printing and we only pay what it costs them. And of course we're not making any money on the fleeces either; those are just a big thank you to all you awesome backers.

What this means, though, is that we are only making as many copies of Emperor's New Clothes as we need to fulfill rewards, plus some additional copies to send to press for reviews and maybe a couple for giveaways. We aren't planning to have extras for stores, online or off, so if you're interested in a finished copy of the game, this is your only guaranteed way to buy it. (If the game turns out to be much more popular after it is actually shipped, then I guess we can revisit the idea, but I don't know if it will still be at the same price.)

I know there are some people who really want their friendly local game store to benefit and so they're reluctant to pledge through Kickstarter. If that's you, then please check out the Springboard Local Support option. If you have your game store sign up, then you can pledge here, have the game shipped to your local store for pickup, and your store gets a credit just as if you bought it from them. Best of all, it doesn't cost you anything extra! You just fill out the option for Springboard Local Support when you fill out your backer survey when the campaign closes.

Update #16: Meet the Artist: Adam Rex & Chuck Gamble, Designer Diary: Believing Is Seeing, You Got Fleeced!

Note: This is a copy of Update #16 from my Kickstarter campaign.

Meet the Artists: Adam Rex and Chuck Gamble

We've got several more artists to introduce and I realize I'm running out of time, so we're doubling up today!

Adam Rex is a man of many talents. He has illustrated many books with other authors, including Neil Gaiman and Mac Barnett, plus he's written and illustrated several books of his own. One of my current favorites is the Cold Cereal Saga, which is about a breakfast cereal company that is stealing glamour from magical beasts and putting it into their cereal for nefarious purposes. It's all about things that are more than what they appear to be. But this isn't a new subject for Adam; one of his early picture books, Guess Again? is a playful guessing game for kids that continually turns the tables on their expectations, and it leaves my kids in stitches. (Um, not literally.)

Of working on Emperor's New Clothes, Adam says: "This is a return to form for me—I used to make my living doing art for card games, so I was so happy to get back to that after years at the children's book grind that I turned out some of my best work in any medium." You can find out more about Adam at his website AdamRex.com.

Chuck "Lucky Radish" Gamble has been cartooning and illustrating and animating for a long time for things from TV to computer games to websites to publications. Although much of his work has been for kids' stuff, he also works on projects for grown-ups—like Emperor's New Clothes. I first met Chuck because of his iOS app Slideamajig, which was later updated and expanded into Mixamajig. It's basically a mix-and-match app that has all of these goofy characters that you can swipe around to mix up their heads, torsos, legs, and headgear—or you can even put a photo of your own face in there to play dress up.

There's no mix-and-match feature in Emperor's New Clothes (maybe a future expansion for kids?), but for a game that really requires humor to work, I knew that Chuck could inject some silliness into the proceedings, as you can tell from the cover art. Although Chuck isn't known for his art for tabletop games, I knew his character designs skills would be quite handy in a game with so many characters. You can see more of Chuck's work at LuckyRadish.Tumblr.com.

Designer Diary: Believing Is Seeing

Obviously the visual gimmick of the ROOS is a big part of Emperor's New Clothes—it's what people are talking about the most in conversations I've seen online, so at any rate my attempts to start conversations about game design and Kickstarter and the nature of play have felt somewhat derailed. I suppose a lot of that is the novelty of it: maybe once the novelty wears off, people will want to talk to me about all the other aspects of the game, the things that I'm really passionate about.

One of the things about building a game around The Emperor's New Clothes is deciding how to interpret the story. Obviously I've added some more characters that weren't explicitly in the story, but I tried to make them characters that could have fit in a longer version of the story—although they're not in the original telling, they should feel like they fit in that world, that they wouldn't be out of place. But to really have the gameplay match the feel of the story, I had to ask myself what it felt like to be these characters: the Emperor, the Swindlers, the Minister, the townspeople, the Child. I had to see myself in their shoes, think about their motivations, and then decide how to put that into my game.

The most interesting thing to me is that the story doesn't have a moral. I already mentioned that before, but Hans Christian Andersen leaves that up to the reader to decide. Is it a cautionary tale about flattery, like Aesop's fable about the crow and the fox? Is it a lesson about speaking up despite having an unpopular opinion? Is it about putting on a brave face even after you've been publicly humiliated?

In most cases the Child is seen as wise, for speaking up and saying what everyone is thinking, for seeing through the ruse. "Out of the mouths of babes" and so on. However, there's another way to look at it as well, the way I know my children can say tactless things in public because they're still learning etiquette, the way you don't point at somebody's comb-over or shout across the room that somebody's fly is open. As adults, we see, but we pretend not to see—not always because we've been duped, but because of an unspoken agreement to make believe.

It's an interesting contrast to other fairy tales and classic stories. Children are often the heroes of the story—and if there's more than one child, then it's the youngest that gets things right. It's often the child who sees things as they really are (which doesn't necessarily mean just what is visible to the naked eye), who believes in the things that the adults have outgrown, who claps for Tinker Bell and notices the witch and listens carefully for the things that haven't been said. Children don't just make believe; they believe, and in stories it's that belief that helps them see.

Playing games is a lot like that. When we play a game, we choose to believe that an orange wooden cube is actually a Fighter, that the floor is hot lava, that we are in grave danger from a small plastic zombie. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman use the term "the magic circle" (borrowed from Johan Huizinga) to describe this space where a game takes place, in which special rules apply. Within this magic circle, we see what we believe to be there, and together we create a reality that is not "objectively" true. As Salen and Zimmerman put it, "the term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins."

Another great visual example of this idea of "believing is seeing" is in the movie Hook, which takes some liberties in its adaptation of Peter Pan. One of the project backers actually pointed this out to me, because I hadn't seen it before. About an hour into the movie, there's a scene in which the grown-up Peter is sitting down to a feast with the Lost Boys … but when they uncover all the dishes, they look empty. All of the kids dig in and start slurping and chomping, while Peter sits there, starving and baffled. An argument ensues, during which Peter scoops up a bit of nothing and flings it with his spoon—and a blob of colorful ice cream hits a kid in the face. When he looks down, the feast is spread before him and he's finally able to dig in. It is when Peter decides to play along that he is rewarded with the riches that were sitting in front of him the whole time.

I think too often we tell kids "don't be silly!" Certainly there are times when silliness is more appropriate than others. But when it comes to playing games, I think it's important to be a little silly, to choose to believe in something that isn't real. Maybe somebody should have told the Child in The Emperor's New Clothes that sometimes, it's okay to be silly.

You Got Fleeced!

So along those lines, to help increase our exposure, we're throwing in this stretch goal just because! I know a lot of you have been expecting this announcement since watching that initial video so I apologize for stringing you along, but here it is: the Emperor's New Fleece!

I know, we've got the T-shirt available already for those of you who like the box cover art, but sometimes you want something a little more subtle, and I think our fleece is an excellent solution. The one I'm wearing in the Kickstarter pitch video is a one-off, but we've been working with the same folks who created ThinkGeek's Interactive Portal T-shirt. They've done some unbelievable work with fabric technology. While our fleece is not as technically fancy as the Portal T-shirt, I think it's one that fans of Emperor's New Clothes will absolutely love.

The fleece is so lightweight it feels like there's nothing there at all, so you can start wearing it as soon as it arrives in August, even if you live in Florida. Unlike traditional polar fleece, ours is made of a material that is ultra-compact and crushable, making it easy to include in your reward package without upgrading to a larger box (and therefore increasing shipping costs). In keeping with the story, the formula is akin to what's described in the classic story, and I think it's just as stunning in fleece form as it would as a complete suit with train.

Best of all, it's FREE! That's right. We're taking a risk by announcing this now, but as long as we stay above our base funding level, we're going to include one of these with every reward level at $25 or higher.

Oh, and did I mention it's the fleece totally transparent? No, it won't make you invisible—I admit, that would be much cooler, but we can't throw that in for free—but I think you'll agree that even making just the fleece itself invisible is quite a trick. Since it may be hard for you to get a good look at the fleece in the pitch video while I'm moving around, Casey McKinnon graciously agreed to model the fleece for us:

You may recognize Casey from her appearance on TableTop, playing Dixit with Wil Wheaton & Co., or from one of her many web series, most recently A Comicbook Orange. You can find out more about Casey at her website CaseyMcKinnon.com.