About Me

I’m Nick Drage, just in case you found this page by accident. As people have been asking, these are the current projects I’m working on:

All the main projects, Eisenhower Matrix be dammed:

• Working on simple online game formats, for general use or within organisations, to help people think together and get to know each other better online. My last LinkedIn experiment is here, my next one if overdue.
• Helping run SPS’s Games Experimentation Development Group, for professional designers of serious games, there’s more here.
• Preparing content for the Exemplar Strategies newsletter, abstracting strategies from their originating context to give you fresh inspiration when you’re stuck.
• Co-writing Random The Book, a book ( whatever that is ) about randomness ( whatever that is ).
• Preparing Water Water Everywhere ( more on the wiki), a game about flooding in East Anglia, in 2048; I think there’s huge possibilities in players immersing themselves in different scenarios over elongated asynchronous games, to think through options and solutions in a safe-to-fail environment.
• “High Fantasy Football”, an overly realistic simulation of a sport that doesn’t exist. I’ve enjoyed indulging my aeipathy¹ over the last few years, but now it’s time to turn this into some things:
  • Basic version - a combat results table based game between two players.
  • Solo version - take your Order through a season of tournaments at your own speed.
  • Commandery version - two groups face off against other, each managing different aspects of their Order.
  • Story version - there’s a narrative in here somewhere, I just need to tease it out.

Bubbling along:

• Assisting in playtesting an educational game on the survival of ancient tribes.
• Building, at least, a proof of concept of being able to play “text and image” games against unseen opponents over common messaging protocols.
• Making my Critical Friend service clearer.
• A downloadable cyber incident response game for between maybe ten to fifty players or more, along with guides for facilitation.
• An influence game, expected to be invite only.
• Working with an L&D company, under NDA.
• Modifying existing games for solo play, and the commercial possibilities and perils of that.
• Modifying an existing planning game so it can be resolved for the education of players and facilitators alike.
• Having too much Linux in my life, and trying to make all my technology easier to manage.
• Studying American Football board games, especially how they abstract player locations and how they manage simultaneous orders.
• Finding a more appropriate theme for this blog.

More esoteric things, to remind me to mention them to people:

• How could Zero Knowledge Proofs be useful in enabling players to exchange assumptions without exchanging knowledge in un-facilitated games?
• What is the offensive equivalent of DAMROD-C; and what are the differences in red team thinking against an adversary, and against an idea?
• How can we measure the appropriateness of an analogy?

I intend to keep this site as simple as possible, for easy accessibility by people and programs alike, and also for my benefit. Talking of accessibility, the option for changing between light and dark mode is at the top right, how do I make that more prominent? Or am I under-estimating that that functionality is common now?

My work website is here, it isn’t updated and upgraded as often as it should be, get in touch if there’s something you were expecting.

This blog will never have a posting schedule.