Emily Care Boss

Emily Care Boss is an indie roleplaying game designer, theorist and publisher. She was a foundational member of The Forge, an early leader in the indie role-playing game movement and is considered the creator of the American Freeform genre of roleplaying games, which combine indie RPG principles and mechanics with Nordic freeform and American chamber live action role-playing techniques.[1] Her game, Under My Skin was winner of the Audience Choice Award at Fastaval 2009.[2] She has been referred to as the "Dean" of the North American school of structured freeform game design.[3]

Emily Care Boss
Emily Care Boss in 2008
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst
OccupationGame designer
Spouse(s)Epidiah Ravachol

Career

Emily Care Boss got into role playing games during college in the 1990s, playing Ars Magica with a shared world created by friends.[4] She credits talking with people at the Forge Forums during the early 2000s with helping her get into design and self-publishing.[4] Her first game Breaking the Ice was published in 2005.[5] In 2009 and 2010 she published two volumes of RPG Zine, which stood for "Role Playing Girl".[5]

Boss and fellow Forge theorist Vincent Baker are co-credited with formulating the Lumpley Principle (a.k.a. Baker-Care or Baker-Boss Principle), which states, "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play." Further development of the Lumpley Principle describes player contributions as being assigned credibility by the other players in the game.[3][6] She authored Dream Bear, a game about exploring dreams and symbolism.[7] She also coined the concept of "bleed" at Ropecon 2007 and defined it as the emotional transfer between player and character, in either direction, during a role-playing game.[8]

In addition to her design work, Boss is the founding owner of Black & Green Games, which is best known its romance-themed indie games, Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin.[3] The three have been collected into one volume as the Romance Trilogy in 2016, which was nominated for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2017.[9][10] Many of her games have been noted as being adept at handling narratives of romance and sex,[11] and Boss has been outspoken about the handling of love and sex in the design of RPGs and LARPs.[12]

Boss was a contributor to the role playing journals Push, Playground Worlds, the Knutepunkt publication States of Play, and the companion publications for WyrdCon in 2012 and 2013. She organized the JiffyCon series of indie roleplaying game (RPG) mini-conventions in Massachusetts. Her game Last Chance Noir is a LARP game inspired by the Intercon LARP convention she attends every year.[4] From 2005-2009 she co-wrote an RPG theory and design blog Fair Game, with fellow designer Meguey Baker. She was a contributor on a panel that wrote The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012.[13] She was on the programming team for the Living Games Conference in 2014, helped in 2016, and chaired the conference in 2018.[14][15][16] She assisted with judging in the second "Golden Cobra Challenge" for LARPing in 2015.[17][7]

Her game Bubblegumshoe, a Gumshoe System Teen Noir setting, written with Ken Hite and Lisa J. Steele, won the 2017 Gold ENnie Award for Best Family Game.[18]

Personal life

Boss graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst with a bachelor's degree in Social Thought and Political Economy and a master's degree in Forestry.[19] Boss resides in Greenfield, Massachusetts[20] and is married to fellow game designer, Epidiah Ravachol. She is a forestry consultant in the woodlands of western Massachusetts.[21]

Roleplaying bibliography
  • Breaking the Ice, nominated for three Indie Game Awards in 2005, including Game of the year.[22][23][24]
  • Heart of the Rose, 2007
  • Shooting the Moon: All is Fair in Love and War 2008
  • The Colour Game, Tiny Tales of Romance, 2008
  • Sign in Stranger 2009
  • Under My Skin, Winner of the Fastaval 2009 Player's Choice award.
  • Dread House, a boardgame for children and adults, 2010.
  • MonkeyDome, 2010
  • Playing With Intent, a system to structure freeform games, 2012
  • Misericord(e), 2013
  • Remodel, an American Freeform game about women's experience in mid-life, 2013
  • Blood on the Snow collaborator including a live action system for Robin Laws's DramaSystem Hillfolk, 2013
  • Girls Elswehere collaborator, a supplement for Josh Jordan's game Heroine, 2013
  • King Wen's Tower, premièred at Fastaval 2014
  • "Ma, Can I Help You with That?" nano game in #Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology, published by Fëa Livia, 2016, and Pelgrane Press, 2017.[25]
  • Bubblegumshoe, designed with Kenneth Hite and Lisa Steele, published by Evil Hat Productions in June 2016.[26]

Publications
  • White, William J.; Harviainen, J. Tuomas; Boss, Emily Care (2012). "Role-Playing Communities, Cultures of Play and the Discourse of Immersion". In Torner, Evan; White, William J. (eds.). Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 9780786468348.
  • Boss, Emily Care (2008). "Key Concepts in Forge Theory". In Montola, Markus; Stenros, Jaakko (eds.). Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games (PDF). Finland: Ropecon ry. ISBN 9789529235797. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-08-02. Retrieved 2017-10-12.
  • Boss, Emily Care (2006). "Collaborative Roleplaying: Reframing the Game" (PDF). Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying. 1.

Honours and awards
  • Guest of Honour at Ropecon 2007[27]
  • Guest of Honour at Fastaval 2009
  • Winner of Fastaval 2009 Audience Choice (Under My Skin)
gollark: Hmm. I thought you were doing nothing and ojas/momin were doing the course.
gollark: It is quite long. I don't actually read paragraphs with more than 3 lines in them.
gollark: How is what hard?
gollark: "4.11 big data"?
gollark: Check 4.11.

References
  1. Stark, Lizzie (April 1, 2014). Pocket Guide to American Freeform. p. 12. ASIN B00JF4Z3B8.
  2. "FAQ | Fastaval". 2013-12-08. Archived from the original on 2013-12-08. Retrieved 2017-10-12.
  3. White, Bill (2010). "Blurring the Boundaries: Structured Freeform in the Indie RPG Design Community". In Eagar, Amber (ed.). Journeys to Another World: Companion to the 2010 LARP Summit at WyrdCon. Costa Mesa, CA: LARP Alliance. pp. 17–24. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
  4. "Interview with Emily Care Boss". Archived from the original on 2015-04-25. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
  5. Designers & Dragons: The Planinum Appendix p. 19
  6. P., Nathan. "RPG Design Handbook: Chapter 3 (parts 2 & 3)". Hamsterprophecy. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
  7. "Do You Want to Write a LARP Game? The Golden Cobra Challenge". Themarysue.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  8. Bowman, Sarah Lynne (2015-03-02). "Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character". Nordic Larp. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
  9. Duffy, Owen (2017-02-08). "Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-10-12.
  10. "The 2017 Award". The Diana Jones Award. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  11. Richardson, Sarah. "Sexy Times with Dice: 10 RPGs That Deal with Sex and Sexuality". Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  12. "AlterConf Schedule: Sex & Love (vs Violence) in Games". aLTERcONF. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  13. "Free Anthology Celebrates LARPing". Wired.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  14. "The Living Games Conference: A Few Lessons in Larping (Live Action Role Playing)". Themarysue.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  15. Living Games Conference. "Living Games Conference 2016 Kickstarter". Kickstarter. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  16. "Larp, Social Event, and Workshop Schedule Now Available!". Living Games Conference. April 25, 2018. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  17. Depra, Dianne (21 October 2015). "The Golden Cobra Challenge: Calling On LARP Game Writers And Designers". Techtimes.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  18. "2017 Noms and Winners". ENnie Awards. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  19. "Emily Care Boss - RPG Designer - BoardGameGeek". boardgamegeek.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  20. "Emily Care Boss - Emily's Bio, Credits, Awards…". Stage 32. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  21. "Harvesting the Forest". The Berkshire Eagle. 18 February 2008. Retrieved 12 October 2017 – via LexisNexis.
  22. "Indie RPG Awards". Indie-rpg-awards.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  23. "Indie RPG Awards". Indie-rpg-awards.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  24. "Indie RPG Awards". Indie-rpg-awards.com. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
  25. "#Feminism: A Nano-Game Anthology (2016)". BoardGameGeek. Retrieved 2018-03-07.
  26. "Bubblegumshoe". Evil Hat Productions.
  27. "Ropecon 2007 Guest of Honour Profile". Ropecon Official Site. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
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