031: The LPGWV Collective

After having an allergic reaction to the sci-fi feline, our heroes return to space and are immediately confronted by a gamer collective armada!

Things discussed in this episode:

  • 2:11 Dragula
  • 4:42 PopCon
  • 7:22 LPGWV
  • 17:21 Motown Tilt
  • 17:47 Mortal Kombat
  • 19:16 Pac-Man
  • 20:51 PewDiePie
  • 21:19 Pokemon Go
  • 23:14 Okami
  • 24:41 Evil Within
  • 27:07 Sailor Moon R
  • 28:48 Pittsburgh Dad

Introductory Guy
Welcome to design thinking games, a gaming and User Experience podcast card carrying UX. Here’s Tim Broadwater and Michael Scofield examine the player experience of board games, pen and paper role playing games, live action games and video games. Play through the backlog on your pod catcher of choice. And on the web, at design thinking games.com.

Michael Schofield
Design thinking is a process that is used to understand users challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions. And this Podcast, the podcast and this podcast. So we apply design thinking to gaming. And we’ve started Yeah, let me clear my throat Oh, yeah.

Tim Broadwater
Sorry. I don’t know if you know that song.

Michael Schofield
I really don’t know. What’s, what is it?

Tim Broadwater
It’s a club song from the 90s if it felt what a party like we do, if you want a party like this, say, ah, and then the crowd says, ah never heard this song.

Michael Schofield
No, but welcome to design thinking game.

Tim Broadwater
Apparently, the only one who’s spin alive who went to the club in the 90s? That ages me probably. Yeah. One of the cool things that I saw at PAX East was a lot of different collectives, gaming collectives, or communities, right? We talked a little bit on previous episodes about the stream queens. They’re this group of an all drag troupe on Twitch, right, so they encompass drag queens, drag kings, characters, cosplayers and creatures, which is more like Dracula. If you ever watch that shutter, it’s a really cool show. But they’re there. They refer to themselves as like, a collective of Twitchers. Right, and there’s 100 of them. And they their candles always running. There’s someone always streaming, you know, that was also not sure if you’ve heard of the Queen’s gaming collective. They’re like creative creators or streamers, or actually game competitors that are all women. That’s called the Queen’s gaming collective.

Michael Schofield
I have heard of the Queen’s gaming collect. Yeah, I thought they were really cool. So when they first came across my radar, I was like, oh, sweet, because they’re the only gaming thing on our system at the moment. So.

Tim Broadwater
So there’s also the Indie Game Collective. And that’s probably one that is maybe lesser known, but they kind of are this grassroots community of content creators. And they, you know, they do indie games for livestream videos, reviews, the podcast about it. So they’re a group, Twitch streamers, podcasters, gamers, and social media people. And then also a pax east, which we tweeted about on our Twitter is the game hers, which is G A M E. H. E. R s, they had a group at, they actually had a booth at PAX East. And they’re, they’re a safe and supportive space for women, and female identifying gamers. And they get together to chat, play, talk about games, stream, all that stuff. So we’ve talked in the past on this podcast about the people who make games, and we’ve interviewed people who were tabletop game designers, or we’ve also talked to people who, you know, have various different aspects of the gaming community, right. But it occurred to me that it’s we never actually talked to a game collective before. And so there is actually one locally near me that is called LPG WV, which stands for let’s play games, West Virginia. And I think there are 10 plus people in their collective. I got the chance to speak to five of them at a local convention here. The local convention is called Pop con, and it’s just a celebration of popular culture. And so it has artists and actors who signed stuff that has authors and game store people. They have cosplaying and cosplaying panels and competition. So it’s kind of like the catch all where some cons or this is just for gaming, or this one’s just for cosplay, which is like more Dragon Con. Versus this is tabletop games origins. Or tabletop role playing games, you know, GenCon, Pax is more video game, right? So this is kind of a catch all CON. And what was kind of noticeable is like when I walked into the con, the whole back area and surrounding the con itself was set up with tables to play board games, tables to play like, tabletop role playing games, all of these video arcade consoles, tons of just old school TVs with Nintendo’s and seghers and Nintendo 64 s and like all these systems to them. And this is where everyone was at, right i mean the all the people in the connard of course walking around and buying and checking out all the crafters and the vendors and the artists and the actors and everyone but then like when you want a second to chill out, like you can just grab a chair and play a video game right.

So I got a chance to speak to I think just five of their 10 Plus members. And I just was curious about, you know, what is OPG? WV and like, what’s a Game Collective like so? Here? So this is what Rich, Andy, Terry and Heather, which are for the people in the collective said about it.

Richard Dalton
Can you hear me? Because I don’t well. Hello, how are you today? I’m fine. Thanks for asking. I’m Richard Dalton. So LPD WV stands for let’s play games, West Virginia. We’re kind of a collective of gamers, video games, tabletop games, RPGs, you name it, we like to play it. And we kind of formed this group to share that love with other people and meet other people in the community and outside of the community. We’re all from West Virginia. So that’s been an important part of our identity is connecting with other gamers in the area, not just within West Virginia, but within the region. To spread our to spread our love of games and share and their nerdiness

Andy Carter
My name is Andy Andy Carter, one of the founding members of LPG WV usually the correct I think term we’ve referred to ourselves as as a collective of West Virginia gamers with an insane amount of experience and knowledge about the subject, predominantly video games, a lot of tabletop and RPG in there as well. As well as the idea of the game lounge itself that we run here, buy popcorn across Let’s Play Games con and potentially setting up in other places, we’ve been trying to build it up to be able to do that. Just the idea is you know, we want to share gaming, the experience of it, the chances to do it. Just share that with people things they remember things they haven’t seen yet things maybe they’ve only heard of and we’ll have a chance to play here that maybe they won’t anywhere else.

Terry Dalton
My name is Terry Dalton, and I’m with LPG WV. It really all started with all of us going to trivia right? Yeah, Lee and Andy had like a geek specific trivia monthly. And you know, we would go to some cons together and look around and go, we should do this too. Like, you know, we know a thing or two about a thing or two. We don’t know all the things. And honestly, in some ways, sometimes it’s nice to learn some things from people who say, Well, I don’t know all the things, but this is how I understand it. And I think that like also having different personalities, different understandings of the way different themes work. Because I know that, like I know a lot of people that are kind of afraid to play games, they’ll say, I’m not really very good at board games. And I think it just comes from a basic lack of understanding of how to play certain games. They seem very overwhelming at first for a lot of people. And there’s just all these rules, and they’ll go oh, I just don’t know. And you’re like, No, no, no, it’s really actually simple. Once you start playing, you’ll totally get it. Let’s play around. And that’s almost always the case. But you know, there’s occasionally some slightly more complicated games that like if you could just go Oh, it’s this type of game or it’s that tight, you know, like, it’s just like is played just like this. Your goal is to collect all of these things, or your goal is to get rid of all of these things or like, if you can, if you can boil it down to like a basic type of game and they can understand that then all of a sudden they can look at it and go, Okay, there’s a lot about it. I already understand. I just need to pick up some of the specifics.

Heather
I’m whether a group of friends really we kind of wanted to see more of each other and I think the time is spent together during the first few years was getting few and far between. So we decided to start something together that we could all get behind. And then we began to twitch stream. And then we began to go to cons. And so we said, Well, why not bring games there, and it kind of evolved. And here we are. Now we have arcades, we have consoles, we have RPGs, board games, you name it.

Michael Schofield
So that’s cool. So they ended up like they have a just among themselves as like, their own. Like library of all of these different types of games, and they, and they hoist them around and bring them to people. Can I ask like, what is like their ratio of like, like old nostalgia? Games versus like anything kind of new? A,

Tim Broadwater
that’s one of the things they talked about, I think, because they’re all over the place, right? They actually have people different types of people who kind of learned different things. Some of them are tabletop players, and some of them are classic constants, retro gamers, and then some of them are like, no, no, the new new and then others are LARPers. And so it’s just kind of this thing that’s grown and it’s kind of like their game facilitators, you know, kind of helping, ya know,

Michael Schofield
that that phrase came to my mind. Like, I was like, Oh, they’re they’re, like gateway drugs. Right? I drug keepers. That’s what they I, I find it, I find it bananas. I think that people are like afraid to play games. But when she started describing that, well, you know, like, there are a lot of games out there that are incredibly rules heavy and detail oriented. Do you see that all the time. That’s That’s why like, rules like d&d modules and stuff are so popular, because they say cognitive load of just starting can be really daunting.

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, all of the great YouTube being a phenomenal source of like, this is how you play ticket to write in five minutes. Yeah, when does that no one reads the rules, because, and I do encounter it a lot with tabletop board games, that people are just like, This is too crazy. This is too much. It’s just too. And it’s really like, well, it’s actually not if you had someone to Yeah, your first hit for free. And using your metaphor.

Michael Schofield
I don’t know who starts cold, right? You need somebody to kind of like get you through that like doorway.

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, so their game lounge they have set up at the con is really cool. And you can actually see, literally, they’re set up like, this isn’t one corner of a con. A bunch of old school games, like very retro. But then people playing Mario 64

Michael Schofield
Look at all those CRTs you know, like 100 pound devices that someone had to haul around?

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, you have all those video game. They have like the arcade ones, like in the background. And all of this is in storage. I mean, they are a group of people who, you know, have this stuff, they take donations, or they you know, and then they work. You know, all this stuff has to be stored somewhere. Right? Yeah. So yeah. They talk a little bit about their setup, like add Popcaan. And so let’s, you can hear what both Kevin and Andy say. And then I think Kevin comes back in the end here.

Kevin
My name is Kevin. Yeah, the first few years that we came to Popcaan, we were just one of the sort of vendors and tables. And we had a vintage video game Lounge, which was kind of the core. And it was really just to share gaming with others. We didn’t make any money for that it actually just kind of cost as far as moving personal time and stuff. But over the years, it started growing bigger and bigger. And then we started traveling to other gaming conventions. And it just sort of naturally grew into a process where we thought oh, this could actually be a business venture. And that would be a good way to see our friends. Although that didn’t always shake out. Sometimes we actually started seeing less of each other because we were all streaming or focusing on business stuff. But we’re still here probably five years later, at least since I’ve been involved. And this is our largest expansion yet adding the arcade machines and just continuing to grow the presence of LPG WV.

Andy Carter
Traditionally, we do the game launcher itself, which I should explain as a retro console lounge that we built up just collecting TVs, myself and another member Richard of LPG. Most of the systems have come from us as well as a few others that we pretty much just have. That was the first few years now that we’ve had the lounge Running for several years we add on as we can finding systems TVs here and there. Some things get donated some things we find on the cheap, etc. We’ve grown that to I want to say about 35 stations right now for the retro console lounge. This year, we’ve expanded a little bit to try to add an arcade experience as well. We’ve contacted some additional vendors, that would be Motown tilt. They have brought some arcade machines, as well as a friend of ours who’s brought several pinball machines as well. On top of that, we ourselves have sourced about 25 arcade one ups for those not familiar, those are newer sort of smaller arcade machines built to be prefab kits principle on a budget, a lot of them have multiple games in them, but they still have all the same iconography you’d see on the side. And we we have like Mortal Kombat machines, Pac Man machines, The Simpsons beat him up, the Turtles beat him off, things like that. We have about 25 of those. And those just look fantastic all together in a line is an arcade. It’s a really nice presentation. And just great to see all this coming together.

Kevin
So one of the cool things about having a group of friends who are all doing this, the area has expanded as our interest expanded. So what started off as the vintage video game Lounge has added arcades my interest is tabletop RPGs. So for the first time this year, we’ve had organized play sessions happening and we filled every game that we offered this weekend.

Michael Schofield
That’s awesome that they added organized play to this whole thing. It’s like you could you could use them to bootstrap your own convention. I love that they they ended up going after folks with like pin balls, pinball machines and classical arcades. There really isn’t anything quite like a physical tangible bells and whistles pinball machine man that I can imagine. Few people coming across except for like opportunities like this, because you just don’t see them. You don’t rarely see them in like bars, let alone like actual like arcades these days.

Tim Broadwater
I love experience. Yeah, I love that experience, too. Like I when I was a kid, I remember like, how cool it was to go to like Pizza Hut. And then just like you could put your pizza and your soda right on the table and then play the Pac Man, you know, and if you spilled your pizza, it didn’t matter. And then like when I was a mall rat in my middle school years, I you know, I experienced when Mortal Kombat came out in the arcade. I know the Simpson four player, the X Men, four player beat ’em up games and Street Fighter. And so yeah, it’s. And they bring all this up to a con. Like that’s their kind of what their collective does. And so they also, like they said, they started originally just streaming and kind of on Twitch. We actually follow them already on Twitch, and they follow us. If you can check out their Twitch channel. They actually have I think the moth man and the flatwoods. Monster the cryptids. You know what I mean? On their? Yeah, their page. But they actually have a schedule, like most of these channels, do. They have like a schedule of like, Hey, this is when we’re streaming. And this is who will be streaming on what time and you know, and yeah, it’s very cool. And I asked, rich, and Heather, about starting out, like the streaming and all that experience. And this is what they had to say about it.

Richard Dalton
We started mostly with streaming because that was the easiest thing to do. Everybody in the collective has streamed, we’ve had members come into the collective, we’ve had a couple leave, just because you know, life circumstances change. You know, we have a decent streaming number of streaming followers, but we’re not PewDiePie or you know, any of these other folks like we don’t, we don’t focus on that, like we kind of our streaming is different from a lot of the other streaming I’ve seen, it’s kind of just we get on there and chat with the folks. We don’t play the super popular game. We have several people that play you know, indie games, and quirky games. And it’s harder to find audience there. But I think the audience that you find is generally more invested. And you kind of become online friends with them. And that’s kind of happened with everybody who has streamed, we had some Pokemon stuff early on. And throughout this, you kind of learn what it takes to put on a good streaming show. And if you have, even with 10 people, if you all have lives, sometimes it becomes difficult if you want to stream every night of the week, you know, or even multiple nights of the week. And that’s some of the that’s some of the issues that we run into ran into. Yeah,

Heather
So whenever Kevin and I began to do some of the Twitch streaming to help launch our larger presence on Twitch, Kevin and I were pretty actively involved in Pokemon GO and so I have a passion for Pokemon. That’s kind of my thing. And so Kevin did a lot of the groundwork to help us develop a A hour on Monday afternoon evening, where we would sit down and record some of our live PokemonGo footage, kind of screen recording and putting it up on Twitch. And we call it poker Mondays. So poker Mondays with Heather and Kevin was a fun time. We’ve kind of gotten away from it. But it was a great intro to Twitch streaming for us.

Tim Broadwater
I can’t even imagine what it would take to stream like Twitch stream up a cell phone game, you know what I mean?

Michael Schofield
Exactly. That’s what I was thinking. I am super cute. I started looking around for like their poker Monday videos, because it seems like a lot of work to produce that. And you know, speaking as, you know, one of a two party endeavor like finding schedule, or like finding schedule alignment to do anything they’re like, isn’t like really impressive. But you know, they said they have a decent following. And they have like 400 and some followers. And what I like is that recently, they were playing like the, like I see, like missed, and I know there’s remakes here, so it’s probably the missed remake. And it’s a loader, the dark remake?

Tim Broadwater
I bet yeah. It’s the old old one, to be honest. Like, I’ve watched some of their stuff, and they do like crazy out their old games and then a commie they One of them’s on an a comic. And a comedy is a really, really old game.

Michael Schofield
Think it’s like really interesting. And I was. And they mentioned it briefly in like the prior clip, that it’s like now, you know, like, they figured out that this could be a business venture. And what a cool business venture it is. I’m super curious about like, all the nitty gritty.

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, so I think they actually, that’s funny that you say that, because I’ve actually interacted with a couple of them handy. And Katie, on, you know, through the stream, and like Andy said a while ago was like, I’m going to replay through evil within and evil within two back to back. I love those games, and even just to go in and watch them play and just, you really just do talk to a whole time with them. And just so it’s not like 1000 viewers and watching them, but it’s maybe 10. And it’s like a group chat amongst people. But yeah, I asked him about being a collective and how does that work and what it’s like, and what’s cool about it, and Terry, rich and Heather had to say this,

Terry Dalton
I think one of the unique things about being a collective as well is that like somebody might be drawn into the group, because they were interested in a certain thing that another person that one of our group members was interested in, and through like learning the personalities might be willing to branch out, they go, Oh, well, you know, I normally watch this person in this group, but like that, like I was watching this other person and found this thing that was kind of interesting, or, you know, I never really thought I did enjoy it before, but I enjoyed watching it or whatever. And, you know, all of us interacting, being able to, like, bounce off of each other. Because, you know, not everybody has the personality to do all the things. But if you have somebody that maybe does have that personality, and then somebody else that knows the stuff, then you can kind of collaborate and make something interesting where you know, may not have been,

Richard Dalton
there’s a you know, there’s a trade off that you make when you do something like this. And that is if you go from seeing your friends on a regular basis and decide to do this thing, and commit to streaming and planning. By default, you’re going to see that group less. You You have to find other ways to hang out in interact. So that’s other than that, it’s been pretty good. That’s the only really the main downside to it. And life’s change lives change. You know, we have, we were all childless when it started. And some of us have kids and you know, other things get in the way, but like, really, we still love doing what we do. And, you know, enjoy each other’s company.

Heather
So this year, we acquired a very old brick of a TV that is a pink and purple Disney TV. So I’m guessing that’s a princess TV. And we’ve attached that to a Nintendo classic in which we had Sailor Moon R and getting to see little girls play into gaming in ways that are like Street Fighter fun and yet princessy that’s like some big heart energy for me that I’m all about. So that’s a good stuff, you know,

Michael Schofield
super wholesome note about that pink TV with Sailor Moon.

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, I actually love Sailor Moon, which I don’t know if you knew that but I’ve I watched every single episode of the anime, I would love it if they rebooted it like Voltron or he-man. So they make it work. And if they go to an individual convention and set it up, or I know that I was talking to Kevin, and he’s mentioned that, you know, one of the local colleges was like, Hey, we have an Up All Night kind of thing. That’s kind of again, like an event we put on for like, homecoming week or something for the students. Would you all say, your gaming stuff there? And they did that as well. And I think they want to kind of figure out like, how, how does this grow? Right? And how does it change? And does it expand, you know, and more people being involved? And so I asked them about, like, what the future held and like, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then this is what they had to say,

Kevin
yeah. So if I suddenly find myself with access to ninth level spells, and I guess it just cash wish, once a bunch, we’re going to be more than just Popcaan. It’d be great to be able to go and take this to Pittsburgh, or origins, or MAGFest. Or have our sort of own brand of cones that are around the region, it would be this or we kind of just do all the work ahead of time, then we start to get to hang out and share games with people that we like. We’ve had cool guests Pittsburgh, dad came this year, and did signed autographs and photos. And it just sort of keeps expanding as we have the capacity to expand. And hopefully that’s an exponential curve. And five years from now, we’re looking back at what will eventually seem a very small endeavor. If people are interested in following let’s play games, West Virginia, they can do that on the website, LPGA web.com. And we have a discord, which is linked from the website.

Andy Carter
Follow us on Facebook that is simply LPG WV once again, that stands for let’s play games, West Virginia. So LPG, WV, also twitch.com/lpg, WV. A couple of our members are very heavy streamers there. We have, you know, footprint there. And it’s a little different than what we do. But it’s just again, sharing that love of gaming, no warning, it’s 18. And over, we do not censor ourselves. We’re adults, we’re having fun, be prepared. But nonetheless, that’s a nice place to come and chill and talk games with us. You never know who might be playing something or what they might be playing. So that’s another really good way to connect with us. That’s really cool.

Tim Broadwater
Yeah, so that’s the Let’s Play Games, West Virginia. LPG WV collective that I got a chance to kind of talk with. And but yeah, I had never talked to a collective before and never thought about like, oh, wow, if you have someone who’s in the game. Like, I like making comic books, this person likes game animes. Here’s a person who makes games. Here’s a person who likes to twitch stream games. And here’s the game designer and all of those fusing together like Devastator or Voltron and like becoming a collective, you know, very cool.

Michael Schofield
Yeah, I think it’s really kind of like inspiring, because they are able to, you know, turn a hobby into potentially like a business gig. I think there’s definitely like demand for that kind of those kinds of experiences. How cool.

Tim Broadwater
Like I said, like, if they have their own con, or if it is a game lounge, LPGA WV pop up, and they can just take it to other cons is huge. The mobility there is kind of cool, you know, the fact that they can like, well, you can interact with us anywhere through the Twitch app, or like and what just came, but or you can come to one of our pop ups. So very neat, like, so oftentimes, we talked about about game mechanics and the player experience of games. And then we have in this season, I think, getting more into like the tabletop, RPG community, and like game creators and game designers having more kind of one on one interview episodes with them. And so, yeah, when this opportunity came up to like, oh, let’s actually talk to a game collective that’s 1011 12 Plus members, and what did they do? And just very neat, very cool. And there’s tons of them out there. There’s tons of these rings or collectives or communities for various stuff.

Michael Schofield
Yeah, man, it’s really early internet style. Remember, the, the old web rings of, of old and you’re, like, it’s the, you know, the thinking being that like, you know, you can share scant resources among a like minded group and bound by, you know, some rules of thumb or like a code of ethics or code of honor. And like really, I don’t know and then and then from that be able to put yourself out there. I think it’s really neat in the sense that like, you know, like one person trying to get in front have an audience on Twitch is significantly more difficult than being able to have like a specific channel that you can like go to.

Tim Broadwater
So all we need to do now is read the Follow us on the BS,

Michael Schofield
follow us on the BS, I hope you leave that in there. If you would like to hear more of this kind of thing, please let us know. And design thinking games.com where you can play through our backlog you can get in touch you can buy a super affordable advertisements that reach tons and tons of people. You can hit us up on Twitter, let us know if you’d like this kind of a more of our like NPR style radio lab style produced shows. Or if there’s a topic that you want to hear about. We are on the three T’s Twitter, Tik Tok, and Twitch look for Design Thinking games. We’re also on Patreon where we publish ad free episodes at patreon.com/design thinker games.

Introductory Guy
Thank you for listening to the Design Thinking games podcast. You only have so much time and it means a lot you shared it with us to connect with your hosts Michael or Tim visit Design Thinking games on Tik Tok twitch and Twitter DMS are open. You can also check out design thinking games.com where you can request topics, ask questions or see what else is going on. Until next time, game on

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