[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/greg_costikyan.png]]
Greg Costikyan (born July 22, 1959) is an American game designer and science fiction writer. His game works spans numerous genres, including [[WarGaming hex-based war games]], {{Tabletop RPG}}s, CardGames, and VideoGames. He worked on game design for many years, including writing and consulting for Nokia.

Greg has often taken the role of "bitter veteran" in the video game industry, decrying the stifling model of mainstream publishing and being one of the early advocates of the IndieGame scene. In September 2005, he joined with Johnny Wilson, former editor of ''Computer Gaming World'', to create the startup indie game publisher Manifesto Games. As a digital distribution hub it was ahead of its time but it would be eclipsed by institutions such as Steam and the Humble Bundle, and the site eventually went out of business. Manifesto was for a time survived by the blog [[http://www.playthisthing.com Play This Thing!]], an indie ReviewBlog (with regular tabletop features on the side), but this seems to have gone down as well after a time.

Costikyan is also known for his 1994 essay "[[http://www.costik.com/nowords2002.pdf I Have No Words and I Must Design]]", which was one of the first attempts to develop a unified language for game designers to talk about their discipline -- and he did it years before academic game studies even became a thing. In 2013, he published his first game design book, titled ''Uncertainty in Games'', which explores the role and implementations of UnpredictableResults in gaming experience.

He also writes on a variety of topics; his non-fiction writing tends to focus on game design and the role of games in culture, and he has written a few science-fiction novels as well.
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!!Costikyan's works include:

!!! Tabletop Games
[[index]]
* ''TabletopGame/TheCreatureThatAteSheboygan''
* ''Franchise/StarWars: TheRoleplayingGame'', specifically, the first iteration, a.k.a. ''TabletopGame/StarWarsD6''
* ''TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}}''
* ''Pax Britannica''
* ''TabletopGame/{{Toon}}: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game'', co-developed with Creator/WarrenSpector
* ''TabletopGame/ViolenceTheRoleplayingGameOfEgregiousAndRepulsiveBloodshed''
* ''Web And Starship''

!!! Video Games
* ''VideoGame/MadMaze''
* ''Vector 3''

!!! Novels:
* ''Another Day, Another Dungeon''
* ''By The Sword''
* ''Literature/FirstContract''
* ''One Quest, Hold the Dragons''
[[/index]]

!!Other works by Greg Costikyan contain examples of:

* CrazyPrepared: Spoofed in ''Another Day, Another Dungeon''. In the ''Dungeons and Dragons'' rule book, the list of standard equipment items included a ten-foot pole, which generated much player lore about the uses for this item and about [=GMs=] responding by putting useful items eleven feet away to keep them out of reach. For this reason, one of the main characters in ''Another Day, Another Dungeon'' carries a collapsible ''eleven''-foot pole.
* KingIncognito: In ''Another Day, Another Dungeon'', [[spoiler:Vic, the senile old man who tells long, pointless stories and begs for spare change, turns out to be the last polymage, a type of sorcerer thought to have died out more than ten thousand years ago]].
* OurLichesAreDifferent: In ''Another Day, Another Dungeon'', a lich functions as the main Big Bad's [[TheDragon dragon]]. He's an undead sorcerer, but he's pretty much the OnlySaneMan for Team Evil. He once spent a century as a disembodied skull being used as a birdfeeder, and it's left him with an almost uncontrollable urge to kill all songbirds.
* PrinceCharmless: In ''By the Sword'', the princess has great misgivings about her ArrangedMarriage to one of these princes. The prince is fat, smelly, and has bad table manners. The princess eventually talks to a member of the prince's court, who explains that the prince is actually a very gentle man, and he's also extremely gay, so the princess never has to worry about having to have sex with him. She is reassured by this, and decides that this marriage won't be so bad.
* ShoutOut: Costikyan's the title of famous essay "I Have No Words & I Must Design" is a play on Creator/HarlanEllison's short story ''Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream''.
* TrueLovesKiss: Deconstructed in the short story "And Still She Sleeps". No one can wake up the maiden who's been asleep for centuries, because no one can truly love her when they can't get to know her. In the end, they put her in a museum until some future wizard can figure out how to wake her.
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