Mutterings

Moving this blog

2009-10-19T21:20:21Z

As I pay less and less attention to facebook and more and more want to establish my own space, I'll be blogging over her at blue collar space instead. Expect more of me than here, but far more self-absorbed.

Diaspora released

2009-08-11T20:56:32Z

Late news, but Livejournal seems to be the last place to go these days anyway. Diaspora is now available for purchase in hardcover from Lulu. It's awesome. Hell, just search for "awesome" on Lulu and up it comes.

Folding?

2009-07-03T04:13:54Z

Whoever had this idea first is a genius, but his identity seems to be lost. Originally designed for games at conventions, where many players don't know each other, this is a folding character sheet, which lets you display part of the sheet to the rest of the table instead of keeping it all to yourself. Nifty.

In FATE games, however, there's a big chunk of the character sheet that's very valuable for the ref at least to see as well as the player: the Aspects. And so, I give you the folding Diaspora character sheet. Complete with cat.

Again with the Diaspora?

2009-06-11T04:00:24Z

Yeah you're probably hoping I'll shut up. Too bad.

We've entered the "passionate disagreement about trivia" stage. I had a bit of a laugh today going over detailed arguments and realised I didn't actually give a shit which way it went but was just so engaged in the game that I wanted to see my vision exactly regardless of quality. I think we have that hammered out now -- vision is preserved but there are some refinements that I admit, make a better game. Mostly consistency checks and typos left and some formatting back-and-forth.

We ran a platoon game last night as part of the campaign storyline that's been running for playtesting and it rocked. Cops in riot cars commanded by high tech mind reading commo vans with coilgun turrets engaging striking workers with off-world energy batons for possession of a landing strip for incoming supplies. The player side wound up negotiating a concession rather than lose and so the objective was lost but all three PCs got away to be picked up at the secondary LZ. Each had to take a Severe consequence -- basically the worst level of genuine injury in the game; takes months of game time an a minimum of one complete session to recover. Wonderfully, each player chose a different track for his consequence:

Konstan, owner of the ship and bankroll of the operation, took a severe against his Wealth track (which already has some hits on it, so they don't heal yet) -- apparently he had overinvested in getting those weapons to the workers and now the loan sharks have decided he's a bad risk: bounty hunter time.

Rebekah, leading a group of striking workers into a direct hand-to-hand fight with police, was surrounded by the shrieks of the dying and mutilated and found herself horrified at the reality of up-close warfare. She too a severe on the Composure track and suffered a nervous breakdown.

Mac, a heavyweight brawler also leading troops into battle and at the center of the final engagement right at the LZ when everything went south, took his on the Health track: a shattered knee, threatening his whole leg unless he can get high tech assistance.

So one failure set up the motivations and opposition for at least the next three sessions that I can see. My ass is kicked.

More Diaspora

2009-06-09T01:22:50Z

Oh we are so close. We're in the home stretch -- down to copy editing and last minute tweaks. We've had solid playtest sessions every week for the past while and we've prepped an official web site. Looks like our first salvo will be through Lulu and we should have a sample chapter up at the site Real Soon Now.

Fate for miniatures wargaming

2009-03-21T06:32:04Z

Playing around with using Fate (as stripped for Diaspora) to do platoon scale science fiction miniatures wargaming. I guess this is the Striker to our Traveller.

Post-modernism and the classics

2009-03-04T23:02:47Z

So I'm reading Virgil's Aeneid, or more correctly I'm reading the Translator's Note (my favourite part of most classics) to Frederick Ahl's translation, and something struck me about art.

It seems like artists always knew what we discovered only recently. That is, the much-derided (lol) post-modernist criticism would have been obvious to any prior artist above a certain minimum (and low) complexity. Perhaps the genius (and folly) of post-modernism was only in saying it out loud.

First, the work is meant to be performed. Every syllable in the original Latin is crafted to be spoken aloud at a certain time with a certain rhythm and at a certain distance from every other syllable. This attention to the text of the work as the work is clearly a semiotic endeavour. This quality of internal self-reference, it strikes me, is present in practically all art worthy of the name from practically every era. The calligraphers drawing up the Magna Carta work deliberately with cut quill, type of ink, and quality of paper to achieve not just the legible document required as a political artifact, but also to give it moment, gravity, and impact as befits such a profound change in political behaviour. Whether or not they thought explicitly, in fine detail, about these choices is something we can only guess at, but I suspect our instinct to guess that they do not (but rather that they act largely from necessity -- only this ink is available, or from conformity -- this ink is always used for these kinds of documents, or from pure instinct) undersells the thinking of a very real craftsman. A medieval geek who cares deeply about his very narrow niche, he must select his tools deliberately and care deeply about his choice. I suspect he even has the deep-seated urge to communicate his interest and debate it hotly with others, though early on he may have lack the technology to make this discussion something an archaeologist might find.

Well, that wandered. Anyway, other elements that I see Ahl struggling with in translating Virgil that are clearly of interest to any post-modernist critique and equally of interest to Virgil include:

Wordplay. Obviously to make any play on words requires a deliberate perspective external to the work. The temptation to multiply that -- to make plays on plays on words -- is equally obvious and carries us further into the abstract space of the text itself (well, abstracted from the content).

Interlingual references. It seems Virgil uses words that connote in both Latin and in Greek, sometimes directly, sometimes aurally, but sometimes as anagrams. This layer of detailed reference to letter order across languages would give Derrida (damn I gave it away) an erection.

So maybe the post-modernists didn't so much find something new as give us a language (and maybe not a pretty one) to talk about this layer of an artist's intent. Maybe not even that -- maybe they just made sure that the idea of being conscious of this activity is possible. Now our culture is irrevocably poisoned with this parasite: we are all above the work looking down on it as at once the immersive entertainment it is superficially meant to be, but also as cultural analysts looking for things the author(s) intended us to find but that do not relate to the narrative we are intended to experience. How else to explain the pervasive presence of "easter eggs" in film, games, and (certainly since the beginning of the art-form) oil painting? How else to make sense of the "director's cut" or the "commentary track"?

We are all now reflexively engaged with the media whenever we engage the art. We cannot help it. The post-modernists were not so much "right" or even "insightful" as they were the vectors for a new intellectual disease that makes everything wonderfully more complicated. And thus we evolve, layer by layer, into more interesting animals.

Gaussian anthropology

2009-02-21T18:03:36Z

Either everything is deeply interrelated or there are ideas whose time has come or, perhaps, I see patterns where there aren't any. I say this because whenever I read two or three interesting things in a row, no matter how diverse, I see ways in which they are saying the same thing. Perhaps I have a gift for synthesis.

So I recently finished Taleb's book The Black Swan, which is basically about the gross misuse of Gaussian distributions to predict a lot of (important) things that do not, in fact, behave on anything like a Gaussian curve. It's good stuff, an easy read (unlike myself, he has an editor that doesn't mind "cahatty"), and it resonates. A lot of it is obviously right and a lot of the criticism I've read of it hinges on the fact that it can't supply a replacement for the Guassian. As though being wrong but having something to do was better than acknowledging rates of error. I hear the cry, "But we have to do SOMETHING," often enough at work that I can commiserate. Of course we have to do something. We have to acknowledge and measure rates of error rather than assume they follow a curve that WE KNOW THEY DON'T.

Anyway, there's an underlying idea in there that runs even deeper than Taleb hints at. The idea that things "average out". Wedging data into Gaussian curve is one way of assuming this, but apparently in the field of anthropology it's been happening (and is being addressed) as well.

I recently ran into an old friend who I haven't seen for some 30 years. He's an anthropologist (or at least he lectures on it). We chatted and of course I overshared and even got grabby about his area of expertise. He was researching "agency" in anthropology and so I asked for some papers so I could understand what it was about.

Now, keep in mind that I have very little background study in anthropology, so my cursory analysis is probably way off (I certainly had trouble with many "terms of art" in the papers I read and occasionally made the almost certainly wrong assumption that they meant something like the plain English they seemed to. This doesn't work in any other field, so I don't know what I was thinking). Anyway, agency is the idea that a culture does not follow a trajectory that is defined by a vector for progress or even maintenance. That is, if cultures develop to "improve", we expect to see universal adoption of "better" tools when they arrive. We don't actually see that. While there is an eventual adoption of many, there is also a lot of clinging to inferior tools (I recently fought the emacs versus vi fight at work and had to deal with a whippersnapper who was hot on some new GUI thing, so I know how this works) for apragmatic reasons.

So the theory of agency says that you have to treat a culture as an aggregate of free-willed individuals who do not necessarily make pragmatic choices on average. They preserve suboptimal methods and tools for personal or political reasons. They like the texture of coarser corn meal because it's what they ate when they were kids. The process of chipping stone tools remains a skill that is revered and that reverence is sustained by them long after iron tools are available. And so on. Individual agency, then, impacts cultural development.

So here's the synthesis.

Gaussian curve users have as their core assumption that things average out. Yes there are outlying data points, but in general they cancel out and are rare and so things tend towards the mean. It turns out that's just not true about almost everything. It's true about average height. It's not true about average salaries.

Old school (non-agency thinking) anthropoligists seem to similarly assume that the actions of individuals average out culturally. That the whims of agency are outliers on a curve of change that is essentially pragmatic.

For data like salaries (or stock fluctuation, or coastline length, or deaths in warfare, or whatever), the curve is essentially fractal. That is, the variation at a fine scale is self-affine (self-similar if you must, but actually self-affine) with the variation at larger scales. The bottom 50% of salaries follow a curve that looks remarkably similar to the top 1%, shifted down.

And so it seems that anthropology is starting to discover that agency is self-affine with culture. That cultures reflect not the mean of all individual free-willed choice, but rather the whole spectrum of preference. The vagaries of personal preference and memory and politics and love are in fact reflected in the gross details of culture rather than submerged in a torrent of dissimilar data. On reflection this even seems obvious -- what can a culture BE except a novel expression of the finer details of its members? If it were some grey mean of behaviour, the similarity between cultures would surely be much greater than it is.

I'll close by again acknowledging that I may have found this correlation by virtue of failing to understand either idea sufficiently. But the concept of self-affine behaviour over differences in scale seems a natural result of the mathematics of non-Gaussian variation and certainly the impositions of free will cannot be considered Gaussian as they lack natural limits. They are necessarily, as per Taleb, from Extremistan.

How about that, huh? Gauss, fractals, and anthropology, and I didn't once mention memes (oops). Next time.

Mission versus Event

2009-02-10T03:22:40Z

From an essay under revision here.

When players disagree about how to play a game, the game is disrupted. This is usually easily resolved: the rules define how to play the game, thus reducing the chance of misaligned expectations. However, there is at least one place in role-playing games where "how to play" may be unspoken and, in fact, undiscovered, allowing the clash to become systemic. This is the clash between mission and event.

Before I get going, let's say up front that we are talking here about refereed games — games where one player is acting as a gatekeeper of the rules and as a keeper of secrets. He is directing or mediating or facilitating play by having an idea about what will happen in the game and by organizing player input to create a session that's consistent with everyones expectations (genre, verisimilitude, participation, and so on).

Starting at the beginning, the first collision is the game opener: the referee supplies either a mission or an event. One may be disguised as the other, which can be the source of confusion in expectations. That is, the referee is either going to give the players something to do or something to react to. He will probably have a clear idea of which he is providing but, in many cases, is unlikely to explicitly communicate to the players which he has provided. And here's where some friction lies: if a player expects a mission but never gets it, he will be frustrated and spend his energy trying to find the mission — trying to deduce the referee's intent when in fact he may have none. If a player expects an event but receives a mission he may balk and refuse the mission as uninteresting opting instead to wait for the event — or engineer it. When players at the table have different interpretations of the referee's opener, we get havoc unless someone realises the failure and speaks it.

Many games expect the mission to be the opener. Some games make this absolutely explicit — Dogs in the Vineyard, Mouse Guard, and Paranoia to name a few. Some seem to expect it but may not communicate (may not realise!) this. Most versions of Dungeons and Dragons fit in here, though I note that in fourth edition there is a distinct move towards making it explicit.

Some games expect the event to be the opener but I can't think of an example that makes it explicit. The fact that it is not stated in so many games, however, leads to many tables interpreting the game one way or the other and creating a local culture with a specific expectation of mission or event, and this table may find they have difficulty integrating new players or participating in other tables' games even though the same system is deployed.

When all players at the table have the same expectation for the opener, a style of play emerges that is distinct. Mission play acknowledges the artificial focus on a specific goal outside the game and gets down to achieving that goal immediately inside play. The referee is control of the direction and can judge success or failure. This style of play is goal-oriented and effectiveness of the players can be measured. Obviously these things are appealing — they create play that tends not to wander and where victory can be announced.

In mission play, the opener implicates a mission. The goal might yet be unstated, but a goal will emerge. The opener might be an explicit mission: the players are handed a mission sheet by their superiors, for example. More commonly the mission is implicit: players are told a rumour about a great treasure in an old dangerous ruin but are not explicitly told to go there. This lack of explicitness is the dangerous space in this kind of play — it's where a mismatch of expectations will cause players to fail to engage the rumour. Worse, if the players have not identified the fact of mission versus event play, the referee may hide the mission — "you all start in a bar" — expecting players to actively search for the mission before starting it — "the bartender, now that you've bribed him, has a story to tell about an old ruin". This is probably one of the most common sources of friction: the refusal to acknowledge and engage the choice of mission versus event.

Mission play is very well rewarded by specific game mechanisms. Declaring a mission as part of the rules (and rewarding its resolution, again, as a rule) drives play forward very effectively. There can be no confusion about what is expected. It does, however, constrain play to this specific type, which is more focus than role-playing games typically have and therefore might be seen as out of genre.

Event play is a much fuzzier animal. The players may have less of their game-brain devoted to the artificiality of the opener and instead direct their characters to react to events and create the story themselves. In this case less is expected of the referee and more is expected of the players, which will obviously create frictions if the expectations are mis-matched: the referee can easily be seen to "not be doing his job" yet it might not be recognized that the other players have one to do which picks up that slack.

In event play the opener is an event. Something happens that is intended to make the players react but that does not imply a correct solution. Thus the players are forced to engage their characters to decide how and what happens next. This places a burden on the referee to prepare for practically any response and a burden on the players to react without a forced direction of action. These freedoms can be paralyzing without system support — ways in which the system gives your character power over the story.

Event play is rewarded by rewarding players for engaging their characters. Making choices according to stated characteristics of their characters would warrant reward, for example — a character that has a specific character trait that implies "Heads headlong into danger" is given a game-mechanical benefit when his response to nearby boors is to flip their table and punch them in the eye. In this way conflict is created out of event by players manipulating system through their characters.

Successful hybrid play happens when players have the power to establish missions through system mechanisms. This increases the burden on everyone — the referee needs to respond to a wide variety of player choices but now must also find ways to make specific stories explicitly stated as desirable by the players interesting. he players themselves now also have the burden not only of reacting to events to drive play, but also to declare goals for themselves and plan to achieve them. In a way this happens with well established event players anyway, but actually stating it mechanically can be onerous. Reign does this with it's Mission attribute (one of the character's Passions) and it can work well in either form of play — either the player accepts a referee's mission or extract his own mission from the opening event. Or defines one before the event, giving the referee something to work with in designing the event and its surroundings.

The bottom line of all this is the importance of deciding what you are playing and communicating it: the choice between event and mission play entails substantially different pressures for players and referees including different kinds of preparation and even different ways to engage the system (which in many cases can remain exactly the same and facilitate opposing forms of play as needed — few games can be said to intend one or the other approach exclusively). Different players having unspoken differences in this particular expectation can easily fail to be communicated and yet be very destructive, either through deliberate inertia or insistent exploration of details that are not relevant to play (as other players read the opener).

JBB: I find _Mouse Guard_ interesting in this respect as it's very explicit about the mission structure, and uses events to "twist" the plot, triggered by failed rolls to overcome obstacles. The game is divided into a GM Turn and a Player Turn; during the latter, players are prompted to generate their own events. This then provides material enough to construct a new mission.

BJM: That's cool — I had kind of thought of it as a binary proposition (you're playing one way or another) but the idea that you can chain these expectations together is pretty illuminating. Makes communicating what you expect that much more important if you're going to switch like that. I think that's the way Reign works too — you set up an initial scene (event or mission) but players create distinct missions to be addressed. How you do that (again, explicit mission or reactive event) is not mechanical though.

Function and Pressure

2009-02-05T02:34:38Z

A snapshot from an idea in development.

Play has several features or functions that drive how play proceeds and derive from game rules and the interests of the players. The purpose of this discussion is to find a theory that describes play and creates a model that can be used as a map — not to find out where we are or where we are going, though these things might be used to invalidate the theory, but rather to find regions of the map that are not yet explored and might drive new game design.

I propose five functions. There may be others. Some might overlap enough to be combined. In principle, any function can apply pressure to any other function.

Game
The game function is act of playing the rules of the game in order to succeed.

Fiction
The fiction function is the story or narrative that players invent to make sense of their play. In some kinds of play this is literally a story. In others it does not exist or exists as a very thin veneer over the play of the game itself.

Simulation
The simulation function is play creating an experience that appears to simulate something. A trivial case would be the effort to simulate armed combat. Another might be to simulate the basic forms of Greek tragedy.

Reconstruction
The reconstruction function is play that changes the rules of the game.

Risk tension
Risk tension is the degree to which play entails genuine real-world risk. Gambling games emphasize risk tension. Most games de-emphasize it. Very few games attempt to eliminate it.

In all five functions it is acknowledged that different players will desire different weighting and will experience play as having different weights. Solving this social problem might be partially addressed through examination of this theory, but of greater interest to me is the pressures between functions and how those describe play.

To step far afield of role-playing games as a test case, consider the scene in The Deer Hunter where Deniro's and Walken's characters are forced to play Russian Roulette for the amusement of their captors. Now, Russian Roulette has clear rules (game): you put a single bullet in a revolver, spin the cylinder to randomise it, and put the weapon to your head and fire. Clearly we have a pressure chain: game -> risk tension. Deniro's character, however, pleads with his captors to allow three bullets in the chamber. He does this to actually change his risk, so it happens as a result of pressure from the risk tension: and therefore, game -> risk tension -> reconstruction. He does this by taking the weapon loaded with three bullets, now representing very different odds, and shooting his captors (changing the game utterly).

Typical role-playing game play has many chains, but the usual are:
Game -> simulation where play of the game creations an expected simulation result.
Fiction -> reconstruction and simulation->reconstruction where expectations during play for certain kinds of stories or certain qualities of simulation drive ad hoc changes to the rules.
More recently we see games influenced by GNS theory that deliberately create pressures like:
Game -> fiction where playing the game explicitly creates story elements, something that happens outside of the game construction in more traditional games (where you will even find players declaring that the game is irrelevant to the fiction, which indeed it might be in those games as they create fiction indirectly through game -> simulation -> fiction — something that is obvious when you discuss the fiction with these players and they fall back on what the rules allow, what they simulate, and what is realistic to justify or invalidate fiction choices).

The only chains that are strictly under the control of the game designer are those that start with game. So areas to explore in design include might be:
Game -> reconstruction — rules that allow (or require) the change of rules. More correctly, play that, when engaging the rules, creates rule changes. This already occurs in games like Nomic.
Game -> risk tension — adding genuine tension to role playing games by creating situations with real world stakes (physical or emotional). Some folks are already exploring this territory and I expect that they are Scandinavian.

Longer chains are interesting too: Fiction -> reconstruction -> game -> simulation -> fiction happens with some regularity for me: the story demands a revision of game rules to accommodate or realise desired narrative, and the change to the rules now codified creates play that changes what we are simulating or the way (or quality with which) we simulate it.

Preference
As stated before, it is certainly the case that players will have different preferences for different functions. Further, they will probably experience the same play as having different weights on different functions. This doesn't strike me as a problem — rather it is just an acknowledgement that people are different and experience play differently. Obviously play that strongly emphasizes or de-emphasizes specific functions will tend to have easily identified proponents and opponents.

The power of this theory, however, is not to divide those people into camps and to arm them. Rather it is to explore the ramifications of strong preference.

Play that explicitly avoids risk tension, for example, does not solely deny risk. It denies all chains that would go through risk tension. This illuminates the fact that strong and non-negotiable preferences have further reaching ramifications than simply denying a single category of play. Instead it inhibits whole branches of the tree of possible function chains. This isn't de facto bad or wrong play, but it would be naive to pretend that it still encompasses all that one expects it too — who knows where these chains lead?

Specifically there is some memetic pressure to reduce the effect of reconstruction in order to better deploy the author's intention (which can only be expressed through game as the rules are the limit of his impact on play). This strikes me as a gross error that not only prunes off huge pieces of a healthy tree but, worse, fails to recognize that this is actually an expected part of play* at many tables and, moreover (and a nod to JDCorley) is basically inevitable. Rules always get changed at the table, though not always deliberately. As well as deliberate reconstruction there is misunderstanding and inadequate clarity in the text. Any effort to design a role-playing game has to at least acknowledge reconstruction and therefore acknowledge any forseeable chains that use it.

So when a table elects to avoid a function of play, they limit available play in ways that are not obvious because now not only does pressure not lead to that function (or more correctly, pressure leading to that function is deliberately unresolved or redirected), it also doesn't go through it to something else. That's not bad, stupid, evil or wrong but rather it might be more than they expect it to be.

Similarly when a designer elects not to support pressure from game to some other node, he limits the capacity to engage that node (by design) but he also indirectly encourages play paths to that node through other ones not under his control. Frequently that path is through reconstruction, denying the author (correctly) absolute ownership of his rules.

* Moreover I will speculate that a significant fraction of the joy that designers feel while playtesting their game and refining it is in fact reconstruction. That they might then deny that part of their play and deliberately exclude it from their delivered game seems baffling unless they have failed to recognize it as an integral part of their experience. It does explain, however, why a game can feel great at the designer's table and be a dead bore for a player armed only with his book and a willingness to take him at his word about the importance of Rules As Written.

Unresolved Pressure
When a function generates pressure towards another function it is not necessarily resolved (it might be resisted or it might not be recognized). This seems likely to lead to frustration if the function generating pressure is highly desirable by the player. A strong pressure from fiction towards simulation (a story that needs to be "realised" well) that goes unresolved can result in claims that the game "isn't realistic" or is "too abstract" (though it is in fact the play that isn't resolving the pressure, which may or may not involve the rules). Often it is redirected: the fiction -> simulation pressure continues to reconstruction and is resolved by enabling the simulation through new rules.

This is a case that we confronted directly in development of Diaspora — early on we (I) had hoped to avoid designing with simulation in mind, but in fact there is a lot of pressure towards it from many angles at our table. In the end it was directed through reconstruction and, to some extend risk tension via some very real social friction. We don't like risk tension much so that created other pressures. Eventually some of our reconstruction play wound up in the rules (some as mechanisms that might get ground out as game and some as advice that might simply influence play and perspective).

RPG and Art

2009-01-23T01:49:12Z

I think that it is undeniable that role-playing games constitute art in every sense of the word. The act of communally creating a story regardless of mechanical means underpinning it is clearly a work of
art. This thought is often abbreviated, however, whether out of embarrassment or an excess of ego.

First, let's not be shy about calling it art. It is an art form and there are better and worse results as art. As with any art, the capacity of the resulting activity to amuse is not necessarily related to its quality. The capacity to entertain (cf. Eisenstein) perhaps more closely is. The capacity to expose ideas that otherwise may not be illuminated certainly is. To head off the obvious accusations of "badwrongfun" -- yes, some fun is artless. You are not an evil or stupid person for enjoying that. But the fact that your dungeon crawl is great fun does not make it art and, more importantly, the fact that the medium can be used to cerate art does not make your dungeon crawl suck. My crappy doodling in the margins of crossword puzzles in not art either, but it is diverting. I will not defend it as art and I will not be offended if you make the claim that it is not art.

Second, let's not mistake the medium for the message. Once someone (usually a game designer) gets it in their head that this passtime is sometimes art, they usually glom on to the idea that the game itself is art or (more insidious) that the game affects the whether or not art is created. Or affects its quality. I want to stand well apart from that idea. Not because I think system doesn't matter (where system is defined largely as the rules as applied by the table -- vaguer and proportionally less useful definitions exist) but rather because talking about the system is rather like discussing the qualities of cinema by focusing on lenses, film, and cameras.

The, art, you see, is in the play.

Now, when a film-maker sets out to make a great film there is no question that he selects his tools very specifically. But he selects them in the context of his goals. Not all tools are always useful and some turn out to be rarely useful indeed. But the art is in the finished product -- the film itself -- and not in the lens or the colour process.

And so I think that the art in role-playing games if firmly vested in the table itself -- in play. And it is there. We have all experienced a thrill, a sense of awe, a rush of excitement, from a moment in play or, more rarely, from an entire session. When looking back over play notes from a multi-session campaign there is often a powerful emotional response to the story (though -- and this is another essay -- not from the reproduction of events but from the memory of the actual session that it evokes). This response is the giveaway that that we are dealing with art. And it happens sometimes in most games and all the time in none. More in some perhaps. Less in others. But always it is from play as influenced by system and not from system as represented in play. The storytelling is the artform. The people telling the stories are the artists.

Somewhere this feeds into increased narrative authority as a tool to get more out of sessions by inviting more of the table to be artists more of the time.

Rambling thoughts re: art and rpg

2009-01-13T23:46:54Z

Some people have variously lauded and derided role-playing games for assuming the mantle of "art". I suggest that role-playing games are not art in any useful sense but rather method. The art -- and it certainly exists -- is solely in the play. The degree to which the game creates sophisticated, thoughtful, and entertaining play is the degree to which it succeeds as a method for this particular form of creative art.

Now, from Eisenstein: "...from preconceived methodological positions, nothing grows. And a tempestuous stream of creative energy,unregulated by method, yields less."*

So, seeing the game system (as opposed to the game played) as the method, we derive that fixing the method rigidly strangles the potential of the art -- the play -- despite the play requiring some method in order to effectively channel creativity into art. And so, the best methods are derived as part of play, using the written method as a springboard. Methods that assume they will be used without modification assume that they will be used to produce a weak art -- something that might be interesting once but must stagnate as the method is "used up". Modification of the method to suit the needs of the art is the only mechanism for progress.

(Adding the analogy: the paint by numbers set provides perfect rigid method for creating precisely one painting. All the tools are present in it to paint a great many paintings by selectively ignoring portions of the method, but a strict reading of the method produces only one painting. Few would recognize the results of a paint by numbers set used strictly, as art.)

Consequently, effective RPG rules are those that admit to change either by design or by accident. Games that are seen as "flawed" compared to either technical manual (rigid method) or fiction (art) nonetheless may be optimally designed to ensure that play is ongoing, changing, deepening art by providing the space to modify method as play gains sophistication or changes direction.

*"A Course in Treatment", _Film Form_, Sergei Eisenstein 1949, Harcourt

Diaspora artwork

2008-11-29T05:03:58Z

So we've decided to go "art light" on Diaspora, which basically means that I get to do it myself. Now the problem here is that most of the really useful art will be of space craft, because they are the most evocative visual part of the setting (such as it is) and so it's a great place for people to get their grips on things. Thing is, they are very geometric and I'm not real good at that. I played around with Blender, but that's not what I want either.

So I settled on this diagrammatic "blueprint" style that I can do fairly quickly but that produces the kind of thing I want to convey. I think. It'll tak e a few dozen before I get the hang of increasing variation, but overall I'm pleased I think.

Other bits coming along nicely. If I can get my colleagues to get the editing engine happening, we could be in print by February.

Diaspora proceeds

2008-11-19T22:25:14Z

After much discussion with my co-authors, I've revised the Diaspora cover. The titling font is now Skia, which I wasn't pleased with at first but after balancing colours and playing with some simple drop shadows for contrast, actually works pretty well. Toph had the bright idea of including a cluster diagram in the cover and it's a cool idea in the end -- it's emblematic of the game and at the same time echoes the shapes in the bubble chamber graphic that dominates.

The structure is pretty solid now I think and the text is almost ready to go to typeset, though I want a little more attention to it from the table first (we went to typeset too fast last time around).

What about interior art, though? I've considered doing it myself but I'm not a very accomplished illustrator. I can do the diagrammatic stuff but any actual people or vehicles are probably best left to a professional or left out. I'm considering pestering Storn Cook if we decide to actually pay for work.

halfjack @ 2008-11-03T22:09:00

2008-11-04T06:17:38Z

I whipped up a cover image for Diaspora this afternoon using some simple graphics software and a bubble chamber simulator from the awesome Complexification site. Well that and a few minutes with Blender (which I still pretty much completely fail to grasp). I found a font I love but have settled for one I can afford. My preference would be to use Palatino Sans both for titling and body text, but not at that price. I hate to settle, but settle I must.

So instead I'm titling with Gill Sans, a nifty sans serif from the twenties that suits my needs (which is to say, it is installed with my operating system). It seems a bit static for body text though. In the body I'd really prefer Optima but I don't want to get covered in Traveller. Any ideas for a sans serif font with plenty of thickness variation and otherwise well suited to text? Or a Modern era roman would work too, I guess. Maybe there's something in the middle where the two meet.

EDIT: Going with a classic for interior type I think: Palatino.

Still more Diaspora

2008-11-03T04:27:52Z

Diaspora is coming along nicely. After an evening's playtest of ship combat we managed to refine the ship construction system. Now we have three design systems -- ships, weapons, and armour -- that use a unified and very simple system. So things are designed in similar fashion and therefore described in a similar fashion and therefore function (as a game mechanism) similarly. The missing level of scale is vehicles, which we weren't going to bother with but now intrigue me.

Almost at the point now where we need to start writing real game text.

More Diaspora

2008-10-25T03:37:12Z

After another fun playtest evening, we got a very cool cluster, some wicked characters, and hammered out a ship construction system that is vastly simpler than our previous work. I think we might be on to something here.

Some nice parallels are shaping up -- weapons and ships have a very similar design sequence and so I think that vehicles between those two scales are probably similarly representable. And, again, the cluster graphics are really cool.

Diaspora

2008-10-22T04:44:12Z

So a long time ago my gaming table, enamoured with Spirit of the Century and nostalgiac for Traveller, spent a good deal of energy creating Spirit of the Far Future. It's an homage to Traveller built with Fate. It's also probably not going to get finished because Mongoose scooped us with a frankly inferior product and now own the license exclusively.

So we could surrender.

Or we could file off the Traveller product identity and make a kind of white-chocolate Traveller.

Or we could use the new bits to make a new game: harder sf than Traveller, packed with the cool of Fate, and with a target market of, well, ourselves. Thus, Diaspora begins. Currently we are hacking, brainstorming, and playtesting. There's some communication on the SotFF mailing list and the Fate mailing list.

And I get to make cool star maps.

Lawrence Welk

2008-09-17T02:32:04Z

This is important.

LHC Hysteria

2008-09-10T03:29:42Z

Worried about the LHC making a zillion black holes and sucking the world up tomorrow? Maybe the Higgs Boson doesn't so much explain the Big Bang as START ONE? No problem, just keep checking Has The Large Hadron Collider Ended The World Yet web site every hour on the hour for updates.

Ye Olde Blogge

2008-09-09T08:45:00Z

Blogging is actually, I realized recently, the revival of a pretty old-school art form. Anyone familiar with the written work of Thomas Paine knows what I'm talking about already: the pamphleteer¹.

Way back in the day it was possible to get your hands on a printing press and pound out your forty pages of political diatribe into a booklet you could distribute. People would agree or disagree, write their own pamphlets in response, instigate cascades of letters that might later be bound and published, and generally act like a slow motion blog.

Certainly it wasn't as, well, democratic, as it is now: you had to have some means and it certainly helped to be someone that folks wanted to read in the first place. It also happened at a pace that demanded a certain amount of attention to the work: this was not a fire and forget process, drivel hammered out in the middle of the night by some sleepless nobody with an idea needing to get out before sleep is allowed to return. But then we also look back on the pamphleteer with a kind of Darwinian filter insofar as we only remember the, well, memorable.

Now instead of letter exchanges between individuals, author and audience, the letters consisting of well thought out response and counter response driven again by the medium (longhand letter writing takes time anyway so you might as well think as you write, anonymity was not the norm, and the delay in delivery meant you had a chance to think about what you last said with some regret before finally receiving the by-then-dreaded angry reply), we get the Comments Page. The comments being a kind of angry verbal ping pong with the context tightly constrained to the last comment or two so that by the end of a chain the point being argued is far afield and lacking the coherence of an actual argument. A sort of game of rhetorical telephone generating little more than self-righteous purple-monkey-dishwasher results after a couple of iterations. Sometimes this is dampened by a fan base of yes-men, but not dampened into any kind of quality exchange -- more drowned than dampened, I guess. While the fire remains to the end, the point is put out in short order.

So go read Thomas Paine. He thought very carefully about politics and in a way that allowed him to generalize and derive conclusions using genuine logic. His conclusions are as valid today as they ever were and as a founding father of the United States and at least metaphysical author of its critical documentation, he is under-appreciated. His blog would, I fear, be sparsely read today rather than the source of revolutionary (literally) ideas about justice and human rights and, most importantly, what must logically follow if we believe in (or choose to grant, I think) those rights. He didn't harp on the value of logical consistency but rather assumed it.

Imagine an audience that would follow you there.

¹Obviously the authors at Bricklin there beat me to the punch by some margin on the pamphleteer-blogger connection. It's inadequately explored, though, I think.

The Veep From Hell

2008-08-31T00:13:41Z

So it looks like John McCain's tag for veep has connections to white supremacist crazy militant Christian organizations. Everyone who is shocked please raise your hands.

And for fuck's sake VOTE people. Think first, BUT THEN VOTE.

Folk Symmetry

2008-08-28T23:30:23Z

I take the bus to work so I have time to read, listen to music, and think. When I use that time to think, dangerous things sometimes happen. Today en route to work I thought. On thinking, I realized that there is an interesting symmetry between Folk Philosophy and Formal Philosophy. Specifically, there is a Folk Tool that is a Formal Fallacy and there is a Formal Tool that is a Folk Fallacy. Cool huh?

Folk Philosophy is the philosophy that people do without resorting to formal training and rigour. It's when you trust your instincts or local mythology (often the same thing) rather than derive or deduce solutions. So a Folk Tool is something we can categorize as a good trick in Folk Philosophy and a Folk Fallacy is a common pitfall that is readily identified as a failed folk argument. "Folk" is not intended to be derogatory in the slightest, it just indicates untrained thought. I engage in Folk Physics all the time -- it seems obvious to me that if you slam on the brakes in your car, your helium balloon will lurch forward with the passengers. Turns out it won't -- it lurches in the opposite direction.

So, reductio ad absurdum is a Folk Fallacy and a Formal Tool.

When constructing a Folk Argument, you assemble premises and axioms in a very informal fashion but most importantly, though your logic might be rigorous, your premises are usually not carefully stated. That means that they have a kind of margin of error based on facts and interpretation. So, when you folk-argue that "If A then B, and if B then C, and if C then D" and assert A therefore D, you commit a fallacy -- reductio ad absurdum -- because although your logic is fine, the error on your premises is multiplied for each premise. Your conclusion is therefore most likely false even though the logic looks good. The more inferences in your chain, the wronger you probably are.

Formally, however, reductio ad absurdum is not only okay, it's one of the core building blocks of formal logic systems! As a tool it works like so: if you suppose premise A and can, in supposing it, derive a contradiction, then A must be false. It's a test through hypothesis and it can, with a small number of operators, be used to construct all more complex formal logical rules.

More interesting to me is post hoc ergo propter hoc.

As a Formal Fallacy this is simply the assertion that the order of events does not imply a causal relationship. Just because A happens before B, there is precisely zero rationale to assert that A causes B.

In Folk Philosophy, however, post hoc ergo propter hoc isn't just a tool -- it's a survival trait! When developing a strategy to survive, say, testing food for edibility, there are a couple of criteria that will be strongly selected for. The most strongly selected for (especially in an area with lots of delicious looking poisonous fruity) is fail-safety.

Something fails safely (exhibits the property of fail-safety) when its failure does not result in an unsafe state. For automatic trains, for example (my own field), most devices fail in such a way as to halt the train because there are precious few more safe trains than ones that are not moving. In Folk Philosophy, fail safety is very valuable because you use it to reflexively run your life and post hoc ergo propter hoc has it in spades. It's so powerful that most animals use it too.

Let's say you eat a berry and get sick. Now as everyone knows thanks to Maple Leaf, listeria has an onset of up to 10 weeks, so it's entirely possible that the berry you just ate had nothing to do with it. If, however, you reflexively apply post hoc ergo propter hoc, one of two things will happen: you will stop eating that perfectly good berry or you will stop eating that berry that makes you sick. Whether right or wrong, you are safe.

Now, for long term operation of humans and their communities this sucks because you will eventually rule out away everything and starve to death. But in the short term it's a great strategy: it's right often enough and it's safe when it's wrong. That also makes it the go-to logical tool when you're scared, which is why people make profoundly improbable leaps based on next to no evidence when they are analyzing something dangerous looking like thimerosal in vaccines or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or having too much toothpaste on an airplane. It's no good for building a civilization but if you find yourself having to test berries in the wilderness, it's a keeper.

Kamen Rider versus...

2008-08-17T00:14:06Z

Starfish Hitler.

I got nothing.

Fear Politics

2008-08-16T02:54:10Z

I got a disgustng little mailing today from an MP outside my riding, Bev Shipley. It's a picture of a hypodermic in a playground with the ominous text "safe?" -- a clear though quiet attack on the safe injection sites which are a thorn (lol) in conservative sides as they seem to be working.

It's basically a "tough on crime" announcement (indicating an election in fall I'm betting) telling me I should be terrified because junkies are loose on the streets stabbing kids, raping dogs, and being really stoned. It says they all need to go to jail or be forced into rehab (neither of which actually seem to help people with addictions get off them). Oddly, however, they point to climbing drug-related crime and claim it's all the Liberal's fault even though Conservatives have been in power the last while -- you know, during the climb in crime rates.

Oh yeah and junkies (the term they decide to use -- real professional, gang, and I use that term carefully) will ruin the Olympics. See also: China.

So obviously I'm supposed to be terrified and vote for the politicians that will save me by jailing everyone unsafe.

Sorry morons, here's the scoop:

When you tell me something, make it a fact or fuck off.
When you tell me a fact, back it up or fuck off.
When you prove a fact and claim it's a problem, supply an argument or fuck off.
When you demonstrate a fact is a problem, provide a solution or fuck off.
Make sure your solution is based on, say, science. Not your gut instinct that the right thing to do is bury everyone not like you. Real study. Real science. I would like an inkling that our next government is interested enough in solving real problems to reliably identify them and find out what to do from experts rather than 17th century criminology. Or fuck off.

So basically, Conservatives can fuck off. You've made it clear you have no interest in actually fixing anything. You just want me to be afraid and run to daddy. I don't want my government to be daddy. I'm a democratic citizen. I'm the leader. I'm daddy. I tell you to mow the lawn and you get it fucking mowed. Give me a government that will mow the fucking lawn.

Apologies for all the fucking.