I'm sorry, but gaming won't save the world.

Came across this over at Game in the Brain. Seems a game designer thinks games are so wonderful that they will solve the world's problems.

Read that last again.

Someone who does X thinks X is the solution of all our problems and some others that also do X can't help themselves but agree. Doesn't that trip anyone's suspicion meter out of the box? You were issued one of those useful devices weren't you?

It would seem that one thing lots of gaming certainly does is make people naive.


Now they may have a point if all the world's problems can be resolved with easy pat answers and strats off the internet.

Or maybe life is more complex than that.

Or maybe... just maybe, teaching people that anything they think is a problem is problem that they can and should resolve is itself something of a problem. It may lead to such things like.. oh I don't know... perhaps something like faking data because the problem just *has* to be real and it just *must* be solved.



One other interesting thing about the McGonials of the world. They will quickly jump on the idea that games teach wonderful things, but I'm rather certain that they would immediately oppose the idea that they teach anything negative. So in their view Grand Theft Auto won't make little Johnny into a whore using, murdering car thief- it will however make him into a genius.

I think it's far more likely it will do neither, at least to the extent proponents would claim. There may be a case that it will (like any activity) affect certain types of thinking and/or attitude to small degrees. But such effects are likely be a mixed bag of negatives and positives.

Unless of course one does an activity too much. Like say increase a gaming generation's gaming time by a factor of seven. Then you get people dying at their game cafe.

But maybe culling the herd of people stupid enough to think gaming will save the world is the best way... of saving the world.

A day for Quotes

It's a downer of a day due to political developments that foreshadow a depressing future.

Rather than write about that, I thought I'd list some quotes that served me as inspiration when building the background for another depressing future- that from my Shadowrun Campaign, a setting which in my timeline leads to the near destruction of the world and the post-apocalyptic Morrow Project Campaign.


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"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.", Abraham Lincoln.


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“It is ever so with the things that men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”, Gimli from Lord of the Rings.


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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.", perhaps George Santayana.


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"Wealthy Republics do not last long. Wealthy Republics that try their hand at governing subjects soon cease to be wealthy republics. Often they cease to be either.", Jerry Pournelle*

*paraphrase slightly as the orignal quote ended with "neither" rather than "either" and seems to be in context a typo.

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"For it is the doom of men that they forget.", Merlin from the move Excalibur.

Passing Comment- Death: Style vs. System

Came across this blog post and thought I'd give a quick comment here. Quick because life is busy and I have to plan and arrange for kittens that will arrive in five weeks...

The basic point that Carl is attempting to make is that system is very important in deciding if the characters live or not. The debate is with Faustusnotes who claims that play style is more important.

My comment, Faustusnotes is correct. Carl is wrong.

All the crunching of systems numbers means nothing in the comparisons Carl attempts, for the simple reason that for such crunching to be decisive- the play style must be held constant.

However Faustusnotes' entire point is that play styles aren't constant.

Carl point thusly fail to even address the question put before him, and are instead misdirection (intended or not).

Carl can claim that a given play style may require more... let's call it bias... to produce given level of deaths. But no more.

How people choose to the play the game is always more important than the game.

Random Thoughts- Cats & Sci-fi Settings

It's been a while since my last blog entry, things have been busy.

Worse, my wife tempted me with Maine Coon kittens (just before she jets off to Paris for a week's business trip). This about a year after we lost our cat of 17 years. These days there are websites such evil wives can use, they have 'kitten cams'. Most unfair.

And this has pushed out thoughts of RPGs for a bit. In the contest of Maine Coon kitten vs. RPG, the kittens win.

For those not in the know, Maine Coons aren't just cats. They're rather different and special cats, sometimes called dog-cats or the man's cat. They are large (males can reach 25 lbs), playful their entire lives and can be trained to the leash or taught to fetch if desired. They still maintain the cat's independent air, but are highly people-centric while doing so. If you've never known one, you'd find them quite the surprise.

I use them as a model for a fey breed in my fantasy games where they are something like advisors to a familyof white witches down through the generations. Because they are that cool.

Switching gears...

I've never much cared for most Sci-fi settings. Star Wars leaves me cold with its endless cycle of Jedi falling to the darkside and almost destroying everything. Star Trek was ruined for me over the years (as my last series of articles likely shows). Ringworld just didn't give me a reason to care. And so on.

On the RPG side things are even worse. Traveller bored me with it's nobles and empires (I'd rather play fantasy, with its nobles and empires) and low tech jump drive ships. The background of 40K bored me even more, with no good guys there's nothing to fight for- your era of endless war is thus pointless. Faded Suns, yawn.

I had thought that I'd be left with a re-imagined original show Star Trek as my only option.

Then I found the Federation of the Hub series by James H. Schmitz.

Think Space Opera. Think high end Psi Abilities. Think a series where things just happen without explaining everything in huge detail (thus leaving many mysteries for GM and players to fill in).

Think of a Federation that appears to be a true Federation, i.e. individual worlds can govern as they like- but may be better said to be a tyrannical librarian government. And yes, that is possible and it's oh so cool as an adventuring setting.

Just pure fun, and a mindset that I love for sci-fi campaigns. After Morrow Project runs its course, I think I know the next place we'll visit.


Schmitz wrote most of his works during the 60s and 70s, at the time his name will just about as well known as Heinlein or Asimov. But he was mostly a short story author whose works were published in the magazines like Analog. And thus he was almost forgotten as the era of the huge novel came to be.

The whole Federation of the Hub story can be had in four books. I seriously recommend them.

Telzey Amberdon
TNT: Telzey Amberdon & Trigger Argee Together
Trigger & Friends
The Hub: Dangerous Territory

The last contains the short novel The Demon Breed, which is perhaps my favorite written sci-fi story of all time.

The Nerfing of the Starship Enterprise: Conclusion

Ok, I've sent some time reviewing the past and how today's Enterprise is but a pale shadow of the original.

The question now is why did it turn out the way it did?

Not the easiest of questions, and I believe it would be difficult to answer even if I did in-depth interviews with every decision maker behind every product. Frankly, I've talked with enough designers and writers to know that often they don't understand why they do things. I doubt this area is any different. But trends can be spotted and those can telling. Given that I'm not a mind reader, I may wrong- but that's not going to prevent me from trying.

There are two areas here, the first is Game and the other TV/Movies. I feel that the nature of each drove the nerfing of the Enterprise with only a little overlap.


Gaming:

• Ablative game design is frankly the market driver. It's the core (with HP) behind D&D and similar games as well as all the most successful MMORPGs.

It's easy for the designer, and easy to grasp for the player. Being easy, it has the deceptive appearance of being easy to balance. They are very popular indeed.

I don't like Ablative systems, and I've written about that before. The simple truth is that few things in life or even in TV/movies are really ablative. Once selected, simulation suffers. Further, once selected it very difficult to keep anything exceptional- it's now just a number of hit points (or boxes in Star Fleet Battles) to be reduced.

Lastly, once a type of game starts down the ablative path- it almost always dooms any following games. WotC hasn't tried to replace HP in D&D, it's an expected element of that genre. Who would risk something different when it has been prove ablative works?

• The Hobby's need for expansions in order to maintain sales drives expansion of setting and technology.

There is a strong pressure to keep a game line selling, and that's difficult to do if your first book out the door defines 'the best of the best'. What sexy reason does the buyer have to get the lastest expansion? It has to have new stuff, and sooner or later that new stuff is going to break the old.

• The desires of designers to 'fix' the original.

Designers often think they have wonderful ideas. They may not be part of the original, but dang it they are so wonderful they have to be in there anyway. The designers of Star Fleet Battles loved historical navy simulations- and names and concepts from historical navy simulations found their way into a Star Trek game.

TV/Movies:

• First and debatably the most important influence- Star Wars.

The impact of Star Wars was huge and has altered the public's view of what sci-fi should look like ever since. Star Trek avoided the fighters for a while, but in the end gave in (at least in part) during the run of DS9.

However Star Wars' version of hyperlight is now the default image for FTL travel. It's blasters now the default of 'ray guns'. The makers of TV and movies love default images, and have a difficult time breaking away from them. In short, the original Enterprise was too... original.

I feel that this influence drove a lot of the changes we've seen. From how warp drive and phasers now work to the numbers of shuttles carried.

• Cultural Change.

The original was a product of the 60s, when American Exceptionalism (while under attack) was still the norm. The Enterprise and crew was the United States written into the future: bold, individual, powerful. When on a equal footing- it would crush its Klingon (Elaan of Troyius, Errand of Mercy) or Romulan (Balance of Terror) foe.

Dramatic tension was added to its battles by other means like sabotage (Elaan of Troyius), unknown foes (Balance of Terror), or outside influences (The Tholian Web).


TNG and later were created when Hollywood (and sadly much of America itself) had decided that traditional America was flawed and without value. Socialism replaced the original's Capitalism. Force wasn't the heroic defense of virtue any more- but the resort of those who have failed to understand what they were doing. Kirk claimed to be a soldier, in TNG Star Fleet was no longer a military arm.

The Captain of the Enterprise was French, and the model of the Federation became the EU.

With such a mind shift, there was no place for a powerful 'best of the best' Enterprise. It could no longer be exceptional. Thus any one-one-one battle with the Klingons or Romulans was now at best a toss up.

In a way it made for easy writing, just about everything was a threat. And the only path to victory was either technobabble, or by talking out the differences.


So IMO that's the current state of affairs.

We won't see anything like the original Enterprise with the current mindset in Hollywood, or the current state of the art in game design. And so, we left with memories of the good old days.

I did love those old days*.


Part: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII

*Like all memories, these are somewhat selective. To be honest, many TOS episodes were less than stellar. Really, Spock's Brian anyone?