Something to Actually Write About

It's been a long time since I've posted on this blog. In that time, blogs have fallen out of favor and I seriously doubt anyone will even read this. I'm doing it as a bit of capstone inspired by reading an old post of mine.

First, a bit of catchup before I talk about what inspired this post...

While I've still been playing RPGs in my own personal groups, I've had nothing to say about them publicly. The social discourse had descended to a level that I found unbearable then, and it's only worsened as time as passed. 

Beyond that issue (would could on its own had been ignored), game design had stagnated around D&D and its offshoots with things like story game designs and reworks of other systems swimming around in the shadows mostly unnoticed. There just wasn't anything of interest.

That too has gotten worse, the last time I visited the local mega hobby store I was told that basically anything not D&D wasn't selling at all although there is a collector's market of some type.

All that is in a way to be expected. I've reached that age where I'm an artifact of an effectively dead civilization. One that few even remember and certainly given their own tunnel vision, no reason to mourn. That happens to every generation. If they are lucky like the WWII generation, they may be respected for a period before they too are forgotten and/or despised.

To paraphrase Tolkien, 'Death is the gift of God to man'. I find an odd comfort and hope in that. This is not only the reality of the world, it's how it should be.

On to what inspired this post and from what I can foresee is the last thing I have to say on the subject of RPGs...

In 2009 I made this post answering set of questions about the future of gaming from RPG Blog Carnival. That article's link to those questions is now dead and the domain appears to be for sale.

Looking over my answers, I wasn't too far off base and feel I can take a victory lap given how completely wrong most such predictions are. How D&D has done over the last decade and a half I leave to others. I haven't been paying attention.

The one area I want to update is the question on how technology will become more integrated in RPGs. I was right for the "near future" given in the questions, but it is here that things have change. And it was this subject that stuck me as the right one to be the last gaming post on this blog.

In 2012, Roll20 came online. Together with first Ventrilo (2002) and then Discord (2015), this changed my gaming world. I could play with old gaming companions from my High Schools days no matter where everyone was located. While I would like in-person gaming better, that isn't as much of a option as it used to be. Plus the lack of travel time along with pre-game and post-game setup and clean-up is so nice.

But other than that, while some things were automated- the games were still the games I used to play. Tokens had replaced figures, and PNG maps had replaced sand tables. The die and some mechanics were automated to our taste- but all that was but surface changes. The real change was the lack of game food and in-person contact.

A bigger change hit a to significant degree this year with useful AI. Depending upon how this technology develops- we could see the end of GMs and Game Designers except for dinosaurs who want to do things the old way. 

It's nowhere near that now, and may in fact never get there. Every technology has limits to its development (notice how Moore's Law isn't a law anymore?) and I doubt this will be an exception. But I have no idea what that that limit will be. That's a question for others only be answered properly by the future.

In its current state, it leaves a lot to be desired. 

It's understanding of game mechanics is nearly non-existent. Ask it to generate a character, and it will break all sorts of rules giving you an illusion of a result. But a shallow and inefficient one for anyone who knows the system.

What it is capable of is adventure ideas and to a surprising extent artwork. If one is willing to spend too much time fine-tuning your questions, it can do rather well. But it's still at the level IMO of generating a concept best left to a real GM to fill out.

It's best feature to me is the ability to generate names and ideas for character backgrounds and appearance, something I've never been good at. Now in seconds I can get as big of a list of suitable names as I want to pick and select though.

For now, it's a great time saver for a GM. Doing some low level work so he's free to do more important things. My sons use it all the time, I use it for artwork, names, and little else.

The promise for the future however is immense. Maybe it can over the next decade or two completely replace the GM, providing the game system and play style to match its users. Maybe one could have it house rule or create entire systems to taste.

And to take it even further, maybe it could translate all that into our personal video game replacing the gaming table and figures with full 3D graphics with coop play on the fly. Or even VR (although that technology also leaves much to improve on).

Maybe. Might even be likely. I'm not an expert in the field.

Would that be a good thing? I'd say no, the path of game design has been to reduce players to an ever more child like being with simple systems by-passing any requirements of balance and simulation. Having a computer do everything for you will just accelerate that. People would play these games, but they wouldn't *understand* these games.

But my opinion here means nothing. That's for the current generation and perhaps the next to deal with. 

Good luck, my last piece of advice is that reality will in time overtake everything. It seems overdue.

An Example of Lost Morality

Up for an example of muddle thinking, moral relativism, and inability to make a decent comparison if one's life depended upon it?

Here you go.

A terrorist could ask for no better ally and future victim. They'll side with them as long as they're alive and die without a whimper when it's their turn in the Terrorist target circle.

For my part, I'll point people towards the excellent Force on Force series of games from Ambush Alley Games. It doesn't have the cards that our muddled witch friend dislikes so much, but it's perhaps the best wargame I've encountered since the turn of the century.

And I'll certainly make up some cards for it. Some might even be terrorist witches, after all Paco Garcia Jaen can't seem to tell the difference.

Weakness of Western Culture- Movies and Games

You know, things like this shouldn't even merit a minute of my attention. In one way or the other, it's common in our ultra-rich culture where people can obsess on whatever subject they happen to fancy at the time. I couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting an example.

Even so, I can't help but see things like this and think that an asteroid wiping out mankind might be a kindness. Who takes a movie this seriously?

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," Hill wrote on the forum. "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."


It's enough to make me agree that it's a dying world, well maybe if I wasn't actually alive. After that passing thought I want to slam the guy upside the head with a two-by-four. He so freakin' deserves it. Oh, by the way, the quote above is from Ivar Hill- he's studying game design.

Really, game design. And I thought the Forge guys were screwed up.

We've seen this same sort of thing in gaming before, even more directly. Especially online gaming where people have actually killed themselves and endangered others by refusing to get up from the computer.

And I think many of us have seen table-top gamers just take things too far.

In fact we can visit just about any online forum and find examples without looking. I've seen the author of Little Fears claim his game helps victims of child abuse by playing it out again in a different setting. I've seen others claim you can gain important insights into rape, sexuality (of a type not your own) or racism by playing rpgs. The author of Poison'd spoke about how games can remake our culture and allow it accept... neck raping of corpses I suppose.

Movies are movies, games are games. They certainly reflect their makers, their viewers, and their players. But they don't control us unless we're so weak we allow it.

And many of us it seems are very weak indeed.