On Walkabout...

I think I need to work out what to put in this blog a bit more carefully. I find that the topics I have covered recently tend to just reflect information I have given elsewhere more succinctly (or more thoroughly, whichever is appropriate).

The good thing about a blog should be the "random noodley" aspect and I think I've been altogether too organised about this. Also I have written enthusiastically and communicating ireful passion on things that, in reality were no more than minor irritations. (See D&D, Cards vs. Dice etc.)

I think when I can decide what needs to go here it will be a lot gentler than it has been.

I am also not committing to being "back" from walkabout in any significant way. Let's just see how many posts are forthcoming before we commit to that.

To be honest, I feel in the world of blogs I am a constant participant who is mostly ignored anyway. So I feel it makes very little difference whether I blog or not.

I only blog when it makes a difference to me. I would like my blog to be interactive and a forum for lively debate. Maybe I have been too definite in my opinions for that. Wishy washiness is something that blogs seem to be built for so commenters can be seen to be swaying the blogger one way or another.

Anyway, that's all there is for now.

Britain Thinks: Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rules?

Have just decided to show some practical support for new internet site Britain Thinks which looks like it could be jolly good fun. At the moment the interface is a bit sparse, I imagine it's intended to be a sort of social networking site with an agenda of debate. Well, we have loads of social networking opportunities, but debates not so much. So they've opened the site with a number of debating tools.

Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.

So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.

Initial thoughts?

Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.

I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:

• I am a user, but I have no acces to edit my account profile! Oh noes!
• There are other users but they have no visible public profiles.
• The debate pages are designed cleanly from a graphic design POV but this masks an underlying incoherence in conceptual structure. Is this op ed Twitter where statements of length are to be frowned upon?
• I think I would like to be able to aggregate debates and even run them from within the personal profile I don't yet have. This would help enormously with, my final point...
• The content is grouped by topic and videos are star-rated but the arguments are not streamed like an essay, you just get assaulted by a little bit about this and then a little bit about that. The topics are huge and being banged around in an opinion pinball machine is weird. If topics had administrators who applied some sort of taxonomy to the issues this would help a bunch. For example in a debate about education comments could be labelled "teachers", "exams", "government", "parents", "students", "curriculum" so that you could watch streams of comments about one sub-topic.

Having said all that I think the idea of using the web as a speaker's corner is a great idea. Usually the forum for issues are controlled by government or some half-baked subset of functionality offered by a social networking site built, primarily, for other purposes.

I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.

I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.

If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...

Yikes!

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Gamer Fatigue?

I find myself wondering about the phenomenon known as "Gamer Fatigue". This is where some person in your gaming community announces that they are "taking a break from RP" and withdraws, mysteriously, into seclusion. To me this seems a bit like "taking a break from Movies" or "taking a break from TV". Gaming, to me, is a form of entertainment, not a chore.

I can understand when people say they're going to "take a break from the gym to concentrate on swimming". I guess I just never really regarded gaming as such an intensive pastime. This points the way to a further set of concepts within gaming I hadn't really thought about before. When I find a television drama, a novel or a computer game compelling it's often on the point of it giving me new ideas or insight into the construction of stories for others. Weirdly this means I often don't like playing in games as I can't really just rip off another Host. Gaming is virgin territory for many gimmicks.

This leads to two further notes. One, that I know other people take their gaming very seriously and look upon the opportunity to play a role as an actual creative enterprise. Some people, myself included, look on their character as a way to interact with the story environment, they are contributing a performance within the rules in order to keep the game going. The other note is that role playing games haven't yet progressed to the point where there is a startling bloom of innovation.

To deal with these points in reverse order. It seems that all the RP that has gone on since D&D has been much after the fashion of people taking pictures of moving objects with early movie cameras. Unlike the former activity, however, because it is not enormously expensive and doesn't have much in the way of toys people have largely ignored this innovation in entertainment (did I mention it also has few military applications). RP's not good for much except as a really cool form of entertainment. The problem is that innovation in the field has been restricted to new methods for number-juggling.

I love RP so much that when my partner didn't want to play I changed the hobby to make it suit her more, now I love it even more myself.

But this is weighty stuff. It also leads back to the former point.

I know a lot of people get "RP Burnout" at present. This is like the reverse of "cinema frustration" in which there are too few movies you want to see out when you fancy a visit to the pictures. RP Burnout is where you've role played so much you just can't take it any more. I think I experienced something similar with console games a while back. I'd just played so many of the damnable things I couldn't play any more or it felt like my brain would fall out. Also console games achieve nothing for the player whereas the benefits of socialisation and group interaction at least give RP a social dimension.

I imagine if you did anything enough then it would lead to a similar situation, if they did release enough movies that you could go all day every day for a month you would probably get sick of going to the movies (in fact at film festivals I believe this is what happens to some). However we roleplay once a week and occasional weekends. At the moment we're doing a little more because we're playtesting new adventures. I'd actually like to adopt a slightly less intensive posture after this testing phase.

But what I'm left with after considering these points is even more clarification of what players want out of the RP experience. I know that Mrs Monkey has been finding some of the experiences very hard of late. I think at the point where you feel guilty because you should have done more is precisely the time that you should start to do more.

I think what I need to get across to people that the RP is an entertainment. Levercastle tends to be treated as such. I think what also needs to happen is not only that the players say what they expect out of the experience but the Host needs to say what he can see happening bearing in mind the characters as presented. If people know what's coming up in a vague sense of the word then they can prepare accordingly.

I think that's actually mentioned in the Core Book but the fine tuning of the concept still seems to be a little off. Ho hum. Back to tinkering.

Tuesday Thoughts

Wow, I thought I'd totally updated at the weekend. How wrong a man can be.

Interesting reader mail in from one of the Doodler's cohorts below, pointing out my shortcomings in estimating the impact of bow-based ranged combat. Archers are plenty quick on the draw if competent, apparently.

Been having a quiet couple of weeks. The high point of the last week was playing Mrs Monkey's Western scenario set in Australia. This was pretty awesome, plenty of Western atmosphere and plenty of opportunities to think over the mechanics of a ranged combat system. This has made me think that ranged combat is a matter of priorities, the actual act of firing a missile would appear to be trivial to anyone given sufficient practice (practice being key because it's even hard to fire a gun if you don't fire guns). So the question is, which part of being involved in ranged combat is non-trivial?

The only answer I can come up with is deciding best how your next "burst" of fire is to be employed. Are you going for the kill? Covering someone else's action? Trying to raise a bit of hell? Defending yourself?

Melee combat seems to be centred on a personal experience, ranged combat is more tactical and uses the environment to support its tactics. The trick to the design of these games seems to be in producing atmosphere and giving people a "feel" for the action hook. This is, of course, precisely what I've been aiming for all along, but sometimes the feeling is somewhat elusive.

Received some feedback concerned that if the players are heroes and heroes find it difficult to die where's the edge of your seat excitement? Where's the risk? In campaign play I have developed a technique of giving players cool toys, if they are not careful toys are removed, thus the hero lives, but the hero's advantage is transient. This seems to provide enough ups and downs.

In a one off the chance of a character dying should be communicated at the outset. If chances are high it would always be best to have something for dead characters to do in the remainder of the game.

Of course I have been sat in on story-based games where people liked to be involved at some level but because of the entertainment value of the actual story they didn't mind just sitting back and watching the action unfold. This is the "front seat/back seat" phenomenon that I've noted in the past where players like to vary their involvement depending upon their mood. If you have such a person in your one-off group you could give them some cannon-fodder, let them partake until bored and then kill them off allowing them to leave the circle or just watch the rest of the game.

Anyway, I'm wandering into a territory of talking about revolutionary ideas and I haven't the time or space to go into all that right now. I'll leave the discussion in "food for thought" mode and wander off. Promise I'll update more promptly next time.