SF and Gaming Blog

Steve Jones‘s commented on my previous posting, comparing Ken Hite‘s subjective film review with the factually inaccurate ‘OK at normal viewing distances’ nonsense you get in product reviews in model railway magazines.

He got me thinking, and my mind started making connections between apparently unconnected things, especially the comparisons between my two hobbies, RPGs and model railways. Is the misshapen Farish class 56 equivalent to the broken dice mechanic of Deadlands. Do E Gary Gygax and Cyril Freezer occupy equivalent positions in the two respective hobbies, very influential in the founding years, but now rather stuck in the past? How much does the clunky class-and-level mechanics of D&D parallel the steamroller wheels and tension lock couplings of ready-to-run OO gauge?

Or am I talking complete rubbish?

You review Star Wars Episode III, and come up with lines like this

But Lucas doesn’t care about his script, under which gelid wodge of pork fat he immures the cast, especially Natalie Portman. They suffer like the damned frozen beneath Cocytus, mouthing clunking, mud-brick dialogue — “wooden” dialogue is several TLs above this stuff

I actually went to my local multiplex on the opening night to see a different film (Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) which I really ought to have reviewed by now. I wondered why there were people dressed as Jar-Jar Binks wandering around.

A thread on DreamLyrics has got people waxing nostalgically about legendary online games of the past, both in Dreamlyrics itself, and in it’s predecessor, the CompuServe RPGAMES Forum.

My most memorable game has to be the very first online game I ever played in, HVG: Maughn Matsuoka’s Hawaiian Vacation.

The system was GURPS Cyberpunk, and Maughn put together a very detailed near-future dystopian setting, with pages and pages of background material. There was a plethora of megacorps, all detailed, and massive changes in geopolitics. The EU had fused into a single state while the US had fragmented into several smaller nations. Ebola rampaged unchecked across Africa turning the continent into Hell-on-Earth.

The pace was fast and furious, with a whole sequence of set-piece battles; the roadside rest stop attack and the ninja attack in the Frontier Hotel were particularly memorable. The latter was a real ‘so this is it we’re all going to die’ moment, much scarier than many supposedly horror games.

Despite all the fights, my character, the techie Neil Jones, wasn’t really a combat character; he spent one entire fight cowering in a ditch while bullets flew overhead. He considered mere survival to count as victory.

The climactic finale had us foiling a Russian plot to set of a load of nukes along the San Andreas fault, calculated to set off a massive tsunami which would have taken out the whole of the Pacific Rim. Nicki Jett’s scary cybered-up amazon Kiko took out a whole squad of Israeli special forces who were supposed to have been our allies! Fortunately she took out most of the Russians as well.

It’s notable as one of the few online games that actually ended, rather than suffer the usual online game fate of fizzling out.

After far too long an absence, Fudge Factor is back! The format is changing slightly; rather than monthly issues, they’re aiming for one article each week. Starting things off is a modern-day adventure, Ghost Hunters of New England.

Meetup.com have just become a pay site, charging 18 US dollars per month to the organiser of each group.

I formed the Manchester Roleplayers group a few of months ago, which had all of three members, too few to actually meet. (Although there was one aborted attempt) I was also a member of the Marillion and Webloggers groups, which didn’t even have group organizers. I didn’t feel like volunteering while I’d failed to get my own group off the ground.

Even with the half-price discount for existing groups, paying $9 a month for a group that doesn’t actually meet sounds like a stupid waste of money. I have therefore resigned as organiser of the group. I expect 99% of other group organisers will do the same.

While I understand that any website needs a revenue stream to survive, the amount they’re trying to charge is completely ridiculous for what you get in return, and I would be surprised if even a tiny fraction of existing groups ever pay up. I think Meetup.com are now heading for the electronic graveyard.

The Gline is uncomfortable with Mage:The Ascention.

One of the reasons I sort of stopped playing White Wolf’s Mage is because a lot of what was being bandied about in the context of the game sounded uncomfortably close to a lot of the trash I’ve been forced to listen to from people who work very hard to undermine rational thought and a reality-based worldview.

Disclaimer: I know “it’s just a game.” I have no trouble telling the difference between reality and fiction. The reason for my discomfiture has nothing to do with that. It’s akin to — if this makes any sense — a black man playing a member of the KKK in an RPG. And not just playing him, but PLAYING him — having the character engage in lynchings, manhunts, spewing racist epithets, etc. I can’t think of a single person of sober mind who wouldn’t find that dismaying after a while, especially when you yourself embody a big part of the target of such hatred.

I don’t think the Mage situation is anywhere nearly as bad, but that’s what it feels like. If I’m RPing for fun, the last thing I want to do is subject myself to something that makes me squirm for very deep-rooted reasons.

I recognise there are many religious gamers who get squicked out by games that fold, spindle and mutilate the founding myths of major world religions. I’m uncomfortable with the one or two games that protray Christianity in a very negative light, and I know people who won’t play any games that include real-world religions at all. But it surprises me to see an athiest rationalist get the same feelings.

Saying that I can see where the The Gline is coming from. He goes on to mention how he keeps running into the sort of irrationalist claptrap pilloried in Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, and a lot of that does sound suspiciously like the in-game worldview of Mage:The Ascention. Sometimes I wonder if the libertoids who are in denial about environmental phenomena such as global warming have played too much Mage.

I haven’t actually read or played the original WW version of Mage; I have the less pretentiously-written GURPS version, and have played the Renaissance-era ‘prequel’ Sorceror’s Crusade a couple of times. So I don’t know how much the worldview inside the game reflects the real-life beliefs of the designers.