is a blog by Brendan
Hey Louis Villains. I’m running an in-store demo of Dogs in the Vineyard this afternoon at the Louisville Game Shop, and if you like games that tell stories you should come.
This is the first time I’ve ever run a game for people I didn’t know. I’m kind of nervous!
I discovered quite by accident on Saturday morning that there exists a DOS emulator. Then I installed Master of Magic and played for thirty hours straight.
I love Master of Magic like I will never love another game. It has cute animal friends and pixelated graphics. It has tremendous strategic depth and the addictive buddha-nature of One More Click. Every time I think up a new idea for a computer game, it is basically me trying to replicate the thrill of a cartoon devil telling me my granary is complete.
Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:
“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”
Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).
That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?
According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.
Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.
Everyone’s a-tizzy about the controller for Nintendo’s next console. By “everyone” I mean “all my friends are nerds.” In case the article I linked is still down, allow me to summarize for you:
The general reaction is positive. It’s new and different! It’s not the ten thousandth attempt to recreate the Dual Shock! You move the whole controller to move things on screen! (Yes, lovely, and check out the front end. That’s an IR panel. Want to know what happens when you point it straight down?)
My reaction is not positive, and this morning I remembered why: I am one of a rarefied set of humans who have actually played a video game with a remote before. That’s right. There was, for some time, in my living room, a Philips CD-i. I tried to swing a katana with it. I directed a claymation man through an Egyptian sewer. And, though I’m not ungrateful to Bruce for letting us play his video games, the fact of the matter is that its user experience
STOP READING HERE, MOM
sucked a dog’s penis.
Metaphorically.
You didn’t stop reading, did you, Mom? Sorry.
Wheeler came to visit us. It was fun! We played a whole lot of video games and some board games and ate high-quality vegetarian foodstuffs. He stayed with Lisa and Scott three nights and me and Maria for two, and did not hold me responsible for making him trudge all over Bardstown Road in the heat. Wheeler is, to quote Sumana, a good houseguest and a friend.
Lisa, Wheeler and I constitute three fifths of our weekly instant-messenger-based Nobilis game. Normally we play from our disparate locations in Louisville, Louisville, New Mexico, Georgia and Connecticut; this time the aforementioned three of us were all in my apartment at different computers, which was a neat if odd kind of synthesis. It’s easier to Laugh Out Loud at a joke when there are other people doing the same within earshot.
The problem with chess as the universal metaphor for conflict–you know, like in every movie ever–is that there’s no nonviolent way to play.
My cousin Bruce is critically ill in a hospital in Indianapolis. He’s had a transplanted kidney for the last seven years, and things have often been a little rough with it, but this time a viral infection in his pancreas seems to have caused it to fail entirely. The last I heard, things were improving slightly for him–they reduced some of the swelling and fluid buildup, but he’s still on oxygen and morphine. I hope things continue to improve.
Bruce lived with my family for a while, when I was in middle school and he was taking classes at EKU. He brought with him a huge and nearly comprehensive collection of first edition AD&D resource books, miniatures and modules, not to mention games like Paranoia and Gamma World. When he moved out, he left them to me. It was a huge and valuable gift, magnified by who I was (and am). I still have every piece of it.
He went to dialysis at the time, of course, and had for years, and would until 1998. I wonder what it was like when he went in for the last time. He showed me the scar tissue that had built up on his arm from the treatments, once, and the image has never left me.
All RPGs currently implemented on computers (including consoles) take the form of applications: behaviors written with an end in mind. But pen-and-paper RPGs aren’t applications. They’re operating systems.
Discuss! Or don’t.