Sexuality (part 1)
A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about sexuality and sexual and/or gender bias.
Art
Cheesecake art in fantasy is a real issue. I thought it was mostly gone but there's heaps of the damn stuff out there. You know - the male characters are ripped with muscles, the female characters are showing cleavage. It's because the target audience for the games are adolescent males.
e.g.
That cover made quite an impression on my adolescent psyche.
Evolution
Men evolved to hunt and kill things. Women evolved to raise the children. For whatever reasons in the past, its bot a recent thing. And arguably its unnatural - look at lion prides, the women do all the hard work and the men lie around and yawn impressively.
I don't want this to get into an argument about capability: males and females should not be in competition in certain areas. Strength for example, some women will be stronger than some men but men can achieve a higher extreme of strength than women. On the flip side, men cannot give birth or sustain another life from their bodily secretions.
Content
RPG games tend to have a lot of combat. They tend not to have a lot of romance. The thread discussed homosexual relationships but it became apparent that for a lot of people, role-playing games are not where sexual elements are discussed. It's just not a part of many games.
Her Indoors told me she likes the 'girly' novels she likes because they cover themes which she says fulfill a level of escapism and cover life events that she will never again experience. Falling in love for the first time, having an affair, having to choose between two suitors. These are the stories she enjoys. They're certainly more believable or perhaps 'down to earth' than the stories I enjoy (interstellar wars fought by galaxy spanning empires? secret agents working to stop the encroach of extra-dimensional aliens?). Are there many games which cover this area? Only one that I can think of. A game of "Romantic Fantasy". It still involves a lot of swords and struggles so I don't know how it fits in with the whole 'romance' thing.
Is this the central reason why the hobby is dominated by young males? Because we like the fights, the power and the glory? It becomes our escapism - so should we not cater for their escapism?
Wouldn't there be room for a game where we take our relationship maps and our GM-less story-driven games with conflict escalation and use them to model something other than fights in the playground?
The model of relationships. The first kiss. The first time you realised you liked someone. The first time you were jealous for the affections of another. The first time your heart was broken.
Fights in the Playground. Maybe that's exactly what we should be modeling?
The 23rd Letter
Balbinus on RPG.net responds to someone asking for sourcebooks about running a campaign about the whole concept of PSI powers:
"IMO the best is a game called 23rd Letter, it's basically Firestarter (the Stephen King book/movie) the rpg. Probably OOP but available I would have thought on ebay."
Thanks, Balbinus!
It's not out of print! You can buy The 23rd Letter from Key20!
http://key20.com/product.php?productid=403
Priest Chaser
...that the citizens of Perugia compelled the surrender of the citadel of Gerard du Puy, the cardinal-nephew of Pope Gregory XI, during the War of the Eight Saints with a trebuchet nicknamed the cacciaprete ("priest chaser")?
I think that the modern day Catholic Church has dire need of this.
What’s that in the background?
Today I had lunch with Mike and Jim in Kainan Cafe.
We then went round to Forbidden Planet where I refrained from buying a lot of stuff.
This is self-control, I tellya.
Return of the Great Old Ones.
Found this gem when I added Pooka's blog to my blogroll.
"In 1901, New Year's Eve, the Stars Were Right. The Great Old Ones Returned, bringing with them all manner of being from their starry prisons. Fortunately for humanity, while the Old Ones were certainly horrible to look upon, they were not nearly as great as they would have had us believe. Intergalactic layabouts, Cosmic conmen, and Trans-temporal thieves, the Great Old Ones may be functionally immortal, but they also happen to have little work ethic."
It's a setting into from Spirit of the Century. Read more here.
Made me laugh. In a crowded office. Terribly embarrassing.
Raising the bar
I'm arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it'd be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them's the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot and only a small fraction of it makes it to the blog here.
I have noticed, however, that my layout and design skills need some exercise and possibly even some help. I can appreciate good design, I just have issues doing it myself. Part of this is inspiration and part of it is time (which I have less and less of) and skill (my photoshop skills are not legendary).
Looking at the character sheets I left for download earlier this week, they belie their age. They were done in 2000 or so and were definitely more 'tell' than 'show'. That's the first thing. They look like Civil Service Sickness Benefit forms. I was sent a character sheet recently that was 7 pages long and full colour. I've seen the pre-gen character sheets for Everway. I think I need to raise the bar considerably.
I also need an artist in general as PJ is now going to be too busy and I don't know anyone else who knows how to hold a pen.
Spiralling Down
I don't blame anyone really. Sometimes I get angry or depressed and curse my friends, my family, the company, the system, the church and anyone else I can name. But it's a short madness and like all things, it will pass.
I haven't slept very well in the last few days. Bouts of lethargy and a resolute stubbornness seem to possess me on these cold mornings. The coffee is too bitter and the crispy flakes of golden corn taste like ashes and feel like razorblades. It has been the same with every meal in the last week. The meat is dry and powdery, the vegetables hollow and watery. I leave most of my food untouched, I clean the plates and I plan my next repast.
I read my mail in the morning but today I let it wait until after lunch. Such is my decadence and freedom. There were some offers of cut-price firmware, live-feed porn and a flyer advertising pressurised space on a new station about five million miles from me. We wouldn't be alone in the dark any more.
Of course, none of it does me any fucking good.
This station won't go online for about two years and I'll be long gone. I logged onto ChatNet and scrolled through the thousands of messages. One read, "Space Age Boy seeks Earthy Girl for Zero-G Hijinks". That made me smile. Ten million years of evolution and still men were firing out crap chat up lines to lonely women. Was this more or less effective than a wooden club?
There was a long thread about some poor shithead stuck out in the dark, spinning around Jupiter in a damaged pod and a quickly decaying orbit. Some pitied him, some laughed and I really wanted to say something smart, something cutting that would make them blush, make them shut up, make them think. Someone had even managed to get a picture. It was a poor likeness, stupid office party from six years ago. One another thread they were running a numbers game on how long it would take for the pod to burst, how long it would be until Jupiter was seeded with my blood, sweat, piss and tears. I took a few moments and used a few tears. Nothing dramatic.
The problem with this situation is that there'll be nothing left. I hadn't been to the Clinic, hadn't left my legacy in a little cup so there wouldn't be another me. There wouldn't be enough left of the pod to scratch an obituary and so the ChatNet onlookers would be my only witnesses. I tapped out a quick message to anyone who could read. Something simple, something regal. It would take a week to hit the Net but by then I'd be spread into a fine mist by hurricane winds in the upper atmosphere of a star that nearly was.
I can't be saved.
Earth and Mars are months away. The closest transport could get here in time but then wouldn't have the fuel or the facilities to effect a rescue. And if they tried, they'd join me in this slow doom. At least they are close enough to actually talk to me. I hate the heavily punctuated conversations with my family on Earth. My family haven't called in two days. I was the black sheep of the family when I took the job and staying i touch seemed nothing more than a formality. The Company was good enough to provide me with a Counselor. She's in her mid-forties and very good at her job, telling me to express myself, that it's alright to cry and that it's wrong to bottle up my anguish. After the third session even she stopped calling.
There's a girl on that transport. She's lovely. I know she's just trying to comfort me but we have long talks in the evenings, we play chess and I dream of her when fatigue finally overtakes me, Her signal is getting weaker as Jupiter creates too much radio noise. I'll see her tonight, tell her I love her and say goodbye. I've never said that to anyone before. Never wanted to. Never needed to. But if I don't say it tonight then I never ever will.
Through the three-inch reinforced plastic windows I can see Jupiter with it's great glaring red eye. I've never seen it so large, stretching to create an everlasting dusky plain beneath me. I'm not within the orbit of Callisto on the way down. Spiralling down.
There is a hole in my memory
I don't remember a game I allegedly ran over a decade ago. Nothing at all memorable.
I think it was a superhero game/
That worries me.
“Do people still go to cons?”
This year, Q-CON celebrates it's 15th year.
It was sixteen years ago that I finished the 'market research' of conventions in Ireland (via Gaelcon and Warpcon - and getting illicit copies of their after-con reports from by Bothan spies). This was while I was the President of the RPG society, Dragonslayers.
It was a year later that I proposed the convention to the then-committee and we modify the constitution to create the "Convention Director" post and run a convention Q-CON 1 on a wing and a prayer. I organised the Megagame and ran games in 5 game slots that weekend. I got real tired.
For Q-CON 2 and 3, I took the mantle of Convention Director and in the face of promisers (who never deliver) and naysayers (who you should ignore) and no-confidence supporters (who stab you in the back) it was moderately successful. I burned through any good will I had built up and alienated people who didn't even know me.
So why would I consider running a convention again?
Because someone asked me to?
Yeah.
WotW: Earth – The Second Launch
"Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on Earth as little grey, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet's atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features."
Chapter One "The Eve of the War" - The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells
Roughly two years after the arrival of Martians on Earth, a second series of ten "shots" are fired from the surface of the red planet. Is this another invasion? Was the first invasion actually that, or was it just a scouting mission? Now that we have had two years in which to come to terms with such technology has been left behind, will that make it any easier for us to communicate with inter-planetary cousins?
The Second Launch is a set of ideas, guidelines and scenarios for GMs to allow them to generate that same sense of wonder, awe and terror that the original landings created. Here are some questions that will be answered:
- Where do the capsules land? Was England an accidental or deliberate target? If they landed somewhere remote, would they have had more time to adapt and be ready?
- What weaponry will they bring to bear?
- Will they have some kind of protection against our microbiology?
- Will they be able to multiply when they get here?
- Do they have Earth-bound help?
- Can we talk to them?
- Can we kill them?
Gates of Hell
A couple of pics of a really accessible volcano.
Easily re-used for something gaming...
“I don’t have any choice, somebody has to save the world”
I've been reading a lot of old comics this week.
- Warren Ellis Planetary
- The Eclipse Miracleman stories.
- I'm trying to track down my Authority trade paperbacks as well.
There's been a recent thread on RPG.net about creating a setting where Superheroes conquered the world.
This, along with other memes, was part of what I was working on with the Watchtower game.
When I first started writing my own superhero settings for the Marvel Super Heroes game, I started with Zenith. This was the name of a team of superheroes based in the UK (and years before Zenith the superhero started in 2000AD). The original lineup was Metalon (strongman), a Minddancer (telepath) and Shatter (telekinetic). As time went on, the lineup changed. Metalon and Shatter stayed, but they added Aura (telepath), Scorch (pyrokinetic), Sentinel (energy manipulator) and Synapse (speedster). It was around this time that I started writing my own fiction around these characters which turned into my first and only attempt at a novel. As I was about fourteen, it needed some work, needless to say.
Zenith stayed with me for around 3 years until they lost their government funding. Synapse died, Metalon and Sentinel left and a new group called Apocalypse Inc. started, funded by the rich but probably insane Hemlock (snaffled from Jack of Hearts, Marvel Premiere #44). Additions to the team were Stasis (Healer) and Nucleon (radiation controller). There were also villains from the time: Tantrum and Hysteria, Skybreaker, The Red Menace, Lillith. This was all using the Marvel System.
I started writing my combined UK background for superheroes, including the WW1 supersoldier, Yeoman, his modern day clone, Lionheart, Lancaster, Vitesse, Prodigy, La Feu, Striker, Plasma, Blaze "Death!", Frost, Nano, DeathMaster, Deacon, Schreck.
Not long after I started playing in Jeremy's game and this introduced the Zombie Squad to my cosmology. The lineup, as I recall, was Sergeant Strike (scrapper with a force field), Demon Motorbike guy (it had a graser too), UnderGraduate Von Doom (you know, ruler of small country, but before he got his doctorate), Stick (a martial artist) and Baron Samedi (voodoo loa). They fought giant robots, travelled to Ravenloft (where we recruited Strahd) and other places and annoyed an ancient evil a million years ago in a place a million light years away which immediately started pursuing them at light speed. And should have arrived...just...about...then. I don't remember fighting it. I think we may have changed game. Or left the group. I don't remember. We used Jeremy's homebrew system for this game.
The next superhero game involved the Protectors. These individuals: Glitter, Warhead, Download, Quill, Inferno - faced off a weather manipulator in Colorado and that was the only game we played. We used the ill-fated Heroes and Heroines for this.
After that, we had quite a few one-offs until I got a few friends together, wrote a backstory for the US involvement in the world and started my first Watchtower game. This was really the first superhero game that I placed in the USA. The Watchtower was an organisation that spanned the US with approximately 40 offices across the nation. They had quasi-legal status with the US government though few actual legal powers but a good relationship with the Federal government made crime-fighting a lot easier. The San Francisco team had recently been killed by a bloodthirsty voillain known as Bloodrage and they were recruiting new members. They were Jade Dragon (Alan), Atomic III (Gavin), Bullet (Iain), Ebony (John) and Ivory (Aidan). Gavin's second character, Wraith, debuted when he let Atomic III go mad. Aidan's second character, Quickening, replaced Ivory pretty soon as well. Most notably they eliminated (yes, that is a euphemism for killed) Bloodrage and defeated ARES. the US Supersoldier. They also witnessed first hand the issues with FORTRESS and why time-travel is bad.
This involved creating a whole background for the US as well. This was "The American Dream" and had luminaries such as Atomic I, Lifeline, Moon Boy and others I don't remember. World War 2 superheroes and their unfinished legacies.
A few years later, we continued with the New York Watchtower. Again it started with a recruitment drive where Balance (Paul), Yellowfist (Gavin), Indigo (Aidan) and Skyhook (Rob) joined up with other existing members (Red Shift, Psiren, Jack White) to bolster out the membership. There was a conspiracy afoot to extend the reach of the Watchtower globally though 'conspiracy' often has negative connotations. This was the beginnings of an "Authority" level campaign which is why I permitted the monstrously powerful characters that the players had. e.g.
- Yellowfist, a modern-day Native American shaman gained his powers by channeling spirits. In theory he could do anything but he only had Falcon and Bear at the start.
- Skyhook could move huge amounts of stuff around with the power of his mind. This includes a TK gun platform as well as being able to lift huge amounts.
- Balance has absolute control over matter - being able to shape almost any amount at will and being able to transmute other amounts.
- Indigo, a high tech hero, had teleportation abilities which could place objects on the outskirts of the solar system.
The "plan" was that they would have the opportunity to step into these roles. Yellowfist as the infantry, with Skyhook as artillery, Balance as the engineers and Indigo as recon and supply. Sadly they only got round to cleaning up the oceans before, due to real life, we had to split the group.
I'd still like to continue that game, in theory, with the same or different characters.
This finishes some of the cosmology for my superhero games.
New Downloads
Some people were looking for them so I've put some downloads on the books page:
Wildtalents fanzine 1 60K PDF
Wildtalents 3 fanzine 1.5MB PDF
Wildtalents 5 fanzine 373K PDF
23rd letter character sheet 22K PDF
zombi character sheet 86K PDF
If there's anything else in particular that people are looking for, please mention it and I'll see what I can dig up. Please note that this wildtalents fanzine was something I was doing nearly a decade before Wild Talents (the superhero RPG) was released.
Man vs…
The topic of conversation this morning in the car was the substance of plots. Traditionally, we have plots which are Man versus Man (and yes, I intend to keep the male pronoun because anyone who would be sensitive to it likely has stopped reading a long time ago).
Man versus Man
This describes the quintessential struggle, the stuff of legend. Good versus evil, human versus alien, hero versus monster, rebel versus tyrant, civilised man versus the savage; the most accurate description might be the struggle between two directed intelligences. These games are easy to play because the adversary is present and real. They have motivations and malevolence. They are Hans Gruber to your John McLain, Lector to your Starling, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man to your Venkman.
We fight them because they represent the things that are wrong in this world, and they are flashy, obvious wrongs - whether they're stealing millions of dollars with a funny accent, killing Gary Oldman or trashing Manhattan (although we're unsure that killing Gary Oldman is a crime). We feel a sense of satisfaction seeing them put down (even if we know they may return).
Man versus Nature
Some of the best adventure stories are those told from the point of view of a single protagonist where his conflict lies not with the righting of wrongs or the marching of armies, but in the struggle against nature itself. Whether you're weathering a Perfect Storm, trying to survive the Day After Tomorrow or even just making your way through a post-Zombie epidemic Dawn of the Dead, the environment you are in is challenging enough to make a compelling story.
One of the memes of Zombi, was that the walking dead were not your enemy, other people were your enemy. This was borne from every movie:- you can hide away in your fortress and the mindless zombie hordes can beat upon your door but it requires intelligence to breach your defenses. This isn't to say that nature cannot be a harsh enemy. It is mindless but merciless. It can be witnessed when you travel from place to place, be it the cold of the snow-bound mountains, the drought of the desert or the cold emptiness of the vacuum.
Man versus Self
If religion is to be believed, we struggle with this every day. When we consider physical attraction, we encounter the most base 'animal' parts of ourselves. The acknowledgment that another human is attractive goes back to our pre-sentient days and when we continue on our way, we have successfully mastered the animal. This extends obviously to the personal wars against addiction, fetish, desire, greed, sloth and rage. We control ourselves and, as a result, these ideas are possible to play out in a game.
These were most recently examined in the World of Darkness games by White Wolf: I interpreted them as Lust (Vampire), Rage (Werewolf), Pride (Mage), Sloth (Changeling), Envy (Wraith). Though these games it was possible to spend a lot of time engaging in 'versus self' gaming as the player articulated the internal struggles of their personal demons. They are the Louis in LeStat, Hulk's Banner, Star Wars' Han Solo.
The State of the RPG Industry
An article on MSNBC writes about the woes in the RPG market:
"Wizards does not reveal sales figures, but Pramas estimates the overall market for traditional role-playing games at $30 million annually."
When I first read this, my immediate thought was 'piffle!' and that it was a vast underestimate of the market.
Okay. Let's take this apart.
- Wizards doesn't release sales figures but we have to assume that Wizards is being honest when it says it's got 300 people on staff. 300 people multiplied by a minimum wage salary of $20 000 is 6 million dollars. But if we assume that people are earning more than that but only a third of them are working on traditional role-playing games (as opposed to board games and card games) and we add in the cost of printing and shipping books, we kinda should keep that figure constant. That's a huge section of the market gobbled up by Wizards if Chris Pramas is right.
- Chris Pramas works for a competitor to the traditional role-playing games department at Wizards. Green Ronin has a photo of 9 chunky people (one of which is a woman, the rest seem to be very hairy) and I think we must assume that they're earning $60K each? You'd hope. That, plus the costs of printing etc, must drive the revenue of this company to a million dollars or so?
- A
fewlot of years ago, James Wallis told me over a very nice vegan meal in Cork that the industry had a problem. The market was not very large and you had several large-ish companies fighting for scraps and really, no-one was making any money. Which is why, I think, he decided to go elsewhere. What does this mean - people with talent shouldn't waste their time trying to write RPGs if they can do anything else well. - If the $30 million dollar estimate is right, you can see why Wizards made the land grab a few years ago with d20 and OGL. It was an overt, aggressive move on their part and it created a monster and, due to the economies of small grabby companies and the lowered bar to entry, it really damaged the industry as the market was flooded with Wizard's d20-branded crap. Small companies, including Green Ronin, saw it as an opportunity to land grab as well. Boom, thousands of shit products hit the market and the consumers did what they do best. They bought them, they read them and they felt burned.
- This all serves really to further label the market as the 'D&D market' which is a misnomer. I definitely see a lull in the market. Our local club seems to have all the same people, they're just older and fatter. I don't have any visibility of QUB Dragonslayers any more and don't know what they're doing from day to day. Does Pramas have any real knowledge of the PDF games market. I've spent more on RPGs in the last year (PDF and dead tree) than I had in the five years previous.
- As a comparison, World of Warcraft is estimated to pull in $1 billion a year by itself. Yes, it's the largest of the MMOs but it's not the only MMO out there.
So what's with the future of gaming then? MMOs are going to be more accessible even though they are more expensive because they offer some social elements with the instant gratification of 'pretty things to look at'. I admit I've been tempted to try WoW and City of Heroes but I always stop myself. I don't want to sit, sequestered in a room and try and schedule hours of gameplay with my significant other. I like to get out with the guys, sit in a room with other people and have it as my night out. The social side of things is much more important than the quick hit of a game.
From a business point of view, the gaming market is always going to be hard to estimate. There's no easy way to estimate the number of gamers out there as some of them never interact with anyone outside their own gaming group. And the people who run homebrew games? From an industry economy point of view, they may as well not exist.
Comparisons with other hobbies must be made. We're not really in a sporting hobby. There's a thriving market for people who play football, who go scuba diving, who surf or sail, climb or whack balls with sticks. We're the trainspotters, chess players and stamp collectors. We have to establish and embrace that we're not cool, we're not the masters of the world and it doesn't really matter. We're not affected by the doom and gloom headlines of the mainstream press. Even card games have some respectability, wargames even more so. It doesn't matter what you look like - from lardass nerd to malnourished goth - you play role-playing games, you're a dork.
And would it matter if the RPG companies folded?
I think not.
Site refresh
Bear with us while we engage in some site jiggery-pokery. Those of you who subscribe to the feed shouldn't notice any difference. Also it's a bit harder to tell who wrote what post at the moment, but that's OK by me - it makes it look like I've written more!
Albion
Okay, maybe this proves I'm not a comic geek but I'm seriously underwhelmed.
It's like the British version of Planetary. And not very good.
OREs Magica
I spent some time at work today thinking about things that could be done with the ORE system. I admit that I've not yet had the chance to really test it in anger
Part of this is to kick a bit of life into the forums at Project Nemesis as well as the ones at Arc-Dream especially seeing as July brings us Wild Talents second edition.
OREs Magica is a terrible pun on Ars Magica, one of the best RPGs of all time. In Ars Magica, the players can be Grogs (the peasants and footsoldiers), Companions (nobles, 'adventurers' and 'special' characters') and Mages. The background is 'Mythic Europe' which, to be honest, can be as 'fantastic' or as 'mundane' as you like. I quite like the "turnips and boils" of low fantasy contrasted with the Magic of Ars Magica.
OREs Magica takes the background of Ars Magica and plonks it onto a ORE-based system. I don't have Reign yet but I'm guessing that the Reign system works much the same (though they have the concept of Expert Dice which are a little like Hard Dice.)
Anyway - the thought I had was that you could easily replicate the Techniques and Forms of Ars Magica onto the ORE system.
The Techniques (or Verbs) of Magic are:
- Creo,
- Rego,
- Perdo,
- Intellego,
- Muto
The Forms are:
- Animal,
- Auram,
- Aquam,
- Corpus,
- Herbam,
- Ignem,
- Imagonem,
- Mentem,
- Terram,
- Vim.
e.g. Curdus the Fire Mage has 3d in Creo and 2d in Ignem. To create Fire, she rolls 5D. One match is needed minimum and the height of the roll dictates the intensity of the flame. The Width of the roll can indicate speed or skill. She also has 1d in Perdo but no dice in Aquam, therefore she cannot "destroy water" without additional, outside assistance. The most common assistance is Vis.
Vis is the purified essence of magic as extracted from magical things. To convert, for instance, a Magical Bull's Heart into Vis requires two rolls; the first being Muto Animal and the second being Creo Vim. A failure in the first roll may be attempted again. Failure in the second roll means the Vis disappears in a dramatically appropriate way. Success in both rolls means a number of points equal to the width of the Creo Vis roll are extracted from the heart.
But why do we need Vis? Every Mage wants more Vis. Why? Because Vis has some very special properties. Each point of Vis that is expended in a Magic roll can have one of the following effects:
- Each point adds a single dice to the Magic Roll adding to Techniques and Forms. This means that you can perform pretty much ANY magic if you have Vis to help.
- Each point adds a year and a day of permanence (in the Ars Magica book, adding Vis makes something permanent but I never liked that.) After the year and a day, the magic wears off. This has some serious repercussions for Longevity Potions and magical constructs. It won't affect a house built with magic if the structure itself is sound.
The maximum amount of Vis that may be used in any activity is equal to your Vim score.
To do any more on this I guess I'll have to buy Reign 
Okay, I'm convinced!
WotW: Earth – The Computational Analyser
"In the Spring of that year I had the good fortune to visit my friend, Mr Askell, at the Royal Society where they were pursuing development of a computational device using the research of intellectual giants who had gone before. Bright young scientists to'ed and fro'd with metal rods and some articles salvaged from the Martian machines. This device, Askell explained, could perform complex mathematics faster than the most talented idiot savant and I watched in awe as nothing particularly exciting seemed to be happening. "This," Askell explained, "is the future".
In the background I could swear I heard the tuts of the luddites of the Royal Society making their opinions known."
The first Computational Analyser was built in Manchester University in 1900. It drew scientists from afar to view the processes which ran it - whole orders of magnitude faster than Babbage's engine due to the salvaged Martian technology which powered it. What a Babbage Engine could perform in 3 minutes could be calculated in 3 seconds on the Analyser.
The building of the device was originally opposed by both the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. However it was funded entirely by the Royal Navy and by 1903, there were six analysers in Britain and a further two had been shipped to the Americas each with a full maintenance crew of twenty.
Supporting Links:
Babbage's Analytical Engine
Thomson's Differential Analyser
Cynical-C
Mario Kart for the Wii
Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I've had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports.
The game isn't as 'fast' or 'frenetic' as playing the game in the Arcades (which was also a lot blurrier and more confusing) but it's hard to beat for playability especially when the other racers are friends of yours (or friends of friends).
In addition to the single player 'Win the Cups, unlock the racers' game, you can have up to 4 players on one Wii (as long as you have enough controllers) and you can also play on the WFC network getting up to 8 human racers either from your friends list (requiring the sharing of a Kart friend code) or playing against the multitudes of people out there in the real world.
Races, battles and coin collecting games were all good fun. I'd played half a dozen games at the weekend which meant I wasn't totally unprepared for the game and Paul showed me some tricks (like the jump boosts, firing backwards etc) while we waited for Lee to plug his Wii into his projector at home. Once in, selection of games was very easy and there was little or no latency in the service.
Last night I hooked up with Paul, Lee and Tanya to play Wii Karting. Lee and Tanya were at home in London on Lee's Wii showing that two people can play online from one Wii. Two people or more playing on one 32" TV is not the best experience and can be somewhat confusing so I applaud Lee's idea of hooking up to a projector. It would make a difference. Paul and I were online from home - him in Mallusk, me in Bangor.
The 'signpost' communication method isn't the best however with only a limited number of phrases available so it's not taking advantage of the social vibe that the 'Mii' avatars could provide. Maybe at some point in the future they'll provide voice chat but that's in the future and not right now. I'm told tales that some enterprising folk are using their XBox systems as voice chat relays so they can play Mario Kart and laugh at each other. We were all Mac people so we fired up iChat (voice) and regaled each other with insults and guffaws as we dumped turtle shells, bombs and banana skins on the other racers. I reckon Skype voice would work just as well.
As for racing itself - it seems slow when watching someone playing but it gets very quick when in the race and you know you're half a lap behind and every corner counts. The game balance is helped by the use of "weapons" like the banana skins I mentioned and homing turtle shells and other methods of wiping out other people. Every time you get hit, or stunned, or squashed or shrunken it slows you down and the sound effects are excellent.
The tracks also, range from odd to excellent and in fact none of them are bad in any way. There's a lot of colour and some people may feel seasick with it (luckily I don't suffer from that), there's enough variety and obstacles to keep it from being a dry race and it seems to push the Wii in terms of what it is capable of.
Is it worth getting the wheel? I don't know. I've played it with the wheel and with a third party half wheel and I think that it might be worthwhile not getting the wheel unless you want the whole experience.
All in all, it's an excellent game and my interest in it is magnified by the potential for playing online against friends.