lategaming

Mike Cane 2008 reports that NASA got it wrong and an asteroid that they reported to have a 1 in 45000 chance of hitting Earth actually has a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth. It took a 13 year old German schoolboy to validate the figures after NASA experts forgot to take into account the cloud of satellites which could cause the asteroid, called Apophis, to veer into Earth.

The date this is meant to happen is 2029. Now…here’s the math. In school, we had a class called Religious Education and one of the nuns who taught, Sister Mary-Jo, was one of the most progressive ‘persons of Religion’ I have ever met. She explained that the Bible was literal and also interpreted. That it was a historical document but not perhaps in the way it should be interpreted.

She believed that Jesus was real and God was real, that Jesus was born in some time around 3-6 BC and that he died on a cross, aged 33 and ascended to heaven.

If Apophis does hit Earth and cause the “End of Days”, in 2029, then it proves one thing. Chris De Burgh may have been right.

“And just before dawn at the paling of the sky,
The stranger returned and said “Now I must fly,
When two thousand years of your time has gone by,
This song will begin once again, to a baby’s cry…”"

I don’t know what’s more upsetting. That the world might end or that the Lord chose Chris de Burgh to be his prophet?

Of course, as a result I’ll have to tie this into my Prospero mini-setting…

[This is a hoax BTW. See NASA statement. But of course, to avoid world panic, they would say that...]

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.

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?

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.

A real shame.

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.

A couple of pics of a really accessible volcano.

Easily re-used for something gaming…

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.

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. A few lot 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.