Ron's Info-Closet Annex
The online extension of Ron's Info-Closet.
Book links are usually to my Powell's affiliate program; game links are usually to Funagain Games, and benefit the Games to the Rescue Project.
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Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
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As I mentioned in my Friday 5, last night we watched the film Incubus on DVD to celebrate Halloween.
Incubus is the only film ever shot entirely in Esperanto, the "second language for all" invented over 100 years ago, which now has about two million speakers (on par with Icelandic and Hebrew). The film was made in 1965 by the director of The Outer Limits and stars William Shatner in his last role before Star Trek.
Verdict: suprisingly good. It may not be to your taste, but this is a cult classic. It was thought permanently lost, but a print resurfaced in the late 1990s in a French art-film theater, where it had been shown to packed houses for 30 years. It was only released for the first time a couple of years ago, digitally restored.
The film is very beautiful, both in its cinematography and in its story. There are a couple of goofy special effects, and one fairly awkward experimental shot, but overall this is a heck of a beautiful film, visually. The story is equally beautiful; it is a Bergmanesque allegory involving the triumph of love over evil in a sort of Everyvillage, set in Everytime. Indeed, everything about the movie is archetypal. Because of its powerful Christian imagery, it can be seen as a Christian allegory, but Christ and Satan are referred to only as "La Dio de Lumo" (The God of Light) and "La Dio de Mallumo" (The God of Darkness) respectively, so all the imagery of crucifixes and churches can be seen as mere "place-holders" for more universal spiritual truths, just as the film's Esperanto can be understood as a universal place-holder for whatever mysterious language the incubus and succubi speak.
Speaking of which, the script is written in flawless Esperanto, and quite poetic too. The actors get the syntax right 99% of the time, and usually get the pronunciation right too, but there are a few howlers. In particular, Shatner is stumbling about at one point in the belief that he is damned, shouting (in Esperanto), "Malsupreen! Malsupreen!" ("Downwards! Downwards!") Now, "malsupreen" is actually pronounced "mahl-suh-PREH-ehn", but Shatner, ignoring his language coach, pronounces it "mal-soo-PREEN" (with the last syllable rhyming with "bean"). I can't tell you how hilarious this is to an Esperantist. Shatner makes a few other goofs; he makes the typical American English mistakes in Esperanto pronunciation, but throws in a few from French too: he frequently accents the last syllable instead of the second-to-last, and pronounces Esperanto words with "en" in them as if they were French; e.g. he pronounces "sen" more like English "sun" instead of rhyming it with English "men". But since Shatner is Canadian (from Montreal, IIRC) and probably knows a fair bit of French, this is to be expected.
As a bonus (sort of), before they showed Incubus at the small art gallery where we first saw it in 2001, they showed a few arty shorts and a weird 1963 horror film called The Mask (banned in Finland!), which one might consider a Lovecraftian pseudo-prequel to the Jim Carrey vehicle of the same title, if not an actual influence on it. A psychiatrist gets hold of an ancient (and ugly) Aztec mask that brings out the evil in its owner. When the psychiatrist puts on the mask, he sees fabulous and genuinely scary dream sequences that drive him mad. These are rendered in 3D, for which the theater gave us glasses. (You always know when to put on the glasses, because the 3D sequences are cued by a hollow voice intoning, "PUT ON THE MASK! PUT ON THE MASK!")
The Mask was almost like two films spliced together: a corny early-Sixties horror film with bad dialogue and bad acting, and bone-chilling 3D montages featuring the mask, skeletons throwing fireballs, boats poling through lakes of bones, etc.. The writer and director for these montages was the same guy who did a lot of Frank Capra's montages, Slavko Vorkapich.
Entered 19:56 [/multimedia] permalink
One of the social mailing lists I'm on has a tradition of posting "Friday 5" lists, which are lists of five things that made you happy during the week. That's an approximate way of putting it. Since I don't believe that external things can make you happy (except perhaps drugs, but not until they've become internal things), I'll just say that my Friday 5s are things that "made my week", "pleased me", or "cheered me up", without committing to what these terms mean with respect to happiness.
Enough Neo-Stoic blathering. Since our list has just started the Friday 5 tradition again, here's more or less what I posted. I hope to make this a regular Annex feature.
In the order I think of them:
Truth in Blogging: The link for The Other Wind will ensnare you in my dastardly Powell's affiliate program, as described at Books Ron Read. You're safe with the others, though -- or as safe as you can be on Halloween...
Entered 13:37 [/personal/friday5] permalink
Gamers who run GNU/Linux systems should check out gtkboard, the free software world's answer to Zillions of Games. Conceived by a gifted programmer from India, Arvind Narayanan, gtkboard can currently play about 30 games. Thanks to its Logos (Lots Of Games, Open Source) library, however, gtkboard will soon be able to run the almost 1000 free games available for the Zillions platform. There are other good reasons to run it too.
The gtkboard project is understaffed at the moment, so if you're a developer and a gamer, gtkboard needs you!
Entered 12:29 [/games/game_systems] permalink
I just finished reading the final novel in a six-volume science fiction cycle by Brian Stableford sometimes called "Emortals". Privately, I call it the "Third Millennium series" because it is based loosely on a future history by Stableford and David Langford called The Third Millennium (1984) (not to be confused with the apocalyptic Christian fantasy novel of the same name).
The Emortals series spans approximately 13 centuries, from the late 20th century to the middle of the Fourth Millennium. Much of the action focuses on the characters' quest for "emortality" (true immortality is not seen as a plausible goal because a putative immortal would still be subject to death by misadventure).
This is not great speculative fiction. Stableford is neither Greg Egan nor Gene Wolfe. However, the Emortals series is thought-provoking; for example, Stableford's reasoning why periodic rejuvenation by nanotechnology would provide only "false emortality" is a bloody thread running throughout the series, and it is not at all clear that he is wrong. Also thought-provoking is the ideology of Hardinism, which posits that the Earth must be owned by someone (in this case, a small clique of emortal capitalists) in order to prevent a catastrophic global "tragedy of the commons". (Hardin's original paper can be found online.)
The volumes in the series are listed below, in Stableford's preferred reading order (= rough chronological order). Book links in this article are part of my Powell's affiliate program, as detailed on the Books Ron Read page. If you enjoy this series of novels, you might also enjoy the game 6 Billion. (In this case, the link benefits Games to the Rescue.)
Entered 00:25 [/books] permalink
I created a page on the Piecepack Wiki today called Playing Chess with a Piecepack and 88 Cents or Less. You probably have the eight dimes and eight pennies, or something equivalent, but do you have the piecepack?
In the spirit of WikiWiki, "AlphaTim" Schutz added the game setup illustration you see above, and Mark Biggar added an explanation of how to play Chess with just a piecepack. Thanks, guys!
Entered 19:19 [/games/game_systems] permalink
Just about six months ago I was interviewed in email by W. Eric Martin of TwoWriters.net for an article in Games magazine about "rule-changing games", which I call "transfinite games".
The article was called "Meta-Gaming 101" and appeared in the September 2003 issue of Games. Although the interview seems to have informed the article significantly, not much of it was explicitly quoted. (And if you're looking for the "Center for Ludic Strategy", I assure you that you're really looking for the Center for Ludic Synergy.) Thus, I am reproducing the interview below, with Eric's permission. I have changed nothing except for abbreviating the header, deleting my .signature, and making the hyperlinks "live".
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 18:07:38 -0800 To: "W. Eric Martin" <eric@cluestick.org> Subject: Re: Questions about rule-changing games From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@ludism.org> On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:51:27PM -0500, W. Eric Martin wrote: > Thanks for responding so quickly! As suggested, I've included my > questions below. My deadline for the article is the end of March, > so if you can answer the questions by Friday, March 28, that should > give me enough time to incorporate your answers. > > Please don't feel obligated to answer everything, but the wealth of > knowledge you display on your Web sites and in your articles > inspired me to keep adding questions. Thank you very much. I've answered everything I could. If any of my answers do not seem cogent, please let me know. > 1. How would you like your attribute to read? Founder of Seattle Cosmic Game Night and the Center for Ludic Synergy, Gamemaster of the Kennexions Glass Bead Game, and card-carrying Pope. > 2. You list Nomic as an interest on your home page; what about the > game appeals to you? Why single out Nomic when all other games are > grouped as "board games, card games, and role-playing games"? That's just my crufty home page, which has evolved over more than 15 years. My online bookmarks have quite a different breakdown. However, I do have a sentimental attachment to Nomic because for two and a half years, I played a face-to-face game as an undergraduate at Yale. Further, Peter Suber's Nomic Initial Set is the best thought-out, most balanced ruleset of its sort I have seen. More to the point, Nomic can encompass all the other types of games mentioned; during our college game, we frequently subsumed games of Illuminati, Nuclear War, Black Spy (Alan Moon's Hearts variant), and even Cosmic Encounter. We called these little pockets of other games "barlafumbles" in Nomicspeak, the artificial language of my college game. > 2a. What common elements, if any, do you find in the Nomic games > you've played? I've run across many games online that introduce > colors, money, and locations, for example; are these quirks of > particular players, or is this to be expected from our collective > gaming experience? Every Nomic group varies, but there are often similarities because Nomic players like to introduce features of the real world that interest them. Since Nomic is a political game, these include awards, titles, offices, and political parties, as well as the items you mentioned. These are all _imaginary objects_ or properties, and I think this partly stems from the fact that many Nomic players are computer geeks, and a computer programming technique called "object-oriented programming" has been very popular. In fact, in Nomic's first online heyday (the mid to late 1990s), there were a couple of experimental intergame computer protocols that would let Nomic players carry objects from game to game. > 3. What doesn't work about Nomic, if anything? Or does the game > fail only if the players let it fail? The main problem is that Nomic games sometimes buckle under their own complexity. However, if there's anyone left in the game who's still interested, they can have "constitutional conventions" or "revolutions" and "purge" all the old rules that don't work at once. (Yes, I know this sounds unsavoury; Nomic players tend to be fond of power grabs, even if the power is imaginary.) It really is up to the players. Our group really had the will to keep playing, so we jokingly introduced a kind of Orwellian doublethink. When we encountered a "boogle", or snag in the rules, we plastered it over with a "whabawwea" by chanting in unison, "We Have Always Been At War With East Asia!" (or Eurasia, as the case might be) -- an allusion to a brainwashing technique used in Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. In our club, even _winning_ the game didn't end it; when someone won a game we would "pop" up to a "metagame" and "push" down to a fresh game with the same rules, minus the rule or rules that had caused the person to win. > 4. In your introductory essay to the Kenning Game (I spent a lot of > time looking around your site), you relate Nomic to James Carse's > idea of infinite games; what's the appeal to you of playing a game > merely to keep playing? The last sentence of _Finite and Infinite Games_ reads "There is but one infinite game". I'm sure Carse means life, or the world. Nihilists, ascetics, and lunatics aside, this is a game most people want to keep playing. "Transfinite" games like Nomic are like the world on a smaller scale. Tolkien delighted in the Elves of Middle-earth he created, and his Elves delighted in the magical jewels _they_ created. In just the same way, Nomic players, like role-playing gamers, love to explore the worlds they create. Creating leads to exploring, and exploring leads to creating. Sometimes the most fun in Nomic happens when you discover unintended consequences from the way two or more rules interact. It's like one of those dreams in which you discover a new room in your house. The difference between Nomic and role-playing, however, is that in Nomic, there is no gamemaster -- the creators and explorers are the same. (In the game we played at Yale, a player was called a "govotnik", which expressed the idea that she was both government _and_ voter.) > 4a. Following that thought, Kate Jones told me that one of her goals > with Lemma was to create a game in which the purpose was to keep > playing -- yet I know from one of your newsletters (mentioned in > your game system article) that your gaming group did not have a > great experience with Lemma. Any thoughts on the difference between > Lemma and Nomic, or is the difference all in the players? Nomic was written by a professor of constitutional law, and its design reflects that. It is much more detailed, formal, and rigorous than Lemma, which in its turn is much more free-spirited. With all its loopholes, Lemma seems to be designed for an afternoon's play, while Nomic games can go on for years. However, after talking with Kate Jones myself, I've concluded that your experience with either game will largely depend on the group with whom you play. I've certainly heard of enough Nomic games that only lasted an afternoon. > 5. Being a math person myself, I like your description of these > games as transfinite; do you feel there's a continuum of > "rule-changingness" that games like Nomic, Lemma, Fluxx, Democrazy, > Cosmic Encounter, Proteus, and Bartog can be placed along? That is, > from most changeable to least? Or are the games too different to > compare in this way? Yes, I do think there is a continuum. At one end of the continuum are games like Checkers whose rules do not change. Then come games like Cosmic Encounter, in which the rules change mostly at the start of the game. Then Fluxx and Democrazy, in which the rules change every turn, but are limited to the rules on the deck of cards. Then Nomic, in which the rules change every turn and are limited only by your imagination. Finally there is life itself, in which the rules change from moment to moment, and we are never quite sure what they are. > Is rule-changing a strong enough quality (such as simultaneous play, > bidding, or hidden movement) that it can be considered on its own? Yes, and you can add rule-changing to any game as easily as saying, "On your turn, you make a new rule". As kids, long before they heard of Nomic, my wife and her sisters added rule changing to the game Sorry. They called their variant "Evil Sorry", and they still have the rules somewhere. > 6. Care to comment on the other games mentioned in question 5? > (Obviously CE is huge in your group, but the rule-changing aspect is > only a piece of the game, not the essence of it.) I haven't played Proteus (the game from Kadon), although I would love to. Bartog I understand to be similar to Mao, about which I am sworn to secrecy. > And you mentioned that your group has tired of Fluxx; care to > elaborate on why? Seattle Cosmic tended to find Fluxx games too similar to one another after a while. Also, we focus on strategy games, and there is very little strategy in Fluxx. Nevertheless, there are some people in the group who still like it. > 7. Are you familiar with "The Only Known Game," a creation by Mark > Bassett and Steve Knight that predates Nomic by two years and very > much resembles Lemma? Yes, I've seen it. It looks all right, but I prefer games with more initial structure. Changing the rules of a game as you go is not new. Peter Suber's real innovation was his detail and rigour. > 8. Are there other rule-changing games I haven't mentioned that you > feel should be covered in this article? Well, _Games_ did that great article on 1000 Blank White Cards last year. (I found that very similar to a nameless boardgame I played with some friends in New Haven one night.) Dvorak <http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/> is a more structured version of the same idea. Bob Abbott's game Eleusis <http://www.logicmazes.com/> is a forerunner of these games, and Das Regeln Wir Schoen <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=1003> is really the German original for Democrazy. Mutant versions of Suber's Nomic Initial Set have proliferated; one that interests me is Solitaire Nomic <http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/acka/hist/solitaire.html>, which I carry around on my PDA. You should also look at Matrix Games <http://www.io.com/~hamster/> and Shared Universes <http://members.tripod.com/~lkraz/SharedU.html>. Mornington Crescent <http://parslow.com/mornington/> is very silly, and the Fantasy Rules Committee <http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/frc/> have done some really amazing stuff. And then, of course, there is the Glass Bead Game. > I've enjoyed your sites greatly, and have found many new topics to > explore, especially the idea of being headless. I look forward ot > your responses! Thank you; I'm glad you've enjoyed my stuff. I've tried to answer your questions in a timely way, in case they raise any further ones. Best, Ron
Entered 05:14 [/games/transfinite] permalink
A Coping Strategy for Bad News
The news just keeps being bad, doesn't it? Does it cause you as much anxiety as it does me?
I came up with a list of things to remember about the media's presentation of the news that serves as a generalised coping strategy. I hope this short list helps you to cheer up.
Note: Some of these items apply mostly to news about the USA, where I live, such as ones that mention a bicameral legislature.
OK, let's take a semantic pause, everybody.
Entered 04:58 [/polyticks/media] permalink
Sirius Cybernetics = Microsoft?
The major difference between the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and Microsoft, as far as I can tell, is that Microsoft would never, ever use a slogan like "Share and Enjoy!"
Entered 20:45 [/polyticks/ip] permalink
Check out this superb new book on game design, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2003).
I won't say much about it, because I'm a few chapters in, having only skimmed the rest, but so far it's obvious that there has never been anything like this before. It's more than 650 pages long, meant to be a textbook for an academic course in game design (any kind of game, on computer or off). It's even of interest to non-designers, because it contains original games by James Ernest and Richard Garfield, among others, and an essay by Reiner Knizia on his Lord of the Rings game.
And, oh yeah, my Game Systems series was cited, and served as source material for a chunk of the "Games as Open Culture" chapter.
If you buy it here, I'll even make, like, $3.75...
Entered 20:32 [/games/design] permalink
Now that I've got a blog, I bet a lot of my friends will think I've become incorrigibly self-obsessed. However, I've been keeping a paper journal since 1982, when I was 16, so I've been self-obsessed a lot longer than that.
Entered 19:43 [/personal] permalink
These two new Cosmic Encounter powers come from a post I made to the seattle-cosmic mailing list on 17 March 2003. Our group still hasn't playtested them, probably because we haven't been playing a lot of Cosmic this year.
These powers are based on the Mesmer and the Vulch, respectively. The Mesmer can turn any Edict into any other Edict, and the Vulch can collect discarded Edicts. Naturally, like the Mesmer and Vulch, the following two powers are not meant to be used together (except perhaps at Cheezy Cosmic Nights).
FLESMER (optional)
You may treat any Flare in your hand as though it is any other Flare in the game (whether in the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, the discard pile, or someone else's hand). As usual, you may only use the Super version of a Flare if you possess the corresponding power. Once you declare that a given Flare "is" another Flare, you may not change your mind.
You may look through the Challenge Deck, the Flare Deck, and the discard pile to see what Flares do, but each time you significantly slow down the game while doing so (by unanimous vote of the other players), you must lose a base of your choice. You must shuffle the Flare Deck and Challenge Deck after you have looked through them.
This power may not be combined with Flulch in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: All other players must show you their Flares. You may select one to take into your hand. Discard after use.
Super: You may use any Flares in your hand as either Wilds or Supers, except this one. A given Flare cannot be declared both Wild and Super in the same challenge.
FLULCH (optional)
When another player discards a Flare, you may take it into your hand.
This power may not be combined with Flesmer in a game with multiple powers.
Wild: You may retain the Flares in your hand, including this one, even when discarding the rest of your hand.
Super: Once per challenge, you may take a Flare from the discard pile into your hand, even if you yourself discarded it.
Comments? Seattle Cosmic has also collaboratively come up with at least two more that need to be formalised: the Deafener and the Crippler. See this March 2000 newsletter.
Entered 13:59 [/games/design] permalink
The Tale the Fishers of Men Tell
Perhaps the life of Christ is The Greatest Story Ever Told, but didn't your mother teach you to stop telling stories?
Entered 21:21 [/sophia] permalink
Lion Kimbro wins big prizes in the year 2000 Cheezy Cosmic tournament.
Entered 21:14 [/personal/friendly] permalink
The Info-Closet Annex opens to visitors
I've been thinking about doing a blog for a while, but didn't want it to be one of those whiny "Sorry I haven't been making any entries lately, man. I've been real busy. Uh, not much happened today except I had pancakes for breakfast." affairs.
Fortunately, I had the radiant example of Lion's Den, my friend Lion Kimbro's excellent blog, before me. I asked him what blogging software he was using, and he said it was pyBlosxom, which eventually led me to blosxom. (I prefer Perl to Python.)
I vow that no matter how long between entries I go in this blog, you will never, ever see an entry like the "pancake" one above.
In other news, yesterday I added a GeoURL tag to the front page of the main Info-Closet, so click the GeoURL icon at the top of the page to see where the Info-Closet is in "real" space.
Entered 20:47 [/news] permalink
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