Calvinism

Ny blogg igen!

2009-01-09T23:03:00.002+01:00

Jag har bestämt mig för att börja blogga på svenska.

Jag överger den här bloggen tills vidare. Min nya blogg finns på:

http://kallebergman.wordpress.com/

Games as politics

2008-11-10T19:26:00.006+01:00

Can gaming be a tool for a progressive, Leftist politics? Some Swedish larpers seem to think so. They have argued that larping can be a means for exploring new subjectivities — new gender roles, for instance — thus putting existing structures in question and open the path for a transformation of society.

This idea — of creating a space, a realm, where certain structures of mainstream society are inverted or transformed through the medium of performance (and what is larp if not a species of performance?) — closely resembles what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas. Communitas is a state, common in the ritual practices of traditional cultures, wherein social structures are inverted or eliminated. The king becomes slave, the slave, king. In communitas, the tension that exists in every society between hierarchy and collective is temporarily resolved. As such, communitas can serve a conservative purpose — it allows people better to deal with the existing social structure. But communitas can also be transformative, when it is brought out from the close confines of the rite of passage, the holy feast, the coronation ceremony, and made into a movement. Examples from history abound. Turner cites the 60s counterculture, the Indian liberation movement and assorted millenarian sects.

If we buy this notion of larp as a potential source of communitas, then it seems as if the main issue is whether this communitas will perform a conservative or a transformative function — will the experience of social rule-bending be brought over to "real life", made to found new practices and lifestyles, or will it serve to strengthen existing institutions by offering a temporary respite in make-believe form?

But is this really a proper analysis? Are the main sources of opposition to the left today of a symbolic-structural nature — the kind of symbolic structures one might hope to upend through communitas? Doesn't today's hegemonic liberal culture already encourage us continually to transform symbolic structures, encourage us to remain in a state of flux with regard to status, hierarchy and tradition? Marx said, apropos of capitalism, that "all that is solid melts to air and everything holy is profaned". Is this not truer now than ever, in our post-modern era? Global capital requires us, the Western class of capitals "privileged" servants that drives the motors of economic growth, to be creative, flexible, accomodating... replaceable . As such, it could be argued that communitas is actually a cornerstone of liberal ideology — the ruling ideology of global capitalism. Far from being radical and transformative, communitas is already the telos of liberal politics.

The locus of oppression today is not the old symbolic hierarchical structures of the Western world which are in any case withering away. In the ideal liberal world, there is no difference between individual subjects with regard to society at large — oppression today is not the oppression by specific individuals whom society calls "masters" of specific individuals whom society calls "slaves" — the specific individuals are totally interchangeable, and what remains is the structure of oppression as such which is not symbolic at all (does not involve any fixed "roles" into which individuals enter) but purely material — a function of the flow of natural resources, labor, and commodities. In fact, to tear down the wall between, for instance, the man and the woman — as those Swedish larpers are trying to do — can only serve global capital in so far as it makes subjects less dependent on the categories enforced by tradition and hence more mobile, more flexible, more interchangeable.

This is not to say, of course, that trying to eliminate gender differences is bad in any way. It is one of those things about liberal politics which is actually good and which the Left ought also to strive for. But it is unreasonable to assume that such activities taken in isolation could serve the main leftist cause, which has always been and will remain to destroy the material structures of oppression and exploitation which bind people in serfdom, not through the mediation of symbolic categories but because of the exigencies of their material existence.

So if games are to be transformative (from a leftist point of view), it is not enought that they bring about communitas. They must rather help to create a revolutionary subjectivity in the participants. Is this possible? I would argue that it is not, on the basis that the purpose of games are precisely the opposite of creating revolutionary fervor: they act as a sedative. Remember that old Roman political principle of bread and circuses. Today's circus is, or is increasingly becoming, the game. The reason for this, I think, is that today's society is increasingly organized on the basis that each person should be able to live an unhindered, secure, unproblematic life and be able to reproduce him- or herself and to contribute to the reproduction of society without impairment. In its extreme form, this lifestyle, the purpose of which is of course to make the machinery of capitalism work as smoothly as possible, becomes a sort of vegetative "baseline life", a life without excitations, without excitement — the lowest common denominator of "life". Such a life is really a sort of no-life (in the sense that you might tell someone "get a life") — it is desubjectivizing. That part of the human spirit that strives for excitation, for a life that is not simply the flaccid reproductive cycles of fungi and bacteria but the life of a full human subject with all what that entails, must find an outlet outside of society, since society allows no such excitation. But since society encompasses all of the "real" world, the only source of outlet is in a world of make-believe — in games.

The above analysis is a simplification, of course. We do not all live the life of simple reproduction and there are other sources of excitations than games. But increasingly, it is becoming reality. Increasingly, games are becoming the only arena where we can exercise our "will to power". As such, games, far from being a potential training-ground for transformative sentiment, are sure to be the drain into which all such sentiments are flushed.

My thesis here is simple. Whereas games are fun, and can perhaps learn us to function better and smoother in liberal society, they will not be the tool that the Left is desperately seeking for upending the capitalist world order. If we want to do that, we will have to stop playing and start living in real life.

Languages

2008-09-17T23:33:00.004+02:00

I have recently discovered how much I prefer writing in Swedish to writing in English.

This is no less than natural, of course, since Swedish is my first language and English is, at best, a foreign language that I happen to have a rather good grasp on. But there are deeper reasons at work. Reasons profound, almost metaphysical.

English does, quite honestly, disgust me. It is a vulgar tongue, fit for vulgar men only. It is a base creole of Old English and French, lacking all the handsome ruggedness of the old Germanic vocabulary as well as the flair of antiquity that only a true Romance language can muster. It is spoken monotone, with a certain drone, sometimes interrupted by shrill screams. It nominally has vowels, but they all reduce to the same lazy 'schwa'. I'm not even going to go into the consonants.

To be certain, the English language has fostered its share of great men of letters. I presently can recall only Shakespeare, but I'm sure there must be others. However, it is arguable whether "fostered" is the right word to use, unless we by "foster" mean something akin to what old Josef Fritzl did to his (grand)children. That something good might nevertheless have emerged from conditions such as these, is simply proof of the unconquerability of the human spirit.

If I persist in tormenting myself by writing in this accursed tongue, it is only because it has somehow — inexplicably — become a Lingua Franca for all humanity. Every would-be man of letters must endeavor — this is my firm belief — in making his voice heard to all of mankind. If this means that I must sully myself with the Saxon tongue, then so be it. I just hope that someday, people will acknowledge my sacrifice, and shed a tear for a man of so young an age, lost irredeemably in the claws of English.

Thoughts on the player-character relationship

2008-07-25T22:55:00.004+02:00

A lot has been said about this topic. Here are just some additional thoughts:

We have an idea of the existence of something called "immersion", when the player tries to rid himself of meta-level thinking, and tries to "become" the character he's playing — to adopt his persona as naturally as possible.

And we also have an experience of the total annihilation of the character as character — of the character becoming nothing but an empty vehicle for the player's quest for phat lewt or some other kind of problem-solving.

Placed between these two extremes, the annihilation of the persona and the "annihilation" of the person, we have a continuum in which the person and the persona exist in tandem, parallel to each other, "alongside" each other, and where the person makes decisions about the actions of the persona from his own standpoint as someone different from the persona.

According to the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, in order for a fictional character to be properly aesthetic, he has to be viewed "in the mode of the other"; that is to say, as if he were another person than the one doing the viewing. Bakhtin argues that the activities and life of a person can only be invested with artistic value from the point of view of another person, because artistic values are such values as tragedy, justice, hubris etc, and from your own point of view, you can never experience your own life as tragic, just etc — you can be depressed but to really be able to see a life as properly tragic, it has to be the life of another.

Of course, the consequence would be that Bakhtin would not consider the kind of game, where one term in the dyad player-character is eliminated, as properly artistic or aesthetic.

In the intermediate spectrum, a possible field of investigation opens up. How do players view their characters? Can this be influenced by mechanics or other means? And even if the third-person view of the character opens up the possibility of an aesthetic sight, in Bakhtin's sense — to what extent is this possibility realized by players in actual games?

New Blog: Calvinosophy!

2008-07-22T20:00:00.003+02:00

Lately, I've had an increasing urge to write about philosophy. And since it's always funner to write about something when there's at least a theoretical chance that somebody else will read it, I've wanted to blog about it. However, I do not wish to clutter this blog with a lot of philosophical talk, so therefore, I've started a new blog. I present to you: Calvinosophy.

Semiotics as a Way to Formally Model Role-Playing

2008-07-11T01:27:00.011+02:00

In researching role-playing, we are basically dealing with three descriptive/analytical levels: the formal level, the functional level and the aesthetic/content level (one could argue that there is also a social/cultural level, but I find it rather boring). The aesthetic level is the level at which we analyze the fictional and artistic content of role-playing, investigate how it comes about, what it means and how we should relate to it. The functional level is the level at which the mechanics of role-playing are analyzed: basically, what makes it tick — this is what Forge theory has mainly been doing with its GNS triangles and new system design ideas and whatnot.

The formal level, finally, is the level at which role-playing is described as a purely formal structure without any reference to specific content. This post will be about the formal level. Some attempts have been made at devising formal models of role-playing, usually by creating hierarchies between interacting elements such as system, fiction, social contract, etc. This post does not contain such a model. Rather, it presents an approach to the construction of this kind of models, sort of a meta-model. To be specific, I think that the study of the formal level of role-playing should take its cue from semiotics.

To approach role-playing in a semiotic way, i e from the viewpoint of the science of signs and systems of signs, means to acknowledge the simple fact that RPGs are just such a system of signs. This would entail the added benefit that role-playing theory would be able to utilize the many insights of semiotic theory.

What is semiotics? It all goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure, and his distinction between the signifier and the signified. In de Saussure's terminology, every sign is made up by these two parts, constituting an integrated whole that is recognized and understood as a sign. Both signifier and signified are abstracta, a point seldom appreciated. This is to say, that when we hear the word "tree" spoken, it is not this particular, concrete sound that is the signifier, but the abstract sound-image evoked by the sound, and which is represented by our brain in some mental medium. Correspondingly, the signified of the word "tree" is not any particular tree, nor is it the sum of all actual trees, but it is the abstract concept TREE, as represented by our brain.

But the central insight of de Saussure was that this two-place relationship between signifier and signified could be applied to things that weren't words. For instance: the little stylized pictures found on toilet doors aren't words, but they are signs, and they can be analyzed as consisting of signifier (the little pictures) and signified (the mens' and the ladies' room, respectively).

An added degree of complexity emerges when one realizes that signs can take the role of signifiers for higher-level signs. This is what happens, trivially, in metaphor. For instance, George Orwell's novel 'the animal farm' consists of signifiers (words) and signifieds (the fictional content of the novel), but we all now that the novel as such is really a metaphor for Soviet totalitarianism. This can be analyzed as a signifier-signified relationship, where the literal content of the novel becomes the signifier, signifying the metaphorical content.

* * *

There are of course several modes of signification, several kinds of signs. They range from the very concrete (the way a picture of a meadow signifies... well, a meadow) to the very abstract (the way mathematical symbols signify... God knows what). Some of these modes of signification will be of high relevance for RPG theory, some will hardly matter at all. I will, however, not try to figure out beforehand which semiotic categories are relevant for us and which are not. Rather, I will just go right ahead and try to sketch out how a semiotic model of RPG might look, and point out relevant distinctions along the way.

We will start at a baseline level of content: the fictional content of the gaming world, what has been called the "shared imagined space", the places, people and events taking place in the make-believe world of the game. There is, hopefully, nothing weird about considering this to be the content of role-playing.

Although this content might, as already demonstrated, constitute the signifier of a metaphor, it is more natural to view it as a signified. The signified of what? What sets of signs have the fictional content of an RPG as their signified? There are many such signs, but most of them sort into two basic categories:

Linguistic signs
Mechanical signs

Linguistic signs are just what they sound like: language! Speech! Discourse! Of course, the majority of any RPG session takes place in the medium of spoken and written language. This is trivially true, but this simple fact holds great treasures in store for us: it means that a vast ocean of linguistic research can be brought to bear on RPG theory. In recent decades linguists have acquired an immensely increased understanding on how language is structured and how it is used to accomplish many things. Both the strictly formal as well as the social and cultural aspects of language use have been considered by an army of scholars. We are talking potential!

Linguistic signs affect the fictional content of RPGs in several ways. On the most basic level, a player simply describes something in the game world. For instance, I might say "my character opens the door and steps inside". This would be a two-level sign. On the first level is the purely linguistic content: the string of words and their meaning in the English language. On the second level, this English sentence is taken to signify certain events in the fiction.

The relationship between these two levels is not trivial. For instance, imagine that you are the GM, and you have decided that the door in question is locked. You now say "the door is locked". So, obviously, my character did not open the door and did not step inside, even though this was what I said. The ways in which the first-level linguistic signs affect the fiction on the second level is by no means straightforward, but is governed by a set of complicated rules.

Another use of linguistic signs is in-character speech. Imagine me making a serious face, adopting a slightly lower pitch and saying "By Pelor, this door is locked!" This is immediately understood, not as describing the game-world directly (we already knew the door was locked) but as describing what my character says. Once again, you — the GM — might theoretically say something like "you find yourself to be suddenly mute" (perhaps the evil wizard cast a 'silence' spell just then), thus annulling what I tried to introduce into the fiction.

Mechanical signs are more peculiar for RPGs. They are given by the game rules as spelled out in rulebooks and suchlike. Game rules, too, are two-level signs. First, we have the strictly abstract mechanical level. On this level, certain marks and numbers on my character sheet are understood to signify abstract mechanical magnitudes and concepts. The comes the fictional level, where these abstract magnitudes and concepts in turn signify facts and circumstances about the fiction.

For instance: take hit points. A certain number of marks or crosses, or simply a digit, on my character sheet will be taken to signify the purely abstract notion of "numbers of hit points left". This abstract notion will, in turn, be taken to signify the medical state of my character in the fiction.

* * *

But a heap of signs does not make a system of signification, and we all know that in any RPG, the linguistic and mechanical signs will interact in complex ways and, above all, that they will be used by the participants according to certain rules.

This is really where the semiotic approach to RPG theory comes to its forte, for what is a set of rules that governs the use of a system of signs if not a grammar?

The analogy with natural language now becomes clear. A conversation corresponds to a gaming session. The content of the conversation corresponds to the fictional content of the game. The words and sentences used correspond to the linguistic, mechanical and other signs constituting the "lexicon" of RPG. The grammar and the rules of speech correspond to the rules of the game, both explicit and implicit, both mechanical and social. And language as such corresponds to the RPG viewed as a semiotic system.

By now, the reader surely has at least a vague appreciation for how a semiotic model of RPGs would look. But why? What are the benefits of the semiotic perspective? What is gained by this approach that are lost in others? I will take a few paragraphs at the end of this post to try to answer these questions.

* * *

I've already alluded to one reason: Both semiotics in general and linguistics in particular are well-researched fields, and there are vast amounts of insight and material to be gathered once one starts to view RPG through semiotic lenses. In particular, it would be possible to apply the methods of semiotic research on RPG theory, thus giving the "field" what perhaps would amount to its first proper methodology (although it would of course only apply to the formal, and not the functional and aesthetic, aspects of role-playing).

More particularly, the semiotic approach would allow us to clarify a couple of somewhat vague notions. System, for instance, could be analyzed in terms of the "grammar" of a semiotic system. And we would be able to pinpoint precisely how the so called "shared imagined space" is shared, that is to say, how the "fictional content" of the game is generated by a process of negotiation.

Furthermore, the semiotic approach would give us a tool for analyzing the social dynamics around the gaming table. Phenomena considered in sociolinguistics and the field of linguistics known as pragmatics, such as turn-taking, speech acts and many other forms of dynamic linguistic behavior, could be "rediscovered" within the framework of role-playing. Types of linguistic behavior unique for role-playing, such as the complex shifts between different "frames" (In-character and out-of-character being the typical ones) and the negotiation of fictional content, could also be analyzed on this basis.

* * *

So, this has been a basic sketch. Little more can be provided in a blog-post. However, I will return to this subject in due time, perhaps offering some further ideas. Until then, all comments are welcome.

Manifesto against self improvement

2008-07-01T14:17:00.006+02:00

Every person seeks to do something with themselves. We all strive for success, money, respect, friendship, love, happiness. But recently and in our culture this basic aspect of human existence has mutated into an aberrant form, which I will designate by the name "self improvement". The idea of self improvement, as the name suggests, is not to improve the external circumstances of one's life, or to achieve something lasting, but to improve oneself, or, more to the point, one's self, one's personality, one's — to use some philoso-lingo — subject.

The method for achieving this is either psychological, mystical, or both. These methods are born from those two movements so characteristic of the twentieth century; psychoanalysis and New Age. But we shan't let the methods fool us; the true ideological source of self help is none other than capitalism.

It should be immediately apparent that the idea of "self-improvement" could only arise in a highly individualistic culture, in which few projects any longer are allowed to be "collective" or — God forbid — "universal". In our late modernity/capitalism, each man is an island. Capitalism is designed so that if each of us works only to further his own personal agenda, then the macroeconomical structures of society will channel this work into material growth for all of society. This tendency has been helped along by the abandonment of all other social institutions that could provide a counterweight to this individualism inherent in the capitalist system, such as religion, nation, race, class, family, and even truth (those things that Jean-François Lyotard calls "metanarratives"). This is not in itself necessarily negative, of course, but when all these things are stripped away, what remains is the individual in its pure nakedness.

The very word "self-improvement" brings to mind an image of the self as a sort of internal living-room which can be decorated, rearranged, refurnished, sometimes under the watchful eye of a professional interior decorator. Our image of the self, the mind, as a place, or better yet, a thing, starts — philosophically speaking — with Renée Descartes, who split the world into the res extensa (extended thing), the world of items having breadth, width and height, and the ego cogito, the nonspatial, nonmaterial thinking self. With Descartes, a tradition began in Western thought which viewed the self, also called the subject (as in "subjective"), as something radically separate from the world of things and experiences. Many confusing doctrines has been based upon this distinction, for instance, idealism, which viewed all of the world as simply a way for the subject to organize its own thought. The self, then, became the timeless, absolute ground on which all of creation rested. All of the world, simply a form of your consciousness. Sounds looney, right?

Looney indeed. And this loonieness lives on today, although in subdued forms. Today, most of us would claim to believe, neither that the world is radically separate from the mind (as Descartes would have it), nor simply a form of it (as the idealists claimed), but that the mind, on the contrary, is in the world, namely, in the form of a brain which is made up of matter that has formed complex molecules, nerve cells and so on. But despite this explicitly stated belief, which goes under the name of "materialism", the Cartesian doctrine continues to lead a hidden but thriving existence to this day. And the commonality of the idea of self-improvement is as good a proof as anything of this.

When man in late modernity/capitalism finds that his own private existence is the sole available focus for his dreams, hopes and strivings, and coupled with the well-ingrained Cartesian picture of the self as a thing, a substance, self-improvement is the result. It can take such forms as improving one's empathy, one's sociability, one's creativity, one's industriousness, one's courage, or to change one's way of looking at the world. It often goes by the path of self help-litterature, seminars, or courses. And the ultimate goal is, of course, to make a better person of oneself, which is interpreted in terms of taking this self-thing and improving upon it, decorating it, making it better and more beautiful. Not unlike how we, who live in a consumerist culture, constantly seek to improve upon and beutify our material surroundings by buying ever more things with which to outfit them.

The only problem is that the self is not a thing.

This simple fact has been recognized almost since the days of Descartes. One of its first proponents was David Hume, who, however, went a little overboard and claimed that the self doesn't exist at all, which is even more absurd. The fact was recognized by such philosophers as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, but the person who gave it its ultimate formulation was Martin Heidegger.

According to Heidegger, human existence is characterized by what he calls Dasein. Dasein is an everyday German word meaning, simply, human existence, but to Heidegger, it is a technical term, designating the way in which people, characteristically, are (i e, exist), as opposed to things like rocks, trees and chairs. Dasein is characterized by a number of features, the most general of which is Being-in-the-World (this hyphenated monstrosity is the attempt of the English translators to render Heidegger's somewhat idiosyncratical use of German, which has greater allowance for compound neologisms than English). Being-in-the-world means that Dasein (that is, human beings) are never radically separate from the world, like the Cartesian self, but are always already in it.

This is not to be understood as materialism. Materialism would make of the human mind a thing among others, no different from a rock or a tree. True as it may be from a purely scientific perspective, the philosophical problem of this doctrine is that it fails to account for the way in which human existence is undeniably different from the existence of a rock or a tree. This failure leaves the window open for Cartesianism to sneak back in. When the mind is made a thing among others, that quality which separates minds from things are left a mystery, and this mystery is unavowedly accounted for by some variant of the Cartesian doctrine.

When Heidegger says that human beings are in-the-world, he does not mean it in the sense that an object can be inside a container. The world is not a container, and human beings are emphatically not things. What he means is that all that which characterize human beings — thoughts, beliefs, emotions, fears, longings, loves — are directed towards or preoccupied with the world. You cannot have a thought without something to think about. You cannot have a belief without believing in something. There would be no fears with nothing to fear, no longings with nothing to long for, no love with nothing to love. And so on. Human beings are, from the beginning and in all their activities, engaged in the world. They are engrossed in it. They care for it. There is no feature of human activity which is not somehow directed towards the world.

For Descartes, to be a human being is to be a thinking thing, radically separate from the world of extended things. For Heidegger, to be a human being is nothing but this being engaged in the world.

When people, then, engage in self-improvement, treating themselves — their selves — as things to be worked upon, they forget what these selves are, what it means to have a self, what it means to be human — namely, to Be-in-the-World. Instead of directing their gazes outwards, into the world which is the ultimate horizon of meaning for all our human concerns, they direct it “inwards” into that thing which they believe are closest to themselves. But this belief is a delusion, brought about by Cartesian metaphysics and capitalist individualism. The self is not a thing and its direction is not inwards. To engage in self-improvement is to forget what is really important, namely, the world which we all share and which we are all in.

So what am I saying? That we shouldn't strive to become more creative, more empathic, more industrious? Yes, and no. What I'm saying is that the whole point of being empathic is to act with more empathy. The whole point of creativity is to create. The whole point of industriousness is to make industry. That is to say, all of these things are also in-the-World. The risk with the Cartesian self improvement program is that these simple facts are forgotten. That people start to see self-improvement as an end in itself, rather than just as the means to achieve some end which applies to the public world in which we all live. To be thus preoccupied with oneself to the extent that one fails to see the world, is simply egotism. It is vain, it is amoral and it makes no one happy except for the individual himself.

In this, it is neither better nor worse than that other child of capitalism, namely, consumerism. And truly, self-improvement might be seen as a kind of consumerism of the soul. The comparison is especially apt if one considers the enormous amount of money some people spend on self help books, seminars and therapy. Perhaps it makes you happier. But buying a bigger wide-screen TV than your neighbor might also make you happier. And sincerely, I doubt it. Because if Heidegger is correct, then the very meaning of being, say, empathic, is to act empathic. And why, then, go trough the circumlocution of first improving some ghostly self-substance that isn't really there in order to then be able to act in a certain way, when you can just go straight for the goal?

Learning French

2008-06-26T10:01:00.011+02:00

Suddenly, and with great clarity, Calvino realized that two languages aren't enough!

He decided to learn a couple more. And to start with French, la langue du amour.

So, yeah, I've taken up French. And since I've neither the time nor the opportunity to take actual classes, I've decided to learn it by my own two hands. Er... eyes. The goal is, of course, to be able to read Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Lacan and the gang in the original, so I'm shooting for reading-comprehension above all. The following is a brief account of my method.

Step 1: Buy some crappy book

First of all, I bought a book called "Teach yourself French", the cover of which you can see on your left. (It can be gotten from Amazon.com). It was pretty crappy, cause its grammar- and lexicon parts were incomplete, plus it had a lot of really boring exercises and not a lot of text which kinda is what you use to actually learn stuff. So yeah, I got bored pretty quick, but I think I at least learned something, like how to say "there is" (il y a). Which is good because il y a literally means "he has it", so I figure I'd be pretty confused in my further studies otherwise.

Step 2: Parallel-reading
After having got burnt on "teach yourself French", I tried my hands at parallel-reading, which is really funny. Basically, you get one copy of some certain book in French, and another in your native language (Swedish, in my case), and then you try to decipher the French book sentence by sentence with the help of the other book.

In my case, the books were:

Some Tintin-albums
Le Petit Prince
The webcomic Megatokyo, which has a French version

So yeah, pretty cerebral litterature there (well, Le Petit Prince is actually quite profound). I also wrote down words I figured be good to practice on, and got myself a pretty hefty list. This way, I learned words like avoir and faire, which means to have and to do respectively, and a lot of other niceties of the French language.

Step 3: Throw yourself out of the three and flap your wings
I got a little bored with all the webcomics and stuff, and I finished Le Petit Prince pretty quickly, so I went looking for bigger prey. I found this:

Now I work in the following manner. I read a chapter (they're pretty short chapters, like two pages long) and every word I don't understand, I look up using this lexicon. Then I kinda write the translation in the book above the word or phrase in question. I then translate the entire chapter into Swedish, whereupon I make a list of all the difficult words to train on.

I've written a word-training script in Python. The code is as thus, only, there's kinda a bunch of tabs that blogspot won't show, so I mark them with big red X-es:

import random
from sys import *
import string

f = open('words.txt')
content = f.readlines()
length = len(content)
loop = True

while loop:
X line = random.randint(0, length-1)
X wordlist = string.split(content[line], ',')

X print wordlist[0]
X answer = raw_input('See the answer!')
X print wordlist[1]
X answer = raw_input(' ')

X if answer == 'q':
XX loop = False

Then you simply put a file named "words.txt" in the same folder, with the French words followed by their translations, separated by commas, as thus:

avoir, to have
faire, to do
il y a, there is

The program will randomly generate one French word, and when you press enter, it will show you the translation. And then you press enter again and it will give you the next French word. Simple as pie.

Oh, and I've also borrowed a book about French grammar, to help nature along a little.

The Beauty of Philosophy

2008-04-08T22:24:00.007+02:00

Philosophy is one of my little indulgences. I was asked by a friend to explain what i like about philosophy, so here goes:

Philosophy is presently considered to be in a crisis. This crisis has been growing upon us for a long time, perhaps since Nietzsche, perhaps since Hume, perhaps since Socrates, but it is epitomized in the thoughts of certain 20th century philosophers, all of which have tried to radically redefine philosophy or criticize or dismantle it from within. The logical positivists wanted to reduce philosophy to the analysis of language. Wittgenstein claimed that language was enough in itself, and that philosophy was a process of clearing up the confusions that had given birth to it, so as to return it to oblivion. These people, then, were preoccupied with language, and it has rightfully been claimed that at the dawn of the 20th century, philosophy took a "linguistic turn": the key to philosophical problems were said to inhere in the words we use. But with the post-structuralist, foremost of them Derrida, language itself becomes treacherous, snakes in on itself, slips from our grasp and leaves us utterly incapable of talking about anything.

This leaves us with philosophy in shambles. How is one to pick up the pieces? Where is one to begin rebuilding this once magnificent edifice, queen of sciences? One can start to wonder if it's even worth it. Don't we have all we need in empirical science? Doesn't it provide us with all the knowledge we need? Doesn't it satisfy our epistemic hunger?

I provide this background because I, like everyone else interested in philosophy in this day and age, have necessarily to battle with these questions when I ask myself, "why do I enjoy philosophy?" This question, then, certainly doesn't have a straightforward answer, and it will lead us down a winding path where we will most probably end up lost. But it is worth it, for though philosophy is a cruel mistress, she is beautiful all the while.

The first approach if one is trying to discredit philosophy is to question its applicability. As opposed to the empirical sciences, philosophy seems to have no practical effects. It seems to be simply intellectual masturbation, dealing in issues not relevant to anyone. Granting for the moment that this is even true (which is of course questionable), one can immediately reply that the critic seems to have applied the normative standard of "practical applicability" as a ground for judging philosophy. If one rejects this standard, the criticism fails. And why, indeed, should we accept it? What does the word "practical" even mean in this context? Does it refer to material gains? But whence, one is justified in asking, this fixation with material gains as the ultimate standard of good? What, indeed, is material wealth other than the means by which man perpetuates his own existence as a biological being, caught in an eternal cycle of growth and decay which serves no purpose whatsoever except for its own endless continuation? Material acquisition can never serve any other purpose than to allow for further material acquisition. We work in order to eat, and we eat so that we will be able to work another day, and so on until the day we die. And when we die, we leave nothing behind, for all our work has gone towards making food, which we have already eaten if it hasn't rot. If this is the standard by which we measure applicability, then count me out.

If philosophy does not partake in this senseless perpetuation of mindless biology, then what does it do? My answer is simply this: a philosopher is somebody who is not content to perpetuate the world, but who wishes to make sense of it. In this respect, philosophy has three colleagues among the activities of man: religion, art and science. However, a way of making sense of the world can easily become a means of trying to escape it. This is so, because a man who spends a lot of time considering the world can easily reach the conclusion that it is inherently senseless, and if this is true, then the only way to make sense of it is to make sense, i e, to make it up, to fabricate it. Faced with a choice between accepting the real senselessness of the world, the lack of meaning, the utter vanity of it all, and to put one's faith in an imaginary realm of supreme meaning, many people understandably chooses the latter.

Of the four methods, religion is the one that lends itself best to escapism. What starts as an attempt to find the meaning hidden behind the façade of the world, ends up as the creation, ex nihilo, of a transcendental realm of pure purpose, pure meaning. Earthly life in all its futility gives way to eternal bliss in the hereafter.

Art, too, easily becomes escapism, although the socially agreed-upon nonreality of most fictional worlds makes art a less powerful tool for escapism than religion. Indeed, if someone finds the same sense of ultimate purpose in, for instance, the plot of a novel that millions find in the teachings of the world religions, we are inclined to view him with not just a slight bit of condescension.

Science, on the contrary, is badly suited for escapism. This is because of science's total disregard for meaning. Science is interested only in causes and effects, explanations and illuminations — not in ultimate purposes. Science is preeminently immanent; this fact accounts for both its success, and for the fact that many people feel it to be extremely inadequate.

This leaves only philosophy, and in a sense, philosophy is the discipline which bridges the gap between the other three. Philosophy is not immune to escapism. More than one philosopher has found in his doctrine a presumptive way of transcending earth-bound existence and reaching something higher. Interesting enough, whereas some philosophers — notably Plato — have identified philosophy itself as the true purpose of man, others have pointed to religion or art as fulfilling this role. Nevertheless, there are other philosophers who stand as proof that one can, by means of philosophy, reach the insight that the world is senseless and still not succumb to the temptation of escapism. I'm thinking here primarily of Albert Camus, whose "absurdity" corresponds to my "senselessness". And yet again, there are those philosophers who have spent a whole life philosophizing without ever so much as touching upon the problem of ultimate purpose.

For this reason, many have hoped that philosophy should be able to succeed where both religion and science have failed, i e, to give an account of reality which neither succumbs to make-believe, as does religion, nor is existentially bankrupt, as is science. Because nowhere does one find standards of intellectual rigor so severe, as in philosophy. The philosopher, from the days of Descartes onward, is not allowed to take anything for granted. He is supposed to question everything, to engage in methodical doubt. Everything science accepts without a word — the validity of induction, the uniformity of nature, the objectivity of the external world — is subject to scrutiny within philosophy. With rules so severe, shouldn't one be able to penetrate into the very core of existence, and finally illuminate everything?

Sadly, no. The world does not lend itself to this kind of explanation. The philosopher tends unavoidably to become entangled in paradoxes and riddles. The result is the perennial battles waged within the philosophical world: between materialists and idealists, between subjectivists and realists, between relativists and positivists, between empiricists and rationalists, between foundationalists and holists, and between post-structuralists and everyone else. And they have led to the present situation: the crisis of philosophy, by which I started this post.

In the face of these paradoxes, these unsolvable problems, these unending debates, is one to give up? Is one to shrug one's shoulders and say, "well, we tried philosophy, but it didn't work. Let's try something else." No! The moment one says that, one has again succumbed to that hated standard of value, by which something can only be good if it is useful. We tried to make sense of the world, and we found only riddles. Well, doesn't that teach us at least one thing, namely, that the world is enigmatic, that it is structured so as to give rise to paradoxes, that multiple viewpoints are possible on the same phenomena, each granting a different, internally coherent picture, but none being commensurable with the other?

And isn't there another standard of value, which we use, parallel with usefulness but totally independent from it, namely, beauty? Just as a work of art needn't necessarily serve the purpose of making sense of the world, but might just serve the "purpose" of being beautiful, so too might philosophy be a way of unearthing the beauty — sometimes weird, sometimes scary, sometimes sublime — of the world in which we live.

In the beginning of this post, I spoke about the "linguistic turn" that philosophy allegedly took in the beginning of the 20th century. In the novel and the poem, linguistics gives way to aesthetics, and if it is true what the postmodernists tell us, that all philosophical systems are merely "metanarratives", then doesn't it make sense to say that the linguistic turn must inevitably give way to an aesthetic turn?

And so, I am finally equipped to answer the question that provoked me to write this post: "Why do you enjoy philosophy?" The answer: "because it is beautiful".

The Paradoxical Logic of System

2008-02-17T00:47:00.007+01:00

(1)

When we consider an RPG system in and by itself, we are guided in our judgment by a certain set of presuppositions, a theory if you will, about how it will actually be used, at the table, in actual play. This theory might or might not coincide with reality. A greater understanding of how systems are used will assist us when we attempt to assess them, and will also increase our understanding about the dynamics of the gaming table.

The usual, straightforward model would be, that the players come to the table with some, more or less well-defined, creative agenda. They pick a system, often in the form of some pre-written rules-set, and follow it. Hopefully, it contributes towards their fulfilling their creative agenda, in which case they will continue using it. Otherwise, they might discard it or modify it.

I will suggest that a more complex dynamic is in fact in operation when systems are used. I will try to explain this idea by the introduction of something I call a virtual actor, or just an actor. We can understand what the actor is by reference to literary theory. In this field, a distinction is made by the author of a book, and its narrator. The author is the real person, the man or woman of flesh and blood who actually wrote the book. The narrator, on the other hand, is wholly fictitious, virtual: he is the mouth in which the author places the words of the fiction. The narrator is most visible when he refers to himself as "I", as in books narrated in the 1st person, but he crops up elsewhere too. The narrator, then, exists wholly on the plane of the fiction itself.

The actor, similarly, is a virtual individual who exists wholly on the plane of the system. He arises on the initiative of the player in response to the system, and his purpose is to mediate between the player and the system, much like the purpose of the narrator is to mediate between the author and the fiction. What, then, is the purpose of the actor and how does he come about?

(2)

Consider Polaris. Polaris is a game in what could perhaps be called the "story game" tradition and it is more or less explicitly acknowledged that players come to Polaris with the intent of creating and experiencing good stories together, where "good" in these circumstances mean more precisely "chivalric and tragical". People, then, come into the game with a cooperative agenda. However, peculiarly, the game rules presuppose a certain amount of antagonism between the players. The core of the game is the innovative conflict resolution system in which the stakes of the conflict, and thus the dramatical weight of the narrative, is continually raised. In order to make these rules do what they are intended to do, i e, contribute to the creation of an epic, tense narrative, players must make use of the conflict system, which presupposes that they act in opposition to each other.

However, the system is not built for antagonism between players. It has no checks and balances, no central GM authority with final say on matters. All is very loosely held and allows for very much fiddling. And in fact, it is, as I previously noted, more or less presupposed that players will in fact act in concert to make a good story.

This, then, seems like a paradox. On the one hand, the system can't handle antagonism, and on the other hand, it requires antagonism in order to do its job properly. Despite this, people seem to be able to enjoy Polaris — I am myself one of them. So how is the paradox resolved? My answer is as follows. In being confronted with this property of system, the player resolves to act in a certain way. He will follow the overall spirit of cooperation and contribution to the common story most of the time, but when time comes to make use of the conflict resolution rules, he will suddenly "change personality" and act as if he had an antagonistic agenda. This "as if" can be expressed in another way: the player creates a virtual persona, the actor, who has an antagonistic agenda, and when this antagonistic agenda is required for the system to work as intended, the player hands over control to the actor.

This, then, is what I mean by an "actor": a virtual persona created by the player in response to the system, who is allowed to make certain decisions according to "his" agenda in order to make the system work as intended. Some things will be immediately apparent: 1) The actor is, for the most part, not made explicit, neither in the rules text nor around the table. It would be interesting to examine to what extent the making explicit of the actor could contribute to the play experience. 2) The actor cannot be equated with the character, since he has meta-knowledge about the game and the rules. 3) By introducing the actor, we have to abandon the simplistic idea, to the extent that we held it before, that system is just an algorithm which one runs through in the hope of getting the desired type of game as output. System actually influences the way players act, play and think. 4) The actor exists on the system plane. He is created in response to the system, to make it work. Each system will give rise to its own actor/s. The actor, then, can be considered a part of the system.

(3)

I think the notion of the actor can be developed into a powerful analytical tool. In order to give the reader a better understanding of the concept, I will provide some more examples.

(The following seven paragraphs were written by Simon Petterson)
Consider The Shab al-Hiri Roach. On the surface, this game appears to be competitive. There's even a win condition. The one who has the most Reputation at the end of the game wins. The problem is, if you really play the game to win, the game will break apart in a matter of minutes.

An example of this is the framing of conflicts. You get extra dice for every named character you narrate into the scene on your side. There's no limit on the number, here, so the logical thing to do, if you're playing to win, is to narrate in a heap of named characters into every conflict. Yet, nobody does this, as it would ruin the game.

In the same way, the logical thing to do when framing a conflict is to always twist the story so that both your Enthusiasms and your Expertise come into play, in every single conflict. This isn't so hard to do, if you're willing to let the story suffer, and it's enough with one type of conflict that fulfills that criterion, because then you can repeat it over and over again. However, this would also lead to boring play.

And again, trying to resist the roach's command. This demands that you sacrifice a point of Reputation for no mechanical benefit whatsoever. Since the actual story has no real way of influencing the mechanics, this would always be a bad choice if you play to win. And yet, people do this in play.

If you take only the player into consideration, the explanation would simply have to be that people don't play the game with the goal of winning. However, this is not really true. People do frame conflicts that are to their advantage, even if they don't go so far as to twist the story to do it. There are two conflicting goals here, that are both pursued simultaneously.

The explanation to this phenomenon can be found in the theory of the virtual actor. the player is mostly interested in creating a good story, but for this to happen, there needs to be conflict and competition. However, this competition needs to be kept in check so that it does not ruin the game. Thus, the player is constantly driving towards the goal of the good story, but he is pushed to make certain decisions by the actor, who is trying to win the game.

An example of this is the setting of scenes and the staking of Reputation. These two cannot be performed by the same "entity". The player is interested in the story, and as such, has no interest in the number of Reputation set at stake, since this has no effect on the story. The actor, on the other hand, is trying to win, and cannot be allowed to frame the scene, or all those things exemplified above will occur. The solution is, then, to let the player set the scene, and the actor evaluate the risks involved, and stake a number of Reputation appropriately.

Another example: On Swedish rpg forum www.rollspel.nu, criticism has sometimes been raised against what has been called "my-turn-to-say-something points", i e, some kind of currency used within the game by players to gain extra narrative rights (like the "drama points" in the Buffy RPG). Often, these self-same points can also be used to gain tactical advantages within the framework of the rules, such as, for instance, a bonus to an attack roll. The criticism is based on the seeming incommensurability between these two uses: there is no sense in having one kind of currency which gives the character either power over the story — used to introduce cool ideas and make the story better — or tactical advantages that help the characters along, since these two goals, better story and tactical advantage, are often opposed to each other. This has led some to wholly reject the use of my-turn-to-say-something points in their game design, claiming that they could not possibly work. However, I think it's an empirical fact that they do work, and that we need to try to understand why, if the criticism is right, this is still the case. And here, once again, the actor comes along to help us. On my hypothesis, the solution to the mystery would simply be this: the player, when using my-turn-to-say-something points, simply constructs an actor which takes care of one aspect of the point use — either the "better story" or the "tactical advantage" aspect — while he takes care of the other aspect himself.

In a common style of play which could perhaps be described as "setting-heavy simulationism", borrowing a little GNS terminology, an important aspect of the enjoyment derived from the game lies in the sense of being "transported" to another word. This experience necessitates the "suspension of disbelief", an important part of which is to act in accordance with what the knowledge and attitudes the character could be assumed to possess (i e avoid "metagaming) and in other ways behave as if the world was a real world and not the creation of a fickle GM. Presumably, however, this kind of behavior is seldom the ultimate agenda of the player (if it is, the game becomes something akin to "deep immersion", which I discuss below). More likely, the "in character" agenda is transferred to an actor, leaving the player free to follow his own ultimate goals when they coincide with this agenda.

(4)

Is there always an actor? My intuition is "no". In fact, I believe that certain styles of play can be characterized by their lack of an actor. I'm thinking here, primarily, of highly competitive gamist play, on the one hand, and what could perhaps be termed "deep immersion", on the other.

In a game like D&D, there's a rule for almost every circumstance. In case there isn't, the GM has complete adjudicatory power. These properties of the D&D system makes the use of an actor unnecessary, and in fact, I would not be afraid of suggesting that this was indeed the purpose of designing them such (even though the concept of the actor was most likely not explicitly held in mind). It could probably be argued from the perspective of a player used to this kind of rules that a game that necessitates the use of an actor is broken. In such a game as D&D, all players can have a remorselessly antagonistic agenda (antagonistic towards the GM, that is), and the game will work just fine even if all decisions are made in accordance with this agenda. D&D-style play, then, is a style of play that removes the actor by placing all decisions in the hands of the player.

Deep immersion could, a bit vaguely, be characterized as a style of play where the player attempts to "identify" with his character in all respects, to act like him, react like him, feel like him and think like him. The Turku manifesto comes to mind. In this style of play, there would be no need of an actor, since the player simply always acts like his character would be presumed to act. Deep immersion, then, is a style of play that gets rid of the actor by placing all decisions in the hands of the character.

(5)

That's all I've got, for now. However, I think this idea has potential to be elaborated further. Moreover, I believe that the actor is only one of a potentially large number of similar structures and patterns at work in the actual practice of roleplaying, that could be unearthed with further study and deeper analysis.

I am indebted to Simon Pettersson, Mikael Bergström and Arvid Axbrink for helping me elaborate these ideas, and to Simon in particular for providing me with the Roach example. The ideas put forth in this article were first discussed in this thread (in Swedish).

The Myths of Climate Change

2007-12-27T15:53:00.001+01:00

I have previously ranted against those who tackle the climate issue by changing their own consumption patterns, declaring their actions pointless. I will now clarify my position on this matter.

Let me start by stating very clearly that I do not condemn the act in itself of changing ones consumption habits to reduce CO2 emission. While retaining that this is indeed pointless I find nothing immoral or detrimental about it, and indeed I have myself changed my behavior.

What is, however, both immoral and detrimental is an attitude which I believe myself to have observed, that wishes to reduce the climate question wholly to a question of personal consumption. This attitude is spread by stylishly political celebrities, holier-than-thou enviro-gurus, writers, filmmakers, journalists, former American vice-presidents, and members of the well-meaning public. It is immoral because it is perpetuated for the sake of personal gain. It is detrimental because it is fallacious and misleading. It is, in short, a myth.

"The myth of individual responsibility" echoes strongly the mores of contemporary Western culture. We live in an era where the great collective endeavors have all failed. Collectivism is seen as an abomination, liberal market economy as a nature-given norm, grounded in ineffable, transcendent ethics. Ours is a culture where no man ever has to bother with anything above and beyond his own personal, private life. Society is a self-adjusting system, governed not by the will of the people but by macro-economical feedback-loops, the invisible hand of the market economy which guides everything to its right place. We are adjusted to thinking, not in terms of how we, as a collective, should manipulate society, but only how we, as individuals, should behave ourselves inside the rules given by society in order to maximize our gain. Politics is reduced to mere fashion statements (and to the meaningless gesture of the election booth). And indeed, it is a functioning system. It is a system which has brought us quite a deal of material prosperity and, perhaps, happiness. But it is a system fundamentally unable to tackle climate change.

The citizens of the west are unable to deal with the idea of collective efforts. Faced with a threat, they do what they've always done, what they're raised to do: they adjust their private behavior. They swallow the myth of individual responsibility with ease. It becomes a sedative for their worried consciences, as they tell themselves: "at least no-one can say that I didn't do anything". And the people who work to perpetuate the myth profit: the writer who writes a bestselling book on how to live a "climate smart" life, the celebrity who gains publicity for his lifestyle changes, the neighborhood moralist who preaches to his friends in order to win moral points.

And the earth grows hotter.

System, Techniques and the Future of Role-Playing

2007-10-30T00:41:00.000+01:00

Much of contemporary RPG theory considers the system as the focal point of creative endeavour within the hobby, a tendency that can be traced back to the Forge motto of "system does matter". As such, it has brought us a great deal of innovation in system design — indeed, no-one can deny that the last seven-or-so years have seen an explosion of new approaches to RPG systems; one needs only study the pages of Indie Press Revolution for all doubt in this matter to vanish.

In no way do I wish to deprecate the work made by those pioneers who gave us games like Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach, The Mountain Witch, etc. Surely, these games, and their creators, have offered more to our hobby than — I dare say — any other single creative community in all its history. However, I feel that we have reached the point when we know what system is capable of — thanks to the demonstrations of the aforementioned creators — and perhaps it is time to take a more critical look at what it is and what it can offer us.

If all these games can be said to have something in common, it is their narrowness. This narrowness is a consequence of the tight pairing between system and concept that is an important part of the design philosophy of the Forge and related communities. This pairing, which is the logical result of the battle cry, "system does matter!", guarantees that the system will present and highlight the concept in the best possible way. However, narrowness, while good for the purpose of allowing a better match between system and concept, is nothing good in itself. It locks players to the ideas of the designer, which might not be the same ideas as he would have explored, if he had the power to take any concept and make a game of it. Indeed, in many ways, indie RPGs are like adventure scenarios — they present one story, and the only choice players are given is whether to play that story or not.

By now, the reader is surely growing impatient with me. None of this is news to anyone, so what is my point? My point emerges from the simple observation that many roleplayers are concept developers. The popularity of mainstream games such as GURPS, which allow the group to play in any setting the like, points to this fact. Not everyone is content to play the concepts already presented to them by other designers, but at the same time, not everyone has what it takes to design his or her own system. And GURPS is not always a satisfying solution, since this system and others similar to it clearly defies "system does matter". So how to give these people what they want?

The techniques and mechanical solutions developed over the last few years by innovative designers constitute a tool-box, from which each neonate designer can pick and choose when clothing his own concept in system. Thus, while each system still more or less only supports its own concept, it's becoming increasingly easy to create such systems for new concepts. Sometimes, this results in "story game heartbreakers", games that do not contribute anything new to the toolbox, but simply reuse the techniques already developed. However, such a game, while probably not being innovative enough to attract the excitement of the larger community, might still fulfill the immediate needs and desires of its creator, when it comes to faciliating playing the concept in question.

As this toolbox grows, this process should become increasingly easy, and here, I think, lies the solution to the problem of our concept-maker. If only given enought tools, it will not be terribly difficult for him to assemble these tools by himself for the particular needs posed by his particular campaign. In such a scenario, even the mediocrest of system designers might play his own concepts by the credo of "system does matter".

However, there is no need to limit our toolbox to strictly mechanical features of system. On the contrary, there are, in roleplaying, many techniques, methods and skills which can not be said to be part of the system (understood in the classical sense of some set of formal principles — implicit or explicit — which the participants adhere to in their creation of the common narrative). Examples of such techniques might be, how NPCs and their relations are used to build a social world around the PCs; the use of improvisation by the GM; approaches to different subject matters, such as politics and ideology; etc. Moreover, there is no need to consider only those kinds of tools that adherents of the Forge design philosophy historically have been prone to create. There are indeed other design philosophies out there, and they too must be considered in order to create a synthesis of all sorts of techniques from which each group can take their pick when embarking upon a new campaign.

By making these tools available, not only as integrated parts of larger systems, but as independent building blocks, we empower players to make the best of their concepts, each according to his or her tastes. When this point is reached, something becomes apparent, namely, that the activity of roleplaying is no longer a matter of playing a particular game with a particular system, but rather, that the process is always and equally the same; to assemble out of a set of building-blocks the tools one needs for the moment. And then, perhaps, we can become aware that roleplaying is a skill, and should be learnt as such — and perhaps, more books can be published that are not simply new systems, but training manuals and how-to-guides that can teach and inspire roleplayers to become even better. It is my hope that this will be the great project of the next decade: to stop seeing RPG:s in terms of isolated systems and start thinking of it as a continuum of activities in need of a universal toolbox, and to begin development of this toolbox (which surely will be a neverending project, as it should). And I believe that this approach will better serve the interest of those of us who wish to see the potential of the medium expanded to its utmost limits.

The Man with No Subconscious

2007-10-21T15:34:00.000+02:00

This is a vague idea for an SF story, a roleplaying character or something else.

Imagine a man with no subconscious. He is aware of all his mental processes. What would that entail? When he hears spoken language, he is aware not only of the message communicated to him, but of everything from the squiggly shape of the sound wave as it reaches his eardrums, to the abstract syntactic structure underlying the sentences.

What would he do? Would he become a mastermind psychologist, able to explain hitherto unexplained mental phenomena simply through self-scrutiny? Or would he collapse under the sheer weight of awareness pressing on his mind, or even fall victim to a recursive loop, as he increasingly became aware of the very process of awareness?

The Only Solution

2007-10-01T18:20:00.000+02:00

Current mood: Climate despair :(
Current music: Looptroop — A Modern Day City Symphony

Stockholm, a modern day city symphony/
The dying Mother Nature once sang this hymn for me/
It's all vanity to try and uplift the crowd/
Ain't no use, no one can stop them now/
She quoted Bob Marley and I came to the conclusion/
Total destruction is the only solution/

Six Degrees

2007-09-30T17:06:00.000+02:00

This is a book review, of sorts.

I'm an emotional guy, but popular science books usually don't make me cry. However, as I read the final chapters of Mark Lynas' Six Degrees, I wept. I sat in a downtown café and literally could not hold my tears back. So horrific, so utterly hopeless is the picture of the future that Lynas presents in this summary of the latest in climate forecast science.

Here's the deal: the process of global warming has a certain inertia. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were to stop, suddenly and completely, tomorrow morning, temperatures would still continue to rise for several decades to come, for the same reason that the water doesn't immediately start to boil when you put the kettle on the stove — it takes some time for the higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to have their effect.

Even worse, there exists some positive feedback loops, which make sure that once global warming has started, it will quickly start to accelerate way beyond human capacity to stop it. As the polar icecaps melt, the albedo of the Earth decreases, meaning that more sunlight is absorbed as heat. Increasing temperatures lead to the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane from the tropics and from melting subarctic tundra, further adding to the greenhouse effect. And, scariest of all, warmer oceans can lead to the release of huge amounts of methane which has hitherto been locked at the bottom of the sea.

In the extreme scenario — six degrees of global warming — Mark Lynas prophesizes something similar to the Permian Mass Extinction, a cataclysmic event 250 million years ago when 95% of all species of life went extinct. In this scenario, humanity is unlikely to survive at all. But even in a less extreme case, the human race will be greatly decimated, and civilization will most certainly crumble.

This is a book that everyone should read. No, scratch that. There is nothing special about this book. It simply summarizes the science — science that should be common knowledge, but which remains a special interest of the few, while the great majority of people choose to remain in blissful ignorance. I hate to get moralistic, but when push comes to shove, this has nothing to do with morals. It has to do with survival. Our survival. Your survival.

I have seen my death

2007-09-28T13:04:00.000+02:00

I have seen my death, a thousand times over.

I will get shot in the back during a food riot as I try to plunder a grocery store.
I will die of heat stress in a car with a broken air conditioning while fleeing from a burning city.
I will drown as a rat, trapped in a house during a flash flood.
I will be beaten to death by teenagers out to steal my bottle of water.
I will starve in a refugee camp, too weak to fight for the scraps of food provided by the authorities.

There used to be a time when I was optimistic about the future. I figured, come hell or high water, humanity would persevere. We would suck it up and keep on fighting. But I'm not so sure anymore.

I have been reading about global warming. It's not a practical joke. It's not one problem among others, one more addition to the long list of fucked-up shit that humanity has to deal with. It is the problem. I am confident in my conviction that humanity has never faced a bigger threat than global warming. The climate question is the most important political question — not just of our time, but of all times. Which just adds to the tragedy in the fact that it can't be dealt with. There is no single entity today on this planet with the power to stop global warming, and none of the entities which, together, might be able to do something about it seem very interested. To put it frankly: we're fucked. We've set fire to our planet, and now all that's left is to watch it slowly burning to a cinder.

Today's book: Mark Lynas — Six Degrees.

Postmodern Shaman Fight!

2007-09-25T14:40:00.000+02:00

This weekend, I attended Stockholms Spelkonvent (Stockholm Gaming Convention). There, I witnessed a game of Bliss Stage, Ben Lehman's new game about psychic mecha battles. This, and the subsequent conversation, inspired me to make my own psychic mecha setting.

I consider my setting to be one of "postmodern shamanism". This means, among other things, that the symbols and tropes of classical shamanism — animal totems, masks, fetishes etc — have been substituted for the symbols and tropes of modern popular culture. Consequently, when shamans do battle in the spirit world, they don't do it in the form of animals or anything like that, but in the form of mechas! (Or, concievably, something similar, like X-wings and TIE-fighters).

Okay, so you play shamans, right? But this ain't your father's shamans. The spirit world has come under siege by the meme-pool of mankind. Cartoon characters, computer ghosts, men in black, psychic extraterrestrials and anthropomorfic manifestations of cultural phenomena roam the collective subconscious. Shamans adhering to schools, ranging from those that wish to return to the ways of old to those who fully embrace the blessings of modern technology and upload their spirits on the psychic Internet, battle it out in mental vistas inspired by the genre staples of popular fiction. Governments try to control the spirit world through insidious schemes while anarchistic dream hackers strike out against oppression. And the old gods still linger, waiting for a chance to reclaim their glory.

System: Central to this game would be the system for psychic combat, by which you fight out battles with your mecha. Since it all takes place in the spirit world, the mecha can have all kinds of crazy abilities. I'm imagining a fast-paced system with lots of room for narrative extravagance. Maybe something effect based.

One Can Have Her

2007-08-01T09:30:00.000+02:00

One Can Have Her is written by my fellow wrnu-ite Jonas Ferry. It's set in the grim, black-and-white world of film noir, and concerns the struggles of a few men on the wrong side of the law, and the woman they all love. The game has its own website over here, and it can be bought as a pdf for $10.

The premise of OCHH is simple enough: The characters are all film noir-stereotypes. They all have a goal that they strive to fulfill, a horrible crime in their past, and an enemy that stands in their way. And they're all in love with the same woman, the femme fatale. The game concerns the characters' struggle to defeat their enemy, reach their goal, avoid the repercussions of their crime and, of course, to get the femme fatale. As the title suggests, only one character can reach this desirable outcome.

Chargen: Chargen is completely non-mechanical. You simply decide your character's name, his crime, his enemy and his film noir stereotype, plus his relation to the femme fatale. All characters are male, as are all important NPCs except for the femme fatale. This is a man's world. All choices are made from lists of ten options each, pre-generated by the GM. Example lists accompany the game, but GMs may make their own. Chargen is deliberately kept simple; the idea is to flesh out characters through actual play.

Chargen does not tie in to the resolution mechanic in any way, which is fine with me. You don't have "skills" or "attributes" that affect your chances to win conflicts, and in my opinion, this is just as it should be in a game like this. After all, in a co-narrative game like OCHH, resolution is about plot management, not about simulating the characters' in-game abilities. In this regard, OCHH is very intelligently designed - moreso than many an indie rpg I've read. I think many game designers would succumb to the temptation to throw in a couple of "aspects" or "talents" or whatever that wouldn't contribute to the game, but Jonas Ferry doesn't. Kudos for that!

Resolution Mechanic: The resolution rules use cards. Each player begins play with a hand of seven cards. In a conflict with an NPC, the GM gets his own hand, and the party identified as the "agressor" starts by playing some cards on the table. You can play a single card, a pair, a three-of-a-kind and so on. The opponent must beat the value of your cards and the number of cards you played. I'm at somewhat of a loss as to the exact purpose of this mechanic. It provides an extra tactical element in the game, but why it was included, I don't know. Perhaps Jonas Ferry might shed some light on this?

Every conflict has exactly one "agressor", and he is the only one allowed to define his stakes before the conflict. If he loses, he is not allowed to start a new conflict over the same stakes later in the game. That means that if you try to kill someone and fails, you can't try again later. The purpose of this rule seems to be to keep the story moving forward in new directions, and perhaps to give a sense of "spiral of failure"; more often than not, the stories told in OCHH is tragical, and seeing one's character losing one hope after another could certainly contribute to this. I think I like this rule.

Face cards have special effects. When you play them, the conflict immediately ends, and depending on whether you played a jack, a queen or a king, different events take place in the story. If you play a jack, the police arrives. A queen signifies the arrival of the femme fatale, and the king means that the enemy of one of the participants appears on the scene. This might mean that the victory goes to the player of the face card, through the actions of whoever just entered the scene, or that the conflict is interrupted and can be picked up again at a later time. This is a nice rule that guarantees that the femme fatale and the characters' enemies never become unimportant, and gives the players a certain amount of direct control over them.

Narrative Power: Narrative power is distributed in a fairly traditional pattern. Players control their characters and may frame scenes. The GM controls all NPCs.

Endgame: As players use up the cards on their hands, the game approaches its principal moment: ratting. According to Jonas Ferry, OCHH was concieved as an rpg based on "the prisoners dilemma" of game theory fame. In the ratting phase, each player secretly writes down if he will rat. The rules are unclear on whether it is possible to rat on several other characters. In any case: Each character ratted on goes to jail for his crime or is destroyed by his enemy. If one single character avoids being ratted on, he gets to attain his goal and the girl of his dreams, the femme fatale. If two or more characters avoid being ratted on, neither of them achieves his goals or gets the girl, but at least they stay out of jail.

Now, the thing with the prisoner's dilemma is precisely that it isn't a dilemma. Game theory-wise, there is only one reasonable course of action: to rat! On the other hand, the ratting phase of OCHH isn't a real prisoners dilemma, so it's all the same. In any case, the players are presumably expected to act on the basis of their characters' personalities, as developed through play, and their relationships with the other characters, rather than on pure game theory strategy. Which is a good thing, because there is no real mechanical connection between the ratting phase and the rest of the game: the only connection is the story.

Final opinion: OCHH seems like a fun game with a number of clever design solutions. Definitely a game I could imagine playing.

Lacuna

2007-07-31T10:10:00.000+02:00

In Lacuna by Jared Sorensen (bloody dane!), you play Mystery Agents, tasked with exploring the collective subconscious known as "the Blue City", finding Hostile Personalities (the bad stuff that makes people into killers, rapists and psychopaths), and eradicating them. The Blue City is a mysterious place, and expeditions into it are fraught with peril; some of it in the form of the Spidermen, spiderheaded beings with an unknown agenda who appear now and then to attack agents.

Lacuna is kind of a gimmicky game, which means that it's harder than usual to tell if some particular aspect is a "bug" or a "feature". But hey, let's give it a shot.

Chargen: Lacuna promotes anonymous characters. This is an obvious "feature, not a bug" - Lacuna is not supposed to be about the characters. Lacuna characters are empty shells, whose sole purpose are to serve as vehicles for the players to explore the setting and the mystery. This, at least, is my analysis; Lacuna is not a game for character immersion enthusiasts. Chargen consists of assigning stats (dealing entirely with the characters performative abilities), randomly (!) generating a name (from a list of 100 common english surnames), and setting the characters heart rate (more on that later). The heart rate, an important stat, is determined by the character's age, which in turn is determined randomly - in my opinion, a completely unnecessary piece of real-world causality simulation in an otherwise rather abstract game.

Resolution mechanic: Lacuna's resolution mechanic is simple enough: roll a couple of dice, sum, and compare to difficulty. The complicating element concerns the character's heart rate. This starts at a resting pace, determined at chargen, and every time you roll, you add the result of your roll to your heart rate. When your heart rate reach a certain level, also determined at chargen, bad things start to happen, and ultimately, you're extracted from the mission. As far as I can tell, this mechanic serves to give a sense of "fight against the clock" to the game. Whether it works, I'll let playtest decide.

Static: An interesting mechanic in Lacuna is static. Static is a stat that pertains to the entire group. In a in-game sense, it measures the amount of conflict between the players and Control (the mission overseers), but around the table, it is a story management device. To put it simply: the more static the group has, the deeper into the mystery they'll delve. The group gains static from specific actions, like disobeying orders, requesting backup, and so on. Specific amounts of static is related to specific events in the story. For instance, when preparing a story, the GM might decide that 21 points of static will mean the players come in contact with the spidermen.

The static mechanic particularly catched my attention because I have been playing around with a similar mechanic for one of my own projects. I think that, at least theoretically, it's a good way of controlling a story and makes sure it gets where it's going. But here, too, playtest will have to be the judge.

Setting and story: The cover of Lacuna says "part 1". Does that mean there will be a part 2? I don't know, but there definitely could be. The setting of Lacuna is as much a mystery to the GM as it is to the players. Maybe you're supposed to make up your own explanations. Maybe you're supposed to keep it mysterious. Or maybe you're supposed to wait for part two. (An indie game with a metaplot? Madness!) I don't know, and I don't know if I like not knowing, but that's for each and every one to decide for himself.

DRYH Playtest Report

2007-07-31T09:10:00.000+02:00

This sunday, I playtested Don't Rest Your Head with two buddies. This is how it went down.

First, chargen. Making characters in DRYH is a very non-mechanical process: it consists mainly of answering a questionnaire whose purpose is to tie in the character to the story and the setting. This questionnaire is the entry-point for the GM wishing to create stories that relate to the characters, and is the main tool for maing DRYH a "pickup-game".

The questionnaire consists of five questions, one of which is "What just happened to you?". This question allows the player to determine the first scene of the game as regards this character, and allows him to control the direction in which his story will go (together with another question, "What is your path?", where the player can describe how he pictures the character's future). However, neither of my players really took this opportunity; their opening scenes were strange things that forced them to react (one player found himself trapped in a flooded hotel, the other was witness to a bird attacking and killing a man), but they weren't really the beginning of stories, and so I had to create the story myself. Well, that was their loss.

As I mentioned in my review earlier, DRYH is a pretty conventional game when it comes to how the plot is managed and how the narrative power is distributed; eg, the GM controls it all. So I decided to run it just that way. I presented the players with obstacles they had to overcome using their smarts and the resolution mechanic. This went fairly well - after all, I am an experienced GM of the traditional kind.

I used the resolution mechanic frequently - moreso than I would in a game using your run-of-the-mill system, because it is pretty much what DRYH is all about. I don't remember reading about this specifically in the text anywhere, but I chose to present the difficulty of all actions before the players decided which and how many dice to use. This was probably one reason why the players succeeded with most of their actions, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, because more successes also means a faster spiral towards echaustion and madness, which is all fine and dandy. Without that spiral, DRYH would kind of lose its point.

One thing about the resolution mechanic irked me. When pain dominates, the GM gets points which he can spend to fuck things up for the players. However, when those coins are spent, the players get coins which can be used to exactly offset the effect of the GM's coins. It all ends up at plus minus zero, which is a lot of bookkeeping for no reason at all (that's a truth with some modification, but not much). I consider this an obvious bug in the system, and next time I run DRYH I will houserule my way around it.

I regret that I didn't get the chance to see the resolution mechanic from the players' point of view, because as a GM I couldn't really determine whether the part of play where you get to decide how much madness and exhaustion to bet on the roll and see your madness and exhaustion ratings slowly creep upwards is interesting or not. All I can say is that it worked well, mechanically. I also regret that I didn't have a chance to see the players crash or snap. >:)

The adventure played out nicely. I had fun, and as far as I could tell, so did the players. I think I managed to whip up a pretty convincing "fight against the clock" scenario, with a nice little cliffhanger at the end. I could definitely picture myself playing DRYH again.

Wendy's World

2007-07-24T08:28:00.000+02:00

Two threads on Story Games led me to this idea. This one about non-character-centered play, and this one about a game called "The Princess Game". Now, note that I've not actually read The Princess Game: just that blurb in the thread. Earlier, when I read the first thread, I started toying with the idea of a game centered around one NPC character, where the players controlled different aspects of the world around him/her. When I read the princess thread, I got dissapointed at discovering that you didn't play the world around the princess, but rather aspects of the princess's mind. And then I realized the obvious connection between these two thoughts.

So, the idea is this: Wendy is a girl with a vivid imagination. A very vivid imagination. In fact, sometimes it's like her make-believe world gets a life of its own. That its inhabitants get their own life and their own agendas.

This game is divided into scenes. Between scenes, the players can switch characters. Every character has an agenda. Naturally, the only way to fulfill an agenda is through Wendy. To some, Wendy is the long lost queen of Far away who must be returned to her rightful place. To others, she is the brave captain of the pirate ship "The Albatross", who are going to lead her crew to riches and glory. In order to win the game, players must incorporate Wendy into their story. Each scene may end with a conflict wherein Wendy might potentially switch sides. At the end of the session, the player who has fulfilled most agendas win.

Something like that, in any case. I'll think more about this.

The Dictionary of Mu

2007-07-23T09:02:00.000+02:00

Next in line is The Dictionary of Mu, by Judd Karlman. This actually isn't a game at all, but a setting sourcebook for Ron Edward's Sorcerer. Consequently, there isn't much in the way of a system to analyze. If I were familiar with Sorcerer, I would be able to comment on how well the Dictionary utilizes the Sorcerer system, but I'm not and I won't.

The setting is an original take on the old "Mars as a dying desert planet" concept born with Wells and Burroughs. Here, Mars is the home of a number of "lost civilizations" of Earthly myths, stories, and crackpot theories: Atlantis, Lemuria, Hy-Brasil and so on. It is a vicious, brutal place whose inhabitants have realized their planet is in its death throws and long to leave it behind on ships headed for the stars. On Mars, all things dead, dying and forgotten are reborn as demons, malicious spirits, and this is where the setting ties in with the sorcerer system - sorcerer being a game where you bind and control demons.

The Dictionary is a setting and a campaign. Important future events are hinted at throughout the book, and it's easy to incorporate them into the campaign. Characters with fates on a world-altering scale are statted out as PCs. There is even a system to decide when and how the campaign will end: with the start of the next epoch. (The transition between epochs is marked by a cataclysmic event). The Dictionary of Mu provides a setting made for messing up.

The Dictionary is an inspiring read. If it turns out that I like the sorcerer system as well (I've got the game at home but I've never read it; I'm gonna have to deal with that now), I could definitely imagine GMing a shorter campaign in this setting. However, because of its world-shattering nature, it seems ill-suited for repeated campaigns. The Dictionary is one story: much of the setting material is in the form of events, present and future, rather than places and things. And any story becomes duller with repeated readings.

Don't Rest Your Head

2007-07-22T12:51:00.000+02:00

Lately, I've been stocking up on indie RPGs, and I thought I should share my personal opinions about them as I read them. First out is Don't Rest Your Head, by Fred Hicks (of Spirit of the Century fame).

Setting: The setting is certainly the main selling-point for DRYH. It's awesome-cool. Indie game designers tend to have kind of a setting-phobia, which is a shame really. The setting of Polaris, for instance, is so awesometacular that I think the game would have benefitted to be twice as large, with all the extra space detailing the setting. DRYH, however, is very setting-heavy, which, in this case, is a good thing.

The setting is called the Mad City. It is the place where Nightmares live, where it's always night, and where the face of the clock has thirteen hours. It's a wonderful, terrible nightmare fairyland. Very inspiring stuff. Player characters are insomniacs extraordinaire on the run from Nightmares and their own personal problems, and trying not to fall asleep.

Resolution mechanic: DRYH has an interesting resolution mechanic. You roll a shitload of dice of different colors. Some dice are Discipline dice, some are Exhaustion dice and some are Madness dice. The GM rolls Pain dice. The single die that shows the highest result determines what dominates the conflict; if the highest die is a Discipline die, Discipline dominates the conflict, and so on. If Exhaustion, Madness or Pain dominates, that's bad news. This means your character will get more exhausted, madder, or that stuff will get painful, respectively. When you get too exhausted, you crash. When you get too mad, you snap. If you crash, the Nightmares will find you and kill you, and if you snap, you become a Nightmare yourself.

It's a lot to keep in mind when using the rules, and I have a suspicion that they will be kind of slow and heavy in actual play, but I'm gonna have to wait until after playtest to say anything specific.

Story management: DRYH is pretty traditional when it comes to narrative power and adventure construction. There's a GM, charged with the task of writing adventures, framing scenes, narrating results of conflicts and so on. Fred Hicks gives some suggestions about how to loosen up this playstyle and give more power to the players, but it isn't really built into the system in any way.

Campaigning: DRYH has some nice deals when it comes to structuring the campaign. Character creation centers around a questionnaire, and gives a lot of advice to the GM on how to use the player's answers to these question to write a campaign that is relevant to the PCs. This is a technique that I myself use in almost every campaign, so its not really news to me, but it's nice to see it so explicitly spelled-out and given so much attention.

One rule that I found to my liking was the rule about scars. It works like this: every time a character has a failure or learns an important lesson, the player can write it down on his sheet as a scar. Then, as game progresses, the player can use the scar as a game resource to improve rolls. The more scars a character has, the more often will he be able to use them to change a roll to his advantage. This is as close as DRYH gets to having an experience mechanic. What it means is that characters actually learn from important experiences in their lives, rather than by killing monsters or just attending the session.

Overall opinion: DRYH has a cool setting and a potentially interesting system. I hope I'll be given a chance to playtest it soon.

It Doesn't Matter

2007-07-09T11:53:00.001+02:00

Once again, I'm gonna go contrary to my principles and blog about politics. This time, my attention was drawn by this article in Dagens Nyheter, where Jennifer Aniston talks about how she, environmentally concious as she is, only showers three minutes a day. And she even brushes her teeth while in the shower!

No doubt, these little tricks go a long way towards ameliorating Aniston's guilty conscience for belonging to one of the most environmentally taxing populations in the world. But what beneficial effects do they have for the environment, the very thing Aniston hopes to protect by her quick-shower strategy? The sad but true answer is: nothing at all.

Let's change subject quickly. Public elections. Every fourth year, the swedish people hits the ballots. And each time, complaints are made: Too few people vote. Too many choose to remain on their couches. Why won't these people take their democratic responsibility? Don't they realize that they have a chance to make a difference?

Well, in actual fact, they don't. The swedish electorate consists of millions of people. The impact of any individual vote on the result of an electorate is, effectively, zero. It's not precisely zero, of course, but for all intents and purposes, your vote does not matter. Actually, it's the people who go to the ballots who are the fools, and those who stay home who got it right. (I voted for the Green Party in the last election).

"But what if everyone thought this way?" Well, when it comes to voting, everyone doesn't. And me ranting about it on a blog certainly won't change that fact. People have bought into the myth of the public election. And even if people realized the futility of voting, there wouldn't be a problem, because the less people who vote, the more each individual vote actually counts. Somewhere, there's an equilibrium.

The same argument can of course not be applied to the environment. If everyone acted like Jennifer Aniston, then surely the environment would benefit. But it is still a fact that the impact of Jennifer Aniston's actions is, effectively, nil. Aniston has her heart in the right place, sure, and hopefully, her attitude can inspire others - and if enough people are inspired, then the impact can become real. But this doesn't change the fact that when Aniston chooses to shower for three minutes instead of ten, she's making an irrational choice.

We need less self-righteous celebrities talking about their shower-habits, and more world leaders actually making some meaningful decisions to save the environment - because otherwise we're all deep in the shit.

Weeee-ki

2007-07-07T15:23:00.000+02:00

These last few days I've finally gotten around to fixin' up my old homepage. You can check it out at kalle.gmbhtech.com.

At the same time, I got the guy who hosts my homepage to give me a wiki (thanks, Mats). On this, I'm going to write down ideas and notes about systems, settings and other stuff rpg-related. Be sure to check it out, now and then. This doesn't mean that I'll stop writing about my ideas here. The wiki and the blog will complement each other; the blog will contain more of the how-to and the why and the thoughts behind the design process, whereas the wiki will contain the stuff itself. Plus, now and then I'll post here about notable additions to the wiki.

Mad Catz: Revised Edition

2007-07-04T15:11:00.000+02:00

Okay, this is a short idea I got while looking over my old website. Once upon a time, I wrote a roleplaying game about "cats living it up while their owners are gone". You can download and read the pdf here (it's in swedish).

Anyway, I wrote this game before being introduced into Forgeism and modern game design and all that jazz, so it has fairly traditional rules. So when I read the description, "cats living it up while their owners are gone", I thought, well, couldn't you make like a forge-style game from this premise. You could make it into a competition. Like, the game is divided into scenes, and each scene has an increasing chance for the owners to come home. The more daring stuff you do, the more points you get (represented in the game world by esteem in the eyes of other cats), but if the owners come home and find you in the process of killing the canary or whatever, you lose. It would need some kind of mechanism to make it wortwhile to save the most outrageous stunts 'til last, to avoid that players just blow off all their craziest things in the first scene.

Oh well, just a little idea.

What is RPG Theory?

2007-07-03T14:16:00.000+02:00

The following is an attempt to pin down what is meant - or rather, what should be meant - by the word "RPG theory". I make no claims with this blog post, I simply wish to muse a little on this subject.

In any RPG, there is rules. These rules are part of a social contract, decided upon by the participants. Two kind of rules exist. Game rules govern the process of play, non-game rules govern other aspects of the shared experience. We will attempt to demarcate between these two kinds of rules later on. Rules may be explicit or implicit.

We define RPG theory as such: RPG theory is the study of game rules.

We define game rules as such: Any RPG session worthy of the name forms a narrative - a fictional series of event taking place in some fictional setting. This narrative is shaped by the decisions of the players. Game rules are such rules that govern these decisions; when they might be made, by whom, and what set of possible decisions they may be chosen from. Game rules also include such rules that by themselves "make decisions" about or affect the narrative

Accordingly, the formal, explicit, written-down rules of most rpg books are game rules, but game rules also include unspoken conventions, as well as decisions made by each gaming group. Examples of such unwritten rules include "the GM has veto in matters of world description", "A character is controlled by its player, and him alone", "Characters can't use their 'convince'-skill on each other" and so on.

Game rules can be studied in several different ways and with several different purposes. Below, I've tried to describe a number of fruitful approaches, but there are most certainly more.

Superficial properties: A straightforward approach to the study of RPGs is to study the superficial properties of game rules. Are they fast or slow? Do they require little bookkeeping, or lots? Are they realistic, or do they convincingly simulate some prestated setting or genre? Are they well-defined, or do they require a lot of arbitration from the participants? How do they distribute narrative power? This is of course a necessary first step no matter how one aims to proceed in one's analysis.

Player behavior: One way to study game rules is to see how they interact with player psychology and what kind of behavior they encourage. Presumably, the designer will want to encourage some types of behavior and discourage others. By studying how rules affect behavior, he will be able to create rules that promote the desired behavior.

Game experience: Instead of studying the behaviour caused by certain rules, one might study the effect the rules have on the game experience. These two lines of inquiry are of course related, since a player's experience will be greatly affected by the behaviour the rules cause in himself and his fellow players. While the study of player behavior takes the standpoint of the designer, the study of experience rather takes the standpoint of the player. A player might choose to behave in a particular way despite the rules working against him, but this will affect his experience in a negative way. However, rules that aid the kind of behavior the player strives toward will create a better experience.

System theory: The set of rules used by any one gaming group can be thought of as a system of rules. The rules within the system interact, and the purpose of system theory is to describe how they interact - harmoniously or disharmoniously - and to what effect. This ties in to the study of behavior and experience, as one rule that promotes one kind of behavior/experience might be counteracted by another rule, promoting a different kind of behavior/experience.

Game theory: Some species of roleplaying approach traditional games in that non-trivial strategical or tactical choices are made by the players in order to win some in-game benefit - maybe even to win the game. The analysis of this kind of roleplaying parallells the analysis of games in general, and may thus be thought of as "game theory" (not to be confused with the mathematical discipline with the same name, of course). The ultimate goal of game theory is, of course, to create a game that is interesting to play.

Dramaturgy: Roleplaying is a narrative medium, and as such, it has dramaturgy. One way to approach RPG theory is to study how rules can be used to control the dramaturgy of the roleplaying session. There is widely considered to exist "good" and "bad" dramaturgy, and so, the most obvious application of the dramaturgical approach to rpg theory would be to describe how rules must look in order to promote a good dramaturgy.

Metarules: A field that, by the above definition, does not qualify as "RPG theory" is the study of metarules, that is, those rules within the social contract that govern how the gaming group decide upon which game rules to use. A common metarule, employed by many gaming groups, is "the GM has final say in rules disputes". However, metarules are seldom this explicit. I've chosen not to include the study of metarules in my definition of RPG theory, since they are related more to the sociodynamics of the gaming group than to the roleplaying experience as such.

First Larping Experience

2007-07-01T06:37:00.000+02:00

So, this weekend I've been larping, for the first time in my 21-and-a-half-year old life. It was... awful.

It was like one of those really boring rpg session where you just kinda glance up at the clock all the time and wish it was over, but with the difference that you know it won't end for another 24 hours; instead of someone's warm, cozy living room you're out in the cold, rainy forest; and you can't even take to the last resort — OOC talk — because then everyone will be pissed at you. Plus I had one hell of a headache, was tired and a little sick, so I aborted the whole thing and headed home.

So, why was it boring? I've identified three culprits: the organizers, the inherent properties of larping, and myself. Humble as I am, I'm putting more responsibility with myself than with the organizers. As regards the inherent properties of larping, I can't say for sure how big a part they played, and I'm gonna have to try larping at least one more time — with another character, other expectations and better preparations — to be able to decide how much of my boredom was specific to this larp, and how much was related to larping in general, and thus, whether I'm able of enjoying larping or not.

Well, let's get down to it:

Myself: I had created a boring character. It was a scientist with an immense interest in racial biology. In a regular tabletop game, I would probably have tons of fun with him, but in the context of this larp, he proved to be boring. I could probably have made him more interesting, by being more proactive, but I didn't have any in-character incentives for being proactive, and ooc, well, I'm kinda shy. I could have done what I suppose a lot of people do at larps: just kick back, relax and talk smack in character with the other characters. But my character was kind of a bore, and what more, it had been established early on that the group he belonged to was more or less disliked by all of the other groups. And there's that thing with being shy, again. And to be honest, I think there's a limit to how interesting in character smack talking can become — I mean, If I wanted to talk, I'd call some buddies over to watch videos; when I'm roleplaying, I wanna create stories.

The organizers: The organizers, no kudos denied them for the immense job they had surely done, had given me a really boring plot. It can be summarized as "You gotta find an orc to do experiments on". Okay, I found an orc. Now what? Doing experiments — awesome as my character found it — isn't really all that interesting a part of play.

I have more issues with the way the larp was organized, not pertaining to my character specifically. For one, I couldn't help notice that high-status characters (i.e. ministers, arch-magicians and the like) were more involved in the plot than characters of more humble status. Of course, this might not necessarily be a consequence of their high status alone, but might be because those that played high-status characters were often experienced players, with more knowledge about the campaign setting, a better feel for the sort of things that are and aren't allowed, encouraged and discouraged, and more familiarity with the other players and how to interact with them to create fruitful plot-hooks. But to the extent that they were more involved in the plot because of their higher status as such, I think this is a problem which should be adressed. Noone should be chastised because he chooses to play a character of low status.

Another thing which made me react was how the high geopolitical level of the plot and the main characters meshed badly with the larping environment. For some reason, we were supposed to buy the notion that a number of incredibly powerful individuals — arch-magicians, generals, ministers — had travelled far out into the woods to sleep in tents and eat around the fire with common soldiers and, for that matter, racial biologists. It really fucked up my suspension of disbelief. It felt like the plot was one game, and the "going around in medieval clothes in the woods" was one game, and the two games just happened to take place at the same time. Since I wasn't really involved in the plot, I played "going around in the woods" most of the time :). Anyway, I suppose this is how the organizers want their game to look like, but personally, I would make a plot that better suited the environment. Why not change "arch-magician of the realm of dark fairies" to "the local wise man", "general" to "chieftain" and "minister" to "village elder"?

The inherent properties of larping: In a tabletop rpg, stuff happens all the time. If stuff doesn't happen, something is wrong — the GM should do a better job, or perhaps the combat system is sucky. In larping, this attitude simply isn't possible. Things won't happen all of the time. Or, more specifically, things won't happen all of the time to all of the characters. And if they do, they're not necessarily very interesting things. You can compromise with four other people to get a story that you halfway like, but you can't compromise with a hundred other people. I suppose a lot of people have no problem sitting around for an hour with nothing in particular to do, but I do have. I don't think this problem can be adressed — it is an inevitable consequence of the way larping works. I don't know how large its influence is, and I will surely attend another larp in order to find out, but it is this fact that threatens to become the reason Calvino did not become a larper.

Ability Typology

2007-05-16T15:07:00.000+02:00

The following is a typology of player character abilities in "gamey" ("speliga") systems, based on the notion that choice is what makes such games fun to play. Examples have been taken from the feats and special abilities of D&D 3rd edition.

Static effects: This kind of ability doesn't increase the number of choices available to the player; it simply gives him some static rules benefit. Examples of this kind of ability include the feat "cleave" and the class ability "evasion".

Additional choices: With this kind, the character has to make some kind of choice. Examples might include the "dodge" feat, which forces the player to choose one opponent against whom the feat will have effect, or the "rapid shot" feat, which gives the character the choice of making extra attacks at the cost of decreased hit chance.

Resource management: While the choices given by the "additional choices" kind of ability are located in the here and now, "resource management" abilities force the character to think of the future. Resource management is about spending a limited resource in the most optimal manner. Examples abound in D&D: all magic is of this variety, as well as all abilities that have a limited number of uses per day.

Application: I believe that "static effects" abilities should be separated from the other two kinds of abilities in chargen, so that players will not be tempted to pick "static effects" abilities in favour of the other two kinds, and thus decrease his own enjoyment of the game.

Furthermore, I think that the number of "additional choices" abilities available to players should not increase markedly over the course of the game. They may change, yes, but not increase. This is because I believe that there is an ideal number of choices: too few choices will make the game automatic and boring, too many will be confusing. Given that there is an ideal number of choices, players should have access to this number of choices from the onset of the game, and it should be constant for the whole duration of the campaign.

Churchill and Prepositions

2007-04-22T20:55:00.000+02:00

Oh, and another thing:

There's a classic quote, erroneously attributed to Churchill (like so many others), re: the issue of whether one, in english, may end a sentence with a preposition:

"This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put".

(Allegedly spoken by Churchill when one of his officials corrected him on this issue). However, I just realized that "up" in this sentence is actually not a preposition at all, but rather a verb particle, and that the quote thus, hilarious as it may be, is absolutely irrelevant to the debate about final prepositions. To wit: Noone could — on any grounds whatsoever — argue against the correctness of:

"This is the kind of nonsense with which I will not put up".

with "up" final. And as can be heard by anyone with an ear for english, this does not sound even nearly as stupid as the previous quote. So, I guess it's prescriptivists 1 — funny guys 0.

Heist — the RPG

2007-04-22T20:35:00.000+02:00

The following is a little funny idea I got while discussing character archetypes with a buddy. The concept is a role-playing game, geared towards problem solving, wherein you play criminals planning and performing various heists. Think "Jönssonligan — the RPG" but without the comedically motivated inability of the main characters ever to succeed.

So the mechanics would be such that they motivate the careful planning and performing of the heist; gathering intel, scouting out sites, thinking up alibis and coming up with outrageous plots to break into/out of whatever it is that is to be broken into/out of.
Presumably, they would combine a fair amount of traditional adventure design (the GM creates the situation beforehand) with a certain measure of on-the-fly obstacle generation.

A potentially cool mechanic would be if, once the breaking and entering is about to begin in earnest, the game is broken down into rounds just like in combat in a traditional game, but instead of the activities of characters in these rounds consisting of attacks and parries, they would consist of picking a lock, dodging a security camera, sedating a guard, cracking a safe, coordinating the team from the getaway car and so on.

Since the idea was born out of a conversation about character archetypes, here are a couple of character roles that could fit into such a game:

Sneaky guy: Good at sneaking into places and dodging security.
Lockpicker: Can open doors and get into places.
Contact guy: Has his ear close to the street. Good at social stuff.
Driver: Drives the getaway car.
Hacker: Can enter encrypted networks and get info.
Safecracker: Cracks safes.
Con man: Can pose as other people and trick the gullible.
Goon: Beats people up.

Resource Management

2007-04-01T11:38:00.000+02:00

I read an article by Monte Cook, and it got me thinking about resource management. There is a somewhat paradoxical observation that can be made about resource management. We might call it "the paradox of resource management", and it is this: having to manage resources makes the game more interesting, but when you're out of resources, the game becomes less interesting. So a good design incorporates resource management, while at the same time avoiding that the players ever run out of their resources. How can this be achieved?

Monte Cook, in his article, talks about magic (D&D magic, of course, since it's Monte Cook). He proposes a distinction between two types of magic: one that is resource-managed, and one that is not. The one that is not is, interestingly enough, the kind of magic used in combat; attack spells, spells that improve the fighting abilities of one's allies, and so on.

In the dungeoncrawl D&D-epigon I'm currently working on (see also), I plan to make the combat system such that all damage is lost at the end of the fight. That way, players won't have to feel that they are less and less fit for fight the further the adventure goes on. Of course, this won't make battles any less interesting or deadly, as there is still the risk of losing all your health before the fight is over and thus die.

Cook's column opened my eyes to the fact that damage need not be the only resource handled in this way. Extending this idea to the general case, one can perhaps talk about combat resources and adventure resources. Combat resources are such resources that find their use solely within the domain of combat, such as damage, attack spells and so on. It is sufficient to make these resources limited within the scope of a single combat, where their high usefulness and the immediate threat of death makes this limitation relevant. Adventure resources, on the other hand, frequently find their use outside of combat. Spells and special abilities that makes it easier to overcome adventure-level obstacles, like perhaps a spell that allows one to walk through walls, are good examples of this. In this group, we also find some obviously combat-related abilities that are unlikely to be used in every combat, but rather find their function in specific kinds of encounters that might or might not appear in the adventure, like — to take a D&D example — a cleric's ability to turn undead. Adventure resources must be limited on the level of the entire adventure, or they will effectively not be limited at all.

The above observation suggests one step towards the solution to the paradox of resource management, one that I plan to implement in my dungeoncrawling game.

Calvino's guide to pronouncing the interdental fricative

2007-03-31T21:15:00.000+02:00

You put the tip of your tongue between your teeth and go:

"ththththththththththththththththththththththththththththththhhhh"

It's really not any harder than that.

Greaser

2007-03-30T23:43:00.000+02:00

"Greaser" is an acquired template that can be added to any humanoid or monstrous humanoid (hereafter referred to as the base creature).

A greaser speaks any languages it knew before it became a greaser, and it has all the base creature's statistics and special abilities except as noted here.

Size and type: The creature's type remain unchanged, although it gains the augmented subtype. Do not recalculate base attack bonus, saves, or skill points. Size is unchanged.

Special qualities: A greaser retains all the special qualities of the base creature and gains those described below.
Instant repair (Su): A greaser has the ability to instantly repair broken machines by slapping them hard. Magical devices are not affected.
Greaser Charm (Sp): A greaser may use Charm Person at will as a spell-like ability on a member of the opposite sex. The save DC is Charisma based.
Eternal Hairdo (Ex): A greaser's hairdo never gets disrupted under any circumstances what so ever.

Abilities: The greaser gains a +2 innate bonus to Charisma.

Saves: The greaser gains a +2 coolness bonus to his will save.

Skills: The character gets a +4 competence bonus to Ride Motorcycle, Ride Hot Rod, Craft Engine and Profession: Mechanic. He further gets a +2 smoothness bonus to Diplomacy.

Advancement: By character class.

Level Adjustment: +1

Shounen Manga

2007-03-24T20:28:00.000+01:00

Okay, here's the idea: Make a shounen manga.

Or maybe, rather, a shounen manga pastiche. With added extra fun, albeit true to the basic genre tropes; gang of friends, going around battling bad guys with weird fighting techniques.

The setting? Space. I've recently watched all of Firefly, so I'm a bit inspired. This idea I have could perhaps be described — very roughly — as "Firefly meets One Piece".

I'm gonna have to delve into details later. Right now, I'm planning to make this into a rpg scenario as well as — potentially — a comic, so I don't wanna spoil anything for presumptive players.

Emul-o-rama

2007-03-15T22:30:00.000+01:00

I promised myself that I would dedicate this spring to playing all those nifty NES and SNES games I never played as a kid because I wasn't dedicated enough — and didn't have access to the powerful technology that I have now, which saves me the trouble of having to be dedicated.

Now I've finally come around to actually downloading some emulators and some roms. Tomorrow, I'm gonna hit town and see if there are any mac-compatible usb game pads for sale anywhere.

Maybe I'll finally get around to beating Mario Adventure.

Tipping the scales

2007-03-13T10:26:00.000+01:00

The idea of balance is ubiquitous in rpg design. You'll have a hard time finding a roleplaying game which is not to some extent built around an aspiration to balance. But what is balance? What is it that is being balanced?

Of course, for some games, and for some kinds of play, this is a fairly simple question to answer. In D&D, what is being balanced is the characters capability to overcome obstacles of a very straightforward kind; getting from point A to point B in dungeons. When the activity of the characters is well-defined, balancing becomes a rather easy task.

It gets harder the higher the number of possible activities the characters can be involved in gets, and it also gets harder the more the players can decide these activities themselves (rather than having them presented to them by the GM). It is apparent that at some point balance becomes a meaningless concept insofar as it refers to the characters abilities to perform certain kinds of tasks. This is especially true if the focus of the game shifts from problem-solving to something else, for instance, character acting, relationship drama or storytelling. Obviously, we need a new balance concept to account for the kind of balancing maneuvers we can nonetheless see in rpg after rpg.

Why do we balance? What does it matter if my character is so much lamer than his? After all, in most roleplaying games the unspoken assumption is that characters cooperate. One answer that comes to mind is that while yes, character's certainly cooperate, their players don't necessarily do so. The game can become an unofficial competition about who kills the most monsters, who gets the most loot, who collects the most experience and so on. This answer is obviously only relevant in a subset of the cases.

Another possible answer has to do with (metaphorical) screen-time. It's fun when my character gets to do things, and the more competent he is, the more things he will tend to get to do. Accepting this answer, one might proceed to propose that the alternative to balance is some system that makes sure that every player gets his screen-time dues.

But this is not the whole answer, I think. Characters are not simply balanced against each other. They are also balanced against the setting and against the plot. In most rpgs, we are told that a character created by the (balanced) chargen rules is more or less an average person, or so and so much above average. In this way, it is possible for players and GMs alike to set their expectations. What kinds of tasks can my character perform? What kind of problems will be challenging to him? This faciliates immersion, and is an important tool for adventure design. Furthermore, if one desires realism or a certain level of down-to-earth-ness, this kind of balance makes sure that no character becomes too over-the-top.

Some games take lightly on balance. In the Buffy rpg, which I have had the pleasure to GM for a very dedicated group, it is assumed that one character will be the Slayer, and the others will be Xanders. Here, inter-PC balance is thrown out the window. However, PC-to-setting balance is left in firmly in place; you still have to create your character with the point-buy system, although slayers do of course get more points than the rest. Furthermore, steps are taken to assure the screen presence of all characters, in keeping with the spirit of the TV-show which is, of coure, a relation drama where each character is important.

In the above, I have been talking specifically about the balancing of characters against each other, and the setting, game statistics-wise. Are there other things that can be balanced? Certainly. I have already alluded to one: the balancing of different characters' screen presence. Another thing that deserves mention is the balancing of different players' narrative rights. Here, we leave the realm of characters altogether. Interesting as these types of balance may be, they are not the subject of this blog post.

Rules! Huh! What are they good for?

2007-03-12T10:15:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to figger out whether or not I like rules, and if so, for what? It's not the easiest thing in the world. So far, I've found rules useful for the following purposes:

Magic and supernatural abilities, which have no place in the everyday experience and/or common sense of the players and thus cannot easily be arbited without rules.
Combat, which is often more interesting if actually performed around the table (through the medium of the rules) instead of just narrated.
Character creation. Having to work inside the restrictions imposed by a chargen system faciliates the process of creating a character by narrowing down the possibilities, while at the same time stimulating creativity by forcing one to make choices and consider aspects of one's character that one would not otherwise have thought of.
A random element can make the story more interesting, and frees the participants from having to decide in every situation what the most interesting course of event would be.

On the other hand, this is what I find to be the disadvantages of rules:

Some kinds of skill checks are really boring, and often detrimental to the aims of the gaming group. Like checking to see if you find a certain thing or a certain piece of information, the failure of which can often be fatal for an adventure. Whereas others are simply just a waste of time since it more or less doesn't matter if you fail or not. Of course, one may always choose not to roll in these situations, but then one encounters the other problem:
Arbitrariness: Which characteristics should be assigned game statistics, and which should not? Which situations call for skill checks, and which do not? Who decides? What is the purpose of buying a shitload of skills if they are never used in play? This ties in to the problem of balance, to which I will devote a later blog post.

My aim has been to create a system which only uses rules where they are beneficial and avoids them where they are problematic, but that's far from trivial. It's hard to get the benefit of character creation without getting the problem of arbitrariness: who are to say that the skills I buy for my character will become useful in play?

The system I'm currently playtesting, which is a further development from the ideas presented here and earlier, shows promise, but it is a tad bit too simplistic. For one thing, it has no well-developed combat system, and I really like combat systems. Plus it's a little ungainly. It'll probably come to have its role to play, but I'd rather like to find a more generally satisfactory solution.

Beard

2007-03-09T20:11:00.001+01:00

Lately, I've started to seriously consider growing a beard again.

Darwin's Rottweiler

2007-03-08T10:42:00.000+01:00

This is an old video recording of Richard Dawkins answering questions from — primarily — religious types after having held a public lecture relating to his book ’The God Delusion’. Had to link it. The man is simply amazing.

Dunn-Junn

2007-03-07T14:15:00.000+01:00

So, this is what I've been up to:

I'm tryin'a make an RPG system. Yes, another one. However, this one will be completely unlike that other one I've been going on about. My basic intent was to take D&D and mod it into irrecongizability — and then mod it some more — while all the time staying true to the basic pathos of D&D: min-maxing, combat, dungeon crawl, munchkining... well, gamism, to sum it all up into one nifty, hip, down-with-contemporary-roleplaying-theory term.

Because yes, I enjoy those things too, and D&D is more or less the only game on the market that allows you to do it... and I have issues with D&D.

Like classes. I can get the basic idea of classes — to make chargen and gameplay simple by providing a few archetypic character templates — but that doesn't mean I have to like it. But doesn't the classes tie in with the level system in kind of a inseparable manner, you might ask. Will I do away with levels too? Then what will be left? The answer is that no, I will not take away levels and no, classes are not needed for levels to work. The solution is to be found in Green Ronin's eminent Mutants and Masterminds, which introduced point-buy into the world of levels but sadly did it in the wrong genre (superheroes) (Green Ronin has subsequently gone on to create True20, where they, for some inexplicable reason have chosen to go in the opposite direction by reducing the number of avaliable classes to three. )

In M&M, it works like this: On each level you get a couple points, which can be spent on stuff like Base Attack Bonus, Armor Class, Saves and so on (those of you unfamiliar with D&D terminology: they are game statistics, okay?). Now, the vital thing is this: you cannot raise any one statistic above a certain maximum level set by... you guessed it... your level! So what you get is sort of like a dynamic class system, where you yourself decide what your "class" is gonna be good at on each level.

That on that. Next candidate for a makeover is the combat system. Here, my inspiration is Feng Shui (thank you, Robin Laws). Like in D&D, you roll an Initiative score, but instead of simply determining when you act, your roll also determines how much you can act. When you have the highest Initiative score of the combattants, you get to act, and then your Initiative score is reduced by a certain amount determined by the kind of action you just undertook. When the other combattants' Intiative score have once again sunk below your own, you get to act again, and so on, until all the combattants have sub-zero Initiative scores. Then the round starts anew.

Hmmm, yes. There are lots of other stuff, but I can't write about it all in one big mess of a blog post. I'm gonna have to blog about it one thing at a time.

What else? Yeah, I've considered joining a theatre club here at the university. I've never been on a stage in my entire life. Fun stuff. ^_^

An Island, part II

2007-03-01T20:36:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I've been doing some reading on the middle ages, and this has forced me to face the following dilemma: I can sacrifice the basic idea of having the plot involve lots of foreign politics (because honestly, the political situation in the west Mediterranean around the time I have in mind was kinda boring: just a bunch of holy roman emperors going this way and that, and the heyday of those cool north Italian city states came much later), or else, I can sacrifice historical accuracy.

Of course, I sacrificed historical accuracy the moment I dropped a large fucking island into the Mediterranean, but somehow I kinda feel that if you write a historical campaign, part of the point is to actually stick to history, at least as far as your concept will let you. So yeah, I'm kinda split here. Hopefully, more reading will allow me to make up my mind.

Another problem I have is I keep getting these weird ideas about running the campaign with D&D rules. Gah! Out of my head, crazy ideas! >_<

An island in the mediterranean

2007-02-08T15:51:00.000+01:00

Well, the hard times are over. I got my macbook back. Good as new. Exactly as new, actually. Since the hard drive had gone to hell, I had to install everything all over again. Yay for backups!

Anyway, I got this idea for a campaign that I will try to develop into something playable. The premise is essentially based on Västmark, a swedish fantasy rpg. You take medieval Europe, add a little fairytales and a little magic, and throw in a big old island smack in the middle of the ocean where there wasn't any before. The difference is, Västmark got its island in the north Atlantic, whereas I'm gonna place mine in the Mediterranean.

So what does this mean? It means white brick houses, yellow grass, olive grooves, haciendas, warm southern winds, catamarans and fishermen, peach and lemon trees, narrow meandering mountain roads. It means hidalgos, monasteries, italian merchants, arab merchants, stereotypical jews and gypsys, daring swordsmen, devious master thiefs, stern inquisitors, alchemists gone crazy from mercury, faeries and demons taken on human form to mess with people, quirky magicians, corrupt noblemen, poor but honorable knights. It means romantic adventures in the night, wild rooftop chases, duels to the death, courtly intrigue, archery competitions, philosophical discussions over a bottle of wine at the heat of high noon, suspense, adventure and romance.

I really feel like getting geeky about this. Doing research. Drawing maps. Describing the setting in minute detail. Writing up bios for important NPC:s. Like the irresponsible boy king, more interested in partying and adultery than in ruling his country. And his genovese administrators, constituting the true power behind the throne, primarily interested in furthering the goals of their city state. And the countryside noblemen, dissatisfied that the king moves power from the aristocracy into the hands of foreigners, plotting rebellion. And the arabs and the french and the habsburgers, all interested in a piece of the cake. And the supernatural powers lurking in the shadows, pulling strings in the name of who knows what dark purpose.

And as usual when I get geeky about something, the first thing I start thinking about is the language. What kind of a language do they speak at this island? Well, obviously, it has to be some sort of romance language. So I've spent the past couple of days reading about sound changes in the history of the romance languages, trying to figure out how best to develop a new one out of its vulgar latin roots. :p

Rogntudjuuuu!

2007-02-02T19:53:00.000+01:00

The hard drive on my computer fucked up. They say it will take a week and a half to fix it. A week and a half without Internet access in my home! Can you imagine anything more horrible? Face-sucking deathworms from Pluto do not count.

Lucky for me, my school - which is like a ten minute walk away from home - is equipped with computer classrooms, with boxes that run Fedora Core, so the situation could be worse. But still, I think I'm entitled to a: >_<

Good company

2007-01-31T09:38:00.000+01:00

It was pointed out to me that someone else had blogged about the same thing that my last post was about. With friends like that, who needs enemies? -_-;

Illegalize profanity? Fuck you!

2007-01-29T16:54:00.000+01:00

Okay, normally it would be against my principles to blog about politics, but this is so fucking retarded that I simply have to let off some steam. So some fucking cunt in the government of a small swedish municipality has decided that she wants to illegalize profanity. I am not joking! This bitch has decided that it is up to her how we choose to use our language. I mean, what the FUCK?! It will be a cold day in hell before I let the government decide which words I can and cannot use. Like it wasn't enough that people — for some retarded reason — think that swear words are immoral; now they have to go and try and make it illegal as well. It makes me wanna kill!

Right, so first of all, she's a municipal politician. Which means that she can't make laws! Forgot about that, did ya, you fugly bitch? You gonna have to get a seat in the Riksdag first, where I hope that they — rightly — will eat you alive. With butter.

And second; for crying out loud, people, it's just words! There can't possibly be anything harmful about a word. If I want to hurt someone, I can bloody well do it no matter what words I'm allowed to use — and the other way around; a certain word will not be hurtful unless it is used in a hurtful manner. It's not the word that is immoral; it's the way you use it. It's analogous with a gun; the gun isn't immoral in itself, but if you kill someone with it, then you're a crook.

I use a lot of profanity in my everyday language and it always pisses me straight off when some holier-than-thou dickhead comments on it, saying shit like "you shouldn't curse so much". What the fuck have you got to do with that, dipshit? Mind your own fucking business! But this, this takes the fucking prize. I'm starting to seriously reevaluate eugenics, here. My God. >_<

A conflict resolution system

2007-01-23T21:27:00.000+01:00

Right. This post ties in to my previous post about dynamic focus in character generation. In it, I mentioned how I would structure the game around "scenes" in which a central "conflict" would be resolved through the use of some as-of-yet-nonexistent system. This is that system.

Before I go any further, I'd like to credit Arvid Axbrink Cederholm with the inspiration for this system. His game "stadenberättelser" is the shit; check it out!

To recap, you have a number of "traits", which can be good or bad (in the old post, I mentioned neutral traits as well, but I've gotten rid of them since then). A new feature is that every trait has a number of boxes associated with it; the number of boxes can be though of as the "value" of the trait, but rather than reflecting how good you are in the trait, it simply determines how often you get to use the trait.

When in a conflict, every participant draws a card. That means, not just the people involved in the conflict, but everyone else as well. Now, the players have the option of gaining extra cards by involving one or several of their traits in the conflict. For each good trait that they can find a reasonable way of involving in the conflict (prototypical example: "good shot" in a gunfight), they get an extra card.

The game master has two choices. Firstly, he may involve the player's negative traits, getting one card for each trait. Additionally, he may draw a number of extra card, up to a limit of one card for each of the other participants in the game. However; for each card he draws, after the conflict, he has to deal a number of "bonus cards" to the players, starting with the guy to the left of the winner of the conflict, and then going clockwise (the game master himself gets no bonus cards, of course). Later on in the game, the players may use these bonus cards in any conflict.

Now every participant chooses one card, and places it face down on the table in front of him. Then a short discussion commences where the participants discuss what will be the result of the different possible outcomes — this may be rather brief, just so that everyone knows what to expect. Finally, everyone reveals their card. Now, the players each tell a little something about what happens, in ascending order, until the person with the highest card narrates the climax and result of the conflict.

At their turn, every player also looks at the color of his card, and depending on whether it's a red or a black card, does different things. If it's a red card, he may make a mark in one box next to each of the negative traits on his character sheet that the game master used to get extra cards (if any). If it's a black card, he must make a mark in one box next to each of the positive traits that he himself used to get extra cards (if any). Obviously, playing a red card is preferable to playing a black one. If all the boxes next to one trait happens to get marked off, you can't use that trait in conflicts any longer.

That's it. What this system lacks is some method for clearing marked-off boxes, other than the obvious "all boxes are cleared at the start of each new story". More on that as I get ideas.

East european superhero roleplaying thingy

2006-12-19T17:09:00.000+01:00

East europe is cool. Weird gypsy gangster kings who eat cats are cool. Incredibly corrupt, hideously brutal one eyed cops who are pious catholics are cool. Funny-looking jewish midget street performers with unexpected magical powers are cool. Wild chases through narrow cobblestone-paved alleyways between crumbling medieval buildnings are cool. And low-powered, highly eccentric superheroes scrapping to bring some semblance of order to this vodka-driven madness are cool, so here goes:

It's the nineties, and Credznikovenia has only recently slipped free from the grip of communist oppression, but in many respects, the small East European country is still left in the 18th century, or in the middle ages — take your pick. In the city of Kazpartov, the capital, colossal grey blocks of bauhaus boredom only rarely break the consistent theme of centuries-old stone edifices. This eastern metropolis is a stewpot of corruption, rampant organized crime, and weird, half-supernatural events fed by ancient superstitions. In this place, where you can never be sure what awaits you around the next corner, a few people have taken to arms against the horrors that plague the common man. These people, extraordinary albeit in no way superhuman, fight every day against the weirdness that haunts the city.

The keyword for this roleplaying concept is burlesque. The setting and the stories will be brutal and dirty and violent and perversed, but always in an over-the-top, comical manner. The characters will be colorful and bizarre, the adventures random and crazy. The vodka will flow. There will be a general sense of "everything can get all fucked up any minute, so let's not worry about the consequences of our actions".

What I'm currently unsure of is how to best represent this genre in a roleplaying system. The first thing to realize is that the system needs to encourage and support quick creation of weird characters. I'm actually playing with the notion of a random-based chargen system, but I dunno. Free chargen of the type I'm normally advocating has the drawback that an unimaginative player will create a bland character. A golden middle road might be to force the player to make a series of decisions, none of which allows a "bland" choice: 'Is your character a) violent, b) horny, c) gluttonous, d) sadistic, e) mad'.

As for task resolution, I'm thinking quick, violent and random. With special emphasis on the "random". Basically, I want a system that can make the story take a steep turn for the worse anytime. Coupled with some kind of mechanism that allows the players to create Deus Ex Machinae, this could be lots of fun.

Theodore Dobzhansky in da hizzle

2006-12-15T15:14:00.000+01:00

I've decided to write a book. I'm going to call it "An evolutionary approach to the study of language" ^_^

Okay, so I'm not going to write it right now. Maybe in, say, twenty years when I'm a well-established academic who has read more books than what's good for him. Then I'm gonna sit down and synthesize all my knowledge into one large tome, wherein I will claim that all linguistic research should be firmly placed on a foundation of evolutionary consideration.

I even figured out how it will start:

Introduction
Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously quipped that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". At a first glance, this may seem to have little to do with linguistics, but - as I shall argue in this book - language is a biological phenomenon, and thus, Dobzhansky's well-quoted remark applies to language as well as to the rest of the natural world.

I have so much time!

2006-12-11T21:03:00.000+01:00

Today, I wrote my last exam as a technology student for a year to come. Suddenly, I have these huge oceans of time! Lots and lots and lots of time to spend however the fuck I want. It's totally overwhelming.

I'm considering taking up a hobby. More specifically, I'm considering to start writing rpg convention scenarios. For reals, that is — actually arranging them at actual conventions. So if you got any nifty ideas for scenarios: send 'em my way!

New York City Blog

2006-12-07T09:25:00.000+01:00

I suddenly realized that I have yet to tell allay'all about my recent trip to NYC.

There ain't actually that much to tell, though; I mean, sure enough, New York is among the raddest places on this planet, but that was pretty much expected - hey, it's New York! Clothes were cheap; i bought a pair of shoes that gave me chafed feet, and a corduroy suit jacket, among other things. I also bought three books on Strand, which has got to be a piece of heaven accidentaly fell down on earth. One of these was a book that aims to analyze postmodernist literary form through the use of a generative grammatical framework. It promises to fulfill my prejudices against both postmodernists and generativist in one fell stroke; I can't wait to read it! ^_^

Calvino strikes gold

2006-12-05T18:31:00.000+01:00

Dresden Codak might have created the finest webcomic in existence. Go read it now, unless you already have.

I feel like Scrooge McDuck just after he found the goose egg nugget.

Books and comics

2006-11-18T13:45:00.000+01:00

People who read fiction don't know how good they've got it.

I was at the library earlier today. My ambition was to borrow a few, slim volumes of fiction. Then I discovered the comic shelf. 'And shit, they've got the "Locas" collection volume. And "Black Hole". And that new swedish comic artist anthology. And...'

I ended upp draggin home a huge bag of giant hardback comic albums. My arms still hurt. I'm writing this using my nose.

Dynamic Focus in RPG chargen

2006-11-17T13:17:00.000+01:00

I have recently started to question the value of rules in roleplaying games, thanks to certain individuals. Question their value for my own sake, that is - far from me would it be to advocate the total abandonment of rules by all roleplayers as certain rules-free advocates - or, at least, the straw men that their opponents make in their image - have sometimes done.

I am still not, however, prepared to entirely abandon the warm embrace of rules. Below, I propose a setting-nonspecific chargen/conflict resolution system, which can be seen as a sort of adaptive compromise between my newfound rules-free yearnings and a number of concerns which make me unwilling to abandon rules entirely. These concerns are:

Most of the time, the sort of issues that rules are meant to handle can be equally satisfyingly handled by the common sense of the participants (this does not apply to the role of rules in creating tactical challenges for the players to enjoy in the same way that you enjoy tactical challenges in - say - a board game, but I have never been interested in rules in this capacity anyway). However, certain situations cannot be handled by common sense because they involve phenomena that are beyond our everyday experience. Magic is a good example of such a phenomena. I want rules because I want magic systems.
Most of the time, as a gamemaster, I find myself perfectly capable of deciding on my own or with the assistance of the players how a certain conflict will play out. Sometimes, however, I'm out of ideas, and in those cases it's nice to have a system for generating random results to conflicts.
Rules are a nice way of encouraging/forcing the players to describe their characters in a way that is useful to the gamemaster.

This last point is of special interest to me. The way I see it, most chargen systems are too narrow-minded when it comes to the sort of character traits they describe. The system might describe physical and mental capabilites, skills, equipment, resources, personality traits, supernatural abilities and so forth, but no system can have buttloads of game statistics for all these possible types of character traits. Some categories of traits will inevitably become less well described by the rules than others, and the categories that are better described may not necessarily be the categories that a certain player is interested in describing in respect to their character.

I now introduce the term focus to describe the set of character traits that a certain chargen system describes. A system's focus can be said to be narrow if the system describes a limited set of the possible character traits, and wide if it describes a large such set.

To solve the problem of a chargen system becoming ungainly large as its width increases, my chargen system will have dynamic focus. In other words, players will be able to decide for themselves which focus to have on their characters. This will be implemented thusly; characters will consist of a list of traits, which are more or less binary (either you have 'em, or you don't). Traits can be anything; skills, abilities, resources, character quirks, ambitions, background details, belongings and so on. Traits will be grouped roughly into three categories, depending on how good/detrimental they are for the character: bad traits, neutral traits and good traits. A character can have a limitless number of bad and neutral traits, while the maximum number of good traits is the number of bad traits plus some constant. Creating a character will simply consist of listing his traits. Since the player can device his own traits freely, he is the one who decides if the focus will be on the characters skills, his contacts, his personality or what not.

Magic will be shoehorned into this system as follows: a good trait may be substituted for a magical trait, which gives the character access to some kind of magical ability. Each magical trait is associated with a number called the magical strain of that trait. When a character uses the magical trait, he gains a number of magical strain points equal to the magical strain of the trait.

Now we turn to conflict resolution. By "conflict resolution", I mean something approximately similar to what the pundits over at the Forge mean when the use the term. Essentially, instead of resolving the result of every single action (as in traditional "task resolution"), we resolve the results of entire conflicts, and further more, we apply the rules only when it is interesting to do so. In our case, "interesting" means "when the gaming group is unable to decide what will happen", ergo, my point 2 in the list above.

On the basic level, the game will be divided into scenes, a dramaturgical unit which mirrors the scene of theater and film. A scene might or might not lead up to a Conflict (written with capital C to distinguish the rules-technical sense in which I use the word here with the everyday sense of the word). The rule is; if the gaming group can decide amongst themselves what will happen, don't open a Conflict. If not, do.

The Conflict rules will use random numbers to decide how the scene will end. Players (including the GM) will be able to influence the events in their favour by using the neutral and good traits of their characters, and the neutral and bad traits of their opponents. This will tie into the magic system somehow; certain results in combination with a high level of magical strain will give rise to some sort of magical backlash on the magician. This is the part of the system which I have not yet figured out, though.

That's it, more or less. I'll write more when I get more ideas. For now, I'll leave you with a nice little rule which is not tied in to the central idea of the system, but which I like nonetheless. I like it when players put some work into creating supporting cast, cool places and things for the campaign. To encourage players to do this, they will be able to add anything they've created for the campaign as a good trait to their character sheet, without it conting towards the maximum number of good traits. So, if you create an NPC and put some work into him, you can add him to you character sheet as a good trait; maybe he's a contact of your character's or something like that. Neat, huh?

New Yorkistan

2006-11-07T21:12:00.000+01:00

I found this cover of "The New Yorker by Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz. I think it's neat. "Turban Sprawl" ftw.

Robert Oppenheimer

2006-11-07T12:17:00.000+01:00

Legend has it that when the first atomic bomb was detonated in the desert of New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the following lines from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, shatterer of worlds". Legend probably has it wrong, but it is a cool quote nevertheless.

I got to thinking about Robert Oppenheimer today during Molecular Physics class, (when our teacher started talking about the Born-Oppenheimer approximation to the molecular Schroedinger equation). I think he would make an excellent fictional character; he held so much power in his figurative hands, yet he was unable to decide how to use it. The power of science to reshape the world, and all of that stuff.

One could make it extra interesting by adding some urban fantasy sensibilities to the mix. Maybe something was awoken in that first atomic detonation; something that had been asleep for a long time; something with many arms and many heads, like taken from some feverish hindu nightmare. Maybe Oppenheimer was not primarily a scientist or an engineer, but a mysticist. Maybe the American government was hoping to find a way to counter the Nazi sorcerors' evil plans, or maybe Oppenheimer had conned the American government into thinking he was simply making them new fancy weapons, when really he was serving his own dark lord.

Lately, I have had some vague ideas about maybe, just maybe taking up cartooning again. It would all depend on me finding a mode of work that I feel comfortable with, but were I to suceed in this, then maybe Bob Oppenheimer would find his way into my comic somehow.

High Fantasy Epos

2006-11-05T15:17:00.000+01:00

The High Fantasy Epos (abbreviated HFE in the following) is a popular subgenre of fantastic literature. We all know the basic premise: evil threatens the world, and Our Heroes must journey far and wide in an epic quest to vanquish this evil in question. Today, I suddenly got this vague idea about writing a HFE RPG campaign.

The HFE genre is well suited to be adapted to RPG:s in the format of a campaign rather than a static setting, because a HFE, like a campaign, focuses on a series of events rather than a collection of places, and furthermore, the epic quality of a HFE tends to change the world in which it takes place dramatically during the course of the story, which fits badly with the static nature of most published roleplaying settings.

Furthermore, with fantasy, you more or less don't need a setting at all, because "fantasy" is a setting in its own right. It's all been done for you already: the vaguely medieval society, the nonhuman peoples (elves, dwarves, orcs), the magic, the monsters, and so on. All you need is for something to happen.

So much for theory. What's my motivation to beat once again on this arguably dead pony? For me, reading HFE is a sin of the past, and it was long since I last let a RPG campaign be inspired by this genre. Maybe it's time to rethread the tracks of youth, to see if HFE:s have something more to offer grownups than it had for the fourteen-years-olds that we once were. Also, to work within the bounds of a highly conventionalized medium is a spur for one's creativity: "the restrictions make the master", as someone once said.

Plus, writing fantasy is an excellent excuse to make up conlangs :p

Shangri-La Diet

2006-10-31T22:13:00.000+01:00

I'm a skinny guy, so I find the Shangri La-diet interesting for purely intellectual reasons. The basic premise just screams "quackery": doctor Seth Roberts (he's a doctor in psychology, so his academic credentials doesn't really add to his credibility as a dietist) claims that by drinking a few cups of sugar water slash eating a few tablespoons of olive oil every day, you can decrease your appetite to such an extent as to quickly lose weight. The good doctor himself claims to have lost tens of pounds by his own method.

Dr. Robert's book is an Amazon.com bestseller, and people all over the blogosphere say "it works". The diet is, however, completely unscientific; no studies have been done and all the evidence is anecdotal. The explanation Roberts gives to why his diet works seems to me simply incoherent — although of course I haven't read the book — and according to this guy it's factually incorrect as well.

But of course, the diet doesn't really require that much effort, so it's easy to try it out. All you gotta do is buy... the... book.