Slow News Day

Why does THIS guy have his picture in the newspapers? Okay, so his sister’s a high-priced call girl who lead to the downfall of Eliot Spitzer. How does that make HIM relevant to this story? If he was “Kristen’s” pimp or something, I could see it, or if he’d appointed himself his sister’s spokesperson. But he’s just her brother. Unless she was “out” as a call girl to her entire family and given them all the gory details, or secretly filming her trysts for Christmastime home movies, I don’t see what this random Joe could add to our knowledge of what was going on. Even if the goal simply to get some insight into the mind of a call girl, I still can’t see what this guy could tell us that a researcher can’t. Normally, I get a little irritated when people harp on news organizations about covering fluff, rather than the latest child to die from some dread disease in Africa. There’s more to the news than the latest catastrophe (or scandal, for that matter). But this does seem like it’s really reaching. Is this girl really so much of a celebrity that her family should now be front-page news?

The Blind Leading the Imbeciles

[Iowa Republican Representative Steve] King also believes [Senator Barack] Obama’s middle name, Hussein, would be encouraging for terrorists. “Additionally, his middle name does matter,” King said. “It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name.”

"Obama Scoffs at Rep. King’s Remarks" The Wall Street Journal.

You know, I'm a fan of representative Democracy. I like to think that people can be trusted, when they're serious about it, to elect people who would actually look out for their interests, and make intelligent decisions. And I've spent a lot of time arguing with people that our elected officials aren't bad people, we just don't hold them accountable enough.

And then people go and vote someone like Representative King into office. You'd think they were trying to prove that they can't be trusted with the vote.

Sigh.

Who Needs Genuis?

In today's Slate, Erik Sofge pens a scathing critique of Dungeons and Dragons, and it's relatively broken system of morality. He claims that the game is about nothing other than blameful slaughter of arbitrarily defined "monsters" in the name of acquiring material goods and advancements in power.

Sofge is right, and he's wrong. Dungeons and Dragons subscribes to what I've come to regard as the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" school of Good and Evil. Monsters are, by nature, irredeemably evil enough that they are effectively incapable of change, but enjoy it just enough that you can ascribe an element of choice to their actions - and thus justify punishing them. This is in contrast to The Lord of the Rings, where the Orcs are implacable agents of evil because they're under the direct control of Tolkien's version of Satan, being, after all, the twisted creations of same. Sofge is correct in that, at it's base, Dungeons and Dragons isn't about telling an uplifting story. But then again, neither are children's games of Cops and Robbers or most Jason Statham films. And many immature gamers are playing a cross between Make-Believe, and their favorite action movies. And, let's face it, in many action movies, if they didn't tell you who the good guys were, you'd never figure it out on your own.

But Dungeons and and Dragons traces its decent, through the original Chainmail (not the one that Wizards of the Coast created just a few years ago) to wargames - where the whole point is assemble an army of what are, in effect, toy soldiers, and battle it out with the other guy's army of toy soldiers. This is why high level Wizards (or Magic-Users as us old-timers remember them) bear a distinct resemblance to artillery pieces - they suck in hand to hand combat, but they'll lay waste whole companies of line troops with a single Fireball.

The creative play aspect of Role-playing feels like an afterthought in older editions of Dungeons and Dragons, because it was - the game was more about giving a combat résumé to your world-beating fantasy generals as much as anything else. But where Sofge goes astray is with the idea that Dungeons and Dragons HAS to be played this way.

For the most part, it is - thirty-plus years of baggage will do that. Veteran D&D players tend to default to that mode of play, especially when dealing with people they haven't played with before - if you know nothing else, assuming that you're going on a dungeon-crawl/killing spree is a good bet. But the game itself does nothing to force you to play this way. If I decide that I'm going to make combats frighteningly dangerous, and give the players their rewards if they talk they way out of trouble, I'm perfectly capable of doing that. I might have to tweak some rules here and there, and set expectations, but I won't break the game in doing so, and nor will I strip it of its "Dungeons and Dragons-ness." If I penalize, rather than reward, the player characters for murdering Orcs in their sleep (as opposed to finding a less-lethal way of incapacitating them) - I'm not breaking the rules as they are written. (But keep this in mind - the Navy Seals wouldn't leave a group of sleeping enemies alive and well under that circumstance either - after all, unless you knew you wouldn't be coming that way again, you'd be faced with the possibility of having to fight them on your way out - but this time, you'd have a non-combatant princess in tow. One man's atrocity is another man's smart fighting.)

Sofge falls into the trap that a number of boosters of Gurps and the World of Darkness allow themselves to be caught in. The rule books to just about any role-playing game are an instruction manual about how to take an imagined world (even one based on say - the War on Terror in Afghanistan {and yes, there is a game based on that - it uses a variation on the current Dungeons and Dragons rules}) and break it down into an abstraction ruled by funky, polyhedral dice. The "framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater," is both a creation and the responsibility of the players. Dungeons and Dragons is a holdover from when the hobby, being brand new, was immature. And, because of its ubiquity (pretty much everyone who games knows how to play D&D), it is the most common point of entry into the hobby. People new to anything have an immature understanding of it, and many people enter the hobby as children, or young adults. As people mature in the hobby, many "graduate" to other games, where the rules systems are tailored to support a more mature style of play. However, to be honest, a lot of gamers never really mature much beyond the kill-goblins-take-treasure style of playing. And they tend to stick with Dungeons and Dragons. You can be unpleasantly impressed that a 12-year-old is still happily riding a tricycle when he could be mountain biking - but that's not the tricycle's fault.

Sofge is correct in that there are dozens of more innovative and sophisticated games than Dungeons and Dragons. Runequest, Sorcerer, Bureau 13, Traveller, Champions, Epiphany, The Morrow Project, UnderGround or Ars Magica are all excellent examples. And many of them are out of print, and/or the companies that created them have folded. It is Dungeons and Dragons ability to stay relevant in the face of its lack of sophistication that had kept it around, despite being obsolete. There will always need to be a gateway into the hobby. And despite being somewhat outdated and unsophisticated, Dungeons and Dragons fits the bill.

What's the Message?

For those of us in the Puget Sound area, the big news story of the week was the early-Monday-morning arson that destroyed a handful of model homes in Woodinville, Washington, and damaged a couple of others nearby. So far, what little evidence there is seems to point to the Earth Liberation Front (E.L.F.), a group of environmental radicals that has come to be labeled as "eco-terrorists."

From my layperson's vantage point, the E.L.F. are more eco-vandals/saboteurs than anything else, occasionally targeting organizations - business, government or educational - engaged in behavior that they find environmentally destructive. But it seems that it would be hard to pin down what the E.L.F. are about, because there really isn't a coherent group there. From all appearances, anyone with an environmentally-based grudge, and can of lighter fluid can act in the name of the E.L.F., and that doesn't exactly lend itself to "staying on message." It also seems that it would be difficult to work together to come up with ways that might get the word out without turning off the general public. Here in the Puget Sound area, the E.L.F. is mainly known known for setting fire to a University of Washington building while going after genetically altered trees that we actually in another building.

But it brings up an interesting point. Can a group that anyone can "join" really have a coherent agenda or message? Movements of various sorts have had this problem. Just as when the World Trade Organization Conference was held in Seattle back in 1999, and the authorities found themselves dealing with two sorts of people - "those who genuinely want[ed] constructive change and who understand the art of civil disobedience; and those for whom destruction is entertaining." And given the tendency of the media to concentrate on the more dramatic images of mayhem and destruction, the message the the would-be agents of change are attempting to disseminate gets lost in the overall din.

There, There

I've never been a fan of political pandering, and I'm even less so if I feel that I'm in the target audience. Perhaps it's because I'm old cynic, but pandering has always felt false, and I like to think of myself as someone who can deal with the situation as it really is. I may not always deal with it well, but if that's the case, I could use the practice. The current uproars around the "Mortgage Mess" and the loss of the new military air tanker contract to Northup-Grumman EADS have produced huge volumes of people telling us how we've been victimized - by everyone from greedy banks to the United States Air Force.

But it seems unlikely that the constant talk is really going to be translated into real action. While Congressional action might be able to overturn Boeing's contract loss (which, it seems to me, would only tell Boeing that they never really have any competition in contract bids), they're unlikely to come up with a viable bailout for people who got burned in taking out home loans that required home prices continue to rise at about a trillion times wages. So isn't it time that we started preparing to deal with the realities of the situations that we find ourselves in?

Are we really so fragile that we can't be expected to deal with the fact that the economy is taking a downturn? Or, that there are some jobs that we won't have a chance as sharing in? Are these things really such catastrophes?

And in the end, that's what gets me about pandering - the underlying message is all too often - "You can't handle the new reality - you're too weak, or too stupid, or too unwise - and because of that, you're owed a better reality. And it's someone else that owes you that reality." But, you know, it's the ability to deal with hardships that creates strength. And it isn't like we haven't dealt with hardships before. The Great Depression makes the current problems with the housing market and the loss of the occasional military contract seem to minor to attend to. Not that I'd want to go through the Great Depression right now, but I'd like to think that we'd find a way to deal with it. I don't know that being told we can't at every turn is at all helpful.