This piece started out as an innocent “oh haha ur so rite fringe is sooo good lol” -comment on Alvans earlier post, right before it went on a binge and never returned home. It went out the window and came back as regarding videogames (surprise!) and how they somehow manage to fumble it all and be very videogamey, or in some cases, draw you in and leave you bleeding for more. Mostly, what makes them tick the way they do – for me, anyways.  And how this text will recklessly stumble right through the confines of whatever it’s supposed to be wedged between, oh, it’ll never apologize.

Notice I’m not treating all games under the same ideology, just those heavy on story (or depicting a notion of one, even if there’s none).

Context! There’s this thing called .. well, that. If I perform an action in a depicted world and it doesn’t reflect there, I get annoyed, miffed and irritated to bits. Example: You have this wonderfully graphic character you’ve paid attention to, guided him/her through the world that has presented him/her with new skills and whatnot. Then you walk against a wall and there it goes, stupid mindless videogame avatar doing a videogame walkcycle, standstill and unaware of the bloody brickwall scrubbing his face.

All of a sudden, your character is reduced into a representation of player navigation mistake. Ta-ta, it was nice seeing you, miss Believability and mister Immersion. Sorry about the stale wine. Oh, and if I change the world, I expect the change to be permanent and propagate with ripple effects, depending on how it affects other things / NPCs / whatnot connected with it in the gameworld.

Immersion in faked out world built using stiff-at-best mechanics is a bitch to implement. Mainly it becomes a swamp that has no bottom – as you hone in some important detail that colors the world that much more, it creates a dependency or requirement to do another to support it, and so forth. You’ll start to realize how much you miss on the real world when you begin breaking things to their elements. Just a moment in your own time, even if you’re not doing a thing. It’s insanely complex, and you can’t simulate it.

You just have to try your best to fool the player to think he’s immersed, when you’re just really drawing his attention away from flaws.

Walk, walk, walk, nothing out of ordinary, walk to a staircase and if your eyes are keen and lively, you might notice your character grab the handrail casually .. Or strum his fingers against the radiator in a room if he’s close enough. Glance at something, being natural. Something surprising happens – look! Nothing to act by, just birds taking to flight. Tilt your head slightly at a sound of distant rock falling. Little things your character should be doing. What you’d do. Context-aware.

Okay, bit thin cookie-cutter examples considering the depth of subject matter. However, it’s still about the context and how living and breathing the world around you seems. Everything should happen within context of the world and surroundings, and there should be parts of the world represented to the player even if they’re not important, or even required. As you, the player, observe the world, the world should observe you back, unashamedly. Giving you context when you don’t expect.

Think of the very moment your character is in. What’s happening in the world that doesn’t give a flying wack about your character, a pebble beneath the bedrock trying to make a change? What sounds does that world make? What defines the local space around him at that very moment? What does it look like? How it all bounces off of him? What gets sucked in? What’s the string that connects YOU there?

Say. How about a character that reacts to the player? Not a blind representation of your actions, but more like companion. Did you guide him to a thorny bush? Is he pissed off? Wait, what, did he just throw a rock up in your direction and shout obscenities?! Well, at least he still follows your mouse clicks. Maaaybe.. If you promise to behave. You find yourself in some strange semi-conversation, just without voice. Oh, you do get commented on, so tread carefully. Especially since it’s multiplayer. Other players companion character trots by, laughs with your char about the idiotic failure you, the player did just some time ago. Semi-public shame! But you’re so immersed in the living commentary of your actions in the world that you just stare, bewildered. Then you hear the other character taunt affectionally his player, as if he was a puppydog who just wasn’t housetrained yet. Characters momentarily take over and become the players themselves, just from outside perspective. It all becomes delightfully confusing, wondrous and profoundly different.

Would that create the necessary string between the player and world? Or something completely different? Could it be possible to build some multilayered insanitychains on tabletop RPG using this idea? I expect Alvan to wear some feathers and run to the woods to meditate on this.

Now, why the hell did I focus on character issues only? Why not hints of context and surroundings in Web2.0 where you, the social browser, need to know there are other people present, not just minute “lol my cat hiccupd” lines and some bling on screen? It’s not just games. How to drive advertisements deeper into people now that they’re so accustomed to them? Hell, these days marketing guys need to come up with  bloody big campaigns to launch a new advertisements. Jeeves, could you let me know at what point do we need to start figuring out how to sell ourselves the idea of real world around us? You know, with people becoming so superficial, shallow and black/white? What has made them so distant from it?

Meh.

Oh boy. If there is one television show that proves the age-old truth of “no amount of superficial cool makes up for a lack of depth” true, it’s Heroes. It’s pretty easy to rate any Heroes episode by taking the number of important characters in the episode without powers (HRG doesn’t count, neither does “The Hunter”, who will turn out to be a) empowered or b) another HRG) and divide that by the number of important characters in the episode with powers. In the early episodes, for each of the main empowered character, there were at least one or two normal humans. These provided some way of exploring the powers. But then they started killing, empowering or just dismissing the non-”hero” characters, leaving us with SUPERPOWERED BEINGS DASHING OUT AT EACH OTHER WITH TEH ZOMG POWERS½!!!§!!11½! Or without powers. But still, boring. It’s gone from character drama to powers “drama”.

Sometimes  I wonder what is going with with the writers.

Fringe (mtv3.fi/fringe for us Finns) is pretty much the second-best American show airing these days. Before it started, J.J. Abrams, the creator, told that the show would be Jumping The Shark at every possible opportunity. And it’s pretty much delivering, but not in a bad way. Nearly every episode of the show changes things in a way that’s somehow relevant to what the show’s about and characters jump across the board all the time. All this without things getting all Lost-y and confusing.

The thing about this is that by changing the angles all the time and keeping the pressure on, the show has managed to stay fresh, episode after episode. It is clearly planning on being a long series, as more questions are being asked than answered. But also, they’re taking great care that in the grand scheme of things, there are no “filler episodes”. Even the ones that seem like they’ll turn out to be just a monster without a greater motif are suddenly turned around by tying it to one of the aspects the show is about. Like posing a personal threat against, for example, a relative of one of the main characters. And because you know the show can do with the crazy turns, you can’t be sure if things will be okay in the end.

And that’s the thing. Fringe keeps everything essential to the whole by keeping them connected to something that is explored actively in the show. While each week, there is a new monster or some other new strangeness, they’re not just loose incidents. Nor are they a part of some story arc that progresses step by step. They’re part of what I love to call a Story Thread – a form of thematic tie that binds things without them actually needing to follow a neat step by step story structure. There are a lot of these threads running in Fringe – You know the Observer is there. You know the Pattern is there, and it’s probably the main thread of the show. And you notice how that guy from that one episode is connected to this thing here. And now there’s that butterfly motif that is telling us what’s coming up. And now we find about how that odd thing that happened is actually related to Walter’s relationship with Peter. Or the relationship between Olivia and John. You know, the underlying feeling how things are connected. Without them needing a story arc that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Taking a leap from Fringe to RPG campaigns, it’s a neat structure to work on – there are not so much “Story Arcs” that get completed, or even “Mythos Arcs” where the big plot gets pushed forward in the sessions that are tied to those. There are these threads that get resolved during the game. And every game session is somehow connected to one or more of these threads.

In a long campaign, we would of course have the Big Thread, the one that’s about the player characters working towards something. That would tie into most of the games in some way, just like in a typical game. But just progressing Big Thread in every game will leave it empty of ideas quite quickly and the players feeling a bit let down – “Doesn’t anything happen without it having a major part in the big plot? I mean, those old bag ladies that were terrorizing the local store were actually Vampire Queens. And I was just planning on buying a soda from that store.” Thus we will have some other threads running beneath the surface that get touched when the need arises. There might be a relationship between two player characters that’s not on such secure ground, played by both of them “having” to seduce other people because of their job. There could be a social commentary thread about hospitals being corrupt, and the characters seeing sides of that every now and then. There could even be a symbolic thread about crows being the harbinger of doom – they’d show up eating the corpses of the dead and caw in the distance when things get ugly. And when you would normally run a “filler game” to keep the players from criticizing the fact that everything has to do with the big plot, you hit them hard with a session that’s all about one or more of the other threads.

There is a sudden flocking of crows at a small British town near where the player characters are based. It has nothing to do with the big plot, yet it will tell something about the crows. Maybe one of the lovers needs hospital care, and the only way to save him is to find his brother, who can act as a donor for a transplant. And as the hospitals are corrupt, things get a bit more complicated. A “filler game” becomes much more connected to things. Without being connected to the big plot. This should really mean that the hospitals have nothing to do with the Big Thread, but being a secondary thing you’re exploring.

Also, the threads serve as a way for the Game Master to jump the shark without a) it feeling totally disconnected from the rest of the game and b) being connected to the big picture. If you want to shake things up, have the hospitalized character die and the brother take his place in the team. It’s a relevant death because the hospital thread has been explored on the background before. And it’s not a “Okay, the aliens killed our friend, we need revenge” thing because they didn’t kill him, the accident that got him hospitalized was his own fault. And it’s a great thing for the relationship thread because frankly, that has been going nowhere for like 10 games. Now there’s this identical brother who looks and feels like him, but is not him.

How are these threads different from running subplots in the game? Have a big story arc about PCs fighting some aliens and a lot of smaller subplots going on, one about the crows, another about the hospitals and so on? The difference I’m trying to point out is that Story Arcs are arcs. They have a beginning, middle and an ending. Threads are more thematic and symbolic things without so much to do with story structure. They only become part of the game when you want to take a break from the main thing. Otherwise, you notice them running in the background and it’s more or less just color. They are more about exploring a subject than trying to resolve it by taking steps. A Big Thread about the player characters fighting an alien horde would have more to do with getting to know the aspects of what the horde is than about taking steps that will eventually lead to a big confrontation that will determine the outcome of the war. Of course, you might want to keep your Big Thread more like a story arc, but it doesn’t stop you from using the thematic style to make the “fillers” more relevant.

I try to distance myself from political stuff, mainly because my views tend to be just plain trollish and then I and somehow end up voting people everyone hates. But this Urkintalaki thing has got me thinking about a minor detail about the “new ways of interaction” between the public and the democratic process. People who are involved in opposing things like Lex Nokia and Lex Karpela are the highly educated and technology and media savvy ones – the organizing is done over the internet, the anti-adverts are done in HD video and edited with professional quality. Mostly as a group effort – the costs of producing the highly professional content are cut because the people involved are the ones who could be/are doing it for a living (no idea which one is the real case). And the word is spread electronically, using social networking technologies like Facebook, to keep the movement from collapsing and the message being forgotten.

Now, compared to this, a protest by farmers that gets their only TV-time by the protesters pouring manure on the entrance of the Eduskuntatalo can be seen of being in a bit of a slump in getting their voice heard. And it’s not a matter of there being more people interested in Urkintalaki than there are of laws that affect the farming community, it’s just that the social demographic between these two groups is different, and one is way more efficient in handling itself in the field of high tech and media.

The way I understand representational democracy like we have in Finland is that we vote for people who we want to represent us. This set of people then is a nice, wide take on the Finnish people as a whole and what they/we want, as a statistical whole. We have been given the right to promote our differentiating views by protesting. So, the question nagging on the back of my head about if the Urkintalaki people are successful (the previous masinointi against Lex Karpela wasn’t) – Is media-savviness tilting this? IF the Urkintalaki campaign succeeds in changing the way the vote goes, where so-many low-tech campaigns about non-internet issues have failed, are we moving to a society that, as a political entity, is favoring a small elite that knows how produce pretty television adverts over the people who only know the traditional ways of making themselves heard.

I don’t think that would be what’s democracy is about.

So, just paid some money and will be going to Knutepunkt this year. Which means that I’ll be in conferences/related hulabaloo most of the end of April this year. May will not be pretty. I predict a massive hangover after Vappu.

Ok, I’ve finally managed to browse through Mouse Guard RPG – not read it completely, but enough to make some notes about it. The production values of the physical book are high – Full-color hardcover book with solid typography all the way through. The layout is given a lot of room, which is nice after the cluttered Burning Empires. Art is of course top-notch, not a surprise since it’s from the Mouse Guard comic. The rule system seems quite good (well, it’s Burning Wheel and then some), but so-far, nothing in it really makes me go “Ooh, I want to steal that for my homebrews”, which usually would be a marker that the game has reached its goals for me. That doesn’t mean the game is bad (good things I spotted were, for example: more or less formalized plot-twisting, animals getting and edge with their basic natures, seasonal changes), just that they don’t really inspire me.

That is also a bit of a problem with the whole book. It’s good. I can easily see the appeal and it works out just about as I imagine it would. And there are cute mice and villainous weasels. It’s very loyal to the comic and you could easily represent the events of the comics with it. All in all, it does what it promises very well. And yet, I feel somewhat cheated when I’m reading a 320 page RPG book that doesn’t stray from its purpose. I’m odd like that.

I’ve used the “RPG books are like cook books for me” -metaphor before when talking about games with friends. I originally stole it from some conversation thread on some forum, but it’s so true in describing what I get from RPG books these days. They contain recipes, ideas and inspiration. “Ooh, coriander chicken, sounds good, I’ll try something like that next time I’m inviting my friends to eat some chicken-based food. I’m not really keen on the idea the recipe has on the rice, so maybe pasta would be better” When you’re starting to play games, you follow the instructions by the letter, but once you know your own (and your group’s) tastes, you just cherry-pick things from new material and use the ideas to spice up the stuff you know that works.

And in this respect, Mouse Guard feels like a 320 page book about a wedding cake. After reading the book, you can do a wedding cake with it, and you know a lot more about wedding cakes and their history. But you already knew how to make a cake, and the recipe itself is quite normal. Also, you now know how to do the groom and bride from sugar, and sure, you could use that in your future cakes, but do you really want to the next time you’ll bake a cake for your birthday? Mouse Guard is that book for me. I could probably use it to host a great game about Mice with Swords, but if I wanted to do something else with the rules, using the game as a basis seems a bit more trouble than it’s worth. And no, playing Rabbits with Axes isn’t “something else” in this context

I have to compare the book to Burning Empires again – both are very narrow in scope, but at least with BE, changing the color of the game doesn’t feel so awkward. The innovations in that game are quite re-usable and they are on a higher level than just mechanical – the structural stuff is really something that draws me in (which is funny, as MG’s structural stuff just seems bland and uninteresting to incorporate into a game other than MG) there, as are the basic ideas of the world.

I’ll probably read Mouse Guard RPG through properly once, and then give final judgement to it. At the moment it seems like it’s a great game that I probably could never GM as it feels very uncustomizable. But then again, if I ever want to do something that has to do with little animals with a human side and a human society, I’ll use this game for it, for sure.

Summary: Great book, just not for me.

I’m currently annoyed at:

• Not having a pair of 3-D glasses
• Facebook meme “25 things” that includes tagging your friends so they “can” do the quiz too
• The realization where things went wrong with the game I’m running, midway the campaign.
• Slight flu
• Having to postpone a LARP I’ve been planning for my birthday on account of not being in the country
• Forgetting the Lady GaGa CD in the car
• Not being able to express myself in written form as well as I’m wishing (or “not having an editor on my retainer”)
• Television series with Filler Episodes
• Missing laser tag tonight
• Not moving on with things
• End of Last Watch. Too Deus-Exy, in my opinion, even if the metaphysics were sound
• Life in a distant corner of the world

Since there is an emergent trend of cat blogs, I’ll post one post about them here, now. It is a blog about the zany life of my three cats, Mörri, Tallukka and Töppönen.

Be warned, post contains cat photos.

Mörri and Tallukka are planning to take over the world. You are probably on their very long kill list.

Töppönen doesn’t bother with their schemes. He knows he will be the king when the time comes.

This was the last picture ever taken by a nameless photographer. It was taken on that special day on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Moments later, shots were heard and Kennedy was shot. There is no apparent connection between these two things.

That is the life of the kitties here. They’re like the Great Old Ones, waiting for the stars to be right for their reign to begin. Until that day arrives, I will be a loyal servant, et cetera.

I’m two thirds done reading The Last Watch. They should have included some sort of a health warning on the cover, went to bed around 5 reading that thing.