I finally saw Dune, and I liked it. Denis Villeneuve is predictably excellent, and the performances and music were great.
I guess my only gripe (although a major one) is that he should have done the whole novel in one film, in one go. If he doesn't like Marvel films so much, why go down the sequel path?
Last year I finally finished Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, a history of roleplaying games as they grew out of a surprisingly long and rich history of tabletop war games. I thought it was longer than it needed to be, but as a well-sourced academic work it's hard to criticize. This interesting article by Giaime Alonge gets into some of the cultural context surrounding the rise of modern war board games in the 1960's simultaneously with the anti-Vietnam war movement:
"Should we assume that there was a morbid fascination with Nazism among wargamers? I would say 'yes', at least in part. One of the most important sections of the aforementioned magazine The General was the 'Opponents Wanted' page. In the pre-Internet era, finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task. Wargamers used ads to find playing mates. Several of these ads clearly state a preference for playing the Germans – or even the Japanese – in games on World War Two. Some ads go even further, like one from a 1971 issue, which reads: 'The Fuehrer desires a good Joe to crush in Stalingrad.'[17] Actually, some of the interest in playing the Nazis has strictly technical reasons. Besides games specifically devoted to the last phase of the conflict, in World War Two games the German player is usually the one on the offensive, at least in the first part of the game, and one could argue that wargamers normally prefer to attack. In some ads, authors say that they prefer playing the Germans in games where the Axis has the initiative, but want to play the Allies in Anzio (1969), a game about the Italian campaign, where the Germans are on the defensive from the very beginning. Moreover, one of the main pleasures in playing a wargame is achieving a result that is different from the historical outcome. You thus might want to win World War Two with the Axis, as you might want to win the battle of Waterloo with the French. It would then mean that you would have been 'smarter' than Napoleon. Nonetheless, dismissing this whole phenomenon with simply technical reasons would be naïve and misleading. There was a fascination with Nazism. After all, in the 1970s, Nazi paraphernalia were widespread in American and European popular culture. Susan Sontag’s well-known 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism elaborates on this point in detail.[18] Wargames were following the current."
The article also reminds us that Dungeons and Dragons, a game where you roleplay a violent vagabond, kill monsters, and take their stuff, was created in part by Gary Gygax, a lifelong pacifist and Jehovah's Witness.
My Dad is sick. He started coughing last night, and today at lunch he had trouble swallowing (admittedly large) pieces of sausage and broccoli. We got a big up of chicken broth into him, then he went down to rest for the afternoon.
I'm guessing (hoping?) it's just a cold. His vaccination was last Saturday. He's convinced he's having a reaction to it, I really doubt it.
We're keeping an eye of things.
Meanwhile, here's an insanely addictive write up (if you're 46 like me) of 50 all-text games (mostly) from the 1980's.
The write-up of 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging is fantastic.
"It was the fan mail that set Garriott on a path toward reimagining what a computer role-playing game (C.R.P.G.) could do. In these letters, people described how they played the first three Ultimas, which were open-world games that did not require a linear path to complete, giving players the freedom to steal from shops or kill townsfolk. The letter writers explained, according to Garriott, that 'the easiest way to gain power was not to play as a good guy.' He was despondent. 'I inadvertently made games that drove the players to act dishonorably, as this was the path of least resistance.' What if, he wondered, there were a game in which your moral choices had consequences? He wanted the next installment of Ultima to reward honor and courage, and to penalize players for casual depravity. Garriott’s family and colleagues warned him that players might feel as if they were being punished for having admitted to enjoying robbing and murdering, but Garriott ignored them. 'This was the art I was compelled to make,' he said.
Where would these moral ideas come from? Garriott studied Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and Arthurian codes of conduct, but none felt applicable enough for all people. He was attracted to Buddhist and Hindu thought, but these traditions didn’t seem to offer a framework for a game. The plan for Ultima IV coalesced for Garriott after repeatedly watching his favorite movie, 'The Wizard of Oz.' Garriott had been ruminating on the essential ideals of truth, love, and courage and realized that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, respectively, embodied these concepts. With these three ideals, Garriott created a schema of relational virtues through which a player would develop a hero."
First off, Ultima IV is the first game I remember where you could "talk" to anyone and everyone. Sure, a lot of the people in the game had little to say beyond "Hello" but no small number of them actually played key roles in your adventure. You had to interact with them in ways beyond combat or stealing if you wanted to progress within the narrative frame.
Even as an 11 year-old I realized something special was happening here.
Second, I had a friend in high school who wrote an English class paper on the game. (Or maybe it was the sequel, Ultima V, which covered similar ground? Or both?) The English teacher wasn't too thrilled but then again, video games were not taken seriously by anybody back then. Pac-Man and Space Invaders were what people thought of when you mentioned gaming, not narrative driven quests for spiritual purity and enlightenment.
Third, my mom didn't let me play alone in my room. We set up "the computer table" near her own work-space. (At the time she had a typewriter, but not long after she had her own IBM.) I spent hours there laboring over a Commodore 64, constantly jotting down clues and hints and notes and map locations on a legal yellow pad. I'd ask my mom for help with turgid Tolkienisms, or run over to the phone to call a friend who was also working on finishing the game and who might have figured out one of its many daunting secrets before I had.
As something resembling "maturity" set in during high school she let it slip that she'd set things up like that on purpose. She got a kick out of watching me play that damn game, and if it taught me that there's more to life than murdering bad guys and taking their stuff that's secondary to the rest, to her covert tutelage and tacit support of my love for strange adventures.
"During his time behind bars, Gabriel made dice using one of the most common resources of all: toilet paper. 'You don't even need glue, just toilet paper,' he says, 'The way I did it is just by folding it into very thick square, wetting it, and then shoving it into a square corner, say a window sill. You do this over and over again, applying water when it starts to dry out, alternating corners. Eventually you have nicely shaped square. You have to continue shaping it as it dries with your makeshift corner jig. It shrinks a bit and gets quite hard.'
Where May was housed, 'No one ever got in trouble (that I know of) just for making them. If someone pissed off a C.O [corrections officer]. they could theoretically get written up for making dice (gambling paraphernalia) but mostly the cops didn't actively harass us in closed custody. If a person lost their dice it would more likely be during a one of the big shakedowns, where the cops go cell to cell and throw almost everything out on the tier. As in the real world, folks in prison hoard random stuff. They'd go through and throw it all away once a month, once every few months, or whenever someone OD'd on meth or something. When I got to medium and then minimum custody they really stopped throwing dice away, and in fact those kind of tier wide cell tosses were much rarer.'"Other means of randomization include playing cards, spinners, and perhaps most simply a cup filled with numbered chits.
