Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

MMOs and Morning Storytime Hour

One of the great things about flying with Goonfleet is not having to work in the mornings.

By which I mean that I get into work, fire up the pc, and get to read compelling stories authored collaboratively by scores of people on the GF forums.

Of course, there is rarely a single, cohesive post anywhere that tells the story of what has happened.  You can cheat, and skip to the end of whatever ALL CAPITALS IMPORTANT FLEET OP thread has grown to 10 pages and 500 posts overnight, but even that will only give an insight into the mood at the thread's conclusion.  Actually deciphering what happened is a different matter: forum threads, especially those which grow so rapidly, see substantial assumptions about contextual knowledge made by those who are collaborating in the events described in real time.

So the story has to be read start to finish, from page one, skimming the brief flame-wars and nerd-rage between acrimonious neighbours and browsing past the detours and cul-de-sacs of off-topic diversions.  The narrative is built jointly, rarely more than a paragraph at a time, by those participating in the events, and this happens in real-time. Some posts are aimed at fellow participants.  Some posts are aimed at observers: the "at work crew", most often, furiously F5ing as they read and begging for updates when the postrate slows.  Occasionally, most often in a moment of extreme triumph, a post will be explicitly aimed at the other: those spies who read our forums to report to their masters amongst our enemies. The result is a curious mixture of description and conversation

Like any historical record made up of primary sources, care needs to be taken when reading the narrative.  Much of what is written is speculative or precipitate, and turns out to be incorrect.  Some authors are notably trustworthy; some are notoriously not so.  Some people are not there, but are repeating as fact what they have misunderstood from participants.  This is goonfleet, so some will be downright lying for comedic value, and the wording of those trolls- which would seem indistinguishable from actual, factual claims to the inexperienced reader - are the keys to knowing they are intended humourously: at least three times last night posters claimed that the enemy leader Shrike was tackled in his titan (an uber-boat that we kill when bored).  Each of these reports was clearly intended to give the message "you should get here quickly" while not intending to convey the meaning "Shrike is actually tackled".

The overall shape and mood of the story is the primary indicator of current success or failure, shaped by occasional, blessed reports from high-value posters.  Then, sometimes, will come silence.

If you notice that posts suddenly stop for half an hour or more, then something big is happening.  Usually, it means something big and good is happening.  If we are getting slaughtered, some people will usually not reinforce their failure, but will come to the boards to say "welp".  If something wonderful happens, then even those who die jump back into ships and get right back out there, and don't have time to post about what happens.  This happened last night at about 12:50 GMT, and I read on eagerly, quickly reaching the mass ululations of delight posted an hour later as we discussed our victory.  Note that I say "we": these tales build our group identity.  It is the "we" of Goonfleet who killed Shrike, defended Detorid, cleansed 9-9, reclaimed Tenerifis and are siezing Omist and Feythabolis, even if no single Goon was there for all of these acts.  It is not surprising that one of the posts on the GF site is an adaption of Beowulf: stories and history make up a lot of the alliance wiki, and what better than the epic tradition?

NOW Sesfan Qu'Lah bode in the system of the Goons,
leader beloved, and long he ruled
in fame with all goonfolk, since his father had gone
away from the world, till awoke an heir,
haughty Remedial, who held through life,
sage and sturdy, the Goons glad.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM THING

You may think I am exaggerating when I say that some GF posters are unreliable or hard to read.  Perhaps you think that you've read enough forums to be able to effortlessly discard the chaff.  Well, allow me to quote Arghy, who it so happens is the single best poster in Goonfleet.  Imagine you are trying to piece together an engagement and you come across this, without even a hint of a clue what provoked it:

Hate to tell you this man BUT DINOSAURS ARE FAKE!! well not really but i do f***ing hate the idiots who speculate any further then 10000 years then say i cant make up my own story when its got just as much proof(guess who dident get along with the dino man at the museum?). I love f***ing with guys who believe science is an absolute haha shoulda seen how flustered i had this astronomer, he f***ing strongly believed that blackholes exsisted when i told him they dident because we have never seen one beyond some darkspot on a blurry camera.
How about the guys who think they know how big the universe is? HAHAHA man what the f*** is at the edge of it dude? you cant even f***ing FATHOM THE DIAMETERS YOUR TALKING ABOUT SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE MR PROFESSOR! I can tell you how old the earth is because i measured the radiation released from this thing! what did the radiation thing come from? what?! thats not important!

I suspect that you see what I mean a bit better, now?

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition

OK, I've held off on writing about the newly announced Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition for as long as I can.  I can't help it: I'm interested in this and that's that.  As Nate would have it, this post is suitably captioned, and you non-gamers whould consider yourselves waved-off.

Pen and Paper games companies have had a bad time of it, recently.  The hobby as a whole, aftet the great growth of the 70s and early 80s, has tailed off greatly in recent years.  There have been a couple of rennaissances in the last fifteen years: the launch of White Wolf's Vampire line added a lot of new people to the hobby, and then the launch of D&D 3rd Edition brought a lot of the older players back to the game, as well as prompting a spurt of growth in the industry itself through the D20 "open" ruleset.

But P'n'P gaming faces a challenge to its existence which is drawn from its very nature: it is pen and paper in a digital age.

Computers offer many of the elements that the pen and paper hobby lacks.  The computer provides a GM and opponents (or partners) who will always be there on time when you want to play.  And many of us now play Massively Multiplayer Online games in order to achieve the social aspect which single-player games lack.  The adventures are richly detailed and narrative structure is, at least, better than that which some GMs come up with.

Add to this the changing demographic of the core, veteran customers: we have plenty of cash but are encumbered with many other demands on what leisure time we have.  Wizards of the Coast can no longer afford to sell simply to a shrinking, school-and-college-based, cash-constrained market.

So they have decided to focus far more in this upcoming version on an attempt to incorporate online tools.  You can see a demonstration of some of these in this video on youtube.  View the linked videos in youtube's side-panel to see more detail.  At first, I was very dubious.  WotC have tried, before, to incorporate digital tools, rulebooks and products into the D&D line, and the results have been less than stellar.

However, at least the ideas are right here.  The target marketplace for which WotC are aiming are time-constrained and not many potential players know the three or four others within a reasonable travelling distance with whom to play.  So Wizards have decided to offer a virtual tabletop, so that distant groups - the college buddies who now live hundreds of miles apart, perhaps - can play online.  Some tools to do this have been available for years - IRC clients, messageboards, dice-rolling tools and more - but Wizards (as seen in the youtube link) are offering a 3D, graphical version more in-tune with the expectations of modern media consumers.

The service is to be a subscription one, priced competitively ("it'll cost more than a cup of coffee but less than an MMO" according to WotC's Bill Slaviscek).  While subscription services do present a mental barrier to many people, providing that the service is technically successful, I suspect that they will find themselves with decent MMO subscription numbers of 20k: if the other tools succeed then, given the add-ins like online subscriptions to both the flagship D&D magazines, I wouldn't be surprised if that grows five-fold over time.

Given the major time constraints mentioned before, help in speeding up preparation will be a big draw.  If I can more quickly build an adventure for my ongoing, 20-year-old campaign using the online monster generation and book-keeping tools then I will undoubtedly do so, even without using the virtual tabletop.  If the latter is comparably quick then I'll find a use for my 44" TV, instead of scrap paper for cack-handed on-the-fly mapping!

Long-distance gaming, done right, really has immense potential.  Going back to the networking issues mentioned above, I know a lot of gamers.  But I only know half a dozen or so who can make it to my house in Edinburgh every week on a Monday evening.  That is the fundamental chokepoint on growing the hobby: the network effect.

There are caveats.  When Neverwinter Nights was released a few years ago for the PC (not the earlier online version) there was a rush of enthusiasm from a great many people for the idea of running their friends through adventures in exactly the same manner as is portrayed in the Virtual Tabletop video.  In the end, virtually every attempt seems to have ended in failure.  The effort required was huge and the learning curve too steep for the average GM, who does not tend to dabble in scripting encounters or trying out virtual world software.  The minimalist approach will be best: draw a quick map (or, even better, seed a random one with style and size) and drop in some encounters, then  off you go.  The ability to fudge on the fly when the GM realises that he has grossly miscalculated an encounter's difficulty will also be important.

There are, as well, issues with the sort of conferencing experience that the virtual tabletop represents, and I experience those in the distance-conferencing that we do in my work.  It is important, in a performance medium like collaborative gaming, to get feedback from the audience.  Each player (particularly, but not exclusively, the referee or "dungeon master") is effectively playing to an audience of each of the other gamer in a group.  To perform without any feedback at all is not an easy skill.  Ideally, I would want video thumbnails of each of the other participants in a corner of my screen, but that level of penetration of video-conferencing is several years away, yet.

Anyway, this looks fun.  I worry that it may be a couple of years early, measured against the advance of both technology and consumer attitudes, but i doubt if those two years of delay were available.  The potential upside is huge, both for Wizards and for the gamer.  Just what the effect on the rest of the gaming industry will be is more questionable.  White Wolf have CCP's online expertise o back them up.  There is not another company in the entire nidustry who have the capital or the expertise to provide anything similar.  Trickledown, or rising tides floating all boats, may work as it did with D&D 3rd Edition.  But the key result of a successful implementation would be enhanced market dominance for the industry leaders, and a solid lock on that dominance caused by greatly increased barriers to entry.

Interlude from Charles "Comedy" Manson

I was reading about Charles Manson - somewhat gruelling but he's a part of American folklore and pop culture - when I came across this quote.  Some of what he says is clearly mad.  Some is obviously self-aware.  But is he knowingly making a hilarious, dark joke here?

There were these two kids - everybody thought I was cruel because one day he (the youngest boy) fell in a three foot ditch. There was a lot of bushes, the slope was three or four feet above the ditch. Down there it was muddy and he was crying. Others standing around said, 'Help him out', but I didn't. I said, 'Watch'. About twenty minutes passed or so and he stopped crying and started to climb out on his own. And the second time he tried to climb out he fell back down, but kept on climbing out more. Finally when he made it, climbed out, he was really tired, and stood in front of me and smiled.

I pushed him back in the ditch again.

Everyone knows and anticipates the lesson he is apparently teaching - about self-reliance and making someone eschew self-pity - right up until that last line.

The Beginning of the End

In a choice laden with all sorts of portent-type things, Stahlregen has picked Nine Inch Nails' "The Beginning of the End" (remixed by BSG) as the music for the new, too-short Goonfleet recruitment video.

In other Eve news that interests nobody but me, our enemies have lost 2 motherships in 24 hours.  The less of a very real 10 grand's worth of imaginary internet spaceships would be striking enough.  That one of them was probably bought partly with the embezzled ("borrowed") funds of ISS, whose head was flying it and who gathered the funds in an IPO from investors makes it all the sweeter.  When shareholders recently raised issues of trust, of inappropriate lending and of unwise investment strategies with him, he suggested that they ask for their money back from us in Goonfleet.  The wise ISS investor is already cashing out.

Ach, some people...

I got three comments posted via the contact form on this site today, which is a rarity: most people use the comments page.  What made it even more unusual is that all three were about a post from the best part of a year ago, discussing a concert by the Teenage Fanclub I'd attended.  One was a friendly, if anonymous note, pointing out a thread about my review on the Teenage Fanclub fansite, and warning me that one or two posters were out for my blood.  But the other two were a bit more unwelcome.  Clearly both by the same person, the first one was a short string of badly-spelled insults.  The second said (edited by me to remove unimaginitive swearing and correct personal details):

oh look what i seem to find out
Mr xxxxx xxxxxxxx
23 xxxxxxx xxxxx
Edinburgh
EHx xxx

why don't you make it easy and just take doon that p**h you call a review

Now, our friend may have the technical skills to be able to do a whois 9or the tenner to pay to have it done for him), but he isn't smart: uttering threats is a serious business in Scots law, made more serious for the offender when he forgets that, like most self-hosted sites run by professional devs, I log all IP addresses of my tiny readership on this site, which would enable the police to issue an order to the ISP (Virgin Media, in Newcastle, so we have an emigre, folks) to reveal the offender's details, and a second order to the site he came from to do likewise to provide evidence that he had recently viewed the thread on the Teenage Fanclub boards, which would themselves be held liable for continuing to host a second series of threats of physical violence by one of their more committed posters.

Of course, luckily for our militant muso, I am old-school internet, still living in the days of free speech, fond of those libertarian principles, and rather resentful of the legislation that Blair introduced to make such convictions easy.  But I admit that, when the address is that of my family home, I was very tempted for a second...  And you have to love the faux-gangsterism of asking why I don't "make it easy on myself?"  Someone is over-compensating a touch.

I registered on the site, thinking that it would at least be a laugh to have an argument about this with the more sane denizens who were clearly a bit :rolleyes: about the whole thing.  But music is about pleasure and personal taste - one of the few areas where I find relativism an arguable proposition. The discussion of why the review was read as so negative (the review was actually hugely favourable, but I couldn't help but be interested in the personal dynamics on-stage) would have been dragged into a flamewar by the few.

The odd thing is that these are fans of the teenage Fanclub we're talking about, here.  If I'd posted a review saying that Slayer sucked I would have anticipated such a response.  But one saying that an excellent gig by the Bellshill Beach Boys had an odd ambience?  Every band, every book, every football team, I suppose, has those who just invest too much in it.

===============

Edit: In the end I did post on the site: Goons don't back down from such internet buffoonery.  It was fun to enjoy such fleeting notoriety, and I now feel able to empathise with such great martyrs of the internet age as Paris Hilton and Jade Goody, upon whom I have always modelled myself.  Everyone should, at least once in their lives, experience viewing a messageboard full of angry, pitchfor-wielding strangers with a big picture of oneself (rather a good shot, I felt) under the words "DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?  AN ENEMY OF THE FANCLUB!"

It has certainly given a very good laugh to my colleagues at work, a couple of whom I have had to reluctantly dissuade from stirring up further fan-based musical lynchery.  One actually had an account there already, and it would have been fun to see his reaction if he had simply stumbled upon it.  There have been strong suggestions that I should dob the offender in to the constabulary anyway, but I fancy that in a fight bbetween rugby-player and basement-dwelling internet troll (I'm the first one, thanks for asking) I suspect I'd have a fair chance.  It certainly wouldn't measure up in tension to the last time I had a bunch of people cruising Edinburgh, high on speed and wielding baseball bats, pretending not to know my address (now that was a concern).

Justifiable Assault

Vigilantism is on the rise.  Hot on the heels of Smeato comes this story from Seattle,  I wholeheartedly endorse the actions of the unknown "little hippie girl" who took the law into her own hands in order to stop the singing of that vile hymn to mediocrity and middle-of-the-road blahness, Coldplay's Yellow.  I am only disappointed that she was one of the few Americans who does not tote around several concealed firearms on her person, as that would have allowed her to dispense swift and summary justice.

The Sound of Radio 3

Apologies for the silence: I should be able to start posting again from Monday or so, but in the meantime I am doing a mixture of things that eat time: mainly stuff on the masters (more of which later).

PS For non-Brits, Radio 3 is a highbrow classical music radio station.  Typically, you know you have tuned across it when you suddenly hit silence. You then turn up the dial and find a very, very quiet cello playing pianissimo in the 200Hz range, just aruond where whales use for trans-oceanic, deep-sea trench communication.