An Unnamed Force - 1/31/2014

There is a separation and a distance between that which is that that which we would have be. In the space that leads from one to the other is where we seem to live our lives. It is that space that pulls us away from where we are, from the now and the here into some future that has not yet come to pass.

But why should we be pulled into that space, into that non-existent future? It reminds me of the way that Einstein described space as warped, which alters the movement of anything that passes through it, resulting in the effect we call gravity.

It pulls us, pulls me, from where I am and what I am doing into something I cannot really see. What I want is clear, but the places I will go because of what I want are not. We see the light in the distance, and miss the grass beneath our feet.

Where does it come from, this fundamental unease with that which is? Some is from necessity, the simple ability to look to the future calling for its own use. Try to convey an idea without speech, without pictures, without a structured language or common sensory references. It is very difficult, because those abilities call for their use.

But what we do, the lengths to which we are pulled, are far beyond what is necessary for each of us to survive or thrive. Why, then, do we reach so far, and so often lose what already is in favor of that which is not yet?

Whether one calls this dreaming, or growth, or any of a dozen other names, it is there. We lack the ability to be satisfied, to be still, to reside in balance without that pull to move away from balance into something else.

I'm not saying this well, what I'm describing, but I feel it there, that pull, dissatisfaction, desire to avoid comfort, the need to stretch, and I do wonder why it pulls so hard and so relentlessly on so many of us. To move forward, to grow, is one thing. To lose sight of everything else is different.

361

Poetry Don't Count - 1/30/2014

There is

amongst the nothing

some core

that will not leave me.

It was given to me

before I was born

and shall endure

past my end.

My life is to see it

feel it

hold it in my hand

and know its many depths.

It is the mystery

the center

the outermost boundary

the impossible

and the simply real.

When I close my eyes

and drift

that is where it is

when I open them

and see the sky

that is where it is.

When once more

I walk the days

that is where it will be.

And here

in ink or photons

I present some piece of it to you

in hopes

that we will see more of those depths

than I will

alone.

126

A Subtle Distinction - 01/29/2014

There's something I learned in diversion, many years ago, that still sticks with me. It is something I see misunderstood and misapplied in every day life, and something I still forget to distinguish.

Fault is an emotional response associated with blame. And fault can be countered by excuse. Responsibility is a recognition that consequences derive from actions. Responsibility cannot be countered by an excuse.

Fault is concerned with the why of the action, and implies that any action, with the right why behind it, is acceptable. Responsibility does not offer that excuse, but neither does it deny that reasons underlie that action. Two people, both abused as children, may offer this childhood in defense of their actions. But one person will say “I should be excused, because of my childhood”. The other will say “I did what I did, because my childhood led me to make this choice”.

The first person claims that we may be considered entirely devoid of conscience and ethics simply because we have had some experience, or lacked it. The second person claims that there may be some reason in their life that they made this choice, but they still made this choice, whether consciously or not.

The first person claims, ultimately, that we do not make choices, but are programmed by our entire lives to perform the actions we take. The second person claims that we make choices in light of our past, our future and our present, but that these choices still are ours, and not simply the product of the forces acting on us.

The first person claims that we are not people. The second one affirms that we are.

The next time you offer an excuse, whether to yourself or to others, remember that an excuse may avoid punishment, but it also eliminates the power to choose and to be a person. I am still working hard to learn this and internalize it. Maybe writing it down this way will help.

329

Changes in the Fog - 1/28/2014

It's raining tonight, here in the fog. It's never done that before. I'm cold, here in my cave. I've not felt that here.

Something is changing.

The lights are out there tonight, moving like... animals. Images flit through my head of what animals they remind me of. Muzzles and paws, fins, flowing, running circling. And teeth, oh so many teeth.

Are they circling towards me? Or just moving? It seems like they hunt, but I don't know what their prey is. And what would they do with their prey? Men hunt, I think, sometimes, for the saving of something, not the eating of it.

With the rain comes something just more than a slight breeze. Not enough to clear away the fog and show me the sky above or below, but steady. Enough to bring scents I don't recognize from this place.

And a sound.

Just slightly there, a wailing, I think. Not the lights, though. Something else. Something... beneath me.

It does not seem to come from the ground, though, but from up around the edges of my island. It pulls at me, rising and falling, sometimes to nothing, but always coming back. There is a note in it that is not familiar to me. Though I suppose no sounds here other than those of leaves and branches and my own feet really are.

Time to go find out.

230

Do All That - 1/27/2014

Okay, so last night I talked a little bit about advances in gaming and what they meant from a technical standpoint. It was all very general, and didn't have much to do with my main point, which was about storytelling advances in gaming.

Traditional games, be they board-, war-, or card-, largely rely on the players themselves to build any narrative, and it generally has more to do with the interactions of those players around the minor structure that the game provides. Since the games are designed specifically to be replayed, each session of the game results in a new narrative. In games like chess and go, the narrative is one of strategy and the interplay of resources and territory. In games like poker, bridge and other multi-round games, the story builds over the course of a period of time, with each round adding complexity and nuance.

But some nebulous time in the late sixties and seventies, people started getting the ideas that games could be more than that. Arguments have been had over who had the idea first, but it was the game Chainmail that established the dynasty that is now known as Dungeons & Dragons. Somewhere in this foggy age, we also saw the beginnings of computer games closely related to the same basic idea, that games could become explicit narrative, and not just collections of replayed rounds resulting in group social interactions resembling stories.

And things have moved forward, ever since. With the release of Wizardry and Ultima, we began to see large-scale, complex worlds created for the player to interact with. This was in contrast to the text-adventure style games where choices were not just limited, but often absolutely restricted to a specific path. Wizardry gave us the dungeon crawl, heavy on mood, atmosphere, combat and puzzles. Ultima struck out in a different direction, focusing on the making of choices and interaction with pre-programmed characters called NPCs.

Both engendered sequels, and again. Ultima IV is still considered one of the finest pieces of role-playing fiction ever designed because of its depth and focus on moral decision-making. Wizardry:Bane of the Cosmic Forge gave us one of the first games with multiple possible endings, and truly different ones, not just a single encounter with some optional dialogues and victory scenes.

And as more games, and more kinds of games, came along, there were greater emphases on the elements of narrative. The writing of dialogue, the addition of dramatic, comedic and tragic points, the basic idea that the game was something more than a simple linear path to be followed like a race-track, over and over again for the best score or time.

Some of these elements began to show up in games that, technically speaking, didn't seem to need them. Fighting games with background for each character the player might choose or face. Entire mythologies that seemed to add little directly to the question of how to win a particular battle. And yet, some of these mythologies have become powerful stories in their own right, transcending the relatively simple format of the gameplay and propelling series like Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur into a genre unto themselves.

There's a trick to it all, of course. Gamers have been arguing technology vs. gameplay for decades. I prefer to think of it as tools and storytelling. The story can't be told without the tools, and the tools themselves tell no story. Recently, we have begun to see true mergers of these ideas, in games like Bioshock, Heavy Rain, Deus Ex, Dragon Age, and, of course, (you knew it was coming), Mass Effect.

The trick to good, great, wonderful gaming, whether it is on a tabletop, playing Candy Land or building the next multi-billion dollar online phenomenon is balance. Give me beautiful visuals, music and voice acting. Give me deep, powerful universes in which to play. Make the play itself feel like play, like I'm back in Brian's backyard in Corvallis and we're running around pointing our fingers at each other and yelling “pow pow I got you!”

Do all that, and I'll gladly buy your game. Do all that, and you'll help us all get games programmed on higher quality paper.

699

Games Programmed on Cheap Paper - 1/26/2014

So, awhile back I discovered Good Old Games, which is a site dedicated to re-publishing older games legally. Most of them require some help to run under more recent versions of Windows, and in those cases they're packaged with a DOSBox wrapper which allows for playing with appropriate settings already in place. It's a wonderful way to go back and play games that went out of production years or even decades ago.

It's also a great way to watch the development of the sophistication available in computer gaming. It's been a gradual set of changes over the last 30+ years, and most people have focused more on the technical aspects than the gameplay improvements.

Don't get me wrong, in many cases, the technical advancements in graphics, file-size, processing power and the OS-side tools have made gameplay improvements possible. But like any other tool, it required the industry to pick up those tools and make use of them for something beyond bigger bangs and wow.

We can point clearly to the technical advancements. CGA became EGA and then VGA and SVGA. Basic sprites and vector graphics became 3-D environments with polygons, textures, complex animations, even facial expressions (time to mention Mass Effect again!). Add to this the increase in the number of things and processes the computer can keep track of, the amount of information that can be held in RAM, and the sophistication of AI algorithms all made greater and greater complexity of world and gameplay possible.

But, again, it requires people to pick up those tools. Charles Dickens more or less invented the novel, but it took the early 20^th century and mass publication for enough experimentation to take place for authors to really learn how to put a book together. Without pulps and dime novels, we never would have gotten to people like Kurt Vonnegut or Chuck Pahlahniuk. Without Zork and Ultima I, we wouldn't have Starcraft, The Sims or (yes, I'll say it again) Mass Effect.

And the technical improvements are mirroring those in cinema, now. At first, movies were made by individuals, perhaps with a couple of helpers and actors. They grew to incorporate larger crews, and a manufacturing process in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Then they grew beyond that, and Directors became the driving force instead of studios, with giants like Hitchcock, Welles, Kubrick and Coppola.

Now we're seeing something of a return to the individual filmmaker and studio-independent crews. The technology has become cheap enough and easy enough to use that good stories can once again be told without having millions of dollars behind them.

Flash, and ultimately HTML 5, have put many of the necessary tools back into the hands of the small, even single-person development arenas. Even if these games never become the kinds of blockbusters that everyone wants to make, they are tools that allow the amateur to develop their chops, to walk the path through the design and implementation of a game and see the experience through, beginning to end. (A great site for checking out these games is Kongregate).

We have hit the age of the pulp game, when they are produced both on the highest of scales in development houses like Bioware and Blizzard, and on the most personal of scales. What comes out in the next fifteen to twenty years is going to give rise to the Vonneguts and Tarantinos of the late 21^st century.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

576

Dear Ed, Thanks For All the Crap - 1/25/2014

In 1951 (or thereabouts), Theodore Sturgeon made the first statement that would ultimately results in what is now known as Sturgeon's Law. Simplified, it is this:

“90% of everything is crap”

Sturgeon was talking about the fact that most products of human creativity, engineering and manufacturing are produced with expedience in mind rather than quality. Or, at least, attempts at quality fail instead of succeeding.

If you want to experience Sturgeon's Law directly, go to a video store (yes, I'm old, that's my analogy). Substitute Amazon Prime, Netflix or Hulu, if you like. Start looking at titles. Count the number of movies or TV shows that you have no interest in watching, for whatever reason (crap), as well as the number of movies or shows you are interested in watching (good). If something puts you on the fence, ignore it.

You will find (as I routinely do) that the ratio is just about 9:1 in favor of the stuff you don't want to watch. And that appears to be consistent pretty much across all media that reach some critical level of production within a culture.

For a long time, I took this as an indictment of creativity and the will toward excellence, and fundamentally a bad thing. I am now looking at it a bit differently.

Oh, the true crap, the stuff that is produced to make money and rip off the consumer/audience, that is still true crap and should be stopped. The next time you buy something that falls apart five minutes after you take it out of the box, or watch a movie that you literally can't believe anyone bothered to make, that's the stuff I'm talking about.

But setting that aside, we're left with the remainder (about 50%, in my experience), where an attempt at excellence is made. 80% of that is still crap, but it is crap that is making the effort. And I have come to realize that without that 80% of the remainder, we don't get the 20% that we love.

So to those of you(us) who make crap, but are trying to make something good, keep at it (as I will). Who knows, if Ed Wood was still alive, he might have produced something that people other than himself would have seen as great. But he never gave up, and for all those failures, for all of the crap that he produced that is very nearly unwatchable, I thank him.

407

A Haunting Confession - 1/24/2014

Hello, my name is Michael and I am... a nyctophile.

Yes, I know, this is a shocking and disturbing revelation to many of you, but I do honestly enjoy being in environments with fewer photons in the visible range present than is normal. I like darkness and I like the night. Not just because these are places where one has to deal with fewer crowds, not just because it tends to be quieter and easier to take, but because I truly love these places and times.

There is a mixture of reasons that this is so. It began, undoubtedly, because of my light-sensitivity. It's not a pain threshold thing, it's just that my eyes take in more light than most. Gives me excellent night-vision. Which, in turn, makes darker environments more physically comfortable, and I have fewer problems navigating and functioning in them than most people do.

I remember a couple of times when I was a kid, reading by starlight (not moonlight). It wasn't easy, but I could pull it off. And let me tell you, once you get used to it, showering in pitch blackness has an incredibly relaxing effect.

Which is why the page looks different today. I have been asked by some of my readers (how weird to have readers?) to change the color scheme to something that doesn't hurt their eyes. Ironically, I chose it because the classic black text on bright white screen is what hurts my eyes. But since I won't be reading my posts much on the site, and since alienating one's audience is best kept until much later in one's career, I have updated the color scheme. Let me know what you think.

282

Anticipation and a Center - 1/23/2014

So the anticipation of this has become surprisingly pleasant. I've started blogs and serial writing projects before, but they've always petered out one way or another. They all involved plans and structure, and became more than I wanted to do even before I started them. I must remember that improvisation is my greatest strength.

Funny how things work better when you play to your strengths instead of trying to break your weaknesses.

That brings an image to mind, about how to think of weakness in terms of mentality and personality. Instead of seeing something as less, I suddenly see it as a wall, or a chasm. Not something where I am simply less practiced, limping along, but something over which I must build a bridge or a ladder if I wish to cross that way. Or work my way around the edges until I am past. An interesting notion.

And that, perhaps, is the purpose of writing this way. Not to accomplish a goal such as a treatise on the nature and devices of fiction as they relate to game design (one of my planned projects), but to wander. To find the edges of those parts of me that might be useful, if I could figure out how to get around them and make them work the way that I do. To find interesting notions, simply because there must be something to talk about, and make them something more than interesting notions at some point.

And on that note, I include something that I've posted elsewhere, that at least one person has told me is useful to her. It is a litany, to be spoken when times are difficult. I wrote it recently when I had a depressive episode, and it has come to be very powerful for me. Speaking it reminds me of my true situation, and helps me to fend off the emotions of the moment. It becomes centering, calming and a source of strength. I offer to you to take it and use it as you see fit, except that is is not to be sold (in other words, a no-commercial-use Creative Commons license).

I ride the wave

It does not ride me

I live my life so that, when the waves come, they are few and far between

I live my life so that I catch the waves, and they do not catch me

I live my life so that, when the wave is passed, I have no regrets

I listen to myself

I interrupt the negative thought patterns

The cycles that pull me down

I am mindful that my perceptions, my understandings, my expectations

Are not those of other people

I am mindful that I decide

Always

Whether to speak or act

I am mindful that I am not being driven

I drive

468

Life Can Be Something Good - 1/22/2014

So I want to talk about depression. Not the sour moods we all get into from time to time because life sucks occasionally, but clinical depression. This is best defined as a state where simply moving on from that mood state becomes impossible. For some people, it is based on an event or series of events. Loss of a loved one, divorce, abuse either emotional or physical, any number of causes. For others, such as myself, it is neurological in origin, a function of brain chemistry which then interacts with psychology.

Whatever it's source, too many people misunderstand it. And this is entirely reasonable. We are all intimately familiar with the basic form of depression. It is a common mood state and an easy word to relate to. What is different about clinical depression is that it is not the commonly understood mood state, although it shares many features with it.

Here's an analogy for understanding what depression is like. Load up a small box with books, about thirty or forty pounds of them (vary the weight by your own personal level of upper-body strength). Set the box on a low table. Stand with the box on either your left or right side. Twist your torso to that side and down, and pick up the box. Don't bend your knees, do all the work with your arms and back. Lift it quickly and as jerkily as possible. Set it down the same way on the other side of you. Preferably all the way down on the floor.

Congratulations, you have now messed up your lower back. Probably quite badly. You may not notice any pain until the next day, but it will be there if you've done this exercise correctly.

Over the course of the next few, agonizing weeks, notice your mood state. You will discover that any motion you make is painful. You will discover that remaining still is painful. You will lose enthusiasm for doing anything, because it hurts to do anything. It hurts to do nothing, too, but at least you aren't making things worse, so far as you can tell.

You will become irritable, frustrated and angry. You will snap at people, even if they are being loving and helpful. It will seem that most people have absolutely no understanding of what you're going through, how badly it hurts and how much you just want it to stop.

Aspirin and the like won't do anything, and ice packs and heating pads don't help much or for long. The pain is there while you're awake, and makes it impossible to sleep sometimes. Other times you will collapse into a sleep so deep you won't move for six or eight hours... resulting in waking to even greater agonies than you went to sleep with. You become angry with your back, with the situation, with the fact that the only solution is to wait for things to get better.

Now, cut the agony down to a dull roar. Say about 50%. You become much more functional, but are still in pain all the time. Still frustrated, angry, upset, hard to get along with. Now take away any sense that you know where that pain is coming from.

You know it's there. You know that you feel something that you just want to stop more than anything, but it isn't your back, or your foot, your eyes or your belly. Something hurts, somewhere, and there's a part of you that just screams in the back of your head, begging for it all to go away.

I will steal part of a phrase from Terry Pratchett: wearing the world hurts. Everything, whether physical, social, professional or emotional, causes you some kind of pain and anger. Without a cause, you end up with two possible things to be angry with: the world, and yourself. For most of us who are depressed, it is both. And because you don't know where the pain is coming from, you have no idea if it ever will go away. The pain itself begins to lock you in, dulling your joys and heightening your unhappiness.

We will never know how many people every year die of depression. Suicide is easy to spot, but it is just as likely that a depressive will commit a homicide as a suicide. And there is no way to determine how many vehicular accidents and other deaths are indirectly caused by depression.

I lived with that sourceless, indefinite and unending pain for twenty years. It broke me, but it could not make me quit. To those of you out there who are in this place, ask for help. This condition has a physical cause, regardless of how it started. Once your brain chemistry becomes sufficiently unbalanced, as mine was, it will not come naturally back into balance. There is no more shame or failure associated with clinical depression than with epilepsy or an allergy.

I survived my pain. I call on you to do the same. Ask for and accept help. Life can be something good.

845

Like Blade Runner, but I'm not Harrison Ford - 1/21/2014

There are times when I wish I could say everything that's really in my head. All of it. There's so much sometimes that it feels crowded in here, like the crush of the street in Kolkata or Beijing at the peak traffic hour. So many voices, so many observations and rants and raves. So many jokes and stories and things to say about the world.

I could talk literally forever without running out of words, ideas, concepts, interests, fascinations, obsessions.

But I don't. Because that's not what one does. One selects, carefully, the words and ideas and statements one can make. And one comes to places like this and forms safe pieces that can be posted without calling down thunder and wrath. One does not reveal what truly lies in one's mind and heart.

Because...

I don't know. Maybe we just can't do better than tolerate each other. Maybe what's in my head is just too ugly and chaotic and off-kilter to be shared.

I write stories, and poems, and little essays, and those are analogs for the worlds and constructs in my head. By paring them down to a few characters and situations, I can make them real, in some sense. Comprehensible in scope and complexity. But they are all me, one way or another, some small facet of the neural network of storms that I live inside.

I envy the freedom of a man like William Burroughs, who simply let that out into the world, and found respect for it. Or Hunter S. Thompson, who made a career out of showing off the darkest parts of himself and daring people to judge him for it.

Of course, they were both completely fucking nuts.

285

New Fog - 1/20/2014

The fog is changing. Thicker here and there, thinner elsewhere. I could swear, for a moment, just now, that I saw the surface of one of the lights. It shone like fire, right in my eye, before fading beyond some new thickness of cloud.

Why do I know what fire is?

I've never been able to make one here, but I know what it is. Bright flickering, hot and orange. Not really like the hard shine of that light, but I know what it is.

I call them fern-things, because I know they aren't ferns. But I've never seen a fern. Couldn't tell you what one looks like, but I know it's not quite the things that are here.

I know stone, and fog, and moss. But I don't know where from. I know that if I cut the trees down, they won't grow back. How do I know that, if I haven't ever done so?

The fruit is good, but sometimes I feel a wanting for something different. Something specific. Red, wet, chewy. Meat. What is that? Why do I think, almost, that I can smell it cooking, sometimes. Is cooking putting meat on fire? It seems like good meat is hot, and red.

How long have I been here? I don't remember before, but if I know things that are not here, then there must have been a before. Mustn't there?

234

Again...-1/19/2014

So, I fucked up again. I was talking with someone and didn't realize that I was upsetting and offending her. To Liberty I truly do offer my apologies. I had no right to make your day worse, and would take back those words if I could.

And as an extension, to everyone I have ever failed, hurt, upset, angered, let down, offended, creeped out, or have otherwise made your life a less happy and positive place to be, I apologize as deeply as I can. I have been stupid, clumsy, blind and ignorant, but have always done my best to act without malice.

There are lots of you out there, I know. Some I am not even aware of. But those I am aware of include Andy, Mary, Lauren, Derrick, Wayne, June, Dene, Bob, Casey, Marcy... the list seems to go on the more I think of it. All of you people I have failed in my life, all of you people that deserved better of me.

I will try to give better, but let's face it, these are mistakes I will make again. Words I will say that I will not understand until too late are hurtful and wrong. Choices I have made to speak or act, when silence or stillness would have been better. Decisions I have made not to speak or act, when words or deeds would have been better.  From all of you, I ask forgiveness, but understand if you choose to withhold it.

Maybe, someday, I'll get it right.

239

Island in the fog - 1/18/2014

Random Fiction Fragment (a RaFF instead of a riff)

There's something like dew on the moss outside of my cave when I wake. I look out into the fog and wonder, for the umpteenth time, where I am. It's never dark, it's never light. Good enough to see by, the mist swallows up whatever there might be more than fifty feet away. I can easily throw a stone so far I can't see it land.

How long I've been here, I'm not sure. Lost count of how many times I've slept after the first few hundred. Not that it's a meaningful count. I have no way of knowing how long I sleep, how long I wake, even how long it takes me to get someplace. Only soreness in my feet and legs tells me anything, and I can't trust that anymore, since I know every square meter of this island.

There's me, and the cave, and the inedible damp fern-things that I use for bedding. Behind the cave is a spring, and the trees that bear the fruit that I eat.

And one-hundred fifty-nine paces from the front of my cave is the Edge. It drops off into nothingness, just more fog. I can travel around the circumference of this island before I need to sleep, two or three times over. At no point is there anything but moss, fern-things, the cave, the spring, and I'm repeating myself.

That's a hazard, here. There is literally nothing to do. The fern-things won't burn, neither will the moss. The fruit trees might, but they never drop a branch, and I haven't got any way of cutting one down. None of the stone will take an edge, I can't find any dirt, even, to draw or write in. There's me and what I say to myself (is it out loud? I don't know anymore).

Out there, sometimes, are lights. Or there might be. Could be I'm dreaming, or imagining them. I keep thinking they might prove to be vessels, since they seem to move. Maybe one will come here and tell me where I am, and why. The fog washes out everything that might identify them. They could be a hundred feet or a hundred miles away.

There is no weather, here. Slight breezes on occasion, or I think they are. No rain, no snow, no hot days, no cold ones. Total neutrality of environment.

There's air, here, but no birds. No insects that I've seen. I haven't had a cold or the flu since I got here. But the moss is real, and the fruit. The water tasted pure, and satisfies my thirst.

So where am I, and why?

Something I Don't Understand - 1/17/2014

So, I'm going to ask you all to explain something to me.

I walk outside, and there's water falling from the sky. The world is cool, clean, calm and beautiful. The clouds and the winds move light through the sky and onto the ground and everything is in balance and finding renewal.

And most of you say it's depressing, unpleasant, nasty weather. The average person hears it's going to rain and lose their smile immediately. This is something I have never understood.

Some say it's related to Seasonal Affective Disorder, where some people become depressed because they don't get enough sunlight into their retinas. This unbalances the sleep cycle and may lead to Vitamin D deficiencies, among other effects.

But the light is still there, and a single afternoon isn't enough to invoke a true state of SAD, so what is it? I look up and see the marbled white-and-gray light and enjoy it. It is not the hard, brassy blue-sky sunlight, it is sunlight filtered through what feels almost like stained glass. The rest of you look up and see... what?

I do not, and probably never will, understand this prejudice against the rain. Every day it rains here, I look to the green that is everywhere and know that these two things are directly related. I go to Southern California every now and again, and find slight horror in the fact that you can spot the City Limits because that's where the grass turns from brown to green. Green shouldn't be caged like that, and neither should a desert be twisted into something it's not.

When I was in High School, my cousin Greg and I remodeled our house a bit. This resulted in me having a bedroom that was partly under the roof. With just Styrofoam batts in the ceiling for insulation, I could hear the rain with incredible clarity. The most peaceful sleep of my life was under that roof, during rain.

How can that make anyone sad?

332

Luke Plissken and Snake Skywalker - 1/16/2014

So tonight I want to talk about two of my favorite characters. Both were ones I ran in two different Champions campaigns that my friend Matt ran. Total opposites, and yet tremendous amounts of fun, in different ways.

The second was Lance Goodson, also known as Really Really Good Guy. Dumb as a box of rocks and harder to destroy. I built him around a disadvantage I chose to call 'Impervious to Reality'. He lived in his own world of Golden or Silver Age comics as a true superhero. That the world around him did not conform to the rules of these comic books completely eluded him. Something like the Tick, but not quite as aware of his real surroundings.

The first, much more complex character, was Nemo. Nemo was intelligent, paranoid, only partly human and utterly amoral. Not immoral, not evil, but incapable of considering the ramifications of his actions except in terms of his own survival. The concept I built him around was as a person who literally had no face to call his own. He was a shapeshifter, but had no 'base' form around which he was built. This separated him from humanity in a thousand ways that I explored in my own conversations with him in my head.

How can so much enjoyment in a role-playing game come from such absolutely different characters? How can we find so much to identify with in Luke Skywalker and Snake Plissken at the same time. Both are iconic characters in their own way. The idealistic boy-hero and the infinitely cynical anti-hero. But both Star Wars and Escape From New York hold our attention, and tell stories that are engaging, enjoyable and (wait for it) immersive.

The answer to that question, I think, is Jungian in nature. We are not a single voice, a single pure individual. We each walk with our own demons and angels (or whatever your culture might call them), and they all speak to us all of the time. What we call the self, the ego, the soul, the personality, is the balance point between them.

Really Really Good Guy is my idea of the pure, noble hero. Ignoring the worst aspects of reality and fighting on regardless. Nemo is the ultimate pragmatist, concerning himself only with the immediate needs of himself and his situation. Both are here in all of us. We are all Luke (or wish to be) and we are all Snake (or wish we could become).

So here's to the demons and angels in all of us. They make us what we are.

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In Memory of Pru, Bob and Dave - 1/15/2014

So I'm doing this, and I'm thinking about written versus verbal communication. I've had some issues with people in the recent past where written communication became more of a barrier than a useful means of conversing. In one case, we worked it out, in the other, we did not.

But what does that have to do with anything? Well, this is a world increasingly reliant on texts, tweets, emails, messages on social media sites, blogs and a thousand other forms of sending words to people without actually saying them. Is that a bad thing? In and of itself, no. But there is a problem that develops, and it is getting worse.

Specifically, nobody is teaching people how to write well and clearly. People think that because they can converse easily and effectively with others in person, that they can say the same things in a written format and it works just as well.

No, it does not.

Much of face-to-face conversation happens non-verbally. Specifically, tone of voice, body language and facial expression. Take those away and words that clearly mean one thing become ambiguous, reliant on the mood and reading style of the recipient to understand correctly. Which is why those annoying goddamn emoticons started appearing, so that there was some vague indication that “hey, this is a joke, not me saying something horrible”.

I went to a small private high school in Portland, Oregon, called Catlin Gabel. From 7^th grade until I graduated, I got writing pounded into my skull. In 10^th grade, I remember spending an entire semester writing three and four sentence paragraphs and then analyzing what I had written. How long was each sentence? What were the first five words in each sentence? What words did I repeat? Over and over and over again we did this.

And I got better. When I went to college at the University of Puget Sound, I was in the Honors program, which basically meant I got good grades in high school and didn't know enough to spot the program as an unnecessary adjunct to an otherwise good educational experience. In our first class, we found out the format. Each four-month semester, we would read six books. And then we would write a 5 to 8 page paper on each one. Sounded reasonable to me, only a little rougher than high school.

I was in the decided minority.

I also lived in the Honors house, and so I got to see many of my fellow Honors students undertake this ritual the day before each paper was due. We had class at noon Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Papers were always due on Wednesdays. So at noon on Tuesday, the whole house would start writing. Notes came out, final readings were done, and 24 hours of agony began. Most of them were rushing to print out what was essentially a first draft of their paper the next day at 11:49, just in time to run to class.

Because I had spent so much time just writing and writing and writing in high school, I would sit down around 5, read the question, write my paper, find my quotes and be done by 10 or 11 (if I wanted to polish something). I didn't get solid As, but B’s and better all the way through, doing at least as well as any of my classmates (with one or two exceptions).

And that's because I didn't have to think about how to construct a sentence so that it was clear. I didn't have to think about which words worked and which didn't. I could focus on the idea I wanted to get across and then let the largely automatic process of constructing sentences, paragraphs and essays take its course.

I'm somewhat rusty now, and less strict about it, since my audience isn't a bunch of professors with specific ideas about how these things should be done, but the basic skills are still there. I'm at 661 words right now, and it's taken me about fifteen minutes to put this together.

Not bad for being out of practice.

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Smooth Roads on the Citadel - 1/14/2014

Okay, so one final rant about immersiveness. This one having to do with games.

I have been playing computer games since before I bought Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the early 80's. The Mass Effect trilogy is the game I have been waiting for since those days of CGA graphics and intentionally impossible gameplay. It is my favorite computer game ever, and I have played through all three games multiple times.

Mass Effect I also contains one of the most egregious examples of failure in immersion in computer games ever.

Immersion in games is more complex than even the coordination of hundreds or thousands of people involved in making movies and TV. That is because it requires the direct interaction of the audience as well as the authors. And more, it requires that the player be able to interact with the game in a way that allows for immersion. This largely happens through the interface (a focus of future rants), but also occurs in the manner in which the authors offer both gameplay and exposition to the player.

This divide is marked in Mass Effect in there being three separate modes of play. There is the basic tactical/shooter mode, which defines the most active elements of play. There is the character interaction mode, wherein the player makes decisions about how Shepard will speak to non-player characters in the game (NPCs). Then there are cutscenes.

When they first appeared in games, cutscenes were an innovative way of adding story to the experience. No longer limited to short, scripted conversations to provide large chunks of exposition, designers could now throw in large-scale full-motion video, eventually with voice acting and cinematic elements. Getting players involved in the story now included all of the tools that movies and TV had been making use of for decades.

But while a TV show or movie is nothing but a cutscene, players play games in order to take control of the action. Cutscenes, it was quickly found, could not simply be dropped in where they would best fit the overall story, but had to be placed carefully, so that the player looked on them as an addition to the game, not a frustrating interruption of play.

Mass Effect I ends on The Citadel, a space station that houses the central government of a large section of the Milky Way galaxy. The player is there to confront Saren Arterius, who is the primary servant of the Big Bad of the piece, a machine intelligence known as Sovereign.

The final encounter begins with an argument between Shepard and Saren, which ultimately ends with Saren being thrown down into a lower chamber. Which, of course, becomes the scene of the second stage of the fight. Now it gets tough. The second stage of the Saren fight is easily one of the hardest in the whole game (if not the hardest, Thresher Maws aside). It requires careful attention be paid, careful timing and a strong knowledge of Shepard's abilities and those of his/her squadmates. This is especially true when playing on the harder difficulty levels.

And then, when you get Saren down to about 50% health... boom. An unskippable cutscene that lasts for a full minute or two. Completely interrupting your rhythm in the fight with Saren. Possibly occurring during the middle of an attack/skill animation, virtually guaranteeing that you will be caught unprepared when the battle picks up at precisely the second it left off to go tell you that the fleet is still fighting Sovereign. Not fun the first time it happens, it becomes something truly torturous on later playthroughs.

This cutscene adds nothing to the fight with Saren, and destroys the sense of immersion you had just seconds ago. Why? Because it took control away from you at a completely inappropriate moment. In addition, it is clumsy, because there are many ways that this could have been avoided with very little work on Bioware's part. Having Saren break off to try to complete his original mission of capturing the controls to the Citadel and run to another part of the station would have added a third and satisfying stage to the fight, and allowed for the cutscene without disrupting a player's control in the exact middle of the critical moment.

So, lesson to designers out there. Immersion in games is more than it is in other media because the player is involved. You take control away from a reader or a viewer in written and cinematic formats. In a computer game, you cannot just take control, loss of control must be as carefully managed as cutting, dialog and lighting in movies, or pacing and word choice in literature.

In short, smooth roads make the best stories.

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The Jump, the Punchline and the Nipple - 1/13/2014

Okay, so yesterday I started talking about immersiveness in fiction. Writing has fairly simple rules for that, but what about more intricate forms of fiction?

In cinematic formats (TV and movies), words take a step back, and become primarily vehicles of plot, while the visuals and audio effects take over the descriptive aspects of storytelling. Flow and immersiveness in a cinematic format relies on much more than the selection of words and construction of sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

In a cinematic format, to the abilities of the writers, we add the skills of the actors, the technicians of multiple stripes, camerapersons, editors, directors, and a host of others. It is not the work of a single person, but that of dozens or hundreds, sometimes more. And all of this must come together in a way where the medium and its requirements and challenges does not interfere with the telling of the story.

Since part of the purpose of stories is to take the audience on an emotional journey, there are three types of scenes in cinematic pieces that are especially useful for analysis in terms of flow. These are the scare, the laugh and the sex scene.

Startling someone is easy. Let them sit quietly for a while, and then pop out of the nearest bush. But scaring someone is much more difficult. This is a problem that all horror writers have had to deal with since the genre was invented some time around the beginning of language. In order to startle, one must only surprise. In order to scare, one must build an atmosphere of tension and threat prior to the moment of fright.

But in order for the tension to mean anything, there must be a release. That is the pattern of fiction, of storytelling, of life itself when it is at its best and worst. Building tension involves creating the immersion. Release involves breaking the immersion in a very specific way. Unfortunately, this means that after the release, one's audience is actually pulled out of the story. Adrenalin is very hard to ignore.

In horror, it is the moment of fright, the jump, the cat leaping out of the closet. In humor, it is the punchline. For both humor and horror, one can build a pattern of tension and release that is either done well (Rear Window, Airplane!) or poorly (Hostel, any Will Farrell movie). Do it well, and you have something that will affect people, do it poorly, and nobody remembers the title.

The problem for the writers/directors is the moment after the fright or punchline. You have just taken your audience out of the immersion by physiological means. Both fear and laughter put the body in a state where it is more aware of itself and its surroundings than when it is calm and immersed. Which is why horror movies must go for brief frights and comedies have to make sure to wait for the laugh to subside before continuing with the story.

Sex scenes have a different problem. In public, it is acceptable to be frightened, it is acceptable to laugh. It is not acceptable in most places to have an orgasm, which is the obvious release aspect of the tension/release cycle in a piece of erotic fiction. And so Hollywood has found that sex scenes can have two effects. One, it can, and often does, cheapen the movie, simply because the nudity and/or sex has more to do with displaying bodies than telling a story. Two, it can, although rarely does, elevate a piece, using nudity and sex to truly tell us part of the story. Which is why there are respected actors (male and female) on both sides of the “I will/I won't” fence.

But it all comes down to flow. Pull me down the road smoothly enough, with not too much or too little in the way of beauty, poetry and elevated acting (or nipples), and it will work. Take a mediocre story, and tell it in an immersive way, and it will be enjoyed. Take Shakespeare and tell it in such a way that I keep noticing the rubber masks and stage directions, and it will not.

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Murder Your Darlings - 1/12/2014

So what questions are weighing heavily on me this evening? None, really. So let's talk about immersiveness in fiction.

Writing has an old adage: “You must murder your darlings”. What it means is that when an audience is traveling through a narrative, there needs to be a flow. A steady movement from one moment to the next. A writer who writes a sentence, phrase, paragraph or scene that is too beautiful, too perfectly written, pulls the reader out of that flow and causes them to notice the writing instead of the story.

Now there are exceptions. The beginning or end of a chapter or section can have something like this, although even there, the writer must be careful. The hooks that every writer wants to start a story with are a good example of where this can work, and where it can go horribly awry. There's an entire contest called The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest that celebrates the worst possible opening sentences contestants can come up with. Some of them are truly horrifying.

On the flip side, there are sentences that are iconic in literature for being perfect beginnings. “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And my favorite, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” That sentence starts William Gibson's Neuromancer. That sentence (written when dead channel meant static, not blue) created an entire world in my head, that the remainder of the book filled in perfectly.

But what about in the middle? The middle is a road, and needs to be smooth. Bumps in that road, places where the pavement rises above or falls below the general level, interrupt the journey, make the driver aware of that particular moment of road rather than the overall journey on which they have embarked. I don't know about you, but I hate potholes when I'm behind the wheel.

So the next question is: how does this simple rule translate into other media? Tomorrow.

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Ethics - 1/11/2014

I said I'd post something about my Ethics, so here they are, at least a first pass through them.

1. Do no unnecessary harm.
2. Take only that which is freely given, give only that which is freely accepted.
3. Do not misrepresent who or what you are.
4. Do what you say you will do.

So let's get some items out of the way right now, since some of you will insist on capitalizing on certain words in this list. “Freely” means without coercion or duress, not without money, so you can leave those jokes at the front door, please.

Unnecessary harm works like this. If I render you unconscious, strap you to a table and cut your ribcage open with a circular saw, I'm committing murder and the harm is unnecessary. If a cardiac surgeon does the same thing, she's saving your life and performing necessary harm. If I shoot someone randomly, and kill them, that's unnecessary. If I shoot someone because they're about to harm another person, that qualifies as self-defense and is necessary.

Not misrepresenting who or what you are is my version of “Don't lie”. The problem is that lying in many small ways is social lubricant. The cashier at the grocery store who asks “how are you doing today?” doesn't want a complete rundown on your aches, pains and frustrations. Saying that you're “okay”, “fine”, or “surviving” (my favorite) isn't the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it is a more than acceptable answer to a question intended to promote social harmony rather than a caring inquiry into the well-being of another person.

Do what you say you will do is pretty self-explanatory. And the Ethic I have the hardest time with. Writing this blog is, in part, about saying I'm going to do something and then actually following through.

How am I doing so far? Three hundred twenty-three words in this post.

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First Wanderings - 1/10/2014

So let's ask a question that once drove a man mad.

What is value?

I'm not going to follow Robert Pirsig's path of trying to define the aspects of the Is that exist prior to our perception of them, but I am going to talk about what it is that we find in things that causes us to consider them more important than others. The concept of value as judgment, of appraisal, of deciding which of our resources we will spend on what.

And that's what it comes down to. That which we value is that which we expend our resources on. And we really only have a few resources on a personal level. We have time, attention, effort and whatever physical and societal influences we can bring into play (money and power, in other words).

And of those five, which of those are the most valuable? To me, time attention and effort are worth spending carefully. The other two are for implementing my time, attention and effort. So maybe we don't have five resources, but two which make the other three useful.

But back to the idea of valuation itself. What is it that causes one person to value, say, Mozart, and another to value Joe Satriani? And a third person to find music in its entirety to be nothing but mildly pretty noises? Each person experiences essentially the same sensory input, and they come up with three entirely different reactions. Is that something inherent to the physical identity of an individual, or to a mentality, or is it dependent upon experiences with that input and the emotional associations we have?

It's a little like nature versus nurture, but I like to think that that argument is largely settled with the answer as “both”. This gets more complex. And it probably has something of that same answer in it. For some people, the neural structures that connect musical input and emotional or valuation processing and output are built on one side of some set of critical values, and other people have them elsewhere. This means that the first group gets some amount of neurotransmitters going, some pleasure or insight or other kick to the brain that the second group simply doesn't get.

Then there's the mentality. If one has a passion for order, then Mozart is much more likely to be valuable than, say, Jimi Hendrix. If one, like me, found words at a young age and music much later, that early experience may well have resulted in a mentality that focuses on words and considers less specific tools of communication to have been of less value during those critical formative years.

And the third group may simply not have terribly discriminitive hearing, or may even have grown up in an environment that denigrated music.

Who knows? I think this is one of those questions that is interesting to ask, but more for exploratory purposes than for ever finding an answer.

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The Basics - 1/10/2014

So the purpose of this thing is for me to develop the habit of writing a minimum of 200 words a night. I want to feel uncomfortable if I haven't sat down and done this every day. What am I going to talk about? No clue. Why? Because.

Sounds good to me.

So, a few rules.

1) There are very few situations where there is a right answer. There are an infinity of truly wrong answers (How much is two and two? Horse), but only rarely is there a single right answer. If I say something that disagrees with something that you say, that doesn't mean either of us is wrong. Doesn't mean either of us is right, either. We can argue all day whether two and two equals Horse or Elliptical, and we're still both wrong.

2) What that means is, everything you read here is pretty much how I see things. It is the manner in which I interpret reality. My interpretation of reality is, necessarily, incomplete. So is yours. We are both human (I presume), and lack both the perceptual and cognitive qualities which would allow us to encompass the entirety of creation and everything else. In other words, we ain't smart enough to be more than kinda-a-little-bit right.

3) Which further means that, if we disagree, that doesn't mean that we should spend energy trying to figure out which of us is right and which wrong. We should explore the possibilities in such a way that both of us end up with a more complete interpretation of reality than we started with. We may still not agree on what is going on, but we have the opportunity to understand our own interpretations better, if nothing else.

4) There are some issues upon which I will not bend, even a little. Don't try to make me, unless you have some really good and clearly thought out arguments.

5) I have (and will post), my own fairly straightforward Ethics. Expect them to be the cornerstone of my interpretation of reality.

6) I have no particular axe to grind with any group or philosophy, and will primarily use this forum as a way to wander through my own skull. Please do not expect anything in particular from me. My two favorite subjects are games and fiction, so storytelling will be a significant part of this journal.

7) On the other hand, everything that Is, is part of a larger story...

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