Gaming

Where I talk about roleplaying games, computer games, board games, and other interactive entertainment

12 Things

PETERMBALL Gaming, Journal, News & Upcoming Events, Works in Progress , , , ,

We’re mid-way through a long weekend here in Oz. This still catches me off-guard, since I’ve spent the majority of my adult life not really paying attention to long weekends, but the acquisition of a dayjob changes your relationship to such things. And so we’ve hit Sunday and I’m mooching around the new house, grooving to a mix of the Hilltop Hoods and the Beastie Boys (RIP, MCA), just kinda…randomly getting things together.

And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning.

1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE

So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on.

You know, moving stuff.

There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done now,” ’cause we’ve basically moved enough that it feels like we’ve moved in and can live a functional life. The truth is there are still all those odds and ends that need to be fixed up, and the room containing my computer/files/desks is littered with boxes of files that should probably be put into the filing cabinet, just as the bedroom closet looks more like a place to store half-full boxes of clothing rather than a bedroom closet.

Although, to be fair, you should see the closet. For a single bloke who owns three pairs of jeans, three jackets, and a seemingly endless supply of t-shirts, it’s one of those spaces that feels slightly epic and impossible to fill.

2. ERNEST HEMMINGWAY

I’ve never really been big on Hemmingway as a writer. I’ve known people who adored him, but I always leant towards F. Scott. Fitzgerrald as my writer of choice for that particular era of American letters. I mean, seriously, The Great Gatsby. It has its issues as a book, just as Fitzgerald has his issues as a person, but there is something about the sheer amount that book packs into approximately 50,000 words that makes me look at 100k novels and think, really? This is our standard length? Did we miss the levels of awesome that could be achieved at half that?

But we were talking about Hemmingway, who I seem to have started reading in earnest for the first time since I was…shit, eighteen? Nineteen? A really long time. It’s the net result of watching Midnight in Paris, in which Hemmingway shows up as a character, and I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the reflection of Hemmingway that’s thrown up as a social construct. He’s just such an unremitting bastard, capable of throwing out these moments of sparse beauty, yet so…self-loathing? Or a kind of loathing far more external than that?

In any case, I picked up a small book of writing advice that’s been curated from Hemmingway’s letters and articles, and it’s full of these moments that are both beautiful and angry. My favourite, thus far, is this:

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and he could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” (From A Moveable Feast)

There’s a part of me that thinks, well, yes, that. There is another part of me that thinks, really, Hemmingway? Just ’cause you say it pretty, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a dick.

3. CONTRIBUTORS COPIES

These showed up my PO Box earlier this week

It’s shiny, in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense, and the print edition is due out in Mid-June, which means this is one of those rare occasions where I’ve received contributor copies before the book goes on sale.

4. SPEAKEASY

So as part of my dayjob I curate a bunch of writing and publishing links every Friday for the Speakeasy blog. I have to admit, it’s one of my favourite parts of the dayjob, since it means the vast majority of the stuff that I’m reading on the internet anyway now becomes part of my working day. And since I figure there are probably a couple of writer-types reading this who may be interested, I figured I’d point the way in case you’re inclined to check it out.

5. PLANNING

One of the random things I’m doing this week? Putting together a new writing plan.

Someone asked me the question “how many stories do you submit a year” at work on Friday. It freaked me out a little, ’cause once upon a time there would have been a pretty steady answer to that, and now there is not. I’ve been living without a writing plan for months now (and, effectively, since life went kaboom back in November of 2010). I have grown weary of the uncertainty, and I figure I’m staying in place for the next twelve months, so I’m going to spend a few hours this evening putting together a plan that’ll allow me to…well, get stuff done.

The problem with writing plans is…well, me. I over-estimate my own abilities a lot, particularly after I’ve let writing lie fallow for a stretch, and it often results in plans where I’m trying to do all the things all the time. This barely worked when I was a marginally employed writer-type with a wealth of free time. It’ll surely fall apart now that I’m regularly employed and trying to fit writing around the edges of things.

6. I CANNOT GO NEAR MY POST OFFICE BOX

I maintain a PO Box that I use for three things: receiving subscriptions, ordering things online, and an address I can put on contracts that doesn’t change every six-to-eighteen months.

A few weeks ago, in the lead-up to the move, I realised that Shifty Silas, my new laptop, was capable of running a bunch of computer games people had recommended to me. I’m usually pretty careful about playing computer games, since I have an addictive kind of personality when it comes to narrative. If I start watching a DVD boxed set of a TV series, for example, I’ll down it in one sleep-deprived sitting rather than space it out. I want, in essence, all the story, all the time.

Also, basically, I like to win things. I mean, I really like to win things. To the extent that, if there are no victory conditions, I’ll invent them simply so I can win.

It’s…well, it’s not a pleasant side of my personality.

These two things, when combined, generally make computer games the equivalent of narrative crack and I’m usually careful to avoid them. But friends raved about Mass Effect and Mass Effect II, and my flatmate had some copies floating around, and it wasn’t like I was doing anything other packing, so I fired Shifty Silas up and played them both. In fact, I played the hell out of them. In, like, rapid succession.  even started replaying the game, this time with an external mouse, ’cause the first time around I wasn’t able to use sniper rifles.

They were exactly the kind of interactive narrative-crack I fear when it comes to computer games.

And because the designers of Mass Effect are evil, you can’t really play those two games and get the end of a story, so I’ve ordered a copy of Mass Effect III. It’s been posted and now it’s sitting in my PO Box, waiting for me to come pick it up.

And when that finally happens, when I pick it up and start playing it, well, I’m going to be good for very little else that week. And I have the self-control of a lemming that’s just been shown a cliff.

Which means I can’t pick up my mail at the moment. And I’m going to avoid it for as long as I possibly can.

7. RABBIT HOLE

If you’re a writer-type, you probably want to come do this.

Basically, the Rabbit Hole is a three-day event where a bunch of writers come together and collectively thumb their noses at, say, NaNoWriMo. Instead of being all 50,000 thousands words in a month, the word-warrior heading down the rabbit hole is chasing 30,000 words in three days. It’s run at the QWC a couple of times, but this year the event is going national as part of the Emerging Writers Festival, with teams gathering in Melbourne (where it’s hosted by Jason Nahrung), Tasmania (hosted by Rachel Edwards), Brisbane (hosted by, well, me), and online (hosted by Patrick O’Duffy).

It takes place between the 1st and the 3rd of June, and it promises to be a weekend of words and smack-talk between the four teams. I may even bring the Spokesbear as a mascot.

You can register for Team Brisbane over the QWC website.

8. SEASON THREE OF 30 ROCK

I don’t really review things, ’cause I kinda suck at it. Me and non-fiction, it’s not a thing that works well (and I’ve been reminded of this, quite explicitly, because I’ve been writing a non-fiction article for work and it’s like pulling teeth, dammit).

But I did watch the third season of 30 Rock recently. And, at one point, I may have laughed so hard that I developed tunnel vision and passed out for a few seconds.

Just saying.

9. TRASHY TUESDAY MOVIE

So about a month ago I tried to watch the 2011 Conan the Barbarian film with my flatmate. It…wasn’t good. I say this as a person who has a really, really high tolerance for bad movies, especially any kind of fantasy epic. The only way I got through it was jumping on twitter and making fun of the movie as we went, so other people shared my pain.

Halfway through the topic of Hawk the Slayer and whether or not it was worse than Conan 2011 came up.

I’d never seen it before, so my flatmate and I arranged to watch it the following Tuesday. And, since I’d tweeted the first film, I figured…well, why not? I tweeted throughout the second film, and about halfway through people started suggesting films we should watch and make fun of in the future.

And thus the tradition of the Trashy Tuesday Twitter Movie got started. It was an accident, I swear, but somewhere along the line we developed a schedule. If you’re interested in joining in, we generally kick off at 7:30 PM, Brisbane Time, on a Tuesday evening. Next week’s film is RED (Helen Mirren with a Sniper Rifle!), and on the 15th we’re watching Red Dawn. Debate about the hashtag usually starts earlier on a Tuesday, and the results can be found on my twitter feed @petermball

And yes, this is basically what I do when I’m avoiding posting here. I’m sorry blog, but Twitter is my new love.

10. I’M NOT SURE I LIKE HAVING A SMART PHONE

Actually, that’s not true. I acquired my first smart-phone at the beginning of the year, and it’s instantly become one of my favourite things ever. It’s the promise that SF always offered me – a miniature computer that I can carry around in my pocket and access nearly everywhere. It lets me carry around my email and a collection of books to read and all that stuff.

What I dislike is the way it’s changed my relationship to the internet.

Over the past four months I’ve watched my engagement with things become increasingly passive, largely because I spend the vast majority of my non-dayjob internet surfing on the phone rather than the computer.

I receive my email on the phone, but I dislike the keyboard I’m forced to use there so I don’t respond until I’m sitting at a computer. I can read blogs and my RSS feed, but I don’t comment or come here to write things unless I’m sitting at a keyboard. I can check facebook and twitter, but…well, actually, facebook and twitter are the places where the phone really shines, so it’s not like either of those have suffered.

Basically, I put a lot of things off until I’m sitting at a keyboard, and that never seems to happen ’cause I can check things on my phone.

I’m trying to figure out how to combat this problem, since it really doesn’t sit right with me. Half the reason I love the internet is that it allows me to engage with things, and I’m not really a huge fan of any medium where passivity is the primary mode of engagement.

11. THE AVENGERS

Last week, in the midst of moving, I took an evening off and went to see The Avengers with a bunch of my co-workers. I freakin’ feared this movie so hard, since I’m a) a huge comic nerd,  b) not a fan of anything Joss Whedon has done that involves armies of villains, c) generally irate about films and not inclined to like them, and d) a huge fan of the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Hero TV series which delivered everything I want in an Avengers comic in cartoon form instead.

In short, I wanted this to be teh awesomes and figured it wouldn’t quite get there. I certainly didn’t think it’d live up to the cartoon.

What I got was teh awesomes. I may have made high-pitches squealing noises of joy in the theatre.

If I had to deliver a review, I can do it in three words: FUCK YEAH, AVENGERS!

12. NINJAS!

They’re everywhere. You just haven’t noticed them yet.

There is always something bittersweet about a looming tide of sadness

PETERMBALL Gaming ,

1. Beginnings

This happens five years back. I’m attending a barbecue at my friend Chris’s house, one of those semi-regular gathering of the geeks that used to occur in our neck of the woods before the social-group in question splintered. There were board-gamers, sword-swingers, and RPG players, all people who had gradually filtered into one-another’s lives through conventions and half-completed RPG campaigns and getting enough folks together to play Settler’s of Catan. I’m a RPG player, by and large, but I have a geeks weakness for games in all its forms.

At one point in the afternoon I’m talking to a guy named Al, who I’ve gamed with a time or two. We’re talking about Call of C’Thulhu and how he’d love to run a weekly game. “You can’t do that anymore,” he says. “People don’t have the time.”

“I dunno,” I say. “There’s a bunch of people here who’d kill to be part of a good Call of C’Thulhu game. Have you tried asking?”

And so Al asks, and there are at least four of who are interested – me, Chris, Al’s wife (who is not the internet, not even on facebook, so she remains unnamed for the purpose of this story), and another guy we all know. We settle on a time: C’Thulhu every Sunday night. Al will run the game.

2. Landmarks

Presumably I used to do things on Sunday nights that were not playing Call of C’thulhu with my friends, but I’m not really sure of the details anymore. The years prior to 2007 are a dim and strange place that’s barely remembered.

And 2007 is the year a lot of shit changed: I finally got the hang of writing fiction and getting it published; I finally left University teaching behind and started the process of abandoning my Phd; I walked away from a long-term relationship after we’d gotten engaged and realised it was a bad, bad idea. It’s a relationship that ends amicably, then goes downhill afterwards and stays bad for a very long time. There are whole months where I’m afraid to answer my phone, and Sundays become the night I get to forget the angry frustration that’s getting twisted around my stomach. It’s the night where I get to hang with people who weren’t familiar with me as part of a couple, a night to hang out with people who are fast becoming friends.

I look at my life prior to 2007 and it seems unrecognisable to me. I seem…so much less like me.

3. The First Game

It starts as C’Thulhu games often do. We create characters, we arrive in Arkham, we’re prepared to go mad.

Chris has played in Alan’s games before and raves about the experience. Call of C’Thulhu characters are notoriously short-lived, being caught in a game where seeing the uncanny drives you to madness and eventual death. Part of the joy is the downward slide, the inevitability of your decline. I create a character based on Ernest Hemmingway, looking for work as a local journalist. I spend the entire first session finding lodgings and trying to get job, getting to know the various NPCs who become part of my characters daily life.

We show up every Sunday, and it’s weeks before anything weird draws our character’s attention. It’s even longer before we encounter things that force us to make San checks and the craziness really starts.

4. The Unexpected

Turns out I was right – people will play a weekly RPG game if the group is right and the game is good. Al’s Call of C’Thulhu runs for about a year and a half, maybe two years. There are some troubles in that time and the forth guy drops out, but the rest of keep gaming. In that time we ended up skipping a handful of Sundays at most. It’s followed by other games: more Call of C’Thulhu, some classic Deadlands, and more recently Space: 1889, but the weekly games kept coming. Doing math on the back of a napkin, I figure we played about 210 to 220 games over the last five years.

And the games are good, the kind of RPG sessions that remind you why you started gaming in the first place, but they aren’t the best bit. There’s a rhetoric, among gamers, that part of the joy of gaming is getting together with your friends, but often this overlooks the dynamics of gaming groups. I’ve spent plenty of time attending gaming sessions where half the people are friends – people I know outside of the game, often in advance – and the other half are just people I game with. Not people I dislike, per se, but something akin to work colleagues one gets along with because they are work colleagues.

I have no expectations of becoming friends with people I game with, but the Sunday games defied expectations. The people I game with are smart and interesting and generous, and spending time with them every Sunday quickly becomes the highlight of my week. They become people I enjoy spending time with outside of games, people I enjoy knowing.

5. David Morcome

My first long-term Call of C’Thulhu character in over a decade. He utterly fails to become a journalist, which is expected, and utterly fails to go mad over the year and a half of the campaign. He keeps reading Mythos tomes that tell him he’s an insignificant speck in the face of a harsh and unknowable universe, keeps encountering things that make his comrades go crazy, and every time he shrugs and goes, “yeah, I’ve expected something like that ever since the war.”

He finally snaps in the final seconds of the campaign, sending himself mad when he tries to use a ritual he read in one of the tomes he’s been collecting. Not to try and stop the world from ending, mind, just trying to get some petty revenge against someone who crossed him once. The fact that he’s going to spend the rest of his life as a brain in jar, tended by mi-go, doesn’t seem to bother him. It actually seems kind of cool.

6. Christmas

I dislike buying gifts for people. When it happens, it usually happens for two reasons: because I am expected to by social convention, or because I know and like a person well enough that I want to bring them joy (admittedly, this usually this involves books). Christmas, therefore, becomes a special kind of hell – there are many gifts that need to be bought for people I don’t particularly know, and a handful of gifts that receive real forethought and care.

There are exactly six people that fall into the latter category. Three are members of my immediate family.

The other three are the members of my Sunday night gaming group.

7. The Last Game

Last Sunday we reached the finale of Chris’ Space: 1889 campaign. There were time anomalies, Martian revolution, characters lost into the Aether, a giant steam-powered French war-machine shaped like a Cockerel, and my retired British army officer got to ride a T-Rex. It’s the culmination of about a year of game-play, all told, although we did the campaign in two seasons and played something else in between. It’s been a brilliant game, the kind that remind me why I like gaming, and in particularly why I like gaming with this group of people.

It’s Saturday night as I write this. Tomorrow night we’re going to get together and talk about what happens next.

And then, on Monday morning, Al and his wife will be moving to Melbourne.  They actually delayed their leaving by an extra day so we could fit in one final Sunday.

There’s about a thousand words invested in this blog post trying to articulate how sad I am about their departure, and I suspect I’ve not even come close to managing it. Certainly I’ve done a bad job explaining it to people in an off-line context, and much of this week has been spent trying to keep busy so I don’t think about how much it’s going to suck when the two of them leave.

About this time last year I posted a link to a talk Amanda Palmer did at a Boston college where she posited the theory that the reason people become musicians, artists and writers is because they’re looking for a kind of connection. She theorizes that most artists aren’t really interested in money or success so much as the “wine moment” where you all come together and find your like-minded people and are energized by their presence, beliefs, and discussion.  Maybe it’s just a fancy way of saying Find Your Damn Tribe, but it seems right enough to me, and it’s sure as hell a rare experience. Sunday nights is the first time I every really felt that while gaming, and there’s a greedy part of me that really wants that to never end.

I’m happy for my friends: they’ve been wanting to get out of Brisbane for a while and they’re going to have a great time in Melbourne, if only because it’ll be easier for them to get a coffee after 4PM in the afternoon. And in theory, we’ll still game every Sunday – we’ve already got plans to do so, using the magic of the internet – but it’s easy to sense the doubts seeping into the conversation. Sure, it should work fine, but what if it’s not the same? What if it’s too hard? What if, gods forbid, it becomes *just a game* like so many other campaigns I’ve played in. I suspect we’ll be fine, but either way, after tomorrow our rituals and gaming will need to evolve a little. In one way or another, Sunday nights will mean something a different than they used to.

I still haven’t really figured out how to say goodbye to this particular ritual, or to these particular people. There’s been an undercurrent of sadness running through my week already. I suspect it will only get worse over the next couple of weeks when Sunday hits and I find myself at a loose end. I may need to start planning alternate outings to keep myself busy, at least ’til we kick off the online game.

I expect there will be tears, either at the point where the goodbye happens or not long afterwards (please, god, let it be afterwards. I’m so much happier weeping in private). I’m not good at saying goodbye at the best of times: it’s an empty word that relies far to much on context to carry the meanings. I’d feel better if there was an alternative – something that actually meant I’m happy you’re getting to do something you’ve been wanting to do for a while, and thanks for being two of my dearest friends for the last five years, as well as feeding me and hanging out and listening to me rant about work/life/books/etc. You’re some of the most awesome people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. You’ll be missed, and hopefully we’ll catch up soon, and now I’m going to head off and be a little sad that you’re going. 

But that shit’s unwieldy and slightly odd to articulate out loud, so I’m guessing thanks for the last five years of friendship and gaming will have to do.

David Bowie and Bing Crosby Singing Christmas Carols

PETERMBALL Gaming, Journal

My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy.

So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment of the game (whereupon our mad steampunk adventurers broke the rules of time and space to deliver presents to thousands of Martian orphans) hinged upon the singing of The Little Drummer Boy.

Which immediately led me to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing a Christmas duet. Truly one of the weirdest video clips I’ve ever seen

Sadly, we’re running out of time on our Sunday night gaming. Half the group is moving to Melbourne in March, and despite the fact that we’re going to try moving the game online, it’ll inevitably miss some of the things that have made Sunday nights a tradition – gathering together every Sunday, sharing dinner and a metric buttload of junk-food, catching up on one-another’s weeks. While I doubt I’ll get the chance to miss the people thanks to the wonders of modern technology, adapting to the change in the weekly social ritual we’ve built up is going to be tricky.