Seven Lions

Against all intuition and spurred by willful nostalgia, I went out and bought the 4th (5th?  18th?) Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.  I remember the halcyon days of yore, when I would spend hours of nerdy bliss reading about spheres of annihilation or various bits of Vecna–and even occasionally playing the games with others (which, in my experience, invariably proved that CRPGs didn’t turn gaming into a manic-obsessive tactical combat and resource gathering exercises, it simply did it with incredible graphics).  Of course, if you done what I done, then you know what I’m about to say.

It’s horrible.  It’s indescribably bad.  I had to go pick up an old MERPS scenario just to get the Pepsi flavor out of my mouth.  Apparently, despite the sublime comedy of Order of the Stick, AD&D can officially now stand for Attention Deficit and Disorder.  So I did what any right-thinking modern individual would, and I checked to see how the copyright works on good ol’ 1st Edition and it turns out you can’t copyright rules (I don’t know how WotC managed to trademark or patent or otherwise legally absorb tapping, maybe that was all just a dream…) and, sure enough, a bunch of good folks (who probably hold Richard Stallman in higher esteem than I) have already produced OSRIC, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation or, to put it another way, all of 1st Edition minus the Mind Flayers, blurry cats and balls o’ eyes.

Imagine a world where anyone can discover a +5 scimitar, regardless of whether or not they want to have dragonpeople come along for the ride (don’t get me wrong, I thought Dragonlance, while kinda drawn out and cheesy, way okay, and anyway, it’s Samson Agonistes compared to 4th Edition).

I took the liberty of updating Apple.com’s woefully out-of-date description of its Adobe Flash Player for Mac.

Now includes information for iPad and iPhone owners!!!

I’ve stumbled upon an imbroglio:  Apple hates Flash.

I had no idea until Stanford got me an iPhone and said “Develop scholarly digital media for mobile devices!” and I said, “Yeah, sure–John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Mobile Edition!”

And then I found out that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, and that Steve Jobs thinks Flash is awful because it makes Safari crash and that the only way to get your Flash app working on an iPhone or iPad is to use some packager from Adobe that isn’t even out yet.

Way to go, Nintendo.  Seriously, now that Apple has locked in a revenue stream by controlling the applications that run on their proprietary mobile environment, they’re happy to lock out the greatest tool for rich internet applications because they, claim, it’s not open.  It’s two issues, really:  Apple wants to break the chokehold Flash Video has on the net, and I don’t give a hoot about that, but I do care about issue two: Apple wants to control the “software processes” that run on its little closed-core world, and that sounds like it puts Apple on the wrong side of 1984.  The amazing genesis of Web 2.0 came about because of platform-independent application environments, not because of Quicktime.  Closing down the fun little platform that Apple has created means someone like me, who already knows a perfectly usable platform independent language for writing code, has to go and buy the Nintendo SDK (or whatever it’s called for the iEnvironment) and submit any application for review by the Standards Board so that it can appear in the official company store, even if it’s free.

Don’t get me wrong, I love svg and HTML5, and maybe in two or three years that’ll provide a competitor to Flash, but the idea that Apple is going to close itself off because HTML5 will be here someday doesn’t ring true.  They might as well say they’re not implementing Flash because the iPhone is waiting for the Semantic Web.

There’s such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It’s not even the writing, it’s that people read it and they just accept. Like they’re listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they’re so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can’t express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on page thirty-three, ‘They make up’.

But there are forms of storytelling that have been able to avoid that.

There was this old computer game, Zork. You run around solving puzzles and fighting, but you could mix something up, do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it didn’t let you know. You keep playing, oblivious to the fact that you can’t win.

It’s simple, really. You run around collecting treasure—platinum and jewels and… stuff. Well, one of the treasures is this Faberge egg, all covered with jewels and gilt. But the egg isn’t the treasure, it’s what’s inside: this little bird, made of gold. No matter what you do to open it, the bird always gets broken and ruined. Like in life, there’s no warning and, just like in life, there’s nothing you could do to fix it. Video games nowadays, they’re determinist, derivative or just plain porn. But those old games, they were like life.

Life, not random but not determinist, not like a book. Why does every linear work need conflict, suffering and pain, why can’t it just be a happy story about love? Because it follows a pattern, it has to: because linear narratives can only do so much.

In Zork, there’s this thief, he prowls around while you’re playing, and if you’ve got something valuable he takes it, that’s why when you find the treasure, you have to lock it up. If you let him have the egg, he’ll open it. Turns out you can get the egg back, later, and next to it is this beautiful clockwork canary.

But I don’t know if it sang, because I always broke it.

Not the kind you’re expecting, but rather watercolor interpretations of AGDI’s remake of the classic Sierra On-Line 16-color sequel to the only briefly named Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero.  Now, before you scoff, I know the artist and she’s eminently capable of producing more detailed work, but the goal here was to recreate the sense of 320×200 resolution with limited colors in the style of Persian miniatures.

Having Tea with the Enchantress Aziza

The ending scene with the sultan

The marketplace around the fountain in Shapeir

Prezi is a presentation creation package that advertises itself as the living presentation tool.  All the cool kids at DAC09 were using it, and it’s particularly appealing because it allows you to embed swf into the presentation, so maybe we’ve finally got an awesome presentation tool that can put a rest to the one that Tufte so despises.

To demonstrate, here’s my own Prezi from DAC09, for my paper “Scholarly civilization: utilizing 4X gaming as a framework for humanities digital media”:

I found out over the weekend that Son of the Great River was one of the nominees for the 2009 Cybils in the Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy category.  I’ll put up a more detailed post later that gives me a better chance to express how excited I am by this news.

. .  . . . . .

. . @. . D

If  . . . . . makes you quiver in your boots, but maybe you’re no longer so worried about suffering Yet Another Stupid Death and instead you wish you could get together some friends to assemble a ballista and shoot the damn dragon, then you’re Dwarf Fortress material.

As an aside, if you have no idea what that @ symbol is supposed to be up there, then there’s not much I can do for you.  Back to Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is a Rogue-like virtual life simulator wherein you make a small society of midget alcoholics dig wells.  And tan hides.  And forge copper goblets.  And it has aquifers.  If you really feel like you need to know about the game itself, do what the Internet does and look it up on Wikipedia, because what it does isn’t nearly as exciting as what naturally occurs as the result of the interaction between simple rules-based elements.  The goal of Tarn Adams, the game’s creator, is to build a functioning world that creates emergent narrative.  While this kind of thing has been hinted at in various sandbox and world-domination games, Dwarf Fortress is the first to my knowledge that has built-in structures for creating a long-tailed history of a living world.  Your dwarves will engrave important events on their walls, and they’ll leave behind an abandoned hall (a la Moria) that an adventurer can later explore.  The world is built not only through realistic geological and environmental processes, but populated by rules-based ‘legendary’ people and states.

It’s currently a .28 release version, and while you’re menaced by rather moronic goblin sieges (Adams is as critical of them as anyone) you can still have an amazingly good time harnessing the killing power of magma, mining ore, smelting it, creating alloys and using that to fashion goods (And everyone knows I’m a big fan of ancient metallurgy, even the fantastical kind).  It’s not any one individual activity that makes Dwarf Fortress interesting, though, it’s that they’re all running together, to create the semblance of a functioning society that goes beyond a glorified ant farm and becomes almost (still not quite) like a story.  It’s quite an amazing thing.

Dwarf Fortress (Did I mention it’s free?)

How would WOPR describe a recession? I suppose a little like this. There are collections of creative visualizations like Data Beautiful and theorists like Edward Tufte from whom we can draw rules for the visual display of information. But how do we use creative (visual) expression of knowledge to portray complex, deep and novel theoretical claims? If I have new scholarship and want to convey that new scholarship to my colleagues, is there a time when the best method of conveying that scholarship is non-narrative and non-textual? Or are visualizations better-suited for the purpose of illustration or pedagogy? Are they a spice that cannot stand on their own or can we make claims in multimedia that we cannot make using traditional linear text? And if so, what are the best examples of such claims?

I gravitate toward maps, both physical and conceptual. Flowcharts as slices of models also seem ripe with potential. And, of course, conceptualizations of “The Future” always contain animations and flashy visualizations that happen to be well-suited for portrayal in an episode of Star Trek, various attacks on the Death Star, or a Matthew Broderick vehicle from the 80s.

Years ago I’d mentioned to a friend how someone should create an image search based on images and not on phrases.  So I could put in a picture of a Ding Tripod and get all sorts of images that somehow shared visual similarities with Ding Tripods across the world (Even if the image name was J00001.jpg or someweirdmayanthing.png).  Just played around with Google’s Similar Images search, expecting that the folks who just handed 30 million books to Stanford had finally gotten it.  They haven’t.  Similar images to this:

are, according to Google Similar Image Search, a whole bunch of classic 2d maps.  Documentation is scarce, but it seems to have a text- or peer-collaborative- backend that doesn’t have anything to do with image analysis.  Oh well, on to Google Wave, which I hope will live up to all the hype.