Monthly Archives: December 2009

I’m a very private, introverted person. I love living alone, in my little house in the middle of the woods.

At the same time, I can’t quite understand what all the fuss is about with regards to the full-body-imaging scans being considered as security measures at airports these days.  Granted, TSA has a horrible reputation for doing all sorts of nonsensical and basic-civil-rights-violating sorts of things, but when it comes to this, well . . . it seems like folks are raising a ruckus over something that really isn’t all that invasive at all.

The example scans I’ve seen don’t seem like anything anyone could find any prurient interest in. They might show a few folds of fat that might be a bit embarrassing, but really, we all give up a certain amount of privacy every day of our lives to ensure our own safety.  A large number of jobs in government and education require fingerprinting – those fingerprints going into an identification database. All of us deal with cameras recording us pretty much everywhere we might decide to go in public, often catching (and occasionally publicizing) rather embarrassing moments. An entire generation thinks nothing of exposing their innermost secrets on Facebook.

So what’s the fuss over some not-really-all-that-naked pictures? The images that I’ve seen from these machines don’t really seem to be all that violating. We saw more detailed nakedness on Rebecca Romijin Stamos as Mystique, in a PG-13 movie.  It’s certainly less invasive than having some random stranger cupping your privates in a pat-down — or worse, the dreaded strip-exam.

I guess it’s just something folks would have to decide – if they really would rather choose to not having these rather ken-and-barbie-ish images seen, instead of  another good safety check to make sure that they don’t get blown up.

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• New Airport Scanners Described As ‘Intrusive’ (npr.org)
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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

I’ve been caught MUDing again.

Years ago, in high school and college, MUDs were my thing. (Gosh, am I really that old?) I could pretty much play them on any computer with an internet connection and a telnet client, and lacking a good group of tabletop gamers, they let me get my RP fix. My MUD of choice was an outgrowth of my love of the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels, DiscworldMUD.

I watched a lot of the folks I knew on the MUD leave for the “greener pastures” of graphical MMOs such as Everquest and World of Warcraft, and eventually, those and other games also tugged me away from text-based gaming.  I was actually a bit surprised to see as many people logged on, now.  With all the resources out there for gaming and roleplay in a three-dimensional environment, all these people are still playing the lowest of the low tech games.

There is definitely something there to miss. The community is tiny in comparison with the large graphical MMOs, and generally better behaved and open. Roleplay can be enforced, a relative impossibility in higher population games that the companies have yet to find a solution for, leading many of the roleplayers in those games to despair that the company cares nothing for them.

There’s nothing quite so good at spurring on the imagination as knowing the only pictures you’re going to see are the ones in your own head. The MUD community’s still out there (check out http://www.mudconnect.com/ to find MUDs you might like to play), and they don’t require a high-end PC or graphics card to play.  All you need to bring is your imagination and an open mind.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins lately, and a lot about it has reminded me of something I’ve been missing a lot of in games, lately: Story.

The games that I remember the most fondly from my childhood are those that had the best stories and character development. Gameplay in some of them might have been simple turn-based “Keep Pressing X” type controls, but the stories were what kept me playing them. My first introductions to PC games were also story-driven games. Some of the best stories I’ve seen in video games were in RTS games in which I might have been controlling entire armies, not just in RPGs where stories are “essential”. (Starcraft is an excellent example of a good, well-written RTS campaign)

The thing is, with the coming of multiplayer gaming, storytelling has pretty much been deemed unnecessary. The best examples of this are in the RTS genre, where the RTS of the past always had massive, story-driven single-player campaigns – campaigns that simply no longer exist in the modern versions.  If an RTS game even has a single player option or campaign at all, it nearly always seems plugged on as an afterthought, a repetitive little bit of narration plugged on what is essentially just a “against-the-computer” battle.  Without the story, there is nothing to make the player care about the characters or races.  It all turns into making a choice between the pure gameplay based advantages and disadvantages of each, rather than because the race itself means something to you.

As much as I love World of Warcraft, MMORPGs took the story out of the RPG just as much as multiplayer removed it from the RTS.  True, these stories might have a large, involved storyline put together by the developers, but the average player likely knows very little of it beyond the names of important bosses in dungeons.  (The exception to this, of course, would be roleplayers, who make it their business to know the lore of the game, but they are hardly the “average” players.)

Dragon Age has reminded me of just what I loved about all those old games with their involved stories and characters you couldn’t help caring about (or hating with a vengeance, as the case may be) – that it’s paired with good, fun, gameplay mechanics only adds to the fun of the game. It also brought to mind just how few truly story-driven games exist on the shelves these days, and just how much I wish there were more.

I’d like to see gaming get back to the point where story is not just an unnecessary and thoughtlessly added bit, but an essential part of games.

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While I’ve written about why, at least for me, e-books will never replace real books, I am finding the  attitude of some publishers toward the format to be rather like hoping the problem will just go away if you ignore it or bluster at it enough.

Publishers should take a lesson from the mistakes of the music industry, and look at e-books not as an attack on the publishing industry, but as an evolution of it.  Instead of fighting the change, we should be looking at ways to embrace this new technology.

For the companies completely denying the e-book consumer by refusing to provide e-book versions, a significant portion of the market will be entirely lost, because there will be people who will simply not buy the book at all, unless they can get it electronically.  This would be the worst example of hiding in the sand, because it would mean those books that aren’t available as e-books would lose the potential sales that they would otherwise have had.

Several large publishing companies, such as Simon & Schuster and Random House, are setting delays between the release of hardcopy editions of books and the e-book versions, which could be a valid compromise, encouraging those who are truly excited to get the book to go out and buy it at their bookstore.  It would set up a delay rather similar to the delay between a theatrical release of a movie and the DVD release.

But here’s the thing: There will always be a group of sincere and devoted bibliophiles, like myself, willing to pay more for a beautifully crafted hardcover edition of their favorite books, but these will never be the “average reader.”

For the average reader, the ones already willing to wait for the cheaper paperback versions of books, waiting a few more months for the similarly cheaper and more convenient to purchase e-book won’t bother them one bit.  If a book they want is not yet available, well, they’re just more likely to go back and buy something else that is available instead.

It’s a difficult situation, and compromises will have to be made to make this new market work like it should, but the response to this new technology should not be one of fear or antagonism.  E-books are inevitable. They’re already here.  Publishers are going to have to learn ways to profit from them, or they’re going to be left in the dust.

I read a lot. At any given time, I might be reading several books at once, and I average finishing somewhere around three books a week.  And since it seems to be time for such things, I decided I’d give a little list of the favorite books I read this year.

These books may not have been published this year. They might’ve been republished in a new edition, or won some awards that brought them to my attention, or they might’ve just been sitting on my waiting-to-read stack for a while, but each of these I read for the first time this year, and would recommend to anyone.

1. Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
   Winner of the Newberry and countless other awards and medals this year, and of course written by my favorite contemporary author, this is one of the best examples of what makes Neil Gaiman so great. His books may exist in the realm of the fantastic, but they are a prime example of just how much truth can exist in fiction.
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
   This is available on Doctorow’s website as a CC licensed e-book, for those with empty pockets, and it’s definitely worth the read, and the purchase. Cory Doctorow is one of the best emerging authors in the sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction genres. There’s nothing pulp about any of his work, and Little Brother, written for an adolescent audience, is just as pointed in its commentary as any of his others.
3. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
   This is written by the same woman who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, which I have not read.  This book is about the “life” of a young woman buried in Highgate Cemetary in London during the Victorian Era. (There did seem to be a lot of good ghost books lately…) Obsession is the major theme of the book, with each character seeming to have his or her own version of it, from obsessive love to obsessive hate and everything in between.
4. Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman, art by Andy Kubert (Pencil), and Scott Williams (Ink)
   As usual, my favorite graphic novel of the year was written by Neil Gaiman,  though this is a departure from my usual Sandman love. I’m usually a Marvel fan, when it comes to comics, but this gorgeous hardcover edition of Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? was too beautiful to bypass, and proved to have a wonderful tale within. It answers the question of  what happens to the world, when a bat dies.
5. Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews, Art by Will Conrad, Ink by Jo Chen
   It’s unusual for me to have two graphic novels on my list, but these two were awesome enough for it. Of course, I’m a rather fervent Browncoat, but even putting fan-bias aside, this is an excellent comic.  Perhaps, with the television executives unwilling to give Joss Whedon the free reign he needs to produce truly great material, comics will provide a place for us to find the great writing that we all love him for.