In a truth that is likely the entire definition of ‘ironic’, I am – as most know – a confirmed atheist working for a nominally Catholic charity organization.
It’s really not as bad as it seems.
Nobody really pushes the whole ‘faith’ thing (though, like anywhere else, a belief in something is taken for granted as a default position) and the focus is on the work. The work is, bluntly, good. Doing what I do, supporting the initiative set forward by the organization as a whole, is a fulfilling, rewarding experience (even if I do, now and again, complain about my job, like anyone else).
On the other hand, those we serve are presented with faith both directly and indirectly, and spiritual ‘holistic’ conceits are considered part of the therapy. For a time, I faulted that. Why should these people, who are largely a captive audience, be forced to address faith if they’ve made the choice that it’s not important to them? Certain recent events have, however, changed my mind about the entire situation. In a good way.
Read more..
I’ve decided to start a series of fun (though not perhaps terribly useful) science-based projects. Just for the hell of it. After all, the world’s pretty much a fabulously cool place, and I spend a lot of time going ‘NEAT!’ and not doing anything about it. Thus, if I can turn my home into Mad Science Lab, it’s a net win for everybody. 
The first project, then, is The Carbonator – what’s intended to be a crazy steampunk looking device (perhaps installation is a better word) that applies simple chemistry to homemade beverages and results in pure awesome.
Design conceits:
1) I want it to be very vertical, and very brass-and-glass. Ideally, it should fit in a space one foot square. We can go as dense and as tall as we’d like.
2) It will be electrically powered, 120VAC, running on minimal current draw (mostly for the mixers).
3) Fitting with the steampunk aesthetic, it will be belt-and-wheel driven from a single main motor. (RPM does not have to be high.)
4) It really, really needs gauges. Perhaps a vaccum gauge on one side, and a pressure gauge for the system? This would be neat.
5) It needs a manual, two-stage process. If we can get arcs of lightning while running, so much the better.
Initial design is a central copper pole (to which everything mounts) put on a 1ft-square plate base. Two acrylic (rather than glass, for safety’s sake) cube-shaped chambers will mount on rotating mounts, while a central food-grade tube (probably copper!) will connect both chambers with gimbal quick-connects (so that the rotation of the cube is not affected by the gas connection). A hand-pulled vacuum pump will be attachable to the liquid cube, with a valve available to close the reaction chamber away from the liquid chamber. Both chambers will have pressure gauges, and the liquid chamber should also have a vacuum gauge.
The reaction chamber will use vinegar and baking soda to create CO2 (in that classic third-grade reaction) and pressurize itself. While that side of the system is starting, the other side will have its air evacuated from the chamber. When the valve between the two is opened, CO2 will pressurize the liquid chamber, and the liquid will be agitated to absorb more. When it’s all said and done? The liquid in the liquid chamber should have absorbed CO2 under pressure… and thus will be carbonated.
Nifty, eh?
One of the things I often hear is how much tolerance we should have for religious belief. Unfortunately, superstition leads to irrationality –
…. and babykilling.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/tanzania/7687951/Seven-new-albino-killings-in-Tanzania-and-Burundi.html
For a while, and for the pure fun of doing it, I used to play the Gypsy at renfaires and other, similar venues. It was great fun – putting on the show as a mysterious fortuneteller, watching people oooh and aah as you helped them ‘solve all of life’s problems with but a simple consultation of the cards.’
It was purely for amusement, I thought. I mean, who believes the white guy with a hokey gypsy accent and the shiny, modern Tarot deck picked up for ten bucks at the local new age store? It only got weird when people I knew, my friends who’d come by to see the show, started asking me for readings ‘off-camera’, claiming how ‘talented’ I was and how incredible the experience was for them, and how they never knew anyone so accurate…
… er. It was a trick. A show. Nothing more.
It was, however, a valuable experience – it taught me how the entire scam works, from an inside perspective, and how easy it really is to get caught up in the heady power of it all. And.. frankly? I was by no means a pro – I was just decently observant. Drawing on that experience, let me lay out for you psychic hopefuls the anatomy of the scam – how it works, so that when you experience it you may get an alarm bell or two.
Ready?
- Establish the ambiance.Pretty simple statement, that one – but every stage performer will tell you exactly the same thing. You cannot get people to suspend their disbelief if you don’t create a scene consistent with their expectations, and internally consistent with the activity.Riding a bicycle through a renfaire is /unacceptable/. Ideally, the person walking through the fairground in street clothes should feel welcome, but slightly out of place – it encourages them to get into the spirit of the event, to buy hats and costuming, and to want to get to know about the craftwork, the clothing, the anachronism – and, well, it helps them get involved in the fun. Similarly, when you go to a film or to a stage show, certain things happen to assist you in suspending your assumption that what you’re watching isn’t real. They dim the lights, work with consistent costuming. They never acknowledge the camera (thus divorcing your observation from the event) or the audience – unless acknowledging the audience brings you in to the scene.
Heavy curtains and closed doors minimize outside noise. Cellphones are turned off. Direct lighting (Where you can see the bulb) is kept to a minimum. Attention is hyperfocused.
Similarly, if you’re going to run a psychic reading, you do much the same thing: make sure your space reflects expectation. Make sure your own costuming and outfit fit the paradigm you intend to bring to the table. Make sure your props suit your patter – don’t pull out shining and steel if you’re doing the rustic gypsy, and if you’re Jon Edwards, don’t pull out a dowsing rod. It all has to be built to a single, easily believed picture.
When the mark crosses your threshold, they have to enter your world – it makes them predisposed to believe you.
- Involve the mark.It isn’t simple enough to just have them come in and start the patter – the game absolutely must include two way communication and audience participation.
You see, cold reading is a game that involves THEM telling YOU everything, and you spitting it back up to them in a format they can accept as originating with you. It involves asking magician’s questions – questions that if answered simply allow you to control the conversation and get an outcome that makes you look darned good – and it tends to impart a bias in the mind of the participant that they can actually affect the outcome… that their choices matter.
All of the best psychics know that if you let them, your ‘client’ will handle the whole thing themselves. By adding a subtle bit of misdirection, you can set it up so that they’ll just willingly forget to notice that they’ve given you everything.
My own personal patter was with the cards – I would go on about the fact that no one visits the Cards without having a question in mind, that there is always something they seek to answer, a story they hope to know the ending to. I would tell them how the cards could show them, if their mind was open.
I’d have them concentrate on the cards, shuffle the cards until it ‘felt right’. I would tell them that shuffling disrupted the energies of those who had used the deck before, and then handling the cards would infuse their own question with them. I’d talk easily, walking them through every step in the process – just like a magician doing a card trick.
And – you see – they believed that the cards mattered. They’d studiously work with them, shuffle them, cut them – and I would studiously NOT touch them, for fear of contaminating them with my own energies.
And then I’d have them lay out the deck into three piles. By now, their eyes were invariably wide – and they were leaning forward, hoping I’d have something to offer them.
- Ask for the answer.Once they’re ‘in’ – once they’re focused on your meaningless object, you throw in a misdirection that would make David Copperfield proud.
“You have shuffled the cards – you have focused on your question – and now you have a choice. You can tell me,” I would say, very seriously and earnestly, “what your question is – and I will interpret the cards specifically for that answer. Or, you can keep your question to yourself – and the answer will be more general, and you will have to delve into its deeper meaning yourself. Do you wish me to guide you, or would you rather guide yourself, mm?”
… eight times out of ten, they’d tell me their question. The actual /whole point/ – they’d lay it out, right in front of me.
“Is my husband cheating?”
“Is my daughter going to do well at school?”
“What will happen if I make at work?”
- Cater to reactions.From here, I had three paths. If the answer was truly complex, I could look at them and say, “You already know what you hope will be – the cards, too, know – let us see what they say – ” … and I would let the ‘cards’ build toward the answer they already hoped (or feared) was true. You tailor, then, your patter to match their reactions to what you say – if they frown when you talk about their husband smelling of someone’s perfume, you quickly shift to another ‘tell’ – they’ll never remember the one you abandoned.
If the answer is more frivolous, or simple – I’d let the cards throw it out, and riff on the theme that seemed to get them more excited.
- Let them feed you more data.My routine involved turning over three cards – the past that leads you to the question, the question in the context of why you asked it, and the answer the cards give.
You see, don’t you?
The first card invited them to speak of it – to correct me if I got their past wrong, to offer compelling imagery and convince them I already knew it all, so telling me was alright.
The second card allowed me to get them to frame their question in context. “Do you really fear he’s cheating? The card implies that you know the answer already..”
… and the third card? The third card would let me feed them a bit of logical advice without actually addressing the issue.
And that’s /it/. that’s all there is to it – no one will come and get advice from a housewife about their kid’s college careers – but someone with a solid amount of common sense, observational ability, and enough showmanship can get you to take their advice for fifty bucks and a good show.
But there’s nothing at all psychic about it.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, quite frankly, World of Warcraft is a hell of a lot of fun. In fact, it is the best cooperative single-player game ever made.
Note, however, what’s missing there.
It is not, by any real stretch of the imagination, a RolePlaying Game in the way us tabletop devotees define the term.
Yes, you have an avatar, yes, you have amazing experiences in-game. But the world is not alive and breathing, the game is not conduscive to personal storytelling, and the storyline over the lifetime of a single character is a convluted, tangled mess.
There is no trouble with the concept that everyone should experience content and story at their own pace – VanCleef is still VanCleef, dangit, and the questlines and Deadmines instance are all a heck of a lot of fun. The first time you see the ginormous underground ship, you ooh and aaah and get a silly grin in the switch from killing miners and goblins to suddenly being in your own Goonies-inspired theme event complete with silly hats and cannon and a guy who drops a parrot pet.
I suppose it comes to this: if we translate WoW (or any MMO – but this one will /do/) into the standard RPG continuity mechanics… the base game, vanilla WoW (old world), is like the core rulebook. It has some errata these days, sure, but it’s really just got the standard race/class combinations, and details a certain timeframe and the basic setting. Over the years, they’ve come out with two sourcebook trilogies – “The Burning Crusade” started off by introducing two new races, advancing the world timeline in one big jump (with quite a bit of backstory) to the opening of the Gate, and details the broken world of Draenor and the ongoing war there. Two adventure suppliments were taken as canon – the Black Temple, which fleshes out the story of Illidan, and the Shattered Sun Offensive, which tells the ending of Kael’Thas’s story and begins the redemption and salvation of a race from an unexpected source.
The thing is – /then/ they came out with a new ‘core sourcebook’ that fixed the mechanics based on the outcome of TBC.
To sum up – the blood elven city now has Mu’ru missing, the references to Kael’Thas have changed, the blood elven mechanics have changed to reflect their new, non-magic-eating state… the world has fundamentally ‘advanced’.
Now, in WOTLK, Blizzard has introduced the next world sourcebook. The battle for Northrend has begun, the events of TBC are in the past (but the gate is still open!) and Arthas created a war between himself and the rest of Azeroth. The Legion is still there, the Titan lore is expanded – all sorts of neat stuff is going on… but it’s definitely a time jump. Heck, Blizzard has included a /cutscene/ this time to just flat out emphasize that this /is/ a continuing story, and this is one of the major turning points in the world.
Now, if this were the home game.. you could set a game in any timeframe. Old world, TBC, or the dawn of Wrath. You could change the future by altering storylines.. your players aren’t beholden to the overall storyline advancement. In a MUSH, it’s similar – everyone experiences this stuff at the same time, and the ‘older events’ don’t continue to persist just for the fact that they had content in ‘em somehow.
Yet, on WoW, or any MMO – you run into the trouble that the old world story no longer matches up to the new world story – it is static. The world has moved forward – we know more, we see more, we have more, but the ‘new’ is closed off to players not at a certain level of achievement already. If you’re under level 68… you’re in a different part of the storyline. So. Reconciling the storyline /now/ with what has come /before/ in an open RP group? Very, very difficult without massive amounts of rationalization.
Roleplayers thrive on STORY. MMOs thrive on CONTENT. Content =/= story.
There’s a lesson in this for the world designer, however – have a timeline.
In these days of instant access to vast piles of information, there’s no excuse NOT to update your theme document with an ongoing event timeline that not only emphasizes what has happened since the theme was originally committed, but links to summaries and logs of the surrounding events that changed your world. If a dragon ate a city, you’d best reflect it in your theme document – along with what it was like before, what happened, what it was like after, and current events around this monster event.
Again, it speaks to scope- the smaller the scope, the easier it is to maintain a low entry curve to the world as a whole.
If you’re trying to RP in WoW? One big suggestion: agree on a timeline. Set up a ‘world event’ knowledgebase and, though it may have spoilers therein, simply say ‘This is the basis for our gameplay as a group.” If the RP group takes down a boss.. .mention it! Continuity can be made group-by-group, if nothing else… but the group must maintain responsibilty for their own continuity.
On the spoiler side of the fence? Well.. if you do this, some spoilers are unavoidable. However, those ‘spoilers’ are fundamental to your understanding of the current state of affairs not only for the RP group but the world as a whole. Better to spoil than not, in that case, says I – because you’re essentially trying to create a roleplay experience in a single-player cooperative game that has a little bit of co-op only content. MMOs exist to give a /sense/ of a living, breathing world – but not that reality.
The meat here starts around the two minute mark.
What I want to point out is that this woman doesn’t actually believe she’s a scam artist – but she does believe that she can look at photographs and tell you if the people involved are living and dead.
The important thing to note here is that she uses cold reading techniques to try to confirm her statements with Randi – she throws out extra data, trying to indicate how well she knows these souls, looking for ‘hits’ – but Randi gives her no approval one way or another.
Sadly, it’s very easy to delude yourself when you seek outside confirmation. Is she deliberately trying to throw this out there as false? no. But she’s definitely not doing anything WRONG – she’s just mistaken as to what rate of success trumps chance, and is operating from conversational cues.
Or so I think, anyway.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eji8E4UbAsU]
What got me started on this entire crusade, back in the day, was a meeting in 2006 with a sales rep for Tunguska Blast. He was a very nice blonde fellow in a very nice suit – and while I don’t remember his name, here in 2008, I do remember the very expensive watch he wore and the carefully cultivated image of quality he offered as he spoke to a good forty people in the meeting room of a local hotel.
It wasn’t my first exposure to a scam – but it was one of the most abjectly repellant ones I’ve ever seen.
I tasted his fruit juice, and listened to his speil. I watched as he preached to the crowd and pulled people in to the idea of not only getting very very healthy, but getting rich while doing so. After all, if you’re going to have a panacea – what better way to sell it than to get a multilevel marketing scheme going at the same time?
I was less brave, then, and while I didn’t fall for the pitch, I didn’t stand up and say anything either. To this day, I regret it. Consider this, then, me standing up. So. Let’s take a long, hard look at Tunguska Blast.
Read more..
When I was a kid, my father and I sat around one day talking about the fact that he was self-employed, about how business works, and about how someone builds a successful business. I remember him leaning back in that creaky office chair of his, putting his hands behind his head, and saying:
“Son, there are only two ways to make money. Do something nobody else has ever done before, or do it better than anybody’s doing it now.”
I admit it – at the time, I listened, but – well. I had no clue. The words went in the ears, sunk into the brain, and had no real context to have any meaning beyond being a catchy saying. The thing is, though, like all bits of wisdom you get when you’re young that matter, this simple statement has actually become the cornerstone of both my understanding of business and my own professional career.
Now. In a blog about gaming – specifically the roleplaying space, MMOs, and the fabric of our shared hobby – why would the above statement, all about business, have any bearing?
A Different Way of Looking At Things:
When you set out to build a new text-based roleplaying venue, it may not seem to be a thing that has any real bearing on the business world. After all, you’re likely not going to be charging cash for it, and nobody makes money (well, almost nobody!) building a garage-project roleplaying space for people to come and play with. Our hobby isn’t exactly the sort that drives thousands to a pay site – it’s just not something that can be easily incorporated into the standard business model.
(Maybe if we had a REAL webclient – but I digress!)
Even so, the economics of supply, demand, and growth are still there. There is a limited audience for a highly competative group of gaming projects across dozens of genres, a limited amount of server time, a limited amount of developer time, a dearth of coders (and don’t think that’s not a problem!), and an aging gaming population with fewer hours to spend on a very time-intensive hobby. The Casual Gamer, often born of necessity, is your audience now – and the evolution of the model of a standard text-based multiplayer RPG has certainly changed with that audience.
Look around you at the games you play. Even if they contain legacy grids – more and more games are going for fast travel, venue-based mechanics like those we proposed a decade ago over the static grid you must learn to find your way around a simulated city. Die-hard simulation gives way to abstraction in the interests of time. Systems evolve to make sure new players don’t have the time/experience sink to overcome to be viable… just like a business model, our ‘standard feature set’ has certainly changed with the times. Those games that could not change to cater to the new tastes of the population have faded, eclipsed by those that could. Think about it – how many active World of Darkness sites are there these days? How many ‘fan genre sites’ have popped up in the last few years? What do the longest-running games have in common?
I’m going to do a bit of serious illustration here, though, with the MMO space – a nice common ground to discuss our own development in a similar, though much smaller, genre.
In the beginning, past Meridian 59, there was UO. It was a top-down, isometric game (very popular at the time, and continuing the tradition of the Ultima series), very open-ended with a wide world to explore. It was a commercial success, and an eye-opener to an entire industry. However, even at its inception, the game was an iterative step: a polish on the idea of cooperative isometric open-world gaming that had already been tested on AOL (Neverwinter Nights!) and in other venues. It was NOT revolutionary… what /was/ revolutionary was its accessability.
One monthly fee was a Big Deal in the days when you payed through the nose by the minute. Trust me.
Its major competition came from Verant and SOE – Everquest. It took most of the core open-world abstractions and innovated, offering a first person perspective and an emphasis on group, cooperative play. Roleplayers – then the core demographic of both games – flocked to it in droves. Immersion, offered by the first-person engine and smooth play in a detailed world (along with very early attempts at NPC scripting that made the world feel more populated and yet wild and open in the wilderness spaces) was key – and it made EQ the king of the genre in the west for a very long time.
However, the demographics of gamers changed – as gaming went more and more mainstream, players became hungry for a different kind of experience. They still wanted immersion, but they also wanted PvP challenges and epic PvE encounters: the ‘boss mob’ and precanned story became an important part of game design. Age of Camelot emphasized the over-the-shoulder view and created a smooth and fully realized fast-paced experience (over the deliberate pacing of UO and EQ) – and this was further refined in Acheron’s Call and – believe it or not – in EQ as camera controls improved and UIs were redesigned.
Then … along came Blizzard. Blizzard looked at the gameplay and demographic of the MMO space and, with customary Blizzard talent, rebuilt the model, refining it to a high, polished shine. The trend toward realistic graphics was dropped in the favor of uniform consistancy across virtually every system on the market (you didn’t have to buy more machine to play!) – and their choice of a comic-book sensibility allowed them to go crazy with design decisions that just made the world come together and made the average player FEEL epic. Their lore was deepened, expanded, and a world people already knew quite a bit about (due to the Warcraft RTS games) was realized and made accessable. The gameplay experience was polished to a mirror shine.
And.. quite simply – they launched with the ultimate refinement to the base model.
Now, in the marketplace, you can’t just sit on your laurels – and no one has. WoW challenged the MMO space to evolve; gameplay mechanics that were true conveniences (?, anyone?) became ubiquitious. You couldn’t turn around without bumping into a huge yellow exclamation point or easier NPC interactions. Instancing and story-driven staged gameplay became a genre standard. Finally, the MMO genre was available to more than the RPG ‘nerd’ like me who was willing to wade through a text parser or huge volumes of manual to get to the meat of the story – you could pick up and play and be immersed.
Plus, Blizzard realized there were dozens of /types/ of gamers. Raiders, pvpeers, pvers, roleplayers – they were the first to emphasize multiple Roleplay servers at launch, even if they didn’t turn out to be the meccas we roleplayers had hoped for. Fueled by their own success, they didn’t stand by idly – they expanded every gameplay experience, using each expansion not as a stand-alone gimmick (see EQ!) but as a way to deepen and refine the fun.
Now, competators in the MMO space have to contend with the 500 lb. gorilla that is Blizzard.
So how do you?
You can’t polish – they’ve beat you to it. Genre conventions must exist, certainly, but you can’t build the same game and expect the same numbers. Instead, you must innovate. You have to change the core model fundamentally in a way that offers a brand new sort of experience within the MMO construct. WAR doesn’t quite get there – it’s PVP-focused WoW, in many ways… it doesn’t go far enough from the basic model to offer a truly unique experience. For the MMO developer, that’s the new challenge – how do you target the core audience with a game that presents a new way of playing?
You could target the pay-for-play model. Microtransactions show promise, and a lot of nominally free MMOs are really starting to show intriguing numbers.
You could target the fantasy genre. You need a world with a mythology that everyone can wrap their heads around – this is why Fantasy works. Everyone, geek or non-geek, jock or egghead, can immerse themselves in a fantasy world. We are raised on mythological stories of ancient heroes – it’s easy. If you want to break the fantasy mold, you need another shared mythology with the same kind of power.
You could target core gameplay. It’s arguable that MMO gameplay these days is precisely what Yhatzee describes it as being: “essentially, you click on the bad guy, and take it in turns to kick each other in the shins until one of you falls over. The entire game consists of making sure you have every shin-kicking advantage.” Even WoW, for all of its polish, doesn’t really break this model… but City of Heroes and Earth and Beyond (and, yes, Eve Online) did.
You could target something I haven’t even dreamed up yet. Maybe a better-controlled player economy, or a game where every single item is handbuilt by the player in question for a task at hand. Maybe an MMO that didn’t care at all about ‘stuff’ .. one prime candidate would be to overthrow the dominance of level-based gameplay. Could you imagine? A world where /all/ content is meaningful, and can be conquered in any order – there is no ‘level 80′ to trivialize a challenge, you just script new things to encounter, new things to do, and bad guys are ALWAYS a problem. Solves both MUDFlation and level madness in one swoop, doesn’t it. (This, by the way, would be a Half-Life 2 MMO. Headcrabs are a challenge.. until you figure out how to deal with them. Then they’re annoying. But they’re /always/ a threat.)
In our MUSH space, we haven’t yet had a blizzard – the world is wide open. However, the person who designs a game with high polish from the beginning, a definitive expansion model and a willingness to grow over time? That’ll be our own genre-defining 500lb. gorilla. I find myself wondering what that game will look like.
