Organizing game books is for suckas

Reading an interview with David "Zeb" Cook over at Grognardia tonight reminded me of another great value of wikis for RPG presentation, which also applies to any technical document.

Role-playing game manuals must do two, often contradictory things. They have to present information sensibly for the new user, and they must serve as reference manuals for the experienced user.

So when you organize, you usually lean toward making them reference books, because they'll only be introductory material once, but reference material dozens of times (you hope).

Along comes hypertext, and your linear need to organize like a reference manual is dead as a dot matrix printer. Now, feel free to organize the whole manuscript for the noob. A decent site map will make your hypertexted wiki rule book completely accessible for in-game reference purposes.

3 stories on being a writer

I have difficulty thinking of myself as a writer, because I do not write for "fun", and writing is a painful, tooth-pulling experience. Earlier this year, I had decided to give it up. Here is what I wrote to myself on March 4:

I have decided to stop benig a writer, and to stop thinkin gof myself as a writer. I do not write. I do not like writing. Writing is difficult and obstreperous, and chiefly, I do not do it. I have many friends who are writers, and what they do is write. I do not.

So this leaves me with a hole in my perception. I don’t know what I am, or what I do or how to categorize myself now. I have an uncommon facility with English. That and a familiarity with layout sofware seem to be my marketable skill.

I don’t know who I will become now. Hopefully, somoene better, someone with fewer illusions.

I was basically ready to think of myself as a professional editor who dabbled in writing on the side. That still might be a sane idea for me.

Instead, about two weeks later, I signed myself on with a company called World Leaderz as Head Writer and Web Content Specialist. The backsliding didn’t even seem strange at the time, I just blundered in and started.

==

Since then, I have heard, unbidden, from four different people involved with the company, that I am an “excellent” writer. People use the word so uniformly, I wonder if they’re humoring me. I have no method to discern whether I am actually an excellent writer, or an accidental bullshitter.*

The difference is in confidence. Not the blustery unself-aware confidence that marketing employees use like motor oil to lube their ill-defined engines of commerce. I’ve tried that confidence, and a fairer-weathered friend I’ve never known. I’m talking about the confidence borne of experience and clear thinking.

As an editor, I have this latter confidence. I’m totally worth my money as an editor, and I can tell you why. Writing, however, is so much harder to do, requires more attention and grit, has fewer objective, measurable standards, and I’m such a weak-willed, lazy man. If I’m ever any good, I can’t tell you why. I’m an epistemic slot machine.

==

In junior high school, they occasionally took a bunch of the gifted kids into a room and talked to us about more interesting things than we had in class. (One wonders why we couldn’t maybe come up with an entire curriculum of the interesting stuff.)

One of these sessions involved an aptitude test. There were 14 or 15 areas of aptitude, things you might actually be sort of good at naturally. Above a certain score in each area indicated that you might be suited for this sort of thing as a career. The instructor told us that we should probably have three areas above the line.

I had one: verbal skills. I wasn't just good at it, I brushed the ceiling with it. Then about eight other areas were just below the line.

For all the crap aptitude tests get, this one was practically oracular about my future career. I’m not demonstrably good at anything, but somehow I’m great at telling you about everything I’m above-average at.

==

I’m back on the job hunting trail again. If you are or know of anyone looking for an above-average generalist who can show his work, my email is in the right column.

*Yes, they might be the same thing on some level, but anyone attempting to smear some of that smarmy wisdom on me is really saying they’re not trying to understand my point.

Humans Ape Dolphins

It's been two weeks since I've written anything here, and I won't try to tell you my life is too boring to write about, because it isn't. I haven't said a thing about riding bumper cars in Atlantic City with Teller, or going to Boston for a weekend to play games with long lost friends, or the bizarre job I've been doing on Bible trading cards, or the monsters I've been cranking out and giving away lately.

And it isn't that I've been "too busy" to write. Here's a free bullshit detector tip: People who are genuinely busy don't tell you they're busy. They tell you what they're doing, because they're parietal lobe-deep in the work, and that's all they have to talk about.

As usual, I've got a few half-formed ideas about faith and games and the ongoing process of becoming productive that I haven't bothered to write down. But I haven't written any of them down, so you won't see those here either.

Instead, I'm breaking my electronic silence to link to an article about humans learning to function with echolocation. It had never occurred to me that people would be capable of it. Huh.

Movies April-Jun 2009

I had an ambitious plan to talk about the movies I'd watch this year one at a time, and a format that involved putting up movie posters and links to imdb. I also thought I'd try to have something to say about each movie.

But it doesn't look like I'm devoting the requisite giveadamn. Instead, here's what I've seen since about April, in roughly chronological order:

The Matrix
We watched this serendipitously around the Matrix's 10-year anniversary. When I discovered that about a week later I asked myself how it holds up. It holds up OK!

Slumdog Millionaire
We enjoyed this movie, but the end seemed to be a different flick than the beginning and middle. Was that on purpose? Was there meant to be some redemptive switch that I missed being flicked?

Star Trek (2009)
This movie is just as fun as everybody tells you it is.

Tropic Thunder

Bender's Big Score
The first of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies was OK. I laughed a little, but not a lot.

Frost/Nixon

The King of Kong
A tale well told, but my enjoyment diminished soon after when I discovered that the real story is not as simple as the one told by the fimmakers. See Jason Kottke's discussion of this.

No Country for Old Men
I forgot that this was a Coen brothers movie until M reminded me about 3/4 of the way through. Then it started feeling familiar. Unsettling, funny, and ambiguous. Reminded me of Fargo. The movie sits better when you realize it's about Tommy Lee Jones's character, not about the characters you spend the most time with.

The Beast with a Billion Backs
The second of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies is more of the same. Good enough.

Be Kind Rewind
I guess the lesson is that even when you take creativity into your own hands, and make something people love, you still get screwed by corporations with lawyers.

He's Just Not That Into You
The movie seems to break some of the rules that the publishing phenomenon laid down. Plus, it wasn't a very good movie. Plus, Mac guy isn't a good actor yet.

Bender's Game
I wanted deeper, more incisive gaming parody out of this.

Shopgirl
I love Steve Martin, even though I'm not always sure why. The awkwardness and depiction of loneliness are funny and sad here. I enjoyed watching this movie.

Up
I cried a little.

Cash for your gas guzzler

Mildly annoyed by this "clunkers" bill the House passed.

The Short Version:

Under the House bill, car owners could get a voucher worth $3,500 if they traded in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for one getting at least 22 miles per gallon. The value of the voucher would grow to $4,500 if the mileage of the new car is 10 mpg higher than the old vehicle. The miles per gallon figures are listed on the window sticker.

I spent some time ranting about this and erased it all.

My first reaction is to rail at the perceived injustice. I've driven the same subcompact 30+ mpg car for 10 years without so much as a firm handshake of gratitude. Now suddenly, anyone who drove a 8 mpg behemoth for less time gets cash to upgrade.

I want a reward! I was community-minded when there was little incentive. I want others punished! They need to live with the consequences of their hubris.

But that's pride and greed doing the talking.

I'm trying to learn to be on the side of grace. I want to smile when good is done, no matter why. I've received good things. Why would I want good denied to anyone else?

For those of you playing along at home, this is transformation by the renewing of my mind. And it's surprisingly tricky.

Information: free and expensive

Taken from Wikipedia
Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.


From me
Information is so valuable that there has to be a way to profit from it. It's just that information's value, when decoupled from a physical medium, is extremely difficult to gauge.

Information is unquantifiable. "Cows go moo." seems like a single mote of information, but fractally smaller bits of information are implicit in that three-word sentence. Like what a cow is. How a moo sounds. Why "go" is an appropriate verb in this instance.

At this level, information is so voluminous, that you can only charge for it in bulk. In that way, all books are like newspapers -- you bundle in important parts with the unimportant parts, without knowing exactly what any given buyer deems "important." You hope people will pay to get the parts that are important to them.

Information is also extremely context-sensitive. Noise to one person is life-saving info to another one. Depends on whether you stand next to a train track, or on it. Which one would pay to hear that whistle?

Don't have a point today. Just thinking.

Bing is worthless.

Microsoft is soft-launching its improved search engine, Bing.com.

I'm happy to say that my name was the second thing I entered to test it out, proving that I am not entirely self-absorbed (but still mostly).

Here's the horrible news. I am neither the top return, nor the dominant presence in Bing search returns. The other couple of internet-active dudes around the U.S. with my name have significantly higher placement.

Google has it right. I generally turn up as the top 4 or 5 entries in Google, based on geek cred. Eponymous pretenders rank farther down.

WTF Microsoft? Things just haven't been the same since Bill left.


Update: Aad't Hart agrees with me.

Tiny Art Director

Just a quick pointer today. Tiny Art Director is is blog site where an illustrator takes art direction from his young daughter. She tells him what to draw, then critiques it when he's done. Funny, cute, petulant, drawings of dinosaurs... what's not to like?

He's got a book coming out too, so add that to your amazon list, whydontcha.

Hijinx: I didn't know I thought that fast

I'm going to a game convention next month. Yesterday the organizer asked me to run Hijinx, the d20 mini-game of cartoon bands I wrote approximately one thousand years ago for Polyhedron magazine.

When the game came out in 2003, it met an audience brimming with indifference. A few people loved the humor and the gall of the idea. A few people hated it, and called it wasted space. But mostly nada.

It was my favorite thing I wrote that year though. I'm still grateful to the editor, Erik, who took the big goofy gamble with me, and Kyle, the art director, who made it look pretty good.

But when Kevin asked me to run it yesterday, I froze for a few minutes. Could I even do that? My embarrassing (but in retrospect, obvious) confession is that I never even playtested the damn thing. I wrote 20,000 words on inspiration and deep rules knowledge. Is it... is it even playable? Do I know what to do with Quickenstein's monster? Would I get stagefright? Sometimes I get stagefright!

A few hours later, without any conscious effort, I had a setup, a villain, a plot outline, and a crazy topicality which, I daresay, would make a fantastic new millennium episode of Josie and the Pussycats. Just like that. Inspiration and rules knowledge just showed up again.

So I said yes. Now I have to reread the rules and figure out if this thing is playable in the next two weeks. Loving my goofy ideas helps a lot though.

Frederator cartoons: RHOMBUS!

Seems like a long time ago when my friend, Scott, sent me a link to a cartoon short that circumscribes a 12-year-old boy's mindset so thoroughly, that one knows, intuitively, that only an extraordinary man-child could have created such a thing.

The thing is Adventure Time. I found out today that Adventure Time will become a regular series on Cartoon Network later this year (or early next year).

Faltering laurels I strain to frame around Adventure Time will be inadequate. You just need to see it. Block out the next 7 or 8 minutes for this -- minutes which will surely be among the best of your day.

Since you've got 6 or 7 minutes left on your break, also watch The Bravest Warriors by the same man-child: