Seem to be reading a rather messy pile of books at the moment. I will probably start mixing up what ideas come from where. For the record though:
Should keep me busy eh.
I seem to be on a retro jag at the moment. My excuse is that there was good design in the constraints, plus a message from my mother that they have found a couple of boxes of old role playing games.
So emulators are being downloaded, 'copies' of games I had found on the net (I used to have a box of Commodore 64 games but it got left in a flat move somewhere. Oh foolish student that I was).
Also a scouring of ebay and a bizzare hope that old hardware and playing these games on the original hardware will give me some kind of epiphany. It wont but it will be fun for a short while.
But what are the games that most stick in my mind, well most seem to be from the Commodore 64 (I had a Vic 20 and a ZX81 before that, but none of the games except monster maze really remain in my memory, well that and the Scott Adams adventure game 'The Count' which was a cartridge for the Vic 20). After the 64 came my Amiga 500. Games on that, well I loved playing Trip-A-Tron. Daft that, but anyway..
From the 64 (in no order):
- Shadowfire
- Psi Warrior
- Enigma Force
- Frankie Goes To Hollywood
- Zoids
- Lords of Midnight
- Domarks Revenge
- The Sentinal
- Infocom games, Suspended, Deadline and Starcross.
In fact on my 64 I remember being obsessed with the next Beyond release, or following the releases of Denton Designs.
On the spectrum I always wanted to play Mel Croucher's 'Deus Ex Machina'. I think I have just snagged a copy from ebay, just need a spectrum to play it on.
I think the only hardware that is still in the family is the Amiga and that is probably not in a good way. I hope to try and rescue that when I visit the family to recover the box of RPG's.
And in that box, well I am not sure but I know that I had far too many rules and not enough time to play them all, in fact I enjoyed the construction of the game worlds in the rule books so much that I collected rules. I know I had:
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Star Frontiers
- Indiana Jones RPG
- Star Trek
- Paranoia
- Call of Cuthulu
- Car Wars
- Killer
- Warhammer
and maybe a few others, which ones remain and in what state I am yet to discover but it feels stupidly exciting.
I am sure I can think of a good excuse to talk more about a long time ago as if it was relevant to now.
yay, I am on dopplr but now do not seem to be actually going anywhere much. Oh well.
More like re-reading. This has been sitting on my shelves for the last few years. I have delved into it a few times, the last time extensively after finishing Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theater" (I have that in the re-read pile as well). Narrative is cropping up in so much work that I am involved in. The use of narrative in gameplay and learning, its use in both guiding a learning experience as well as making a point easier to understand.
I also have in my bag Pat Kane's "The Play Ethic".
I got this after his talk at the BBC's Design Forum conference. Again I have been reading it in small pieces. It is a dense and complex book, about play. I should sit down and digest this fully, but for the time being I am dipping in and slowly designing two services that should complement each other even though they are on different topics. One on climate change and the other on games.
Just a quick thought, the videos that Pat Kane showed, 'Dirty Kuffar' by Sheikh Terra & The Soul Salah Crew (2004) or DIGIHAD were mashed up, music, politicised activist videos, mostly making use of found (stolen) footage.
We saw many of these same techniques in Adam Curtis's BBC 2 series, 'The Power of Nightmares'. This was a three part 'rip, burn and mix' construction with a new soundtrack designed to deliver a cultural / political thesis on the modern world.
'The Power of Nightmares' is available all over the internet, just like the Jihad videos.
I used to love playing adventure games on my Vic-20 and Commodore-64 and never really got into point and click adventure games (though some of the more mashed up games on the 64 and then the Amiga were great. I am thinking about games from Denton Designs 'Shadowfire' and ' Frankie Goes To Hollywood' or Mike Singleton 'Lords of Midnight').
Now these games still exist, though under the moniker of interactive fiction. There seem to be some real gems out there and the tools to easily author your own. What is important about them and this book is that you are in game worlds, ones with their own rules as to how objects interact. They are truly interactive and I think there is lots to learn from revisiting these and seeing what can be applied to the likes of interactive television.
over on my geeKyoto project site I blogged about a BBC event that I was lucky enought to attend. It was the 3rd Design Futures conference, held by the BBC’s Design Forum. We had a number of speakers, John Thackara I have blogged about in the above post but here I want to talk briefly about Pat Kane, The Play Ethic and playful spaces.
Pat attended the conference at the last minute and the gist of his presentation was about play, especially online but not games. It was about the playful ideal, how ideas and philosophies of play affect and inform the things we do online even without thinking about them being playful.
A lot of online video was used which lead to the thesis that YouTube was the most playful forum on the web at the moment. Not to say that all videos on their are fun. He showed a Jihaddie video, distributed on YouTube (and I am sure many more online video services). This was a highly political and charged video. It was polemic and propeganda but it was constructed in a mashed up, creative, playful way. Music, video and news footage joined together to put across an idea inside your web browser.
The fact that around the video there were also comments both textual and video made this possibly one of the more open, public and possible vibrant disucssion spaces on the whole agenda of Iraq, Terrorism, Middle East Policy etc.
These spaces are not the definitive places for dialogue but they are important places for people to sound their thoughts, maybe the ones they feel uncomformtable with.
Was there a problem? Only with the fact that this space, this arena for discussion was in fact owned by a Shareholder owned Internet Company (Google of course). This lead to the discussion about such spaces belonging in the Public Service arena. Is it right that Google own the space? Will they control what is said in these spaces in a way that strangles free speech. Google may claim that they will try 'Not to be evil' but they do have a responsibility to their shareholders that is enshrined in US law.
Initially I thought that this is a problem, that this is the sort of service that should be run by bodies such as the BBC but soon came to think differently. After working at the BBC for 5 years I know that such a space could not exist, at least not from the BBC as is. These spaces in fact need the risk willing, the type of thinking that start ups and small, fast companies can come up with. Even once in the belly of a beast such as Google there will still be the risk willing thoughts that a body that has been created in the image of 'Public Service' would not be able to muster.
I hope that spaces like this continue to be created, they will spring up and allow us to create with the playful instinct.
I am currently reading 'The Long Summer' by Brian Fagan. It is the story of how climate change has changed civilisation.
The book is rich in story and detail, looking at the climactic changes that have affected humans since the last Ice Age. How they have adapted and how societies collapsed. Of real interest is the fact that cities grew as a mechanism for feeding and control but as such became incredibly susceptible to crop failure. Older social models, subsistance farming, hunting etc. these groups could move and adapt to changes on a yearly cycle. Not always comfortably but they could move. Cities were locked into space, they had now way of moving and thus when disasters did strike they hit cities the hardest.
It is not hard to see where we, in the west sit in this model. The whole of western, first world society is modeled on the city model. How will we deal with the catastrophic changes ahead?
This makes a great companion to Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' and in fact a worthwhile project would be to take the content from these and other books and map out in time lines and spacial visualisations the stories they tell. I was thinking about a project that Gavin Bell created, NovelContext. This project is intended to look at the links within fiction but a similar mapping for many non-fiction, pop-science books would be an exciting project.
In a spat of googling and wikipedia poking around I just found this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Trap
It describes the Live Action Role Playing Game Tresure Trap that was founded in the UK in 1982. In a castle in Cheshire, people went along and dressed up as orcs, hobbits, elves and adventurers. In fact for one weekend my best friend from school and I went along and played a game.
We had seen a piece about it on Blue Peter. A quick letter to the BBC and we had a sheet of information on Treasure Trap. We played quite a few role playing games, Dungeons & Dragons and Star Frontiers were the main ones.
My friends dad drove us up there, and soon we were playing an introduction adventure in the castle.
What do I remember from it? Not loads, but I do remember the sponge covered swords. One puzzle in one of the rooms was 'Red To red or else your dead'. Someone had to solve a red face on a rubiks cube so we could get out of the room, meanwhile the 'gamesmasters' were waving a torch back and forth, slowly getting lower to represent the ceiling coming down.
I also remember getting separated from the main party and getting captured by a group of Orcs. I was sent back with a curse so that I could not speak.
It was fun, i enjoyed it. Of course we did not join. It was too much for school kids from London, how would we get there to play a game? I am sure our parents would not have enjoyed having to drive there every weekend.
But it was a good game.
More memories are available here http://www.treasuretrap.net/.
