PARANOIA

On an industry mailing list, RPG.net's Shannon Appelcline wrote, "We hit a great milestone on the RPG.net Gaming Index last week: 10,000 unique books and magazines. When I consider that my old standby reference, Heroic Worlds, had about 3,600 entries, I'm amazed by both how much the industry has grown since then and how much data we've managed to collect in just a couple of years. At this point I'm pretty sure we have 90+% of printed RPGs, though a lesser percentage of magazines and PDFs." Here's the Skotos press release.

PARANOIA has always rated quite well on the RPG.net Index. At this writing, the current Mongoose edition stands at #34 out of 1,083 games in the Core Rules category, tied with the 2004 religious-apocalypse RPG Heaven & Earth (Event Horizons/Guardians of Order/Abstract Nova) and a hundredth-point behind indie masterworks Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard. PARANOIA is also #61 overall among 10,000 products -- actually 10,027 as I write, which shows how the Index continues to grow.

Thanks to all the registered RPG.net users who have voted for PARANOIA. Though I could exhort newcomers to visit the RPG.net Gaming Index page for PARANOIA and start industriously stuffing the ballot box, in fact the Index guards against such chicanery. Appelcline and RPG.net's Christopher Allen have posted many deep-thinking articles about systems for collective choice on Allen's fascinating but now-dormant blog, Life With Alacrity. These articles discuss specific measures to dilute the impact of "drive-by voting." So if you want to support PARANOIA, just grit your teeth and become an honest, upright member of the RPG.net community. Hey, you could do worse.

Gareth Hanrahan's PARANOIA mission "Spin Control," collected in Alpha Complex Nights, begins with a highly important Troubleshooter assignment to maintain and/or destroy spork supplies in an INFRARED cafeteria. The mission naturally progresses from there to -- yes, you're way ahead of me -- to a public-relations campaign for brain-eating zombies. But the idea that pertains here is the spork.

Now, spork fans, witness the revolutionary Battlespork -- spoon, fork, toothbrush, and self-cleaning razor all in one! First proposed in 1992, trapped in bureaucratic limbo to this day, the Battlespork Spork-Toothbrush-Shaver would help defend our overburdened troops from the omnipresent menace of oral bacteria.

(Via the Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator.)

Labels: spork, sporkery, sporking, sporks

Signs & Portents issue #56 (.PDF link), the latest issue of the Mongoose Publishing in-house magazine, is available for free download. This issue includes "Keep Your Dictionary Handy," a long, fun article by Zild (of Paranoia-Live.net) about slang terms used in Alpha Complex. Zild compiled the common slang seen in published PARANOIA books (vatslime, goosack), drew more from the active "Alphaslang" topic on the P-L.net forums (bootsmoke -- a dead citizen, plus seven other usages; still dripping -- recently decanted), and added many all his own, including a section of Commie Rhyming Slang, brand names, and a disquietingly long list of euphemisms for dying:

• has gone to that big briefing office above the dome.


• is shooting trouble with UVs.


• donated his body to R&D.


• joined the scrubot's list of things to do.


• is on tomorrow's menu.


• et cetera....

Zild remarks in the Alphaslang topic, "Further contributions are very much welcome, as I already have my eyes set on a sequel!" Commendation point to citizen Zild -- and a treason point for not alphabetizing the list.

Alpha Complex comes to life in Japanese photographer Joe Nishizawa's incredible photos of underground Tokyo.

(Via Chris Nakashima-Brown at No Fear of the Future.)

Loyal citizen Elle-R-KNO of Paranoia-Live.net forwards this Wired blog report of breakthroughs in Japanese smile-measuring technology:

The breadth of a smile can be measured by new technology from Japanese electronics and health care company Omron Corp. [...]

In a demonstration, a camcorder took videos of journalists covering the announcement. Percentage numbers indicating how much each person was smiling popped up in bold blue letters next to their faces on a monitor, flashing higher or lower as their expressions changed. The numbers ranged as high as 89 percent for a person who was grinning, while a somber face registered 0 percent.

Sony Corp. already has a similar Smile Shutter function for its digital cameras which automatically clicks the shutter when people in the image break into a smile.

But Kawamoto said Omron hopes to used its technology in the medical field, to assess the emotional state of patients, or pack it in mobile phones. Okao Catch can also be useful for people who want to perfect their smiles, or for robot communication to make it easier for machines to decipher human reactions, according to Omron.

Doubtless this tech will soon adorn an airport security line near you....

Labels: smile

The King's College London Institute of Psychiatry posted a story on April Fool's Day that seems not to be a joke: "Virtual reality tube ride reveals extent of public paranoia."

Researchers stuck 200 test subjects on a four-minute virtual-reality simulation of a subway train ride. "The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants." And lo and behold, the test subjects were spooked!

The research, led by psychologist Dr Daniel Freeman, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, demonstrates that suspicious or paranoid thoughts are much more common in the general population than was previously thought and that they are almost as common as anxiety and depression. [...]

Dr Freeman and colleagues found that the participants interpreted the same computer characters very differently. The most common reaction was to find the virtual reality characters friendly or neutral, but almost 40% of the participants experienced at least one paranoid thought. The participants were extensively assessed before entering the train ride, and it was found that those who were anxious, worried, focused on the worst-case scenarios and had low self-esteem were the most likely to have paranoid thoughts. [...]

"In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case," says Dr Freeman. "About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts. This shouldn’t be surprising. At the heart of all social interactions is a vital judgment whether to trust or mistrust, but it is a judgment that is error-prone. We are more likely to make paranoid errors if we are anxious, ruminate and have had bad experiences from others in the past." [...]

People who feared terrorism on the Underground tended to report more paranoid thoughts in the virtual train, possibly reflecting the after-effects of the London bombings on 7 July 2005. However, the researchers also found that people who regularly used the Underground experienced less paranoid thoughts in the virtual train.

Wow, science is really marching on at King's. Comments on the Slashdot topic "VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid" highlight the junk-science angle, especially this one from LighterShadeOfBlack:

A VR reproduction of the London underground? A place where you're crowded by people, a place which in all honesty does have a reputation for being a haven for pickpockets (whether that's deserved or not, I don't know), and oh yes, one other thing -- the site of the last major (successful) terrorist attack on Britain. [...] Being somewhat cautious in that particular situation is a world away from the headlines implicating that 40% of us are clinically paranoid all the time.

The new issue 55 of Mongoose Publishing's free online magazine Signs & Portents includes a short, pithy PARANOIA article by Gareth (The Traitor's Manual) Hanrahan. "Reasons to be Cheerful" has nothing to do with the Greg Egan short story of that name. Rather, the article lists an array of secret motives Troubleshooter characters harbor (escape, drugs, gaining mutations, "free thinking"), along with conditions that satisfy those motives. By achieving these hidden goals, players earn Perversity points, which may provide some consolation as your free-thinking character is hauled off for a deep brainscrub.

Gareth is all over this issue. He also contributed a one-page overview and a short scenario for the forthcoming Mongoose edition of Traveller, that languorous and idyllic project that has distracted him from writing the forthcoming PARANOIA bot book. Enough shilly-shallying, Gareth, get to work!