Recently, a Japanese magazine called RPG Gamer published a version of Barbarian Kings, a boardgame I designed decades ago. I don't read Japanese, and so did a Babelfish translation thereof. FWIW, "Caster phone" is, imagine, a translation of Japanese characters that represent phonetic translations of the name of the continent in which the game is set (Castafon), and somehow "player" becomes "prayer"--perhaps the English term was adopted directly into Japanese, but the 'l' became an 'r'.

I'm seeing some Japanese characters as I paste below, but I have no idea how they'll render on your machine--I may be seeing them because I have Korean installed here. (Because I was checking out a bunch of Korean MMGs, that's why.)

Babelfish clearly has its limitations.

=====

RPGamer Vol.4 ' the supplement is, the American game designer, conventional ?????? board game ' barbarian ???? ' of the ???? ??????? work. The board game which draws the leadership dispute in the continent of magic, in RPGamer edition preparing the map 2 aspect, it appears.

- Caster phone continent
The caster phone continent SPI edition ' barbarian ???? which first comes out ' is the map which has been attached.When the prayer is 4 or less, play in the caster phone continent recommends. At that time, you should have played at the number of scenes below, probably will be.
* The number of scenes is stated even in the rule book.

- ???? continent
The ???? continent is the map which is used afterwards with PBeM on Internet. When the prayer is 5 or more, play in the ???? continent being magnificent, it is pleasant, probably will be. You use scene entirely.

' Barbarian ???? this journal supplement play example '
As for map and unit design renovation. The marker which displays the dominant right of the territory (stain classified by both sides to come) it adds.
posted by Greg at 11:00 PM

Ted Castronova has an interesting, and in parts quite funny, economic analysis of how people divide their time between work, gameplay, and other leisure activities at Gamestudies. I think his prediction of worldwide recession as people 'migrate' to MMGs is over the top, but as usual, Castronova's tongue is at least intermittently in his cheek. If you don't mind academic dryness and a little light algebra, it's definitely worth a read.


posted by Greg at 5:07 PM

Some upcoming events that look interesting:

Accelerating Change 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface will be held at Stanford on November 5th through 7th. According to Jerry Paffendorf, one of the speakers, it "explores the future of massively multiplayer environments and games designed to have an implicit relationship with systems in the real world (economic, creative, topical, social, educational, physical (body/geography), etc.)" The stellar list of speakers include Will Wright, Cory Ondrejka of Second Life Nova Barlow of Themis, and Robert Gerhorsma of Forterra (nee There).

John M. Ford writes that on October 1st, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is "running a fundraising day called 'Art Perchance: The Pleasures and Perils of Artful Gaming.' Short version is that people have been donating artworks of various sorts, which will be raffled off at the end of the party. You get a certain number of raffle tokens when you buy a ticket. There are three levels of ticket, from $75 for one lousy token to $300 for ten -- hey, this is an art patron mishigas here -- and you can win more by playing carnival-midway games with names like 'Wheel of Dada' and 'The Matisse Toss.' There'll be carnival food for Urban Trendies (booze sno-cones). Oh, and they've got a tattoo parlor. Somewhere, Henry Clay Frick is banging his head against a Rodin bronze."

Next January, the Slamdance Film Festival is holding a indie game festival. Apparently, they're trying to treat it like a film festival; attendees judge games, and there's $5000 "in cash and prizes" for the winners. I think there's a fundamental disconnect in thinking here; will such an award help you in marketing your game to publishers, the way film festival awards sometimes help indie movies in getting picked up? The answer is: I'd be astonished. Even IGF winners don't normally land publishing deals. But it is interesting that a film festival is branching out in this way.



posted by Greg at 10:38 AM

IT Managers Journal has a lengthy and quite skeptical article about the Infinium Phantom console. I've expressed some skepticism about Phantom before, and much of this is on target, but the authors are wrong on two points, I think.

First, they make much of the fact that, if successful, Infinium Labs will have to front a whole heaping load of money. In essence, they'll be practically giving the console away, in exchange for a subscription commitment, a deal that should be familiar to anyone with a cellphone. It's also not that different from the classic console model; when consoles first go on sale, they're sold at a loss, with the manufacturer making up the different in terms of platform royalties on game sales. However, console manufacturers are deep-pocketed electronics companies, and can take the cash hit in the early days of a new system; Infinium is venture funded.

This is true; however, the subscription nature of the model works to Infinium's advantage. A subscription commitment is a contractual commitment, and it is possible to, in effect, factor the receivables--to borrow money from lenders, at a discount to face value, on the basis of the fact that your subscribers have a contractual obligation to keep paying you for some time. Thus, IMO, the problem is solveable.

The other issue the authors raise is clonability. Typically, VCs look to fund businesses with protectible competitive advantages, and the authors believe that, if Infinium is successful, many other businesses will spring up with typical offers. They say, in fact:

Almost any smart sysadmin can figure out how to stream games and set up an ecommerce 'try before you buy' online game delivery system, so competition is virtually certain.

Well, actually, there are 'streaming' game sites available now, but they offer relatively few titles, and generally older ones. IMO, the key to making a success of Phantom is making sure they have a deep and broad catalog, something which they haven't demonstrated yet, of course.

But more than this, I think the statement betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about what game streaming technology is. It has very little to do with streaming audio or video, and indeed, the term is something of a misnomer.

Streaming linear media isn't that hard; once enough of a clip has been downloaded, you can start playing it while the rest downloads in the background. A game, however, is not linear, and there's no way of predicting before a player starts playing exactly what assets he's going to need.

Most PC games are, when you come down to it, a few megs of executable, a few more megs of .dlls, and hundreds of megs of media assets--models, textures, 2D graphics, sound, video clips, etc. What you need to do is get the .exe and the core .dll's onto the user's machine initially--the whole file(s), not part of them. Then, as the game look for media files, you send them out over the net. Since only a portion of the media files are needed for any particular level, you can "chunkify" the process, making sure the user gets the files he needs before playing.

This still isn't instanteous; even over a broadband connection, there's going to be an initially delay as the first files show up, there's going to be a longer load delay between levels, and in some cases, the game may hang for a bit while we hunt for some media asset that isn't available locally yet. Still, over broadband, the whole thing is feasible, just.

But the point is that it is not trivial for a sysadmin to set up a game-streaming operation, even though it is trivial to set up audio and video streaming. It's a different beast.

And additionally--not all games are coded in such a way to make streaming neat and easy. In some cases, getting a game to work at all in this environment may mean having to go back into the code base and make some modifications--which publishers are only going to do if they see a financial interest in doing so.

Of course, a number of vendors do offer 'game streaming' solutions--I used to be more up on who does, but it's been a couple of years since I looked at the technology--so yeah, it's still possible to clone the basic service offering, assuming cooperation from the same publishers who have deals with Infinium. But it's far from as trivial as this article makes out.
posted by Greg at 4:02 PM

I must have overdone the gloom and doom in my Origins report; at GenCon, more than one person expressed a hope that I was having a better time there. I did, I guess.

I spent most of the con at the Mongoose both, flogging Paranoia XP, which appeared there for the first time (and should start showing up in stores this week). From that perspective, the con was quite successful; we were out of copies by end of day Friday, two days into a four-day con. Mongoose also sold out of both the GM screen, and Paranoia T-shirts; they'd printed up a bunch of these, in Clearance colors, with the logo and "Paranoia is fun. Other games are not fun. Play Paranoia" on the back. The fronts had different Clearance-appropriate slogans.

Takyn-U-RUN ran virtually continuous Paranoia demos, an exhausting prospect--for days of high-intensity GMing. I ran a couple of sessions, but he was a live wire. Mongoose seemed to do pretty well with its other products, particularly the Conan and Babylon 5 material, and sold out of some other items as well.

Among the purchasers was the odious Palter, whom I had referred to as such in the Origins post. He offered congratulations on Paranoia's reappearance, and asked me to sign his copy to "The Odious Palter"--points for graciousness, at any event.

Indianapolis struck me as an extremely dull city; except for the area immediately around the convention center, there seems to be no streetlife. My hotel was about a mile and a half away, and being a New Yorker without atrophied feet, I walked the distance back and forth each day. The only people I encountered on the street all seemed to be homeless. Indianapolis is also dominated by war memorials unlike any other city I've been in (other than Brooklyn, the home of Union triumphalism). At city center is an enormous Civil War memorial, and a few blocks north, an even huger World War II one. One wonders why Indianapolis, in particular, felt the need for these.

This time, I actually did pick up some games. Pirates of the Spanish Main is sold in Magic-like booster packs; these don't contain playing cards, however, but die-cut pieces of styrene plastic sized like a card. You punch out components from which you assemble little age-of-sail ships, which you then use to fight battles. I like the concept and the technology, but am less impressed by the gameplay; any age of sail game that doesn't have rules for the wind gage and crossing the T is, well, somewhat lame.

I picked up two boardgames; Ideology: The War of Ideas and Inkognito. The former looks like it might be fun; I haven't had the time to check out the latter yet, which I bought largely because Alex Randolph is the co-designer. (Randolph is one of the great American boardgame designers of the mid-20th century, best known for Twixt.)

The bulk of my purchases were, however, at the Forge booth. The Forge is an online community were amateur (in the sense of "we do this for love, not money") RPG designers discuss works in progress. Much of what's produced there is a free download, but in some cases, they self-publish. Paul Czege's My Life With Master (reviewed here some months ago) is one such, and I wanted to check some of the others out.

Essentially, the hobby games industry has some of the same disease afflicting digital games, albeit not to the same degree; its harder and harder to get an original title noticed, licensed games are spreading, and the larger publishers are loathe to launch a new line without a clear marketing message. Thus, increasingly, the most original work is being done by indies. I'll probably review some of these later, but the games I picked up include Matt Snyder's Nine Worlds, Ron Edwards's Sorceror, Luke Crane's The Burning Wheel, and The No Press RPG Anthology, a collection of 8 short RPGs.

The plane trip back from Indianapolis was interesting; it felt like virtually everyone on the flight was a gamer. I wound up playing San Juan with the two guys in the seat next to me, a woman across the aisle was discussing some boardgame she was designing, and at one point, the guy seated ahead of me turns around and asked whether I had designed Paranoia.

Bizarre to feel like everyone in such a setting is part of the same little subculture...


posted by Greg at 9:20 PM

Howard Rheingold (virtual community guru) has an excellent comprehensive list of what he calls "urban mobile games" (and which I previously complained about people calling "big games").

I like his term better, although I'm not sure "urban" is necessary here. These are LARPS-cum-mobile technology, kinda sorta. In principle, they could be non-urban, although most to date have been.

Still, it's always exciting when a new game style shows up, even if nobody has yet figured out a way to make a business out of them. Of course, not all game styles do become profitable enterprises; with rare exceptions, neither LARPs nor play-by-mail makes money, for example. (Pace Rick Loomis.)

But Howard's list is a good place to start in investigating this phenomenon.
posted by Greg at 5:30 PM

...talking about server-side platforms here, not platform in the sense of hardware.

When I founded Unplugged Games back in 2000, J2ME was future tech and BREW had not been announced. We had faith that we'd get phones that could run apps in a bit, but at the time, what you had to work with was SMS and WAP. To do any kind of games with those technologies, you needed to have a server in the mix. And my expectation was that mobile would be like online: you've got networked devices, people are going to want to use the network to play multiplayer games.

While you can roll your own server-side code for each new game, that's inefficient; if you expect that your company is going to do a lot of multiplayer games, it makes sense to code a generalizable framework to handle issues like player authentication, player matching, keeping game states in synch, dealing with security, billing, etc., etc., etc. In short, we obviously needed to build our own server-side platform, akin to the platforms used by operations like Pogo.com and Uproar and all. Indeed, one of the first things I did was prepare a set of use cases, outlining a slew of different game styles we might want to support, to ensure that our platform was sufficiently generalized.

When we started going out for more than seed capital, I quickly had another realization: venture capitalists like to invest in technology. They do not like to invest in entertainment, because entertainment industries are viewed as too risky. (Never mind the obvious irony that VCs exist precisely to make investments viewed as too risky for other sources of capital.) When we talked about the platform, they loved it. That, we were repeatedly told, was where our real economic value lay. We'd become the sole platform provider to every wireless carrier on the planet, and the likes of Verizon would funnel us big bux, and that made a lot more sense than trying to sell stupid little games to dumb consumers.

Thus, over time, our business plan shifted from positioning us as a mobile game publisher to positioning us as a mobile platform provider (who also had to do some games to demo our nifty platform).

I didn't actually believe this, by the way--but was willing to play the game, if that's what it took to get funding. And hey, maybe the VCs were right, and that's how the game would play out.

Mirabile dictu, the same thing seemed to happen to everyone else who was going out for money in the world of mobile games at the time. Digital Bridges had their platform. Jamdat got funding on the basis of their platform. Cache-U had their platform (and they were the only one of us, I think, who actually bought into the idea). mForma had their platform.

This was a mirage, because there was absolutely no reason any wireless operator should pay us a dime, or adopt our platform exclusively. Why bother? All they needed was a link to the game from their WAP deck. Why should they care what magic happens on the serverside, so long as the player is happy? As it turned out, I was right; you need a platform to support your own multiplayer games, but there's no obvious reason that the operators should pay you for it, or adopt a single platform.

(Cingular did adopt mForma's platform, BTW--but it didn't do them any good... They trail far behind Verizon and Sprint and even AT&T in terms of consumer uptake of mobile games.)

At the time, the mobile phone manufacturers got worried about this plethora of platforms. They were afraid that it would lead to balkanization of the mobile game world,making it impossible for a T-Mobile customer to play an O2 customer or whatever, and making the job of mobile game developers a nightmare, since they'd have to optimize for a bunch of different platforms. Thus, they got together and created something called the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum, which was supposed to provide an open specification for mobile game platforms that the rest of us should, if we were good citizens, agree to support. Fine, whatever, we all said we would, and forgot about the MGIF, because industry bodies like that take forever to get anything done anyway. And as far as I know, the MGIF never did a damn thing (and has since been folded into the Open Mobile Alliance).

So then J2ME and BREW came along, and mobile game companies found out that they could make money selling dinky little soloplay games, and never mind the platform crap, which they all quietly forgot, and never mind what they'd told the VCs back when.

But today--everyone is looking at the market, and figuring that multiplayer mobile is the next big thing in the mobile games market (and never mind that, as Mitch Lasky at Jamdat put it, they cost twice as much to make and make half as much money as single-player mobile games).

So guess what's happening? The VCs are funding a bunch of new companies that claim they're going to provide =the= platform for multiplayer mobile games. Kayak Interactive is the latest.

Now--here's the thing. There's still no reason for a platform qua platform to make any money. A platform is a necessity for supporting multiplayer mobile games, but at the very best, what you're funding is a middleware play. You are not going to capture more than a tiny share of revenues generated by multiplayer mobile games this way. As so often in the games industry, VC narrow-focus on tech at the expense of content is leading them to make dumb decisions.

Don't take my word for it--download and read this excellent white paper from UK developer Macrospace (hosted on the Forum Nokia website). It goes into how and why wireless carriers, game developers, publishers, and consumers alike will do just fine in a world of competing mobile platforms without any standardization--and with the platform itself generating little or no revenue.

Still not convinced? Consider this, then.

At Java One last June, Sun and Nokia announced that SNAP, Nokia's platform, is going to be integrated directly into Sun's WTK for Java 2--both on the J2ME side and on the J2EE side. In other words, there's going to be a platform, available from Sun and already nicely integrated with the serverside technologies most mobile game developers are going to use, and part of the standard Java distro. (SNAP, incidentally, was originally developed by Sega, and was acquired by Nokia for reasons that still remain inexplicable to me.)

So am I saying SNAP wins the platform wars, and VCs looking to invest in other platform plays are nuts to even look at the space? No, not really; I agree with Macrospace. SNAP just becomes one other option, and nobody wins, and it doesn't really make sense to invest in the space for other reasons entirely. But if you disagree with me, and believe that Someone Will Win The Platform War, and that winning the platform war is worthwhile and will make someone a pile of money--well, you're betting against both Sun and Nokia. Which sounds like a bad idea to me.

Or am I missing something?

(And, of course, the inevitable disclaimer: I work for Nokia, and may be biased. Also, everything here is absotively posilutely my own personal opinion, and should in no fashion be construed as the opinion of my employer or anyone else, whether a flesh-and-blood person or a corporation, and whether from Finland or not.)
posted by Greg at 2:40 PM

This has me rather annoyed.... Apparently a fellow carrying a White Wolf book (Exalted: The Abyssals) was hassled by security while boarding a New York Waterway ferry from Jersey to the city. Because of the Republican convention, there's heightened security in the financial district, and the guy was travelling to one of the ferry terminals down here, presumably because he works downtown. So they're searching for bombs and such as people enter the ferry. Moron security guard decided the book was "inappropriate," whatever the fuck that means.

I believe I'm going to email NY Waterway in protest. Others might want to consider doing the same.

(Thanks to Boingboing.).

Update:

Emailed them as follows:

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am a downtown New York resident; a frequent ferry rider to New Jersey from downtown New York; and an award-winning designer of tabletop roleplaying games, including Paranoia, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, and Toon (a complete ludography at www.costik.com/ludograf.html).

It has come to my attention that recently, a security guard checking the bags of customers boarding one of your ferries hassled him because, in his bag was a copy of a roleplaying book, with an illustration of a female warrior on the cover. The security guard wished to confiscate this book on the grounds that it was "inappropriate."

The complete story may be found here: http://mephron.livejournal.com/349969.html. In addition, you may wish to note that several other sites have picked up the story, including www.boingboing.net (one of the most widely read blogs on the planet), and my own blog (www.costik.com/weblog).

While everyone understands the need for heightened security in the wake of recent terrorist warnings and the upcoming Republican Convention, this remains a free nation. You and your personnel have absolutely no right whatsoever to confisctate someone else's reading material. "Security" in this contest means ensuring that people don't board your craft with weapons; it does not mean ensuring that they don't board with books that you don't like.

This issue is a particularly sore one for those of us involved with roleplaying games, since the Christian right has frequently accused roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons as being Satanic, and has tried to get roleplaying games banned from schools. We are no stranger to censorship, and take a dim view of it.

I hope and trust you will swiftly institute procedures to inform your security personnel that the reading choices of your customers are none of their damn business.

Sincerely,

Greg Costikyan

--------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most difficult tasks people can perform,
however much others may despise it, is the invention
of good games...
-- C.G. Jung

Update:

Just spoke with people from New York Waterway, who say:

1. They're trying to track down mephron (the original poster) to get more detailed information from him--e.g., time and ferry route.

2. If the story is true, it is not only a violation of company policy, but also of martime regulations, and if it is true, they wish to correct the situation as quickly as possible.

3. Anyone with further information about it are invited to contact them directly.

Sounds sensible to me...


posted by Greg at 2:45 PM

Greg Aleknevicus at The Games Journal has a long piece entitled "German Boardgames Are Fraudulent," a title he acknowledges is purposefully inflammatory, in which he argues, in essence, that German boardgames (or Eurogames, to use a broader term) are bad because they graft an arbitrary set of game mechanics onto a theme.

He says:

The point to be made is simple—the wholesale grafting of a theme onto a set of mechanics is dishonest if those mechanics have no real world connection to that theme. Can a game really be about exploring the Amazon if it can easily be re-themed to the terror of the French Revolution? Is it realistic to simply add floors to an existing skyscraper? Did ancient explorers really decide the orientation of the islands they discovered?

How very like an old A-H fan (which internal evidence from the article indicates Aleknevicus is).

Most of A-H's designs grew out of a simulationist impulse, largely because many were designed by people who cut their teeth on board wargames, which are simulationist by nature. In this regard, they were quite unlike the prevailing 'mass market' boardgames published by companies like Parker, Milton Bradley, and Kenner at the time, which mostly slapped marketable themes on top of proven mechanics (the track game, pachisi variants, peg solitaire, etc.). This is, in fact, part of the reason we 70s and 80s game geeks liked the hobby boardgame style; it seemed more intellectual, more engaged with something real.

However, to use this fact to attack the common paradigm of modern German boardgames is mind-bogglingly silly. The Eurogame tradition rises out of the mass-market boardgame tradition. In the US, the mass market boardgame has become a notably uncreative and rather dull field largely, I believe, because monopoly has eliminated any need to attempt to innovate (Hasbro essentially owns the boardgame market here). In Germany, by contrast, a half-dozen or so strong game publishers compete vigorously, and as a result, the traditional mass-market boardgame has mutated over time, and the audience for such has come to appreciate systems innovation. And indeed, virtually every Eurogame has a different core mechanic (games in a series, e.g., the Catan titles, being an obvious and understandable exception).

(N.B.: "Core mechanic" is Eric Zimmerman's term, and I rather dislike it, but that's a topic for another day, and it serves well in this context.)

In short, Eurogame designers are not designing from a simulationist impulse; they design largely by looking for interesting and novel core mechanics. This is, to my mind, an entirely justifiable and reasonable approach to game design, albeit my own impulse is generally to reach for some simulationist hook to hang a game on. Aleknevicus ends by calling for some sort of synthesis of the two design traditions--he wants games with the creative mechanics of Eurogames and the simulationist approach of US hobby boardgames--and while that might be interesting, I don't think it's at all reasonable to claim that one tradition is superior to the other.

Eurogames rock. A-H published some of the finest boardgames the planet has ever seen. These are not contradictory statements.
posted by Greg at 5:42 PM

I used to think this was somewhat useful, and cool technology. I am now having my doubts.

Over the last several years, I have bought from Amazon:
1. Many books on game design and development.
2. A fair bit of science fiction--mostly either technologically edgy or British.
3. Quite a lot of books about the circus (don't ask).
4. A great deal of YA fiction intended for female readers. (Gifts for the kinder, obviously.)
5. Some manga. (Ditto.)
6. A couple of volumes of classic literature.

So, um, here are my current recommendations:

Blue Wizard Is About to Die, billed as "the first book of poetry about videogames."

Pattern Recognition, Bill Gibson.

The third Baroque Cycle book, which I will buy at Borders, thank you very much, since it will take longer for Amazon to get it to me.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next.

Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

Naked Lunch.

Fake, Sanami Matoh, "hugely popular in Japan, especially among teenage girls."

Howl and Other Poems.

Two Edmund Gorey books and three later volumes of the Fake manga.

Creepy Susie, by Angus Oblong, "Your mother never told you these stories because" you would plotz, to paraphrase. My goth-ish 12 year old would probably like this.

Kerouac's Desolation Angels

Belloc and Gorey, Cautionary Tales for Children

Charley Stross's Toast

A Vonnegut

Narrative as Virtual Reality, Marie-Laure Ryan

...This is chaos.

I have to assume they think I'm an extremely downbeat 12 year-old girl who is bizarrely otaku about the Beats, cyberpunk, Gorey, and videogames.




posted by Greg at 6:32 PM

Now this is tres cool: the Internet Archive has established a program called the Classic Software Preservation project to preserve older software, focussing on computer games.

In essence, they will take older games, get the data off the floppies or whatever, and preserve the code. This is something I've been talking about for years; magnetic media has a lifetime of only a few years, and we run the risk of losing a lot of older software, just as we've lost a lot of early movies because film decays, too.

Of course, unlike say, The Underdogs, the Internet Archive is an incorporated non-profit, and can't do anything that even arguably violates copyright. Consequently, though they'll be archiving the code, they won't be making it available for download--except in cases where they have specific waivers from the rights owners.

They're looking for donations of older games, by the way.

Ultimately, of course, what I want is for older games to be available as playable entities; it would benefit everybody if they were. Fans of retro games would enjoy them; modern designers would gain insights from the past; and academics would be able to study them. Publishers might even get ideas about what older IP is worth reviving (remember that the revised Frogger was a best-seller just a few years ago).

But this is a big step in the right direction, anyway.

Incidentally, they're also archiving game videos, which strikes me as interesting but odd. A lot of what they're archiving (e.g., Red vs. Blue) is widely available from commercial sites--but if you download it from such, you either wind up paying for access to premium servers, or sitting in a long line. It seems to me like it's clearly a lot more convenient to download it from Archive.org... They're using a system called Free Cache, but it only helps reduce bandwidth to the original hoster if other ISPs/hosters pick up and use Free Cache (and I see no particular incentive for anyone to do so.... It's going to reduce an ISP's incoming bandwidth usage, but not bandwidth to the consumer....). So the upshot is that in all likelihood, the Internet Archive will wind up picking up the cost of serving these videos, some of which may prove very popular. And videos are notorious bandwidth hogs.

Not sure this makes financial sense. But hey, whatever. Go watch the complete run of Red and Blue.
posted by Greg at 10:01 AM

PARANOIA XP GOES GOLD
Internet Technologies Revolutionize Roleplaying Game Development

New York/Austin/Swindon -- Aug 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. and the creators of Paranoia XP announced today that the new version of the classic tabletop roleplaying game had "gone gold," and would be released in time for GenCon 2004.

To a large degree, the game was developed online, in public. Fans of the game contributed enthusiastically via blog, wiki, and online forum. They wrote text, debated rules, proofread, ran statistical analyses, and even wrote a computer simulator to test the game's paper-and-pencil rules.

"Online collaboration made this edition of Paranoia the best yet," said Allen Varney (http://www.allenvarney.com), the game's designer. "We borrowed the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game, and it worked brilliantly. I plan to create future games the same way, and other designers should consider it too."


THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND

Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future. A well-meaning but deranged Computer desperately protects the citizens of Alpha Complex, a vast underground city, from all sorts of real and imagined enemies. Players take the role of Troubleshooters, The Computer's elite agents, their job to search out and destroy the enemies of The Computer. Each player character is, however, secretly a traitor... In short, Paranoia is a light-hearted game of terror, death, bureaucracy, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, insane robots, and technological satire that encourages players to lie, cheat, and backstab each other at every turn.

The original version of Paranoia, designed by Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg, pioneered in 1983, and was an instant hit, going on to sell more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

PARANOIA XP

The popularity of the original game was in part due to society's fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and uneasiness about the new desktop computers that were starting to revolutionize working life.

Happily, today those fears are obsolete. Instead, we have terrorism, spam, viruses, trojans, malware, distributed denial of service attacks, the RIAA, cyberwarfare, identify theft, the Patriot Act, terrifying new diseases, the threat of environmental catastrophe, the grey goo scenario, and weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, Paranoia is more relevant than ever before, and Paranoia XP updates the world of Alpha Complex for all these terrors and more.

DESIGNING IN PUBLIC

In order to involve Paranoia's community of fans, the designers decided from the start to discuss the new version's development via a blog (www.costik.com/paranoia), and to invite comments, suggestions, and contributions from anyone who wished to participate. Naturally, there was a potential legal issue; there was no easy way to compensate people for their contributions, and nobody wanted to deal with the potential bookkeeping involved. The solution: a virtual inversion of the Creative Commons license. Posters were warned that anything they contributed might be used in the game, without any compensation whatsoever, and that although the creators would try to credit people whose material was used, it might slip their minds in the hurly burly of meeting deadlines. The legal "boilerplate", in a take-off of a popular Web meme, even said "All Your Rights Are Belong to Us."

The fan community soon found it wanted to debate, discuss, and contribute in a more free-ranging format--and luckily, a pre-existing fan site, Paranoia Live (http://www.paranoia-live.net) agreed to host a forum for public comment and discussion. Varney soon discovered the utility and importance of posting and participating in the forum. "There were so many good ideas worth stealing... and the enthusiasm and support of the community really kept me going in meeting a pretty brutal deadline," said Varney.

To publicize the game, Varney started a wiki at http://paranoia.allenvarney.com. Framed as a "Lexicon" game -- in which players contribute one entry per turn to an alphabetic research report on a fictitious topic -- the wiki traced the history of "the Toothpaste Disaster," a wide-ranging Alpha Complex calamity. Varney recruited almost two dozen players, in hopes of finding writers for upcoming Paranoia support products.

"The project succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. The Lexicon game produced the largest stable of talented writers Paranoia has ever enjoyed." Varney has informally organized the best Lexicon writers as the "Traitor Recycling Studio," to collaborate on the next few Paranoia supplements using -- yes -- a wiki.

"We stumbled into this," said Greg Costikyan, one of the original game's designers. "I wanted to incorporate a blog from the start, but the community's response, and Allen's embrace of them, was both startling and exciting. I think Allen is onto something here--at least for artforms that are collaborative in nature, such as games and possibly film, there's a lot to be said for tapping the collective talents of the fan base, as filtered by a professional."

MONGOOSE AND GENCON

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. (http://www.mongoosepublishing.com) of Swindon, Wilts., is one of a new breed of hobby game publishers, producing roleplaying and miniatures games for the adventure gaming market. Among its fine roleplaying products are Conan, Judge Dredd, Babylon 5, and Macho Women With Guns.

"We had... no clue what we were getting into," said an exhausted-sounding Alexander Fennell, director of Mongoose. "But the bloody thing is finally at the printers... ahh, I mean, ahh, only a traitor could fail to find this new edition of Paranoia hilarious, spiffy, and well worth your money. Paranoia is fun. Other games are not fun. Buy Paranoia."

Paranoia XP will premiere on August 19th at GenCon (http://www.gencon.com), the world's largest convention for game players and enthusiasts, held annually in Indianapolis with more than 20,000 attendees.

"When the first edition of Paranoia debuted at GenCon in 1984, it was more than just the hit of the show," said Eric Goldberg, a designer of the original game and, with Greg Costikyan, the owner of the Paranoia property. "Players were first startled and then delighted when they realized the game turned the reigning Dungeons & Dragons paradigm inside-out: instead of deadly serious co-operation, players are encouraged to find ever more entertaining ways of getting the other guy before he gets you. Our game designer peers, in addition to bestowing several awards upon the game, gleefully co-opted the edgier, more humorous tone, which in turn spawned a new generation of role-playing games." "Paranoia XP is both the 20th anniversary edition of the groundbreaking Paranoia game and a new edition for the 21st Century," Goldberg continued, "We hope that the incorporation of Internet technologies will prove every bit as revolutionary as the original game was... ah, rather, Paranoia was perfect. Paranoia XP is even more perfect. The Computer says so, and The Computer is Our Friend!"

HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY!

Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Have a nice day!

For more information and/or disinformation, interviews, drivel, or just for the hell of it, feel free to contact:

Greg Costikyan at gcostikyan (at) nyc (dot) rr (dot) com

Eric Goldberg at egoldberg (at) ungames (dot) com


URLS:

Paranoia Blog: http://www.costik.com/paranoia
Toothpaste Disaster" Wiki: http://paranoia.allenvarney.com
Paranoia Forum: http://www.paranoia-live.net
Mongoose Publishing: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com
To Order: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpg/detail.php?qsID=530&qsSeries=Paranoia%20XP
Allen Varney: http://www.allenvarney.com
Greg Costikyan: http://www.costik.com

Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

Paranoia Copyright © 1983, 1987, 2004 by Eric Goldberg & Greg Costikyan. Paranoia is a trademark of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. All rights reserved. Mongoose Publishing Ltd., Authorized User.


posted by Greg at 2:52 PM

I suppose I shouldn't complain overmuch, given that I purposefully chose about the cheapest hosting place I could find.

Nonetheless:

1. As you may recall, some weeks ago I had a problem; I was getting 10,000 bounced emails a day to my main email address, and repeated calls to my service provider got me no where. I specifically asked them to disable the SMTP server, as I never actually send mail from it (I use my local cable provider's SMTP server)--I only use the POP server. They refused, basically claiming it wasn't a problem "as long as your password is secure..." I went and changed all the passwords, FWIW.

I sent some copies of the bounced emails to people who were bouncing them, with full headers; one advised me that it was virus-originated. I also simply killed the old email address, so I wouldn't have to download 10,000 emails a day, and set the server to bounce any mail to that address. This was at least a short-term solution.

2. Two weeks ago, -all- email to all costik.com email addresses started getting bounced, along with a message saying (sender) "is currently not permitted to relay through this server. " Now the oddness here is that this is typically a message from an SMTP server to someone trying to send mail through the server who does not have authorization to do so (often because the sender isn't in the same domain as the server). It's not a message you typically get from a POP server that's bouncing incoming mail. Whatever.

I wrote the provider saying "wassup?" essentially, and got a message saying that they were having problems with mail servers on several hosted sites, and the problem would be solved shortly. It wasn't.

I tried again, got the same message.

I called their phone support; the fellow on the other end tried several things, said he would bump it up a level, and I'd get email. I did get email, saying the problem was solved. It wasn't.

Nex thing I knew, my website was down, along with this blog. Not only that, I could no longer connect to the mail servers (I had previously been able to do so, although it was futile, since all incoming mail was getting bounced), nor could I FTP to the site. Another call to tech support; oh, you have to contact our abuse email address.

I contacted them, and was told I was a spammer, and my account would not be reinstated.

As you can imagine, this rather pissed me off. I emailed back a rather irate note, pointing out that I was no damned spammer, and if there was any spam going out of my SMTP server it was their damned fault as I'd told them to turn it off, for chrissakes.... I also cc'ed Cory Doctorow, on the grounds that if they didn't give satisfaction, maybe I could get him to blog it on Boingboing--I mean, if you can't get satisfaction, you can at least get revenge--and he wrote asking if he could post it. I asked him to hold off, since one possible response on the part of my hoster might be to get more rigid and impossible in the face of bad publicity.

Yesterday they said "Okay, we're reinstating your account." However, when I FTP to the site there were no files there... no folders... not even a "public_html" one.... Nada. I was fearful they'd simply wiped the whole damn thing. My site is backed up... The blog posts are stored on Blogger... But the comment files weren't. No backup there. Gak.

The problem was compounded by the fact that a press release for Paranoia XP has to go out soon, and I really wanted to point to the Paranoia blog, similarly caught in limbo.

Today, however, everything seems to be back, including the comments. I've backed them up, and will continue to do so regularly.

However, all email to costik.com addresses is STILL getting bounced... I have an inquiry in... sigh...




posted by Greg at 12:36 PM