Burrowowl

A roleplaying game is, at its heart, a collaborative storytelling mechanism. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of hacking, slashing, shooting, and blasting tactical simulations. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of player-generated narrative and creativity. Most games contain several elements of both. Something that is present in the introduction chapter of most RPGs, but is frequently glossed over and not spoken of again, is that it is not only collaborative but cooperative. When five people sit down in somebody’s mom’s basement with some books, clipboards, and dice bags and start spinning yarns about elves and dragons and spaceships and giant robots, everybody has a pretty solid idea of who is going to win. Everybody and nobody.

Most games have a game master — certainly the most popular ones do — whose role is to control and present the world to the other players. The other players control and present a far more limited set of characters and objects and actions, typically limited to those of a single fictional character in the game master’s world. The players, through their characters, collude to overcome the challenges set forth by the game master. Everybody, including the game master, is pulling for the ultimate victory of the players. This is the norm, but not always the case.

Sometimes the players’ characters just at odds with each other. One wants to go slay the dragon. One wants to go unseat the evil king. Another wants to stop the dread necromancer’s horrible scheme. When one or more of these can wait, and the players are willing to be reasonable, this is not a problem. When two or more just cannot wait, you’ve got a problem. When two or more will necessarily preclude each other, you’re not talking about cooperative play any more; if the players cannot figure out a way for both their characters to get along, cooperation becomes competition.

There is something basically dishonest about entering into a roleplaying game intent upon meddling with and confounding the goals of the other players without being quite up-front about it. When you play Chess with somebody, it is understood that you will take your opponent’s king. If the game you’re starting up revolves around political maneuvering and conflicting interests, everybody needs to know this heading in; you’re setting up a situation where some of the players will win at the others’ expense, and that’s a different sort of game entirely.

Hey look, I found another cartoon to watch. Hooray for me. How bout I tell you about it?

Chaos;Head is about a (wait for it) socially-awkward high school boy and a (wait, wait, you’ve never heard this before) bunch of beautiful women who intrude in his life, resulting in (oh precious suspense) awkward semi-romantic situations intended to titillate the socially-awkward male demographic. This is all terribly formulaic, all very focus-group-tested and sanitary.

But this isn’t a romantic comedy, no no no, this is a suspense/thriller. There is a string of bizarre deaths in Shibuya, where the protagonist lives. The protagonist is an unreliable witness, which is the key leverage used in telling the story. He is prone to delusions. He lives in a cargo container on the roof of a building where he collects anime-related figurines and plays video games all day. He has an imaginary friend (an anime character he thinks is his wife). He thinks somebody is watching him, sometimes even in the solitude of his own room.

The pacing of Chaos;Head is excellent. The intro and ending theme music are hideous. The character designs are visually pretty typical for a romantic comedy, which adds to the creepiness of the paranoid tale of supernatural horror. The invisible super-swords are retarded. The production quality is uneven; sometimes nice but often lackluster. Clearly this is a product of a production crew with a limited budget and timeline trying to cram a very complicated video game plot into half-hour chunks. So far they’re making an admirable run of it. I look forward to the next episode, and so should you.

Bonus points for including nutty URLs on-screen that you can actually visit online. Nice.

By all account I’m no true Star Trek fan. I couldn’t tell you what shipyard the Enterprise C was built at. I can’t even remember the name of Khan’s wife. I enjoyed watching reruns of the original series when I was a kid. I enjoyed The Next Generation when it was new. I watched the first couple seasons of Deep Space Nine. I saw most of the movies. I watched most of the first season of Enterprise. That’s about all I’ve got in Trekkie cred, but I know bad news when I see it.

The new Star Trek trailer disturbs the heck out of me. It’s gone sweaty. Spock looks metrosexual (I take it the Vulcans have extra-logical exfoliation techniques). Was that supposed to be Scotty? Please God, don’t let the dude that played Harold appear as Sulu. I suspect this will be even more offensive than… Well, I’m just not sure, but I fear that the new Star Trek flick is going to be horrible on so many levels it’d make Christopher Pike blow out his “no” button.

One of the plagues of the Internets, one of those sterling examples of a technology victimized by its own success, is unsolicited bulk email. It is obnoxious. It is a hassle for recipients and system administrators. It is a pain to identify in an automated manner, spawning an entire sub-industry of professionals dedicated to thwarting it. Frankly it’s a theft of service. It’s also fairly easy to get involved in accidentally.

For people that have been using the Internets since before they were re-pluralized, the notion of just adding a big batch of total strangers to your mailing list wouldn’t even come up. Who’d do that? It’s terrible etiquette. Sadly Miss Manners hasn’t quite spread the word. Happily, the folks at MailChimp have an excellent listing of representative scenarios to help illuminate the unwashed masses that are looking to do some legitimate mailing:

“I bought a list of 30 million emails from this guy on the Internet, and…”

Stop right there. Don’t use MailChimp. Don’t use anything. Throw away the list. Turn off the computer. Snip the power cord, so this doesn’t happen again. Now go punch yourself in the gut.

It’s an entertaining read, especially if you already know better.

Got to see the first returns come in while having dinner at Old Ebbitt, a bar and grill across the street from the Treasury building. After dessert we went back to the Hotel Harrington (more on that later). it had been a long day. We’d buried my Nana at Arlington in the morning and gone to Maryland for a party at her nephew’s house. My sister was bumming a bed from us for the night before heading back to California, and we were all just about ready to get some sleep. I was the last holdout, leaving the television on to wait for the west coast returns. The moment the polls closed back home, CNN called the election for Barack Obama (it was certainly no surprise at that point).

Moments later we heard cheers from eleven floors down. The crowd at Harry’s got the word and were out on the sidewalk celebrating. Car horns erupted up and down the street. Rebecca, Sharon, and I got up, put on some street clothes, and headed down to check it out. The streets of Washington, DC are pretty mellow at night. Not many people out and about. We saw small groups of people, maybe three or four walking together, jubilant. We were tempted to head back up, then we heard some commotion down E street, towards the White House. Let’s check it out, why not?

As we walked, we passed by dozens of people who would pump their hands in the air and shout “Obama!” or “Yes, we can!” and an occasional “President of the United States!” I can only assume the McCain supporters were just not interested in staying up or going out for a defeat. Everybody we saw was ecstatic until we got to a group of nicely-dressed people exiting a hotel to their valet parking. Never found out who they were.

The next not-terribly-happy group we ran into were the White House security people on Executive Avenue. Apparently they were a bit edgy. The sidewalk nearest the southern end of the White House, which had been open to the public the night before, was off-limits. We had to cross the street to follow some college-age kids that were hooting and hollering. Once we got around to Lafayette Square and saw the stream of young people coming in from George Washington University to celebrate the election results, I understood why.

Everybody was positive, but nearly everybody was young, partisan, and energetic. It was invigorating to see people smiling and laughing and singing and chanting (and even dancing in the streets a bit). But get that many excited young people in the same place at the same time, and you start looking for you nearest exit. Everything was positive. Everybody was well-behaved. There were no problems. But that didn’t mean I needed my pregnant wife on hand if anybody did something stupid and brought the Feds down on us.

We cheered along for a bit, never quite going to the center of the action, and headed back to our room. On the way, we stopped off at the Elephant & Castle to listen to the President Elect’s acceptance speech and tip back a drink just before last call. The yelling and honking continued into the night, keeping us up off and on till three in the morning. I should probably ask one of the locals if this happens every time a new president in selected. I bet our waiter at Old Ebbitt knows; his mother is an undersecretary at the State Department.

Neat town.