Petty annoyance or serious problem? You decide.

On April 20, The Sunday Times published an article with the headline:

Grandmother, 71, tackles slave traffickers for the Pope

Really?  A Grandmother?  Amazing!

What's amazing is that this headline somehow manages to sweep away Lady Margaret Archer's professional achievements as irrelevant to her identity in comparison to her grandmotherliness, and simultaneously imply that we should be shocked that a grandmother could possibly be asked to "tackle slave traffickers".

To be brutally fair, the article does in fact briefly survey her career, but this one headline - and the second paragraph, which reads:

"Margaret Archer, a 71-year-old grandmother who has spent most of her academic career at Warwick University, has just been appointed head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences by Pope Francis."

neatly excises facts like:

• Her PhD in sociology from the University of London
• Her reputation as one of the most influential theorists in the critical realism school.
• She was elected president of the International Sociological Association at their 12th World Congress of Sociology
• She was one of the founding members of both the Academy she now heads and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences
• At the time of appointment she wasn't working at Warwick University (a respectable school) any more, but is actually a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (one of the world's most prestigious technology universities in the world (ranking 1st in Europe) and home to the Blue Brain Project.)

So, what's the big deal, you might ask - she is a grandmother, right?  Other articles, like this news release from the Vatican give pretty straight-forward coverage of her qualifications, and this is after all the Sunday Times, so we might expect more of an interest story approach than hard-hitting investigative journalism.

I think it's fair to say that in such a piece it would be perfectly ordinary to mention the fact that a researcher is a father (for example) or is from some locale the readership might find interesting. But this information is normally considered secondary - it's just a little garnish to make the subject of the article seem more personable. The meat - the reason you're reading the article at all is the achievement being reported, and if these details aren't at all relevant you certainly don't expect them to be in the headline or to feature prominently in the initial paragraphs.

Unless you're a woman, I guess.

Some won't really understand what I'm getting at, so as an illustration, here are some other articles with their headlines rewritten in the same style:

Welshman finds new beetle in Brazil

Small-town man appointed to national association

Husband of Ojibway woman appointed to Great Lakes Science Advisory Board

Fact: nationality, where you grew up, who you are married to - all irrelevant to the actual news.

Interesting details about the individuals?  Sure - and actually I think it would be great to get more personalization of prominent researchers in the media to help get people more interested in science.

But it doesn't belong in the headline, and it doesn't deserve pride of place in any article purporting to report an individual's professional achievement.

E is for Exalted

A series on games I wish I had played more of.

In 2001, a friend of mine bought a copy of the Exalted role-playing game by White Wolf Publishing, and was incredibly enthusiastic about trying it.

This was a bit of a departure from our usual fare - to start with, we were pretty deeply invested in Dungeons & Dragons of various flavours, and although we had played a number of other games (Rifts, TMNT, Battletech, Call of Cthulu (the old Chaosium version), ICE's MERP, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Gamma World, Amber, Battletech, and even a homebrew) we always drifted back to the old standard.

To make the sell even more difficult, some of us were - ah - unenthusiastic about gaming in the World of Darkness. We just found the whole angst-ridden vampire trope Anne Rice started left us with a bit of a bad taste in our mouths. [1]

However, our friend's enthusiasm was infectious, and once we'd had a chance to read through some of the background material and the mechanics we agreed to give it a shot because, frankly, we were finding it as interesting as he did by that point.

The WW Storytelling System mechanics were unfamiliar to us, so character creation was a bit tricky, and it also took a bit of a mental stretch to wrap ourselves around the basic concept: that the player characters are all chosen and imbued with power by various deities, thus becoming demigods - thus the name Exalted.  The scope for high-powered play (with plenty of role-playing and political intrigue) seemed wide, and things started to get interesting when we started role-playing through bits of character background. [2]

I don't recall what happened, but sadly our intentions got derailed soon after the first real session, and as intriguing as the game seemed we never tried again.

I suspect this is a game that would demand a fair bit of my time, unfortunately, so I doubt I will ever really get another chance - something I regret.

###
1. An example of play:
Player: "I ponder despondently the fate of my long-ago bartered human soul."
GM: "OK, roll...uh-oh - Your mournful yet classically beautiful demeanor has attracted the attention of a self-destructed goth teen who is now stalking you and dangerously close to revealing your true identity."
Player: "I evade!"
GM: "Ethical dilemma! You have discovered she is writing suicide-themed poetry inspired by your mysterious persona! Roll to resist befriending her and offering her dark immortality."
Player: "Arg! I failed!"

OK, I admit - the game doesn't really go like this and in fact has both an interesting mechanical foundation and an intriguing setting. Our scepticism was founded more on a reaction to the increasingly annoying trope that was displacing more interesting vampire variants in popular media than on the gaming community's interpretations, most of which were actually quite well thought out. Added to this: one of the ubiquitous "asshole but we tolerate him because he's actually an OK guy most of the time" sort of hangers on was so incredibly enthusiastic about WW's Werewolf game that it was very nearly a kneejerk reaction to be sceptical.

2. Not required by the game, but we did it both so we could practice using the mechanics (and tweak our characters prior to play as we learned what worked and what didn't) and so that our characters would enter play as fully developed as possible, since one aspect of the Storytelling System is that characters typically don't progress much in comparison to other games - they enter play fully formed and progress relatively slowly.

There are bees, and then there are BEES!

Today, my boy informed me in no uncertain terms that I couldn't go to work BECAUSE OF THE BEES and instead should stay home and play.

Good advice, though I doubt my boss would buy what he's selling.

In any case, he's been a bit obsessed with bees lately because we took him strawberry picking a couple of weeks ago, and the lady who took our group to the assigned greenhouse made a big point of telling us that the cardboard box in the middle [1] was FULL OF BEES [2] and that if we disturbed it or swatted away any bees we might see we would be horribly stung [3], and probably die.[4]  

Seriously, rather than pointing out that the bees had to be there to ensure we had strawberries to pick and warning us that bees can sting if frightened so we shouldn't bother the hive or molest any bees we see, she chose to make it into a horror story.

I've done my best to undo the damage (bees help make strawberries, they make honey, they won't hurt you unless they think you're trying to hurt them, etc) but I confess my feelings are conflicted:

You see, I live in Japan where not only are there bees, but there are OH BY THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY - BEES!

OK, so they're hornets.  But still, the point is that they're actually dangerous[5].  Not only are they big, stinging insects (legitimately off-putting to any rational human being) but they're actively aggressive and known to not only attack but also kill people.  Look at what a slightly smaller relative sub-species in China did last fall.

Vespa mandarina japonica is, I believe, the largest of the bunch, and they are the target of quite intense public safety efforts when they're found in inhabited areas, particularly if those areas are near schools or other places where children play outside.  All through the warm months they forage voraciously, and when new queens reach maturity they set off to find places to nest, and little cracks and holes in the eaves of houses are notoriously popular.  Any area with a number of uninhabited houses will make local authorities nervous - with no one to notice when these monsters are taking an interest, there's no telling how big a nest might get before it's detected - and eliminating a nest of hundreds is a major undertaking requiring serious equipment.

Anyway, thus my conflicted feelings.

On the one hand, I would like him to see videos like this one and say "cool!" rather than have nightmares.

On the other hand, he's too young to really understand that some bees are OK to watch and others demand a quick retreat to safety.

To make things even more tricky?  A history of bee sting allergy in the family.

Though honestly, after getting injected with a cocktail of haemolytic and neurotoxic venom by a hornet this size allergies are not an issue.  Single stings have been known to kill, and the best case scenario is that the sting will feel like a hot nail being driven into your flesh. [6]

Yeah, I'm happy to class the risk of occasional bee-stings as part of growing up, but the risk of having a hot nail driven into you and then dying is not really something kids should have on their already-busy injury schedule.

So, now to think of ways to explain bees in a bee-friendly way while still instilling a healthy terror of respect for giant hornets.

###
1.  a portable hive for pollination.  Most Japanese fruit growers don't have the luxury of keeping large numbers of bees, and natural pollination isn't sufficient.  Those with greenhouse operations (strawberries and other berries) often use these portable hives to introduce a captive population into a closed area.  Outdoor operations (apples, pears) typically use collected pollen and do it by hand.  Yes, every year Japanese farmers hire armies of middle-aged women to have sex with trees.  And yet GMOs are banned.

2. Her emphasis.

3. Her words.

4. This exaggeration is all mine.

5. Remember the movie Swarm? Yeah, these bad boys girls make "africanized honey bees" look kind of tame in comparison.

6. No, really, scientific eye-witness account: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1025_021025_GiantHornets.html

D is for The Dying Earth

A series on games I wish I'd played more of.

For this installment I'm going to cheat, and choose a game that I have actually never played but desperately want to: The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game.

This is a game by Pelgrane Press that some [1] will recognise immediately as being based on one of the marvelous universes created by the late, great Jack Vance. [2] By all accounts, it is an excellent game that skillfuly blends the traditional dice-wielding of more mainstream games with the compulsion to role-play that diceless games like Amber bring to the table.

And it's based on the worlds of Vance: this alone is a selling point for me.

The game has accumulated significant reviews like this one, despite being a fairly niche product, and has survived for years.  I am not surprised: Jack Vance apparently not only approved the game, but was actively engaged as a consultant, and the reviews say that it shows.

I am an unabashed fan of Vance, and in fact if I were to be asked to name three authors whose work would remain after a purge of all other books in the world, I suspect my list would be:

1. Jack Vance
2. Vance, Jack
3. The Baron Unspiek

I yearn to play in this setting [3], and I have found everything I've read about the actual mechanics intriguing - should I ever get the chance to buy this game I almost certainly will, even if I never get a chance to play it.

###
1. You know who you are. And so does the Baron Unspiek.

2. Sadly, this font of beautiful writing (and inexplicable footnotes) passed away on May 26th, 2013. May he be remembered until the Sun is infested with a strange alien mildew.

3. From everything I've read of the mechanics, it actually sounds as though it would be easily adapted to allow play in Vance's science fiction worlds as well.

C is for Chainmail

A series on games I wish I'd played more of.

In 1996, I was pawing through a mound of used gaming books at a favorite store [1] when I came across a buried treasure: one of the last printings of the famous [2] mediaeval wargame Chainmail.

I had played historical wargames in the past, mostly in the form of "simplified" board variants. [3] They were interesting, but somehow not satisfying.  I had also once or twice looked at the Warhammer system from Games Workshop [4] but although it looked interesting it seemed like a little too much of an investment.

But this...This old booklet, with its silver cover and the plastic binding coil, looking as though it had been put together by extremely dedicated amateurs, was a piece of history that any D&D player should know about - this was one of the roots from which Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed the first versions of Dungeons and Dragons. And for one dollar, there was no way I was leaving it in the bin!

So I bought the book, took it home, and read it over.  The rules are short and to the point, and my first read through was done in less than an hour [5] - at which point I was seriously enthused.  The rules weren't exactly simple, but they were as simple as possible, using a fairly basic mechanic that you could see had been logically extended to nearly everything you needed to do in the game.

I immediately got down on the floor with "glops" and push pins to try a quick battle between highly generic medium foot. [6]

Unlike many games which are very specific - focusing on battles of the First Punic Wars or the Third Crusade's Assault of Jerusalem for example - Chainmail is a set of generic rules for simulating real or imagined battles from the mediaeval era, and as such the real complexity comes in when trying to figure out which of several unit types is the closest match to whatever forces you're trying to represent, and an additional level comes in if you need to modify the unit with additional weapons etc.

Things of course got even more complicated if you started involving the various fantasy creatures or the heroes which formed the real centerpiece of the game.

This last bit seemed a bit daunting, but since the mechanics themselves seemed straightforward I was confident we could work something out, perhaps gradually building up tables that by consensus we agreed to abide by in building armies.  But my first run through with a couple of relatively small forces of exact equivalence convinced me that it should be quick and easy to run games with the system.  My next logical step, therefore, was to dragoon my brother into trying a slightly more ambitious scenario with me.

We played, argued briefly over interpretation of a rule [7] and ultimately ended the game with no resolution.

But I was hooked.

I had searched for years for a wargame that was straightforward enough to initiate new players with ease, but seemed sophisticated enough to offer actual rewarding play. I looked forward to organizing many games, perhaps even some kind of tournament campaign with my gaming buddies playing different parts in the internicene wars of some crumbling fantasy empire.

But alas it was never to be.  We had ongoing RPG campaigns, and ever-swelling list of obligations in our encroaching "real lives" and apart from a couple of abortive battles that I somehow managed to rope people into we never really played the game.

This is a shame, because the game itself seemed like the sort of game I could actually get into - unlike the ruthlessly serious historical wargames or the various editions of Warhammer.

I no longer have the rules, though no doubt they still live somewhere among the gaming things I left behind in Canada.

But I often think: Man, I wish I could get a real game of Chainmail going...

###
1. Friends will probably remember this store as being occasionally managed by Odin himself.  This was when they had the location in a strip mall on Pembina Highway, which I admit is a strange place for Odin to run a business.  Surely some place in Gimli would have been more apt?

2. In the circles I travel in. I'm aware that most people would probably be scratching their heads or furiously googling at this point.

3. The next person who promotes a wargaming system to me with the claim that it's "simple" will be punished. There's no such beast.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I've seen games that are quite reasonably organized - but please, let's be realistic.

4. The one that over the space of about 3 years completely ruined the iconic gaming magazine White Dwarf, turning it into little more than a figures catalog.  Yes, I am still bitter.

5. There aren't many games for which a single reading of the rules is sufficient to really understand what's going on.

6. I was working with one of those cheapo short-pile carpets, so the push pins stuck in quite satisfactorily, and the "glops" are beads of coloured glass that we were using for counters in another game.

7. If I recall, we consulted the rules to find that the rule we were in disagreement over was in fact written in the confusing and apparently irrational way it seemed, and we actually did agree that it  shouldn't be that way, and so in my first ever game of Chainmail with someone else we came up with a house rule.

B is for Backgammon

A series on games I wish I'd played more of.

My first encounters with backgammon were empty affairs – literally so, in fact: around the time I was introduced to chess and draughts/checkers [1] I received the sorts of encouraging gifts that grandparents and aunts and uncles buy, which included the occasional set of pieces and a board, the flip side of which often had a mysterious pattern of elongated triangles. I could tell that there was something you could do with this pattern, but I didn’t even know enough to be able to formulate questions, so I just forgot about it.

Years later, I encountered the word backgammon in a novel I read for school: when I was about 13, we read a short-ish novel about a young man in a coastal village in Cornwall [2] who gets mixed up with smugglers. Backgammon plays a large role in the story, introducing various characters and plot twists through the game and the gambling that went along with it.  [3] I didn’t really understand what this mysterious game was [4] so no doubt quite a lot of the context was lost on my 13 year old self.

Fast forward to university, and I had finally over the years learned that the strange pattern on the inside of my chess board was a backgammon board.  On top of that, I had come across an old copy of Hoyle’s Games at a booksellers [5] and had been enjoying playing around with long out of fashion card games and the like – naturally, an explanation of backgammon was also in the book. Cue long hours in my room at residence playing backgammon with a friend.

The first few times, I know we messed it up.  Neither of us had ever played before, and we needed to work out what Hoyle’s explanations actually meant [6] but once we had the hang of it, we spent many hours chatting over a game.  And that's a key: unlike many other ancient games, backgammon is very social.

There are other ancient games of course, with long pedigrees and deeply embedded into their various cultures: chess, go, draughts, just to name a few that will be familiar to nearly everyone.  Backgammon takes its place proudly with them, but adds the dimension of not requiring such deep thought.  This makes it far more conducive to casual play over drinks - oh, you can play chess casually as well of course, but one thing that we learned was that once you do know the rules backgammon is surprisingly easy to teach, and the learning curve is very gentle on beginners - probably because of the random dimension introduced by the dice. 

Because of this, backgammon is a game that you can pull out to play with friends after dinner, or to set up on the pub table, and just play over and over and over again - the rattle of the dice becomes part of the conversation, and the movement of the blots almost incidental...until the moment when you lose and are obligated to pay the next round. [7]

Some other ancient games (dominoes comes to mind) are highly social as well, not to mention the multitude of relatively basic card games, and in communities where they are truly ubiquitous I'm sure that chess and similiarly "difficult" games become social as well.  

But we seem to have lost something over the decades of the twentieth century in that these sorts of social games have gradually faded away.

It would be a shame if these things faded entirely.

###

1. Strangely, I’m fairly certain I was taught chess before any card games more complicated than snap or fish. Not by any parental snobbery, just a coincidence: I have vivid memories of the games nights my parents and their friends had when I was small, but such events petered out before I was old enough to participate and as we only rarely had family gatherings it’s surprising I learned as many games as I did.

2. This is my impression, decades later, and it makes sense, but I’ll grant that we had just moved out of Cornwall so my memory may be defective. I sadly don’t recall the title or even very much about One important note: It was not Jamaica Inn, this much I am certain of.

3. And now I wish I knew the book, and even more wish I could go back to rewrite the essay I submitted on it because in retrospect I’m sure there were themes of brinksmanship and risk-taking echoed in the way the backgammon games played out in the story and the actions of the main characters. Of course, this is all fragmentary memory so may not be reliable. EDIT 2014/6/6: after much searching, I had given up but today by complete chance came across the book in another context - the title is Moonfleet, by John Meade Falkner, available on Gutenberg here. 

4. Nor, being a typical teenager, did it occur to me to ask the teacher since it didn’t really seem relevant at the time. I will confess to not having been particularly enthusiastic about reading a book about 18^th century smugglers. (at the time my reading list mostly involved things like Dune, various Heinlein, the Prydain books, Tolkein and the like – I felt that “pirate stories” were something little kids would be interested in).

5. You kids today have no idea what an enormous leap forward the internet is.  No, really.  Consider: practically my only ways of finding detailed information on how to play backgammon would have been to go to the library and wrestle with the card catalog, to find someone who knew the game well and get them to teach me, or to go out and buy a backgammon set (even though I already had one!) that included a rules card.

6. I haven’t seen any recent versions, but the older versions of Hoyle’s were written and printed in an age where it was reasonable to assume everyone had an understanding of the basic principles of board, card and dice games, and probably had some passing experience with the game in question – they just needed detailed rules on paper to refer to as a way to polish their play and resolve disputes.

7. My sympathies if you were using the doubling die.

A is for Amber

A series on games I wish I'd played more of.

The universe of Amber presented by Roger Zelazny in his books [1] is fascinating.  Imagine a platonic ideal of the universe - Castle Amber - built around an intricate, looping Pattern [2] that is the magical heart of reality.  Everything in Amber is the template for the rest of the universe - and the universe itself consists of a nested, infinite series of variations on Amber, getting ever more different as you move away. All these realities manifest themselves from the Pattern, but of course the further away they are the less true they are to the essence...sorry, the Amber universe is so mind-blowing that it's genuinely impossible to describe in one paragraph, I think.  Possibly half a page of (at least) four dimensional mathematics could do it...

In any case, now imagine that the Lords of Amber, the children of the demi-god Oberon who (reputedly) inscribed the original pattern, have the power to step from one reality to another by force of will.

Imagine as well, that "opposite" [3] Amber is a place called the Courts of Chaos, where there are no rules, and everything is fluid.

Now imagine a game in which the players take on the roles of a few of these Lords of Amber and Chaos and proceed to interact with one another and with other characters in the setting - usually to further a plot to seize the throne of Amber or similar. Amber Diceles Roleplaying is this game.

This is a slightly difficult game to wrap your mind around, if only because the possibilities of the setting are so vast and amorphous that it's quite difficult at first to figure out what you can do. [4]  It takes some experimentation with formats and styles, not to mention group membership, to find the right combination.

I've played this game a handful of times with friends, and each time it got better and better, but never seemed to quite click.  It's a game that demands a significant investment in time, however, so sadly I doubt I will ever get a chance to play it again.

But by every god, how I'd love to!

###

1. Starting with Nine Princes in Amber - the first series, featuring Prince Corwin, calls to me most.  Zelazny seems to play a bit too much with the concept of "hero" in the second series (which features Corwin's son Merlin) and the disjoint doesn't do it for me - though it may be those books as much as the first series that informs me on the nature of the universe depicted in the game.

2. I imagine it as an enormous, looping rosette - a Celtic or Saxon re-imagining of the labyrinths of Indo-European yore.

3. Whatever that means in a multidimensional universe.

4. Partly, that's because the answer to the question "what can we do?" is literally "Anything you can imagine"