Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • TV and the demise of European soccer

    So, that festival of the boot is on again, and although since I moved to Europe my interest in soccer has waned considerably[1], I still watch the World Cup quite avidly. Of the 6 European soccer giants – Spain, Italy, Germany, England, France and Holland – only 4 made it to the round of 16, and in that round already another – England – has been knocked out in a match they lost 4-1 to a German team that beat Australia 4-0. This is the same England team that struggled to get through the group stage. The two finalists from 2006 went out in the group stage, and in such an ignominious fashion as hardly befits European minnows, let alone France or Italy. Italy was beaten comprehensively by Slovakia and only drew with tiny New Zealand after pulling a penalty with traditional Italian diving methods[2].

    I noticed that the three European giants who have bombed so far all have quite old players. Italy and England particularly, but even France still has players like Thierry Henry. Holland has also been playing a little poorly – they really struggled against Japan – and they also have quite a few holdouts from previous cups. On the other hand, Germany has a very young team. This article in the Guardian makes the point that this is not a coincidence, and that the Germans have been putting a lot of work into developing local talent. It’s also the first German team to be representative of Germany’s multicultural modernity, with 5 or 6 players being of Arab/Turkish/Eastern European/latin American origin. I take this as a sign that the German FA has been searching far and wide for talent.

    So what is with the old teams that bombed? I think that these three countries – the UK, France, Italy – have opened their football markets simultaneously[4] to easy foreign transfers and massive television marketing money in the last 20 years, and the consequence of this has been an easy-come-easy-go attitude by the clubs. Instead of doing the hard work of developing local talent, they’ve taken the low-risk approach of buying in talent from abroad. This makes FA Premier league games fun to watch, but it has had the dual effect of a) importing players from smaller countries and giving them exposure to world-class coaching and playing techniques and b) reducing the pool of talented local players. The consequence of this at the world cup is that these countries’ national teams not only have to select their line-up from a shallower pool of talent, and thus rely increasingly on has-beens like Rooney; but they also find themselves facing a wider pool of nations with quality players who have been groomed by these big football nations’ leagues. New Zealand, for example, has a line up whose entire transfer value was  a third that of one player on the Italian team (de Rossi, I think). They had one player from Blackburn in defense, another player from an English team in midfield, and another in offense, and they assembled around this spine a team that included several amateurs. In 1982 their team was entirely composed of amateurs. So while the available quality for NZ has increased considerably, England and Italy find themselves relying increasingly on old men, and in the washup of last night’s defeat the press are also claiming that the young players aren’t so great.

    Make no mistake, this is good for football. Having an increasingly diverse pool of finals contenders, with 2 Asian teams through to the round of 16 (and one a favourite, I note, to go to the quarters!), an African team through to the quarters, and a selection of latin American teams, is good. But from the point of view of the football giants of Europe, something has gone wrong. Compare the British approach to football with the Australian or NZ approach to rugby. If a NZ player ever plays for a foreign club, they can never again play for NZ. So even though the foreign clubs pay vast sums more than the local clubs, NZ players wait until their world cup hopes are over before heading overseas – after their (shameful) 2008 World Cup loss, a whole stack of players who knew they wouldn’t be selected again headed to French and British clubs to earn the real money. As a result of this the All Blacks have players lined up 3 deep for most positions, and the lead players can’t guarantee selection in the next game if they don’t keep their act together – and this is the stated policy of the NZRB[5].

    This should also be the case for the European soccer giants. There is no way that in a nation obsessed with football, as England is, a 30-something second-rate striker like Rooney should be able to even get in the squad, let alone onto the pitch. There should be a 28 year old and a couple of youngsters ahead of him – the same for Lampard, Cole, etc. Beckham stayed in long past his prime, and was a crap captain to boot. I think this is a result of market forces operating in England, and although one should rightly observe that although these market forces have had a good effect on the rest of the world game (and on the viewing public’s enjoyment of football), the British FA needs to think about some countervailing mechanisms to groom up a new generation of English players.

    I suppose it could be argued that the Italian problem is not so much an effect of broadcast TV as the general corrupt and moribund nature of Italian institutions. But I think that Italy and France have similar broadcast models to the UK, and I wonder if the Northern European countries have (as is traditional up there) opted for a more genuinely social democratic approach to the game, that strikes a balance between the market model of “buy the best team you can” and the long-term good of the game. Because football is notable for its intense nationalism, I think that the long-term good of the game and national success are inextricably linked, as you can see from the excitement about soccer that is stirred up in rugby countries (like Australia) when we have international success. It strikes me as interesting that some of the European countries with the most intensely nationalistic fans – Italy and the UK – have managed to somehow water down their own national teams in a way that pours cold water on that nationalism. Transferring that national allegiance to clubs is not going to be  a good thing for social order at local soccer grounds, and the game isn’t going to maintain its populist appeal if it loses its nationalist appeal (not that it will ever be unpopular – soccer is a very very good game to play and to watch). But Associations like the FA have an important role to play in fostering local talent, otherwise why have them? And I’m sure there must be more than a few people in England and Italy and France this week thinking “why do we bother with an FA at all?” when their national teams perform so badly, their local leagues are essentially deregulated in every significant particular, and the FA doesn’t even properly monitor on-pitch referee or player behaviour.

    The Italian captain made a comment last week to the effect that not beating NZ would be like the All Blacks failing to beat Italy in rugby. It’s noticeable that recently Italy have beaten England at Twickenham, and the IRB is moving to include Argentina in the Tri Nations. I wonder if this week a lot of Italian soccer fans are thinking of teaching themselves the rules of rugby, and diversifying their football interests? If Australians can do it[6], so can Italians.

    —

    fn1: Football culture in England (and probably much of Europe) is a horrible, macho and nationalist display of male tribal bonding that I just can’t get behind or support. From afar in Australia the Champions league was fun to watch, but in England it feels like you are participating in a form of ritualized abuse. The complete and total exclusion of women from all aspects of the sport, the hyper-macho posturing of the fans, their sudden exaggerated Englishness, it’s all horrible, as is the tense atmosphere the football areas, the armies of police, the dogs, the chanting aggressive dimwits wandering around in dangerous gangs, the implicit acceptance of this phenomenon as a side-effect of the game that has to be tolerated in order to enjoy its limited benefits. And, of course, there is the gender divide – with women thoroughly and completely uninterested and excluded. If you’re wondering why British women are so thoroughly unsporty, you don’t need to look any further than the crowd of a British football match, completely and utterly devoid of women. To people from outside Europe – or people from a rugby tradition inside Britain, for that matter – this all looks very strange.

    fn2: Note as well that Italy had a particularly easy run, being drawn in a weak group and being given amazing referee favouritism – in their final game against Slovakia with 10 minutes to go their two strikers attacked the Slovakian keeper, kicking him and punching him, and the Slovakian keeper received a yellow card. The whole thing was caught on camera too – if it were Aussie Rules Football or Rugby those two men would have been sent packing immediately; and this came after another unprovoked attack in the first half. Italy should have finished that game with an 8 man team and a much less flattering scoreline[3].

    fn3: In case you hadn’t noticed, I really hate the Italian national team. I have done ever since they beat Australia in the 2006 quarter finals with a shocking piece of diving. The sooner FIFA accepts the inevitable and introduces video refereeing and summary execution for diving, the better.

    fn4: After that British player won a case in the European court, a case which ended up not benefiting him at all but completely changed the face of European football.

    fn5: On a side note, I don’t much go in for the complaints of some in the British press that the English players are paid so much that they don’t care whether they win or lose internationally – I think they care very much, although I do think that injury-wise they probably assign their first loyalty to the club that pays them so much. But Southern hemisphere codes have a salary cap, which I think does have the consequence of reducing the prima donna element of player behaviour, and preventing the players form influencing the selectors as much. I also wonder if the greater respect rugby players show the referee compared to soccer has anything to do with their relative pay grades. At a rough guess, an Aussie football player is paid maybe 5 times as much as a referee, while an English star would be paid 50 times as much as a referee. Obviously institutional factors are the main driver of this, particularly the post-match judgements made in rugby which mean that you can’t just argue your way out of trouble on-pitch. But surely that pay grade differential makes a difference to on-pitch behaviour. As an example of down-to-earthness, when I did weights at the University of New South Wales I spotted bench press for a professsional rugby league player, who was doing rehabilitation weights during the summer break[7] in between contracts, before heading to Europe to play with a French team. I somehow doubt that your average premier league player ever has the misfortune of having to share training space with us mere mortals, let alone having a non-professional human being assist them with their weights.

    fn6: Australia has 4 codes of football that we divide our attention between, and we’ve been world champions in three of them.

    fn7: “rehabilitation weights” for a dislocated shoulder in this case meant doing 85-100kg bench press sets of 12, with clap push ups in between and 30 second rests; followed by dumbbell flies with 35 kg on each shoulder, and more clap push ups. The man himself probably weighed 100kg. That’s some rehabilitation!

  • Double Cross 3: The Angel Halo Syndrome

    It’s time to turn my attention to describing the powers and effects in the Double Cross game, so today I’m going to attempt to translate the description of the first power in the book, Angel Halo, and some of its associated powers.

    You can't escape the light…

    With the light as your ally, destroy your enemies

    Angel Halo is a syndrome that enables you to change your own body’s refractive properties, or to manipulate and modify light itself.  Also, this ability can produce glowing effects like a jellyfish or a deep-sea squid, and bedazzle people with their radiance; or arrange the wavelengths of light to attack people with a laser beam.  Strengthening the five senses is also a feature of this ability. With perception so strengthened, one can aim correctly and, with the laser attack at its disposal, this is the strongest or nearly the strongest in attack power of all the syndromes. The Angel Halo Syndrome also has a lot of attack methods that use stealth or bedazzlement. Angel Halo is a syndrome which enables one to flourish in any field of endeavour by virtue of its many ways of being used.

    Because users of this power can be easily identified by the faint glow that they give off when the effects are invoked, the syndrome has been named “Angel Halo.”

    Effects

    Eyes of God

    Maximum Level: 1

    Timing: Reaction

    Ability: Perception Difficulty type: opposed
    Target: Self Range: Close (same engagement)
    Corruption: 2 Restrictions: None

    Effect: You use all your senses to avoid an attack. You are able to effect a dodge using your ability check for this effect.

    Bedazzling Radiance

    Maximum Level:1

    Timing: Major Action

    Ability:Renegade Control Difficulty type: Opposed
    Target: Any Range: Sight
    Corruption:2 Restrictions: None

    Effect: Using a pattern of glowing lights, you hypnotize your opponent and reduce their movement ability. Make a ranged attack, and if you hit your target receives the distracted bad status effect.

    Flash sprint

    Maximum Level: 3

    Timing: Minor Action

    Ability: None Difficulty type: Unchallenged
    Target: Self Range: Self
    Corruption: 1 Restrictions: None

    Effect: Deceiving your opponents with a weak flash, you can move while they’re off their guard. Make a combat movement, and with this movement you are able to disengage, and you can move through other engagements without having to enter them, or being affected by them. You can use this power a number of times equal to your level in any one scene.

    Blessing of the Lord

    Maximum Level: 3

    Timing: Minor Action

    Ability: None Difficulty type: Unchallenged
    Target: Self Range: Self
    Corruption: 2 Restrictions: None

    Effect: This effect gathers radiance inside your body, and amplifies it before its release. Combine this effect with another Angel Halo effect, and you can add your level to the number of dice you use for the other effect.

    Eyes of Crystal

    Maximum Level: 3

    Timing: Major action / reaction

    Ability: Perception Difficulty type: None
    Target: Any Range: Any
    Corruption: 2 Restrictions: None

    Effect: This effect quickly projects a scene like a mirage before your eyes. Add your level in dice to an ability check used in combination with this effect.

  • Current Viewing: Avatar

    It’s as if James Cameron sat down one day 10 years ago and asked himself (as everyone should!), “how can I make a movie that is perfectly designed to please faustusnotes?” and, before he’d even had a chance to put his hand to his forehead, out of the blue came the answer: combine Nausicaa, Last of the Mohicans and Aliens! A lesser director would probably balk at this plan, but not James Cameron! He managed to pull it off, and throw in more than a little Princess Mononoke while he was at it.

    The result of any such attempt, if executed by a good director – say, for example, James Cameron – and including Wes Studi in the cast, would just have to be brilliant. And Avatar is brilliant. I really can’t understand what all the criticism was about, because on any of the points where it supposedly failed, it clearly didn’t – at least within the context of big budget hollywood – and it excelled itself on so many other levels that it thoroughly deserves praise.

    In essence it’s a classic anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism story with an excess of noble savage imagery, in which a representative of a powerful culture invades a supposedly savage or less-powerful culture and attempts to destroy them in order to take their resources. Like most imagined anti-imperialism stories along this line, it throws in the standard elements of the plot, with a soldier going native and the noble savages being brave but ultimately hopeless, though unlike in the standard noble savage story, in this case they aren’t doomed at the end. The story does what a lot of previous iterations of the story explicitly refuse to do – it has used the medium of science fiction to grant the natives the power they think resides in their own myth, and thus enables them to emerge victorious. This fundamentally undermines the original racist underpinnings of the noble savage myth, incidentally, which is based on the assumption that the beauty or pride of the natives is full of pathos because of their inability to endure in the face of a superior western culture – they’re doomed to die out, and we have to mourn their loss but accept its inevitability, which may also be a reflection on our own fall from the state of grace we supposedly once enjoyed in our more primitive forms. This doesn’t apply in Avatar, because the Nabi aren’t museum pieces, but a thriving culture with special technology, and in the end they use it.

    I should say at this point that, although I portray the tale as “a classic anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism” story, I’m hard pressed to think of many in the modern era. “Classic” stories of this ilk are actually few and far between. Sure, we have some stories that are anti-war, or anti-particular wars (such as Platoon, or Three Kings) and we have a few tales which tell the sad story of the end of an indigenous tribe (like, say, Last of the Mohicans) and we have a few that are transparently glorifying in the conquest of the natives (Pocahontas?) and even a few which just attempt to portray them as the mysterious other (Black Robe), but do we really have very many anti-colonialism stories floating about? Sure, there may be some in print, but I think in the movies they’re actually few and far between, which probably explains the visceral right-wing response to a movie which so transparently puts America, rather than 19th century Britain, in the imperialist picture. It does so, too, with all the button-pushing tricks which James Cameron used so effectively in Aliens, deployed viciously to get us to think both ways, and to see the humanity of both sides. No wonder supporters of wars of choice don’t like it.

    So what does Avatar actually do? It gives us a disabled hero, Jake Sully, whose legs are useless, who has been dumped against his will into a role he can’t perform, surrounded by people unlike him, because his brother died back home and he has the genetic fit to replace his brother in a very expensive job. The job in question is remote-control driving an avatar, the body of a Nabi alien grown in a lab, and using it to engage with the local Nabi on the planet of Pandora. He doesn’t have much else to do, the pay is good, and the military pressure him, so he goes. And as soon as he begins remote piloting that body, everything changes. Then the plot starts and he ends up being faced with some difficult choices between the needs of the soldiers and the corporation who want to exploit Pandora, on the one hand, and the needs of the Nabi amongst whom he is (literally) going native, on the other. Unusually for a hollywood movie, too, there is no artificial resolution here – he has to pick sides, and it looks likely that picking the Nabi side isn’t going to work for him.

    From the moment I started watching this, I was struck by the complex ideas the avatars can be seen to embody. I immediately thought of Thomas Covenant, who thinks he is dreaming but refuses at first to engage with his world because the moment he wakes up, he’s back to being a leper; better to hang on to his reality than allow false hope, which is a problem surely Jake is going to suffer when he spends half his days in a body he can’t own, able to run and jump and fly, but the other half in a body with no legs. I was also reminded of the very new ethical controversies surrounding our real life versions of these remote pilots – the people flying drones over Afghanistan and Iraq from safe bases in the UK or America, who are a million miles from the (usually incorrectly targeted) actual people they are killing. The thought everyone has about this type of war is that its remoteness prevents people from making accurate moral decisions, because there is literally no interaction between them and the target, not even at the level of risk. But Jake Sully, while he is remote piloting, does interact with his targets, and that makes the offer of treachery he so easily takes early on in the movie all the more callous when it comes to its cruel fruition.

    This movie was very well crafted, from beginning to end. Of course the actors are great, especially Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington. The world is wonderful, though I understand its blueness may not appeal to everyone. It’s clearly modeled on the jungles from Nausicaa, though there’s a strong undersea influence that I really like, and which really suits its low-gravity physics. The flying scenes are also beautiful, and very very redolent of Nausicaa at her finest. Just when the tension and boredom of his daily life begins to get too much, Jake Sully thrusts us into a beautifully-rendered combat, chase or action scene, so the pace of the movie is good despite its length. The mecha are James Cameron at his best, and also (again) the comparison of Sully on his tiny flying thing against the great corporate machines is very close to Nausicaa on her Mehve versus the Corvettes of her enemy. The Nabi themselves are very similar to Native Americans, an image which must have offended all those many Americans who don’t want to accept any particular hard realities about the behaviour of previous incarnations of Jake Sully, or the moral culpability of those corporations which “explored” the “wild” west. This similarity reached its cinematic perfection for me when I noticed Wes Studi, of Magua fame, playing the Nabi chieftain – reprising his role of Magua on the side of the good guys! And there’s more than a hint of Princess Mononoke in the relative positions and roles of Sully and his lover (whose name I didn’t quite catch).

    In many ways, too, I think viewing this movie is like watching a version of Aliens remade by a more mature James Cameron. Aliens is shallow in the very best of ways, an action movie which glorifies a bunch of macho soldiers while it glorifies in destroying them; but it is devoid of any cultural context, any sense of the soldiers as having a military past, or any moral questions about who they are or what they have done in the past. The corporate operative is a cardboard cutout wall street bad guy, who from the start has no humanity. In their new incarnations in Avatar, these characters are fully fleshed out and human. The soldiers hint at their pasts, referring to conflicts in trouble spots we know of – Nigeria or “the desert” – and though they are the same rich, interesting characters from Aliens, we don’t see them in this movie in the same sense as uncomplicated representatives of the human race. These people, the first ambassadors of humanity to the Nabi, have killed humans, and are proud of it. Their leader is a noble savage figure of his own, vicious and strong and proud of it, loving his men and ruthless in his disposal of them. The corporate rep is just as scummy as in Aliens, but this time he has a conscience, and we see him struggling with it as he acts in his own and his corporation’s interests in heartless and destructive ways. As the tension mounts and the cost to his humanity along with it, we see his rhetoric escalate through a pretense at callousness to outright hatred, but it’s impossible not to notice the occasional nervous gulps, and the uncertainty. This is a man who knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he doesn’t have to do it himself, and he knows where the benefits lie. To back it up we’re given regular hints that the situation on Earth isn’t so pleasant, and the mission to Pandora isn’t just a mission of enrichment, but that there may be an edge of desperation to it. No one on the human side in this story comes out unsullied, but no one goes into it a cold inhuman monster, either. James Cameron has attempted to construct, within the limited confines of an action movie, a real semblance of the moral and cultural imperatives of soldiers and corporates in a colonial administration.

    This inversion and maturing of the Aliens mythos is beautifully represented in film through the reversal of some of the key images from that movie. In that movie the hive mind was undoubtedly evil and the soldiers good and helpless – in this movie the soldiers are not good, and in control of their own situation and the escalation of the conflict, while the hive mind is portrayed as good from the start. That movie finishes with a memorable final scene of the frail human in her mechanised cage, destroying the highest representative of the hive mind. In this movie the most evil representative of the humans is in that metal cage, and the good guy is the representative of the hive mind that is being destroyed outside of it. The figures in the battle are reversed just as the moral sides have been flipped. I don’t think any of these images arose by accident. This is masterful work by Cameron, renegotiating his own opus to represent a more mature view of war and soldiers and the Other.

    I’ve heard of a few other criticisms of Avatar that I’d like to look at, both political and aesthetic:

    • It’s just another anti-colonialism movie: what are the other ones?
    • It’s anti-American: It’s anti-imperialistic, and the only way it can be therefore construed as anti-American is if we equate imperialism and America. Does America still have a policy of manifest destiny? I’m yet to see anyone who criticized Avatar on this basis make a coherent claim that America is an imperialistic nation, or that it is still following a policy of manifest destiny. So how can this movie be anti-American? If the problem is that everyone doing the bad stuff is American, well, I think that there have been many many movies made with Americans playing the roles of Nazis, Russian spies, super-villains, etc. that were not decried for their anti-Americanism. The essence of this objection is that the movie too closely resembles a critique of the formation of America; but most of the people objecting to the movie also simultaneously object to claims that America was a colonialist project, so how can they then claim this movie is anti-American? Only by studiously maintaining that any history lesson with America as the bad guy is wrong – and any such objection is unscholarly, anti-historical, in short just plain stupid and wrong.
    • The plot is crap: I don’t get this at all. The plot is very simple – soldier goes native, picks sides in a colonial war, helps the natives, the war unfolds, things happen. There is nothing complex in this plot, and as far as I can tell the only real holes in it are the usual action movie holes where people get away with things that in real life they wouldn’t (like refusing to fire on a sacred site, but not being punished; or running through a building full of cctv without being noticed). The plot of this movie is a third as complex as Last of the Mohicans, and I would say pretty much on a par with Aliens, so where’s the problem? Action movie plus simple plot, with a few minor slips to enable smooth flow of the action, is perfection, in my view.
    • The anti-colonialist ideals are ruined by the going native imagery[1]: under this criticism, it’s bad that Jake Sully helped save the natives, because in doing so he removed their agency and ability to control their own destiny, and weakened claims about their own power. This is a valid criticism, from some purist post-colonial perspective, but it fails on basic aesthetic grounds, and more vaguely on a post-colonial grounds. The aesthetic grounds is that, of course, you could make a movie in which all the people in the movie who are like the people in the audience (i.e. American) are bad, and all the people who are unlike the audience (i.e. the 10′ tall blue people with brains in their tails) are good; but good luck with that. You need a person to bridge the gap in the races to maintain the key ideas of the anti-colonial tirade, namely that we all share a common soul, and that the act of colonialism itself was not some kind of racial or cultural inevitability – it was a set of choices by people like Jake Sully who, like Jake Sully, could have chosen differently. And, more practically, you need the audience to be able to identify with the hero, while identifying with the Other through him or her. This is the radical threat of the soldier who goes native, and precisely the reason that such behaviour was so widely scorned in colonial times. Secondly, from a post-colonial perspective this complaint is overdone because colonialism usually requires interaction and interrelations between the colonised and the coloniser, it involves treachery and compliant local powers, and there is no simple sense in which the colonials and the colonisers are simply divided by a line that sets them apart. The idea of an anti-colonial narrative in which everyone amongst the colonised is pure, and everyone amongst the colonising is evil, is as simplistic as a 1920s cowboys and indians movie in which the indians are all savages who have to be wiped out[2].
    • The noble savage thing[see footnote 1]: the thing about noble savages is that they fit into action movies a lot better than if they were just noble and not very savage; and anyone who has watched Black Robe or Apocalyptica knows that it’s really hard to feel too much for a character who is just unremittingly savage. If your movie opens with you knowingly eating raw capybara testicles, things just are going to go downhill with your audience. If, on the other hand, it opens with the opening chase scene from Last of the Mohicans, we’re immediately on your side, and we don’t want you to die. The noble savage is an idea that rightly pisses off the people on the savage end of it, but when done well it is the main vehicle by which indigenous people are able to enter the consciousness of their western colonisers as real, worthwhile people while also retaining their difference. It’s also worth noting that the full and proper definition of “noble savage” requires a kind of acceptance that the “noble” part of the native character is an anachronism, and has to give way to the modernising influence of the white man; that the concept involves a fundamental assumption that this culture must pass, and that we should mourn its passing the way we mourn the passing of the dinosaurs, with a shrug of our shoulders and a guilty relief that they aren’t stepping on our car. This doesn’t happen in Avatar, because the sci-fi medium enables Cameron to imbue their “anachronistic” gaia-worship with a magical force which prevents their passing. So what we’re left with is more of a “noble warrior” or a “paladin savage” image which is not going anywhere, thank you very much (and is fun to watch in combat).
    • The deus ex machina ending: I have no problem with a deus ex machina that is set up in the plot and is a fundamental requirement of the narrative context. Joseph has to squish the Egyptians with God’s Help; Jake Sully has to have his moment with the birds
    • An action movie with a disabled lead: I think that not enough has been made of the fact that Cameron cast the lead character of an action movie as a person with a disability – a significant disability. I think this is quite revolutionary for hollywood, and should be used in all future conversations in which high-minded film buffs who think David Lynch is great tell you that action movies are shallow. Piss on them from a great height with the moral superiority of your equal opportunity action movie cred. But don’t mention the interesting and unresolved tension in the movie – the utopian society Sully wants to enter clearly has no place for the disabled, and as soon as you fall off a tree in Pandora that’s it, you’re deadweight on a very anti-disability society. I didn’t see many wheelchair ramps or braille signs on Home Tree.
    • The squishy ending: I really hate fantasy stories where the character goes into a world they love so much more than this one, but at the end they return to the mundane world – in this case returning to life with no legs. I am willing to settle for any kind of compromise in order to have them get their wish and stay in the paradise they want to be in. This is part of the reason I love Neil Gaiman. Also, I note that the ritual in which Sully achieves this goal looks very much like that weird dance-ritual thingy in Baraka.

    I think it should be pretty clear from this review that I loved this movie. My partner first saw it while tripping, which I think she recommends; I don’t know about that, but I strongly recommend watching it, and if you like it but haven’t seen them already, check out its main influences too, because they’re great as well.  And if the supposedly rabidly left-wing anti-colonialism shtick pisses you off (because you, you know, like killing people and taking their stuff[3]), then just sit back and enjoy the awesome fireworks. Or take a chill pill.

    —

    fn1: what is it about the left that, when presented with a brilliant left-wing anti-colonial polemic, widely popular and brilliantly done, they have to bring up these second-rate, second-order nitpicks of the work? I don’t particularly care if there is some aspect of modern “ism” politics that it fails on, it still does a damn good job of attacking the thing it sets out to attack, and we should be happy about that and save our complaints about it for some more deserving project

    fn2: in fact I suspect most early cowboy-and-indians movies were more sophisticated than this, portraying indians on both sides of the battle and giving them a great deal of agency, even if it simultaneously portrayed them as inferior and bad

    fn3: which obviously all my role-playing readers do

  • Daily Mash proves nerds control our economy…

    … by revealing that Cheryl Cole is actually

    a computer-generated, manga-esque promotional image designed and maintained by a team of priapic teenagers working shifts in a dingy, fetid bedroom in Stoke littered with copies of White Dwarf magazine and a job lot of Triple Velvet.

    The “Diana in Heaven” article’s pretty funny too.

  • Visions of war from the late steampunk era

    These being paintings of airships and early aircraft at war, particularly world war 1, which can be found here. I was stumbling about the internet this sunday evening and discovered this site via this chap, a military historian with a focus on aerial warfare. I’m one of those rubes who has no skills in historical analysis but a strong interest, so I’m easily taken in by the next history book I read, but it seems like this site has some interesting historical theorizing going on.

    I was struck immediately by the romantic steampunk elements of the images on display there. They map immediately to Stephen Hunt’s books, which are set in a fantastical Britain, never named but clearly portrayed as such. There’s a definite element of romance to those giant ships of the air… and even though any image you see of war in the sky is actually horrific and coldly terrifying, somehow those early aviators manage to retain a sense of casual adventure, the essence of romantic steampunk role-playing.

  • Heian era vox populi

    Because there isn’t a great deal of easy work in steamy Beppu, I’ve taken up some freelance editing work while I wait on certain work opportunities to develop over the next few months. This editing work involves editing about 100 very short (200 word or so) articles by adult Japanese students of English, written casually on topics drawn from daily life. This is a bit like doing a kind of vox populi of ordinary Japanese life – how often does a person get to read the opinions of 100 normal people every month in their own country, let alone in another? The articles cover a wide range of topics, from political topics (including whaling, environmental issues, the declining population) to what someone had for lunch yesterday. But there are some interesting trends and ideas in the articles, which have surprised me.

    Japanese seasonal writing transcends the mother tongue

    Even a passing familiarity with Japanese literary and cultural traditions is enough to acquaint the foreigner with the idea that Japanese people have a strong sense of the importance of the seasons and the cycles through which they move. Furthermore, this sense is an important aesthetic motif in writing, art and philosophy. I was slightly surprised to discover that not only does this sense extend into everyday writing by everyday Japanese, but it extends into their writing in a second language, no matter how amateur their writing skill. Some writers will speak self-consciously of the importance of the seasons, but much more common are essays about a seasonal topic or activity, with no self-referential cultural knowledge. They simply report on or revel in the seasonal activities they love. These topics come in waves, so in April I received a bunch of essays about hanami (cherry-blossom viewing); in late April, articles about the beauty of walking through falling blossoms; early May, articles about children’s day and koinobori (carp streamers) in the wind; in late May, now, I am receiving a huge pile of articles about children’s sports days, which occur in the end of May. In the middle, there were a series of articles about what people did in their week-long Golden Week holidays, often about their experience of “nature.”

    The tradition of writing about nature is language-invariant

    A lot of the articles, regardless of the season, involve descriptions of the natural world and trips into it. This doesn’t surprise me in a nation that is essentially Shinto (though of course, the Japanese will tell you they’re not religious, possibly while they’re taking you to a shrine, where they will, of course, pray). It’s interesting the extent to which it enters their writing in a second language, and the extent to which even with limited language skills the writers are able to convey a sense of love of nature built around mountains and seasonal changes, and imbued with a feeling of mystery.

    Miyazaki’s characters are real

    Another noteworthy point is that Miyazaki Hayao‘s anime are so imbued in the national consciousness that they don’t need introduction. If someone visits the house on which My Neighbour Totoro was based, they don’t need to preface their activity with this information; they just say, “I visited Satsuki and Mei’s house.” It’s almost as if Mei-chan is every Japanese person’s neighbour.

    Heian-era ideas never change

    Some of the topics seem to emerge straight from a lost Japanese era, and are striking for their eternal Japaneseness. These articles read like a vox populi conducted in the Heian era, or taken from the Tale of Genji. For example:

    • I have received several articles about haiku-gathering trips, in which groups of Japanese people go to an area of nature during a period of seasonal change, wander about for a few hours, take some time to write a few haiku, then gather in a restaurant or tea house and compare haiku. One was even assigned a grade. This is a level of formality about the interaction of Japanese language and nature which, in addition to being largely unheard of in the West, is a direct tradition inherited from prior eras
    • I have received some articles about manners which read like a Heian court epic, particularly articles about the disputes between a woman and her daughter over wedding plans, or about the behaviour of “ladies” in a workplace towards the men, and how it is simultaneously elegant and deceptive
    • Many articles will invoke timeless images of Japanese life, in passing, which immediately attach an image of historical continuity to the work – images like the koinobori, or being able to see Fuji from your backyard, mentioning falling sakura in connection with an activity unrelated to the season, and so on.
    • Sometimes, the essay has a cunning, sonnet-like trick in which the essay builds through a gentle and wistful tone, but in the last sentence or paragraph suddenly changes direction completely to deliver a hard, vicious or cruel conclusion about the personality of the author or one of their interlocutors. I’m convinced this is a trick of a historical form of Japanese writing, though I don’t know which kind

    Japanese wistfulness is independent of writing skill

    A lot of the writing I receive has a wistful and elusive tone that one might associate with a more professionally-done style of Japanese writing, or with historical writing. It’s interesting that even people with quite low-level English skills manage to capture the slight sense of vagueness that enters normal Japanese conversation, along with the passive acceptance of other peoples’ traits, and the roundabout way of presenting strongly-held opinions or uncomfortable facts. I would have thought that representing national character by nuance in a story is a trait of a skilled writer, but it turns out that this seems to occur even where the English level is quite low. The style seems to mostly survive editing, though sometimes I feel like I have to bend the rules of English to preserve a style that is obviously of the author’s own making, even if not deliberately done.

    About the picture: taken from the story “Yuki Watari” (Crossing the snow) by Miyazawa Kenji, illustrations by Katao Ryo, which I bought for my partner’s birthday.

  • Japanese role-playing game Double Cross: Skill resolution

    We saw in my previous post how a simple character is made in the Double Cross role-playing game. I have subsequently skipped across the more complex character generation rules straight to the bit about how the characters operate in practice, i.e. how tasks are resolved. This is basically divided into two parts, the standard skill resolution system and combat. It’s also very strange, because it uses a mechanism I’ve never seen before.

    The basic resolution mechanism

    The basic resolution mechanism is the use of a pool of d10s to calculate a value, which is compared against a difficulty to determine success. However, instead of simply counting successes on dice (as in Exalted) or summing all the dice (which would, I contend, be madness), Double Cross 3 uses an insane hybrid. Under this system, you roll all the dice and take the maximum value that occurs on the dice. This would give you a value between 1 and 10 (which for large dice pools will almost always be 10!), except that Double Cross 3 has a critical system, in which any die that rolled up a 10 is rerolled, and the maximum of this new pool of dice is then added to the previous maximum (10). This continues until all subsequent sets of 10s have been exhausted. We’ll consider an example of this shortly.

    Rolls of 10 are considered a critical, but it’s possible through syndrome effects to reduce the number required for a critical from 10 to, say, 8 or 6. In this case any die that hits or goes above the critical number is rerolled, and added on to the maximum from the previous roll.  It’s not clear from the rolls whether this maximum is the new critical effect limit, or the maximum on all the dice. If the latter, things get very fiddly. There is an example in the book of someone rolling 16 ten-sided dice against a critical target of 8, for a total of 33.

    The difficulty classes are given as:

    • Easy: 3 – 5
    • Normal: 6 – 9 (success to be expected in most cases)
    • Difficult: 10 – 13
    • Really Hard: 14+

    However, challenged skill checks go directly off the competing skills, so if you have a PC using stealth against an NPC it will be a direct application of their body against the target’s sense, with the higher roll winning.

    Example

    It’s a little fiddly, so let’s consider an example. Yumiko has a sense of 9, and 4 levels in missile combat, so when she attacks with a gun she rolls 9 10-sided dice, and adds the 4 for her missile combat skill at the end. Let’s consider such an attack. Her fine specks gives her an extra (level*2) dice, or 2, in this case, for a total of 11. I don’t have enough dice for that sort of stuff, but let’s give it a go. She rolls and gets… 1,2,2,2,5,6,7,8,9,10,10.

    That’s pretty poor. So we roll the two 10s, to get… 4 and 5. So adding the maximum of the previous round (10) to this round (5) and her skill of 4 gives us a total of 19.

    Yumiko’s body is 1, with 1 level of dodge skill. So if she wants to avoid getting hit she needs to roll above 19 on that 1 die… let’s try it. She rolls and gets… 10! Rolling again gives us… 4, for a total of 14, +1 for dodge gives 15.

    So Yumiko hit herself. Damage is then resolved as the total success roll divided by 10, plus 1, plus any effects due to syndromes. So in this case it would be 19/10, plus 1, or 3 dice, plus any weapon/syndrome effects. After this Yumiko gets to take off effects of armour, and the remains are hit points of damage. I haven’t yet found the rules on rounding down damage. I presume the same effects apply in other situations where damage can be applied.

    That seems quite potent; with 3 dice one can easily struggle above 15 damage, and our little schoolgirl only has 23 hit points.

    Some notes on this mechanic

    This mechanic is fundamentally a pretty tricky one, combining as it does the counting aspects of a system like Exalted and the adding of systems like D20, along with division at the end. It also includes a system of challenged dice rolls, which I’ve been suspicious about since I tried playing Talislanta (I think it was Talislanta). Challenged dice rolls are also a property of warhammer 2, which takes a long time to chug through skill resolution. This system could take an awfully long time if one has low critical thresholds and high dice pools – Yumiko is first level and already up to 11 dice!

    Probabilistically, this die-rolling mechanism is evil. It involves taking a sum over maximums of chains of multinomial distributions where one parameter in each link of the chain (the number of trials) is conditionally distributed according to the results of the previous step in the chain. Compare this to the standard Exalted mechanism, which is simply a sum of multinomial distributions where each multinomial distribution has 3 outcome values (0,1 or 2) with relatively fixed probabilities (0.6, 0.3 and 0.1 respectively) and the number of trials is fixed (by the dice pool). Simple!

    So, over a period of some days, I have calculated the probability distribution for the skill system, which can be done using transition matrices[1]. I ran some calculations in the stats package R, and the probability distributions are shown in the figure below for three sizes of dice pool: 4 dice (black), 8 dice (red) and 16 dice (green). I also ran some simulations (not shown) which roughly reproduce these probability distributions, so I think they’re correct[2,3].

    Three Double Cross probability distributions

    So with 4 or 8 dice there is a 25% chance of getting a 9, and in all dice pools of size up to 16, 9 is the most likely value. This kind of surprised me, but obviously it has to be true. Actually 10 is the most likely value, but it gets redistributed immediately across the remaining (infinity – 10) values. Considering just the first 9 values, in a die pool of size 16 as soon as you roll a 9 all other values become irrelevant; whereas if you roll a 2, any of the remaining 15 dice could be larger. So, on any die pool larger than 1, 9 is the most likely value when you’re taking maxima. The Double Cross authors seem to have recognised this by setting the difficult skill checks to above 10; on a roll of 4 dice there’s only a 35% chance you’ll get above 10. Of course, starting with 11 dice the probability is 69%, so really it’s not so hard for Yumiko to do hard things with her sense (i.e. her guns).

    This is the weirdest skill resolution mechanism I’ve ever seen. It’s going to be fun just for its sheer kookiness, but I suspect it breaks down fast. As soon as I get a chance to play this, I’ll let you know…

    —

    fn1: We can represent the process of calculating the total as a series of steps, with the full dice pool rolled at step 0. For a dice pool of size k, we can define a matrix P, whose ij-th entry gives the probability of going from i dice in a step to j dice in the following step; a starting state vector s, which is a  vector of length k whose j-th entry represents the probability of j 10s occurring in the first roll; and a final probability matrix Q of size kx9 representing the probability of any number less than 10 occurring at a given size of dice pool up to and including k. The number of steps required to reach a given value x can be calculated as the quotient of l=x/10. Denote this number of steps as j. Then the value x can be written as x=l*10+r. For step 0 we calculate the probability of 1 to 9 directly in order to construct the first row of Q. For all step sizes greater than 0, we calculate the probability vector of all values occurring at step l as t(s)P^(l-1)Q, where here the t() represents the transpose (I can’t write maths here easily). The probability of the value x is simply the r-th entry of this vector[2].

    fn2: You probably think I have too much time, and right now I *really* don’t, but I haven’t done any decent stats in 6 months and this kind of stuff is fun for a weirdo like me.

    fn3: Actually I think there’s a tiny error in these values, because the sum over 40 or 50 values doesn’t come to less than 1 in all cases, which it must do. But they’re close enough, and I can’t find what the error could be, so stuff it. I think there is a very small error in my calculation of the probability of maximum values, or I have to include some modification for the probability of stopping at step l, but I can’t quite see how to do it.

  • The evolution of society through Jethro Tull

    I went on a YouTube wander tonight, starting at Rupesh Cartel and ending up at Jethro Tull, who’ve been around since the 70s. I noted that in their earlier days Jethro Tull sang about very mediaeval stuff, along with the small concerns of ordinary life one might expect to associate with a peasant’s view (think Thick as a Brick and Heavy Horses here), but by the early 90s they were singing about agricultural society and the larger issues of a complex and interconnected social structure (think here Farm on the Freeway) before advancing further to the concerns of the military-industrial complex (in Broadsword) in the mid-90s. Of course, the tone of Broadsword is very much mythical/legendary, but the content – voluntary preparation for war and glory – is a much more modern (Victorian?) phenomenon. The peasant from whose view they sing in the early days would see war very much as a catastrophe that he/she has to be involved in, not as a source of mythical glory.

    Is there any phenomenon in human society that Heavy Metal hasn’t covered[1]?

    —

    fn1: If you aren’t sure yet, I watched a clip from The Man of la Mancha, a 70s movie starring Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, based loosely around Don Quixote. I was brought to it by the Australian prog metal band Vanishing Point, who sample it. It’s all covered, I tell you.

  • Japanese role-playing game “Double Cross 3”: Character Creation

    I promised I would read through this game and give a full report, and by now I’ve read far enough through to make an attempt at character creation. There are two methods of character creation, Quickstart and Construction. The former is done by choosing a sample character and then developing a life-path for it; the latter is a full creation process. I haven’t read the latter, so I’m going to try the former today.

    Quickstart creation essentially uses all the statistics from the sample character, and the only creation part the player engages in is the social history of the character. I think this reflects the importance of the social setting in this game, and the role played by a character’s social supports (their Lois). Also, characters have a cover, which is chosen for you in the sample characters.

    Basic characteristics

    There are 4 basic ability scores, and under each ability score a couple of skills which are affected by it. The ability score is, I think, determined by your choice of syndrome (I haven’t got that far in the book to be sure), while the starting skill values are determined by your cover (so a high school student has different skills to a company man). The ability scores and skills are:

    • Body, which is strength and constitution, and covers three skills: melee, dodge and ride/drive.
    • Sense, which is a kind of intelligence score, and covers the three skills of ranged combat, knowledge and art (which has various sub-specialties)
    • Spirit, which is a kind of willpower score, and covers the three skills of Renegade Control (used for powers), will (important for resisting triggering your impulse), and knowledge (which has sub-categories)
    • Social, which governs diplomacy, requisition (for preparing items, which I think might be special objects in this game), and information (about research and gathering information)

    Again, these skills indicate a strong social element to the game, and a simple framework (I haven’t got to task resolution yet!)

    Other character creation elements

    Having chosen your sample character, you need to determine the following elements of your life path:

    • Your origin, the environment in which you were born and raised
    • Your experience, which can be chosen from four background tables: High School, Company Life, Underclass, or UGN (the company that our heroes work for)
    • Encounter: determines a person you met in your life who is very important to you
    • Awakening: How you discovered your Renegade talent
    • Impulse: an emotion which, when triggered, threatens to evoke overwhelming emotions which carry a particularly high risk of overwhelming your control of your powers, and causing you to lose your humanity and become a germ

    The first 3 sections of this process each give rise to a Lois, a person with whom you have a particularly close bond. One of these will be an NPC. For each Lois you need to determine a negative and positive trait in your relationship, and turn it into a narrative for your relationship with this person.

    All these decisions are made by “ROC,” Roll or Choice, so you can create your character completely randomly by rolling on d100 tables, or you can choose everything. Since choosing everything involves decoding lots of entries in lots of tables, our example character is going to be done randomly. Shall we try?

    Sample Character: “Sparkling Twin Bullets”

    We’re generating a Japanese role-playing character here, so one thing is fixed: they’re going to be a high school student. Any of the sample characters can be, of course, but there is one that comes with a pre-packaged High School student picture (click to enlarge):

    Odd-coloured shoes: the hazards of school-girl life

    The text at the bottom left of the picture says

    UGN Children. Awakened as Overed in infancy, these children are raised by the UGN agency. You are one of these

    Your earliest memories are only of study in order to control your power. You realised that you are not normal, and you have a duty to fulfill.

    It’s not the case that you don’t yearn for ordinary life. It’s not the case that you don’t imagine a world at peace.

    But, for now you are using your power to protect others. In this there is meaning, you believe.

    This is the path you learned to follow…

    The big text at the top left says “Duty! Roger! Finish this quickly!” and the part at the right is this schoolgirl’s character image (the “Sparkling twin bullets”) writing.

    The UGN children story is not essential to the sample character, so we can change her, but let’s not. We’ll give her a UGN background and assume that she’s still in high school, because the stat block for her character sheet says that’s her cover; but the rule book says that UGN Children have to select their experience life path element from the UGN table.

    We’ll call our girl Yumiko, in honour of my friend who has been recently helping me with my Japanese study. In Japanese characters, Yumiko means “Free Beautiful Child” (由美子）

    Basic statistics

    Syndrome: Yumiko is a tri-breed, so she has 3 syndromes, which are Angel Halo (manipulating light), Morpheus (creating and manipulating matter), and Hanuman (changing the nervous system to increase speed or reflex).

    Basic stats

    As might be expected of someone with this focus, Yumiko’s stats and skills are:

    • Body 1, 1 level of skill in Dodge
    • Sense 9, 4 levels in missile attack
    • Spirit 1, 1 level of skill in Renegade Control
    • Social 3, 3 levels of skill in requisition and 1 level of skill in Information (UGN)

    She has 23 hit points.

    Effects

    Effects are the powers her mutations give her. In addition to the standard (concentrate), she gets the following:

    • Fine specks: increases her ranged attack by improving her precision (this is an Angel Halo perception effect)
    • Hundred Guns: in exchange for some raw material, this creates a ranged attack weapon, the form of which is up to the player (this is a Morpheus matter creation effect)
    • Penetrate: Enhances a gun so that it penetrates armour better (this is a Morpheus matter modification effect)
    • March Weapon: Gives the power of using two weapons at once, either ranged or close combat (this is a Hanuman sensory modification)

    Those are some serious powers with guns! Yumiko is a deadly schoolgirl!

    Connections

    Yumiko has a connection to an executive in UGN (however would a schoolgirl do that??!!), which gives her a bonus on her Information (UGN) checks.

    Life path

    So, using random rolls, let’s go through Yumiko’s life path.

    Origin

    Inheritance of power: Born the heir of a family that values its genealogy, Yumiko has always carried an inheritance. The Lois for this origin is a teacher. (I rolled 27)

    Experience

    Dirty job: As a UGN Overed, Yumiko had an experience on the battlefield that she doesn’t want to think about a second time. The Lois for this experience is a fellow soldier. (I rolled 87).

    Encounter

    Herself: Yumiko has minded her own business and had few encounters with others. Her main connection in UGN is Artemis (Shikishima Ayame), a UGN illegal with great powers who tends to look after isolated members of the organisation. (I don’t know yet what a UGN illegal is, and I rolled a 2).

    Awakening

    Ambition: Yumiko is driven by a single eternal goal, and will bravely consider any sacrifice to achieve it. She only has one dream, which is for everyone to admire her, and to be able to overcome any enemy. When she achieves this goal, she is uplifted. (I rolled 4 on a d10 on this table, and it gives a corrosion probability of 17%, near the high end)

    Impulse

    Hunger: In her heart, there is an empty hole. Nothing she consumes can fill it, but it has to be filled. So, by any means… (This flaw gives a corrosion probability of 14%, the lowest)

    Lois

    This gives us three Lois‘s, characters with whom Yumiko has a close relationship she cannot neglect. One of these is the NPC, Artemis. The others are a childhood teacher, and a fellow soldier. For one of these, Yumiko needs to establish a positive and negative emotion, which conflict in the same relationship. I choose to make these for the comrade-at-arms, and off we go…

    Positive:charity! This person is a figure like a junior member of her team who always strives at hard tasks, a sick sister, etc. who Yumiko cherishes (I rolled a 21).

    Negative: threat! This person has the power of a formidable rival, and may be someone Yumiko is afraid of losing to (I rolled a 10).

    These two elements need to be worked into the same relationship, so I think we can see what is happening here.

    Let’s put it all together, then…

    Yumiko’s full story

    Born into a wealthy family from whom she stood to inherit a great deal, Yumiko manifested her Overed powers early, and was taken in by UGN. Her family were a typical loveless aristocratic family, and during her powers’ awakening she was cared for by an elderly teacher whom she still respects very much (this is Lois 1, the teacher). Taken in by UGN, she was assigned a cover as a school girl in this teacher’s school, and mentored by the teacher while she learnt to control her powers and fit into society. At an early age she was thrust into a terrible task, of the “burn this school down to save it” sort, and in this horrific battle she endured much grief and many battle scars that she dare not think over again. There was only one survivor from this battle, a junior soldier who Yumiko protected to the end out of a sense of duty, and she carried him bloodied and battered from the ruins of the school. He recovered, and to this day they have maintained their original relationship, as if she were his senior and more respected figure; but in fact his powers have grown fast and there is increasing tension between them as he chafes within the bonds of her charity (this is Lois 2).

    And the bonds of her charity can be great indeed, for she has few friends or associates and has always been lonely, from the time of her loveless early childhood right through her training at UGN. She has always withdrawn, and focussed sullenly on the development and control of her powers. Some say that she feels rejected and spurned by her family, cast aside in the unloving embrace of UGN, and that she has a deep, dark desire to be accepted which also drives her ambitions and her stern sense of duty, both to UGN and to her junior colleague. This complex attracted the attention of Artemis, herself a loner, who recognised the risk that ambition thwarted, duty spurned, or acceptance withheld could trigger a great shock for Yumiko, and drive her to dark deeds.

    Also, Yumiko is a very good shot, and has a fine selection of schoolgirl outfits, many with matching shoes.

    ijo desu!

  • A long time ago, in an ocean far far away

    Many years ago I ran a campaign I referred to as “The Apocalypse Campaign,” set in a post-apocalyptic Europe in which the sea level had risen. This was back when A4 drawing tablets for a computer were hideously expensive, and scanners were expensive too. So to make my higher sea-level Britain, I photocopied pages from an atlas (A4 size), did some careful calculations of enlargement scales to get all the different-scaled maps up to the same A3 size, then carefully joined them together, traced them out onto a new, single huge piece of paper on a light table I found in an abandoned garage next to my house[1] (even light tables were quite expensive, I recall!) and then painted over the lines.

    So I spent, obviously, a lot of time on this, and I came up with a quite fascinating piece of work in which England was broken into several significant islands drawn on a crappy map coloured by one of the worst artists the world has ever known (me). I had to flood the world by quite a bit – maybe 50m I think – to reproduce the effect I wanted, which was the beautiful world map from the White Bird of Kinship novels[5], and this took some work, and I think I used a bit of GM’s license in there too (it’s not like anyone was going to check, this was before the internet could host massive maps, so no silly nerd was going to come along and complain I had my contours wrong).

    Today I discovered that this site, using google maps, can produce the whole effect in a few seconds. Not only that, it can give street-level detail of anywhere in the world, hardly a comfort if you live in Bangladesh or Amsterdam; but it did enable me to check the location of my own flat, and determine that with a 5m sea level rise I’ll be on water-front property! Any more, and I’ll be going uphill in a hurry.

    Perfect material for post-environmental-apocalypse gaming, if only it showed values more extreme than 14m. Who cares about that? (Besides a couple of 100 million South Asians, and the entire Pacific Island diaspora).

    —

    fn1: an interesting story that. I went digging through that garage with my flatmate, who had written some excellent art theory articles about Bladerunner[2], and we discovered a box full of old documents. Sorting through this box, we discovered a bunch of jewish religious material and some schoolbooks from world war 2. We contacted the owner of the garage to tell them what we had found, and it turned out that the owner was my boss, and the school book pictures were some material from her own childhood that she had lost. I think her parents had been refugees from Germany, though I don’t recall that clearly. Anyway, we kept the light table.

    fn2: The gist of them was, 1) that Roy Batty plays a role very similar to that of the Gnostic Redeemer, come to Earth to destroy his maker and to tell the people that the Earth is a trick created by Satan (or some such), and 2) that photo that Decker examines on his super-crash-hot computer[3] is a close simulacrum of some painting by a dutch master, which famously has the picture of the painter in the mirror; but in the Bladerunner version, there is nothing in the mirror, and the investigation of the photo is physically impossible. This serves to cause the reader to question their own humanity, whereas in the original painting the figure of the painter in the mirror is meant to restore your sense of self as a viewer, and remind you of the presence of a human creator. Or something[4]

    fn3: I watched Bladerunner again 2 nights ago, and it’s interesting how in some ways the vision of future technology is really basic, such as the TV on which the photo is examined, but in other ways really advanced, such as when Decker directs a computer to do things with commands like “no wait! back up!”

    fn4: They were actually really good, but after 15 years the details are a bit blurry.

    fn5: Which I recommend, strongly