Das Tagebuch Murnaus

I had a dream last night that aliens had invaded and taken many of us (including me) back to another planet, and Charlie Sheen was a collaborator/ overseer.

And he was being a real jerk about it, like "Who's standing here WITHOUT a shovel in his hands, NOT mining thorium? Duh, WINNING!"

In other news, my Poland game is due in the publisher's warehouse inside of two weeks. Links to aspects of the game:

Buzz: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42591/summer-lightning-the-invasion-of-poland-1939
Where to buy: http://www.locknloadgame.com/Section_Cat_Content_Detail.asp?SID=33&SCAT=87&ID=95
Rulebook: http://www.locknloadgame.com/www.locknloadgame.com/sneakmanuals/SL-Manual-part.pdf
Very nice map, complete: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/952346/marc-von-martial

Well, been a while.
I was glad of the time off; I spent much of it designing a new game, on the clearing of the Scheldt Estuary by the First Canadian Army in October-November 1944. Another campaign necessitated by another of Montgomery's screwups, this one cost the lives of over 1,500 Allied soldiers, with a further 5,000 wounded. The operation was commanded by the First Canadian Army, and over 50 percent of the dead and wounded were Canadians, but British, Polish and American troops were also under the Army's command. I've been wanting to do a game on this battle for several years; no one has designed a game strictly on this battle until now. Not sure where I will publish it.

Last week I got word that my Poland 1939 game had finally cleared enough hurdles and generated enough pre-orders for the publisher to take a chance on printing it; it should be in their warehouse by the end of February! Yippee, been waiting a year or two ofr this to happen. The graphics man did a beautiful job of the map and counters. Also, the publisher in Toronto who's been holding on to two of my designs (Balkan Gambit, Greek Civil War) will probably be able to move on them this year.

So, I spent quite a bit of time doing research and writing a set of rules for the Scheldt game, but it was nice to sleep in mornings and get a late start to the day. I baked up about a dozen weighty fruitcakes; I found a good recipe for that, and baked up a lot of other things too. Christmas we went to my Mom's in Sidney and New Year's we spent, as usual, at my Dad's on Pender Island.

I don't think I will bother with any year-end memes this time. 2010 was certainly an eventful year and in the main a happy one for me, I think. The domestic situation is pretty good, actually very good when I think of how things were five years ago, or ten years ago. And you can't fault that.

Last night was fun, it was "Circuit Breaker" - the first industrial/EBM night at Paparazzi, and I was DJ for a solid 90 minute set. Not everything worked, but it was a Sunday night after all and it was a small crowd (the usual people) and I did get them to dance it up now and again. I took the first shift too, so it didn't much matter what I played. I certainly had fun!

As jackbabalon requested, here is my set list:

SPK - Invocation (used this for soundcheck)
Fortran 5 - Love Baby
Chrome - Meet You in the Subway
Grace Jones - Warm Leatherette
Throbbing Gristle - Discipline (this was a live recording with bad volume so faded out to...)
Test Dept. - Fuckhead
Einsturzende Neubauten - Abfackeln
Laibach - Now You Will Pay
DHI - Climbing (this one was stompy-popular)
Numb - Blood
The Boris Karloff Civil Defence PSA
Wumpscut - Soylent Green
Severed Heads - Pilot in Hell
Greater Than One - Kunst Gleich Kapital
SPK - Walking on Dead Steps
Dive - Dead or Alive
Chris & Cosey - Confession
Sons of Nippon - Seppuku Beat

Hopefully they will have another such night some night, there were 15 or 20 more people there than there usually are on a Sunday night so I hope so....

Far too long since my last post, but it was a busy month or six weeks in there. I eked out some of my vacation and took most Fridays off, I suppose I could get used to a four-day week but certainly not as much gets done.

Aki got home without incident (pity about the 14-hour bus ride to his town from Tokyo, and back again), and I think making the flight by himself really boosted his self-confidence and ability to deal with the unknown. At least, I hope so. Like any 15 year old he has grumpy non-communicative days, and other days where he just amazes me with his insight and intelligence. Now he's in Grade 11, with a full load of demanding courses - Physics, Chemistry, Drafting and Design, and Computer Programming. Next term is English, Social Studies, Math and Auto Mechanics. He says he's planning on Engineering at UVic - if he can maintain the focus, not get distracted and cultivate good study habits, I think he'll make it. I hope so, because he doesn't have the option of becoming a glib nerdy Poli Sci fake-it type like me.

Tuvan Independence Day party went off well, lots of people showed and most of the meat got eaten. shadesofwinter and Blair came with a big ice cream cake with the Tuvan flag on top - printed on a piece of rice paper so we could eat the flag! epexegesis came, I hadn't seen or talked to him in a year or two. It was a nice warm day without too many bugs and afterwards we sat in chairs and watched the meteors come down.

A couple of weeks later my friend Lissa and her kids came to visit from Bainbridge Island. I've known Lissa for 24 years, she was one of my first contacts in Mail Art, back when she was "Phlegm Pets", doing pieces for a zine called Cerebral Discourse that her then boyfriend "Burnt Raisins" and other friend "CDR Rotor" printed on an offset press in a Seattle basement. Her kids are 19 and 15 now. They stayed for a few days and we all climbed Mount Doug, which I hadn't done before. With binoculars and difficulty I picked out our house from the summit.

I got to DJ again, this time in a public place! Recently the goth_vic people have had two chances a month to dress up and go out - "Cabaret Noir" mid month at Logan's and "Boneshaker" near-end-month at Paparazzi. Dan usually plays a lot of vinyl but was getting bored with it, and gave me a chance to play for an hour and a bit at the latter night. I brought a bunch of CDs and had a lot of fun! The best part was playing Nash the Slash's "Dance After Curfew" and getting a really good reaction from people. I hope I can do it again some time.

For the first time in years I went to a Fringe play - a production of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". It was OK, the cast tired hard with some interesting set design (scrim on angular frames that suggested the distorted buildings and perspectives of the film) but no one had any voice control and the sound (drones and the odd "deee-DEEE" to underline moments that were supposed to be scary) was just plain annoying.

Labour Day weekend would have been a lot more fun if, midway through Saturday, I hadn't cracked a big porcelain onlay while eating a chicken salad sandwich. A month before the same thing had happened when I was eating a tortilla chip. At first I thought it was the same tooth, but no it was the neighbour tooth (cracked in 2007 - http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/157342.html). Still, I couldn't do anything about it until Tuesday - got it fixed all right, then Wednesday I had both toenails removed (I had lost both of them before in accidents, and each time they grew in more lumpy and ingrown, so I thought I would just get them removed once and for all, the scientific way) and I am still gimping around from that, then Thursday more dental indignities (cleaning and grinding). I mean, I'm glad I have a set of teeth in good repair (though many more of these porcelain onlays and my mouth will be on its way to life as a sink) and in a while my feet will be all right, but I was glad to see the end of that week.

The garden died with a whimper. Lots of snow peas came out, and there was some nice spinach and a few turnips, but most other plantings were - not good... radishes bolted, cabbage disappointing, onions flowered, and deer at lots of things. But the apple tree is loaded down - not so the pear, but next year should be good for it. I wonder what I should plant on the plot to save it from going back to sod during the winter, I'd like to do a bit less digging to prepare it this time.

Not a great deal of gaming done, but I am selling and trading a few items. I took Virtualia and pulled it apart into basic, intermediate and advanced versions, so that an acquaintance at McGill University could try and use it in his classroom. If it works and there is some kind of lesson from it we might make a presentation on it at the fall 2011 meeting of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, in Ottawa. Hope so.

And, you know, I think I am really starting to like instrumental surf music.

I am Geek of the Week, this week!
#241, to be precise.

It really doesn't mean anything except that last week's geek picked me, and here is where people ask me questions about my games:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/516989/geek-of-the-week-241-brian-train

Go me.

This is kind of interesting:

Board games get electronic makeover at Queen's
Last Updated: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | 4:28 PM ET

A group of Queen's University researchers in Kingston, Ont., have reworked the popular board game Settlers of Catan so that projected images of characters actually move about on the board.

"This is no doubt the future of board games," said Roel Vertegaal, who presented a research paper Monday on electronic board games at a conference hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Settlers of Catan reimagined

Roel Vertegaal offers this description of the electronic version of Settlers of Catan:

"John, Jack and Peter are playing the electronic version of Settlers of Catan. As soon as their hexagonal board pieces are placed onto the table the game lights up, with every tile automatically sorted. A randomly selected tile lights up to begin play. The players with property on that tile receive resources from that tile, which they can use for construction. The tile shows an animation of a lumberjack cutting a tree.

John, who’s next, picks up his tile and pours the wood where he wants to construct a village. Animations show buildings being constructed, and the village is populated by animated game characters. Next, Jack commands the citizens of his village to conquer the newly built village through a marking menu.

Characters run out of their houses as Jack pours iron ore from a resource card onto his village. An animation shows the villagers smithing swords from the ore, and the arming of a band of men. He picks up the tile, and pours the band onto the village of Peter, which is easily overrun."

"This is about humanizing technology, getting people away from the screen," Vertegaal, an associate professor at the Queen's Human Media Lab, said in an interview. Gaming has become too successful in the last five years, with some terrible effects, he said.

"We're seeing kids sit inside with a screen. We're seeing adults walking under buses because they're looking at their technology."

The conference, sponsored by the card maker Hallmark, is entitled Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction and brings together researchers working on integrating interactive technology into traditionally low-tech objects such as board games and greeting cards.

Settlers of Catan is a board game where players compete to "settle" on the island of Catan by collecting and trading resources.

The electronic version uses a computer, an infrared camera, an overhead projector and thin hexagonal tiles of cardboard embedded with infrared markers. The tiles are pieced together as the game advances. Images are projected on the tiles but the players determine what images are projected and how the characters interact.

When someone moves or turns the cardboard tile, the image moves and turns. Connect one hexagonal piece to another and characters walk from one piece to another. Tilt a tile towards another to "spill" an army for war.

In his paper, Vertegaal wrote that people who tried out the electronic board game felt "they suspended belief that this was an electronic game."

Vertegaal envisions new display technologies such as flexible, organic light emitting diodes that would enable video screens the thickness of a hair to be fixed to the cardboard tiles. The screens would project a game's animation instead of the overhead projector.

Each tile would be like a mini-computer, capable of interacting with the adjoining tile, depending on what the player wanted to do.

Vertegaal said his version of Settlers of Catan is a futuristic take on the traditional game but he expects people will begin to see electronic board games come to the market in five to 10 years.

"The importance is to have families sit around the board game again," he said. "Playing Risk on the computer is not a great experience. Having tunnel vision because you're glued to a screen is not great, and that's what we're trying to break here."
***

Video is here: http://www.hml.queensu.ca/node/249

Hm! Yes, being "glued to the screen" (which makes me feel like I'm playing with a bucket on my head, looking through a small hole) and the absence of any tactile element is what's always turned me off computer games. But then again, all a board game needs is some paper components and a flat surface - no power required, no fancy technology, if someone spills their drink or the dog eats a piece then make a new one. And you can change the rules, or invent new games, without having to be a programmer as well (well, it would be impossible to reprogram these small pieces, or at least uneconomic).

This is interesting, in a silly way:

Mathematical formula predicts the perfect toy

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | 11:26 AM ET CBC News

(Associated Press)A British psychologist has come up with a mathematical formula to help parents choose the toy that best matches their child's nature and their wallet's cash level.

Dr. Cliff Arnall was asked to devise the formula by British toy company Worlds Apart. The company had sponsored a survey that found a majority of youngsters received Christmas presents they didn't like or didn't play with.

"For a number of years now people have been saying, particularly parents of younger children, that a lot of the toys they buy end up not lasting too long," said Arnall in an interview Monday with CBC Radio's As It Happens.

Arnall, who has also developed mathematical formulas to predict the happiest day of the year (June 19) and the most depressing day of the year, (Jan. 24), took six basic criterion [sic] into consideration to come up with the best toy for your child.

The perfect toy formula was devised by British psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall. (Worlds Apart)
Each criterion was assigned a letter and parents could plug in a number between one and five.

Pi: Does the child prefer individual play?
Po: What is the child's ability to play with others?
CR: Does the toy stimulate a number of senses?
S: Does the toy promote social activity?
U: Can a child play with the toy all year around? Is it easy to store and easy to transport?
H: Is the toy robust enough to be handed down. Will it still be relevant for younger siblings in years to follow?

Then, and this is where a calculator comes in handy, you add all these numbers up, and then add them to (T multiplied by L), where T is the estimated number of hours the child will play with the toy in a week, and L is the number of months the toy will likely be played with.

That number is then divided by the square root of C, where C is the cost of the toy.

Even with a calculator, it's not so easy. The Worlds Apart toy company has a website where parents can simply plug in their numbers and get the answer with a few clicks.

A rating of 40 is considered a very good score, said Arnall. The simplest toys, like playing cards, tend to score highest. And a score will drop sharply if a toy is expensive.

Arnall is hoping the mathematical formula reduces the stress of gift buying, rather than raising it, as can happen when people are forced to figure out math.

"It's really to help discriminate between toys and give parents an opportunity to take a step back and have a think about their child, matching up a toy that's going to meet the needs of their children rather than some very complex and irritating formula," he said.


Pi + Po + CR + S + U + H + ((T x L) / sqrtC) = Play Value

Interesting, but it couldn't apply to all toys - let's take one of my newest games, Battle for China:

Pi = 5 (yes, it can be played solitaire easily)
Po: 5 (yes, it's meant to be played with others and it assumes the player-nerd is sufficiently socialized)
CR: 2 (eyes and brain, mostly)
S: 5 (yes, if "social activity" can be defined as two player-nerds staring at a map and arguing for several hours)
U: 5 (oh yes! Just don't play it in the rain)
H: 4 (OK trade value, to go by BGG.com)

And for T and L, let's say it's played once a week for two months, before the next issue of Strategy and Tactics comes out. Per-issue cost is $25.

So, 5 + 5 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 4 + ((4 x 2) / 5) = 27.6

So, not bad but not great either. Hope your stress level wasn't unduly affected by being "forced to figure out math".

A couple of weeks ago issue #8 of World at War magazine, featuring a leading article and full-size wargame on the subject by Yours Truly, hit the stands. Yes, you probably missed it because the mag has a circulation of only about 7,000, but it was nice to see some of my game work hit the relative big time.

https://www.strategyandtacticspress.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=64

And you know, it wasn't long after the magazine came out that I got an e-mail from the publisher, passing on an e-mail he had received from a person billing himself as a visiting professor in Spanish studies at Indiana University. He had found the magazine at a Barnes & Noble and had written in to correct me on where he thought I was wrong, on separatist movements in the autonomous regions of Spain, and suggesting I refer to the works of Stanley Payne and Pio Moa, a Spanish writer. They were fairly minor points but Stanley Payne (who I did not use) has defended the work of Pío Moa, a controversial writer who is viewed by many academics as a pseudo-historian, revisionist writer and apologist for Franco. It's obvious that the war is not over yet!

I've been writing articles for this magazine's sister publication Strategy & Tactics for 16 years, and I have to say this is only the second time anyone has commented to me on the content of the article - and the first time it was to complain about a misdrawn provincial border on a map of 1848 Germany that I never even saw until it appeared in the magazine!

One of the best references I did use in writing the article was Anthony Beevor's relatively recent book The Battle for Spain. I found an interesting review of it online (from The Independent, published: 21 May 2006), not least for his comments on Kids Today:

Antony Beevor: On the joys of history

The Left isn't going to like Antony Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War, but he's used to controversy - his account of the fall of Berlin elicited heated protests from the Russian ambassador. Danuta Kean talks to him about the joys of digging in the archives, his despair about history students today and his brush with Jackie Onassis

Antony Beevor is horrified, but, for once, it is not accounts of rape, torture or political betrayal uncovered in the archives of Berlin and Moscow that exercise the author of Stalingrad. What angers him is the state of British education, especially the teaching of history. "Britain is the only country in Europe, with the exception of Albania and Iceland, where history is no longer compulsory after the age of 14." His words are rapid as machine gunfire. "There is an extraordinary conviction, which has come partly from teacher training colleges, that history is elitist and reactionary and not worthy."

( Read more... )

Found this linked off the BBC online magazine feed:

http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2009/06/lesson-in-revolutionary-politics-from.html

"Wednesday, June 17, 2009
A Lesson In Revolutionary Politics From Video Games

I realize[d] something today about revolutionaries, and this realization can be entirely attributed to video games.

I saw [the] trailer of Just Cause 2, and I was thinking how much fun it would be to actually take over a country in a revolutionary action. I mean, I'm in the process of taking over a planet in Red Faction: Guerilla, but I'm not really the leader -- more the main ass-kicker, really. So the idea of actually leading a revolution is entirely appealing.

Then I thought about how much fun it would be to lead a revolution in an action game, but then be able to run the country in a real-time strategy game. So you go from Just Cause to Tropico.

It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS to govern the country.

That's an entirely different gaming skill set. It's much easier to wreck than to build, and not only do they have to build, they also have to stop all those first-person action heroes who want to lead their own revolution."

This is so superficial and puerile I don't know where to begin. I may design games about revolutions and civil wars, but I'm under no illusions that I am teaching or trying to simulate more than the barest beginnings of what actually happens in the real thing. And I do not do it via FPS, RTS or any other whing-dang-doodle *blinkenlights* techno-gimcrackery: my route is ideally the BOGSAT (Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around A Table), though I am trying to work up some way to do this via linked workstations.

OK, I'll bet that didn't mean anything to most of you.

But click on this anyway:
http://www.locknloadgame.com/Section_Cat_Content_Detail.asp?SID=33&SCAT=87&ID=95

P500 is how a lot of wargames are being published (or not) these days: they advertise it on a company website, and if enough people place pre-orders with their credit cards to make producing it pay, they print it up and send it out. If not enough, then they don't. Simple economics.

This company does mostly tactical games but is branching out, the publisher thought the topic would sell and the art is pretty good:



Why would/should I design a game on Poland '39, you ask? Well, there aren’t many wargames on the Polish campaign, probably because the conventional wisdom is that it was a very unbalanced contest. I think this is informed mostly by hindsight. The German Army knew it had superior numbers and organization, but much of its equipment was no better than that fielded by the Poles, the concept of blitzkrieg had not been proven in actual combat, and they were not at all sure that the campaign would not bog down into static fighting. As it was the Germans lost over 16,000 dead in five weeks of campaigning.

I used a game system that worked quite well in two other games of mine (one on the Battle of the Bulge that's been in print for five years, and one on hypothetical Allied counter-invasions of the Balkans that's due out this year), and came up with many options to vary the game for both players and make it as equal (or unequal) a contest as they want.

Anyway, you don't have to order this, I just wanted to tell you about it....

Yes, I know, it's been a while since I posted but I've been busy. Finished writing yet another article: 7,600+ words on the Sino-Japanese War, to top the 9,300 I cranked out on the Spanish Civil War over Xmas and New Year's holidays, means I've been a busy little bee.

The problem this time is that in the aftermath of moving every blessed thing I and everyone else near and dear to me own, about a mile away from where it was, is that I lost the box of books and reference materials I had pre-packed in order to write this article without having to unpack my entire library. Over 40 boxes of books and guess which ONE is missing. It has to be somewhere in the damn house. Anyway, I had to round up some lesser quality reference materials and get it done in a cracking hurry - at least there were no library books in that box. Wouldn't want Lt. Bookman to get after me (http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/197500.html).

Next up: the CONNECTIONS conference in Orlando Florida, in early March. Some potential here for making some, uh, connections in the serious games world, wish I had time to convert Virtualia to some kind of digital form. I've given up on learning to use Visual Basic this year - life's too short. Probably not going to Phoenix this year even though I have three games coming out by then (Greek Civil War game, Balkans invasion game, and revision of Vietnam 1964 game), need to save money to fix the back deck and put the stairs back in.

Oh yeah, about lunch: I just realized I am about to tuck into baloney and mustard, with processed cheese on white bread, and wash it down with genuine orange Tang. What am I, nine years old? But that's what was in the fridge this morning... I will try to do better.