It's For the Childeren

Desert Bus for Hope is going on right now. Its part of the Child's Play charity holiday blitz.

Here at the Fringe Element we blog from Wisconsin and Ohio. I have also noticed that most of our readers come from Texas, or that's where you have your proxies. The point is that Child's Play has partner hospitals everywhere and you can give to whatever local children's hospital is in your area.

Go there and donate now.

Gygax Statue

It has been two months since a non-bacon article and I break our silence to announce that Gary Gygax's widow is planning on erecting a monument to his greatness in Lake Geneva, WI. The article is sparse on details, but I assure you that if the opportunity presents itself we will place whatever fund raising widget they create on this website as well. I have not been to Gen-Con since WOTC took it from Milwaukee and created several clones, but I may just have to go to the 2010 event if there is going to be hoopla about the Gygax statue.

Of Silent Passings

From The Fringe Element

I have previously mentioned how the origins of D&D are intertwined with southern Wisconsin. I have been chided, probably in response to the articles I have written regarding Gary Gygax. I have been chided for not recognizing the passing of Dave Arneson. Arneson is pictured above as the bearded guy on the left. The bearded guy in the center being accused of being the murderer is Gary Gygax.

Dave Arneson was instrumental in the creation of D&D back in the ancient days before anyone had thought of a role playing game or a character sheet, or a Dungeon Master. These words are so significant in my life that these men seem to be earth shattering geniuses. I find myself hard pressed to separate out how their original ideas have changed the face of gaming or created whole new dimensions of the paper, miniatures, board game, and video game industries.

Sadly, I never paid much attention to the names on my books which would have given me some inkling of the great men to whom I owe the many hours of nerdy squealing joy. Equally sad is the fact that often we never hear of significant people until after they have died. Arneson Died last week on Tuesday. He was only in his early 60's.

UPDATE: According to our commentator(commenter?) the man I identified above as Dave Arneson is actually Mike Carr. From my perspective this is conflicting information coming from third parties. If Wikipedia has taught me anything it is the value of verification on the internet. So, if anyone can positively identify those in the above image I will go off of that in the future. My goal was to post an image related to this article and not just swiped from Wikipedia, and thereby enrich the imagescape of the internet. However I would warn against using the images I post as a reference since it is abundantly clear I do not know who these people are.

Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.

Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility

For Christmas my wife and I decided to spend our Best Buy gift cards on the Harvest Moon game. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the game revolves around your character as you farm your ranch, raise livestock, get married, and have children. Its basically simulated farm life with some corny environmentalism thrown in as plot. As if working your farm by yourself isn't enough work.

This version has all the familiar elements from the previous games in the series. Cows and chickens, corn and tomatoes, picking stuff of the mountain to give as gifts to woo your intended. In this version there is a greater variety of crops and livestock to choose from. There are winter grains like buckwheat and you can raise an ostrich to ride around town.

However, the downsides to this version are much more profound. The first thing you notice is that the voice sound effects sound like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons and are just as intelligible. "Waa waa waa waa." You notice this because every time you start the game the muffeled trumpet sound attempts to say the games name and every time your character pets an animal it says, "there there." Which I guess is an artifact of poor translation from the Japanese version.

The most aggrivating part of the game is the first hour. Because it takes an hour to get through the introduction. The game forces you to wander around town and have an extended conversation involving gift giving with every citizen of the game before even beginning the toutorial. Like most games, the toutorial is entirely unnessary. Of course while trapped in the insultingly unnessary toutorial, the game's writers decided it was also necessary to force you to interact with the games most unplesant character who spends the toutorial insulting you even as you easily accomplish the tedious tasks he sets before you.

Once you get through the god awful plot and asanine toutorial the game is actually quite fun. Like all the games in the Harvest Moon series, its enjoyable to pretend to be farming your own ranch and the motion controls on the Wii enhance the feel of the game. Its got flow.

Suspicion

One of the great things about being from southern Wisconsin (other than access to quality dairy and cheap liquor) is that the six degrees of separation don't leave much of a gap between a southern Wisconsin resident and Gary Gygax. My in-laws were involved with the early days of TSR. My father in law even claims to have developed a new printing technique to allow the production of the map included with the original Dungeons and Dragons box. This connection has also led to a number of games finding rest in the closets of my in-laws, games that never found their niche like D&D did.

This Christmas, these facts led to my having the fortune and displeasure of playing an old TSR game called "Suspicion." That's Gary Gygax on the cover in center frame being accused of the murder. My father in law took that picture.



The game is a murder mystery where one of the players is the murderer and everyone else is trying to figure out who the murderer is. It adds a note of complexity by giving points to innocent players for being wrongly accused of being the murderer.



Its not hard to see why the game never caught on. It has a 13 step set up process that took over an hour and requires all the players to be present. This process also involves lots of sorting and stuffing cards into envelopes. So it combines all the excitement of sending Christmas cards with all the excitement of setting up a board game. In comparison, the game itself is very short. It probably only lasted an hour at most. The rules have many suggestions about strategy to determine who the murderer is but the added complexity of false clues doesn't add any length to the game. Adding extra players doesn't seem to add length either because with the full six players the game could end in one round and really shouldn't take more than four. The players actions are relatively quick and each roll of the dice just pushes the game toward its inevitable conclusion. The game even boils the clues down to numbered cards so that very simple logic can determine the murderer. Repeat plays reduce set up time but there is still the issue of having to sort all 160 clue cards and stuff them into envelopes. Its basically a more labor intensive version of Clue.



Still I am glad to have played it because of the tenuous connection it represents between me and a great man I never got the chance to meet.

Everyone is Shitting Themselves Over E3

The Electronics Entertainment Expo ceased to be relevant when it became a venue for gaming companies PR departments to masturbate in front of the media rather than a showcase of the latest in electronics for the consumer base. This parallels the fall of the movie and music industries except the video game industry is still going strong. Movie and music companies have been seeing falling revenues and blame piracy and a shift toward video games. Except in a previous posting we have discussed studies that have shown some piracy actually helps music sales. These companies refuse to acknowledge that the mediocre and pedestrian fare they produce might be the reason they can't attract customers. Also, I personally believe that an artist has the right to own and benefit from his creation. However the corporate model of entertainment production where producers dictate creative content and the label owns the final product create an environment that stifles creativity. It doesn't help that independent music and movie producers are being bought up by large media companies because they are profitable and then shut down to trim costs once they are inside the fold of the media giant. The big studios fail to see that it was the niche markets and inherent freedom to create that was the strength of the independent shops. Instead they blame the Internet and pirates and make overzealous moves to defend the copyright (that they swindled away from the artist in the first place) and they wonder why they are perceived as attacking their customer base.

Its like the don't respect the awesome and terrible power of the Internet.

The Walk of Shame

Jack Thompson is a lawyer in Florida who spends his time acting as an attention whore screaming about the gaming or pornography industries interchangably. Its easy to hate him, but I am compelled to feel sorry for someone who is obviously an extreme result of the psychological pathology of our society. Where we childishly glorify violence and adress sex with a bizarre characture, Thompson lashes out at attempts to profit from this communal tendancy. This man is a symptom of our collective social mental illness. Fortunately for the legal profession, he faces sanctions for his outlandish behavior.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/lawyer_threatened_with_sanctions_after_putting_images_of_kangaroos_swastika/#When:08:10:00Z

The FBI abused its power under the Patriot Act? I'm schocked, schocked! Well maybe not that schocked.

Lastly, for anyone who is somehow so unaware that they may be compared to a cave dwelling hermit and in keeping with our mockery of hypocratical politicians; Elliot Spitzer.

Gary Gygax 7/27/1938 - 3/4/2008

Image by Alan De Smet

Ernest Gary Gygax died this morning. Basements across the country today erupted with the tears of thousands of nerds. Like most people that grew up in Southern Wisconsin, I was within the six degrees of seperation from this man who was the central legendary figure of pen and paper gaming but I never had the opportunity to meet him myself. Now it looks like I will never get that opportunity.

Though the age of supremecy of Dungeons and Dragons in role playing games has passed and there was much controvercy within the fan community over the aquisition of TSR by WOTC this man created something that has resonated with the popular culture not just with a nerdy subculture of social outcasts, but with the culture on the whole. Mr. Gygax's enthusiasm for gaming was a testiment to the idiom, "do what you love and the money will follow."

Gary Gygax, you will be missed by thousands of people you never knew.

The Child-Man

Not long ago a shrill bitter woman published an op-ed decrying the contemporary propencity of men in their late twentys to delay marriage and career advancement. Many outlets of the old media recognized the inflamitory nature of her insult and decided to piggyback on its ratings generation powers by printing articles like this. (freedom hating British!)

Most responce to the author has been either an attempt to counter the assumptions in the article or to simply disagree with the author or the traditional notions of success. My contention is that her position is immoral.

This is best explained from a Kantian perspective; Hymowitz is treating all western males as means to an end rather than ends in themselves. To use the language of feminism, she is objectifying men. Or to describe my own moral outrage; Hymowitz has no right to declare that I be of use to her.

From My Cold, Dead Hands

http://www.channel3000.com/news/14916807/detail.html

If you parents are having such problems raising your children to be non-violent, or at least not criminal members of society, maybe you should try a different tact. Allowing or asking for the government to regulate what your children are exposed to is not going to ameliorate the very influences that you consider worst for your child. Instead, I would recommend that you talk to your kids and find out what they think about the things that you're trying to keep them from. Instead of categorically banning an activity, as that is not likely to work, talk to your kids and then if they have mistaken notions or are confused about something, you can view it as an opportunity to be a good parent and give your children a bit of truth that the schools won't give them.

In regulating ethics, government policy is a poor panacea for the perceived ills of society. If the government had any say into what you do, then the things that are declared illegal would actually not be committed because of the fear of the results or because of the respect an individual holds for the government. Usually, though, the most important consideration into doing something that is considered illegal, is whether or not you will get caught.

Of course, during an election year, it is easy to grab headlines by attacking a small fraction of society that, because of its very nature, does not have any effective organization to meaningfully resist attempts to oppress them for political points. Gamers are, at turns, obnoxious, profane, and passionate, but they are citizens of the country who are not deserving of this discrimination.

Furthermore, I would go so far as to say that this proposed legislation from Sen. Jon Erpenbach is at best misinformed or misguided. I admit that it would be a good idea to move 17 year criminal offenders as the juveniles that they still are, but I think it is rather dubious that a simple tax on video games is going to raise enough money to cover the proposed expenses. Personally, I see this as a problem of definition. In this case, the definition of what is, exactly, a non violent offense. For instance, how much would the cost go down if, instead of holding children for having a small amount of Marijuana, why not confiscate their pot and take them home to their parents? Instead of having the state teach a lesson, why not let the responsibilities of parenting fall upon the parents?

Besides, this tax is just going to pull money out of the state coffers, as people will just go online, to amazon.com and such, and buy their video games without an extra insipid tax.