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I don't think there will be many people reading this who are (a) gamers and (b) not already aware of Claw/Claw/Peck, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) head58's groovy new gaming blog, but it occurs to me there are a few. (For instance: Ephemeral Circus, meet athenalindia and theclevermonkey--I've been gaming with them (among others) in London, at least until I had a baby and completely marooned our post-apocalypse Deadlands campaign at an excruciating cliffhanger; athenalindia and theclevermonkey , meet the Boston circus (among others)--sorry for being AWOL so long.) Claw/Claw is off to a nice start, with an admirable focus on praxis, both in the sense of "actual practical application" and also in the sense that that's the name of one of editswlonghair's Agon hacks. So far I have contributed three Alternate Alpha Complexes, which isn't especially praxis-y, but hey, that's how we do. (I think at one point the excellent Allen Varney and his merry band of traitors were working on a book of alternate worlds for PARANOIA, which is the sort of thing that could bring even me out of lurktirement. But I don't know what ever came of it. My understanding is that PARANOIA is now the work of one in-house writer, so Allen and the traitors' more glorious schemes have probably been shelved.) Does the world need a new gaming blog? Perhaps not, but I'm more interested in what these particular guys have to say about gaming than I am in 90% of the gaming pundits out there. Plus the most recent post gives me credit for inventing the flashback, so I'm digging it. Tags: gaming, not my other blog, owlbears
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Brett Holman (Airminded) is paleoblogging the phantom airship scare of 1909. Exactly one hundred years ago this month, Britain was bedeviled with a wave of mysterious zeppelin sightings. Brett’s written on the Age of Scareships before, but now he is actually walking through the panic day by day. It’s great. You could ask for no better guide to the Edwardian UFO invasion.
This is only tangentially related, but it’s also cool: Here’s a quotation a student of mine found for a paper on Percival Lowell and the Martian canal controversy.
The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 1907:
Look back upon the year 1907 and pick out what has been, to your mind, the most extraordinary event of the twelve months. Certainly it has not been the financial panic … That is, after all, a mere temporary disturbance, a mere passing cloud. The most extraordinary development has been the proof afforded by the astronomical observations of the year that conscious, intelligent human life exists upon the planet Mars.
Yeah. Get a sense of perspective, people!
Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.
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Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting, “which side are you on?”</p>
Previously on the deep history of roleplaying games: When David Wesely created Braunstein, his seminal proto-roleplaying game, he was inspired, he said, by three books he’d found in the University of Minnesota library. One was a wargame by the glorious 19th-century crackpot Charles Totten. One was a primer on game theory by the Cold War eggheads of the RAND Corporation. And the third was Conflict and Defense, an assault on RANDian game theory by the Quaker peace activist, systems theorist, and mystical poet Kenneth Boulding. A catholic trinity, to say the least.
Like Totten’s Strategos and RAND’s Compleat Strategyst, Conflict and Defense is an odd duck. Written in 1960, it’s a pacifist’s heartsick response to Cold War brinksmanship. It’s a critique of RAND-style game theory–Boulding calls the RANDies out by name–but it is written in precisely the same esoteric language of models and matrices they use. “Just as war is too important to leave to the generals,” Boulding wrote, “so peace is too important to leave to the pacifists.” The book is a forest of forbidding diagrams and equations, with “indifference curves,” “bare-survival contours,” and “mutual submission equilibriums.” It seems to have been an effort to devise some universal geometry of conflict and peace, and in so doing save the world from nuclear war. Boulding was a prominent economist and a pioneer of general systems theory, but his quest for a unified ecology of knowledge ultimately became a kind of religious mysticism. The information revolution, he argued in the 1970s and 80s, was weaving us all into one planetary superorganism.
I’m not saying that all or even any of this found its way directly into David Wesely’s Braunstein, though I remain impressed at Wesely’s eclectic tastes, and consider the whole story yet more proof of the indispensable serendipity of open library stacks. But the fact that Braunstein was inspired by a spacey Quaker on the one hand and by the RAND Corporation on the other makes me wonder: which side of the culture war were roleplaying games on? Were the first D&Ders squares or hippies, hawks or doves? This was a hobby invented by young American men, men of draftable age, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Two of the biggest groups of early gamers were college students and the military. Is it strange that the conflicts of the era are not more reflected in the history of the hobby? Is it strange that the received history of roleplaying games barely mentions Vietnam?
Read the rest of this entry » Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.
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Historian Douglas Brinkley has an interview with Bob Dylan in the latest Rolling Stone. (We hosted Brinkley at CAS last year, so I guess I’m two degrees of separation from Bob!) At one point, Dylan bristles at a certain phrase used to describe his work:
Brinkley: Are you missing what some critics call the older, weirder America?
Dylan: I never thought the older America was weird in any way whatsoever. Where do people come up with that stuff? To call it that? What’s the old weird America? The depression? Or Teddy Roosevelt? What’s old and weird?
Yeah, where do people come up with that stuff?
Dylan to Nora Ephron in 1965: Folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts.
I know, I know: you are shocked, shocked! to catch Bob Dylan in a contradiction, or shrugging off a label applied to him by his fans. Alert Greil Marcus! Still, I’m protective of the old weird America idea.
Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.
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