Playing on Purpose

The other day I had a rather interesting revelation about the last 10 years of my RPG experiences. While I can't pinpoint the exact moment or actual play in which it happened, I've long felt a deep disatifaction with role-playing games. Imagine, if you will, a culture in which the actual play of these games is a functional substitute for friendship. Do you see what I have been self-inflicting for so many years?

The vast majaority of my time spent with people I like has been in boring, repititive activities. It's trying to balance a egnuine desire to 1) have fun playing these games, and 2) spend time with friends with the basic problem that the playing is not fun. It's not fun because it's dull. I had this glimpse that these games were addictive, emotionally immersive, and thrilling. I had a notion that given the right people and the right shared understanding, you could get that all and more.

I've stopped attending the "game night" I helped to put together and sustain over the last 5 years. In reality, I'm not sure "game night" is accurate - little gaming occurs. It's more of a "hang out, watch movies night". This is even more boring than before. While I do appreciate my friends, I do not enjoy what they enjoy as leisure, it seems. I've tried suggesting alternative activities - especially going out of doors - and so far, there is little or no reception to this. I have a hard time getting any of them to interact with me outside of this venue. This is very frustrating.

I understand the need for an identity and interest separate from my wife or my son. I understand the need to socialize with my peers. I understand just hanging out just to hang out and relax. But, ultimately, my time is limited. I have a future to plan for. I have goals that cannot be met by hanging out. My son will only be 4 years old for a little while. I want to taste the juice of adventure gaming now and without endless shopping trips, cliched tavern dialogue, or bullshit GM-player characters.

If I begin to assemble another gaming group, I will purposefully lay down the expectation that I want to Play on Purpose. I don't want to play just because we're all there, and this just happens to be what's available. I want to play because we all want to play this game.

Does Anarchy Require Utopian Behavior?

This morning the wife and I were listening to NPR coverage of the demonstrations against the immigration bills passed by the House. She asked me what I thought about the situation, given my political beliefs.

I mentioned that I didn't think it was up to anyone but an employer and an employee if they agreed to come to terms ("creating a job") and how much that job paid. It's too bad if some people didn't like the fact that someone else was willing to work "their" job for less money. If some one was willing to rent or sell housing to these people (all those "illegals"), then so be it. That was also none of my business.

My only objection was any additional burden that I, as someone who the government extorts money from in the form of taxes, would incur for schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. My solution of course, is to remove the government completely from these servives, but that's another path I'm not going to go down at this moment.

The wife again objected to my "free for all" attitude, suggesting that would only work in a Utopian society. She didn't explain why she thought this. It's not clear to me why allowing people to freely negotiate between themselves would require anything but the rawest of self-centered drives. These dozens of negotiations are things we all do, every day, with other decision-making people without the slightest bit of Utopian sparkle in our eyes.

I hear this many many times: people cannot freely operate with a government or the state "guiding" the process unless they are all saints or in some way divinely guided for the best possible decisions for all concerned.

Anarchy is not chaos. It is simply life without the State. People are free to choose government, for themselves, and not for others. The State is a monopoly, enforced by violence, on government for a given area. Anarchy is the freedom to choose any agent to help arbitrate agreements and disagreements, including the choice not to rely on any agency what so ever.

I don't see the need to keep track of immigrants. Clearly, they want to come here because unlike Mexico, you don't need to bribe the police not to rob your house and even at half the minumum wage, it beats anything they can get at home.

I think most people are fightened by the influx of people who look different, have different cultural values, and speak a different language. We'd better get used to it: we can no better hold out people driven my the desire for a better life than the Soviets could hold people in.

In way, it's also fair: the United States stole what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Nevada from Mexico in 1848. Maybe it's time we recognize this ancient theft, and not be so uptight about a few Mexican flags.

National Socialist Republicans

Karl Marx must be a confused spirit these days. Tired of rolling in his grave, he has instead possessed Republicans from coast to coast.

From this CNN article: about a GOP revolt on immigration bills now being debated by Congress:

[Rep. Steve King of Iowa] analyzed the issue in class terms.

"The elite class in America is becoming a ruling class and they've made enough money by hiring cheap illegal labor that they think they also have some kind of a right to cheap servants to manicure their nails and their lawn, for example.

"So this ruling class, this new ruling class of America, is expanding a servant class in America at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families. ... Those young people are cut out of this process."

I've never heard of a Republican in modern times become so class conscious. We live in strange times in which the GOP minions are criticizing the "new ruling class." But this is the Party of Lincoln - a part of war, corporate welfare, and - increasingly - of socialist ideals.

Conversion to a Anarcho-Capitalist

I could have just as easily labelled this entry "Conversion to a Conservative." Many of my friends have wondered what happened to me over the last year and a half.

In reality nothing has happened to me. The changes have all been internal. The changes have occured in my head - my way of looking at the same events are now different. No cosmic rays altered my brain. I examined my thinking, and conciously changed my outlook.

I various points in my life I have held different belief systems to be true. Some of the elements of these beliefs never varied (I've always believed in personal privacy and freedom of choice). Other elements are completely opposed (from a neo-socialist to an anarcho-capitalist).

How did this happen?

I can recall one afternoon at work, researching articles on software development employment trends. Report after report mentioned that as a whole software development was going to dissappear in the United States. Foreign workers, especially impoverished Asians, would do the rote programming work for a fraction of the cost of an American programmer.

I asked myself what to do about this dilemna. Personally, I was quite upset. It seemed so unfair - all the years of school and the money spent on tuition down the drain. I often wondered if I would be better off never studying computer science. The industry seemed so bright and full of riches from 1998 to 2001.

By the fall of 2002 I had experienced first hand the .com boom and bust. My (very) well paid position at a semiconductor design company was liquidated while the CEO jumped the sinking ship for a new VP level job at another company. Scores of my coworkers would out of work months. I know of a few others who have never returned.

On the evening news I saw many stories about the growing trend of offshoring. That is, labor in other countries like India and China were nominally cheaper than the labor in the United States. In many cases the savings were so vast that any and all jobs that could be sent overseass were. As if the drought of technology jobs wasn't bad enough, now these darned little brown people were taking our jobs.

I was upset and angry. I just spent the last few years and a no small amount of money educating myself at graduate school for just this field of work. Now, no matter what, a gigantic downward shift in wages was in the works. In some cases, it didn't matter how little you would work for, there simply were no willing employers taking on new technology workers. It seemed like the Dark Times were nigh.

The political rhetoric was also heating up. The parties were jostling for the pathetic sliver of concerned voters for the upcoming Presidential election. On the one hand, the sitting Presdient insisted that we must train the displaced textile workers for the "knowledge" jobs of the future, and on the other I was aware that those same jobs were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape.

One of the solutions offered was a strong system of taxes and tariffs designed to punish companies for offshoring or for the importation of foreign built goods (like software or hardware). Surely, a tariff would make foreign goods more expensive and give domestic firms an advantage. And the taxes would punish companies that sought cheaper labor anywhere but in the United States. I wondered if this was a good idea. I seemed like a good idea.

I've always questioned authority. I had to examine the ideas for myself, on my own time, and verify them as good or bad.

Certainly if I questioned the wisdom of these measures, I could validate them with reason and facts, and come away with a solid understanding of the issues. I would be well armed to convince my family and friends (and appointed leaders) to enforce these ideas.

I began to research why anyone in their right mind would not agree to the idea that placing limits on the movement of jobs would be a good idea. If I could see the arguments against them, I could find their weaknesses, expose them, and further strengthen my convictions.

I began to search Google for anything having to do with "free trade", "market", "prices", and "labor". I was overwhelmed by the amount of opinion and theory available.

Slowly but surely, I felt the outlines of a fundamental crevasse in the explanations. On one side of this gap was the realm of Keynes and Marx, and on the other Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises. Where the former advocated government as a means to channel behavior according to the wishes of those in power by force of arms, the latter advocated a voluntary system of mutually beneficial exchange of value. One side said that my life was not my own and the other said that my life was mine alone.

And of course, there is a huge range of philosophies between the two - lots of "isms", codes, creeds, cape fetishes, and humbug.

At first I was pretty shocked by what I was reading. It was difficult to reexamine the lifetime of economic conceptions and ultimately discard them for something else. The more I read, and the more I questioned, the more I abandoned my previous political identity.

For some of my friends, this change was not all that unexpected. I have held some radical opinions in the past, and I suspect I will continue to do so into the future. For other people my transformation is very scary to them. They no longer really can rely on "safe" assumptions about me. Sometimes it's difficult for them to talk to me.

But I don't think that it is. I try to live by a couple of simple rules - I don't expect other people to do or act in any way that I couldn't myself, and I don't try to make other people's business my own. I perfectly happy to live my own life, and let other people do the same. It doesn't bother me if someone chooses to have bible study in their house on Sunday, or if drink beer and play indoor vollyball.

This is hardly what we'd recognize as a Conservative viewpoint these days. Today's conservative is in the home and on our backs, trying to monitor our private lives and siphon money for one government adventure or another. Whereas int he 1960s they did it in the name of Anti-Communism, today they do it for, well, whatever government backed War On Whatever they have running.

This also invalidates my membership in the great Liberal collective, I suppose. I distrust the government. I do not consider the never ending cyle of crisis and government growth to be a good thing. I believe the choices of a billion consumers to be better than the wisdom of any central planner. I trust that people will choose best for themselves.

I can't do any justice to the host of anarcho-capitalist thought and works. I encourage anyone who is interested (or enraged) to examine, without prejudice and with charitable reading, the concepts. Kill your TV. Make up your own mind.

Journey to Cliche Canyon

While I have decided to not play in games out of social obligation as opposed to what I truly find interesting and fun, I did return to Game Night. I setup a laptop in the adjacent room and worked on Lincoln's War. At the same time I was able to listen in. Occasionally people would filter out and either take a moment for a phone call, get the next drink, or pull the traditional Game Night frozen pizza from the oven.

I noticed many things, almost all of them techniques, that irritated and amused me. The use of these techniques and the bizzare fetish of using them, no matter what, is the at the core of my disatisfaction with role playing games as we have come to know.

I should first mention that these techniques are ones that have been used over and over again, for years and years. I don't think they are unique to what happened that night. If anything, they are used because it's part of gamer culture: "We've always done it this way, so it must be the only right way to do it."

And I realized, in preparing to write about this experience, that I am just as guilty in my previous quests for the Right Way to role play. I have experimented off and on for many years to perfect my abilities in running a game. The problem was that I was not having fun. Surely fu was just around the corner if I only did X or Y without understanding what I actually enjoyed.

It occured to me that it was not the "unrelated" chit chat around the table that made or broke an evening of role playing. I noticed that the amount of unrelated talk was almost irrelevant to the amount of fun I had in the evening. Becoming stressed about the amount of distractions was probably the source of anxiety, not the distractions themselves.

Of course, I was convinced that if everyone just put as much passion and energy into the game as I thought they should, everything would be fine. The problem was that everyone wasn't going to be as passionate about what was happening. The games were essentially contrived injections of things the characters should have cared about. But as we all know, characters do not exist - only players do.

The more I can see a game focusing on player priorities the more fun I have. It helps to have rules that reinforce this - why worry about rules that do not add anything to your moments of play? Eject needless rules - you aren't gonna need them.

What I observed could also fall into "20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours of play". There was a substantial amount of actitivity that almost nothing to do with what the game was about - ordering beer at a tavern, sussing out that evening's mission from the chast of pre-programmed NPCs, bartering in a diceless (and therefore, social intimidation laden) manner with these NPCs, negotiating with the GM about the equipment and dangers of climbing a wall, and so on. Almost in every case, the outcome was dependent on the ability of the player to convince the GM that the outcome was more likely than not.

There is one player in particular, David, who is very good at negotiating these sorts of events. I can pretty much count on him making an argument to "game" the system. It's not that this is bad, or makes David evil. I wish that this sort of behavior could be harnessed in a way that is congruent with the rules.

Now, I did talk to the person running the game later. And his take was that these sorts of things were just the way things were done. The group expected it because it "this is fun." And you know, it may be, for them. I just don't understand it.

Character Development

My friend clarified that he mean "character development over time" to mean exploring the fictional person and decisions, not the application of game mechanics (like experience points). I'm surprised - I really thought it was the other way around.

I really don't know of a game that makes that part of the reward cycle measurable. If such a game existed, what would it look like?

Another Cherished Myth About Lincoln is Demolished

As long as the South rejoined the Union, slavery intact, Lincoln was willing to suspend the war.

The only thing that mattered was the recognition of national authority over any other authority and absolute obedience to it. Lincoln becomes the new Reichsfuhrer!