Did someone mention gaming? Awright!
Dungeons and Dragons is still the industry standard, despite the silly name and clichéd image. By and large, I have to say that the reputation its gamers possess--young, geeky and just barely evolved beyond the point of using a six-sided die instead of a joystick--is completely accurate. Even the newly released third edition and several decades worth of fine-tuning, the game has barely changed at all. "Characters" are still two-dimensional killing machines. They don't have personalities, foibles, dreams or hopes; they have races, classes, alignments and levels. A "prince struggling to maintain his family's power and his own dignity while his father brutally oppresses his subjects" is not considered a viable player character, but a "12th-level chaotic-neutral half-elven sorcerer" definitely is. And, of course, all starting characters are horrendously weak, dependent on the acquisition of magical objects that boost their might, thus reinforcing the whole sordid theme: kill something, take its treasure, repeat.
Vampire: The Masquerade and the other games produced by White Wolf are on the opposite end of the scale, at least in theory. The players adopt the personas of the youngest members of the undead, preying on the largely inconsequential humans and battling each other in a war that is over six thousand years old. The sample characters provided in the various Clanbooks are each fully fleshed-out, with their game statistics clearly ranking in secondary importance to their background stories. You can play almost anything you can imagine: professional kidnappers, traumatized children, dapper businessmen or chanting cult-members; social development is the object of this quest, not the possibility of obtaining the hallowed Axe of the Dwarven Lords. Admittedly, this game harbors its share of power-gamers, too, the ones who want to play the meanest, toughest, baddest-assest vampire who ever swung a demon imprisoned in a katanna. However, despite the incredibly sophisticated level of writing, I no longer play any White Wolf games. This is because of one of their books, The Guide to the Sabbat. When rape, torture and child abuse are depicted as something to engage in, even in a clinically detached mode, in order to lend realism to one's understanding of the psychology behind playing depraved monsters...something's gone just a tad too far. The book is filled with warnings about players who take these games too seriously and ruin the image of the saner gamers, but you have to wonder if the thought of playing vampires attracts dangerous fruitcakes, or slowly creates them.
Steve Jackson Games puts out a line of books called GURPS, which stands for Generic Universal Role-Playing System. As far as I am concerned, it is the greatest gaming engine ever created, because I value the flexibility it offers in creating fresh, customizable campaigns and characters that are actually innovative. They offer sourcebooks on nearly every genre (Fantasy, Space, Time Travel, Supers), character type (robots, wizards, warriors) and locale (Egypt, Greece, Atlantis, Riverworld). Just a few days ago, I spent several hours creating the covers to a handful of new sourcebooks that I thought might be entertaining: GURPS Australia, GURPS Microverse, GURPS Immortals, GURPS Dreams (picture of a Dalì painting), GURPS Biochemical Warfare (picture of a can of Spam), GURPS Bimbos (Britney Spears) and even GURPS The Letter "S". I should have put up the bitmap files for public viewing, but I couldn't see the point in creating a one-joke webpage...
And that's just a few comments on gaming. Now, what was the original question? |
