So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment of the game (whereupon our mad steampunk adventurers broke the rules of time and space to deliver presents to thousands of Martian orphans) hinged upon the singing of The Little Drummer Boy.

Which immediately led me to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing a Christmas duet. Truly one of the weirdest video clips I’ve ever seen

Sadly, we’re running out of time on our Sunday night gaming. Half the group is moving to Melbourne in March, and despite the fact that we’re going to try moving the game online, it’ll inevitably miss some of the things that have made Sunday nights a tradition – gathering together every Sunday, sharing dinner and a metric buttload of junk-food, catching up on one-another’s weeks. While I doubt I’ll get the chance to miss the people thanks to the wonders of modern technology, adapting to the change in the weekly social ritual we’ve built up is going to be tricky.

It’s not simply that it’s a good book, more that it’s fiction that’s brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.

It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July’s short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.

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I may be a little scarce online this week. I’m trying not to be, of course, but the Third Edition of the Mutants and Masterminds roleplaying game landed in my mailbox over the weekend and that means the next week or so will be a frenzy of updating my old superhero campaign notes and preparing for the resumption of the superhero game I’m playing with some friend on Thursday nights (temporarily on hold due to teaching commitments).

Yes, this is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever put on my blog, but it’s not like that should come as a surprise to anyone. I am, after all, a huge freakin’ nerd and roleplaying games where I get to create my own superhero universe from scratch are my kryptonite.

If you need me, odds are I’ll be over in the corner of my office, giggling to myself while I try to figure out how many ranks of fighting and agility guys named Shadow Boxer and Archon should have while Justice League: Umlimited is on the television in the background.

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I found todays post on unemployment and the creation of a perpetual youth underclass on Tiger Beatdown kind of fascinating, especially since it touches on the same issues that were brought up by an Alain de Botton talk that I saw on (I think) TED some time last year.

The gist of Botton’s talk went something like this: the idea of living in a meritocracy is actually kind of terrifying, because if you’re being rewarded for your hard work and achievements, what does that mean when you fail? The shadowy side of a merit-driven culture is that those people on the bottom have only got themselves to blame.

I gather the ideas are explored in further depth in his book , which I’m probably going to unearth from my to-read pile now that I’ve been reminded of its existence.

It’s never really been a secret that these kinds of issues were going to become a problem, culturally speaking. Graying populations, massive changes in the marketplace, the class divides growing wider and wider – this things have been occurring for the better part of my lifetime and the solutions proposed have been stop-gap at best.

For all that SF have moved away from its tropes, these kinds of issues suggest it’s still a cyberpunk kind of future we’re facing.

Naturally, the walking went away after I acquired my first car, even if the mental image of myself as a guy who walked didn’t. And about a year after driving everywhere I walked fifteen minutes to the shops down the street and it utterly wiped me out. I found myself huffing and puffing my way home, two liters of milk tucked under my arm, wondering what the fuck, exactly, had happened.

Because I am not terribly smart, this kind of thing happened a couple of dozen times before I made the connection. I no longer walked, and thus I was no longer a walker. Being surprised that walking now took considerable effort was kind of idiotic.

I write five thousand words over the weekend. I was utterly exhausted when I finally hit the end of the story on Sunday night. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but it seems it’s this time where I’ve finally made the connection. Two and a half thousand words a day used to be an average, not something to strive for.

So I’m no longer a guy who writes a lot either. Which shouldn’t been a surprise, because there’s been many excuses not to write over the last year, and I’ve taken almost all of them, but it still came as a surprise.

Writing a lot, incidentally, means far more to me than walking ever did.

So it appears my creative muscles have atrophied considerably. If you need me, I’ll be over here, having a startling revelation that shocks me to the core of my sense of self. After that I’ll be planning the writing equivalent of going to the gym.

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According to SF Signal my short story, Say Zucchini, and Mean It, should be sent out to DailySF subscribers  on May 17th. I mention this because subscription is free and gets you all sorts of interesting stories sent to you via email every weekday, which seems a far better way of procrastinating at work than spending yet another hour on facebook.

I’m also pretty sure that Say Zucchini, and Mean It will be my last non-Flotsam story for a while. There’s nothing else waiting to be published, nothing else doing the rounds of submission, and I’m not writing any new short fiction until Flotsam is done with.

And, sure, every time I said something like this in the past, I immediately go into a mad panic and write a bunch of stories to try and correct the situation, but it’s entirely possible that this time I mean it. I have a dayjob now. More than one. I can eat without selling short fiction, and so it’s entirely possible I’m slowing down

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Lest this be entirely bogged down in mournful observation, allow me to say this: we played our weekly session of Deadlands early this weekend, and it was awesome. I make no secret of the fact that I adore my Deadland’s peeps and the campaign we’re currently playing has been a cracker, so much so that it’s successfully transitioned the regular Sunday night game into Deadland’s night rather than C’thulhu night when I put it into my calendar.

Finally, after many months, we hit the scenes I’d identified as the mid-point of the campaign, which is probably best identified as “Aliens in the Old West, if the Xenomorphs wore cow skins as a disguise.”

Afterwards we feasted on roasted pork, courtesy of our hosts.

And really, when your weekend includes good company and good food and a horror-western filled with cattle mutilation, life is pretty good.

I do, however, have several pages of notes I put together in preparation for the panel I didn’t make it too, and since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I figured I’d torture the rest of you with a more formalized write-up of the argument I would have made. Turns out I had rather a lot of material once I started writing things up, so it’s probably going to happen in three or four posts over the next couple of days. Consider yourselves warned.

Emotion, Attachment, and Video Games
Part One: The Confession of a Computer Game Tragic

I live in fear of computer games. I am, at my core, one of those gamers – the kind who lacks the self-control to say ‘now is the time to walk away.’ Once the game is started, I have about half an hour to turn it off and get back to my real life; beyond that, I’ve committed. I want to figure out how to win, or how it ends, or even what the next cut scene might be, and then it’s three days later and I haven’t slept and I’ve burned through the bulk of my sick leave in an attempt to try and stop the dark spawn from taking over Ferelden. The game itself doesn’t seem to matter – I can spend three days trying to figure out how to beat an online flash game like Dice Wars or take my promotion to the top in my favourite wrestling sim just as easily as I’ll get sucked into high-profile, gaming wonders with state-of-the-art CGI and thousands upon thousands hours spent in development.

My only defence against this obsessive impulse seems to be refusing to play in the first place, so for the last seven or eight years I’ve refused to let computer games into my house. Mostly this is pretty easy, because I control the technology around me. My computers are low-budget machines, utterly incapable of running state of the art games; I’ve refused to own a gaming consol since I picked up an original NES system at an op-shop in my twenties and lost six weeks to beating the original Super Mario Brothers games; my despair when I upgraded my mobile phone and it came with computer games was considerable, but I found the resolve to delete the ones I liked and now play the ones I don’t when stuck in an airport.

Yet despite my best effort, technology creeps forward. Computers die and get replaced, and suddenly all those games I would have played a few years back if the technology had been up to it are available to me. And occasionally I’ll slip. I’ll break out the copy of Blood Bowl, which I justified as an online game that has a set time-limit to prevent me from going overboard, or I’ll fire up my favourite wrestling sim, which is by nature unbeatable and therefore unlikely to set off my need to achieve.

These are, of course, convenient lies I tell myself because I can’t quite kick the computer game habit, but at least I’ve grown familiar with the cycle of playing both games over the last few years. After a day, maybe two, I’ll realise that my promise that I’m just firing it up for an hour or so is shot and pull myself to a halt.

It would be easier if my friends gave up gaming as well, but they don’t. People will rave at me about their new favourites from time to time, rattling off the cool features, and I’ll find myself tempted. Very occasionally I’ll break and ask to borrow their copy, and I now thank the digital gods that most people now have Steam accounts and aren’t in a position to loan me their actual discs. With the delivery of games via disc becoming outmoded, I am safer from computer games than ever before.

Except when the games are cool enough that people really want to make sure they never lose their copy to hard-drive failure or power surges. Apparently there are still some games worth picking up, old school-like, and thus remain available for being left out. Which is how, six months ago, I found myself playing Dragon Age: Origins. Before I began, I was told three things: play it all the way through, once; play all the introductory stories; be prepared to spend the majority of your time talking to people in the camping site.

While I never managed to reach the end of the game – it’s crack-like qualities were sufficient that after the first week of playing I gave the discs back and asked that it never be leant to me again, for fear I’d stop writing altogether – I did play several of the introductions and the camp proved to be the most fascinating part of the game-play. I also know how it ends – my frustration with the gameplay interrupting the narrative led me to checking out walkthroughs and cheat-sheets, which ultimately led to me shrugging and realising that I was less interested in the game as a game once I knew all the alternative storylines.

This is not the first time this has happened. Many years ago, back before I realised me and computer games didn’t really mix, I started playing Starcraft. My interest in the game ended the moment a friend said “you know, I have this DVD full of cut scenes”, whereupon I promptly watched the story without the game and went on with my life.

Here’s the brutal truth of my relationship with computer games: I’m interested in their narratives, but can’t engage with the narrative because of the game play. As soon as you establish conditions of victory or submission, I’m hardwired to try and win. This, more than anything else, kills my interest in the game the moment it becomes apparent that victory will take days or weeks to achieve.

Computer games aren’t stories, and in this respect their attempts to manipulate emotions always feels like a bit of a cheat.

To be continued…

Often, when my weekends are quiet and sedate, I feel like I’m letting the side down and I find myself thinking, “man, I wish I had a crazy-busy weekend, you know?” Then the crazy-busy-weekend comes along and I go along with the flow and then Monday comes and I wake blinking like a stoned raccoon wondering why I’m so tired.

I need coffee. I need to catch up on the writing that didn’t get done. And I really do need to schedule some more crazy-busy weekends in the near future.

The weekend itself is kind of squished together, a little, in my head. Things bleed into each other.

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Okay,  I guess the first thing is that I’ve been shortlisted for some Ditmar Awards this year, in both the Short Story category for One Saturday Night, With Angle, and the novella category for Bleed.  I found this out while having Breakfast with some friends on Sunday morning, largely ’cause I’d been light on the internets over the weekend, and on the whole it was a rather pleasant surprise.

So thanks to all the people who nominated me, and congratulations to the various other people who have been shortlisted. The full Ditmar short list can be found on the Natcon Fifty website and it’s a frickin’ awesome list this year.

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On Saturday night I sat down to watch the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD for the first time, which was basically as entertaining as I’d expected it to be after catching bits and pieces on youtube. Except for this one stretch which was profoundly uncomfortable, which is largely when a young queer member of the audience brings up Chasing Amy and how it contributed to a culture that made her life difficult as a younger woman.

The response is uncomfortable to watch. This is not to say that Smith doesn’t have some good points (Does no-one ever notice that the character who says “All lesbians really need is a good, deep dicking” is the idiot who is wrong about everything throughout the movie) and some that are straight off the back of the white male privileged bingo card (my brother is gay) and at least one that explains why he at least attempted the film that’s interesting (I once had a conversation with my brother about the fact he isn’t represented in narrative, and I try to change that).

But mostly  it’s just uncomfortable because there’s no real attempt to engage with the question before bulldozing through the answer. It’s one of those real I-had-good-intentions style responses that argues that good intentions excuse the faults.

And really, when you’re a geek, there are times when that does actually count as a victory, ’cause there are portions of geekdom that are scarily entrenched in their white-male-privilege and don’t want to let it go.

Which is why, a few hours later, I was really, really happy when a friend sent me the link to Bioware telling a white-straight-male to Get Over It when he complained about the possibility of female and queer relationships being given equal weight in Dragon Age 2.

There are exactly three computer games I’ve bothered to play for longer than 2 hours in the last six years: Total Extreme Wrestling, Blood Bowl Online, and the first Dragon Age. The mindset exhibited by Bioware above is one of the reasons why I got sucked into DA Origins for as long as I did. I’d talked myself out of Dragon Age 2, not because I don’t expect it to be awesome, but because it’s likely to be narrative crack that ’causes me to stop writing and lose my job.

That one response, linked to above, is probably going to change my mind.

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Okay, what else.

Saturday afternoon I did errands. I bought new jeans for the first time in about five or six years (which is one of those facts that’s readily apparent if you’ve seen the current state of my jeans, most of which have holes in them somewhere). In fact, since they were on sale, I bought a whole lot of jeans, which will cost even more to have hemmed (since I am not-so-handy with a needle and thread and thus happily pay professionals) than I did for the jeans themselves.

I bought some books at proper bookstores – Burn Bright, by Marianne de Pierres; Heist Society, by Ally Carter – then I went to my local Borders and watched the gleeful gutting of the stock by people who were all omg-the-bargins. It made me kinda sad, because I really liked my local Borders despite it’s flaws, and it made me feel sorry for the various people who worked there.

I still remember when they first opened the Borders at my preferred shopping center, and how awesome it was to be able to shop for books I actually read before picking up my weekly groceries.

I’ve already burned through Heist Society, which is just as awesome as Tansy Rayner Roberts promised it would be when she reviewed it on her blog. I would have burned through Burn Bright already, but this copy is a gift.

Sunday I went to Avid Reader and bought more books – the Collected Stories of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (so I can read it at the same time as my dad), Motherless Brooklyn, and Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan.

There is something blissful about acquiring new fiction. Which probably explains my out of control To Be Read pile that’s taking up two bookcases at present.

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On Sunday afternoon I gamed with my Sunday Night Cthulhu group.

We’ve missed a bunch of games recently – due to illness, travel for work, celebrating the birth of one member’s son, etc – so there was something very comforting about slipping back into the Sunday Night Cthulhu routine, even though we’re not actually playing Call of Cthulhu at present.

One of the realities of being a RPG gamer in your thirties (and older) is that weekly gamers are supposed to be impossible, but at this point we’ve been gaming every Sunday for so long that it barely even registers as something as something remarkable. I can’t even remember when we started, although I’m sure it was prior to the first Gen Con Oz and a quick perusal of the blog sees things like “we kicking off the weekly Cthulu sessions after the xmas break” appearing in February of 2008.

Which means we’ve been going for about four years, I think. We’ve lost a player in that time, and recently gained a new one, but for the most part a  core group of four people has been there the entire time.

We played Cthulhu pretty much eclusivly for the first two or three years, hence the fact that Sunday is permanently branded as Cthulhu night despite the fact that we’ve slowly added more systems to the mix (Space 1889 for a while, currently Classic Deadlands which is proving to be 9 kinds of awesome).

Last night’s game, though. Man, it kinda reminds me why I enjoy gaming, you know? Undead revenants kicking the crap out of solitary gunslingers who got caught unawares; the entire team getting caught in a firefight against desperado’s who have the advantage of cover upon the ridge; a mad scientist coming to realize his blueprints are haunted because things keep changing while he’s asleep; the same mad scientist unleashing his flame-thrower for the first time, going a little crazy as he does so.

There is nothing quite so awesome as knowing I get to game with these folks every week, especially since we’re largely in agreement as to the kind of game we want to play.

Awesome Things about 2009 (1/15): Pathfinder RPG

Stick with me on this one, because there’s a lot of introspection involved in it making the list.

Okay, to start with, this is probably important to know: I’m a big ol’ geek and Roleplaying Games have been a part of my life for about two decades now. That said, there’s only really been three game releases over the last decade that I’ve actually been so excited about that I’ve actually tracked the development and promotional material (that’d be Dungeons and Dragons 3E, Mutants and Masterminds 2E, and Pathfinder). There was something really nice about being able to get in contact with my inner game-geek and anticipate for the first half of the year. Pathfinder had me excited about gaming in a way that 4E didn’t, right down to the point where I briefly managed to get a group together and run a few sessions. Over the years I’ve turned into a stoic grump, so experiencing any of the child-like joy that comes from anticipating things is a rare enough commodity that it’s worth celebrating. Outside of the aforementioned gaming products and the occasional fiction book, I think the last thing I really anticipated can be summed up as “the first season of New Who.”

Then, around the middle of the year, Pathfinder arrived (just in time for Gen Con Oz, yet, but that’ll get its own entry). And it was every bit as awesome as I’d been hoping. I then, promptly, didn’t run a damn thing using the rules.

This was extraordinarily weird for me. While I had my brief flurry of activity leading up to the games release, running a few sessions with the playtest rules, the actual final release will probably be one of the first gaming rule-sets I’ve learned as a player rather than a GM*. In this respect Pathfinder represents something of a shift in the relationship between me and gaming – there’s been a couple of times this year where I’ve stepped back and thought “man, I’m just not gaming as much as I used too,” but the truth is that I’m still involved in as many RPGs as I used to be (about three regular games) and I’ve added a weekly session of Bloodbowl on top. The difference is that I’m not longer running games, and for about fifteen years writing campaign notes and preparing adventures was what I did with my free time.

Not that I didn’t run anything this year – I started the year running CSI Arkham for the Call of Cthulhu peeps – but trust me when I say this was less prep time and just plain *less* GMing than I’ve done in a long while. It stole tiny little fragments of time, rather than the extended hour or so I’d used to spend fine-tuning a session and creating monster stats. Running a roleplaying campaign used to be one of those activities that defined my days, now they tend to be defined by writing instead**.

Still, Pathfinder promised me awesome, and Pathfinder delivered. And even if I don’t get a chance to run it, I’ll still be using the rules to kick evil’s arse, Cleric-Style, in my friend Adam’s campaign.

*Okay, yes, so it’s not entirely apt, given that I ran the d20 version of DnD that forms the basis of Pathfinder, not to mention releasing a bunch of d20 products using the system, but trust me when I say there’s enough differences between the two to make relearning the game as a player a delight. Hell, trust me when I say learning the game *entirely* as a player makes for a great change of pace.

**Not that any of this should be read as “Peter doesn’t want to run Pathfinder.” In an ideal world, I’d totally dig running through one of the pre-written adventure campaigns I’ve got lying around, but finding four or five people able to commit to a regular game gets rarer and rarer as you get older and most of the players I know have already got their regular sessions spoken for***.  

***Besides which, if I could find four players who wanted a regular game, odds are I’d still try and pitch a Mutants and Masterminds game first. ‘Cause there is an awful lot of Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque fantasy being played at the moment.

Chris Slee has just posted his summary of the last four sessions of my CSI: Arkham campaign over on his site, which serves as a pretty good summary of “what I did with my weekend” really.

My inner geek is so damn happy with this campaign, it has to be said. Especially last night’s session. The post-title is stolen from Chris’s write-up; probably a far better summary of the game of anything I can come up with and, since I remain too lazy to do proper write-ups of my sessions these days, I’m just going to point you over there if you have an interest in such things (much as I did for session one).