I woke up this morning, physically worse than I went to bed. Nose is clogged up and running, my head is aching and I had to get up twice during the night to take care of the baby so I had a distrubed sleep. But at the back of my mind, I was working through some system-design aspects of Lost Heroes RPG, unrelated to the writing I finished last night. I was getting thoughts and ideas and spent much of my work morning, writing up notes, when I should have been coding.

I finished V for Vandetta last week for the first time. (Not as good as Watchman, but still excellent. I’m spooked by the futuristic vision of Britian that the English government are so deseperatly trying to make happen… like this “for your own protection”). There was an article at the back of the graphic novel by Alan Moore about his creative process for V for Vandetta and he described the experince of knowing that you have something but you need to get at it and work it to get there. Waking up with those thoughts about the system design of Lost Heroes RPG was exactly that, my subconsiousness saying, “hey, you got something here so get off your arse and finished it.” It’s not mind-blowing and my subconsiousness failed to convince that I have something amazing, but at least I’m going to keep working on it.

It seems to be a slow process and the current volume seems gigantic compared to previous revisions. Maybe I should start putting pieces of it up as I go though I had hoped to get someone to read over it before I put it online. The website is certainly sitting there, waiting to be setup.

Some thoughts about it though have pushed me to consider releasing it as an indie or even free project.

I foresaw two major problems to producing a decent quality RPG:

1. Lack of decent tool for layout (I don’t have thousands to spend on some Adobe product)
2. Artwork

First I find Scribus; an open-source Desktop Publishing Tool. Quite complicated and a bit of learning curve, but free. Along with OpenOffice and the Gimp, all the software is there.

For the second, while I can draw, I can’t draw to a professional or high quality level. But then I came across a blog post on design and found numerous photo and illustration sites, where you can buy artwork for use in your projects: sotck.xchng, istockphoto and veer.com (and there is always flickr). Just a quick browse I found pieces I could use. They aren’t on point but would do. If I add my own skill I’m sure I could generate some pieces based on what I found.

So yea it’s actually doable, I mused. (There is actually another issue but I’ll talk about those at the end.)

Then I catch this post from Fred Hicks in my newsreader about actually not publishing and doing your RPG for free. Did Fred Hicks read my mind? Probably not I thought but his advice hit the point. I had considered putting aside a small budget for the project, just enough that I don’t care about making any back. I also read the posts/blogs he linked to in that post. Both were completely relevant to my train of thinking. For me, getting something published was more about a personal milestone or goal than gaining audience or making money (both would be nice but not crucial).

I’m still not convinced but it’s not that important. I still have to do the new version of LH first before I actually need to decide. The content comes first before all that fancy stuff.

I’m certainly not averse to doing it for free. Just take a look at TDOMF my plugin for Wordpress. I’m making a small amount of money on it, not enough to write home about, but it’s a nice feedback. I get bug reports and feature requests every week and I try to respond to all. But that leads me to my last issue that turn me off giving an RPG away for free. With TDOMF, I’m releasing into an existing community who will use it. I have, therefore, an extended “play-testing” user-base that will tell me concisely what’s wrong with it how it works. They are also willing to download upgrades and keep up to date. Releasing a free RPG, there is no community there to release to. It’s a discussion that’s floated around the Irish gaming community for a while. Releasing into a vacuum is the same as copying a file to /dev/null. It goes nowhere and is pointless. Of course, maybe I’m just ignorant of a community out there that would be interested (please inform me!). I’m also acutely aware of the “pluggers”, people who register and logon to forums expecting people to be interested in your project but have no “credibility”. This is something I don’t want to do. I did it for the Irish Gaming Wiki and got slammed down many times. I don’t want to spend time promoting myself and playing the “status game” either. I mentioned in my previous post my “narrow creative bandwidth” and part of that would have to be spent on doing that and everything else would suffer. I’m also aware that the success of free media (RPG being a specific type of media) is dependant on luck and popularity.

Maybe I’ve gotta wait till the Internet starts shouting at me, before I really listen…

I remember a sad incident from my childhood - while I was in primary school, I wrote a “ghost story”. I took several middle pages from a copy book and taped them together to form a little book. On the last page I had done up this elaborate skeleton drawing and the story was pretty much written around the drawing. Now you can imagine the effort a six year old puts into something like this. I had it my school bag, proud as punch. But after the lunch break, I found that some of the other boys had taken it out, drawn all over it and destroying it in the most mocking way they could. They were waiting for me to find it at which point they started to tease me about it, making fun of my writing.

It’s amazing that I can still conjure that memory when I think about the idea of allowing others in. These days I’m a professional software engineer, working on a good team. I have no problem collaborating and sharing ideas about the project. But when I talk about my personal hobby projects, like TDOMF or LH, I don’t talk. They are mine and I don’t share. I don’t think it’s just a childhood memory that stops me. I think it’s a number of personal reasons. First is self-confidence, opening up a piece of work for others to collaborate in, requires that others want to collaborate with you (anyone remember the GCG website?). The second is, I haven’t met or found anyone online or otherwise I would want to share my projects with. And lastly, they are hobby projects. I’m doing them for myself, at my own pace and for the simple pleasure of working on something. Bringing others into it, means delgating, sharing responsibilities, planning… bleurg!

But also, part of the issue for me, is the mental or artistic ownership of the project. I have a “vision” of what I want and I work towards that. The vision may change or move around but I’m always fairly clear on what I want (which may end up being different to what others want). The best way to express that vision to others (so they know what I want) is to bring it about myself, trying to explain it will lead to miscomunication. It’s certainly the case for TDOMF (which is easier to talk about as it’s software). I want to have certainly features implemented and certain polish to it before I give it a version 1.0. Once it hits there, I may consider looking for help with it. The same goes for LH, my Fudge roleplaying project. I have a vision of what I want and until I get close enough to it, I’m not particularly enamoured of inviting others to help me. Take my Reboot RPG, hopefully it’ll appear in a little while as a PDF. I don’t think I’d mind if others expanded or radically changed it after that.

Yet, COG is another Fudge roleplaying project of mine and the vision I had for that is sort of distributed or modular in a way. I have several ideas and components and I want to make a coherent game out of it. I don’t think I’d have too much of a problem exposing it to others and even trying to do something with it (if people liked what they saw). Maybe that’s the trick to it, to share a distributed vision with a group of people who you respect and work towards it. The only obstacle is, I haven’t met a whole lot of people that I respect in a sense that I would work well with them (or vice versa). (I now think of the small disaster Specky went through).

My own friends who I roleplay with have all done their own pet RPG projects. For one, Dark Obsidian, I submitted some fiction to but I didn’t collaborate with the author on it. My friends all have different tastes, particularly in roleplaying. That’s why we play well together but probably unlikely to work well together because we wouldn’t get over some of the fundamentals of game design.

My other hobbies, drawing and writing really are very much single-person activities except when you want to show them off. Maybe that’s it, I’m closet perfectionist - I don’t want to share my projects until they are perfect (close to my initial vision)!

This is a warning, not a saying:

“To know your destiny is to destroy yourself. It is better to live in ignorance and love, for the world is fated to be destroyed by destiny.”

I was at the gym and I started musing on a story in my head. The gym is one place I do a lot of thinking and imagining while I work out. I played the whole story out, right up to the end. It was a fully concieved story, several main characters, background, mythos and a plot. Then those words appeared. I could see them as the last lines to the novel. I don’t know exactly what prompted it as I normally envision stories in my mind’s eye like movies, not text in a novel. The story I was imagining was certainly about destiny, how once you accept it, it consumes you totally but if you try and fight it or ignore it it will also destroy you. Destiny and fate being something much larger than the small lives of men, their hopes and fears.

I tried to analysed my thought processes that lead to it and I know, in part, the text is actually a warning against religious zealousness, though the story had little of that.

trawl through hours of quite-good just for the big reveal at the end

(I know it’s nearly month ago, but I’m only catching up on some posts now).

Of course, she’s talking about Harry Potter, a series I’ve yet to go near. I thought I was just being peculiar in my book-buying habits but there is part of me that, in general, distrusts certain types of series. I’m not just talking about novels, but roleplaying books, TV shows and movies.

I’ve always been more engaged by a short concise format for a series then a never-ending or over-long one: a definitive beginning and a definitive end with in a short enough time frame, such as the recent The Lost Room (TV).

I tried to grasp what it was that makes me distrusts such series by performing this thought exercise and formulating it into a sort of rule or law:

The longer a series continues, the probability of disappointment reaches zero.

This is true. The longer something goes on, the greater the chance that I’ll find something I don’t like about it. Nothing’s perfect. But this isn’t what I’m after. A series can dip and come back stronger. No there is something else. So I started thinking about the various series I’ve loved and hated: The Matrix movies, all six Star Wars movies, Lost (TV), X-Files (TV), World of Darkness (RPGs), Discworld (Novels), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) etc. All these series I eventually turned my back on them or they left a bitter taste in my mouth. They all had a certain strong addictive quality, a fanboy-ism and hype that seemed to throw me eventually off them… many were based on “the big mystery”, like Lost and X-Files. Others had a evolving and alluring mythos, such as World of Darkness and Star Wars. It might have been the tired formula and decreasing impact of the “hit” that turned me. They are like a drug where each “hit” has less and less high which has the knock-on effect of increasing the demand/addiction for more, which further gives the appearance of the series getting worse.

As a series, with a high addictive quota, continues, the apparent quality of the series will decrease.

Where “addictive quota” is generally anything fanboy-inducing, be it a rich setting, a big unanswered mystery/conspiracy, a never-reaching but alluring climax, etc. essentially a element that keeps you coming back for more, whats going to happen next, kind of thing. But this isn’t necessarily correct either. A series can maintain “apparent quality” even with a big mystery. For example the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Star Trek Next Gen. I nearly considered Farscape in that list but that got canned so perhaps the quality didn’t decrease to a level that turned me off.

Of course, what I mean by ”apparent quality” is subjective viewer experience of the series. The quality of the series could be consistent through, but from a user experince of it and the decreasing power of the hit, the subjective quality decreases. However in my experience, the quality objectively seems to suffer a bit.

Anyway lets try to rewrite the rule:

As a series, with a high addictive quota, continues with no fundamental change in premise, the apparent quality of the series will decrease.

H.P. Lovecraft didn’t write a series with the same set of characters. Each short story stood on it’s own, yet each shared a similar formula. In a similar vein, Star Trek Next Gen comprised of lots of short stories (of course nostalgia could be playing it’s part here and making me look back with rose-tinted glasses). Stargate have regularly changed the major antagonist and so by fundamentally changed their premise. However, in the case of Stargate for me, I never got into it so I would have never noticed the quality dipping.

So, the trick, it would seem, is to have a big enough dramatic change or end of story before the “apparent quality” of the series decreases. In the case of Lost it might mean actually revealing something concrete. For World of Darkness… they simply waited too long, for me as a viewer of the series, before changing their formula and ending their big-mystery-story. There is a danger that it’s only the addictive quality that has you watching and if you stop watching, the addiction fades away and the subjective lack of quality is all that is left.

Sure some people have a greater tolerance before the quality decreases which means they are more willing to wait till that big change or the end arrives. Most normal people’s tolerance is not high. My wife got bored of Lost within the first episode of the second series. It took me at least 4 episodes or so. Even when I tuned in to the finale of series two, I found, nothing seemed to have changed! I’ve heard people saying the latest season or finale is brilliant and well worth it, but my subjective view of the quality of show is so low now I can barely work up the interest to switch it on. And of course, in the case of TV, people often start watching later in the series and so their tolerance takes them further than someone who started from the beginning. I think also, as a child and teenager, my tolerance was much much higher or perhaps the impact of each hit was greater so it took longer before I noticed the series going bad.

If I had the time I’d draw a graph, where you have a viewer’s subjective quality and their level of ‘hit’ and as the level of hit dips and goes below quality, quality decreases. Once that happens, if you stop the addiction, a viewer lose interest.

All these does explain why I have developed a general distrust of majorly hyped series such as Harry Potter and why I avoid them, I think. I could be simply spouting nonsense too!

So what does this mean for a ”good” series?

Well simply, a series must change. It can’t depend on the big mystery or that one bad guy to keep it going so long. It has to regularly dramatically change. Well you can, if you get the right audience I think, but you have to be careful then.  If you fail to provide a big enough hit later, some of the audience may find themselves wondering what they thought was great about the series in the first place.

So I wonder… would the Prisoner have been a cult hit if it hadn’t been canned?

(Small side note, I don’t think this affects actual roleplaying chronicles or games. When you play an RPG, I think, the hit is so different, self-generated if you will and so it can maintain the same level as long as the players don’t get too jaded.)

I work and I’m parent. That pretty much sums me up today. Add on top of that that we’ve moved into a new house in the last two to three months.

What this means is that, we’re managing. At home we’re slowly getting rid of the moving boxes. By and by we’ve hired two skips so far, once for the new bathroom and then a bigger one for the new kitchen. But, it looks like we’ll have to hire another one to get rid of all the empty cardboard boxes (and other junk we’ve accumulated in the move)! One room is just boxes at the moment; our other spare room is just a dump for the old carpet. Even our living room is a mess of books in bags waiting to be put on shelves that will appear, soon, on a wall, somewhere in the house.

This all meant that I have no where to code, draw or meditate. What’s worse, I didn’t feel inclined to do any. I could always just clear stuff off the table and start drawing or sit down for a few hours in the living room with my laptop and headphones or even just close the door in the bedroom and take 30 minutes… however it dawned on me that the lack of a workspace was an obstacle to actually pursuing my hobbies outside the priorities of my life. It isn’t the only obstacle however.

Of course, being an engineer, once you understand a problem you can often solve it. So why haven’t I starting coding TDO Mini Forms v0.3 yet or got dug into maps for Reboot (see here and here)?

A workspace is a meant to be physical thing, a space separate from every day life. Somewhere private. But essentially it is just a tool. Required but you don’t necessarily need a private room (unless there are practical considerations such as space to store equipment etc.).

I could easily grab my laptop and start writing (or coding) anywhere! No it is also a mental thing. A workspace allows you separate your life and what you’re about to work on. It simply helps set you up for work. When I was training Shotokan, you would enter class, bow, take your place and start training. You would leave work behind. The workplace simply aids in giving you head-space.

And that is what I am really missing. Head-space. My free-time gets filled up with all things that-must-be-done-now. When I try and make space for me, I just zone out. Tired. Sophie, my wife, gets pretty tired these days, which is understandable, so I end up taking on a little more. My head-space is actually just vegging out in front of the TV, playing my Nintendo DS or Unreal Tournament 2004 on the PC. None require any real particpation on my part. Sure I could write in this period, but it isn’t just a case of my body being unwilling, it is also my mind. I need to feel I can and able to do it, not be dragged down by lethargy.

Which also means it’s a little hard to really chill-out because part of me goes… “you know, you should really finish of that piece, get it done” (where piece is a flat-pack piece of furniture or a piece of code for Wordpress plugin).

I could meditate, but I’d probably just fall asleep!

Anyway, all these to conclude that an abstract or true workspace is also one of time and mood, not just some physical space.

I’ve recently setup Pligg for Redbrick. It’s only available to Redbrick users and you can only login with your Redbrick user name and password, thanks to the power of PubCookie. I only did this as a demo. I wanted Pligg for something else, but a few people have started using it.

Anyway, because of that some users had suggested Redbrick’s services are not very well integrated. There all little distinct bits and bobs, not really connected or talking to each other. i.e. There not “Web 2.0″. Now I think “Web 2.0″ is one of those bullshit phrases, however, the idea of integrated services much like MySpace is an interesting idea and I started thinking, a thought-exercise if you will. Here is how I would see Redbrick becoming “Web 2.0″…

BTW Any software I suggest is only because I’m familiar and have in some capacity setup, hacked or modified. I’m not saying they are the best in class, only that I know what can and can’t be done with them.

Backwards Compatibility

Forget it. The first thing to do is, get rid of the newsgroups. Why? Well any new service setup has to integrate with the newsgroups or worse… synchronise in some fashion. This is never well done and discourages use of the new service as people revert back to what works. Also, because it’s a set of newsgroups, readable via only an archaic text browser, it’s impossible to take advantage of the many new web-based applications (like Pligg) and integrate them to give a complete feel. You can’t extend newsgroups with new features!

Also our newsgroups do not archive and do allow us to reference a post in other software. A big pain if you want to integrate with something like Pligg and allow people to submit their “posts” for voting, for example. (On the flip-side it means there is nothing to save making it easier to ditch).

Then there are the inevitable comparisons. “This software sucks because it doesn’t do XYZ feature in SLRN”. I’ve heard arguments in the past in a different community on a mailing list from people who stubbornly didn’t want to have a web forum, cries of “splitting the community!” and that email is so much better than using a web interface. Do you see me shedding any tears? And there is also the social aspect to consider, people use it because they know it and everyone else is using it. Until the majority stop using it, the majority won’t move.

I’ll come to “hey” in a minute…

I’d like to point out that I’m not advocating that Redbrick does this, only that this is probably what is needed to “move forward” into Web2.0. I don’t think Redbrick would need to get rid of all its technical
services like shell access, user webspace, vhosting, etc. to do this either. Both can easily live side by side.

Now that we can start with a clean slate, what should Redbrick 2.0 do?

Now What?

The boards formed the social centre point for the users of Redbrick software. So to replace the newsgroups, we need a web forum. One that’s extendable, hackable and just plain cool. My personal preference is for Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com) which is a very nice looking piece of software and is certainly not like phpBB. We need to be able to easily extend the software and I’ve played with Vanilla and it’s quite easy to extend. It’s built on adding “extensions” and has extensions for RSS feeds, permalinks, signatures, bookmarked discussions, blocking categories, threads and users, etc. I haven’t tried integrating it with Vanilla but I’m pretty confident it can be done.

BTW It does have a spell checker plugin. This uses GoogleSpell, however it won’t work on Redbrick because it won’t work through the proxy with https. We’ll need to get curl installed on PHP to do it.

Now we can start integrating the other services. Let’s start with Pligg. To integrate with the Vanilla forum, we need to make a “virtual” category that actually submits a story to Pligg. A simple approach would be to create a theme for Pligg that matches the forum and then create an extension for Vanilla that shows Pligg has a category. Submission and voting would be still via Pligg.

With the Wiki, it depends on the level of integration we want. MediaWiki is a monster of a piece of software. Modifying the look and feel is a headache. The most basic integration would be that the “Talk Pages” actually go to discussions on the forum. This could be just redirection or something more integrated. I don’t particularly like the idea of importing Wiki entries from discussions posts or threads (or vice versa) but you could easily write an extension to autolink to Redbrick Wiki entries and there is a Wiki markup plugin available for Vanilla.

As for Planet… well Planet is good for the combined Redbrick Blogs feed. The best thing to do is have entries in Planet submitted as new stories to Pligg. The interesting ones get voted up and become “published”. It is questionable though if you want to provide users with web services like blogs, if they should be automatically submitted to Planet and Pligg or should it be an opt-in/out like service.

Chatting

“Hey”: the other corner stone of Redbrick. It’s great now that Redbrick has a Jabber server. Why do we need Hey? For the same reasons as the newsgroups, why do we need to have a Jabber to Hey service?

I think people would need to start using Jabber more, in fact exclusively. Jabber and some magic web coding could be the greatest replacement for Hey. Like Gmail, when you’re browsing the new Web2.0 Redbrick forum, signed in to Pligg or the Wiki, you could have a “chat” window popup when someone tries to talk to you. It would be nice that you can also use Jabber to “hey” someone who happens to be logged in using a shell.

As for IRC and chat services… well, em, I don’t really use them too much. I leave that up to someone else.

Tagging

“Tagging” stuff on Redbrick would be the big thing or the most challenging. Tags can be just superficial and give a nice visualisation/”tag cloud” of Redbrick or they can be useful like in Flickr where people use tags to group stuff.

You need some sort of API or service that would allow Redbrick users to freely add and remove tags from any forum thread, wiki page, pligg entry and possible from user’s webpages and blogs. I’m sure it can be done but it’d need some thought.

Making it look the same

I think this is a pretty major and important thing. If the services are integrated, they need to look the same. However this isn’t challenging. It’s just a lump of work that someone would have to do.

Frontpage or rather, bringing it all together

Yea. Redbrick Frontpage. If we’re going to have all these services really tightly integrated, the frontpage is the place to bring it together. This isn’t just “links” but rather a summary of the latest Wiki pages, new forum threads, published pliggs, etc. But that’s not all though, I mean if you’re like me, you’ll pick and choose the RSS feeds you want and never have to visit the Redbrick frontpage.

The frontpage has to encourage discussion, commentary, etc. In a sense, it should be more “blog” like. News should have comments and trackbacks so we know Redbrick bloggers are interested. It should have an RSS feed as basic! Podcasts and guest blog entries from Redbrick users. Rants from Associates, etc. Moderated by the current committee/admins. A sort of “best of Redbrick”, kind of place.

Conclusion

Why bother? Everything works well enough for us now.

I’ve started to write a novel.

It isn’t my first attempt at writing a novel. I have two sitting on my laptop’s hard-drive. One of my major difficulties with them was that I couldn’t get into re-working and re-writing them, something I’ve tried to train myself to do with LH.

My prose is pretty blunted these days. Because I’ve spent so much time writing non-fiction based stuff like COG and LH, my descriptions and wording is pretty rustic. I used to do, what I call, “mental doodles” (you can see a few of them on the frontpage of my main webpage). You just write what comes into your head, be it a rambling nonsense, a poem, a scene, a conversation, etc. I don’t do them at all these days. Instead I write blog entries or posts on forums and newsgroups. This has helped my non-fiction stuff alright, but not so much my fiction. However an element of novel writing is the long winding explanations of things that reveal elements of the characters and the world, so I’m hoping they’ll help me along.

But that’s not all of the challenges I must overcome, I prefer writing short stories, i.e. taking a single idea and turning it into a story. (You can see some of my efforts here). And there is a distinct difference in writing a novel compared to a short story, many writers can only do one well. I’ve read one or two Stephen King novels and thought… “This would be much better as a short story” and recently I read a collection of Robert Silverberg short stories from the 70s and while I found the writing excellent, the stories themselves were sort of… empty.

Writing novels is about character portraits: character-oriented prose. While writing a short story is about exploring a single idea or concept and leaving the audience with something. I’ve tried writing a script once and found myself struggling. A script, be it a play or a screenplay, is purely about characters, everything is character based. The plot is the character. It’s a strange graph, at the bottom you have short stories, which can have some character-based stuff, than novels, which are mostly character-based, and then on the top, plays that are entirely character-based.

Continuing along this train of thought, short stories are, well, short. They take one idea and present it in an entertaining way. In a sense, when I’m writing a short story, I’m writing towards a goal. Which makes it much easier to complete. However, writing a novel is not the same. Going back to the Robert Silverberg short stories I read recently. They were really well written and pulled you in as a reader, but ultimately empty. I finished it thinking, “What was the point of that short story?” Robert Silverberg is writing short stories as he would novels.

In a sense: it’s not the arriving that matters but the journey. That’s an idiom I’ve used myself but to be honest, I never truly followed. (Another saying: Knowing is not the same as believing). I’ve become quite goal-oriented as a way of driving myself forward. With short stories, I often have written the story before I put pen to paper (or turned on the laptop). I know what I want to happen, what should be in it, and I write it. I spend a lot of timing thinking about what I want the audience to read in that single short story. A novel, however, is not the same. It wanders, explores characters, sidetracks and comes back and even pulls together and breaks apart. Writing a novel is truly about the journey and not necessarily about an end. A novel can be good without a decent ending or even a point. Unlike a short story, which requires a point or decent ending for an audience to get.

So I have to learn to explore rather than race to the end. To do this, I’ve dropped any semblance of plotting at all. Instead I have images, characters and vague intentions. I don’t know exactly where I’m going, only that I’m heading somewhere. Bringing it back to roleplaying and gaming, my “cammy’s model v0.1” for running long-campaigns, seems to be applicable to novel writing, with a few noted exceptions. We don’t have complete adventures instead we have chapters and they do not have to have a distinctive beginning and ending. Elements can be characters, bits about the world, history, plot hooks, etc. So far I have a number of elements I plan to introduce, making for several chapters before I have to getting going if you know what I mean.

Sidetracking a bit here but I really really hate it when the second part of a novel has little or nothing to do with the first part. Or more specifically when the story changes utterly, to a different planet or world, with a complete new host of characters and won’t return to the first world until the end. It bugs me. Obviously, by the time I’ve gotten to this part of the novel, I’ve gotten involved with the characters and world presented. I’ve invested time… and now the rug has been pulled out from under me. Arg! (Same is true for roleplaying campaigns too).

So, going back to this journey stuff, I don’t have a goal for this novel. I don’t know if I’ll be trying to publish it or not. I want to enjoy writing it. The thing is, people buy and read novels. The market for short stories, afaik, seems to be in anthologies and collections. If you want to be a writer, it’s to novels you go. It’s weird, bringing up a point I made in earlier post about “gods”, what’s the point of gods if you don’t believe in them? Or to make it more applicable: what’s the point of writing a novel if you don’t intend to publish? Is there a point? The answer I guess is that it is irrelevant. It is the journey that counts.

With all this floating around in my head, I starting thinking about roleplaying and gaming and what the difference in short story and novel writing mean when viewed through the RPG lens. Briefly leaving aside the real gaming (as in winning-oriented) aspect, can we look at roleplaying in the same way? Most people I think would say that convention games and once-off games would be the equivalent of short stories, that long-running campaigns as novels (and LARPs as plays?). This is a rather shallow view IMHO. Short story would be more “goal-oriented” with characters changing somewhat in between. This does apply to most convention games I think and most roleplaying systems too. Indeed, all published campaigns I’ve seen or played are goal-oriented, taking the characters from point A to B. I, myself, am very much on this short story spectrum of stuff, preferring goal-oriented type systems and stories. I don’t have a problem discarding character histories/backgrounds and letting players become characters with the story and believing that adventures serve purposes. However, it would seem that most people (who are not real gamers) are more on the novel-character based spectrum. (Arggg… another thing to argue about!) All character. This kind of stuff doesn’t fit well into the once off/adventure based concepts. White Wolf’s WOD2.0 system tries to be character based (weather it works or not, I’ll leave up to your critical minds, dear reader) and demands you come up with fully-fledged character before play. In part I can see it but I think the approaches so far are flawed. Yea, character is important, but character cannot be forced nor can it be designed. It must be revealed, even in novels you may design your character beforehand, but the reader only sees what you reveal to them. If you spend hours creating characters but only a small fraction is made relevant to the story, that is all the character that is important. I guess I need to think more about this, perhaps in the future I’ll write an article about this when I have some more concrete conclusions.

I finished reading Ninjalicious’ “Access All Areas” over my holiday. It describes the hobby of Urban Exploration (UE). UE is exploring parts of a city that aren’t normally available to the public such as abandoned buildings and sewers. But this includes active building sites and employee only areas of buildings too.

It’s an interesting read but I’m afraid I’m not going to be taking the hobby up. The risks are too (be it an accident or getting caught). However it makes great reference about how to infiltrate these kind of places, how to deal with guards and employees etc. It’s great info for writing and gaming and it’ll sit there beside my copy of “A Guide to Committing Murder” and “Worst Case Scenarios”. There is a lot about the ethics of UE (Urban Exploration), which are also quite insightful.

There are few things in the book that made me start thinking. Many people say “oh yea, I used to that as a kid,” but they wouldn’t think of doing it as adult. Certainly as a kid myself, friends and I explored the mysterious sewers under the castle in Malahide park. Also, if you’re caught in while doing UE, teenagers will be more likely dismissed as being “bored teenagers” but adults will be looked on as very suspicious. We have such a strange view of being adults.

As a sport, something I would love to get into is Parkour (or Urban Freejumping I think it’s called in the states) you know “Jump London” and “Jump Britain” stuff. When I take Alice (my daughter) down to the playground, I see older kids trying to do things that the Parkour guys have turned into an art. But I can’t get over my inhibitions to play around with it and there isn’t any real group in Dublin. It’s another one of those things that you do as a kid but not as adult.

But, there is something I did as a kid (or at least as a teenager) that I do now: Gaming and Roleplaying. I’m on the verge of the big 30, yet I’m still playing and running games, even writing and thinking about them. I won’t be able to make a career out of it but I don’t see any reason to stop, unless it’s because of a lack of people to play games with.

For literally years, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with my web space. At the moment it’s a dump for anything I’d like to keep online or be able to reference online such as my weird and wacky writings, my pleasant amateur art and various pieces of software or code I’ve done. And thats enough for me, I think.

However, I was interested in blogging software before the word “blogging” became hip. I didn’t blog, I just used the software from GreyMatter to MovableType and now Wordpress (which now runs this site). So the question haunts me (only a little though)… why I don’t I really blog and who reads this anyway?

My posts are aggregated into Redbrick Planet (which means they get posted to Redbrick) and now they get cross-posted to my livejournal. However comments are few and often come from random web-surfers or those looking for support on my software. Occasionally comments can be found on the Redbrick boards (Redbrick Planet gets cross-posted to the boards) but not that often.

In my mind there is three (possible four) types that most blogs fit into. I’m not saying these are categories that all blogs can be fit into or are strict definitions. They are simply the way I think of blogs when I come across them.

There are the online diaries such as LiveJournal. Unless I know the person, I ignore theses. However I’ve posted several times about personal incidents good and bad. But I do this infrequently. I don’t want to share with the world my problems, I have family and friends to do that. I’m also not comfortable talking about things that might land me in trouble other people’s privacy or work-related stuff. More than one project I’ve done in work has been smothered in NDAs.

Then there are the journalistic type where articles about various topics are posted. If I’m interested in the topics, the writing is easy to read and the content is fairly frequent, great. I’ve written a few articles, mostly on roleplaying, but they are very infrequent and they are truely first drafts. They have the basic points but lack structure and decent prose. I just don’t have the time between family and work to really do proper essays and the research required for them. And like all ego-driven things, the response I get to what I have done is minimal if at all and this discourages me from really put more effort into it.

The last type is what I think of as the tracker or the journal. The blogger in question posts updates and news on various projects like this guy who has managed to swap his way from a paperclip to a house! I have various pet projects I’m working on such as two RPGs, writings and even my “astral projection” attempts. I could certainly write about those but then I’m taking time away from working on them. Also in part I’m rather private about them, I guess I’m little paranoid to be honest. I don’t wear my life choices on my sleeve and I don’t know who reads my blog. Guess that makes me seem a little boring. On top of that, my life-work balance sucks so updates would be even less frequent than they already are.

(There is another type, but is it really a blog? Software, art and other content put online via blog software, kinda like what I’ve done on my current webpage. I don’t really consider these blogs, though they may be part of a real blog. It just turns out that blog software are handy (if simplistic) content management systems too).

I guess a way to look at it is, if I trawl back through my archives, how much would I like to keep or promote on the site. And I’ve already decided that with my layout and categories. I guess I’ll still be haunted by the missing purpose of this space, but I won’t be loosing any sleep.

In an ironic way, this post is reflective of my blog’s current state. It has neither purpose or conclusion. I’ve even failed to really phrase the question.