The Gaming Outpost

  Quite a long time ago now I had an idea float through my head which I jotted down to form the basis of one of these articles.  I had been thinking about the fact that role playing games are a sort of niche hobby.  I am aware that there are said to be something on the order of ten to twelve million role playing gamers in the United States alone, but that number is inflated by the vast ranks of those who play the many computer and console simulations of the real face-to-face socially interactive role playing games that are the foundation of the hobby.  I also know that in Scandinavian countries Live Action Role Playing games have become the new club scene, gaining a legitimacy there which is unrivaled on this side of the pond; however, over here gamers will often hide their involvement due to the stigma attached to being one of those nerds who play games like Dungeons & Dragons™ or one of those Vampire goths.  The hobby is a niche, on the order of building model train layouts and collecting stamps and coins, something that attracts a sliver of the population at large, no matter how much those of us within this hobby think it should expand into the mainstream.

  Within that niche, however, we speak of games that appeal to a niche–a niche within a niche, a very small fraction of the population indeed.  The mainstay of the hobby is the fantasy role playing game, anchored in Tolkienesque images of a western European realm of elves, wizards, dwarfs, and other wondrous creatures on fabulous adventures in a world of strong good and stark evil.  Other games have found moderate success in appealing to settings and concepts which are not too far afield from this core, such as a mythic feudal Japan, Arthurian legend, Lovecraftian horror, and Vampire mythology.  Still others look for areas of overlap in our demographics.  That is, many nerds like role playing games, and many nerds like Star Wars and Star Trek, so a space opera game should be successful, particularly if it can get a license to use those trademarks.  Similarly, nerds such as us are big fans of superhero comic books, so superhero games should succeed with gamers, particularly if the D.C. or Marvel labels can be tagged to the outside.

  The hazard with such efforts, of course, is that they are generally trying to appeal to that small group of people who enjoy role playing games, and find within them a yet smaller group who like space opera, or superheroes, or spy stories, or westerns, or whatever the attraction happens to be.  Of course, the big question which must be overcome by those who design fantasy role playing games is why anyone would play this instead of D&D™.  That is a major obstacle to overcome when targeting a small market.  By creating a space game or a spy game or a ninja game you have a ready answer, evident from the setting.  However, most of the obvious alternate settings were claimed long ago, D&D™ and Legend of the Five Rings™ fighting over the Oriental adventures market, Top Secret™ going head to head with James Bond™ for the spy thrillers, Traveler™ and Star Frontiers™ staking claims on the space genre long before Star Wars™ and Star Trek™ appeared on the game scene, Gamma World™ trying to hold its own against Shadowrun™ and Twilight 2000™ in the post-apocalyptic field, and Boot Hill™ proving that westerns really are dead until Deadlands™ revived them by infusing them with the undead.  And without some serious advantage, forget about trying to reach the World of Darkness™ crowd, who are pretty well locked into Vampire:  the Masquerade™, breaking out only occasionally to try Werewolf:  the Apocalypse™, Wraith:  the Oblivion™, Mage:  the Ascension™, or one of the other rather formulaic X:  the Y games.

  Thus the independent game designer is constantly moving into more and more obscure areas, looking for that niche no one has exploited which will bring him fame and fortune.  Thus we get Big Eyes, Small Mouth™ to appeal to anime fans (although even here there is competition from a Sailor Moon™ game) and constant talk of modeling a game on every nuance of popular culture, such as attempting to base a game on Angel rather than Buffy.  Searching for a niche within a niche, designers aim for smaller and smaller slices of a well-contested pie.

  It may sound as if I think this wrong-headed.  That might be particularly suspected, given that as author of Multiverser™ I stand at the helm of a game which seemingly goes the opposite direction, attempting to claim the entire pie with a game which does everything well, or at least well enough.  I’ll plead innocent on that charge.  After all, given Multiverser’s™ interfacing rules, any niche game published becomes an expansion of the possibilities for it (since Multiverser™ player characters can become characters in other games).  Thus I would encourage game designers to create and promote worlds which do new and different things, because each of these becomes a new reason for people to play my game.  More seriously, I do invest some of my time into game theory and assisting others in their game design efforts, despite the fact that some view this as “helping the competition”.  I’m a supporter of such designs.  My interest in this article lies in what motivates these people to create games for which they cannot demonstrate any real commercial interest.

  As I was musing on this, it occurred to me that I could adduce a very similar example in an entirely different field.  My mind recalled two musicians who, it seemed to me, were targeting a niche within a niche:  James Vincent  and James Ward.  Both were known to me as artists in the field of Contemporary Christian Music; each had at some point come forward with a jazz style that was extremely atypical of such music.

  Ward I knew first.  It happens that he was an old friend of my cousin Peter, the two of them having gotten to know each other at a Christian summer camp in New York State.  Peter had one of Ward’s albums back when I was in high school, so when Ward came to my college with a band called Elan, I made a point of hearing them.  The music was avant-garde Jazz, an unusual style which had a very small following in the music world generally; the predominantly Christian audience at my school thinned markedly as the concert progressed.  Ward abandoned the effort, and by the time I was at the radio station he had revamped his career with the much more mainstream (for contemporary Christian music) Mourning to Dancing album.

  Vincent, by contrast, I first encountered through the radio station at which I was working when his album Enter In was released, billed as Jazz Fusion and again off the beaten track for contemporary Christian music despite appealing strongly to me personally (regular readers of this column will recall that I have eclectic tastes musically).  We programmed several tracks from that disc, but I don’t think it ever appeared on the charts in Contemporary Christian Magazine.

  Thus for the last few years the names of these two artists have gradually risen to the top of my list of unwritten article ideas.  Finding nothing to draw these thoughts into a coherent whole, in a burst of inspiration I looked up both of them in Google™ and visited their web sites, and then sent each of them a personal note expressing my interest in this and their insights into it.  James Vincent wrote back, and thanks largely to him I have realized what I had heretofore missed.

  As I perused Vincent’s site, I came upon this description of one of his albums:

  After a nearly twelve year departure from recording, Eclecticity was my first project.  While listening to the recording for the first time in eight years with a very talented piano player friend of mine, the question was asked “why is this not available?”.  The only reason I could give was “I suppose because it is not commercial in the least”.  My friend stated, “who cares, it needs to be heard”.

  That, it seemed, was the motivation behind so many of the game designs that were targeting a niche market.  Sure, many of the designers believed they were creating the next truly great role playing game, that the world was going to beat a path to their door, abandoning D&D™ and V:tM™ in droves to play this new entry in the gaming world.  But in the main they wrote these games because these were the games they wanted to play, and they published them because they thought that others might well be looking for a game very like this one.

  Vincent confirmed this attitude in himself as he answered my questions in e-mail.

…[W]hen I was undertaking any musical project, I never thought of how many people would be reached by the message of the music, but rather that I just let the music flow out of me as honestly as I could.  What I do with music has always had a relatively small number of people that appreciate it, and that has always been okay with me.

  Vincent goes on to compare this to the Gospel of Christ, noting that those who are serious about looking to Christ to transform their lives in the present are a very small portion of all who would use the label Christian for themselves.  In a sense, contemporary Christian music is already a niche within a niche, as not all who would call themselves Christian would listen to Christian music, or contemporary music.  Similarly, role playing games may be the largest chunk of the hobby games industry (depending on how you count and what you include), but it’s already a small piece of a small piece of a small pie.  The focus should not be on how few people would actually be interested in any particular creative effort, but on making the products of that effort available to as many of those who would be interested as possible.

  Is there then no hope of commercial success for the niche game?  James Ward may have given up on Elan, but James Vincent is still creating his music two decades later.  “Thanks to the internet,” he writes, “I daily receive orders from all over the globe, and interestingly enough the most consistent sellers are Enter In, Waiting For The Rain, and Space Traveler.”  Today it is possible for a niche product within a niche category to find its audience.  Even if that audience is a very tiny fraction of the world population, the population of that world has gotten very large and considerably easier to reach.  It probably won’t make you rich or famous, but if you’re willing to forego those as definitions of success, you can still produce a successful game.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  Long enough ago that the world has since become a very different place, I took a psychology class.  I actually took several psychology classes, but this was the first.  One of the subjects covered concerned the concepts of discrimination and generalization, which prove to be central to the way we as humans perceive and understand the world around us.

  If by some chance you either never had that psychology class, or it has been as long ago as mine and you have forgotten more than you learned in it, understanding these cognitive tasks is important for what follows.

  Generalization is the process by which we recognize similarities between objects or ideas in our world.  As I mentioned long ago in Left Hand, every person’s left hand is unique.  In theory, you could learn what a person’s left hand looks like so well that you could identify that person from a photo of their hand.  Certainly fingerprints rely on the fact that every left hand is different from every other left hand in the world.  However, we call all of them hands, and indeed we call them left hands.  In using those terms, we recognize that there are similarities between all these objects that enable us to generalize them into a category.  To use a more extreme example, we believe that every frozen water crystal is unique; however, when they pour out of the sky and bury us neck deep in drifts, clogging our roads and blocking our walkways, shutting down schools and services, we don’t look out the window and speak of billions of unique objects piled on the ground.  We just call them all snow, and satisfy ourselves that we have sufficiently identified them.

  However, those who grew up on Sesame Street and those of us who viewed it through the eyes of our children know that one of these things is not like the other.  That is, the other side of generalization is discrimination.  Fragments of shattered glass are not snowflakes, feet are not hands, and psychology is not rocket science.  As important as is the ability to generalize many slightly different objects into categories such as ducks, role playing games, and boring professors, it is equally important that we are able to discriminate, to know that Rover is not a duck, pinochle is not a role playing game, and that cute English teacher on whom you had a crush in eighth grade was not a boring professor.  (Well, you didn’t think so, anyway.)  We recognize that things are alike, but also that things are different.

  This concept returned in a different guise years later (but still years ago) in law school.  It is the core concept of a precedence-based common law system such as ours that the attorneys practice discrimination and generalization.  It’s called distinguishing a case or applying a case, but it’s really the same thing.  One attorney says that this case in which the defendant shot his wife Betsy is exactly like another case a hundred years ago in which a man discharged his gun and killed his dear Betsy, and as that man went unpunished this man should also.  The other attorney points out that in that case Betsy was the man’s horse, and it’s not at all like this situation.  All cases are the same, in that one person claims to have been wronged by another; all cases are different in the details.  Discrimination and generalization, in this case in the form of distinguishing and applying previous court decisions, is a two pronged process of recognizing which details matter enough to require that this case be treated like that one or differently from that one.

  At some level all things are alike.  All objects are made of matter; all objects and energies are made of quarks.  At the same time, above the molecular level all things are different, no two objects being so completely identical that we cannot distinguish them by some detail.  Even quarks come in several flavors.

  It is not surprising then that as I wrote Multiverser this concept of discrimination and generalization found a place within it.  The game offers hundreds of named skills, ranging from putting out fires to changing the world with a thought.  The referee is given significant leeway within the game to apply his own cognitive abilities in this area, deciding for example whether doing a one hundred eighty degree skid turn in a Jaguar ought to be its own skill, or whether it should be something any driver could attempt in any vehicle, or whether it is somewhere between those end points.  In each case, the referee is called upon to determine whether this is a new skill (discrimination) or a new application of an already familiar skill (generalization).  Is this enough like that to be the same thing, or is it different enough to be something else?

  As we end each quarter, we do a free quarterly article which looks back at the last dozen articles.  (We last did this in Pens, a light consideration of how writing serves as an extended memory device.)  With each article, I ask myself how it is different from all those I wrote before–nearing two hundred now as we approach the end of the fourth year.  Each week is supposed to be something different.  Are we repeating the same ground, putting old ideas under new titles just to meet publishing deadlines, or are we genuinely writing, as our tagline says, something different each week?  Looking back over the past quarter, it’s worth asking afresh.

183. Anniversary started our quarter, because it happened to be published on my own wedding anniversary.  It suggested that even the most curmudgeonly among us have days that mean something, for better or worse.  We all have our own holidays.  In that sense, it was a bit like the earlier article Celebrations, but that the older article was more about public holidays on which everyone celebrates, and what sorts of things we celebrate collectively.
184. Spelunking was an entry in our series on adventure design.  Some worlds exist purely to explore; what happens in them is incidental to the wonder simply of being there.  Of course, the series had several other entries, including the quest-based concepts of Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, and Scavenger Hunts, and the earlier Antagonists, but while all of those were about creating the basis for some sort of plot-driven story, this was focused on a world without a story.
185. Foreshadowed dealt with a staple of fantasy literature and the problems it presents to role playing games, the idea of a prophecy or fate in which the characters are entangled, and how that can play out in the world without someone railroading everything.  This problem had been considered before, in Prophecy, with some solid ideas about making and fulfilling specific predictions within the game world.  Foreshadowed was focused on less specific omens, premonitions, impressions.  Similarly, Auspicious suggested how to build the fulfillment of auspicious omens into the mechanics of a game, but that had nothing to do with specific predictions.
186. Fish Pond explored the idea that how powerful we think we are has a lot to do with the world around us, the people to whom we compare ourselves.  The closest I recall coming to this idea previously was when Comparisons discussed what it means for one weapon to be better than another; but that was a very different discussion related more to game mechanics and what makes something better or worse.
187. When we decided to talk about Character we were venturing into an area that had been addressed many times from many angles.  As far back as the second quarter of the series we asked Who?, noting the unreality of someone having such specific knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses.  Knowing looked again at the oddity of the character knowing about himself what the player knows about the character.  Characterization suggested ways to distinguish characters from each other through nuances of performance in play; Clones offered the suggestion of using people you know or characters from other sources as game characters.  CharGen and Negative Points were both about the process of creating a character, the former showing how character generation systems act as limiters to keep characters within the bounds of game expectations, the latter looking at means of patching problems in both randomized and point-based systems.  Romanian considered the problems involved in obscure skills and how to decide when characters should have these.  It is a subject well covered; yet Character did take it somewhere new, showing that the character is not truly that which appears on the character sheet.  A character sheet is only information about the character; the character exists in the shared imagined space far more completely than even a notebook could define.
188. Perceptions considered the idea that disabilities and abilities were not always so easy to distinguish, that sometimes what a character cannot do empowers him.  Previously, Can’t had examined the degree to which our characters, like us, are often defined by what we cannot do; this one, though, was more about how the negatives are positives.  Again, Disabilities got close to this, but was more about compensating, what people do to overcome their flaws.
189. Legacy spoke of character motivation.  Not surprisingly, we addressed this before.  In fact, Motivation was the title of an entry which considered why player characters were part of the team, what brought them to the adventure and kept them involved in it.  Objectives described using character motivations as a source for in-game conflict.  Perhaps closer to the mark, McGuffin discussed how to design the object of a quest, that one thing everyone in the story wants.  In this case, though, Legacy was considering the degree to which we are motivated to leave our imprint on the world, to have done something memorable that will change the future after we are gone, a very different sort of character motivation.
190. Advances looked at the future.  Science fiction themes came up sporadically in many articles; Transmats was specifically focused on a future technology.  This new article, though, gave a core idea for running a game all about advancing technology and its impact on the lives of people.
191. Cold was about dangers that did not appear so dangerous.  Of previous articles, only Plague approached the same ideas, and it did so entirely within the context of the disease whose cause is unknown.
192. Escape is another adventure design approach; we just discussed those in relation to Spelunking.  This was more like Antagonists than any of the others, but was about fleeing from pursuit rather than interfering with the plans of the villain.
193. Avery Brooks called my attention to Flying Cars, a technology he and I had long expected would become part of our lives long before now.  Like Advances, it spoke about the future; but it spoke more about the future that doesn’t happen and what impedes it.
194. Finally, Happy considered whether imagining ourselves to be someone else suggests that we are discontented with who we are.  It is very much a consideration of why we play.  In one sense it is similar to Flirting, which was about what we gain from being someone else, but that was much more about discovering our own identities through our play, and this about reasons to explore what it’s like to be someone else when we know ourselves and are happy with who we are.

  I had been considering how to apply these concepts of discrimination and generalization to other areas of game design and play; I think, though, that the extensions should be obvious at this point.  In all situations, we are always considering how this is like what has gone before, and how it is different.  Making that thought process conscious can focus it, and point us toward new and better ideas.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  I heard a song one morning that started some thoughts in an odd direction.  The lyrics asked, are you who you want to be?  Part of me said no, I’d like to be a lot of things I’m not.  I’d like to be someone who didn’t have to worry about having the money to cover my bills.  I’d like to be a dynamic and charismatic speaker to whose words listeners cling with rapt attention.  I’d like to be in better physical shape.  (None of these characteristics were the point of the song, incidentally; however, the question struck me has having ramifications that reached beyond its intent.)  In many areas of my life, I would like to be someone else, someone who had easy solutions to my problems and strengths where I have weaknesses.

  On the other hand, part of me said no, I pretty much am who I want to be.  At least, who I am is the result of my own decisions concerning what is important to me.  If I really wanted to be in better shape, I could exercise.  It is within my power to change myself, to some degree.  There are no major flaws in my personality which particularly bother me, most of the time.  If I really wanted to be different, I would at least make an effort to change.  I concluded by this that I must be pretty happy with who I am.  At least, I’m not unhappy enough that I’m investing any significant time or effort into trying to be someone else.  I’m not even putting too much into pretending I’m someone else.  I am me, and I have come to terms with that.

  Then why, something inside me asked, do you play role playing games?

  That was an interesting question.  It had nothing to do with the song, of course; yet it had everything to do with being who I want to be.  If I am truly happy with who I am, why would I take time to pretend to be someone else?  What benefit or attraction could such an activity have for someone who is happy with who he is?

  Another song brought an answer to my mind, a song I would be too old to know had I not had children.  It is sung by a world famous television star who goes by the name Ernie.  The words to this song start, “I would like to visit the moon.”  He sings about going to wondrous places to which few people can go, but always says he would come home afterwards.  “So although I might like it for one afternoon, I don’t want to live on the moon.”  Being happy with who I am doesn’t mean there’s no pleasure in pretending to be someone else.  I can visit and explore places I would never wish to live.  I can try out different careers and lifestyles.  In my mind’s eye, I can see what it would be like to live through different kinds of events, from horrendous natural disasters to frightening political upheaval to peaceful utopian boredom.  In much the same way, I can imagine what it would be like to be someone I would not truly want to be.  Walking two moons in another man’s moccasins, as the Native Americans put it, means I will begin to understand who he is and how he thinks and why he does what he does.  It does not mean I will ever necessarily want to be, think, and do those things.  It is a path to discovery, to understanding.

  Besides, I’ve been role playing for a lot of years.  I am not completely sure that I would then have been happy with who I then was a quarter century ago when I first heard of these games.  Certainly I have changed since then.  For one thing, I started playing role playing games.  It is also certainly the case that in playing role playing games I learned much about many things.  Although it took a long time, eventually I came to understand stories from the inside well enough to write at least one worth publishing.  More significantly, I learned much about the characters I played, and sometimes incorporated some of their qualities into myself.  Role playing has helped me become the person that I am, so if today I am happy with who I now am I got this way in part by pretending over the years to be other people.  Anything that has served me well in regard to molding me into a person I respect is worth keeping for that, at least, so perhaps I role play because it has benefited me in the past.

  Beyond that, who says that we role play because we are unhappy with who we are?  No, I know you didn’t say that; but someone probably thought it at some point.  It can be inferred from the question.  If you are happy with who you are, why pretend to be someone else?  One very simple answer could be that I pretend to be someone else to remind me how very blessed I am to be me.  My life is not perfect, but clearly it could be a great deal worse than it is, and on balance I find I should be thankful for who I am.  There is something very positive about going through a difficult and dangerous time in your imagination, then setting it aside and being able to thank God that that was not your real life.  It has some things in common with awakening from a bad dream and suddenly realizing with joy that none of it was real.  It may be cathartic.  As I wrote some years ago in Faith and Gaming:  Bad Things, for some imagining a great terror leads to a greater faith, the knowledge that God is greater even than this.  Even those without faith can walk away from such a game with the feeling that the world is a good place, and the life they lead is perhaps not so bad as it might have been in a different time or place.  They might even drift so far as to suppose that whoever made the universe made something that really is pretty good, all things considered.  I can play a character because I am entirely happy with who I am, and enjoy being reminded that I am not someone else.  Someone else can play a character who is not who he is and recognize that his life has been good.

  Certainly in role playing, in pretending to be someone else, we can learn much about ourselves and how to change who we are into someone we like better.  Even if we like ourselves well enough, we can learn and improve by considering how we might be different.  Our hobby is a wonderful petri dish for experimentation in self-identity and self-improvement.  Yet it is also great fun and encouragement for those among us for whom the biggest lesson is that who we are is a great and wonderful thing to be embraced and enjoyed.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

Not too many years ago, Avery Brooks appeared on a commercial in which he was bemoaning all the things he had expected to have when he grew up that he doesn’t have. Chief among the list, he demanded, “Where’s my flying car? I want my flying car!”

There is an idea in this that I am going to address one day, about predicting the future. Today, however, I am interested particularly in the fact that there are no flying cars. Like Brooks, I grew up in a world in which the future was so bright, sunglasses were standard issue. I saw videophones at the New York Worlds Fair in nineteen sixty-four, and expected these to appear in homes within a few years. Flying cars were an assumed part of the future. After all, they were so thoroughly integrated into our expectations that even George Jetson drove one. Yet today there are no flying cars.

The immediate reaction most optimistic futurists would have is, no, there are no flying cars yet. They just have not been developed; we’re not that far along. I’m not certain this is the reason, though. I recently learned that there very nearly was a flying car, and it was not something relegated to the future. In the late nineteen fifties, a mere couple of years after my own birth, the Federal Aviation Administration approved the production and sale of a vehicle that would operate on the roads but also could fly like a small airplane. The designer found someone to produce it. It was almost a reality.

The dream died for lack of interest, really. The company would not start production without five hundred advance orders, and those orders never came. Perhaps the price was too high. Maybe potential customers weren’t sure whether they would need a pilot’s license or what would be required to operate such a vehicle. Perhaps the company failed adequately to promote their efforts, or the product did not match the hype. Possibly people didn’t really want to fly after all. In any event, it never happened. Avery Brooks and I can complain that the future of which we dreamed was stillborn.

That may not be the only time it didn’t happen. In the early nineteen eighties airplane design genius Dick Rutan designed a one-man airplane that was about the size of a compact car and flew with an ordinary Volkswagon engine. Such a vehicle was clearly designed with the commuter in mind, and at the time you could buy the plans from Rutan and build it yourself from materials easily acquired from hardware and auto parts stores, for something comparable to the price of an economy car and the willingness and ability to assemble it yourself. It did not revolutionize transportation as we know it. There just weren’t that many buyers. Again, the flying car slipped through our fingers.

Not everyone is disappointed, however. Marilyn Vos Savant has written in response to a question about flying cars that she hopes these do not debut in her lifetime. After all, the roads are dangerous enough as it is. What would traffic be like if we took to the skies? In that context, fender benders become fatalities. One passing scene in Back to the Future Part II gives something of the feeling of air traffic in a world of flying cars, and other science fiction movies including Blade Runner and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones have offered similar frightening visions. It may be that the failure of the flying car was a blessing.

Not everything that is called progress is so; and not everyone welcomes progress. There often is a difference between what we say we want and what we actually do want. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country said people are afraid of the future because we are afraid of change. It is true that some people have an irrational fear of change. On the other hand, sometimes the fears are quite reasonable, based on sound thinking. I imagine, based on their slogan Birds fly, men drink, that the Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society would object to flying cars merely because they leave the ground, but Savant objects to them because she perceives a much greater danger in such a proliferation of personal aircraft than ought to be tolerated.

Savant’s position, on the other hand, might be alarmist. After all, arguably automotive traffic has resulted in more accidents, accidents which are more serious, and far more fatalities from transportation accidents, than anyone could even have imagined before the technology appeared. We would, by and large, accept that the benefits to society are worth the costs, even in lives lost. In fact, to some degree the increased accident rates spring less from the technology itself and more from the fact that the technology has increased the number of people traveling and the number of miles traveled. If you’ve ever seen a twelve lane highway completely snarled in both directions with rush hour traffic (I have seen the New Jersey Turnpike so snarled around Newark International Airport at rush hour), try to envision that with horse drawn carriages and wagons instead of cars and trucks. The very absurdity of that image springs from the fact that without the vehicles we have now, there is no imaginable reason for so many people to be traveling the same road at the same time like that. The accidents occur because the ability to travel so easily becomes the impetus for masses of people to do so.

At some point, though, modern governments committed themselves to making the automobile a reality. Roads had to be built, gasoline stations encouraged to proliferate, and parking accommodated. With the flying car, it occurs to me that major changes in infrastructure would again be required to accommodate such vehicles. That is, where would I launch and land? Even assuming I can get airborne at fifty miles per hour within fifty yards (I am not sure whether this is practical), that means I can’t do it on the street in front of my house. I also can’t do it in downtown Wilmington in Delaware, and that’s a relatively small city. George Jetson parked on the roofs of his apartment and his office. I can imagine high rise buildings with hangers built into the structure at different levels, so you can park near your floor. Building such hangers makes no sense without the flying cars to use them. Owning the flying cars has little practical value until such facilities exist.

It seems also to be a peculiarly American dream, born of our individualism. It is not a practical view of the future. Flying cars will consume more of our dwindling energy supplies than ground-based ones, and do more damage to our environment. There are different assessments of how serious these problems are, but they are indeed problems. A more environmentally sound view of the future replaces such independent vehicles with mass transit systems. The latest plane to splash onto the headlines was not an innovative personal transport but an airbus billed as the largest yet, outstripping the reigning Boeing 747 and hoping to dominate the market in high volume passenger service over the next decade. Certainly big business thrives on providing services we cannot provide for ourselves, so there is a strong incentive to push people into mass transit of various forms and out of independent vehicles. There is sense to the argument. Private flying cars are problematic. Too many aspects of the idea lead to unanswered questions.

We may one day hurdle these obstacles, leaping forward to a time of common private air traffic. How those problems will be solved is at this point a matter for speculation and brainstorming. Certainly the society which launches such vehicles will be very different from this one in more ways than merely that there are roadways in the sky. Designing such a world in a fictional setting is almost as challenging as solving the problems of such technology in the real world.

Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.