Welcome to the one hundred fourth entry in the Game Ideas Unlimited series.  While one hundred four might not at first glance sound like a milestone, it in fact is a quite significant one.  One hundred four is eight times thirteen; that is, it is two times fifty-two.  Put more plainly, this column marks the end of two years of continuous publication of the weekly series.

  Perhaps you remember this event being foreshadowed four weeks ago when we presented our one hundredth column Century.  At that time, we noted that you might think the one hundredth column in the series to be a major milestone, but that we would be talking about milestones in this column.  It seems in one sense as if it would have been perfectly sensible to note the one hundredth column as a milestone, a moment for celebration.  At the same time, the one hundredth column wasn’t terribly important relative to the calendar, and in that sense this completion of two years means so much more.  Or does it?

  It is certainly the case that we have established the pattern of looking back every three months at the articles which filled the intervening weeks.  Last quarter we commented on this when we discussed Patterns, and at the same time we looked at the dozen columns of the winter quarter of the year.  Now, with summer upon us, we take a moment to recall what we’ve done this spring.  Here, in brief, are our recent installments.

92. We began with an Exercise, an idea for sharpening our ability to multitask which could be done in connection with a common recreational activity:  reading the credits after the movie while listening to the music.
93. Objectives recalled several previous columns about player characters working together, reminding us that characters with conflicting goals will eventually come into conflict with each other.
94. Bridge was a lesson in strategy, borrowed from a card game, about what assumptions to make when faced with a challenge.
95. CharGen was one of several this quarter that examined the mechanics side of game design.  Here we looked at several popular methods of character creation, and offered some ideas on freeform approaches.
96. We were talking about humor at the gaming table when we reached Funny, attempting to distinguish the laughter that helps the game from that which gets in the way.
97. The two-pronged nature of Rewards systems was our next foray into game mechanics, showing how rewards systems needed to consider both what was being rewarded and what was being encouraged by the reward.
98. Negative Points returned to character generation systems and gave some ideas on how to improve random and point-based approaches.
99. Romanian was about ways to work with unusual character skills, whether they’re included by the player or suggested by the referee.
100. In Century we looked at the importance of mindset to the setting, beginning with the recognition that every moment in time has its own ideas which should be grasped to truly recreate that moment.
101. We found out that I don’t particularly care for Waltz music; more usefully, we considered the danger inherent in the artificial constraints of form crushing creativity within a medium.
102. The next entry reminded us that the odds are Cumulative, and that every time you pick up the dice you’re taking a chance.  This is something of which to be mindful both in play and in design.
103. Sometimes a small victory can be a Token reward that keeps people in the game.  The value of this to scenario design is considered in last week’s article.

  As mentioned, at the end of the last quarter we talked about the pattern of looking back every quarter.  Because of that pattern, we are celebrating the one hundred fourth article as a milestone, rather than the one hundredth.  Certainly it might have been different–we might have looked back after every ten, or twenty, twenty-five, or fifty articles.  Those would be milestones based on our decimalized number system; these were milestones based on our calendar.  It doesn’t particularly matter; that is, one set of milestones is not more valid than the other.  Both are, ultimately, arbitrary.

  If you’ve been saddled with trying to learn the metric system, blame Napoleon Bonaparte.  It was his idea to create and use a system of measurement in which everything was based on multiples of ten, and his scientists worked to provide this for him.  Celsius temperature, then known as centigrade, liters, grams, meters, and the other units of the system are all interrelated, and all use what he perceived as the very rational decimal relationship.  Certainly this works quite well for those of us who use base ten for our number system, and it’s certainly easier to learn than the wonderfully colorful English system used by most Americans and Brits, at least.  Yet it is not really less arbitrary; it’s just better related to other things.  The decimal number system is itself arbitrary, developed because humans (in the majority) have ten fingers, and so could count that far before needing to find another way to indicate the next number.  It’s a very impractical number system for our current computers.  Built on a system of on/off switches, they are really much more facile in binary (base two), hexadecimal (base sixteen), and perhaps base two hundred fifty-six.  The next generation of computers might have trinary chips (using positive, neutral, and negative charges for three digits), in which case base three, base nine, and base twenty-seven would be the logical numeric systems in which they would work.  Creatures who had different numbers of fingers probably would wonder for a long time why we chose something so mathematically unusual as base ten.  It seems so arbitrary; in the end, it is.

  Interestingly, Napoleon also attempted to institute a ten day week.  The predominantly Catholic French would not allow him to change what God had established.  Divine decree aside, the calendar is rather arbitrary.  It is useful to us; we tie it to the seasons, and so know when to plant and when to harvest based on it.  Astronomers use a different calendar, though, one which is based not on the relationship between the earth and the sun but on the position of the earth relative to the stars.  The number of hours in a day is arbitrary, chosen for the ability to divide the day into convenient increments.  When the day begins is also arbitrary; a number of ancient cultures begin the new day at sunset, and others at sunrise, and there certainly is less logic to beginning it at midnight than either of these choices.

  So there’s really nothing inherently significant about two years, no more or less than there is about one hundred entries, or indeed than there is about any other number.  Each column added to the series is itself a new milestone, a greater accomplishment than before.  We can’t celebrate each of these as milestones; to do so is to decimate the notion of celebration.  We pick a pattern, and we stick to it.  We give ourselves token goals, new objectives, and we celebrate when we reach them.

  In grade school I was shown a movie in which a fantasy kingdom was installing its first clock, and the king ordered someone to set it.  The servant hesitated.  To what time should it be set?  They contacted an astronomer, and asked him.  His answer was to set it for whatever time you like; what matters isn’t what time you choose initially, but that you abide by that decision thereafter.  In designing worlds, at least, it’s perfectly fine to be arbitrary about many of the decisions you make.  What matters is that once you have decided, you abide by your own decisions and stick with the pattern.

  Next week, something different.

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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.