We’ve reached the end of another quarter.  Game Ideas Unlimited has existed for ninety-one weeks, twenty-one months, seven quarters.  True to our pattern, this week we offer a look back at the past quarter, briefly summarizing (and linking) what we’ve covered, and hopefully fitting it together in an idea of its own.  Think of it as one of those annoying television series episodes that are constructed entirely of clips from previous episodes, but which have some kind of story or point that almost redeems them, and then remind yourself that this article is free.

  Let us begin with our look back.

79. Attention talked about the ability to switch on our awareness of what is around us, distinguishing a heightened level of attentiveness from a superior sensory ability as character traits.
80. Trust discussed this aspect of relationships, the notion that we have confidence in some people and not in others.  It raised the question of whether your game characters are trustworthy, and whether others trust them; also, whether your character trusts people he sensibly would trust, or whether the people he trusts are known for their betrayals.
81. In Transition we looked at worlds in flux, at those moments in history, past, present, and future, when the world is undergoing rapid change.  Wars, technological advances, collapsing governments, and cultural shifts all make for powerful backdrops to ongoing campaigns, giving player characters more to do than crawl dungeons.
82. Partnership discussed the difference between working together and working together, that is, the idea of being together while working as opposed to dividing your efforts to achieve goals by attacking on multiple fronts.  These are presented as alternative problem solving strategies for party play.
83. Language talked about the strengths and weaknesses inherent in speech, not merely generally but from language to language.  It was noted that each language is better at discussing certain ideas and worse at others, depending on what mattered to the people who originally spoke it, and that these communication issues can matter in play.
84. Invention, the child of necessity, takes the spotlight as we consider the act of problem solving.
85. Control was actually about fear, about those elements that make fear real, both in reality and in games.
86. Prophecy gave some insight into ways to use predictions of the future within game stories.
87. Culture asked, “Can you say ‘Shibboleth’?”  It looked at the player characters as foreigners, people removed from the familiar and facing the difficulties of understanding a new home and the people who live there, and of the complications that come from always being recognizable as not from around here.
88. Graffiti gave a different idea on decorating your dungeons.  People have been scratching their names into everything for as long as they’ve been able to write.  Adding such useless inscriptions to the walls of your dungeon or your space station makes sense.
89. Opportunity Costs found a game idea in an old sermon based on an accounting concept:  the notion that no one has enough resources to do everything they would want to do, and so choices made to do one thing usually mean that something else is left undone.
90. Can’t is a word my wife, at least, hates; but it is a truth about all of us that we have our limitations, those things we cannot do, whether for lack of skill or emotional baggage, and having characters so limited makes them more realistic.

  In introducing this article, I commented that we had such retrospectives once every quarter, in every thirteenth entry in the series.  I do this for a number of reasons.  For one thing, even I find that it helps to be reminded of where we’ve been, of what was said.  It is easy to forget what I wrote last week, and some of these stretch back considerably farther than a week ago.  So a quick review of topics is helpful.  For that matter, you might want to go back to the last review article, Reports, to see the subjects covered in the previous three months, and from there you can work back through the articles that preceded it.  There is, of course, an article index here at Gaming Outpost, but it lists articles in a well-organized but not very useful alphabetical sequence.  These summary articles provide the sequence, along with some idea of what each was about, and so serve as chronological indices.  It is also certainly true that I publish these summary articles free to give the many non-members who visit this site a glimpse of what their membership would buy them (for better or worse).

  I don’t do them to get a free article out of them.  You might think that a motivation, considering that at this point in the article I’ve written around eight hundred words of nothing new.  Perhaps that (and budget concerns) is a motivation for those television episodes that use spliced footage of previous entries to fill time.  It is not a motivation here.  With each look back, I attempt to find some idea that makes looking back fit the overall idea.  It is the case, however, that part of the motivation for having these regular glances in the rear view mirror is that we’ve always done them.  It is expected.  It is a pattern.  Perhaps few would notice if the season-ending piece didn’t come; yet I would notice, and the rhythm of the series would be disrupted.

  It is that aspect that I put forward this week as an idea worthy of consideration:  that life has patterns, a regular rhythm that cannot be ignored.  Day and night move forward, always the same despite being different.  Our company, Valdron Inc, takes its name from a world and a city in a game which has been played around this world, run by E. R. Jones, a world in which chaos was normative.  In his effort to achieve true chaos, he had designed a randomized calendar based on the appearance of seven moons whose crossings had no patterns and yet were predicted by the sages.  If you made inquiries, you could find out what month would come next; but it was determined by dice when the information was needed.  Still, crops grew, rains fell, days and nights passed from one to another, snow came and went, and one of my characters once quipped, Even in Valdron, the seasons are lawful.  There is regularity, recurrence, repetition in the world in which we live; it is necessary to life.  The worlds we imagine may be very different; yet for life to thrive, they require their own patterns, their own cycles of time and life.

  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.