Game Ideas Un limited: Numerology

  Last week's article was originally published on October seventeenth.

  I suppose that everyone really is superstitious about something.  We can't escape it; it's in our nature.  I have several things in my life that make me uncomfortable.  I have struggled to get over my fear of driving in Woodstown; I had three cars die within half a mile of each other in that tiny village, all within maybe ten years at the outside.  I am uncompromising about keeping the dashboard clear of all papers and objects, as I was in an accident over thirty years ago in which school books flying in front of my face as I went around a turn prevented me from seeing the road.  My step grandmother was paralyzed in an accident because she had braced herself against the dash with her arms, so no one is allowed to put arms or legs up while I'm driving.  I have my perhaps unreasonable fears and concerns; the number ten seventeen, last week's date, is one of these.  It is probably, as you may in a moment conclude, the most unreasonable of them all.

  I graduated college just in time for a recession; no one was hiring--in fact, I had companies refuse to take my resume.  Even the personnel director of a company where I, working as a security guard under contract, had prevented a robbery, was unable to get me into his workforce.  Finally I got a job at a contemporary Christian radio station.  I was underpaid, certainly, and it was a long commute at the beginning, and there were tensions of which I'd had no expectations at all; but it was a job, and I had some wild hope at the time that I would be able to build contacts in the Christian music industry that would lead to opportunities to record and perform, and maybe make some decent money doing something I enjoyed and knew I could do.

  That part didn't happen.  There wasn't enough money to make demo tapes, even when I did finally meet some of the right people.  I worked there for five years, and rose from announcer/disc jockey to assistant program director to program director.  I struggled to keep the good music on the air against the pressures of a management who thought that only very old people listened to "religious broadcasting".  I fought with my wife who thought I should get a good paying job somewhere else.  I struggled to survive on pay that was grossing about half what I had estimated I would need to earn net to meet basic needs.  I burned out several times while pushing forward at that job.  When it was over, I stopped listening to music radio entirely for over a decade, and rarely listened to tapes, and had little hope of ever doing anything with music again.  I took a series of short-lived jobs, and then went to law school.

  That radio station was contemporary Christian radio giant WNNN-FM; it was at one-oh-one-point-seven on the dial.  While I was there, we pushed the envelope of what we were allowed to play by creating a special show just for the cutting edge music.  I suggested calling it Studio Ten Seventeen, and for several years I hosted it.  Since then, that number, one oh one seven, ten seventeen, in whatever form it takes, plagues me.  Last week's article on Foliage was published on ten seventeen, and I cringed when I happened to check the date to see how far into fall we would be when it posted.  My recent Bible reading has been in Nehemiah and Ezra, and both books report a census including the entry, among maybe thirty families, one thousand seventeen sons of Harim (not his sons, but his descendants).  I see it on the clock far more often than I like; I notice it in phone numbers and addresses and random number sequences.  Sometimes it's the amount rung up at the register.  It appears everywhere.

  I would wager that not one of my readers has ever noticed that number before; and unless this article has a deeper impression on you than I expect, you'll never notice it again.  It's not an important number to you.  I would also be willing to bet that even in my life, the number ten seventeen, in all of its forms, does not really appear more frequently than is statistically predictable.  It isn't that I'm plagued by an increased number of appearances of this number; it's that I notice it every time it appears.  I even notice if the time is ten sixteen or ten eighteen, that I almost hit it.  After all, any time you looked at the clock and saw that it said ten seventeen, you would think, it's ten seventeen.  I see it, and I think, IT'S TEN SEVENTEEN.  It's not the number; it's me.

  On what is really the same subject, everyone knows that the full moon makes people crazy.  Everyone knows that when the moon is full, emergency services are all going to have a bad night.  Emergency rooms will be busier, and with the more bizarre sorts of problems.  Police will have more crazy and violent cases on their hands.  Ambulance and rescue personnel will be on a lot of calls.  Everyone knows this.  You know this; I know it.  The problem is that it's not true.  Studies have demonstrated time and again that the phases of the moon have absolutely no impact on reports in emergency rooms, police encounters, or accidents.  It doesn't happen.  Yet most people who work in those professions will tell you that it's true, and there are theories put forth in all seriousness about the impact of tidal forces on the fluid in the brain.  Why do they think this?

  They believe it for exactly the same reason that the number ten seventeen bothers me:  they notice the correlation and don't notice conflicting data.  I don't remember the thousands of times I look at a clock in a month, but I do remember the one time in something approaching a thousand it has that number on it.  I remember few if any of the values in that census table I read, but the sons of Harim hit the right number.  In the same way, any time there's a wild night for emergency services personnel and it's a full moon, they remember that.  If it's not a full moon, they either don't notice or they comment about how much worse it would have been if the moon were full.  If it's a quiet night with a full moon, again they don't notice it or they comment about how lucky they were to get away with a quiet night under a full moon.  The only data that's really remembered is that sometimes there are crazy nights that have full moons, and sometimes there are quiet nights that don't, and the rest gets blurred into the mix so that the myth gets repeated.  In short, people believe that full moons bring out the crazies because they expect that, and so supporting data confirms those expectations and conflicting data is ignored.

  So how can you use any of this in a game?

  These are invalid correlations which spring from sensitization.  That is, I think that the number ten seventeen is plaguing me because I notice it whenever it appears; emergency personnel think full moons mean bad nights because they notice full moons when they occur on bad nights.  So to a large degree, this is about what we notice.  Yet as referee, you have a great deal of power over what the players notice.  The very fact that you mention the sky is gray today sensitizes them to the possibility that the weather (which we mentioned in discussing Foliage last week) might be important.  If you keep mentioning the guy in the trench coat and derby who always shows up at all these disasters, they're going to be very suspicious of him even after they learn that he's a crime reporter with a police scanner in his car.  I remember one old GammaWorld module in which our characters were instructed to remove the necklaces we'd worn since childhood and place them on the table just beyond the edge of the village.  We must have spent half an hour of game time examining that table from every direction we could, looking for any hint about our assignment; we completely missed the fact that our necklaces were different colors, a vital clue to what lay ahead.  Most players attach importance to anything the referee says is there; creating invalid correlations in their minds is rather easy--in some ways it's tough to avoid doing so when you don't intend it.

  All of this can lead to misdirection, superstition, plot hooks, and surprises.  Lead your players down the garden path sometimes, and then when you pull the rug out from under them and reveal the truth, they'll kick themselves for having missed it when it was right in front of them all the time.

  Just over two years ago we talked about superstition, how to create it and incorporate it into play, in Believable Nonsense.  Finally we've expanded on that with ways to get players to create their own.

  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.