Game Ideas Un limited: Treats

  Dang.  It's Halloween.  What are the odds that a weekly column would land on Halloween?

  Before you tell me that it's one per year in seven, it's more complicated than that.  Because of the complexities of leap year, date shifting creates some very odd results.  I'm told that centuries can only begin on certain days of the week (although I'm not sure that information accounts for the fact that the last year of a century the number of which is not also divisible by four is not a leap year, if I recall correctly that trivial bit that isn't going to matter in any practical way to me in the course of my life).  We'll suffice it that it didn't have to happen in the life of the column, but it did happen, and we'll go from there.

  I'm not big on holidays.  Most of them are a burden on my finances and my time.  However, this family has always made a big deal of Halloween in particular.  One of my sons at one point did not much care for Christmas because it tended to overshadow Halloween.  I have no clue what, if anything, we're celebrating (unless it's our Celtic heritage in a family so ethnically diverse that from mere oversight our children's birth records probably don't report the same combinations of European ancestors), but we do celebrate it--costumes, candy, decorations, sometimes parties, once a pit-barbecued leg of lamb.  So, seeing as it's a holiday, I'm going to give out treats by passing on some of the oddities I've collected as game ideas which have not bloomed into articles despite being planted on my desktop for more than a few months.

  Ages ago, Seth Ben-Ezra wrote an article in which he mentioned Ascians.  These were apparently some race of people from some fantasy series of which I was unaware; but I tried to determine the meaning by using what I knew of the word and by looking it up in the dictionary.  I was nowhere near it.  The usage to which he referred had so little to do with the ordinary meanings of the word that it could not be derived without knowing what it meant.  This eventually put my mind off on a tangent of things that aren't what they sound like, or aren't what we think.  I thought of the Pentagram, that geometric shape which was originally thought to be magical not by European cultists but by Greek mathematicians, because of the relationships of the sides of the internal shapes.  From there I went on to all those unfortunate misprints in advertisements and church bulletins.  We always enjoy these.  There's the piano for sale by the lady with fancy carved legs, the dog that eats anything and is especially fond of children.  I hear that the ladies auxiliary have cast off clothing of all kinds, and you can see them in the fellowship hall if you're interested; also, the church has a young mothers' meeting once a week, and anyone interested in becoming a young mother is encouraged to visit the pastor in his study.  There's a wealth of potential in all that for giving someone the wrong idea.  I particularly grimace when people quote the old King James Bible verse that we should abstain from every appearance of evil, thinking that that means we should avoid anything that even looks evil, when it really means we should avoid everything that is evil no matter how it looks.  Just this past week one of my sons mentioned a video game in which you "shoot men out of a helicopter", and I had to get him to clarify whether that meant you shoot from a helicopter at men, or you shoot at men who come from a helicopter, or possibly you use men to target something by ejecting them from of a helicopter on planned trajectories.  A lot can be gained from statements that are for one reason or another easily misunderstood; phrasing can be very important to misdirection.

  I wanted to commend J. K. Rowling for her use of Diagon Alley (as if my commendation mattered to her at all).  She must have gotten the name by splitting the word Diagonally, but I find myself wondering whether she gave it that name in the first book already knowing that she was going to have Harry mispronounce it in the second (and so wind up in the wrong place), or whether she just used it when the opportunity presented itself.  It could be a good example of planning ahead, or it could be a good example of those Bits we talked about a year ago, little things that you throw in on the fly knowing that you can do something with them eventually.  I do a lot of pieces about language and misdirection, though, and I can't say much more about this one without duplicating something.

  Here's a weird one, suited to the occasion.  Every night when the youngest two of my sons head for bed, I grab a book to read to them and sit on the bed of the elder to do so.  It began a few years ago, when I was reading Verse Three, Chapter One to the youngest almost as quickly as I was writing it, but it has continued beyond that to include the first drafts of its first two sequels Old Verses New and For Better or Verse, the first two of the three books in C. S. Lewis' space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), Prisoner of Zenda, Ivanhoe, and more recently Treasure Island.  And, each night as we go into the room, the dog comes in and lies down between the beds (or sometimes under one and sometimes on one) and stays there while the story is read and the lights are turned off and I sing the short good night song I wrote for their brothers near a generation ago now.  I have no idea why the dog is there; invariably she complains within the hour that she's locked in the room (they close their door when they sleep).  I've not found an explanation that really makes sense.  If you close her out during story time, she whines at the door to come in.

  Paul McCartney is alleged to have said in a recent interview that The Beatles were the most successful band of the sixties because they were the best.  I find that begs the question.  Don't get me wrong; I think they did some wonderfully creative things musically (but also some really forgettable ones), and demonstrated significant talent (although people still joke about Ringo's drumming, and no one has ever said that any one of them was the best in the world at his instrument).  My question is, the best at what?  It is said that they set out from the outset to capture the American market, and they succeeded.  Were they the best at marketing?  Were they the best at showmanship?  What was it that really made them so successful?

  Oddly, had anyone else said that The Beatles were arguably the best band of that era, I'd probably have conceded the point.  That it was said by one of their own gives me pause.  I'll agree that they must have done something right; I just don't know what it was.  Maybe that doesn't matter.  Our characters might be successful for reasons they can't guess themselves.  We don't have to know why we succeeded, as long as we can do it again next time.

  I've got a new monitor.  My wife got tired of hearing me slam Coca-Cola bottles on top of the old one to get the picture to come back while she was trying to sleep, and so took pity on me and insisted on getting this for her birthday.  I had joked about my computer reverting to twentieth century Earth technology.  That's a reference to a Tom Baker Doctor Who episode (the one with the vampires in E-Space with Adric and Romana Two).  The rebel humans, descendants of a stranded space crew, had gathered many bits of computers and monitoring equipment from the wreckage of the ship and tried unsuccessfully to make it work.  The Doctor looked at it, commented that it looked like twentieth century earth technology, and gave it a sharp rap on top with his fist.  As the entire bank of monitors and indicators lit up, he said, "What do you know?  It is twentieth century Earth technology."  It's a priceless moment.

  Our technological gadgets can be so finicky at times.  Some days my mouse works fine, and other days no amount of cleaning can get it to respond well (one of the reasons I really dislike mouse-driven software).  How often do our games take this into account?  I do it when I'm running Multiverser, but always in a rather subjective fashion:  when the dice say that the character failed to make the thing work, I look for some excuse to color it that fits with how badly the character failed (relative failure system--you've got a continuity between missed it by that much on the one end and chance to botch on the other).  I'm still looking for a way to do it more objectively that doesn't result in overly complex game systems.  It feels like a part of the simulation that has never worked quite right in any game, and I'm interested in seeing something that fixes that.

  Trick or treat?  I don't know whether that was originally trick for treat as some of my elementary school teachers claimed, that children used to go around performing to earn their goodies, or whether it refers to an ancient Druidic tradition of expecting hospitality or doing mischief to those who are inhospitable, as is sometimes reported, but it doesn't matter.  This week we've thrown a batch of ideas out there, with the hope that something here will be useful to you.

  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.