Gaming.... some history. Yeah, I'm a geek.
Worlds of imagination.
That's what tabletop roleplaying games should be. It's amazing to me that we even need to use that term: tabletop. Video games have become so pervasive, and rpg video games so popular that we now need a qualifier when throwing the term rpg out. Or people might misunderstand.
Of course D&D is the grand-daddy of them all. Though many people who've never played have a huge misconception of what it is. It's been through many, many incarnations. The original publication, which came out in 74' came in three books in a small box and left a lot of stuff up to the players. The game itself comes from table top war-gaming. It was, and still is a fringe group, back in the 60's guys (as it was predominantly a male activity) would get together in dorm room basements and their own home basements and reenact battles from history. Some preferred Napoleonic, while others preferred antiquity, still others preferred the middle ages and it was a variant set in this time period that really got things going. Somebody grabbed onto the idea of coming up for some alternate rules for wizards. The first set of rules that included fantasy as part of the rules was Chainmail, published by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren under the company TSR.
The man that would eventually invent Dungeons and Dragons, Dave Arneson, eventually took this fantasy idea of warfare and stripped it down so instead of controlling entire armies, players would control a single unit, and one player would act as an arbiter and control more generic units. After showing the idea to Gygax (who apparently loved it) the two developed it into the game we now know as D&D,
D&D inspired many, many, many clones. Some were direct clones, like Tunnels and Trolls. Others not so much, like Traveller a game set in space and was the first science fiction rpg. One really blew the doors off the way RPG's could be played, Call of Cthulhu, had the players protraying normal people getting caught up in the horror that was the Cthulhu Mythos. The late 70's and early 80's saw a boom in rpgs. There were a ton published during this time period. A lot of them seemingly out of peoples basements. I have a bunch of small press stuff. None of it's valuable, so no, I'm not sitting on a treasure trove. Yet despite all of these clones, send ups and games inspired from Dungeons & Dragons, it remained by far the most popular game of it's type. Until the 90's.
Now some say that the World of Darkness, or Vampire: the Masquerade as it were was more popular than D&D during the mid to late 90's, and maybe it was, but I dunno. It certainly was popular, but I don't think it was more popular than D&D. It focused more on Roleplaying, stripping away the need for combat or exploration and settling on a much more political bent. It was pretty big by the time I graduated high-school, though for me D&D was still the go to game. All that being said the original company that published D&D, TSR, went bankrupt and it's properties were bought by Wizards of the Coast, the folks that publish Magic: The Gathering. They're still the folks publishing D&D.
Now my preferred version of D&D isn't D&D at all, it's actually Pathfinder, which takes a rules set that was released for public consumption under what is called the Open Gaming Licence, which was an inspired move by Ryan Dancy, one of the developers for the 3rd (or 6th if you want to get technical) edition of the D&D. It allowed other people to take the rules and build off of them. Which is what the company known as Pazio did 4 years ago to come up with Pathfinder.
My personal introduction to gaming wasn't D&D. It was actually a game with the acronym MERP's: Middle Earth Roleplaying.
On a visit to Provo with the school band I came across a game store. I'd never been in such a place before and I marvelled at all the cool stuff that they had flooding their shelves. One thing that caught my eye was a book called Middle Earth Bestiary. Now I did not know what an rpg was at that time, although I had a friend or two that talked about them (D&D, specifically adventures set in the world of Dragonlance). I bought the book because it had cool illustrations and information on all sorts of monsters that were in Middle Earth. I was a sucker for both monsters and Middle Earth back then (I still am) so I spent some of the small stipend of spending money my parents had given me and bought that book. (Looking back on it that might be where my impulse buying of games, books and movies started.) Another friend asked me when I got on the bus if I played the game. I had no clue what he was talking about. He then mumbled something about MERP's and I thought long and hard about what that might mean on the long bus ride back to Roosevelt. I also look at my book of course.
I still have that book. It's not in bad shape, perhaps fair condition. The binding is still intact but there are a few creases on the cover and a bit of tearing on the top and the bottom of the spine. No loose pages. I still look at it once in a while.
That summer I some how conned my mother into buying me the base game when we went to a family reunion in Salt Lake City. I then spent a chunk of the weekend explaining what the game was to people as they just didn't seem to grasp it. I still have all the books to that as well, though not the original box, sadly.
I got my first copy of D&D about a year later, and the rest is as they say history.
(For the record a year or so before I got any of the MERP's stuff I conned my father into buying me a game called HeroQuest. It's an awesome board-game that was published by Milton Bradley and I actually do have my copy still. I did lose some pieces, but Ebay has allowed me to pick up an additional copy with a few missing pieces as well as a couple of expansions about year ago, so yes I do still have a complete copy of that game as well. While not a true RPG in the technical sense, it does have element of RPG's, specifically early RPG's: dungeon exploration, each player controls a character and one player is an arbiter that controls both the monsters and the "plot" of the game. Unlike a genuine rpg however there was no mechanic for advancement so your character never really got better as they went through the dungeons. There's also not a mechanic to handle things outside of combat other than searching rooms for treasures or traps. There are variants that have been published online over the years and there was a game published by Games Workshop called Advanced HeroQuest published at the same time that added some of those elements into the game. By today's boardgame standards it's a pretty simple game, but it still looks cool and if you have four people willing to play it with you it's good for a nights entertainment.)
There's a lot to this, the history of gaming. There's some pretty cool articles that detail it pretty well as well as a couple of blogs where the bloggers regularly interview folks that were there at the start of things. This was a very, very, very short crash course which probably left you confused, befuddled and happy i'm done.
Labels: Games, Geek, RPG's
It's a golden age of television for the geek. Or maybe it was. I'm not sure I don't watch television all the often and haven't watched it regularly for the last 10 years or so. I do know that in the last 15 years we've had some iconic shows. Some programs that have almost become mainstream acceptable, others that have. Now I don't normally wax pedantic about tv shows. Like I said, I don't watch a lot of actual television. If I watch a tv series it's usually on DVD or streaming on Netflix well after the fact. But holy hell, look at what we've got, here are some high lights.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's getting on in years, and yeah it's silly but some how it still remains poignant and popular and geeks (and some non-geeks) just love it. The writing is pretty sharp, the acting is pretty good, and the plots are seemingly epic if not just far fetched, but ridiculously so.
Firefly. If ever there was a tv series that died too soon, it was this one. It's fun. Smart. The plots aren't as silly as Joss Whedon's earlier stuff, but the writing is just as good or better. We did get a movie. A short series of comics, but I'm not sure if this one will ever come back. I hope it does. I'd like to see another season or two. Of course they killed off the two best characters in the feature film (Serenity) but maybe we could see some of their earlier adventures? Or maybe we could just follow Shepard Book around for a season or two and see what cool stuff he did before the series.
Babylon 5. This is a nerds sci-fi show. It's brilliant in it's way, and it did somethings that until that point no other program had done. Ok, it's a bit of a cheat to include it here, but the last couple of seasons ended about 15 years ago (1998) so I think it deserves to be here. It's not easy to watch now thought. The producers insisted on using CGI for exteriors and space flight shots and honestly it looks like a bad video game. The acting is pretty horrible at times too, but it can all be forgiven because they actually included a defined meta-plot. Yeah. There was a plot outline for 5 seasons and they stuck to it. Thank you. It's a fantastic idea and not enough other series have done it. If you can get over some of the hammy performances and bad CGI though this is a series worth checking out.
Stargate SG-1. This baby went for 10 seasons, created 2 spin off series and 2 straight to DVD movies. I always thought the feature film was a little... I dunno, sparse? It seemed like it needed more. Probably because it did. There was a defined story there but it was begging for a sequel. Instead we got a television show. It, like most sci-fi shows, was ridiculous. There's only so much suspension of disbelief that we can attain. That being said as the show progress it became more enjoyable. The characters became more fleshed out and quite honestly you stopped caring how ridiculous it was that the 4 main characters managed to thwart the plans of ancient god beings season after season. They also revealed that there's another universe beyond the Go'ald and the Asgard even if we only got glimpses of it. If you're a sci-fi fan yes, this is one you should watch.
Stargate-Atlantis. This is a spin off, and is probably in some ways better than the original. Of course they had 8 seasons of the previous series to build off of at this point. But another fine addition to the geek/nerd library.
FarScape. Holy shit, the what a bizarre menagerie this is! A lost astronaut stuck on a living star-ship with a bunch of escaped convicts: an angry tentacle man, the miniature obese corrupt and hedonistic despotic frog creature, an oversexed plant woman, and shortly into the first season a grey skinned fugitive who seems to be horny all the time. It's all piloted by... a giant four armed lizard/octopus man. If you haven't seen FarScape, I'm sorry. It's probably one of the most brilliant science fiction tv programs to ever spring forth from the mind of anyone. A joint venture between Australia, Canada and the Sci-Fi channel (back before the Y's) with effects by the Hensen company (of Kermit the Frog fame) it is different visually and stylistically from every sci-fi series ever. These guys are the good guys. They're not bad or evil. Some of them are downright despicable but this is definitely one group that's fun to fly with. The first season has a few terrible episodes but about halfway through the first season it hits it's stride and carries itself through to the awkward cliffhanger finale.
Lost. You can hate this show. I'll respect you for it. But you know what, it was awesome. The acting was good, the storytelling was compelling, and the damn series left those who loved it sitting on the edge of their seats until the end of the finale. So maybe they dropped the ball with the finale. Maybe the answers to the questions you had weren't satisfying (they did answer most of the questions though) but you know what. I felt like I was watching one long ass movie with tons of characters and a ridiculously convoluted but awesome plot. So yeah. You can hate it, but you have to give it props for trying.
Supernatural. Two brothers hunting down demons, ghosts and other weird shit out of myths, fables and fairy tales? Hell yes. The fact that the studio decided to keep going after the 5th season is a bit of a let down not that I don't love the brothers Winchester, but that it'd be nice to see the original vision of the creators fulfilled and put to rest. The series is going strong, and for being a fantasy/horror series is pretty mainstream. I have co-workers that love it. I don't think I can say that about any of the series I've mentioned so far. Yeah, there's some criticism. It's amazing how homogeneous America looks in that series, but I suppose I can't begrudge the producers for being on a budget. Plus this has inspired a copy-cat or two Grim being the first one to come to mind.
Alias. Now if you want to argue about this being a science fiction series, one word. Rimbaldi. If it weren't for the introduction of him and his inventions and the absurd technology they come up with from it, then it wouldn't be a science fiction series. Once could argue that it takes place in a parallel universe where Rimbaldi existed but Rimbaldi takes this from a simple spy show to full on sci-fi. You know what, that's ok. Admitting your sci-fi is the first step. Embracing it is the second. Alias never really embraces that fact but it's still a fun show to watch and it helped pave the way for series' like Lost and Battlestar Galatica. Speak of which...
Battlestar Galatica. Holy hell what a bleak show. It's amazing the actors didn't kill themselves off before reaching the end of this one. Now if you can get past how absolutely depressing the premise is, it's pretty fantastic. There's some brilliant moments and the fact that the Cylons look like us is AWESOME! Well, maybe I'm being a little too enthusiastic. It did show us what was possible in a full science fiction series. And that's refreshing.
Dr. Who. If you haven't watched the new Dr. Who, shame on you. Go and watch it now! This British program is silly, and cheesy and fantastic. The writing is top notch, as is the acting. The plots are a little... far-fetched seems to be the wrong word but it's the best I can muster. You don't watch it for the plots (only) but for the characters. Each actor who has portrayed the Doctor has done a fantastic job so far, hopefully we have four or five more before they decide to put the series to rest. There's some pretty kick-ass monsters too (I'm looking at you Weeping Angels) and some not so kick ass monsters (Exterminate). This series is becoming more and more popular, and it should. If you like sci-fi, go and watch this if you haven't. If you like British television, go and watch this.
There are a lot of others, new series include Once Upon a Time, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, True Blood. I'm sure there's several current series' I've completely missed. That being said there's a lot of older shows I haven't touched. (Lexx, Merlin, Star Trek this and that). Science Fiction is becoming more mainstream, I'm going to tackle a few of these series in more depth in the future, plus some I didn't mention, until then...
PUDDING.
Labels: Geek, TV Reviews
