I learned some more lessons at the “Virginia Backgammon Club”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/backgammon.html last night. I won one match and lost two, which is better than the previous couple of times, though my second-place win from a few months ago is starting to seem like a fluke. Over at the Grounds I’ve been on the mother of all losing streaks, which either means that Fortuna has it in for me or my game is off for some reason.

I think I know what’s wrong, and ironically it was the match that I _won_ that made it clear. I was ahead 2-0 in a three point match, and was bearing off with two checkers on each of my inner table points except the four point. My opponent, Constantine, hadn’t taken anyone off yet and had a guy on the bar. Pretty sweet position, right? I roll a 4-1. And what do I do? 5-off. Not 6-5 6-2, the only sensible move, I leave him a blot to hit, which of course he does, leading to a nailbiting finish instead of a straightforward win or maybe even a gammon.

It wasn’t that I considered the right move and made the wrong choice. It’s that I overlooked the obvious. And this was in a tournament, where I was making a point of being both careful and observant. If I can miss something so blatant, who knows how many other opportunities to make the best move that I’ve missed, in situations where it’s not quite as clear cut? My problem isn’t strategy; it’s focus. I take pride on playing a quick game, but it’s time to slow down.

In other backgammon news: I won’t say that “this”:http://www.lotrfanclub.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?itemID=5320&CategoryID=none&keyword=Our%20Recommendations is the coolest board ever, because I’ve seen some very cool boards. But it’s still pretty cool.

So I’m sitting here in Common Grounds, and a song comes on that sounds strangely familiar. After a moment I place it, and walk up to Aaron, who’s working the espresso machine.

“What is this?” I say.

“It’s the Beta Band,” he replies.

I stand there, grooving to it for a moment. “It’s cool,” I say.

Aaron smiles. “I know.”

Ah, the joys of recycled pop culture.

“Cool trailer”:http://www.lordoftherings.net/index_400_hv_presell.html. Favorite moment: the slightest hint of a grin on Gandalf’s face in response to Aragorn’s question. That’s hope in Tolkien in a nutshell. Minas Tirith looks great. But what’s up with Galadriel reaching down a hand to help Frodo? Hopefully not a cheesy dream sequence. I’d be fine with a post-dunking reunion scene, though. That would actually fit the structure of the films quite nicely.

The more imminent question, though, is how much the 40 minutes of extra footage in the extended-edition DVD can do for Two Towers. No way they’re going to redeem that film’s offending scenes, but the FOTR extra footage worked far more magic than I would have guessed possible, so I’m optimistic.

Around St. Michaels, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore, you can’t spit without hitting a bed & breakfast. It’s a perfect place for a weekend getaway only if your perfect weekend getaway involves lots and lots of shopping. For knick-knacks. If that’s not your thing, then you’ll be better off a few miles further south on Tilghman Island. There, at least, you can sail with Captain Wade Murphy.

Wade is an old oysterman now making a living running charter tours of the Chesapeake Bay. His boat, the Rebecca T. Ruark, is an official national historic landmark, and (he never hesitates to boast), the oldest skipjack on the Bay. Wade is well past sixty but nowhere near seventy, strong, witty, leather-skinned, and sharp-eyed. All of the decomposition that normally comes with age seems to have concentrated itself in his hearing. He sails out of Dogwood Harbor, where the Rebecca is the only ship with a mast amid a flock of yachts and powerboats.

Suanna and I were the only ones who showed up for his two-hour tour this past Sunday afternoon. “I don’t mind,” he said, “As long as you can help with the sails.”

Though I didn’t actually utter the words “goody goody goody,” he may have read them in my eyes. I’m an inveterate landlubber who has harbored a lifetime fascination with boats and all things maritime. I hadn’t dared to dream that I might actually get a chance to hoist a sail on this jaunt. At first it seemed like a guy named Ray would be going along with us, but he disembarked just as we were shoving off. He may have been Wade’s homonculous—he had the same tanned skin, and looked a little bit older, but didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds and boasted no more than three teeth. He waddled around in boats a couple sizes too big for him, making them look like waders.

We puttered out of the harbor under the power of a motored dinghy trailing behind the Rebecca. I got off on just the right start by actually fumbling with one of the slipknots around the sail, before Wade patiently showed me that you just had to pull on the trailing end. We hoisted the sail, Wade stacked up a bunch of multicolored binders filled with pictures, and he launched into the first of his stories. All the while he left the wheel to me, only occasionally muttering something like “aim over yonder” or “full right” to keep us going where he wanted. It wasn’t all that hard, once I got the hang of it, but what was so refreshing was that Wade didn’t treat either of us like customers/walking potential lawsuits, but assumed that, as a reasonably intelligent person, I could probably handle steering a boat.

Wade’s first story was a roundabout defense of the fact that he referred to the Rebecca as “the oldest sailing skipjack.” (A skipjack, by Wade’s definition, has one mast, two sails, and is mainly used as an oyster-shucker. It also happens to be a kind of tuna, not to mention the name of an encryption algorithm created by the NSA.) Since it was built with two masts in 1886, before skipjacks were ever built, and only later became one, this is apparently a sore point for some folks. Mainly for one guy in particular—a 74-year-old retired oysterman who has been, for the past three years, stealing all the advertising brochures for the Rebecca from local brochure-holders and throwing them away. Wade had only recently managed to catch the guy on tape; his trial is actually today. Apparently he had been stalking Wade for quite some time, treating him as a Danger to Society because of his loose use of the phrase “oldest skipjack” among other vague reasons summed up by Wade as “jealousy.” Wade observed that this gentleman had been a “poor waterman,” which, from the way he said it, amounted to the ultimate sort of indictment, accounting for both his lack of success on the water and his lapses of character on land.

After this first story, I had Wade pegged as the kind of person who takes a dim view of what my friend Steve Brown is fond of referring to as “gummint bidness.” The moral of the tale of the brochure-stealer was certainly that, while this guy was clearly nuts in the eyes of the community, he was still able to cause all sorts of trouble for Wade by calling in fabricated complaints about him to distant federal bureaucracies like the DNR and EPA.

Wade’s next story had a different take, though. It began with the sinking of the Rebecca in a big storm in ‘99 or ‘00, and his attempts to get it out of the water before there was nothing left to get. The private contractors he hired brought a puny little crane and charged him thousands of dollars while utterly failing to rescue his boat. At that point “the guvnor” took notice, and (in light of the boat’s historical significance) provided some sort of State of Maryland super-crane, gratis, that saved the Rebecca in half the time it had taken those other twerps to figure out that they couldn’t. This is the first and only story I’ve heard in which Parris Glendening’s stars as a wise and noble super-governor.

Wade’s third story, and running theme, was the systematically stupid ways that humans had behaved in order to eradicate the oyster bays of the Chesapeake. It started with rampant overharvesting starting in the 50’s, coupled with insensitivity to the ecology of the Eastern Seaboard that led in turn to increased salt content in the waters of the Bay. This, in turn, messed up the one defense the oysters had against the nasty diseases that threatened to do them in: the reliable freezing-over of the Bay during the winter months. The end result: no more oysters. Most of the old skipjacks are now running charter cruises for tourists from D.C. We actually hauled up a crateful of oysters during our sail, and Wade demonstrated, with no small amount of bitterness in his voice, that ninety percent of them were dead.

Ironically, if anyone has weathered the death of the industry, it’s Wade. In rebuilding Rebecca after it sank, Wade had to replace the mast; he gave the old one to a guy who makes duck decoys. The world of collectible duck decoys is just another minor point in the the larger lesson: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I had no idea, but apparently duck decoys made from certifiably historic wood can fetch quite a price. Wade has been selling the ones made from his mast on eBay: $5000 minimum bid. He has a whole passel of them that he’s auctioning off, one per year. In the meantime he does charter cruises, taking a dim view of the newer, snazzier, altogether less-classy boats plying the same trade. (“Newer,” in this context, means “anything built in the 20th century.”)

As we sailed back in toward the harbor, I wondered just how long Wade was going to let me keep driving. We took down the sails, he turned on the motor in the dinghy, and then he took a long and involved cell phone call. All the while we approached the multicolored posts that were clearly meant to signal, in some way, our route of approach, which involved at least two surprisingly narrow right-angle turns. It got to the point where I needed to know quite badly whether we were supposed to go on the right side or the left side of the thingee in front of us, but, since I hadn’t made a total fool of myself thus far, Wade made the dangerous assumption that I actually knew what I was doing. He was sufficiently hard of hearing that it was pointless to ask him, especially when his attention was focused elsewhere. Fortunately he noticed my dilemma just in time and casually muttered “to the right,” which was good enough to get us up to the first right-angle turn. At that point he said “turn right.” What he should have said was “Turn right, which will involve a subtle interplay of steering the craft both right and left, anticipating its movement, which is slightly non-intuitive unless you’re used to it, taking into account both the wind and our current speed.” Thankfully, he detected my internal flailing just in time, and relieved me of the wheel.

Far from feeding my boat-fix, our little trip has only made me hungry for more—for a jaunt where we pick up proper speed, unfurling both sails, dodging the boom as it swings around like a freed guillotine, saying “avast!” and meaning it. It’ll have to be another day.

Here’s a couple recommended reads, with nothing in common other than that they share “Scott McCloud”:http://www.scottmccloud.com/ as a starting point.

“Ed Heil”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001268.html jumps from “infinite canvas” comics to a broader discussion of vector vs. raster graphics and the cruft in computer desktop design.

Lore Sjoberg of “The Slumbering Lungfish”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/ “weighs in”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/index.php?p=chargingpeople.1064271013 on the whole issue of micropayments, with very funny results. This is the guy who used to maintain The Brunching Shuttlecocks and still maintains “The Book of Ratings”:http://www.bookofratings.com/.

Hatred motivates obsession: I first learned this at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, MI. The guys who worked in the stockroom were as liberal as they come, but they listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously. They hated everything he said, but they couldn’t get enough of him. Every day they tuned in to his show in order to feed, inform, and clarify their hatred.

Now, I don’t hate Jai, who I have written about once or twice before. But it’s a similar dynamic that keeps me coming back to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”:http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/. This week’s episode, where the Fab Five try to reconstruct a certifiably psychotic tightwad named Alan, only confirms my conviction that Jai must be ejected from the show at the earliest opportunity, or Western civilization will collapse.

In the first segment, we see Jai following the other guys around, nosing in on their business. His words of wisdom regarding Alan’s entertainment center: “This is fancy here, what you’ve got going on here.” Later on he makes fun of one of Alan’s books: “‘Idiot’s Guide to Beer’?! Who’s that much of an idiot that they need a _guide_ to beer?” Of course, said book is a guide to _brewing_ beer, which is exactly the kind of thing you might expect the “Culture” expert to know something about.

Jai sings. That’s grounds for eviction right there. It’s part of a highly pathetic jam session. Here are the clever lyrics he improvises: “Five gay men and one straight man in the house. / That’s all it takes.” Keep in mind that this is what the show’s editors present to us _after_ sifting through who knows what else. This is what they thought represented Jai _best_.

The bone the producers throw Jai this time around is to take Alan to shop for a gift for his girlfriend. Of Satya, the store he chooses, he has this to say: “This is the best place to come because everything is unusual and _so_ unique.”

His advice to Alan before the party: “Offer your guests drinks when they arrive.” “Make them feel comfortable.” Stunning.

The kicker is that we can’t really blame Jai for the absolute disaster Alan makes of the evening in the final segment. No amount of work or advice could have prevented him from mucking things up. Still, we have here yet another episode in which Jai does absolutely nothing to reform the weekly guinea pig. He can’t act, by which I mean that he always seems like he’s acting despite the fact that no one is actually supposed to be performing a role. This is ironic because, according to the website, Jai is the only one of the Five who is a professional actor.

The show is crumbling. This week’s episode was once again rife with conspicuous product placements and endorsements. It’s becoming clear that Carson is not merely annoying, but has no actual fashion sense. Thom remains brilliant, and Ted wins big points for singing the praises of the martini, but the two of them alone cannot sustain the show. It’s going to crumble, and I’m not going to be able to avert my eyes while it does. It’s the First Law of Reality Television: “Everybody likes watching a train wreck.”

I generally try to avoid the waiting room at the Jiffy Lube, but today I mis-timed my arrival and found myself there for a few minutes while they finished working on the Polytroposmobile. I had just decided against reading the cheesy article about Bangkok in a wrinkled travel magazine when the door opened and a peculiar smell wafted in. The smell of dog.

Now then: I am a cat person, or at least as much as anyone can be who doesn’t actually own a cat. The inevitable corollary to this is that I am _not_ a dog person. This is true in spite of the fact that I know and love some dogs and even more dog people. I have made my peace with the fact that dogs are among us, but it is a fragile peace, one that threatens to crack when dogs enter places like Jiffy Lube waiting rooms.

I’m not hypersensitive to foul odors or anything; this dog objectively stank. A middle-aged man with a big smile and a bow tie followed it in and sat down directly across from me. His smile remained plastered on as he tried to make eye contact. He wore a sign around his neck that read:

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT MY DOG

On reflection, there might not have been an actual sign there, but he didn’t need one. He kept looking at me, and I experienced “a curious sense of deja vu”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000065.html. He was waiting for me to look at his dog, maybe pet it, at least _acknowledge_ it. I did my best to avoid looking at the dog, but this was difficult, because the dog was trying to chew on my sandal. Why oh why had I set down my magazine?

Another guy walked into the waiting room. I knew right away he was a dog person because he didn’t immediately gag at the smell of dirty dog that by now was seeping into the furniture. Instead, he kneeled down to scratch the dog on the head.

It was as if someone had thrown a switch on Smiling Dog Guy. He had been waiting for this moment. “Isn’t she lovely? Yeeess. Gooood dog. Goood dog. I’m not sure exactly what she is . . . oh, she’s a mutt, I know, part terrier part sheep dog they usually say, but she’s a goood dog and we love her don’t we oh yes sweeetums yes we dooo yes we dooo.”

I was hoping the new guy would recoil in shock at this strange behavior, but instead he just smiled. “Part terrier part sheepdog. Mah uncle in Alabama had one just lahk this.”

And they were off. My eyes were beginning to water from the smell, and I quickly lost track of the train of their dialogue, which wasn’t so much a conversation as an alternating series of exclamations about this dog and dogs in general. Smiling Dog Guy always followed his by petting the dog and saying “Goooood Dog” or “We love you yes don’t we oh we do.” A couple minutes in, his emotion overcame him and he actually _picked the dog up into his lap_. It was really too big for that sort of thing, but this didn’t stop him.

A young woman entered at that point and wrinkled her nose, God bless her. Briefly, she took in the scene: Man One, holding a big dog in his lap. Man Two, kneeling at Man One’s feet, where the dog had just been. Man Three, seeing if he could teleport himself away from there by sheer force of will. She smiled politely and retreated out of the waiting room, which, I realized, I should have done a while back.

“Excuse me, sir, would it kill you wash your dog once in a while? Especially if you bring it in public? And when it tries to gnaw my toe off, maybe not treat the situation as if it’s highly amusing? And in the name of all that is beautiful in this broken world of ours, lose the freakin’ bow tie.”

That isn’t what I said. No, I didn’t say anything. I was pathetic: I pretended I was making a cell phone call and headed outside for better reception, whereupon I actually did make a call in order to have an excuse to stay outside until they called my name.

I already know what my punishment is going to be for my uncharitable attitude. Years hence, my as-yet-unborn child will look at me with unrefuseable eyes and say “Daddy! I want a puppy!”

What I should have done yesterday, before responding to Greg’s notes on My Life With Master, was to actually read his essay Where Stories End and Games Begin, which he claims is refuted somewhat by MLWM. But I didn’t, and (as Ed pointed out) I also was sloppy in my use of the term “narrativist.” Hopefully what follows will rectify things and not just muddy the waters even more.

When we were kids, I used to tell my little brother Colin stories that he called “Chooseyers.” The impetus came from Choose Your Own Adventure books, which we both enjoyed. When we had run through all of those we could find, I tried making them up on the fly for him, giving him two or choices for how the story could continue every few minutes. This evolved quite quickly into completely open-form storytelling, where Colin took on the role of the protagonist and I took on the role of everything else. We were, in essence, engaged in a roleplaying game—one with no rules or structure of any kind.

The funny thing is that at the same time I was playing “real” roleplaying games, Star Frontiers and Marvel Super Heroes and Dungeons & Dragons, and it didn’t even occur to me that these activities and “Chooseyers” were basically the same thing. It wasn’t until years later, when I started playing Amber, that it hit me.

What’s relevant here is that the whole notion of a “roleplaying game” doesn’t require any of the basic things we usually associate with a “game.” One could argue that at the level of a Chooseyer, what’s going on is no longer a game but simply collaborative storytelling. But this doesn’t strike me as useful, because those Chooseyers clearly have much more in common with D&D than D&D does with Scrabble, or even with a game like Talisman. Storytelling is integral to roleplaying games.

In “Where Stories End and Games Begin”, Greg Costikyan argues that

Even the best games have to compromise the nature of “the game” in order to work as storytelling environments at all. Designing or writing here, at the intersection of story and game, is an interesting exercise, but fraught with peril and unhappy compromises. That is true because story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure within which the player has freedom of action. Creating a “storytelling game” (or a story with game elements) is attempting to square the circle, trying to invent a synthesis between the antitheses of game and story. Precisely because the two things—game and story—stand in opposition, the space that lies between them has produced a ferment of interesting game-story hybrids. And yet the fact remains: game and story are in opposition, and any compromise between the two must struggle to be successful.

This holds true for a lot of games, but not for roleplaying games, whose very purpose is to merge story and game. In a roleplaying game, the story is generated by all the players collectively, and exists only ephemerally in the context of the gaming session. This is one of the reasons that Greg downplays the role of “story” in paper RPGs:

These “stories” are meaningful to players precisely because they are intimately involved. Players frequently write up “expedition reports,” in which they retell the story of a particular session of play, or several sessions. Expedition reports almost invariably make dull reading for those who are not involved in the campaign, because they do not have the same intimate familiarity with the setting, the same long history with the players and their characters.

The fact that most RPG sessions will generate what is, by literary standards, a bad story doesn’t make it any less a story. The purpose of the story in this case is the enjoyment of the participants only, who, because they’re invested in specific roles as well as the general creation of the story, are likely to have fun (and even appreciate the event aesthetically) even if the story that comes out of it isn’t going to interest anyone else.

It’s like a hootenanny, or at least like the ones I’ve attended in the basement of Marist Hall. People come by; some bring instruments. I play the bongoes. Some of the people there know how to play music; others, like me, are rank amateurs. The output of those sessions isn’t going to win any recording contracts, and might even get laughed off the stage at some open-mic nights. But for everyone who’s taking part, it’s grand fun, and on certain rare occasions even transcendent (bolstered by enough alcohol, of course).

The point here is that an RPG is not an instance of a game doing story badly; it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, which is a different kind of story. In one sense, narrativists are people who see the goal of an RPG as being to get that story as close to literary quality as possible.

Moreover, the rhythm of a roleplaying game is not the rhythm of a short story; you have peaks of excitement and periods of boredom and things happening here and there. You don’t have a long build leading to catharsis; you have gradual character evolution instead. The closest non-interactive analog is, perhaps, a “series” comic book—a comic with a small cast of characters who have adventures together, some of them short one-issue stories and others with story arcs that are told over several issues.

I don’t think anyone would dispute that a serial comic would count as a kind of story; I certainly don’t think that “gradual character evolution” and a lack of “a long build leading to catharsis” make something cease to be a story.

Many role-playing gamers never give “story” a second thought—they get their kicks from solving problems and playing roles, they don’t terribly mind whether the things they encounter knit together into some kind of coherent story. For them, that isn’t their main interest in the game.

This is certainly true of many roleplayers, with the narrativists crowded at the other end of the spectrum. But their lack of interest in story doesn’t change the fact that it’s the presence of a story that the players themselves create that distinguishes RPGs from other types of games.

The unique nature of RPGs gets blurred by the existence of computer games that call themselves “roleplaying games” as well. But there�s an important distinction between the sort of story created by a roleplaying game and that created by a computer RPG, a computer adventure game, or even a MMORPG. In all the latter cases, there is no element of performance, no true open-endedness, and (most importantly) a yawning gap between the creator (of the story) and the player. The designers of a game may be telling a story that coexists happily beside the game, and in some cases may do it very well, as with Grim Fandango and Deus Ex. But a game with multiple paths to success and even multiple endings, like Deus Ex, is still telling the story of its designers; its story element sinks or swims based on how original and interesting their ideas are, and on the quality of the writing and the graphic design within the game. The player’s contributions may satisfy them on a gaming level, but on a story level they are merely an audience.

In summary: in roleplaying games, game and story exist harmoniously. This is true of all RPGs to some extent; My Life With Master, because it’s so innovative and unusual, just makes it that much clearer. Ed Heil does a good job pointing out what makes MLWM unique:

But what I think is interesting about games like My Life With Master, as well as many other games of its little-known kind, is not that they don’t have very many rules. It’s that the rules they have attempt to support narrativist play over and above the other kinds of play (simulationist and gamist).

In other words, the rules of MLWM create a situation where you have to pay attention to the story that’s developing; if you don’t, you’re not really playing the game.

I have at least three tangents in my head, clamoring for attention, all having to do with the line between RPGs and computer RPGs. I�m going to save them for another day, though.

Via “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.com/ : Neal Stephenson has set up a “Wiki for Quicksilver”:http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml. Basically a place for the community at large to provide annotations and background. Cool idea.

The book is out, and all kinds of people are reading it right now, and I’m not because I was stupid and ordered it on Amazon. What was I thinking?

It will be arriving in a box that also contains “What To Expect the First Year”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0894805770/qid=1064425752/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-5302622-9575239?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. Crikey.

UPDATE: Regarding the wiki: look also at Neal’s description of the project, which makes it clear that it’s a little more ambitious than a standard wiki, in some interesting ways.

_If this actually works_, then I am a *big* fan of:

# The “MT-Textile”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php Plugin
# The “Smarty Pants”:http://www.daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ Plugin

bq. Both for Movable Type.

UPDATE: Seems to work — except for an extra space above the blockquote. Still, I’m happy.