This game and many others like it saved me from a boring school life. While lessons passed by, i was busy dreaming up my next characters, plans for campaigns and even sketching up the blue prints to some home made fantasy game systems. My mum often likes to taunt me about my old habits when around her friends, telling them about the trips and detours she would have to make to take me to Games Workshop to buy strange dice and weird books.

Living in a world dominated by computer games, i can’t emphasize enough the story-telling and communal theatre-making aspects that don’t exist in MMORPGs, even if they are also great to play. Gaming across a table led to gaming via mail (snail mail). Sounds boring, was actually wonderfully rewarding, even with the disjointed distances of time, waiting for your hand-moderated “turn”(example gm reply to one) to be processed. I think the fact that i paid for these “turns” also added to the tension. Playing-by-mail differed from table hosted campaigns like D&D, in that we played in a shared universe of sometimes up to thousands of players, in 1985! In a sense they were the forbearers of contemporary MMORPGs. I used to love turning up as a teenager at conferences and meet up with the people behind the players or parties playing or sometime famous in these shared universes created via paper and stamps. Our forum was a monthly zine which listed rankings and news items. Some of my favourite (hand-moderated) play-by-mail games included: Saturnalia, Crassimoff’s World, and another game, name forgotten although remember letting the GM crash at my place as he was from Sheffield and had to ask my mum for permission for him to couchsurf.

What play-by-mail games teach you indirectly is creative writing, expanding your imagination (by becoming someone else), and how to deal with others. I guess MMORPGs are taking collaboration to another level entirely (as military industrial complex is studying them!), although they don’t have the writing and character development that comes with RPGs around the table or via mail.

I’m toasting you Gary Gygax tonight for inventing the RPG!

[UPDATE] …and many more have been writing about it here and here

This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)