overgeeked
B/X Known World
I prefer the tamarind.
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The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread
- Thread starter Retreater
- Start date
Will have to try that!
Ryujin
Legend
RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
I was reading Metagaming's magazine Interplay (issue #5, January 1982), and came across this uncredited piece (probably by editor Ron Hopkins) which I could have lifted from any of a number of threads in this and other forums.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Requiem for a Golden Age
The development of adventure gaming has gone to new paths in the last few years. A Golden Age has passed, never to exist again.
Gone are the days when D&D was a novelty enjoyed by a few hardy souls who could figure out a game to play from those initial, oh so disjointed rules.
Gone are the halcyon days of SPI*, when you got a steady diet of serious history, covering
every conceivable conflict.
Gone are the days when game companies were more concerned about the quality of their game's play than anything else.
What we have now in adventure gaming is the Age of Consumerism. I know it has arrived. The word was brought to me by a fellow who sells games in a store. The word went something like this: "The other day there were two mothers in the store bragging about what level D&D character their sons were". It sent chills down my spine.
With that story I knew that adventure gaming had arrived at the pinnacle of our Consumerist culture. In our culture a product is "in" when people buy it only because everyone else is buying. You've got it made when that happens. Quality no longer matters, only name recognition has any relevance at that point.
For a business that's the Holy Grail. Your product becomes divorced from any concept of quality, utility or value. It may even be desirable for the product to have NO quality, since it would only confuse the vacuous mentality of the consumer buyer.
Having arrived, adventure gaming will willy-nilly sweep a few products along with it to commercial success. The mass of
creative and imaginative effort put forth by the numerous small game firms will be stillborn in an echo of non-recognition.
The steady diet of 'new' that the core gamer likes will be gone, along with the few stores that specialized in our kind of games. All that will be available will be a sprinkling of new items carefully tailored for the mass market Consumer.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
* Strategic Publications Inc., ed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Requiem for a Golden Age
The development of adventure gaming has gone to new paths in the last few years. A Golden Age has passed, never to exist again.
Gone are the days when D&D was a novelty enjoyed by a few hardy souls who could figure out a game to play from those initial, oh so disjointed rules.
Gone are the halcyon days of SPI*, when you got a steady diet of serious history, covering
every conceivable conflict.
Gone are the days when game companies were more concerned about the quality of their game's play than anything else.
What we have now in adventure gaming is the Age of Consumerism. I know it has arrived. The word was brought to me by a fellow who sells games in a store. The word went something like this: "The other day there were two mothers in the store bragging about what level D&D character their sons were". It sent chills down my spine.
With that story I knew that adventure gaming had arrived at the pinnacle of our Consumerist culture. In our culture a product is "in" when people buy it only because everyone else is buying. You've got it made when that happens. Quality no longer matters, only name recognition has any relevance at that point.
For a business that's the Holy Grail. Your product becomes divorced from any concept of quality, utility or value. It may even be desirable for the product to have NO quality, since it would only confuse the vacuous mentality of the consumer buyer.
Having arrived, adventure gaming will willy-nilly sweep a few products along with it to commercial success. The mass of
creative and imaginative effort put forth by the numerous small game firms will be stillborn in an echo of non-recognition.
The steady diet of 'new' that the core gamer likes will be gone, along with the few stores that specialized in our kind of games. All that will be available will be a sprinkling of new items carefully tailored for the mass market Consumer.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
* Strategic Publications Inc., ed.
Last edited:
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
Some things never change.
Ryujin
Legend
The game* remains the same. The only thing that changes is the name of the players.
*Metaphorically speaking.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
I believe its "ze game remains ze same".
RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
Hilariously, in Interplay #7, a reader had this response.
------------------------------------------------------------
Do you have any idea of how humorous your editorial "Requiem For A Golden Age" is appearing immediately after your "Coming Distractions ... " column? Remember on that page, Howard, your talking up your $10,000 treasure hunt. It's on the next page you damn consumerism.
By the way, I wouldn't count out SPI covering serious history. With TSR managing it profitably, we just might continue the same policies they had.
Happy grape eating!
E. Gary Gygax
President , TSR
RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
"Gaming... Gaming never changes." -- Ron Perlman, probably
EDIT: Actually, gaming changes. What I should have said is "Gamers... Gamers never change."
Mad_Jack
Legend
Coworker Jim may have just ID10-T'ed his way out of a job... 
This is not particularly surprising, as Coworker Jim doesn't bother to think things through. At all. Ever.
We make high pressure medical tubing, usually in 54-in. lengths.
When they come off the line, we place them on slotted trays, 50 at a time.
When the trays are full the tubes get collected into a bundle and stacked on a rolling metal table with three drawers underneath it. Five layers on the top of the table, then three layers in each drawer, and whatever's left on the order is then once again stacked on top.
When the tables are full we roll them off to one side prior to moving them to the next room to get bagged.
There are approximately 13,000 tubes on each table.
This is a full 18 hours of work for the line.
The tables have a sliding safety plate on the front to ensure that only one drawer at a time can be opened, and to keep the drawers closed when moving the tables.
We always have two people moving full tables. because they weigh A LOT and they're more than six feet long.
Last night Coworker Jim decided to try to move one of the tables by himself despite a coworker literally a couple feet away and moving towards him to help, and did not have the sliding guard up to prevent the drawers from opening.
Coworker Jim is not a small guy, and has all the grace and finesse of an arthritic polar bear. Thus, when he tried to move the table forward, the top drawer slid out quickly and the table overbalanced.
It tipped completely over, dumping all the tubes on the top onto the floor. When we attempted to pick the table back up, we had to pull all the tubes out of the top drawer in order to lift it. The tubes in the second and bottom drawers were largely unaffected but some of them did touch the floor.
However, this is medical-grade equipment, so I'm pretty sure they're just going to write off the whole table.
13,000 tubes at $5 value a piece...
Coworker Jim just trashed approximately $65,000 worth of product.
Because he's an idiot.
Will update on the continuing existence of Coworker Jim as a functional living being after I find out tonight when I go in.
Depends on the topic. I'll generally read the first five pages and see if it's going anywhere interesting and/or has gone off-topic yet. If it's still worth reading I'll give it another five pages. If it's already gone on for a while (like dozens of pages) I'll quickly skim through it and see if the current conversation is still interesting, or skip to the end then scroll back a few pages and start from there.
And on rare occasions the names of the characters.
"Dude, isn't that exactly the same character that was literally just killed last session?"
"No it's not - it's completely different! This one's an elven archery ranger named Therevinthyus who spells his name with a Y!"
I once named my character "Bob, the __", copied the character sheet about fifteen times, and just wrote a new number in the space when he got killed and I had to start over... I later memorialized the character in 5th edition by naming a character "Bob, the 27th". He's adventuring to find out what happened to Bobs the 16th-the 26th...
This is not particularly surprising, as Coworker Jim doesn't bother to think things through. At all. Ever.
We make high pressure medical tubing, usually in 54-in. lengths.
When they come off the line, we place them on slotted trays, 50 at a time.
When the trays are full the tubes get collected into a bundle and stacked on a rolling metal table with three drawers underneath it. Five layers on the top of the table, then three layers in each drawer, and whatever's left on the order is then once again stacked on top.
When the tables are full we roll them off to one side prior to moving them to the next room to get bagged.
There are approximately 13,000 tubes on each table.
This is a full 18 hours of work for the line.
The tables have a sliding safety plate on the front to ensure that only one drawer at a time can be opened, and to keep the drawers closed when moving the tables.
We always have two people moving full tables. because they weigh A LOT and they're more than six feet long.
Last night Coworker Jim decided to try to move one of the tables by himself despite a coworker literally a couple feet away and moving towards him to help, and did not have the sliding guard up to prevent the drawers from opening.
Coworker Jim is not a small guy, and has all the grace and finesse of an arthritic polar bear. Thus, when he tried to move the table forward, the top drawer slid out quickly and the table overbalanced.
It tipped completely over, dumping all the tubes on the top onto the floor. When we attempted to pick the table back up, we had to pull all the tubes out of the top drawer in order to lift it. The tubes in the second and bottom drawers were largely unaffected but some of them did touch the floor.
However, this is medical-grade equipment, so I'm pretty sure they're just going to write off the whole table.
13,000 tubes at $5 value a piece...
Coworker Jim just trashed approximately $65,000 worth of product.
Because he's an idiot.
Will update on the continuing existence of Coworker Jim as a functional living being after I find out tonight when I go in.
Depends on the topic. I'll generally read the first five pages and see if it's going anywhere interesting and/or has gone off-topic yet. If it's still worth reading I'll give it another five pages. If it's already gone on for a while (like dozens of pages) I'll quickly skim through it and see if the current conversation is still interesting, or skip to the end then scroll back a few pages and start from there.
And on rare occasions the names of the characters.
"Dude, isn't that exactly the same character that was literally just killed last session?"
"No it's not - it's completely different! This one's an elven archery ranger named Therevinthyus who spells his name with a Y!"
I once named my character "Bob, the __", copied the character sheet about fifteen times, and just wrote a new number in the space when he got killed and I had to start over... I later memorialized the character in 5th edition by naming a character "Bob, the 27th". He's adventuring to find out what happened to Bobs the 16th-the 26th...
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