Politik und Perversion
Even though most of my thoughts on copyright have been spilled on the german pages of this blog, I today found a little gem of thoughts about copyright in general. I highly reccomend it to readers interested in copyright and intellectual property issues: “What color are your bits?
Enjoy.
For decades the Naftziger collection was the most renowned reference point for wargamers like me if it came to solid information about orders of battle. Its wealth and depth were a constant source of envy and admiration at the same time. In numerous occasions a fading print-out, arriving in a brown envelope from across the Atlantic, settled a long-lasting feud between gamers in Essen and Wuppertal over the presence of a particular regiment of grenadiers or voltigeurs at this or that napoleonic battle.
So I am sad to read George Naftziger has gone into retirement, sad cause with him we loose one of the most dedicated researchers of statistical data for military history. My English skills are not good enough to really describe the gap he will leave.
On his way out, however, Mr. Naftziger donated the whole corpus of his collection to the public, so that it can be accessed at the CARL library of Ft. Leavenworth from now on. And the only thing I can do is to encourage everyone to make the best use of this information, and of course say: Thank you, Mr. Nafziger. May you live long and prosper.
But can it utilize revolutionary interfaces to productize cross-media e-services to mesh extensible niches which helps to incubate end-to-end communities and to drive sticky functionalities while scaling collaborative systems in an effort to monetize open-source convergence?
Found at Slashdot, of course, proving that not every Idle-Posting is useless. In other news: No-one wants to know. And yes, I do realize this is a blog. Thanks.
Somewhere around yet again a long session of reading somewhere around at Tropes I came up with a neat and nice idea for a video game mechanic, that I would like to share and maybe see in a game some day. Unless, of course, its already been done, and I may simply have missed it. I don’t find the time to read all of Penny Arcade, or even TGSA, these days (did you know Blastwave moved?).
But here’s the idea: Instead of having the hero gaining equipment and strength and skills and guns as he progresses through the game, untill he finally encounters a Boss whilst carrying the whole TO/E of a small infantry brigade with him, invert the mechanics and fit them more to the plot of a novel: From being perfectly healthy and well-equipped, the hero slowly depletes his ressources. Sure, there might be the opportunity to restock, but basically the question is wether you can husband the limited ressources you own to solve even the final problems.
This mechanism also would “outsource” the learning curve to the player: He gets more adept at handling the problems the game throws at him by progressing through the game, not because the game arbitrarily decides that he will have more options now because his character has now completed 20 miles of runnning straight or has killed the evil witch.
Plus, arriving at the castle gates of the last enemy with only 50% of speed, dexterity and capability to jump left, being deaf on one ear, having no climbing gear left and only a second-rate gun captured from some enemy with three clips of ammo would not only seem more realistic, it would also create more anxiety and tension than the maxed-out shielded hero smashing the gate with three powerups, the magical monstergun while being at 200% health.
So here is the challenge, game designers: All while you design the game surroundings to become more realistic day by day, why stop at the hero? Make his BFG jam, punch him in the face.
I’d be the first buyer.
… sometimes the world moves quicker than our thoughts. On March 31st our son Leon Elijah was born. The past two weeks have been exiting, exhausting, and amazing. Even attempting to describe how many things the arrival of our little one changed my and our lives would require a small book, and I wont even attempt to tell how happy just looking at him makes me. He is quite simple the best thing that ever happened to me.
So expect some delays in the database world, since yours truly has embarked on a bewildering journey that most of us have only seen with wide innocent eyes from the other side of the boat. I shall attempt, however, not to exclusively babytalk from now on.