So last night I grabbed a mind mapping app for my iPad because I don’t like mind maps.

A mind map is basically just a hierarchical outline that has been painted graphically, so all your leaves are pretty bubbles and the hierarchy is described by arcs connecting these nodes. It’s pretty. But it’s fundamentally flawed because it’s not a way to map your data. It’s a way to organize data in a very specific way (hierarchical) and this very specific way is not always all that useful. Forcing it into that map can be destructive, even. The only way, for example, to imply a connection between two nodes that are not strict parent/children is with an artificial “link” that exists outside the core model of the data.

Why does this bug me? It bugs me because the hierarchy should be an emergent property of the data and not a starting constraint. We should start mapping the data and find out that it’s hierarchical rather than force it into this structure. That is, the mind map severely limits your ability to explore your data set. Instead it becomes just a way to write it down which is, frankly, not interesting.

So anyway I grabbed this app and started playing with it. It’s pretty nifty. It’s very pretty. After a couple of hours enthralled by it I had a huge beautiful map of what this evening’s Soft Horizon game will contain and how they relate. Hierarchically, to be sure, but relate nonetheless. Wow, it is useful. I just had it upside down.

What the mind map does is not organize your data. It discovers your data. What you are exploring is not the data but your brain. You are being invited to invent, decompose, and otherwise investigate the raw stuff of creativity and consequently create something that has structure.

The hierarchical form invite elaboration, for example. I have a node called “Ragged Mere”. It’s a place. I want to know more about it so I start adding nodes (hey are these Aspects?!) like “Peaceful” and “Full of sorcerors” and “Gunpowder”. Cool. I add a couple of NPC nodes — just names, mind you — for people that are somehow attached to these places. Hmm, each also seems to demand elaboration. They get some attached sub-nodes, which also smell suspiciously like Aspects. Pretty soon I have this huge tree of hierarchical data that went all over places I had no idea I was going to investigate. Amazing!

So, okay, I get it. I mean, it’s still a crappy way to represent pre-existing data for all the reasons I ever thought of. But as a creative tool for trying to figure out how to turn a nebulous concept into a structure you can actually use for something, it does indeed work. Because of the way my mind is wired, I have to wonder how much of its power derives from simply being fun and pretty, of course, and that will shake out over time. If it’s useful, I’ll keep using it. If it’s nifty it will gather dust and eventually wind up on my “dead app page”. That’s one step before the trash on my iPad.

The fact that its structure is trivially represented by (and indeed, for many of these apps this is the actual storage format) an outline structure, it’s easy to see how to move from this to a nice linear document, if that’s a path you intend to tread. That’s looking pretty handy too, now.

Damn, I love being wrong almost as much as being right.

–BMurray

Okay that was fun. All the fiddling with my Terrible Grant, I mean. I’m jazzed about layout and typography and stuff relevant to this Highport idea. But is there anything to it? What would go in one of these? Who would get paid and how? What would it cost an end user?

Maybe those should be looked at one at a time. Is there anything to it? Sure. I could be persuaded to generate or acquire and edit content on a relatively frequent basis and fiddle with amusing software to get it done. I’m cool with that. So it’s certainly feasible.

What would go in one of these? That’s the kind of thing that makes lists in my head! So here’s one:

• A Diaspora cluster in some detail. Not everyone feels creative all the time. Detail might include common equipment and maybe military structure ready for use in platoon combat. Ships? Sure! This is already looking like something that could easily span multiple issues actually.
• A new game. I remember photocopying Dragon magazines and chopping that up to build my Snit Smashing boardgame. Making something like that happen regularly would thrill me.
• Preview upcoming VSCA titles. Things like our space combat free PDF release could be stuck in a VSCA magazine.

Obviously I’m thinking mostly about concrete, playable content and not editorial material. Some of this is stuff fans have already been asking for, so it would be cool to be able to fork it over. I can’t see it as being very art-heavy, frankly, but rather more of a nuts and bolts periodical manual for actual play. Tables, charts, diagrams, rules, and enough fluff to get you thinking about how to use it in your game. Very little more. It would look sharp but austere on your iPad.

Who would get paid and how? See now that’s a good question because it’s not sustainable as a single-person effort. As Bob implied earlier, the clone army is not yet ready. But there are some kick-ass game designers and other creative folks withing a few dozen blocks of me and many more within reach of the interwebs. So I’m thinking of some kind of flat fee for a usage license with VSCA not owning the content. So basically I would pay a contributor (of art or writing or whatever) for the right to publish, but they would retain all rights to their content. I thought about doing a royalty thing but honestly I’m just not interested in the accounting.

What would it cost the end user? Well this is interesting. I’m exploring Magcloud because they already do the full-colour magazine thing using a model I like, but also because they have an iPad app and that’s really what I want to get in on: delivery by iPad. Also paper — I love paper — but PDFs can look so damned good on this thing that I am compelled to show you. With product. Currently Magcloud offers content through the app for free with a click-option to purchase the hardcopy. Things looks os bloody good on the device, though, that I’m afraid that’s ass-backwards — it almost makes more sense to sell some kind of ownership and charge a minor printing and shipping fee for hardcopies. Anyway, they will sort that out and if I’m working with them on this I’ll be providing vocal input. They’ll work something out. So there are a few models that would intersect with the Magcloud method:

• Charge the base rate + profit on the Magcloud hardcopy. When they let me charge for the app delivery, charge a base rate + profit. This is least interesting to me, partially because in soliciting art and writing I incur risk and hope to get paid from the Magcloud revenues. This smells old-school.
• Kickstart each issue and use a fraction of that money as budget for the issue and a fraction as profit. Release the PDF for free, selling through Magcloud at the minimum possible (just the Magcloud costs basically) for hardcopy and iPadd app release. This is pretty appealing (zero risk, leveraging technology) obviously.
• Some combination of the above.

Anyway that’s what I’m thinking. I like the visual austerity of Diaspora ¹ and would be aiming at that + colour to really take advantage of the iPad as delivery system. This would not be a magazine you buy for the cool artwork. Lots of folks do that already. I want to produce game-stuff. Shitloads of it.

–BMurray

I’ve talked — okay really I’ve gone on and on — about  the way that publishing is changing and also about how gaming is in a position to take the vanguard in these changes, at least in part because we have limited ties to traditional methods in the first place. Sure there are still the “big boys” out there who do things the usual way, and sure there are still a lot of very small publishers still entrenched in the print-run-investment model, but gamers seem to be fast to explore new media. Now that has implicit risk, too, because sometimes experiments result in answers like, “no”, which means that while the bleeding edge explorers tend to have an open mind about trying new things, they (we) also go through new things like toilet paper, leaving a lot of guesses swirling down the can.

The VSCA has adopted a very low-risk model for its business, which happens to align nicely with new technology. Now, just this morning I was reading about another new technology and then remembering an old conversation, and I ot a little synergistic flash in my head that thrilled me because it implied that I might be able to dick around with fun stuff even more than I already do. This is a good sign, because I am more likely to do something if it’s fun.

So here’s what I’m thinking. What if the VSCA made available on a reasonably fast schedule (monthly say) its current design state for all projects, as well as a few blue collar space articles, and some other stuff, hopefully containing a complete (small) game every time? By small game I mean like a subsystem for something in development, but repackaged as a small stand-alone idea. And what if it was in colour and available digitally or print on demand? I’m thinking somewhere between 24 and 96 pages, delivered regularly, purcased either per-unit or by subscription.

I’m not really approaching this idea as something I think anyone wants, yet (which is why I phrase all this as a giant question) but rather as something that sounds fun to do and has been enabled by recent changes in technology and position — I’m thinking specifically here about Magcloud‘s recent announcement that they have an iPad app pending and that they will be giving stuff away for a while.

So we’re talking here about leveraging (actually I see our methods at VSCA as more parasitical, but “leverage” leverages Leverage, which is hot right now, even though I haven’t seen it yet) someone elses work (Magcloud making an iPad app to deliver colourful content with option to print, with them managing all the customer interaction and just sending us a cheque) so that I can do only the fun parts. And this, as I’ve said before, is how technology and capitalism work together to empower pocket socialists like me, turning my leisure into Scotch.

This would enable us to produce Diaspora supplements, for example, by putting them in a concise format that still has a profitable delivery mechanism, and that is super appealing to me. I’ve avoided supplements so far mostly because the document needs to be above a certain size to make sense turning into product, but if it’s part of (even the largest part of) a magazine format, then that’s solved. It can be as large or as small as the idea is. And I’m keen on Diaspora supplements.

What do you think? Could this be a new way to make games? See, I could see Diaspora broken up into distinct stand-alone pieces that together make an awesome game. If you got those pieces one at a time, would you be happy? If you came to the complete game having played the platoon-scale game for a few weeks and a couple of social fights already, would your experience be better or worse? Now naturally this doesn’t preclude more traditional (if you can call our parasitic method traditional) publication, but rather would augment it. Maybe customers on the subscription list get a discount. Or maybe I figure if you spent $50 on magazines then you already bought a game and I mail it to you. I dunno yet and I’m not promising anything.

But I am thinking real hard, and grinning.

–BMurray

Okay, so really all technology is transitional in a sense, but the technology I’m thinking of now is that which opens up genuinely new possibilities and everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do with it. Look, for example, at the personal computer in the early 80s (when I was first discovering that I happened to be a kind of geek that just got created). For at least ten years from when I got my first computer (an Apple ][+ clone from Hong Kong), the central function of this device was to actively wonder what to do with it.

Fortunately it came well equipped for this. You could program the thing right away and if you felt like delving deeper, you could trivially enter memory data directly, programming the machine code in hexadecimal. You learn a lot that way. If you were even more curious, the machine came with documentation that included schematic diagrams of the whole circuitry and a complete commented listing of the code for the read-only memory.

A few years later my newer computers, Intel boxes for the most part, lacked the tools do wonder. I suppose by this time the manufacturers of such things felt they had done all the wondering that needed to be done and so they could now sell us the fruits of their wondering and we could just consume. Of course this was not sufficient (I bought them to wonder) and so tools became available (and whole operating systems) that let you wonder again. Linux, for example, came with a compiler and a tool chain again and so you were obviously invited.

Anyway, the personal computer is a General Purpose Computing device. It’s not for anything, really, but rather it’s capable of anything that can be programmed into it. As a result it’s in the thing’s nature to always be transitional — we will constantly be wondering what else we can make this thing do because it will constantly acquire more and new power. So I would argue that it always needs to come with wonder-enabling tools because that’s what it is for.

Now this iPad is a different beast but we still don’t know what it’s for. What is different, however, is that the class of people who are equipped to wonder about that are a little more elite. By elite I don’t mean better or smarter or richer, but rather only that they are a small subset of the usership. You need certain skills and certain investment in order to wonder about this thing in practical terms. That’s okay — this isn’t a rant about the loss of wonder. I’m in the elite (or at least I’m invited) — I could wonder if I wanted to. But the fact that most of the developers for the iPad are still wondering has led to an enormous feeling of transition when using the device and the surrounding technologies.

By surrounding technologies I don’t mean technologies that directly support the iPad. I mean technologies that are developing in other contexts but that the iPad is positioned to exploit. These are the places where many users of the device are scratching their heads and wondering (aha!) why the iPad doesn’t do this. For example, why can’t I edit Google Docs?

Okay wait, I know why. I know the technical reasons. I also know they will be surmounted soon enough. But really, this is why the iPad exists — remote storage of data for local manipulation at any arbitrary node (and the iPad is as local and arbitrary as it gets today) and Google Docs is the repository for such remote storage right now. So when I see word processors for the iPad and they do not support Google Docs, I immediately wonder WHAT THE FUCK?

On a more general level, consider Dropbox. Anything that stores any kind of data should be able to export it to Dropbox. If I make funky images with Granimator (and I do), I want to share them with other iPad users (because they make great wallpaper images) and Dropbox is a solid way to offload all that sharing logic to someone else rather than integrate it into an iPad app or, worse, the operating system.

But it’s in the nature of new technology to flounder for a while (a long while in some cases) before it finds niches where it sings. Here’s another example: electronic books. See, I can tell this is transitional because there are some I can only get through Kindle and there are others that I can only get in PDF and there are others still that are self-contained apps. All of these are viable ways to deliver textual content and we don’t have to settle on exactly one (which is good because they have diverse and only partially overlapping strengths and weaknesses) but the disordered management and access to these documents smell like a technology that has not figured it out yet. And it’s clearly not as simple as just integration (like Goodreader, say) but rather a deeper problem of needing a new technology to cope with new technology.

And then, as if it wasn’t enough that technology is changing, technology is clearly changing us too. Our expectations are different than they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. We expect (reasonably!) to trivially share practically anything with people we have never seen or spoken to. Not just make it available, but genuinely share it — make them know it exists, allow them to get it, allow them to change it, and understand their changes. Solid collaboration is still the killer app that doesn’t quite exist yet and a lot of people are stabbing in the dark at it (and wondering) — wikis, Google Docs, Dropbox, Google Wave…all these things are trying to figure out real, distributed collaboration. None of them do it yet, though of them all at least Google Wave (still the least useful for this) is not just an old application elevated to the new shared space. It’s closer to a genuinely new idea, and we sure need one.

We are smart monkeys and so we always re-purpose any technology to make it do what we think it ought to do. As the technology becomes more powerful and as the interconnectedness of people and projects exceeds the point at which we can really analyze it, we will be pushing the human-technology hybrid animal into newer and newer places. The iPad is one of those things that makes this clear. It’s equally clear that it’s a prototype of what will be — it’s clumsy and scattered and poorly integrated. It does a whole bunch of things you already did but in a bigger and smaller package with better and worse graphics. But it is certainly the result of someone smart wondering really hard.

I can’t wait, then, to see where we are next year. Because this transition is more about software and about adoption and usage than hardware. And so, to all you iPad developers out there wondering your asses off for ninety-nine cents a download, my hat is off to you. And my wallet, frankly, open. Wonder over here where I can see it and fondle it and test it and make it do things you didn’t intend it to do. But make it play nice and play freely, because it’s this gestalt technology that is going to really blow us away.

–BMurray

I finally got my 3G iPad last night and had a chance to play with it. I’ll spare you the usual observations except to confirm what others have said — it’s not exactly what I thought it was because it changes my expectations. My desktop computer is less interesting than ever, now relegated to work and World of Warcraft. All my communicating just moved.

I took it to work with me on my commute to see how the 3G stuff worked (and, to be honest, to make sure I get my money’s worth out of the data subscription by getting data) and now I “get” RSS feeds. My Google Reader just tripled its perceived value (okay here’s an app recommendation I wasn’t going to do: G-Whizz aggregates your Google stuff under one application and that’s pretty handy and its mail interface is far prettier than the mail app you get with the iPad). I now kinda “get” Twitter — having used only the web interface to it, it was sort of one-dimensional. Now I have multiple streams, one of which is people responding to me. It makes sense. It’s useful. It’s interesting.

My Reader has a new feature in its mobile form. Normally I can look and see what people I follow are reading and decide whether I want to add their interests to my list. That’s cool — whether or not a service is read by someone I follow is certainly an indirect metric of my likely interest in it. Now, however, because the device knows where I am and knows where everyone else is, there’s another indirect metric: I can read stuff that people near me — physically — are interested in.

It turns out that’s actually a lot less useful in guessing what I might like. But it’s nifty.

The message forums I read are, for the most part, pretty aggravating on the thing. Everything is too bloody tiny. I don’t have any trouble with the soft keyboard but clicking a single 6-point digit is a lot harder with my finger than with a mouse pointer. I never realized before now the strange and precise dexterity we’ve learned through the mouse. So, dear forum developers, that shit has to change. Mobile versions need to be different. Maybe the whole idea needs to be different. The only real success on this front is the Vanilla message forum system, which spends almost all its screen real-estate on a list of messages. Which is what I’m there for.

So last night I hardly touched the desktop machine (which means I didn’t get any layout done: point against) but I was not disconnected. I felt like my brain was still pretty much complete (because the net is part of my brain now) while away from it, which makes my back happier as well as my brain. That’s kind of nice but now movies are too slow — it’s hard to concentrate when my augmented brain is wondering where I’ve seen that actor before and how Scorcese got the lighting to do that and knowing I could find out easily enough. I think this is a kind of birthing pain. Some things are changing and so some comfortable facts are going to disappear.

Tonight I will have the chance to bring the device to the gaming table and I think my printer is going to be relieved. There’s a lot of printing when you’re playtesting in order to keep the rules at the table current with the writing and this little monster solves that pretty tidily. The skunkworks wiki, when in “print friendly” mode also happens to be very mobile friendly. And Dropbox is tightly integrated with my preferred PDF reader, GoodReader (another app plug!), so the playtest draft releases, which are in PDF only, are also handily available. So gamers in particular may be in for a treat — a lot of the failings of electronic books for gaming (and only for gaming — my Kindle still kicks this thing’s ass for paperback emulation) are addressed here. It’s fast, it’s legible, the graphics are pretty, the links work. It’s slick in this context.

I’ll test it in a meeting next, where I’d normally drag a laptop to take notes, send email, and manage the minutes. I expect good things. I expect an IT panic, though — this beast blows the central control mind-set of the IT department away. Attempts to control net behaviour and computer usage are demolished here. Let’s hope it’s for the better, because either way, we’re going to find out.

–BMurray

Okay bear with me, I have several places to go. Actually I have several places to come from and one place to go.

My Kindle is very sneaky without intending to be. Maybe it is intentional or at least part of some business strategy’s “Hope” chapter. Anyway, here’s what happens: I am going along reading a book I carefully chose for myself (in this case Slaughterhouse Five, by Vonnegut) and it references another book (in this case Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Mackay) in an interesting fashion. Intrigued, I go search for it on Amazon and naturally buy it (it’s in the public domain now so it’s only a couple of bucks). And then I start reading that. And this chains — it’s not clear I will ever pop all the way back up the stack (sorry non-programmers, you will just have to live with this mystery) to the book that kicked it off. And it wasn’t Vonnegut, because I got there like that too. Anyway, I am running downhill here: it’s out of hand. This new book could kick off another — maybe several — more books. Indeed, indirectly it already has as it became part of a discussion at my gaming table last night which wandered into discussion of Joseph Conrad and so now I own the complete works of Joseph Conrad.

I am Amazon’s dream Kindle-owner.

Yesterday also contained an interesting plumbing event. I got up and noticed the toilet was running and had been all night. Gurgle gurgle. So I opened the tank and looked in and see that the exit seal is off the dingus that goes up and down to make flushing go. So water is exiting inappropriately. Gurgle gurgle. I reseat the seal and a lot of it comes off in my hand — the plastic is degrading into a fine powder which, when wet, is basically a little oil slick. On my hands. Anyway, the toilet is fixed. So I flush it. As the tank fills the new water pressure on tank screw seals that have been dry all night causes one of them to blow out. And the exit seal unseats again because it is fucked. So now I have gurgle gurgle and drip drip.

This is getting out of hand. I put a bucket under the drip (though thanks to capillary action it’s not entirely reliable where the drip will be except not at the leak) and get the apartment manager involved. A plumber comes in. He replaces the tank screw seals and my leak is stopped, but he’s having trouble with the bad exist seal. He goes to get new parts and comes back with a whole toilet tank assembly (except the exit seal) and installs that. Gurgle gurgle. No joy. So he goes out for new parts and comes back and installs an exit seal. It’s the wrong size and won’t seat. Gurgle gurgle.

That evening my friend Tim tells me of his own plumbing issues and that he found you can get a whole tank assembly — a tank and all the bits that go inside, all guaranteed to fit — for $45.00. That means you don’t even need to debug these things, really — you just replace the whole thing for half the cost of an hour of plumber’s time (and he spent three debugging the problem and never quite got it).

This morning I was watching a show on television about a near-disaster in an airplane. The flight crew notice one engine on their 747 is low on power. They are flying through cloud. The captain orders a relight on the engine, which is a bad idea because at 40,000 feet it will not relight. Not enough air. The flight engineer, a little confused but trained to follow orders, relights without shutting the bleed off, so not only are they in a rarified atmosphere, but part of that air is still bleeding off. There’s just not enough air for ignition and the engine goes out.

This is not a disaster. 747s run fine on three engines. You just need to step on the rudder a little. However, the pilot doesn’t do this and has the autopilot on and it all looks fine because the disaster is mounting slowly (they can’t feel any interesting changes) and they can’t see a damn thing in this cloud cover. Everything is fine! Except everything is not fine — the plane is banking over. When the pilot notices this on his instruments, this is an anomaly — everything feels and looks fine (except what it looks like is nothing because of the clouds) — and so he assumes that the attitude indicator is broken and does not correct. He assumes the back up indicator is also broken since it agrees with the one he is certain is broken.

The plane rolls over and goes into a dive. The pilot is trying very hard now to control the plane (based on false assumptions mostly but the dive is unmistakable) and pulls back the throttle so he’s at least not accelerating into a dive. First good move of the day. Except he doesn’t say anything.

The flight engineer notices that the engines are all losing RPM, doesn’t know they’ve been throttled back, and  has been concentrating on failed engine number four. Naturally he assumes that all the engines are failing so he shuts them all down preparing to relight.

Plummet plummet plummet.

He relights and all four engines come on because the aircraft is now will below 20,000 feet (at 3 miles minute) and there’s plenty of air pressure. They recover the aircraft and congratulate each other. They land safely even though a lot of the plane was torn off in the violent maneuvering.

Nothing interesting was wrong with that plane except that a redundant part (an engine) failed in a way that is well understood and accounted for by procedures. But shit got out of hand.

Mackay’s book is about shit getting out of hand. It’s ostensibly about how groups of people make decisions that are insane in the context of a single person. Crowds do things that no single person in the crowd would choose to do (and I think there’s a lesson about both corporations and democracy in here somewhere, maybe not buried all that deeply) and part of that is the same sort of thing that all these other things suffer from: focus.

You just get too focused. You have the problem you are trying to solve and aren’t seeing the whole thing and how your solutions are contributing to the greater problem. And shit gets out of hand. You buy a book and it’s smart and it references another book and you trust smart people and you buy that book and indeed it is also smart and has references and you talk with your friends about it and they are smart and they want to talk about related books and…YOU HAVEN’T READ ANY BOOKS.

You want to fix the toilet and you focus on the leak and you fix the leak but you forgot the info you had on the rest of the problem and the toilet is disassembled to you assemble it and it gurgles and that’s usually the thingy and you replace the thingy but it still gurgles and it sometimes is the whojamaflip and you have one in the truck and you get it and replace it and reassemble the toilet and it still gurgles and you disassemble and remember the dingus and you have a dingus seal in the truck but it’s the wrong size but you have an adapter and you reassemble and it still gurgles because it’s the wrong adapter and…YOU COULD HAVE REPLACED THE TOILET FOR LESS.

And so with the plane.

But we (and me in specific right now) are often urged to do SOMETHING. Right now. When the right answer is not to do something but to sit back and think hard. Even for just a minute. Pilots do this with the “scan” — no matter what’s going on, no matter how desperate, you take a moment every now and then to look at — to attend to — each instrument and understand what it is telling you. Reset your focus. You need to have confidence in your ability to reconstruct your logic and find your place again (you got there in the first place — you can get back there) but with new information. And that means you have to be prepared to deal with the possibility that you were in the wrong place before. That new information changes everything.

I have no gaming content. Or space content. The Japanese are unfurling a solar sail that will be used both to maneuver and power a small space craft. It looks like it’s working. They also have a plan to wrap the moon in solar cells and beam power to earth with giant lasers. I can hear Tesla cackling madly.

Take a deep breath. Look around. You can find your way back. Hear that rushing hiss? That’s the blood flowing through your head.

–BMurray

So yesterday I had a very interesting (to me) experience that involved the intersection of a bunch of relatively new cultural (and therefore also technological) elements. I was reading a book on my Kindle that was annoying me. I looked up and sighed and noticed that the young woman in the seat ahead of me had text tattooed on the back of her neck. It read, “So it goes.” I went back to my Kindle, bought a copy of Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” (yes I know that’s not the novel the quote is from, but my brain usually makes two or three jumps before I act, so sometimes I skip steps — if it helps, I also bought “Slaughterhouse Five”). I started reading that instead, dumping the previous book. I became happy and satisfied.

Nice, huh? A few things are happening in there that struck me as fairly novel.

I had no problem dumping a book I was not getting into. This is new to me. It’s now trivially easy to get a new book, but it’s also not taking up any space. My sense of ownership of the book is greatly reduced (and this probably feeds into the whole piracy function — we usually talk about what it means to the downloader, but the fact that there is a reduced sense of ownership on the owner seems more relevant to the likelihood they will offer it for upload) and I know I used to go to great lengths to try to read things I was not getting into, solely because I had invested in them. Now not so much. And yet the price of the thing hasn’t changed — just the artifact that I own.

A person sent a secret message to me via her skin. She never knew she sent it. It might not be the message she intended. But she certainly intended to send it, and I received something useful — a reminder that I adore certain Vonnegut novels and would like to be reading them right now. Of course, tattoos are not new, but the range of people that wear them now is different than it was twenty years ago, and I cannot discount the possibility that other things about this woman affected my receipt of the Vonnegut declaration. She was normal. Whatever that is. She was dressed unremarkably. She did not appear to part of any particular subculture. She was not especially young, old, beautiful, ugly, rich, or poor. Just a person totally unremarkable (at a glance) other than the message on the back of her neck. That seems relatively new to me. Or at least the fact that this is common is new to me.

And finally, if I want a book I can get it exactly when I want it. This is something the Kindle really changed for me — when I’m done a book (and now that doesn’t always or even usually mean I read it through) I can pick a new one and start reading it, and if I don’t already own it that’s not going to involve a significant extra set of steps. Click click click, read. The whole idea of pervasive wireless data access for consumer devices changes everything. While I was there buying I bought a couple more books I would also probably like, all based on the random receipt of a little message that triggered a chain of ideas in my brain.

Exploiting the fact that we can instantly react to little random messages in a commercially relevant sense regardless of location seems likely to be a feature of the next 50 years in which we will see huge growth. As more and more things become encoded ideas — as stuff becomes data — the capacity to receive it on the go includes the capacity to pay for it in order to receive it. What all that stuff might be is changing constantly (the other day I read about a guy with his resin-layering 3D printer making a bottle opener just as he needed it on the train — so what if I could instantly download the plans for whatever I happen to need right now?) and right now it’s mostly media. Books (weird that they are last so far), music, video, software, are obvious. What else is coming?

I guess to be accurate we are always living in a new culture. And when you get old, change probably also seems to be occurring at an especially rapid rate. I’m not sure the ways that things can change has ever changed this fast though. I’m not sure we can keep track of the cans of worms we are opening up. Every miraculous new commercial venture that sells something no one ever thought to buy before seems like the surface of something much more amazing, but not as instantly appealing. Are we missing some important things?

Technologies that are still nascent but will be industrialized in the next while include thin-film power sources (which means any electronic device you have now could be on a two dollar sticker soon — think about how that changes things) and magnetic resonance power transmission (wireless power). That means you could slap up a wireless camera anywhere for pocket change. So could anyone else. That means we have to think about treating power like data — do we need to encrypt it or is it time to treat it as a shared resource? Treating power like data? What kind of crazy world is this?

For me the amazing thing about the future is not the vast new ideas that we come to grasp. Well that is also amazing. But what really blows me away is what becomes trivial, and which by it’s very nature (trivial) makes it under-examined.

Who knows what avalanche the next tiny message might trigger.

–BMurray

It’s time for me to think out loud about the game document as an application. All this talk about electronic books and manufacturing buckets and so forth has me thinking that practically every instance of the electronic book is at least as flawed as the paper book in some way or another. See, what the book does right is convey the content via efficient and effective use of the medium. What the electronic book does so far is attempt to mimic the book or extend it incrementally.

Seriously, an electronic device with gigabytes of space a millions of cycles per second and the best we can do is pretend to be a four dollar book? Fuck that.

Exploiting the new medium — a handy computer that does stuff besides display “Hello world” — is going to take some serious innovation. This is not a matter of making new standards or writing books using them or any of that. Real, serious changes to use the machine to do what we really want to do.

See, the game text is a compromise between what the author wants to do for the end user and what the medium is capable of doing. So when we make the machine pretend to be a book, we adopt the same compromise that the author has made for almost 700 years. I think maybe we can do better. Moore’s law, applied since 1450 or so, suggests we can do astronomically better.

What the author wants to do would, in my industry, be encapsulated in a requirements document. We don’t generally do this for books because the compromise we accept cuts so very deep — there’s just not all that much we can do. By contrast, when developing content for a computer, you want to start with the assumption that we can do anything. So now we have to constrain to what we want to do.

So what kinds of requirements would a role-playing-game-delivery-application (usually a book but now released from these bonds) have? Well, a place to start is a little use-case analysis. Here are our users (assuming a traditional RPG structure):

• all players
• non-GM players
• GM players
• readers
• reviewers

Yeah, see, even at this early stage in the analysis we already see that we have vast possibilities open to us just be acknowledging that we can be different things to different people. So let’s look at the most function-rich (I’m guessing!) user — the GM. What does he need this document to do?

• Display rules that are in the context of the current action at the table
• Search for a rule by keyword
• Display action-relevant information for each character
• Display action-relevant information for NPCs and monsters
• Adjust resource elements (fate points, gold pieces) for all players and maybe the environment
• Roll dice
• Display and modify campaign notes relevant to the action at the table and upcoming action
• Record table audio and video
• Convey private information to players (and observers?!)

I could go on. But starting with the assumption that we have a general purpose computer with audio-visual capabilities, a network, and some storage, we find the doors blown open on “what is an RPG if not a book?” As a GM I should be able to award fate points (in secret and in private), get updates based on player activity (“I am tagging ‘Zany funster’ for +2 because I’m just so awesome to be around.” click and fate point tallies on all machines are updated), see what aspects are begging for compels (maybe literally — a player might flag an aspect as a fun thing to tweak and the GM can respond to that red flag). It’s packed with back-channels that are both in and out of story.

So this is what I’m working on right now — what are the use cases for a Next Generation RPG Delivery System? Then after that will come the requirements proper. Then a design. And then I start developing iPad applications? Maybe.

I better go buy some books on that.

–BMurray

Fred Hicks talked me into doing a bundle with him. It’s not as sexy as you think, but it’s pretty sexy: you can now get the Diaspora PDF bundled with the Spirit of the Century PDF for just $19.99 at RPGNow. I may have more to say about the kinds of flexibility that this technology brings to amateur business, but right now I’m just giddy about partnering with Fred.

–BMurray

Part 112 in a series with no end.

I’ve done my writing in the comments over at Rob Donoghue’s superb blog, Some Space to Think. So just read that today.