Parentesi

I love mushrooms. Mushrooms are fun. They are a meme, they are deeply rooted in our imagination. Super Mario in mushroomland; the Peyote; Germanic Berserkr using Amanita Muscaria; the saying "to grow up as mushrooms"; and the smurfs live inside mushrooms!
Mushrooms aren't even a plant, no, not a vegetable. They are not in the animal nor plant kingdom. They are just mushrooms . They are mostly water, but still something living, something which is not water. And indeed they can be very good to eat, or very nasty and deadly. They are soft, have funny shape, with those big hats.
That's it. This post is completely pointless, nonetheless i wanted to write it.

The meaning of life - Gaming

Gaming has probably nothing to do with the meaning of life, or perhaps it's its real kernel. By the way, today I will not publish more of my finnish diaries, but write about... well, gaming, I guess you understood by now.





HOW, WHEN AND WHY DID I START GAMING

I am not a veteran, but I've been gaming for... 20 years?
I guess I figured out the concept of "playing" at, perhaps, 10-12 months after my birth, and I never stopped thereafter.
As a kid, I played with parents, with my brother and occasionally (rarely) with friends. But playing and gaming are different things. When have I started gaming? I cannot be sure what came first, wether the "adventures" with my brother, "Space Quest I", or Monopoly, but indeed very early. And why? I am strong and healthy (sort of) and I like hiking, climbing, swimming... no sports, but the normal stuff. Nonetheless, I admit that the mind gives me more pleasure than the body, and what better than games to stir the mind?
Backgammon is said to be 5000 years old, and therefore gaming goes along with civilization. Gaming is filling your afternoons with something different than hunting or mating or sleeping. Perhaps gaming is the most human thing.
In my 20 years of gaming, many things have changed. I did not notice at the time, but they happened indeed.

BAD POINTLESS SUMMARY ON THE HISTORY OF GAMING

Before the great war gaming was chess, cards, gambling, Go, Backgammon. Good stuff indeed, but games of chance and randomness, games for gambling, games for spare time.
After the war, we created the nerd. And nerds are the creators of many things we now have: Wizard of the Coast, Lord of the Rings, Microsoft, Linux, File Sharing, Google. But not only: nerds created gaming as "lifestyle".
Now it's 1974 and Gary Gygax (hope you are in a heavenly dimension, buddy) and Dave Arneson (the other one everybody always forgets) created Dungeons&Dragons. They created the Roleplaygame. And the world... didn't change, but geeks did.




ROLEPLAY I.E. MENTAL HOSPITAL

Many people ask me what a Role Play game actually is. I believe it is the highest accomplishment of humam mind abstraction. Abstract art or poetry are bullshit, compared to RPGs; Philosophy... you don't want me to talk about philosophy now, do you?
RPGs are about imagining that you are a character that you are not, and imagining this character in a world that does not exist, not painted, nor filmed, and in this lands, he fights creatures that do no exist and talks to people that do not exist, to save the world that does not exist, with clearly unreal weapons or spells. And this makes you happy. Now, is this mental? sure it is.
You might think that afterwards, gaming got even better, evolved, or just stayed as it is. I think it moved backwards. I realized it when, yesterday, I've seen D&D accessories named "D&D - miniature game"
Miniature game? What the fuck? Yes, miniatures and cards nowadays sell more than "imaginary worlds" and therefore, back we go.
What do gamers have today more than yesterday? More stuff, but not more spirit.
Yesterday there was Monopoly and Risk, today there is Monopoly, Risk, Carcassonne, Agricola, War of the ring.... etc.
And this is great. There is an entire world for gamers, for geeks. Board games, RPGs, Computer Games. All kind of games. And this is great. But I cannot stop thinking, that geeks have been transformed, from "socially different" to a commercial target. They analized geeks, understoof how they work and created something they can buy. Like Emos, Punks, Rappers etc.
And are they wrong? Geeks used to read books, to think more than act, to speak like Oxford teachers and such. Nowadays in geek stores I see only school kids and pre-adolescents with Magic cards.

ME AND GAMING = A 100% BORING STORY
Now, me and gaming. As I said, I've been in gaming for a while. What can I tell?
First of all, lack of gamers. When my parents became too busy for board games, I had only my brother. Then he became too old and I had to drop board gaming. I had been computer gaming since I was very little. Am I a very good gamer now? Indeed, I am not. I quite suck at games usually. I like the feeling they give me, I don't like the winning per se. I like the stories. Yes, for me computer games are essentialy movies.

And computer games were, at the beginning, activity oriented: they were based on doing something, i.e. driving a car or shooting monster. They were hard, but fun.
Then PC games evolved, and the trivial arcade, almost abstract ideas (is pong a simulation of tennis or an abstract game?) became, with the help of sound and image, simulations.
I don't have memory enough to describe the history of computer games, but when the internet came, I got randomly involved in RPG by Forums. That changed quite a couple of things....

See you in the next episode!

In the pictures: chess, D&D logo, Carcassonne board game

Memories from the repository

Hi again, after a long time!
After Finland, I "enjoyed" Italy with my beloved foreigner. I may describe Italy to you all, but this is not my task. I may tell you the feelings of such foreigner, as far as I know, but that is not my tasks. I may express my own feelings, but this is not your business.

As I said in other posts, when I don't post I'm not being lazy: I just prepare bigger posts! And so I'm going to "publish" the memories, i.e. publish here what I wrote on paper during my stay in Finland. Now plug you headphones and play Korpiklaani full volume, we're going back to the first day I left for the land of lakes....

10-06-08
Leaving is always the same. A restless night, an early morning, and with the most casual attitude, you say farewell. The day before is a singular one also. It's such a random day. Usually with good weather, a nice afternoon, a wonderful dinner. A "goodnight", something you forgot to do, and, as an everyday "bye" you say farewell; be it for a week, a month or forever.
That's leaving. Leaving is mystic, it's a religion. [...]
I had a weird dream. I left my old house in Dublin, and I brought with me everything: pieces of my closet, tables...
But something (as my Lego collection :| ) I couldn't bring with me. Back to Italy though I discovered that a weird warp portal was in the room upstairs, so that objects could be transferred from Osimo to Dublin effortlessly. [...] I can find nothing to feed the sense of loss, nothing to replace the Emerald. [...] Leaving is forgiving.

11-6-08
Qualche volta ti viene voglia di non fermarti, di prendere aereo su aereo e continuare a viaggiare.
[translation] Sometimes you want to go on, not stopping, to take the next airplane and keep on travelling.

14-6
I've been in Finland fro three days now. The world is so small sometimes. I've run into a small italian food shop. Inside it, nobody but a chubby, bald italian with rough, generous hands. He's been living in finland for 6 years now, with his finnish wife...
He made me nice discounts, offered us a coffee. It's hard to make a living here, he says. Well, no wonder. Italians can't really stand the cold, the silence... finns have bidet though.
And then I even saw Joni, the finn from UCD. I couldn't believe it. Dublin is the entire world, isn't it?
Sometimes in the evening I think I'll go out with Christian, or early in the morning I think about meeting Alice and Giorgia smoking in the courtyard. I still imagine to see kate waving at me through windows. That world is no more. Is it so difficult to settle down in this country, so hard to change homeland? Andrea did. He was alone, but smart and with a clear aim. Maß und Ziel.


20-6-08
In this long time abroad I've stopped writing and playing. Producing. I've been dull to the world but not to myself. I've produced myself. I'm increased, not in size but in capacity. My own world expanded.


There is much more! It will come, with time...

Journey

I made a journey, a most wonderful one, lasted one week.
But for me it was a lifetime, a life within life.
I was surprised from Frankfurt, I love that city!
I was again in Ulm and I loved it.
I was in Augsburg and Innsbruck and... well, not sure I loved them completely.
Then I was near Trento, in the dolomites, at the Taramelli hut.
Then I was back home, and I was so happy and content, that it gave me an energy pump for the life to come next.
That will be really boring, non-exciting. Especially compared to what I've seen and what I've done in the last year. Not to mention the fact that in other projection I could have been abroad.
Well, that's life and my decision. I belong to a place and I belong to people. No place belongs to me nor people do. Besides that, life is a continuous challenge even if you play at home. Working on ourselves is important. If we just focus on the outer world we miss the delights of our soul, we miss to fix the troubles of our soul.

Note: Innsbruck was very inspiring at night, in the inner city, but the rest of the city is a bit grey. Besides, people are really kind!
Ah yeah, I didn't mention, I traveled on my own. I met people, special people, but I traveled on my own. And I was looking for that, I love it. Me and myself...
I love to travel by train: you see the landscapes mutating, you understand the distances, and you can dig into history, imagining to live in fast forward the great migrations. Airplanes are maybe cheap, but they only bring you to a specific place, to the crowded places. With the train you can reach nearly everywhere. You can really say you're travelling.
I traveled for 2100kilometers which only 700km were made by airplane.

I discovered a lot during this trip. I learned about myself, and about life. Traveling is the occasion to put yourself into challenge, or observe yourself from a different point of view. That way you improve yourself, your life. You understand things that are not visible when you live in the everyday life. That's the important part of traveling, besides the fun. Exploring new places and meeting new people is partially true: we can do that always. Just we don't when we are at home, and that's a great flaw, especially if we declare ourselves "international people".