Downstairs I hear...

Sotto di me, una coppia litiga. Si sentono le urla, gli oggetti urtati, ed infine, la porta che si sbatte. Le mani che violentano l'ascensore, chiedendogli la pietà di un viaggio veloce vero il basso...

Gli inferi? No, solo il portone d'uscita.

Litigano e litigano ancora, quei dolic coniugi, che un giorno pensarono di fare cosa buona e giusta nell'unire le loro vite.

Ed io mi chiedo: dovrei forse invidiarli? La mia musica copre le urla...

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

History loves to get stuck in linguistic facts

"Real history loves to get stuck in linguistic facts"

Munin hails you from the far north... "so near to the north pole" as grandma said.

Actually I'm still far far away from the northpole. I can't surprise you with 'Vönderful pictürs vrom Vinlant' because I don't have the cable to download them on this laptop. They'll come soon.

I'm in Lappeenranta - which is NOT in Lapland, and it is NOT snowing - suffering from early awakenings caused by the "midnight sun" which happens to be at 4AM and there's no curtain to stop it. It's true: finnish houses are great to bear the cold dark winter but completely unfit to the summer - which is, as you may not believe, just wonderful.

Finnish summer is not just warmer but the antithesis of the winter. The days are warm (not lately... but in general they are) but not too hot, which allows you to stay in, out, wherever you want. Sometimes in Italy it's so hot that you can't really go out or at least not enjoy it.

If the day is not warm enough for you, you can just stay in sauna, which hot temperatures and incredible moist would please the pickiest tropical reptile.

The sun shines almost all the time, giving you freedom of performing any activity at any time of the day - except sleeping.

Lappeenrant (Willmannstrand) happens to be on the biggest lake of Finland - or so they say - which continues, through an artificial channel, straight to Russia. The border is only at 30 km from here; for this reasons, the city, even though very small, is packed with russians, and pretty much everything is written both in finnish and russian - no swedish. The buildings and the city are small but prettier than most of the finnish cities. It's a nice place.

Lakes are very pretty and always accompanied by tiny foresty islands. The weather is completely crazy, alternating thunderstorms with sunshine, but I heard that it's the same in all europe. And what about the food crisis? It is giving me the creeps, aren't they exaggerating? First it was a bad year for agriculture and now all the prices - even dairy, meat, chocolate, drinks - is overpriced.

Well anyway, I came to think about houses.

What are our houses really for? Are they a place for fitting human beings, feed them and make them sleep in warm beds or something else, a temple to some pagan deity?

I'm thinking of all the rooms locked, left there "for some special event" or "so that I don't have to clean them everyday". Are our houses some temple of self-worship, of esteem-wanking, to show ourselves our little amount of glory and wealth, not to show or to use? Are they some complex political instrument to promote our image? Are they a den of vanity, furniture and appearance, or a safe place for people, steady or traveling, a shelter for friends, to offer them a bed and a warm soup in the time of need?

Take care, Munin.