The Landscape of the Future

[Wild Rose]

I am reaching a "major" birthday this week, one of those with a zero on the end, and have been doing a lot of rethinking of my life. The one thing that seems clear is that the important thing is how we reach out and change others. That is what the web is really all about. Connecting, on the far sides of the globe, people who are like minded. Community, however connected is community.

The reality is that RPG people are a little different from the general run of the mill. It is only natural that "big business" doesn't understand what makes us work - and messes up the things that have potential. Star Trek is an example of this - something big business tried really really hard to crush, but couldn't. Microsoft is starting to feel the challange, and 10 years or so from now the Web will have changed and will probably be open source - the way a lot of us think it should be. And the Web is going to change the world. One day Open Source is going to be the govenment of choice, well beyound the greed of Consumerism. Open Source and the Web, where people give out of gratitude, where people share of their talents knowing that it is the sharing that nutures and enables those talents to grow. This the the landscape of the Future. Arther C. Clark and so many others saw it but had no idea how we would get there.

It all started with people who had the ability to dream, and to make those dreams so real that other people could see them too. It all started with little pieces of papers and grids and funny dice. RPG is really an exploration of our inner landscapes just as NASA explores the one above the atmospere's envelope.

Ironworks is one of the best forums around, because the people who come here have shared a very special inner dream. It isn't about killing monsters or racking up XP - it's about working with limitations and how we deal with others, about the fairness of things and how we deal with that, but mostly it's about giving.

Thank You ALL

[Ziggurat]

Thanks, Wild Rose, for the optimistic view. And this is a great site with good people. Your comments are accurate about Ironworks.

However, I see the trend on the Internet and game distribution as less rosy. Advertisers, distributors, Congress and ISPs want to control content. They want people to only hear what they want. There also may be more censorship in the name of terorism or family values, and less options when only a few providers control access. These are issues I look out for, for who is out there protecting our freedoms? Not many left.

More to the point about RPGs like Wiz 8, Sir-Tech had a real hard time finding any distribution at all even thought the game won many awards in 2002. It is about controll of access, in this case by the financing entities deciding with their investment money (and clout) what they think people will pay for. My 2 cents.

[dplax]

I can agree with most of your points Wild Rose (and I am getting close to a year with a 0 on the end of it too (although only 20 and it will be next year). This is the best forum I have encountered throughout the net. Not one of the others comes close. However I am not sure about everything becoming open source. As long as software companies main objective remains to get money, only games that surely bring money will be released. Too bad Sir-Tech went down.

[Wild Rose]

Yes, but don't you see, that was the incredible thing about Star Trek. Dplax, I have Kids older than you. I was there! I was there then the studio wanted to finish the program after the FIRST season. "Everyone" was amazed when collage students showed up for at protest at the studio. This was an audience no one had planned for. So the second season happened - sort of, and the third was run on such a tight buget the shows are painful to watch. But the thing was that the studio had found something they couldn't control and it wasn't possible to just give it the axe - so they strangled it, and thought they had won.

20 years later TNG was born, and TOC films started. Then the studio started on a different angle - over feed it with spin offs that don't really work. You are right. The name of the game is control. But look at what has happened.

Why does Frodo have "pointy ears"? It wasn't in the book. And the actress who played Galadriel wasn't ashamed to come out and say - "it was for the ears". She concidered it something important, something worth taking a stand for. We have to ask ourselves "Why?"

But Star Trek and Lord of the Rings give hope, and understanding. Hope for the future and understanding that the "little guy" really does count. It's not about control (and that's what big business won't see), it's not even about giving - it's about community, it's about HOW we live together.

Nothing is going to happen fast, maybe not even in Dplax's time, but it will happen. Techis always find a way - and so do Gamers.

[Krull]

Could someone explain what Open Source is please?

Thanks.

[dplax]

Originally posted by Krull: Could someone explain what Open Source is please? Thanks.

Open source program is a program of which the source (the code of the program, how it was written is public). That means you can freely modify it. Linux is like this, yet Windows is not.

[Malthaussen]

For that matter, why is Legolas a blond with pointy ears? That surely wasn't in the book. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I am not an optimist. The current reactionary political environment that has taken over the world makes me fear that the clock WILL be turned back to the Fifties, will we, nil we. And the fifties were not an era of "family values" and law-abiding, forelock-pulling minorities, but the days of McCarthyism and bomb shelters. I know, I remember -- I was there.

The Star Trek phenomenon occurred in the context of the late 60's in the USA, a time when civil disobedience was at an all-time high. The young generation (of which I was a part) were feeling their power and exercising their rebellious natures. And what has happened? Listen to the song "Stop In the Middle of Your Life" (from the Doonesbury comic strip). The young, loud-voiced liberals of that time have mutated into the conservative, repressive rulers of today. The yippies became yuppies, and now they want to do their best to make sure that their own children don't have anywhere near as much fun as they did.

There is still an underground, and the underground is what produces Open Source and all community, cooperative-oriented things. The mainstream is in the hands of the same old types as always -- and thus we have Tolkeinien elves with pointed ears. It's about money, it's about access, and it's about keeping the people on top, on top, and the devil take the hindmost. The Internet is searched diligently by agents of law and order to ensure that things don't get out of hand, and I doubt that will change when everthing in society seems to be moving in the direction of more repression (in the name of Homeland Security) rather than less. Meanwhile the ruling classes even in the soi-disant democracies are growing farther and farther from their constituents, and the underclasses throughout the first, second, and third worlds continue to be crushed, manipulated, and otherwise ignored. Or so it seems to me in my gloomiest moods.

I call myself Malthaussen because I am a believer in the theories of Malthus, who essentially said that the population of the world will eventually outstrip the resources available, leading to a complete collapse of civilization. We have been able to avoid Dr Malthus's predictions by increasing productivity to the point that the vast majority of the world have no real need to work to provide for their basic needs, yet are still expected to work. And the USA and the rest of the west prospers, to a greater or lesser extent, by fostering a society of waste ("consumerism") which will only hasten the day when the Earth's natural resources are depleted. Possibly by getting off the planet and into the rest of the solar system, and thus increasing manifold the amount of resources we can exploit, could our society as currently structured continue to exist. But I doubt any such move will take place until it is too late for most of us. It simply requires too much up-front investment to be attractive to our short-sighted leaders, who admittedly are expected to fix everything yesterday.

Fortunately, I expect to be safely dead before the crunch comes, and I have no children to worry about. If I did, I would dread even more.

-- Mal

[Wild Rose]

The point of Star Trek is not what happened in the 60's - but that it came BACK in the 80's! And the 80's was not reactionary.

Legolas has pointy ears for the same reason that the elf pic in Wiz 8 have pointy ears - elves always do. He is blonde because all the elves in the movie are blonde - which makes them different from the orcs. My point was that the Hobbits had pointy ears - and that wasn't in the book. IMHO is that "pointy ears" represent the fay, the nonconforming, the "stranger in a strange land" the way Spock was. And that gives me hope.

[Malthaussen]

And my opinion is that the "pointy ears" are just a gimmick, and a poor one. A movie's characters should be faithful to the book. Tolkein did not make his elves and hobbits "other" specifically because he believed in racial unity, not in drawing silly distinctions. And blond hair for "all elves" brings us perilously close to the Aryan Superman myth we fought a war to put down.

In Tolkein, neither the hobbits nor the elves are Strangers, nor are they nonconformists. In fact, both in their way are slaves to tradition -- ie, conformity. It is Sauron's desire to upset the status quo and take over that unites the races against him -- even though the elves recognize it is a no-win situation.

As for Star Trek reappearing (in a horrible form, IMO) in the 80's, so what? They wanted to cash in on the sci-fi craze that had made so much money for Spielberg and Lucas.

If pointed ears are a reason to hope, then the world has gotten stranger than even I expected.

-- Mal

Hmm, while IW is great and all, this is more of a GenCon discussion...