I'm sorry to hear that they're gone -- and in all likelihood will be followed by many other X-FILES characters as the last season winds down. The Gunmen embodied the aspect of X-FILES that I often enjoyed most, and yet that received little attention: the show's impish sense of humor. My favorite episodes are the funny ones.
I won't say that every episode of the short-lived LONE GUNMEN series was funny. I never liked the generic babe they added, a character whose motivations seldom made sense. And the plots were preposterous. The debut episode was some nonsense about villains taking remote control of a 767 and trying to pilot it into the World Trade Center. Huh, like that could ever happen.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6)
Amazing to see those "Range" statistics at the end of the press release. This tells the number of votes it took to get on the ballot. In the Short Story category, the nominated story with the least number of votes got 21 votes.
There are SF writers who absolutely live and die based on whether they get nominated. A Hugo Award can jumpstart an entire career. In short fiction it only takes two dozen people to get you the thumbs-up!
Of course, all the nominators have to have supporting memberships in ConJose, and those aren't cheap. Still, it seems like any writer who's two steps above sheer penury could buy memberships for a couple dozen friends and relatives -- under a variety of assumed names, of course -- and then get to wear the fancy "Nominee" ribbon on his convention badge.
Personally, I can think of better ways to spend that kind of money.
I reviewed games in the paper-gaming hobby, 1984-96. It's a hundredth or a thousandth the size of the computer game business, which must explain why I only got one junket.
Summer 1995. Decipher was promoting the first expansion for its STAR WARS trading card game. They flew about a dozen editors and reviewers in to their home city of Norfolk, Virginia, and put us up at a nice hotel. They hired a three-masted schooner (flying the Decipher flag, no less) to sail us up the Elizabeth river past the US Naval Shipyards. We got to meet charming and witty David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the movies. And we each got a top-quality binder and bookbag emblazoned with the game logo. It was a heady experience.
They did a brief demo of the game on the cruise, and all the designers were present. I remember spending most of the cruise debating with the designers about their decisions, instead of enjoying the cruise; I can't say, even now, whether that was responsible of me or just stupid.
A heady experience. But no one ever tried to influence my review, except in the entirely legitimate way of design debates. The review, which ended up lukewarm, took a tongue-in-cheek angle, recounting the junket and the ways it had failed to change my views; unfortunately, the magazine (the now-defunct DUELIST from Wizards of the Coast) cut most of this for space.
In my experience, reviews make little difference in the paper-game business, and junkets on this lavish scale aren't cost-effective. I never heard of Decipher doing another one after that. But they certainly made that one shot memorable.
Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as its base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits.
Asimov also specified that psychohistory only makes accurate predictions when (A) the population size is at least a whole planet, and (B) the citizens are unaware of the predictions psychohistory makes (thus the need for the Second Foundation to remain secret).
SF writer Donald Kingsbury recently published a nice new take on psychohistory, Psychohistorical Crisis. It takes a duplicate of Asimov's galactic empire as its setup, but looks at the whole psychohistory idea with a more modern eye. Here's an excerpt from the preface and a good review by noted critic John Clute.
They wanted native gui functionality, yet cross-platform, and it had to work on netscape (all vers) and IE (all vers). Oh, did I mention that we couldn't expect the users to download anything additional, EVER? So that ruled out java applets (since xp doesn't have a jvm by default). The whole thing was done with ASP, Javascript, and plain html forms.
Sorry for a newbie-type question, but could you have done it in Flash? I believe there are Flash plug-ins for all the platforms you mention. Flash 5 supports XML and can talk directly to databases. I know Flash has a horrible rep among Web designers, but none of the objections I've seen are inherent in the technology. They're all design issues that can be circumvented with intelligent planning.
In 1996 I worked with Warren Spector at the Austin office of Looking Glass Technologies on an online game project. That project got cancelled, but it was interesting to watch Warren gradually evolve (without, I'm ashamed to admit, any constructive input from me) the ideas that later led to DEUS EX:
1. Warren's holy grail is immersion in the game world. The simulation must be rich enough that the world's response to your actions reasonably matches your expectations, so that you can make a coherent plan. Toward this end, for a time Warren had the hope of making game levels laid out like actual real-world structures. But in playtesting early in the development of DX, the designers found that this led to boring gameplay, so they jettisoned that idea. (Warren is no ideologue. If an idea doesn't work, he tosses it.)
2. For Warren, your choices as player must affect your experience of the game. Here Warren differs somewhat from Doug Church, who says the player's choices should literally affect the world or the narrative. In DEUS EX your choices don't really affect much of the actual narrative, until the endgame, but those choices pivotally determine how you experience the game -- as a stealthy thief, or a gadgeteer, or a combat monster.
3. I don't know if Warren regards player individuality as always to be desired, but for DEUS EX one of his guiding principles was that by the end, every player's version of the main character, J.C. Denton, should be different from every other version. That's where DX really shines, in the skill and augmentation systems that force you to make hard choices about your play style. The great response to DX indicates that he was right to pursue this. Although in some kinds of games individualized player characters are probably unnecessary or even gratuitous, this goal is very appropriate to an immersive first-person simulation of the kind Warren cherishes.
Warren has a film degree from the University of Texas, and he talks often about the parallels between computer games today and the very earliest days of cinema. He strongly believes this is a new artform a-borning, and I know he'd like to play his part in birthing it.
I did design work on an unpublished online game about six years ago. Even then, the company I worked for had pinpointed the endemic MMORPG problem of "only players who live online can enjoy the game." In the games I'm familiar with, spending many hours a day in the game was, and remains, the only practical way to advance -- but what's worse, such getalife players also actively interfere with the enjoyment of casual players who play a few hours a month. The heavy player gets all the quests and equipment, upstaging the casual player to the extent that the casual guy can't do much except set up a bakery or something.
The solution we had is the same one Neverwinter Nights is about to introduce: modules. Free-standing adventures, similar to individual Quake episodes, would reward experienced players who replay them multiple times, but would still offer a rewarding experience to the casual player, independent of the player's standing in the game world. Sure, the heavy player is having a deeper experience, but the point is, that deep experience wouldn't interfere with other players who wanted to have fun with less involvement.
I expect that the likely success of Neverwinter Nights will help popularize this meme. About time.
After the success of last year ' s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and high expectations for Resident Evil, out Friday, studios are booting up for more. The game: Alice in Wonderland gets a twisted remake in American McGee ' s Alice, a gothic horror version of the classic tale; based on the game by Electronic Arts Studio: Dimension Status: Horror master Wes Craven directs. The game: A sunglasses-wearing all-American hero blows away bad guys with machine guns; 3D Realms Studio: Dimension Status: In limbo. Star Angelina Jolie was attached to the sequel before the original Tomb Raider opened. The game: Amateur taxi drivers take to the sidewalks and crowded streets, picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations unscathed; Sega Studio: No distributor yet. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber(Montana) currently are writing the screenplay.
Possibly it's true that any successful person draws media attacks, but Fischer in particular has publicly espoused beliefs in a "Jewish conspiracy," a position that virtually guarantees hostile media reaction. Read the book Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin, the inspiration for the fine 1993 movie directed by Stephen Zaillian. In the book Waitzkin, father of chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, briefly chronicles Fischer's strange behavior following his rise to chess supremacy: living on the streets of Los Angeles, passing out anti-Jewish leaflets to passersby.... Depressing, in a way.
Business people have a boosterism neurosis and are seriously detached from harsh reality. Everybody reads FORTUNE and SUCCESS, but nobody subscribes to BANKRUPTCY and FAILURE.
This salient quotation from Week Two of Bruce Sterling's Infinite Matrix blog, "Schism Matrix," could describe the thinking that inspired Matrix.net to launch an online SF magazine in the first place. The company wanted to acquire such a cachet of cool among faanish computer geeks that everyone would want to work for them. (I suspect that the company owners, SF fans themselves, also were willing to pay big bucks for this pretext to hang out with cool SF people like Sterling.)
This kind of hiring strategy only makes sense when the job market, and company management, have both gone completely giddy. It seemed that way to me, back when editor Eileen Gunn talked about this project at last year's ArmadilloCon SF convention in Austin, Texas. Still, it's neither good manners nor good politics to say, "So, you're caught up in a financial euphoria, are you?"
Another irony of the Sterling comment above is that FORTUNE was the only magazine I saw that pointed out the bubble before it burst, albeit in the late stages. Somebody there wasn't detached from harsh reality. But few paid attention, because pointing out bubbles isn't good manners or good politics.
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling's Viridian Movement is a culture movement devoted to combating climate change by making pollution unfashionable. The Sterling-edited Summer 02001 issue of Whole Earth Review makes a good introduction to Viridian ideas. So does the entertaining Viridian Design Web site.
From the manifesto:
Carbon dioxide is not a time-honored philosophical dilemma or some irreducible flaw in the human condition. Serious fossil-fuel consumption, as a practice on the grand scale, is only about 200 years old. The most severe rise in carbon emission occurred during the past fifty years. We're painfully dependent on this practice, but it's not as if we've married it.
[...] Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who are perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming generations by massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they're not the solution either, because most human beings won't volunteer to live like they do. Nor can people be forced to live that way through legal prescription, because those in command of society's energy resources will immediately game and neutralize any system of legal regulation.
However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive. [...] The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will.
[...] The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the twentieth century's industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in superstition and miasma.
And from the Sterling speech that formally announced the movement:
A genuinely degraded climate doesn't mean that the sky is falling. It doesn't mean armageddon, or utter annihilation, or anything half so romantic. It means a conclusive end to our Belle Epoque, though. Basically, it means smoke and heat and damp, clinging filth. All our cultural circumstances will become different then. Everything we know and cherish about life will suddenly become antiquated. It will belong to a vanished, beautiful, innocent era. That will be our Belle Epoque's version of the Great War, in other words.
So why is this an aesthetic issue? Well, because it's a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that's why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide.... What a cramp of our style. It's all very foul and aesthetically regrettable.
Sterling's Viridian Notes mailing list amusingly documents the sad procession of recent climatic catastrophes, such as the recent melting of the North Pole.
"If you tell 100 Americans 'The Earth will burn up if you don't stop driving your car,' 99 will say 'Let it burn!' and the hundredth will shoot you." -- Allen Varney
didn't Steve end up with The Fantasy Trip? I thought it evolved into GURPS
No, Howard Thompson (founder and president of Metagaming) kept The Fantasy Trip after Steve Jackson fell out with him in 1980. Thompson offered TFT for sale; rumor says his asking price was $250,000. Nobody bought. Steve developed GURPS (the Generic Universal Roleplaying System) because he couldn't get TFT. It's very much the same design approach, though GURPS more strongly emphasizes nominal realism.
Oh god, I envision Steve reading that and clutching his chest and gurgling in total revulsion. Howard Thompson founded Metagaming in the mid-'70s, and he published Steve's early designs (OGRE/G.E.V., The Fantasy Trip, and a few incidental works). Jackson and Thompson had a somewhat public falling-out in the late '70s, and the dispute over rights left SJ with Ogre/G.E.V. and Thompson with The Fantasy Trip. Steve left and started SJG in 1980. Metagaming lingered on until about 1986, when it voluntarily ceased operations.
Given the bitter blood between them, phrases like "Metagaming, now SJG" carry the risk of heart attack.
Steve Jackson Games has been around since 1980, which makes it one of the oldest surviving companies in the adventure gaming hobby. With TSR absorbed into Wizards of the Coast a few years back, only Flying Buffalo, Chaosium, and possibly Palladium are older than SJG, and even Chaosium exists only as a shadow of its former greatness. The others, though of widely varying size, are essentially one-man shows, tied to the will and whim and stubbornness of their founders.
I worked for Steve Jackson Games from 1984 to '86, under Editor-in-Chief Warren Spector (a great guy who later blossomed into "the legendary" Warren Spector, at least in the eyes of PC Gamer magazine, for his pivotal role in the development of such computer games as System Shock, a couple of Ultimas, both Ultima Underworlds, Deus Ex, and many others). While I was there, SJG went through a financial crisis startlingly similar to the current situation, though without substantial layoffs. Then, some years after I left, I heard the company suffered another almost identical episode. In each case an incompetent financial officer drove the company into the red, sometimes deeply.
It keeps happening because Steve has arranged his company so that he can exercise absolute control over those matters that interest him -- the creative side, scheduling, print-buying -- while paying as little attention as possible to matters that don't -- mainly accounting. This wouldn't be much problem if the company had a deep bench of talented business people, but company turnover has always been a problem.
Still, I have no doubt SJG will once more weather this current crisis. It's like the old saying about the difference between monarchy and democracy: Monarchy is a proud ship, sailing untouched through the storm, but if it hits a rock it sinks utterly; democracy is a raft, which never sinks but your feet are always wet. Except for a glorious year during the trading-card game boom -- when Illuminati: New World Order singlehandedly pushed annual sales above the million-dollar mark for the only time in company history -- SJG's feet have always been wet. Their feet will still be wet, but above the waterline, a decade and more from now.
Real world peace will never happen. Not until we find someone else to fight. Humans (and in fact, earthlings in general) are just too violent and ambitious.
By "world peace" do you mean some utopian Peaceable Kingdom where no one ever raises a hand against another, or just the end of warfare between nation states? If the former, I agree, but globalization may, in the long term, bring a decent chance at the latter.
Sure, individual people are violent and ambitious, so there will always be bar fights. But just because I'm violent, that doesn't mean I personally wanna go invade Iraq. Organized warfare isn't usually a spontaneous mass outbreak of mindless violent impulses. Political, religious, and business forces manipulate the body politic to foment wars that serve their own purposes. It always works, and in the last couple of decades there have been more wars than in any couple of decades in history. But....
I'm no big fan of the World Trade Consortium et al, but the upside of globalization is that multinational businesses may eventually find it unprofitable to foment war. Although I hear it's a myth that no two nations that have a McDonald's have ever warred against one another, the myth carries a core of truth. If the corporations that rely on peaceful rule of law spend more on a nation's politicians than do the defense contractors, then those politicians won't declare war. Hotspots of racial and religious hatred will still simmer, but organized warfare would be too expensive.
The problem will be rogue nutcase empire-builders like Saddam Hussein. I imagine shrewd globalized companies will install safeguards that spot such problems early. The corps have incentive to promote the trappings of democracy, if only because these offer handy ways of removing problem rulers.
Of course, there's always the danger that the global corporations may start fomenting war as an instrument of competition against business rivals. Or am I being naive, and they often do that already?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry to hear that they're gone -- and in all likelihood will be followed by many other X-FILES characters as the last season winds down. The Gunmen embodied the aspect of X-FILES that I often enjoyed most, and yet that received little attention: the show's impish sense of humor. My favorite episodes are the funny ones.
I won't say that every episode of the short-lived LONE GUNMEN series was funny. I never liked the generic babe they added, a character whose motivations seldom made sense. And the plots were preposterous. The debut episode was some nonsense about villains taking remote control of a 767 and trying to pilot it into the World Trade Center. Huh, like that could ever happen.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6)
Amazing to see those "Range" statistics at the end of the press release. This tells the number of votes it took to get on the ballot. In the Short Story category, the nominated story with the least number of votes got 21 votes.
There are SF writers who absolutely live and die based on whether they get nominated. A Hugo Award can jumpstart an entire career. In short fiction it only takes two dozen people to get you the thumbs-up!
Of course, all the nominators have to have supporting memberships in ConJose, and those aren't cheap. Still, it seems like any writer who's two steps above sheer penury could buy memberships for a couple dozen friends and relatives -- under a variety of assumed names, of course -- and then get to wear the fancy "Nominee" ribbon on his convention badge.
Personally, I can think of better ways to spend that kind of money.
I reviewed games in the paper-gaming hobby, 1984-96. It's a hundredth or a thousandth the size of the computer game business, which must explain why I only got one junket.
Summer 1995. Decipher was promoting the first expansion for its STAR WARS trading card game. They flew about a dozen editors and reviewers in to their home city of Norfolk, Virginia, and put us up at a nice hotel. They hired a three-masted schooner (flying the Decipher flag, no less) to sail us up the Elizabeth river past the US Naval Shipyards. We got to meet charming and witty David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the movies. And we each got a top-quality binder and bookbag emblazoned with the game logo. It was a heady experience.
They did a brief demo of the game on the cruise, and all the designers were present. I remember spending most of the cruise debating with the designers about their decisions, instead of enjoying the cruise; I can't say, even now, whether that was responsible of me or just stupid.
A heady experience. But no one ever tried to influence my review, except in the entirely legitimate way of design debates. The review, which ended up lukewarm, took a tongue-in-cheek angle, recounting the junket and the ways it had failed to change my views; unfortunately, the magazine (the now-defunct DUELIST from Wizards of the Coast) cut most of this for space.
In my experience, reviews make little difference in the paper-game business, and junkets on this lavish scale aren't cost-effective. I never heard of Decipher doing another one after that. But they certainly made that one shot memorable.
Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as its base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits.
Asimov also specified that psychohistory only makes accurate predictions when (A) the population size is at least a whole planet, and (B) the citizens are unaware of the predictions psychohistory makes (thus the need for the Second Foundation to remain secret).
SF writer Donald Kingsbury recently published a nice new take on psychohistory, Psychohistorical Crisis. It takes a duplicate of Asimov's galactic empire as its setup, but looks at the whole psychohistory idea with a more modern eye. Here's an excerpt from the preface and a good review by noted critic John Clute.
They wanted native gui functionality, yet cross-platform, and it had to work on netscape (all vers) and IE (all vers). Oh, did I mention that we couldn't expect the users to download anything additional, EVER? So that ruled out java applets (since xp doesn't have a jvm by default). The whole thing was done with ASP, Javascript, and plain html forms.
Sorry for a newbie-type question, but could you have done it in Flash? I believe there are Flash plug-ins for all the platforms you mention. Flash 5 supports XML and can talk directly to databases. I know Flash has a horrible rep among Web designers, but none of the objections I've seen are inherent in the technology. They're all design issues that can be circumvented with intelligent planning.
In 1996 I worked with Warren Spector at the Austin office of Looking Glass Technologies on an online game project. That project got cancelled, but it was interesting to watch Warren gradually evolve (without, I'm ashamed to admit, any constructive input from me) the ideas that later led to DEUS EX:
1. Warren's holy grail is immersion in the game world. The simulation must be rich enough that the world's response to your actions reasonably matches your expectations, so that you can make a coherent plan. Toward this end, for a time Warren had the hope of making game levels laid out like actual real-world structures. But in playtesting early in the development of DX, the designers found that this led to boring gameplay, so they jettisoned that idea. (Warren is no ideologue. If an idea doesn't work, he tosses it.)
2. For Warren, your choices as player must affect your experience of the game. Here Warren differs somewhat from Doug Church, who says the player's choices should literally affect the world or the narrative. In DEUS EX your choices don't really affect much of the actual narrative, until the endgame, but those choices pivotally determine how you experience the game -- as a stealthy thief, or a gadgeteer, or a combat monster.
3. I don't know if Warren regards player individuality as always to be desired, but for DEUS EX one of his guiding principles was that by the end, every player's version of the main character, J.C. Denton, should be different from every other version. That's where DX really shines, in the skill and augmentation systems that force you to make hard choices about your play style. The great response to DX indicates that he was right to pursue this. Although in some kinds of games individualized player characters are probably unnecessary or even gratuitous, this goal is very appropriate to an immersive first-person simulation of the kind Warren cherishes.
Warren has a film degree from the University of Texas, and he talks often about the parallels between computer games today and the very earliest days of cinema. He strongly believes this is a new artform a-borning, and I know he'd like to play his part in birthing it.
I did design work on an unpublished online game about six years ago. Even then, the company I worked for had pinpointed the endemic MMORPG problem of "only players who live online can enjoy the game." In the games I'm familiar with, spending many hours a day in the game was, and remains, the only practical way to advance -- but what's worse, such getalife players also actively interfere with the enjoyment of casual players who play a few hours a month. The heavy player gets all the quests and equipment, upstaging the casual player to the extent that the casual guy can't do much except set up a bakery or something.
The solution we had is the same one Neverwinter Nights is about to introduce: modules. Free-standing adventures, similar to individual Quake episodes, would reward experienced players who replay them multiple times, but would still offer a rewarding experience to the casual player, independent of the player's standing in the game world. Sure, the heavy player is having a deeper experience, but the point is, that deep experience wouldn't interfere with other players who wanted to have fun with less involvement.
I expect that the likely success of Neverwinter Nights will help popularize this meme. About time.
Here is one borderline-incoherent Newsblaster summary:
Will Hollywood's 'Tomb' be a box office 'Raider?'
Summary:
After the success of last year ' s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and high expectations for Resident Evil, out Friday, studios are booting up for more. The game: Alice in Wonderland gets a twisted remake in American McGee ' s Alice, a gothic horror version of the classic tale; based on the game by Electronic Arts Studio: Dimension Status: Horror master Wes Craven directs. The game: A sunglasses-wearing all-American hero blows away bad guys with machine guns; 3D Realms Studio: Dimension Status: In limbo. Star Angelina Jolie was attached to the sequel before the original Tomb Raider opened. The game: Amateur taxi drivers take to the sidewalks and crowded streets, picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations unscathed; Sega Studio: No distributor yet. Brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber(Montana) currently are writing the screenplay.
is adopting a lot of open source practices (Mozilla)
You mean "Netscape". You think AOL had _anything_ to do with the open-sourcing of Mozilla? Ha!
Maybe he meant Netscape/Mozilla, but a better example would be AOLServer, the open-source server that AOL runs on.
Possibly it's true that any successful person draws media attacks, but Fischer in particular has publicly espoused beliefs in a "Jewish conspiracy," a position that virtually guarantees hostile media reaction. Read the book Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin, the inspiration for the fine 1993 movie directed by Stephen Zaillian. In the book Waitzkin, father of chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, briefly chronicles Fischer's strange behavior following his rise to chess supremacy: living on the streets of Los Angeles, passing out anti-Jewish leaflets to passersby.... Depressing, in a way.
This salient quotation from Week Two of Bruce Sterling's Infinite Matrix blog, "Schism Matrix," could describe the thinking that inspired Matrix.net to launch an online SF magazine in the first place. The company wanted to acquire such a cachet of cool among faanish computer geeks that everyone would want to work for them. (I suspect that the company owners, SF fans themselves, also were willing to pay big bucks for this pretext to hang out with cool SF people like Sterling.)
This kind of hiring strategy only makes sense when the job market, and company management, have both gone completely giddy. It seemed that way to me, back when editor Eileen Gunn talked about this project at last year's ArmadilloCon SF convention in Austin, Texas. Still, it's neither good manners nor good politics to say, "So, you're caught up in a financial euphoria, are you?"
Another irony of the Sterling comment above is that FORTUNE was the only magazine I saw that pointed out the bubble before it burst, albeit in the late stages. Somebody there wasn't detached from harsh reality. But few paid attention, because pointing out bubbles isn't good manners or good politics.
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling's Viridian Movement is a culture movement devoted to combating climate change by making pollution unfashionable. The Sterling-edited Summer 02001 issue of Whole Earth Review makes a good introduction to Viridian ideas. So does the entertaining Viridian Design Web site.
From the manifesto:
Carbon dioxide is not a time-honored philosophical dilemma or some irreducible flaw in the human condition. Serious fossil-fuel consumption, as a practice on the grand scale, is only about 200 years old. The most severe rise in carbon emission occurred during the past fifty years. We're painfully dependent on this practice, but it's not as if we've married it.
[...] Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who are perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming generations by massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they're not the solution either, because most human beings won't volunteer to live like they do. Nor can people be forced to live that way through legal prescription, because those in command of society's energy resources will immediately game and neutralize any system of legal regulation.
However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive. [...] The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will.
[...] The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the twentieth century's industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in superstition and miasma.
And from the Sterling speech that formally announced the movement:
A genuinely degraded climate doesn't mean that the sky is falling. It doesn't mean armageddon, or utter annihilation, or anything half so romantic. It means a conclusive end to our Belle Epoque, though. Basically, it means smoke and heat and damp, clinging filth. All our cultural circumstances will become different then. Everything we know and cherish about life will suddenly become antiquated. It will belong to a vanished, beautiful, innocent era. That will be our Belle Epoque's version of the Great War, in other words.
So why is this an aesthetic issue? Well, because it's a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that's why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide.... What a cramp of our style. It's all very foul and aesthetically regrettable.
Sterling's Viridian Notes mailing list amusingly documents the sad procession of recent climatic catastrophes, such as the recent melting of the North Pole.
"If you tell 100 Americans 'The Earth will burn up if you don't stop driving your car,' 99 will say 'Let it burn!' and the hundredth will shoot you." -- Allen Varney
didn't Steve end up with The Fantasy Trip? I thought it evolved into GURPS
No, Howard Thompson (founder and president of Metagaming) kept The Fantasy Trip after Steve Jackson fell out with him in 1980. Thompson offered TFT for sale; rumor says his asking price was $250,000. Nobody bought. Steve developed GURPS (the Generic Universal Roleplaying System) because he couldn't get TFT. It's very much the same design approach, though GURPS more strongly emphasizes nominal realism.
Metagaming, now SJG
Oh god, I envision Steve reading that and clutching his chest and gurgling in total revulsion. Howard Thompson founded Metagaming in the mid-'70s, and he published Steve's early designs (OGRE/G.E.V., The Fantasy Trip, and a few incidental works). Jackson and Thompson had a somewhat public falling-out in the late '70s, and the dispute over rights left SJ with Ogre/G.E.V. and Thompson with The Fantasy Trip. Steve left and started SJG in 1980. Metagaming lingered on until about 1986, when it voluntarily ceased operations.
Given the bitter blood between them, phrases like "Metagaming, now SJG" carry the risk of heart attack.
Steve Jackson Games has been around since 1980, which makes it one of the oldest surviving companies in the adventure gaming hobby. With TSR absorbed into Wizards of the Coast a few years back, only Flying Buffalo, Chaosium, and possibly Palladium are older than SJG, and even Chaosium exists only as a shadow of its former greatness. The others, though of widely varying size, are essentially one-man shows, tied to the will and whim and stubbornness of their founders.
I worked for Steve Jackson Games from 1984 to '86, under Editor-in-Chief Warren Spector (a great guy who later blossomed into "the legendary" Warren Spector, at least in the eyes of PC Gamer magazine, for his pivotal role in the development of such computer games as System Shock, a couple of Ultimas, both Ultima Underworlds, Deus Ex, and many others). While I was there, SJG went through a financial crisis startlingly similar to the current situation, though without substantial layoffs. Then, some years after I left, I heard the company suffered another almost identical episode. In each case an incompetent financial officer drove the company into the red, sometimes deeply.
It keeps happening because Steve has arranged his company so that he can exercise absolute control over those matters that interest him -- the creative side, scheduling, print-buying -- while paying as little attention as possible to matters that don't -- mainly accounting. This wouldn't be much problem if the company had a deep bench of talented business people, but company turnover has always been a problem.
Still, I have no doubt SJG will once more weather this current crisis. It's like the old saying about the difference between monarchy and democracy: Monarchy is a proud ship, sailing untouched through the storm, but if it hits a rock it sinks utterly; democracy is a raft, which never sinks but your feet are always wet. Except for a glorious year during the trading-card game boom -- when Illuminati: New World Order singlehandedly pushed annual sales above the million-dollar mark for the only time in company history -- SJG's feet have always been wet. Their feet will still be wet, but above the waterline, a decade and more from now.
Real world peace will never happen. Not until we find someone else to fight. Humans (and in fact, earthlings in general) are just too violent and ambitious.
By "world peace" do you mean some utopian Peaceable Kingdom where no one ever raises a hand against another, or just the end of warfare between nation states? If the former, I agree, but globalization may, in the long term, bring a decent chance at the latter.
Sure, individual people are violent and ambitious, so there will always be bar fights. But just because I'm violent, that doesn't mean I personally wanna go invade Iraq. Organized warfare isn't usually a spontaneous mass outbreak of mindless violent impulses. Political, religious, and business forces manipulate the body politic to foment wars that serve their own purposes. It always works, and in the last couple of decades there have been more wars than in any couple of decades in history. But....
I'm no big fan of the World Trade Consortium et al, but the upside of globalization is that multinational businesses may eventually find it unprofitable to foment war. Although I hear it's a myth that no two nations that have a McDonald's have ever warred against one another, the myth carries a core of truth. If the corporations that rely on peaceful rule of law spend more on a nation's politicians than do the defense contractors, then those politicians won't declare war. Hotspots of racial and religious hatred will still simmer, but organized warfare would be too expensive.
The problem will be rogue nutcase empire-builders like Saddam Hussein. I imagine shrewd globalized companies will install safeguards that spot such problems early. The corps have incentive to promote the trappings of democracy, if only because these offer handy ways of removing problem rulers.
Of course, there's always the danger that the global corporations may start fomenting war as an instrument of competition against business rivals. Or am I being naive, and they often do that already?