New on Desk #5 — M-m-m-my Corona

I’ve been rather faint and weary this week, all trochee’d and teary with a particularly nasty bout of flu. At this writing the pesky sickness is apparently going for seconds in the nasal/throat area instead of going away. As one might imagine, I haven’t been up to anything particularly interesting this week. Hopefully we’ll get back to substantial stuff next week.

A Study in Cognition: The Story of My Sick

Human cognition works by narrativizing sense phenomena that are, properly speaking, atomistic, as we cannot actually directly perceive how events inter-relate. It is at best awkward and inefficient to perform higher cognitive tasks directly on complex sense phenomena and layered memories of the same. The go-to solution of the human brain is to arrange sense events into linear causal series — stories. Such stories are accessed more efficiently by our associative-search memories, and the causal understanding we attach to what technically speaking started as atomistic observations helps us understand what it is that we see.

Keeping the above in mind, check out my pattern-recognition, dear Watson. Here’s some half-polished sense phenomena:

• My flu started two weeks after my trip to Oulu, a port city in northern Finland. There is a recently famous popular disease with flu-like symptoms that just so happens to feature a two-week germination period.
• I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Oulu. Chinese restaurants come from China, which is obvious even to my feverish mind.
• I’m jumping to conclusions before reading up on what the actual symptoms of the novel coronavirus are, because it’s more psychologically rewarding that way. First-mover advantage belongs to he who jumps first!

So yeah, my flu is clearly a case of corona, and I don’t mean the beverage. I’ve learned from the media that the right thing to do when you’re infected with the coronavirus is to escape to France before the Chinese get ya, so I guess I’ll do that next.

Actual Play: Subsection M3

Just the day before my flu emerged, the local crew managed to arrange a session for our on-going Subsection M3 campaign. We’ve had some practical issues since the start of the year, work schedules and such, but there’s a lot of energy when we do manage to play. This being a Sunday session, we had hamburgers and all.

My prep for the session focused on follow-ups to unfinished cases, plus my pièce de résistance, an adaptation of the movie Bladerunner as the sort of sudden, bare-bones crime procedural that Subsection works with. Subsection scenarios get what flavour they carry from emergent nuances, and in this case those were lined up nicely: the subsection had grown to know Eldon Tyrell and his debutante daughter Rachael earlier in the campaign, so they were more viscerally hooked into the crime than usual.

Subsection has an interesting take on the Voight-Kampf test, the scifi lie detector that the detectives use to identify replicants (illegal humanoid robots — slaves, essentially) in a non-invasive way. While the conflict resolution system is generally orthodox, with a player success in rolling indicating character success in whatever they were trying to do, in this particular situation the game makes an exception: if the player beats the target number while V-K testing, the player chooses the outcome of the test; if the player loses, the GM chooses the result.

This peculiar rule came into spotlight hard as one of the detectives followed the movie storyline and visited Eldon Tyrell, the old genius and majority owner of Tyrell Robotics. The purpose of the visit was to ensure that the V-K tests would work correctly on the Nexus-6 replicants hiding out in the City, and when the detective confessed to having only had cursory training in the use of the test, ol’ Eldon magnanimously suggested performing the test on his daughter Rachael so he could observe the detective’s technique and confirm that the test would work as intended. The unspoken implication being, of course, that Rachael would obviously prove to be human.

The way this game works is that I cannot declare a given character to actually be a replicant rather than a human. I can bluster and hint at things, characters can shoot people for being replicants, but the only tool the detectives actually have for an ostensibly scientific determination is the V-K test. The implication here is that I’d prepped the entire scenario without knowing whether Rachael was a replicant: the rest of the events would unfold in a rather different way depending on the choice here.

As fate would have it, the detective who happened to visit the Tyrell offices tonight was not one of Rachael’s and Eldon’s old acquaintances. When the player won the roll and chose to condemn Rachael as a replicant (exactly as in the movie), this came as quite a shock to some other detectives in the ‘section. A certain healthly level of paranoia about the scientific merit of the V-K test has been brewing at the police station for a while now, and the rules of the game do not actually say that the V-K result is true, only that it can be determined, and that the political establishment in-setting believes in it. We may well see some detectives start questioning the system in the future.

The majority of the work shift (play session) was spent untangling the Bladerunner scenario. The material is notably thriller-rific, by the way; the movie is sort of slow and atmospheric, but when you break it down into key scenes, it becomes a pretty exciting race against time and desperate slave escapees. The players didn’t make the scenario easy for themselves, either: one of the detectives, an angry friend of Rachael’s, attacked the primary detective physically in the middle of a crime scene in an attempt to intimidate them into scuttling Rachael’s status as a replicant.

More Comics: Bitch Planet

Corona’s primary host population is bats, so I obviously continued reading Batman comics this week. Current Detective Comics, the other flagship Batman title, was much more varied and generally more appropriate for Batman than the Batman run I read last week. It’s all over the place, though, and isn’t generally as grim and crime-y as I’d like. The first longer arc, for instance, is basically a X-Men comic book. Teen Titans, I suppose, this being DC comics.

However, heading beyond Batman alphabetically, with some random stops on the way, had me stumble upon an actually good, recent comic book: Bitch Planet is a dystopian cyberpunk sexploitation satire published by Image (Marvel’s indie label). Pretty similar to my favourite Warren Ellis work, Transmetropolitan. I’m a sucker for political, angry cyberpunk satire.

The story begins by establishing the dystopic patriarchy and an ensemble cast, but where it hooked me was in the second issue, where the local blood-sport of choice was introduced. For vile political reasons, the women’s prison planet would field a sports team to play the violent male sport of Duomilla in the professional league, with the players probably dying on the pitch to appease the lurid appetites of the masses. The game itself is interestingly designed, with all kinds of grotesque touches. For example, teams are not limited by head-count, but rather by total weight: the entire team has to weight in at under 2000 lbs.

I’m all into this sort of thing, combining a sports drama with political satire in a fantastic environment? Yes please, and the angrier the better.

The series also uses its medium effectively, with ample back-matter in each issue expanding upon the ideas present. I imagine that this may have well been a solid first contact with modern feminism for more than just one or two readers.

The big, fat quality bottleneck for Bitch Planet is that the creators struggle to pace their material; to me it all feels like it moves much too fast, skipping from one topic to another instead of allowing the individual story elements time to open up. The aforementioned sports thing that I so liked, for example? Gone in a couple of issues, when I would have been happy seeing it take center stage for a years-long arc. Can’t help the practical limitations on the workflow, I suppose.

Gentlemen on the Agora

My cultural salon of choice has been popping this week, but I feel pretty beat, so just the highlights here:

• The democratic primary candidates in the upcoming American presidential elections seem to be generally against nuclear power. The Agora contributors tend to be STEM types one and all, so this is generally considered a disappointing situation. It was observed that whatever the politician’s personal opinion, nuclear power doesn’t have the votes to justify itself in a platform: you support either Big Coal for the funding and populist imagery, or green energy for support by the greens. There aren’t enough engineers in the USA to make nuclear power electable.
• Contributors provoked me to speculate on Hellraiser x Precure fanfiction against my better judgment. I quickly drafted an outline for a story about teenage best friends, one of whom gets bestowed with the Lament Configuration, with the other pawning herself to the Garden of Light to rescue her friend from the Labyrinth. In the middle of elaborating on this I realized that it all sounded very familiar… I’d managed to duplicate the plot of Valis, a Japanese magical girl platforming game. Clearly adding Hellraiser to magical girls doesn’t take it out of the reservoir too badly, once you get over the pornographic potential.
• A contributor is designing a CRPG, and needed to know about the practical logic of living in the “savutupa”, the dwelling favoured in northern climes throughout the iron age. (It’s basically a wooden version of a yurt in that it’s a house with a large oven, but no chimney, which requires certain habits of living. I haven’t faintest idea what the English-language term would be.) The gentlemen succeeded in filling in a basic picture. Most importantly, build high and keep ventilation holes open when warming the oven to keep the smoke under control.
• Said contributor followed up later in the weak by unveiling his delightfully symbolic, sorta Forgite character spec system for his game. It’s apparently shaping into a “narrative game” (like King of Dragon Pass and such) about life-long story arcs with plenty of potential for interesting emergent variation. The Agora murmured approvingly.

• With my fever going up and down, this thing started bothering me: whose claw is that, exactly in the box art of this classic game? The tyrannical antagonists of Star Control, the implacable race of galactic conquerors, the dread Ur-Quan, have tentacles instead of hands. Their opposing numbers, the Chenjesu of the Alliance of Free Stars, are psionic crystal beings. I asked the gentlemen, offering several speculative scenarios (my favourite: it’s the hand of the player himself; sorta looks like your average wargaming grognard), but I was totally schooled on this one: the box art obviously doesn’t present any particular creature of known space, as it’s merely a propaganda piece tailored for human consumption. The agitprop department of Star Control (it’s the name of the human star fleet in the franchise) didn’t care to strive for physiological accuracy in depicting the Ur-Quan masters, that’s all. Presumably the game’s sold with different cover art in other polities of the Alliance, using visuals that speak to the locals.

Poll Era Rollover!

All right, we’ve finished our January polling period. Here are the final results:

As you can see, we got a tie between two clear front-runners, so I guess I’ll implement both the C2020 Redux article and the RPG Theory of Storyboarding, assuming this bat-influenza ever ends. Expect concrete results around mid-month, I suppose, or whenever I get around to it. Most of the rest also got a fair amount of support, so I’ll just drop the least interesting and consolidate the rest a bit before building up next month’s poll. Like so:

Vote away. As before, I might add some options if interesting stuff comes up over the next few weeks. Please note that the C2020 Redux is again in the list: it’s because I’m obviously not writing the entire project out in one sitting (I actually know I won’t; the article’s mostly finished at this writing because I’m a cheaty cheat and saw that it was going to place well weeks ago), so if you want to see more of that after I put up the first article, we could do more later.