Speeding Up, Letting Go, What the Hell

For a person who always loved games, it took me too long to learn that I'd be able to play more often if everyone enjoyed playing with me. I wasn't a bad loser, or an intolerably bad winner. I was just soooooo slow. I played "well" because I analyzed all options and wasn't quick about it. When my wife Lisa started talking about using a timer, or just not playing some games with me, I got the message.

These days I work at playing quickly, carving off a couple slices of analysis and putting the rest in the "yeah, things might get messy there" bucket. It's not always easy just-letting-go, and sometimes I have to roleplay reasons that I'm not going to work hard at being clever.

For example, playing Lanterns, I limit myself to a one-minute turn, and the last game I played when it felt like I might be making a mistake, I said something like "Well, we dropped the oars and were scrabbling around in the bottom of the boat when we should have been lighting lanterns. So we've gotta dump the lanterns overboard before the boat catches on fire, now!"

Playing Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles for the first time a couple months ago, I played from the beginning saying that my commander was nursing a bad hangover. Did a good job of roleplaying that too, since I ended the game by charging disastrously with the wrong unit, snatching defeat from victory. Ee ja nai ka!

Playtesting new games with skilled designers and tournament players, I sometimes run into a variant of the same problem. Even in their first game, players who don't really understand the rules yet tend to want to analyze everything instead of just-playing-through.

So I've recently been starting introductory boardgame and testing sessions with roleplaying advice: "Pretend we're drunk! We're not going to get everything right. You don't know the system and I'm not gonna do a perfect job explaining things all the way through, so you won't make the right decisions, let's just plow through and if something goes wrong, well, it's my fault, what the hell!"

[[art by By Kawanabe Kyōsai - National Diet Library Digital Collections, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2183868

Manos: the Hands of the Internet

Bruce Baugh introduced me to the Internet. We were both living in Portland in the late 80s and very early 90s. I remember Bruce showing me that his computer was dialing up a system that let it link to other computers all around the world. I’d sort of vaguely known that something like this was possible but had left it to others. Bruce was one of those others. For reasons that might have had something to do with what was working at the moment, Bruce demonstrated his computer’s worldwide connectivity by finding out what the weather was like in South Africa. At that second. Well, actually it took a minute or two and Bruce commented on the computers his query was routing through. I was impressed. I didn't know what to make of it, not really, but I was impressed. And within a few months I had an AoL account and was participating in the gaming forums, which in combination with contacts made through pre-internet Alarums & Excursions surely led me to work professionally in gaming.

I didn't have a television back then (or since . . .). So Bruce was also the man to introduce my girlfriend Lisa and me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. The first episode Lisa watched with us was the epically brain-damaging episode bludgeoning through the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate. If you aren't familiar with this film I’m not going to be the one guilty of linking to it.

When people joke about the early days of the Internet—it’s a series of tubes—I flick past the subject’s personal association with a murderous dwarf, a high priest’s orange robes that flare out into giant hands, and slap-wrestling semi-nude female cultists.

About half-right, in other words. 

Bruce. Thanks for everything. 

"If I could stick a pen in my heart...

…and spill it all over the Sage...”

You are watching the Fellowship of the Ring movie. The Fellowship has arrived at Rivendell. It is time for the Council of Elrond. Elrond begins to relate the history of the Ring.

While Elrond speaks, Mick Jagger climbs onto the council table. Mick is dressed something like an evil elven kabuki dancer. Mick Jagger is Sauron.  

As Elrond speaks, Jagger mimes the rise of Sauron, the forging of the rings, and the gyrations of Elendil. Those about the table pay Jagger no mind. He is kabuki, invisible except to us.

This moment of alternate cinematic history could have come to pass if Tolkien hadn’t been alive to read John Boorman’s script for the Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien slashed the script up with red pen. Slain before reaching maturity, the script fell and came to lodge in the Tolkien collection at Marquette University.

Which is where Seattle’s Tolkien scholar, John D. Rateliff, read the script and lived to tell the story. I wouldn’t know about the Boorman script if John hadn’t told me over a Tolkien-anecdote-stuffed-lunch. Boorman’s Excalibur was one of my favorite movies as a teenager. I think some of the images that he wanted to use in Middle-Earth found a home in the story of Arthur.

But kabuki Sauron? And the entire Fellowship prancing and strutting their stuff to try and seduce Galadriel only for her to choose Frodo as bedmate? Too close to Bored of the Rings for comfort. This is epic 70’s pipeweed material.

John’s blog over at http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/  talks Tolkien in depth and breadth. I poked around on the web after hearing John’s story and found it interesting that fans on some Tolkien discussion sites mentioned just how terrible they would have felt if something like the Boorman movie had been filmed first. But now that Jackson made the films that people pretty much agree got LotR right, some people said that they would be curious to see a less faithful adaptation, an artistic treatment that brought something new and unexpected to the story.