A Dark And Quiet Room

“I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq” by Matthew Alexander

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

So, the man who located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi says that torture techniques don’t work. And then the military shuts him up.

Hmm….

For reasons that seemed good to me at the time, I’ve decided to read the novels of Jane Austen. To aid me in my quest, I’m also reading Peter Leithart’s Miniatures and Morals, in which he insists that “real men read Austen”. He’d better be right.

Right now, I’ve started Pride and Prejudice. This is technically a re-read, but since I first read it in high school, I don’t really remember it. Already I see some of myself in Mr. Darcy. Sigh.

I intend on following the order in Leithart’s book, so up next will be Northanger Abbey.

I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes.

So far, it’s not a romance. But there is a lot of laughing at silly girls, so it has that to recommend it.

Let’s see.

Independent Christian rap being distributed for free.

Yeah, that seems like a bunch of stuff that I care about, all intersecting at the same place.

And check out this explanation:

Our music is purposely released independently. This guarantees that our message is not tampered with or compromised by those whose financial interests form the basis of their decision-making. We are committed to providing Christ-centered, excellent music that stays true to the authentic, rugged hip-hop aesthetic that we love while bringing glory to God -and at an affordable price. And when we can, we will give it away for free. And that’s the case with “The Grassroots” CD. You are important to us. We are convinced that a loyal few is better than a fickle multitude. Our hope is that you will enjoy our music, pass it along to others, and allow us to serve you again in the future.

That’s great for so many reasons.

(FYI, if you end up on a splash page instead of the download page, click through to LampMode.com and look for the Goodies tab. The album is called the Grassroots EP.)

Ever heard of Core War? It’s a computer-moderated game where two players create programs that fight each other. The first one to crash loses.

I admit: I’m a nerd. So this sounded like a lot of fun, but definitely in the category of “never be able to do that”. Though, recently, I realized that I had been playing a similar game for a while now.

That game is called Magic: the Gathering.

From one angle, I guess you can consider this to be a report on the ongoing addiction. But, really, it’s some thoughts on my current relationship with the game and why I think that people interested in game design should spend some time playing Magic: The Gathering.

When I first started playing Magic, it was for the theme. I was interested in a duelling wizards’ game, and then someone came out with one, which saved me the trouble of having to create one myself. (I love when that happens.) And, honestly, one of my growing disappointments in the game at the time was how it was gradually diverging from that theme. The original cards represented effects that could be easily visualized, like Fireball. But as time went on, the effects became more exotic, as did the theming. I mean, what’s a Megrim, anyways?

Also, as time went on, other collectible card games came out that weren’t so reliant on the “buy lots of boosters” strategy. For example, I still maintain that Netrunner was the best designed CCG of the lot, especially because it involved more intricate gameplay than Magic.

So, slowly but surely, Magic faded from my gaming life.

Though, recently, I picked it back up again. Blame it on the mini-decks that were in the GenCon grab bags. I found myself reading through the cards and thinking, “You know, this was a lot of fun….”

And it’s fun once again. Yes, the theme really is just pasted on. (Read this in your best Eurosnoot voice.) Now, the game is fun for a different reason.

Magic took the game development cycle and turned it into a game. Therefore, Magic is the perfect game for game designers to play.

Think about it like this. Each Magic card is essentially a little rule. Therefore, each Magic deck is a system of rules that are supposed to work together in a synergistic fashion. You know, kinda like a game. Then, when you sit down to play, you are actually pitting your rules system against your opponent’s rules system, a la Core War.

But that’s not all. While each duel is a competition in itself, it is also a playtest for your deck/system. A wise player is keeping mental notes of what did and didn’t work. Then, in between duels, he refines his deck, trying to achieve superior elegance of design to produce the desired effects. Then he duels again.

Isn’t this simply iterative design?

On top of this, the very nature of the game requires players to consider complex emergent behavior as the result of simple rules interactions. The Magic development team has done a great job of refining the timing rules of the game, which were a bit fiddly when the game first released. Nevertheless, there is still the need for players to see how timing and independent effects interact in the game. Honestly, part of the skill of the game is exploiting the system, either through deck design or through clever play.

Playing Magic is partly about gaming the rules themselves.

All of this is good for game designers. By playing Magic, you are exercising the mental constructs and thought processes that are necessary for quality design and playtesting. Plus, it’s fun!

And, at this point, you should be able to spend $40 on eBay and buy more than enough cards to keep you in business for quite some time.

So, if you are a game designer, be it a novice or veteran, you really ought to learn to play Magic. It’s worth your time.

This is a great example of a “high context” story, by the way. If nothing else, the “burning plum” angle is quite specific to a few people. And yes, this is all supposed to mean something.

Mara stood in the snow, eating a plum.

“This really is delicious!” she said.

Then, she vanished in a flash of flame. The snow melted, leaving a warm field covered with daisies.

I just launched discussions on emergent campaigns on the Forge and Cultures of Play. Those who are curious might want to check out the threads.

You might even want to contribute.

Just sayin’….

So, I’m considering myself tagged by both Emil and Raquel. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t really care. I tend to look at that kind of thing as peer pressure, which I resist on general principle. But I decided to go with this one, because I think that Adiel has a point.

And, for that matter, I wonder if this is less “things I’m not ashamed of” and more “things I wish I weren’t ashamed of”. You know, stuff I wish that I could tell you. And now, because it’s just a silly game, I can get away with risking little bits of myself. Because, after all, it’s just a game, right?

(There’s an entire blog post in the power of games to break down social barriers, but that’s not this post….)

So, in no particular order, here goes.

1. I love games. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to people reading this blog. But, perhaps I haven’t really expressed exactly what I mean. I love games the way some people around me love music. I love playing games. I love thinking about games. I love considering game mechanics, and the social impact of games, and how the study of games helps us understand people and social structures and economics and body language. I love the metaphors innate in a game (compare the hierarchy of Chess with the territory of Go with the networks of Dvonn.) Games are serious business, and I love all of it.

2. I’m generally tired of being a “Reformed” Christian. So often, “Reformed” Christians are grumpy people, spreading the “joy” of the Lord by spitting on smiling people and then telling them that being happy is bad and that they’ll get used to it as they become more sanctified. This is also a totally unfair, non-nuanced portrayal that reflects the emotional content of my objections, not my intellectual reasons.

3. I am largely yet inconsistently disillusioned with high culture. I’d rather listen to Nightwish or Lecrae or Pink Floyd before listening to Mozart, Chopin, or Beethoven. And yet, Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” still has a special place in my heart.

4. I’d love to figure out a way to marry a liturgy like The Book of Common Prayer to modern worship music. I also know that I’m not the person who will figure this out.

5. I find singing in four-part harmony to be distracting and, at times, very frustrating.

6. I am far more emotional than I sometimes seem.

7. A while ago, I figured out that Jesus called me to gamble everything on His promise that His way was better. It’s like He said to gamble everything on a spin of the roulette wheel. “Put it on 0,” He says. And so I do. The ball is still bouncing around, but I know that it will land where He said it would.

8. My fondest dream is to be an elder in a church comprised of drug dealers, prostitutes, and abused children, all of whom Jesus has rescued.

9. I am afraid that I don’t know how much #8 will cost me.

10. I don’t really like being on the front lines of a conflict. Really, I generally wish that people would just leave me alone.

11. I like being on the front lines of a conflict. I think that I would be bored if I weren’t.

12. I like music with drums or heavy percussive elements. This ranges from Paul Van Dyk and Delerium to Kodo.

13. I understand my world better through roleplaying games. Other games I play to turn away from the problems of the world. Roleplaying games I play to connect to the problems of the world. Crystal says that it’s because I’m a counselor at heart. I think that she’s probably right.

14. I get overwhelmed by large crowds. They actually make me feel very lonely. I’d rather be with just a couple of people that I can actually talk to than be in a huge crowd of people, all alone.

15. I love Peoria. I love being part of my city, warts and all. And, I’m coming to appreciate the urban life. At one point, I probably would have wanted to stay far away from a large city. Now, visiting Los Angeles sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

So, I’m sitting here, doing some work (Integration Services for SQL Server 2005, if you’re curious…oh, you weren’t) and listening to Leaderdogs for the Blind (aka Leaderdogs). My brother bought the Lemonade CD years ago, and we listened to it a lot. (So, um, yeah, this is the music of my teen years…)

My brother works at the same place I do, so I IM him and say, “I’m listening to Leaderdogs!” Because it seemed like the right thing to do.

He then tells me that Lyndon Perry (one of the creative forces behind the band) lives in Peoria. I do some digging, and he’s right. Turns out Lyndon Perry moved to Peoria after the Lemonade CD was released, and now he is a worship leader at RockChurch, which is just a few blocks from where I type.

It is a small world.

P.S. The MySpace page includes a player with music. If nothing else, listen to “Lemonade”. Um, and “Yellow and Black Attack”.

Yeah, that’s a subtle subject line.

Anyways, I wanted to announce a new place where you can buy Dark Omen Games materials.

In addition to being able to find my fine games at Indie Press Revolution and Lulu.com and direct from the website, you can now purchase from the Indie RPGs Un-store. This is a new venture, being coded by Vincent Baker, which will act as an aggregator of sorts for a number of indie publishers. While each publisher will handle his own orders and fulfillment, this site enables the customer (that would be you) to browse listings from a number of different publishers, all on the same site.

So, check it out! And buy my stuff!

The entire universe was founded upon love, and love seeks the welfare of the Other more than the welfare of the Self.

But we are such a selfish people. No wonder that Creation groans. Its very foundations rot away.

And we are the rot.

But thanks be to God, Who has brought the restoration of all things through His Son Jesus Christ, the Forever Blessed. Amen.

It’s that time again! The Go Play Peoria Fall Minicon will be held on December 6, 2008 at the Samaritan Ministries building. The doors open at 9 a.m., and we wrap up around 9 p.m. Please bring a $5 donation to help defray the cost of food.

Bring your own games, plus a willingness to meet new people and try new things.

Got questions? Ask away!

When I went to GenCon in 2007, I had a list of games that I wanted to get and play. Topping that list was Grey Ranks.

This year, Annalise topped that list.

I’ve been saying it in other venues, so I’ll say it here:

Annalise appears to be the vampire game that I thought I’d have to write.

You don’t play the vampire in Annalise; you play his victims. Each character is emotionally vulnerable in some way, and that attracts the vampire. To get an idea of the mood of the game, you can read Annalise’s journal online at the website:

Version with drawings (PDF)
Version with photographs (PDF)

Yeah, that kind of stuff works for me.

Now, why do I bring all this up? Because print versions of Annalise are quite scarce, but Nathan just made the PDF available for sale at his website.

So, if moody vampire horror sounds like your thing, you really should go check out Annalise.

And don’t be afraid of the dark.

It seems like detective novels have very little connection between the title and the actual events of the book. At least the ones that I read seem this way. Ross MacDonald is probably the classic example of this. Consider the title The Zebra-Striped Hearse. The actual car makes a brief appearance in the book, and it’s not actually a major plot point. But, at the same time, the car seems to have some symbolic weight beyond its minor appearance. The same goes for The Goodbye Look or most of the rest of his books, for that matter.

I’m finding that something that I enjoy about reading these books is finding the point in the narrative when the title is explained. So this quote from Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane stood out. The two characters are discussing a woman who killed herself:

“Then,” she said flatly, her eyes on a gaggle of mallards as they waddled down the slope on the far side of the river. “Then she was a tocuh insane, I’d think. Ah, she wanted to die. Mr. Kenzie. So, so much.”

“Wanted to die or wanted to be saved?”

She turned her head toward me. “Aren’t they the same thing? Wishing to be saved? In this world, yeah? It’s…” Her small face grew bitter and gray and she shook her head several times.

“It’s what?” I said.

She looked at me like I was a child who’d asked why fire burns or seasons change.

“Well, it’s like praying for rain, isn’t it, Mr. Kenzie?” She raised her hands to the clear, white sky. “Praying for rain in the middle of a desert.”

Prayers for rain.

Suddenly the book title becomes terribly profound and almost poetic. Makes me think about all the people around me, offering their own prayers for rain.

But who sends the rain?

Jesse Burneko discusses Dirty Secrets in a recent post:

Dirty Secrets is similar. That game is fueled almost entirely by the player’s opinions of the characters and their willingness to express them. The grid is less about generating a surprising random outcome and more about voting. Because the grid is used for all the crimes you’re voting for a given character to be guilty of something. It’s the height of being judgmental. The scary thing about Dirty Secrets is that the only thing you are given to form your *initial* opinion is demographics. That’s by design. But if you don’t put your feelings at the forefront of the application of the rules then the game falls flat.

Also, Berin Kinsman writes about playing Dirty Secrets at a recent con:

If you like crime novels, film noir, detective shows, mysteries, anything akin to those genres, buy this and check it out. It seems like it would be a good party game for mystery buffs who aren’t into roleplaying games and might be a good “gateway drug” to introduce your non-geek friends to roleplaying. It handles genre tropes in clever ways. Definitely a good touch. Nice job, Seth.

Thanks, guys!

Okay, things have been pretty intense around here recently. So, I propose a prank.

Go read this blog post.

That’s my sister’s blog. (Actually, she shares it with a friend, but you get the idea.)

See that part where she says: “People don’t come to this blog to read my insightful opinions.”

Yeah. Um, the prank is for you to leave a comment on that post. Bonus points if you write up something about her insightful opinions.

I’ve already told her that I’m going to do this, so it’s not going to surprise her or anything. It’ll be funny! So please pitch in!