New Beginnings! (A life update)

The crisp breeze of September blows in! School's started again. It's like the third week and I think I'm already behind all my classes, which I suppose is typical. I recently moved into my new digs since bumming it for several weeks when the lease for the previous spot went up. It's a pretty sweet place and I finally have my own room and such. However there is no internet hooked up yet, so I've been mooching off the university wireless when I'm on campus to feed my internet addiction.

I also started work at a local pizza place because I needed more Snow Crash in my life. Maybe I can set up a wifi there... Also, many of the people who work there and indeed the people who own the business are foreign, Turkish to be precise. Being asked what words like 'advice' and 'remind' keeps one on their toes on the English language. I'm not used to giving definitions for words and such.

Gamer's Guild, the game club at UCONN is also starting up and such. I'm running a Mage: the Ascension campaign for our beginning game, to get everybody in gear for some awesome gaming this semester. I'm not setting it in the World of Darkness though, because seriously, I did enough of that shit. Also, we have the room for a ridiculous amount of time (for 6 hours), so we could actually probably get two games going. Perhaps, one-day D&D adventures? I'll have to think about this...

Random Observation:
A new person came to the Guild last week, who said he had Asperger's syndrome. During chilling/bullshitting that happens at end of the club, I was showing peoples Overdrift, which I find hilarious. He, however, hated it. He said he hated the bad acting. I was a bit confused by this. One would think he wouldn't notice? Besides, it's ironic.

I find myself drifting into the abstract

"Ariel, what going on? You've haven't said anything in awhile."

"You have a very contemplative face on."

"What's your thought process right now?"

It's true. I hadn't said anything in awhile and the small what some space of my Japanese car made my silence totally conspicuous. I was totally concentrating on some internal thought processes. I needed it to recharge, since I was totally jamming out a music festival earlier and
I was still reacting to that. Even though I liked it and had a lot of fun, social situations and large groups do tire me out in nonphysical kind of way.

"There's nothing sinister about my silence. I just trying to forget I have a body right now"

"Umm, please don't. You're driving."

"No, no. I'm concentrating on driving, trying to forget I have a body"

"Oh I see. You feel like that you are part of the car. Or that the car is a part of you."

"Not exactly. I'm trying to forget I have a car to. I am just concentrating on the road. And not what the photons hitting my eyes that my brain is interpreting is a particular road, but the Idea of road."

*pause*

"Wow. That is some pretty deep shit."

The Bet

I have this thing about observing games and play wherever I see it, and most importantly observing the people how they are acting and reacting. Like it always amuses me to see people buying lottery tickets. Recently I experienced an interesting sort of game. Recently a pair of my friends got married. Now, they dated in high school, but it definitely was not a continuous relationship since that time. Then again, even when they were apart all they really seemed to think about were each other, so who knows?



When faced with the sudden surprise announcement, after convincing us that it was not an April Fool's Joke, the other guys were of course conflicted. Would this work? How long will it last? The questions about the fate of these two hung in the back of our minds while we celebrated the beginning of the marriage process. Naturally, after those two left the rest of us started placing bets.



Basically we, three, each put down a bet. One bet that the marriage would last for a year or two before divorce, another bet between two and three years, and I optimistically bet three to four. If no one was right, all the money would go toward a party or something. We had talked about how much we wanted them work but our brains telling us that it wouldn't last. The other two reflected it seemed kind of cold to take bets on that. I firmly protested just because we act this way in the Magic Circle of a Game is not indicative of any lack of respect for two, on the contrary we wanted them to last! We all in fact wanted to lose!



That sent reverberations through my skull. A game we all wanted to lose. An interesting idea, no? It may or may not unique in that respect, especially with the way some people play certain drinking games, but it is certainly not common at all. It seems to come about when there is a cost outside of the game to winning. I'm not sure if that's the only time though. I'd have to think about that some more. The point is that I wonder if one can design a game to be like this. Some games are of course moddable so that this is an out come like a Vampire game where everyone takes the Flaw Dark Fate. Not that Vampire games are 'won' as such, but its close.



What would be more interesting was if the alternate endings in Wing Commander III, which were accessed by losing certain missions were somehow better. Like better ships at the end, or somehow more satisfying and less tragic.



I wonder what a game designed from the ground up to encourage losing would look like.