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The Appearance of Gamers - The London Gaming Con 2011

I was reminded recently that in the early nineties Tony Parsons argued that games are the new rock’n’roll. That was nonsense then, and still is, but not because games aren’t creative or expressive, and certainly not because they aren’t big enough. It's because games can make that once in a generation claim of being a new medium, and one of the privileges of this is to resist being mapped onto old thinking.

Games have arrived with their own agenda, where sights and sounds are meshed with challenges, where the senses are piqued to demand and respond to your participation, where immersion is mandatory. Games might jostle with music and movies and books, but they are of a brand new genus. They won’t replace rock’n’roll anymore than architecture might replace sculpture.

But that still leaves a question. Music is inclined to show off.  Performance is at its heart, image and culture flow from it. It has visible audiences that recognise and learn from one another. Its trite but true: music has a ‘scene’.

But the intense participation that makes gaming unique also makes it private. It's as dispersed as it is widespread - for all the magazines and review sites, it has no natural gathering place. We know that gaming has a culture, but what does it look like?

Rattle & Boom: New Moon

What is it about charity shops and film tie-in board games? (Or television tie-in board games or even film-of-the-book tie-in board games, for that matter?) With Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Unplaytested Boardgame, I'd thought we'd reached the nadir of merchandising, but then, like a sparkle in the daylight, New Moon came glittering into our lives. Unopened. For a fiver. The unopened part is particularly telling - like some sort of well-meaning aunt stumbled upon this as the perfect Christmas present for her youf-ful nephew and his "rock and roll" music. "Look, Thomas, this has pale people and astronomical whatsits on it, just like those 'medal' bands you listen too!".

Regardless of the game's original provenance, as of last Wednesday night, it was cracked open and laid out for our distinctly non-Twilight, non-tweeny, thoroughly non-amused friends. 

So how'd it go?

Rattle & Boom: Pirates of the Caribbean Buccaneer

Buccaneer, in its many incarnations, has been around since 1938 and is still in print today. For 75 years, the basic tenets of the games have held true, but each manufacturer, producer, designer and cheesy film tie-in partner has insisted on fiddling with the rules.

Each player is the captain of a pirate ship (arrrr, avast, etc). You take turns sailing around the board to various destinations in search of treasure, crew and trouble. The goal is to collect various types of loot. There are 5 types that are worth between 2 and 5 gold each. There are also 5 pieces of each type. Once you get three (or more) of a single type of loot, you can safely stash it at your home port. It is taken off the board, and you have that much treasure to your name. The first player to match and stash 20 points of treasure wins. 

Rattle & Boom: Formula One

Another charity shop find, Waddington's Formula One Car Racing Game (1962) seemed awfully intimidating at first. A fairly lengthy (8 page) rulebook, a lot of bits and pieces and, most of all, we don't know a thing about racing. Car goes zoom. First one past the ribbon wins the need for speed. Never trust Cary Elwes.

Fortunately, our friends John and Bhavna know their Schumachers from their Earnhardts, so we made an evening of it.

The board is one enormous track, neatly divided into tiny boxes of roughly-equal size. Each race consists of laps around the track (like, John assures us, the stuff on TV). The tricky part to conceptualise is that the boxes on the board don't stand for distance, they stand for speed. Each box is a 20 mph segment. So if you're travelling 60 mph, you move 3 boxes. 120 mph, 6 boxes. (Despite the instructions' best assurance, this isn't actually measuring speed, but velocity. I think. Someone that knows something about physics should come by and tell me how this game works.)

Friday Five: Favorite RPGs

RPGs are what bring us together today. Whether they're traditional Gygaxian tabletop adventures or the most advanced video games, they're the things we argue bout and obsess over. We definitely fall asleep thinking about them. Read about our favorites after the jump, and then tell us about yours!

We're particularly delighted to add a special guest contributor to this week's Friday Five rollcall.  Magnus Anderson lives and writes in London.  He has made numerous appearances on Lollards of Pop on Resonance FM, discussing gaming and pop culture, and devised a cryptic treasure hunt which was published by Big Finish as part of a Bernice Summerfield anthology. He is currently working on a book due for publication in 2012.

Damn You, Peggle! Damn You to Hell!

When you write about games, the temptation is to write about proper games: the ones the people in the know play, for which you have to actually invest in a console or a top-end PC, and which come with a cast-iron guarantee that they’ll eat your life until you finish them (or for all eternity, in the case of the Elder Scrolls). But I realised the other day that I currently spend more time playing games on my iPhone than I do on my Xbox. And since mobile games are being touted as the saviours of the industry – just look at EA’s recent $1.3 billion buyout of Popcap – it seemed time to show them some love.

It used to be Angry Birds, the game everyone and their grandma loves. The trouble is, I apply the same level of crazed completism to ‘casual’ games that I do to RPGs. I didn’t just have to finish every level of Angry Birds, I had to get three stars in every level. And I didn’t just have to get three stars in every level, I had to find every single egg too. I’d like to say I had fun, but the truth is it was soul-destroying. By the time I was on my 100th try at getting that pointless red bird to pass through enough glass bricks, there was absolutely no pleasure left in it. It was just a grim obligation.

Random List: 5 Things I Hate About D&D

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a fairly unreasonable amount of time and my (very tolerant) gaming groups now knows that I've developed a few pet peeves. For the sake of the historical record, here they are... 

Dwarves: I think I'd like Dwarves more if there were a second way to play them. However, since the dawn of dice, Dwarves have always been role-played as squat and sullen, something fully encouraged by the ridiculous "racial overview" guide in each edition's Player's Handbook. The height of Player of Dwarf's humor is a joke about how their women have shorter beards. The rest of his comedic repertoire is made up of homophobia-tinted elf-bashing and ale-related demands. This is supposedly a race of long-lived engineering geniuses - why are they always played as hangover fratboys?

Halflings: At least Dwarves have some sort of functional use. Of Tolkien's many crimes, saddling gamers with a merry fistful of Daily Mail-reading analogues is probably the worst. Even in Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), the furry-footed housepests are remarkably useless.

It's Possible I'm not a Better Person Than David

I’ve always assumed I’m a better person than David. It’s not because of anything he does in real life. In the real world, David makes his friends strawberry cupcakes and takes them to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing for their birthday. But whenever he plays RPGs, he’s like a cross between Stalin, Ming the Merciless and John Wayne Gacy. In Knights of the Old Republic, he didn’t so much turn to the dark side as leap joyfully into its arms.

I’m not like that at all. Within about five minutes of starting to play the first Fable, I was surrounded by butterflies and rainbows, whereas David had red glowing eyes, horns and a fatal attraction for blowflies. Moral choices are all the rage in games today, and I just can’t bring myself to make the bad ones. In BioShock, I saved all the Little Sisters. I mean, of course I did: they’re helpless little girls. What kind of monster wouldn’t? And I’ve always thought this must be because the way I play RPGs – the self I choose to project within them – is the essential me. And let’s be honest, I’m clearly pretty damn lovely.

All Quiet on the FPS Front

I’m currently tearing my way through David Weber’s Honor Harrington books. For anyone who hasn’t read them – and they seem peculiarly under-appreciated in the UK given that they’re about a female Horatio Hornblower in space – they’re about a female Horatio Hornblower in space. Honestly, I can’t put them down, and now that I’ve finished all of Patrick O’Brian’s output, discovering them has significantly reduced my weltschmertz. (What? It’s a word!)

I like military fiction a lot. A group of friends and I periodically get together to watch old Sharpe episodes and wait impatiently until either Sean Bean takes his shirt off or we can ogle some heaving, barely contained bosoms, depending on sexual preference. I also like the new Battlestar Galactica more than Star Trek, not because it’s a better show, but because the Colonial Fleet seem like a real army and the Federation are a bunch of pussies.

Why I Like Broken Things

Bethesda have recently announced that there’ll be no horse armour in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Obviously, I am A-OK with this. I mention it because I am so excited about the game that even some news about what’s not going to be in it gets my juices flowing. I am a very big fan of the Elder Scrolls franchise. If the Elder Scrolls franchise were a person, I would have a poster of it on my bedroom wall. I would stare dreamily at it at night and fantasise about how one day I might be walking down the street and just happen to bump into the Elder Scrolls, and we’d get chatting and realise how much we had in common, and pretty soon we’d be happily married and raising a brood of Younger Scrolls.

There are many reasons I like the Elder Scrolls, but one of them is that it’s still a proper RPG. In fact its third instalment, Morrowind, was one of the first wave of games that brought Western RPGs out of the closet and onto our consoles. And yet, many of those same games now seem to be doing their best to leap back into the closet again, change into more macho clothes and proclaim in deep, manly voices that they love nothing better than a pint of beer and a good glassing and who ever said they were into any of that perverted, turn-based combat stuff?