This Entry Is All About Gaming (and a little bit of cheese)

[tcpip]

On Saturday caseopaya and I attended another part of round #2 of cheesequest with hathhalla and ser_pounce; I made liptauer, but I suspect the wensleydale/stilton with cranberry will win the round. We also played Pandemic a great cooperative game - the disease defeated our collective efforts twice, along with Nuns on the Run, an impressively well-themed 'hide and seek'.

In the world of the Ingress augmented reality, have picked up a rather impressive Enlightened hoodie courtesy of agent ozmusic. It has a battery powered glow-trim, which is quite amusing. Hit level 11 in the game today, which has been quite a wait. However due to the achievment requirements, I'm expecting to hit level 12 next week, and 13 by the end of the year. After a year of play, I have will be considering how much more I continue with it. For a long time it has been more habitual than anything else.

Although the timetable is habitual, roleplaying is anything but in content. Last Thursday was another episode of Masks of Nyarlathotep where the foreign investigators did much better than the previous session in piecing together various leads in their journeys in 1925 Shanghai. Sunday was GURPS Middle-Earth, where we flushed out a demon. My character's overconfidence led to to try to challenge this creature in single-combat on top of a peaked tower; my strategic sense led me to duck away whilst it was peppered with missile fire. In other roleplaying matters, I somehow completely neglected to mention my review on rpg.net last month of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. Tonight, have just finished a review of a Yaquinto classic from the early 80s, Pirates and Plunder.

Comments

[delphipsmith]

Pandemic sounds fun! Maybe we should send a set to the CDC and WHO -- it might help them with their Ebola strategy :P

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Pandemic is a lot of fun; hathhalla and ser_pounce have named the diseases as appropriate to the region. In both cases it was bird 'flu that got us.

I'm fascinated to discover that it's been the subject of an academic paper as well.

[delphipsmith]

Very cool! I'm intrigued by studies like this, where gaming and gaming behavior is applied to real life and vice versa. A few years ago, World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood incident resulted in a number of academic studies on how real people might react to a plague. Fascinating stuff -- for example, "One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalists would rush toward a problem to cover it, and then rush back out."

It's almost enough to make you suspect we're all just living in a big simulacrum.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That Corrupted Blood story is awesome. I have no idea how I hadn't encountered it until now.. I guess most of my friends have finished playing WoW (I never actually started).

I am sure you're well aware that there's more than a few papers that argue that we are in a big simulation. :)

Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream

[delphipsmith]

Yes -- the fact that every exotic meat tastes like chicken suggests that the programmers were either lazy or not very imaginative ;)

[L]a vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. ~ Pedro Calderón.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

... every exotic meat tastes like chicken suggests that the programmers were either lazy or not very imaginative ;)

Well, it could be an in-joke, I suppose.

I suppose most foods either taste like fungus, fruit, bean, mammal, fatty bird, lean bird/reptiles, fish, or jelly.

In a fantastic environment I wonder if there would be a couple more general categories to through in as well...

That's a great quote by Pedro Calderón, and not someone who I am that familiar with. I would make a good introduction to an essay I have been pondering with Zhuangzi butterfly, Descarte's demon, Putnam's 'Brain in a Vat', and Moravec and Bostrom's reality simulation...

A nice epistemological journey into a hypothetical ontology...

[delphipsmith]

fungus, fruit, bean, mammal, fatty bird, lean bird/reptiles, fish, or jelly.

You forgot umami :)

...an essay I have been pondering...

Butterflies, demons and brains. I'd like to read that!