Of Walking, Ingress, and Other Gaming

[tcpip]

It was Thoreau who wrote the wonderful essay on walking, and there is much in it that I do find most agreeable. I do not engage in the twenty miles or four hours per day that he recommends, and I usually do travel with a purpose and direction in mind unlike the transcendentalist. But I am incredibly fortunate to live with a remarkable level of nature and yet only several kilometres from the centre of the city. The foliage around the Yarra River is beautifully dense with a huge number of bats, many species of bird (local and introduced), numerous possums, the occasional kangaroo, and recently I spotted a pair of foxes. Yet it also saddens me with the realisation that as I look at satellite imagery that I live in a tiny sliver of green, as the grey scar of human suburban habitation is the dominant feature. Once upon a time, all of Melbourne was as rich in non-human life, if not more so, as where I live now.

My enjoyment of walking has led me to recently download an pedometer application for my 'phone with consideration of health benefits that comes from a daily ten thousand steps regimen. As expected it took little change from my normal activity to reach such a daily target, although ironically a few days afterwards I was knocked out of action by a cold. Not a terrible one, but enough to put me largely out of any substantional activity for a while (and enough to take a day off work). In addition to the limits on walking, it also has limited by Ingress journeys. On the first night that I picked up the application, I walked Victoria Street, from the far west of Carlton to the far east of Richmond, taking out every single enemy portal, all of which were L7 and L8. It was about 60 in total, and it cost about 500 L8 bursters and around 100 ultrastrikes. Eventually I ran out of power cubes and battery, but was saved at the end of the journey by another agent who provided me with a bit of both.

In other gaming events the long-awaited (i.e., very late) double issue of RPG Review 26-27 has been released, 128 pages of pirate and swashbuckler goodness. It's a huge publication and I'm hoping the next issue will have several more people contributing a few extra articles with its nominated subject of "The Undead". In other gaming goodness, engaged in a very enjoyable game of Laundry Files during the week, along with a satisfactory conclusion to a chapter in our GURPS Middle-Earth game. Today we visited ser_pounce and hathhalla for another day of cheesequest (semi-finals between port salut and boursin) and played Small World and Small World Underground, both fairly well-designed games with strategic and tactical elements.

Comments

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Did you capture them or just leave them grey?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Captured all of them. They went back to blue pretty quickly, but not quite to the level and extent that they were previously.

Cost me about 800 items all up, but I've almost made up for it again.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I really like the pirate double-issue.

I once went on a book binge and compiled game notes on "typical" medieval ships and transport types. I had rough estimates on cogs, galleys and suchlike written down, including averages sizes (which meant somewhat less than I would've wanted, given the variety), speeds, carrying capacities, crew sizes and conditions, and notes on what they were good and bad at. There were even practical notes on how convoys would work. I also had information on how (English) peasants might transport food and goods, where and how a 14th century Italian merchant house might run their business, how much goods a mill or a mine might produce in a day and how many people were needed to work them, and, bizarrely, how to organise and run a camel caravan.

I can only imagine that I played... very odd games back then.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

> I really like the pirate double-issue.

Thanks! It's a real trial getting it all together, but finally made it over the line.

> I can only imagine that I played... very odd games back then.

Oh, I don't know. My historical simulationist side gets quite pleasantly giddy hearing about such things.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I took a look-see, and it seems I still have much of this information. If a DM anywhere ever needs to know that an average English medieval water mill can process 32-48 bushels of grain if it runs twenty-four hours straight, then I'm their man.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That would be great. It is just the sort of information that would really enhance the verisimilitude of a Chivalry & Sorcery or Harnmaster game.

Personally I'm a sucker for history of technology...

[delphipsmith]

Not to mention it's good to know if civilization ever collapses...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I have much praise for the forebears of civil engineering. Much praise.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

If I can find the time, I'll try and collate some of this into a coherent format, and maybe offer it for common consumption. It'll take a little bit of... information wrangling, however, and it might be a good while.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Email me at lev@rpgreview.net and we'll make this happen.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Sounds good. I'll drop you a line when I've got something usable. I'm juggling a few things, so I kinda foresee this being somewhere in the middle of Earth's next great geological period, but we'll see.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

Dad measures about 10km a day, for health reasons...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

He should play Ingress ;)

For the Enlightened of course.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

He gets his walking in going to/from work, not an impossible walk from home--I've done it before, though it'll work up a sweat on a humid/hot day. The other thing, and actually more fruitful to the purpose, is that he'll supervise during recess at the school/family business, so I think he realized he gets so many steps walking back and forth, that he may as well just keep intentionally going back and forth... basically traveling quite far just to end up where he began.

[kishenehn.livejournal.com]

I keep telling people that playing Ingress is good for you, but nobody ever believes me. :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I have seen too many people posting on how they've started walking more as a result. And especially comments from new players who discover that this mobile phone game makes them go outside to play!

[botrytis.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that Ingress has encouraged me to increase the walking I was already doing - and it's certainly encourage exploration of parts of the neighborhood, city and surrounding region I'd never been to before.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Very true that; although more so last year than this. Last year I was discovering all sort of new places of interest that I hadn't known about (who knew there was a fountain behind the Orica building?). Now I fear there are too many new portals of questionable quality.

[delphipsmith]

Mmmmm, boursin... But what is this Ingress of which you speak?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

In the past I've voted against the boursin on the grounds it's too easy. "Any damn fool can add loads of garlic and herbs to a cream cheese and make it taste extra-nice!", was my argument. But yesterday it was the clear winner against the port-salut.

Now, as for Ingress it's an augmented reality game where you visit sites of public interest (memorials, parks, churches.. graffiti - yes the last one counts) which have been determined as portals and capture them for your faction.

As part of the game's backstory there are two factions, the Enlightened (who want to help the aliens come to earth and evolve us) and the Resistance (who think the aliens are trying to take over our minds). I'm with the Enlightened.

I had fun writing up this little tale based on my early experience of the game in RPG Review 23-24:

http://rpgreview.net/files/rpgreview_23.pdf

[delphipsmith]

Hm, fascinating. A nice even-handed review, which on the whole intrigues me and makes me want to investigate further, though it does sound like some improvements are needed.

Before I got to the Ingress review, though, I was pleasurably distracted by your "Gaming World Cosmology." You had me at "the underlying nature of the universe is actually linguistically mediated" :) I suspect this is true; one has only to observe how the name of a thing alters people's reactions to it, to be convinced of this. Or consider the fact that if we cannot name a thing, it essentially doesn't exist. Categories, classification, names are the stuff on which our world is built -- or at least, the human version, anyway. In any culture, names have power.

"change the consensus or use the force of will and reality itself changes" = interesting. Aleister Crowley defined magic(k) as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will."

Your "very scientific [world] in terms of geography, geology, planetology, etc but also with...a precursor advanced species which left various "nodes" of power throughout the land, which were sites of known magical power" reminded me strongly of Piers Anthony's Cluster novels, with its Ancient sites that could be activated by those with sufficiently powerful Kirlian auras. Have you read these?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I don't know those novels, but thank you for the recommendation as there has been a recent expression of interest in the setting mentioned in the article. But no revelation on that subject yet until the contracts are signed :)

[delphipsmith]

The first one, Cluster, has the least about the Ancients; they get progressively more central as the series goes on. Thousandstar is perhaps the most focused on them, since it involves a competition between dozens of sentient races for control of an Ancient site. Full series list is here.

(Edit: Hm, I see your LJ theme doesn't display links in a different color; guess you'll have to just run your mouse over the entire paragraph to find them lol)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

> The first one, Cluster, has the least about the Ancients; they get progressively more central as the series goes on. Thousandstar

Yoink! Purchased.


> I see your LJ theme doesn't display links in a different color;

It bolds them ever so slightly; plus I can see the links in the LJ notification email. In any case I've changed the theme (again) to something where they are very obvious.