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

[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.