Month: August 2000

Free Role Playing Games

Even though I have not had time to play one in over a decade I am still fascinated
by roleplaying games and actually buy quite a few of them. But why buy role
playing games when there are dozens (approaching hundreds) of free role playing
systems available on the Internet?

The pen and pencil RPG market has always been relatively small compared to
other traditional publishing enterprises, so designing a system and profitably
publishing it is an iffy proposition at best. Instead, a lot of folks are putting
the roleplaying games they have designed on the web as free downloads. As with
anything free, the quality varies widely, but on the whole I am impressed at
how professional and playable many of the free games are.

So where do you find free RPG systems? There are several directories on the
web:

Unfortunately it us hard to find many reviews for free RPGs. Brian Gleichman
is trying to do something about that situation — on his site he posts a
new review of a free RPG on a monthly basis.

The Anti-Urinal Crowd

I’m simply speechless after reading this account in a recent column by John Leo, You can’t make this up:

Now sit, Ingvar, sit. Young women in Sweden, Germany, and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene?avoiding the splash factor?but, as Jasper Gerard reports in the English Spectator, “more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women.” One argument is that if women can’t do it, then men shouldn’t either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is “a nasty macho gesture,” suggestive of male violence. A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit, while 70 percent believe they should be allowed to stand. Some Swedish women are pressuring their men to take a stand, so to speak. Yola, a 25-year-old Swedish trainee psychiatrist, says she dumps boyfriends who insist on standing. “What else can I do?” said her new boyfriend, Ingvar, who sits.

Play By E-Mail RPGs

One of the reason I have not played a role playing game in years is because of the logistics of it all. Finding mature individuals worth gaming with is one problem, and actually finding the time to set aside several hours to do so is another. Fortunately, just as the games and game companies are moving onto the web, so is the actual playing of games.

Many folks out there are playing RPGs online through e-mail or on web-based discussion forums. PBEM.Com is the best resource for getted started in playing RPGs over the Internet. They typically have over 500 announcements of games looking for players as well as extensive material on how to get started in e-gaming from both a player and a game master perspective.

Turkey’s Wife Beating Manual

The BBC recently reported on a controversy over a state-run religious foundation in Turkey which published a booklet that advises men on the proper way to beat their wives.

The BBC reported that,

The booklet, published by the Poius Foundation, which is part of the government’s Relgious Affairs Directorate, says men can beat their wives as long as they do not strike the face and only beat them moderately.

Source:

Row over Turkey’s wife-beating book. The BBC, August 10, 2000.

We Don’t Need to Keep the Web Relevant (But Archiving It Is A Good Idea)

Cyveillance released a report yesterday
claiming that its study of the Internet suggests there are currently a little
more than 2 billion public web pages, and that the number of web pages is currently
growing at a rate of 2 billion pages per year (i.e., the size of the web will
double this year).

Those are some pretty amazing numbers. To put that in perspective, a web researcher
quoted in USA Today says that is about the same amount of text that
is available in the entire Library of Congress collection.

But USA Today could not help but get a dig in at the web in its story,
tracking down consultant Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies who said that the
problem is keeping the web relevant, “Creating a web page now is piece of cake.
Even my dog has a Web page. A lot of people’s dogs have web pages.”

Apparently the conclusion that most people are supposed to reach is that a
web page featuring a dog is simply not relevant — more noise than signal. But
this makes an erroneous assumption — that information is only useful if it
is homogenous and intended for consumption by millions of readers.

Consider books. USA Today pretty much turned its entertainment section
into an advertorial for the latest Harry Potter book the past few weeks. Now
I love the Harry Potter series, but the reason USA Today devoted so
much attention to the book was not because of any particular value the book
has (lots of very good children’s literature is published every year), but because
millions of people are interested in the Harry Potter book.

It is extremely unlikely that USA Today will ever run a book review,
regardless of how good the book is, of a small self-published effort with a
print run of 2,500 copies. To USA Today‘s publishers, and most of its
readers, such a review would not have much relevance.

The web is different because the low cost of providing information makes assembling
and publishing information aimed at heterogeneous audiences cheap and easy.
You might not care at all, for example, that there are hundreds of web sites
listed in Yahoo! devoted to paint ball, or that I have hundreds of pictures
of my daughter on my web site. But to the people who are interested in paint
ball or my daughter, such information is very important.

So, I say, bring on the dog home pages.

On the other hand, it is good to know that someone is trying to collect all
(or as much as possible) of the information on the Internet. The
Internet Archive has collected 1 billion pages in its archive since 1996.
The archive is stored on magnetic tape and currently occupies 13.2 terabytes
of data, and is growing at a size of 2 terabytes a month as of March 2000.

Lets do the math. A terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. The largest consumer-level
hard drives available at the moment are in the 75 gigabyte range, so if I wanted
my own local copy of the archive (and who wouldn’t?) it would take 177 of these
75 gig hard drives. In other words, all I have to do is wait 5 or 6 years and
I will be able to install a local copy on my LAN. Now that would be cool.

Jakob Nielsen and the Idiocy of the Microsoft Anti-Trust Case

The funniest thing about the whole antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was
watching how Microsoft’s detractors continually talk out of both sides of their
mouths. Even professionals writing in the computer industry often seem like
they just don’t get it.

Take web design guru Jakob Nielsen (please). At his site’s Spotlight section, Nielsen briefly outlines Microsoft’s new ClearType technology, which
supposedly makes text easier to read on monitors. Nielsen reports that:

A Microsoft manager is quoted as saying that ClearType will be available
next year “for all Microsoft applications.” The Anti-Trust folks should look
into this. If ClearType is made available for Microsoft applications and not
integrated fully into the operating system, then that is the final kiss of
death for any independent software developers. Nobody wants to spend 10% more
time reading their email, their spreadsheets, their documents – or web pages,
for that. So once ClearType becomes prevalent, nobody will use any software
that doesn’t have it.

Has Nielsen been asleep over the past few months? The antitrust trial specifically
sought to prevent Microsoft from integrating something like ClearType into the
operating system with the claim that by integrating something like ClearType
at the OS level, Microsoft was harming developers who might come up with their
own technologies to do the same thing. The entire Justice Department case against
Microsoft is implicitly predicated on the notion that if Microsoft is allowed
to embed something like ClearType at the OS level that will discourage innovation
by making it unprofitable for other companies to work on their own software
to make computer text easier to read.

And as Nielsen inadvertently demonstrates, this is stupid since it puts the
government in the position of making a wide range of close calls about software
since it makes judges and lawyers responsible for deciding what should go in
an OS and what should go in an application.