Category Archives: Chit-chat

Little dribblets of information that fall out of my head.

$178,900.00

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m a bit of a magnet for all sorts of downloadable gaming junque. I’m not a total addict (at least not to the point of needing an external hard drive to keep up with stuff), but I’m always curious to see how creative minds approach any number of gaming-related topics. So, yeah, I’ve downloaded more than my fair share of PDF rulebooks, supplements, terrain tiles, counter sets and figure cutouts.

It did not escape my notice last month when the DriveThruStuff.com family of websites made their pitch for donations to their Haitian Relief Fund. As you may imagine, I was particularly attracted to the “Haitian Relief Bundle”,  which offered a large number of downloadable products – all digitally donated by their publishers – as an incentive for the rather small donation amount of $20.

OK. So I took the deal. But more on that in a minute. Right now, I’d like to give props to the krewe. Here’s the REAL deal: The gamer-powered donation drive for Haitian relief collected $178,900.

That’s extraordinary. That’s not chump change, boys and girls. Here’s a little perspective. In late January the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) pledged $750,000 for Haitian relief. $250,000 was immediate relief from existing funds and the remainder was pledged from anticipated future donations to a relief fund.

Now, the ELCA isn’t some televangelist who can rake in millions in a few days with warnings about lightning bolts from God – but neither is it a small organization (about 4.6 million members as of 2008).  Even if you figure that’s a little over 1 million households, that’s still anticipating far less than $1 from each potential ‘donating budget’.

I’m not privvy to the customer records at the DriveThruStuff web sites, but I’d be really surprised if they had over 1 million customers. The donation total was more likely generated from the giving of 10,000 – 12,000 people – which is a pretty generous response, if you ask me.

Of course, some folks are probably wondering about the goodies that were included in the downloadable bundle. A lot of publishers participated. The ‘order’ appears in my account the same way as a ‘standard’ bundled product would – links to individual downloads for each product. That means I don’t have to waste bandwidth downloading product that I don’t want.

To be sure, the bundle includes some products that aren’t exactly world-beaters. If you’re not familiar with the state of the downloadable gaming press, then I’ll clue you in that it includes its fair share of less than impressive products. However, the relief bundle also includes a fair number of top-quality downloads – some of which ‘retail’ for more than $20 on their own. I was even nicely surprised to find several products in the bundle that were on my ‘wish list’ for the site.

Kudos to all involved – the web sites involved in the donations, the publishers who offered their wares and the gamers who ponied up. Great job, folks.

Baseball and time travel

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In my distant and misspent youth, I was a lousy baseball player. An unfortunate circumstance, certainly, but it wasn’t anything that ever interfered with my love of the game.

(Then again, I suppose your passion for baseball is clearly unquenchable when you can claim to have personally witnessed 12 of the Braves’ losses during their miserable, 101-loss 1977 season…)

The sport itself is fascinating enough – the skills, strategies, personalities, history – but baseball’s place in the Circadian rhythms of the universe lend it a special significance. The arrival of baseball season – that long-awaited moment when pitchers and catchers report – signals both the demise of winter and the end of the ugly sports doldrums that strike our little, blue speck of a planet during those miserable months following the end of the regular football season.

APBA Baseball

APBA Baseball

A couple of weeks ago I was making my usual rounds on the Internet when it popped up right there on Tanga.com: A time-travel machine built of paper and cardboard – the APBA tabletop baseball game. And at half-price, too.

Ring up another sale, you merciless bastards.

It’s serious flashback material. Back in my college-johnny days I was an APBA maniac. Years (YEARS) before personal computers and the Internet arrived on the scene, I participated in multiple APBA play-by-mail leagues. Full-blown Master Game with scoresheets in triplicate insanity. Several 3-game series played out every weekend, details duly noted and everything mailed off to opponents scattered all over the US (and the ‘league office’) each weekend. Drafts, trades, budgets. All of the stuff that any decent computer baseball game can tick off in a matter of minutes these days.

I’m not exactly clear on when my big box o’ Master game stuff and 5 or 6 seasons of player cards disappeared from my game inventory, but during one of my moves the whole kit drifted off into the gaming aether.  Maybe when they released their first APBA Baseball for Windows? I don’t remember.

Regardless, it was a mistake. Yeah, sure, the PC game kept up with a lot of minutiae and eliminated a lot of bookkeeping – but it never seemed to generate the same quality game narrative I enjoyed with the tabletop version. I remember to this day some of those ancient PBM league games: Steve Carlton losing a no-hitter 1-0 on a sacrifice fly in the ninth; Jerry Royster scampering home on a short fly ball for a playoff win while I listened on the radio as the ‘real’ Jerry Royster powered the Braves to a loss against the damned Dodgers when he booted a routine groundball.

So here in the swamp is the starter version of the game again, ready to take a run at becoming a ‘family game’. That’s right. Lucky me. TRULY lucky me. I married a lifelong baseball fan.

The game’s format has changed a bit over the years. Years ago all of the play results were printed on over-sized boards. The basic and master games had separate sets of boards, just to increase the storage demands. The contemporary version of the game has all of the play results conveniently packaged on cardstock pages in the back of the spiral-bound rule book.

Now here’s a truly geeky observation: The new game set contains two dice: One large red 6-sider, one smaller white 6-sider. Back in the day I recall that the game shipped with dice that were the same size. One thing that is unchanged: The game still ships with that odd, thumb-sized, yellow plastic dice-rolling cup. Yeah. I’m THAT much of a geek.

Included is the 1953 ‘Fall Classic’ player card set. That’s 25-man rosters for both the ’53 Yankees and the ’53 Giants. My wife has already informed me that she absolutely will not play the Yankees, so I guess I’m stuck with Yogi and The Mick for now.

Play ball!

Education of a cheechako

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I’m going to write this all up as a learning experience.

It’s not that I haven’t been in cold weather before. It’s that I haven’t had to do so much stuff in the middle of cold weather.

When I was a kid up in Kentucky (we moved to Florida when I was 10), icy winter weather was a mindless novelty. It was an adventure. I had a lot more fun with the frozen pipes, icy driveways and big piles of snow than my parents did.

Some years later, when I was in college at UGA, cold weather was still an adventure. All I had to manage was a walk to class. When a serious ice storm took down power lines all around Athens, it wasn’t anything to be concerned about – rather, it was an opportunity to see if there were any young ladies around who might need some help keeping warm in the evening.

In my distant and misspent youth, romps around high altitudes, snow fields and glaciers in places like Alaska, Montana and Colorado were just temporary visits to frozen wastelands. A few days (or weeks) of wicked low temperatures and it was back to summer in Florida and Georiga.

When the low temperatures visit the usually steamy swamp, however, it’s a bit different. It’s still an adventure of sorts – just an adventure that could end with some expensive repairs to cracked water pipes, water pumps and screened enclosures.

This morning when I cranked my trusty truck to let it warm up for the trip in to the Monday morning school drop-off and then work, the temperature sensor (which I have now nicknamed “Sherlock”) alternated between flashing “17″ and “ICE”. In the process of getting the road show rolling, I learned a few things:

1. Electric garage door openers will indeed freeze. But a few good pokes with a hoe-handle will get them in the mood again.

2. When it gets really, really cold, sometimes a truck tire will go nearly flat for no good reason.

3. Air compressors are argumentative little bastards when it’s 17 degrees.

4. The moisture that escapes from a tire air valve can freeze instantly when it’s cold enough. This not only renders an air pressure gauge completely usesless; it can also jam the air valve open and let out ALL of the air in the tire.

5. As you watch all of the air hiss out through a frozen tire valve, you can create an amazing number of entertaining phrases out of words with no more than four letters.

6. The electric garage door opener, the power outlets in my garage workshop and our heat pump were all wired through the same circuit breaker by the dumbass who built our house.

7. Spicing up your entertaining phrases with 9- and 12-letter words can actually help you keep warmer while you reset circuit breakers, track down power outlets on the external GFCI loop and inflate flat tires.

8. With the truck engine running, the defroster blowing full speed and the door closed, it’s impossible for a four-year-old in the back of my truck cab to hear me screaming entertaining phrases at the top of my lungs. I hope.

9. Even after all of this, I still managed to get to work before two-thirds of our staff. So I am not the biggest cheechako in the bunch.

NOT funny

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I live in a Florida swamp for a number of reasons. Snow is not one of those reasons.

Early this morning, a dusting of snow and other frozen crud hit my swamp. I would like to call this to the attention of Homeland Security and the defense establishment because surely it’s the hostile act of some foreign power. It could not be a purely natural occurrence. Some evil, extra-territorial scientific genius must be behind the whole thing.

Below is a photo of the front of my truck, taken this morning. That is snow. SNOW, Gen. Schwartz, and as an American taxpayer I expect you and your Air Force boyz to solve this problem immediately. Russians? Space aliens? Norwegians? I don’t care who’s behind this – I want you to find them and .. deal.. with them.

Winter can be over now. Is it June yet?

Snow on my truck. In Florida. Damn.

Snow on my truck. In Florida. Damn.

Socks

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I have more white athletic socks than the average junior varsity football team.

No, it’s not some kind of bizarre sports memorabilia fetish. Neither do I have a rare skin disorder.

In fact, my sizeable collection of white socks is entirely involuntary. Certainly, over the years I’ve bought a few pairs of low-cut socks so I could fashion-style around the golf course. But the sheer volume of high-top, crew-top and roll-top white socks I attribute more to family tradition than anything else.

For many years, every Christmas I received a fresh 6-pack of brand-new, white athletic socks. Some guys get ties. I got socks. Old-fashioned, white sweat socks. The tradition was temporarily suspended this year when, owing to some sort of rip in the fabric of space-time I received instead a 3-pack of black dress socks – but I’m sure that’s only a brief glitch.

Somehow, I’m sure, the beginning of the odd tradition was connected to my Dad’s 40-year history as a high school football coach. Wishful thinking perhaps, in a sort of “if we give him enough socks, maybe he’ll run faster” way? I doubt it. Since my early youth, it’s been pretty obvious that I was never cut out to be a champion cross-country runner or an Olympic sprinter. I was always more of a “squat 450 pounds and knock guys down” type.

I’m not much of a runner, jogger, race-walker, cyclist or any other type of high-volume consumer of athletic socks. I’m also not such a total yee-ha that I wear white socks to my office job, so you may imagine that a 6-pack a year is considerably more athletic sockage than I require. Which, in turn, means that there’s a considerable stack of the damned things up on the top rack of my closet.

While I full well understand that there are a number of creative ways to use white socks that don’t necessarily involve wearing them on my feet, I’m just not that much of an enthusiast for sock puppets, home-made boxing gloves or other DIY solutions. I have a moral compunction against using them to strain cottage cheese and, since I moved away from those noisy neighbors, I have had no compelling reason to consider stuffing them with C4, coating them in axle grease and using them as sticky bombs.

So there they sit on my closet rack, leering down at me like the ill-mannered offspring mob of a prolific pair of crew-topped rabbits. The commercial possibilities of “Mens-size-10-11-white-socks.com” seem pretty limited, so I guess I’m stuck with the fecking things for now.

Unless, of course, some generous reader is just dying to trade me his copy of “Case Blue” for a couple 6-packs of white athletic socks.

Gaaaaaaames Woooorrrrrkkshoppp!

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(Or the curious case of the zealously-defended intellectual property.)

The other day, the folks who run the website Boardgamegeek.com received a little Cease & Desist letter from the legal department of Games Workshop. In response, all user-generated content related to Games Workshop products has been removed from BGG.

You want to hear lots of howling, hissing and spitting? Next time you visit the People Zoo, poke a long legal stick into the Gamer Cage and give it a twist or two. I mean, man, this time the natives are really banging the bongos. It’s an event that’s stirring up more emotional discussion and vitriol than the Ameritrash Debates or the Banhammer Wars ever came close to.

I’m not a lawyer. I AM a gamer. But I’m also a former Big Corporate wonk who, on more than one occasion, participated in Big Corporate meetings with Big Corporate lawyers engaged in the defense of our Big Corporate intellectual property rights.

For a gamer who either creates or enjoys user-generated content related to a GW product, having their content burned down at the behest of GW is a bit like having their heart ripped out and kicked down the street at the bitter end of an illicit love affair. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s like discovering that they’re only one of countless other “girls in every port”. The Space Marines just told them that the sex was good, but “true luv” was never in the cards.

I understand the anger. Such user-generated content – unofficial FAQs, rules summaries, play aids, charts, forms, whatever – are typically, truly, labors of love. Gamers create them because they enjoy the games and want to help other players enjoy them just as much. For better or for worse, geeky or not, efforts at that level usually involve some degree of emotional attachment to the game in question.

But just because you love a game doesn’t mean it’s going to love you back.

For Games Workshop it’s all just business. Beyond a doubt, plenty of other game companies actively encourage ‘community’ creation of content relating to their games. But here’s the catch: Games Workshop – despite their name – isn’t ‘just’ a game company. They are Games Workshop Group PLC, a publicly-traded company listed on the London Stock Exchange. They are a multi-national group with wholly-owned subsidiaries in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan and Italy. They move plenty of product through independent retailers, but they also own more than 350 hobby centers.

Unlike most other ‘game’ companies, they make a LOT of money from licensing and from the content they themselves generate related to their games. Their core business is still the gaming hobby – but revenues from related content are ever-expanding (as you can read in their investors’ reports). Their revenues aren’t just generated from selling “stuff”. Their business model is deeply rooted in a broad range of well-developed IP.

As a multi-national concern, one of the things they’ve got to deal with is the different ways different national legal jurisdictions treat the defense of intellectual property. A company seeking to protect their IP can never go wrong by demonstrating active, broad defense of all their properties. Even if some of those properties are no longer being developed or supported in production, as long as they are agressively policed by the company, no jurisdiction is likely ever to consider those properties abandoned.

No doubt about it, the GW action has riled a lot of BGG devotees. A number of them will take their hobby dollars elsewhere as a result. But there’s always a new recruiting class of 13-year-olds ready to walk into GW stores, so any noticeable short-term impact will be offset soon enough. It’s a bit of a cold calculation, but obviously – at least at corporate HQ – the long-term numbers argue for a rigorous, no-prisoners approach to the defense of their IP.

A case can be made that some of the BGG content didn’t need to be taken down, but I can’t blame the site owners for addressing the issue with the broadest possible response. Perhaps GW’s C&D was overly broad – but that’s the way IP lawyers work. They make as sweeping a request as possible and await either compliance or a legal challenge.  It usually means that bigger companies with legal departments have their way with smaller outfits who can’t pay to argue.

Welcome to the majors, kid.