Captain Jonah
Mongoose
I have no problems with technology. Well I am an IT consultant and I play Traveller so it’s a bit hard to be anti Technology . But I still think books have a place in table top RPGs. I play online, WOW, WOT and a few more besides. But I don’t have the same fond memories of them that I have with Pen and Paper games.
The whole, remember that raid when we wiped six times just doesn’t compare to remember when we cleared out the Keep on the borderlands with a whole party of first levels and no cleric.
PDFs are good in that they are easy to transport to games and you can cram a load of books into a laptop or pad. BUT I see them as replacing that 15Kilo bag of books that you need to cover all the rules expansions so you can just take a few core printed books with you.
There is something about a game played from laptops or pads. Maybe its just me but some of the imagination, the immersion, perhaps even some of the magic of pen and paper RPGs is lost if you get rid of the pen and paper.
Kindle books are now outselling printed ones for the first time ever.
Is that a sign that Kindle is replacing books or as I suspect is it a sign that while the numbers of Kindles and ebooks being published is going up the number of printed books being sold is going down a lot faster.
We are in the second decade of the twenty first century current calendar. Science and technology is developing at such a rate that science fiction writers and games are having trouble keeping up. The technology listed for games five or ten years ago now looks to be hopelessly old fashioned.
We approach a singularity. Almost certainly in our lifetimes. Those born now accept current technology as perfectly normal. Those born 10 years ago adapt fast enough to keep up. Those born 20 years ago have to work to keep up with the changes and the speed of those changes. 30 year olds are falling behind. 40 year olds struggle. 50+ year olds give up on many tech functions because they cannot understand them.
This isn’t everyone, there are plenty of older people who can understand and keep up. But as the pace of growth continues those who can keep up become less and less.
Schools with laptops or pads on every desk. The initiative to issue every child with a pad containing all of their course work. Children’s stories on Kindle or pad or laptops or the idiot box.
Those of my generation saw the introduction of PCs. I started in IT before the Apple 2s came out and spend several years supporting the good old 2s. Since then we have a generation that has gone from laptops to having PDAs, pads and phones with all the functionality of a computer. Now we have a generation that was born with and is growing up with the screen not the book.
Book shops are going out of business everywhere. Sales of printed books fall like a stone. The kindle claims it is replacing them.
But is it. As the numbers of people who have read books in any format falls. As the number of people who hold knowledge, learning and the ability to reference and remember facts diminishes and the number of people for whom Google is a verb increase. As less and less people learn or even have the ability to learn and more and more people will online reference data and trust in the often dubious “facts” they find there. Where will we be in another generation? Or even just ten more years.
So many young people these days cannot do even simple math with out calculators. Cannot use a library to find what they seek. Many have never held a reference book.
Printed Books are going the way of the dinosaurs.
Perhaps they are. But as a Dinosaur myself I will hang on to my books till the end and take consolation in the fact that the Dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions of years where as the upright apes are no more than a blip on the timeline 8)
The whole, remember that raid when we wiped six times just doesn’t compare to remember when we cleared out the Keep on the borderlands with a whole party of first levels and no cleric.
PDFs are good in that they are easy to transport to games and you can cram a load of books into a laptop or pad. BUT I see them as replacing that 15Kilo bag of books that you need to cover all the rules expansions so you can just take a few core printed books with you.
There is something about a game played from laptops or pads. Maybe its just me but some of the imagination, the immersion, perhaps even some of the magic of pen and paper RPGs is lost if you get rid of the pen and paper.
Kindle books are now outselling printed ones for the first time ever.
Is that a sign that Kindle is replacing books or as I suspect is it a sign that while the numbers of Kindles and ebooks being published is going up the number of printed books being sold is going down a lot faster.
We are in the second decade of the twenty first century current calendar. Science and technology is developing at such a rate that science fiction writers and games are having trouble keeping up. The technology listed for games five or ten years ago now looks to be hopelessly old fashioned.
We approach a singularity. Almost certainly in our lifetimes. Those born now accept current technology as perfectly normal. Those born 10 years ago adapt fast enough to keep up. Those born 20 years ago have to work to keep up with the changes and the speed of those changes. 30 year olds are falling behind. 40 year olds struggle. 50+ year olds give up on many tech functions because they cannot understand them.
This isn’t everyone, there are plenty of older people who can understand and keep up. But as the pace of growth continues those who can keep up become less and less.
Schools with laptops or pads on every desk. The initiative to issue every child with a pad containing all of their course work. Children’s stories on Kindle or pad or laptops or the idiot box.
Those of my generation saw the introduction of PCs. I started in IT before the Apple 2s came out and spend several years supporting the good old 2s. Since then we have a generation that has gone from laptops to having PDAs, pads and phones with all the functionality of a computer. Now we have a generation that was born with and is growing up with the screen not the book.
Book shops are going out of business everywhere. Sales of printed books fall like a stone. The kindle claims it is replacing them.
But is it. As the numbers of people who have read books in any format falls. As the number of people who hold knowledge, learning and the ability to reference and remember facts diminishes and the number of people for whom Google is a verb increase. As less and less people learn or even have the ability to learn and more and more people will online reference data and trust in the often dubious “facts” they find there. Where will we be in another generation? Or even just ten more years.
So many young people these days cannot do even simple math with out calculators. Cannot use a library to find what they seek. Many have never held a reference book.
Printed Books are going the way of the dinosaurs.
Perhaps they are. But as a Dinosaur myself I will hang on to my books till the end and take consolation in the fact that the Dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions of years where as the upright apes are no more than a blip on the timeline 8)
