I will make one last attempt to bring the focus of this thread back to gaming, rather than evangelization of technology.
It is clear that Somebody lacks reading comprehension. In private mail to me, Somebody accused me of being an Apple fanboy; I see no way that any of my posts on the subject of the technology can be construed as fanboyism.
Furthermore, my focus on my earlier post - before getting sidetracked into a religious argument with a Microsoft fanboi - was about the use of technology for gaming, not the merits of a particular technology.
:roll:
When I am gaming, or talking about gaming, it is the game that is important, not the technology that I am using to play it. I can be just as happy gaming in a climate-controlled slick plastic environment, surrounded by computers and tablets displaying the rules, or dice rolls, or character data, at a touch as I can at a picnic table in Central Park, under a shady tree, with a canvas bag full of books and folders of paper, a box of index cards, a bag of dice, and a handful of pens and pencils.
To me, the technology that the referee or the other players use for gaming isn't inherently a deal-breaker; I'm interested in fun, and can and will accommodate any reasonable request with regards to personal equipage (as contrasted with character equipage). I will make value judgements; if the referee requires that I have an iPad because of some specific capability, I may decline to participate, as I cannot currently justify to myself the cost of purchasing an iPad.
But neither am I a technological luddite; I am perfectly happy to carry around a NookColor for reading, and every month I release two PDF documents full of Traveller material created by and contributed by the community. My computers of choice run Windows 7 as their main operating system, though I also have some older laptops - and some virtual machines - running Linux. Were Apple to allow OS X to run on computers that are not Macintoshes, I might well have a VM running OS X, just because there ARE some things that the Mac does better than Windows - though fewer now than in the past...
The presence or absence at the player level of a particular technology or aid is subordinate to the question "Can I do everything I need to do to play, and will I have fun?". It will be more time-consuming, but I can do math to adjudicate a combat, or to keep a ship's books, with pencil and paper. When playing, even the rules should - in my view - take second place to the question of having fun, and I am not above ignoring the details of the rules when the action is fast and furious, and the ongoing story needs a certain outcome.
The role-playing game is, above all, a group of friends getting together and playing "Let's Pretend". It is interactive storytelling.
I said:
..."Let's pretend that I'm a cowboy and you're an indian and I'm gonna stop you from scalping the women of the town and bang! bang! I shot you and you're dead -- " "Am not! You missed!" "Did not! Cheater!" "Did too! Cheater yourself!"...
All that the funny dice do is provide an impartial arbiter of whether or not you missed. All that the pages and pages of rules do is provide the information you need to understand what the dice are telling you. And all that the pages and pages of source material do is provide Imagination, collected and distilled, to establish the context in which to interpret the dice to determine whether you really did miss...
And no, none of that is trivial, else we'd never have had the "You missed!" "Did not!" arguments when we Pretended before we started RPGing. But it's still that simple.
Some of the members of this forum may recognize that quote; I wrote it in connection with another topic back in 2003, and have occasionally reposted the entire message that it's excerpted from when the topic came up again. But those paragraphs in particular are equally applicable here, and I have never found a better way to express what I feel is the essence of gaming.
Perhaps there are times when not using technology as a gaming tool is absolutely inexcusable. If so, I can't think of them - but still, if it's appropriate, use it. Equally, when forcing the use of technology is inexcusable, don't. But, regardless, keep in mind the most important point: Gaming is about people. It is inherently a social activity. It is about the people we ARE, interacting around the gaming table, with side chatter, snacks, and so on; it is about the people we DREAM OF, in the form of our characters, interacting with each other and with the world they "live" in - if we are playing Traveller, a world of starships, and aliens, and maybe some war or some mercantile activity or political intrigue... and it is about both, together, interacting with each other, as we collaborate in telling each other the story of what's happening in the universe of our characters. It is about sharing ourselves and our imaginations. And we've been doing it for thousands of years, even without technology.
And I, for one, wouldn't be the person I am today, living in the society I live in today, without that.
:arrow: :arrow: :arrow:
To get back even closer to the original topic :idea: of this thread... I think the FLGS will survive the shift into digital publishing. There are advantages to the canvas bag of books and dice and so on; there are advantages to the electronic document. The FLGS will survive, though it, too, will have to change. Some of the changes will need to be technological; perhaps we are seeing the start of it now, with the partnership whose name I forget, but which involves partnerships between publishers and stores (Dale, are you around? I think I remember you being involved with it...). Perhaps the future FLGS will sport a Print-On-Demand kiosk, and a sales terminal with the ability to load e-books onto a thumb drive or burn them to an optical disk.
Some of the changes will have to be social, and will actually represent a return to the past. Your FLGS will be less a store for purchasing stuff than it will a social center. They will have to go back to having back rooms, or a room full of tables, that can be reserved and rented by the hour. They will be places for people to meet, and to discuss gaming, and to game, and to talk about what's good and what's not, and to cross-fertilize imaginations.
In other words, the FLGS will become less a gaming STORE, and more a gaming SERVICE CENTER. Because, like gaming itself, and in spite of the fact that Big Corporations seem to have forgotten it, running a business, especially a retail business, is ultimately about people.
