They’re doing a book tour for a new children’s book. We missed the concert but caught the tail end of the line and got them to sign the book for the baby-to-be. Plus we managed to get “this picture”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/tmbg.jpg. My life is complete.

This is a pretty surreal development, especially in light of my recent ramblings on dictators in exile. Apparently the emergency spending bill Bush signed on November 6—the infamous $87.5 billion—quietly included a $2 million bounty for the capture of Charles Taylor. The State Department spin is that the money isn’t an explicit call for Boba, IG-88, Bossk and the rest of the gang to hightail it to Calabar, Nigeria, where Taylor is cooling his heels. The bill vaguely refers to “rewards for an indictee of the Special Court for Sierra Leone”; Richard Boucher said that they were still deciding just how the money would be spent. But the Nigerian government is, understandably, a bit upset. They were never Taylor supporters, but agreed to host his exile because it was (presumably) the only way to get him to go quietly. The U.S. actively participated in the negotiations that led to that outcome, and now they appear to be going back on the deal in a way that impinges on another nation’s sovereignty.

Which puts me at two minds about it all. It would be a fine thing to see a corrupt dictator get his comeuppance, and while the Sierre Leone court will no doubt be an imperfect vehicle for justice, it’s something. Taylor also remains uniquely able to keep the conflict going in Liberia by meddling from afar; ending his exile would be good for the country as a whole. But what a dumb, bizarro way to go about it.

Ah—pardon me for researching while I’m writing, but the latest appears to be a bit of backpedaling over at State. So the money isn’t a bounty, it’s an “additional tool” for coaxing somebody, somehow, to do something about this whole Taylor thing. But not, apparently, by hiring someone to wrap up the guards in his wrist cords, vault over the outer wall with his jetpack, and stick CT’s carbon-freezed body into the hold of Slave One. So what is the money meant to do, then?

The plot thickens, albeit leavened with some sloppy reporting. This November 2 article in The Observer implies that the money-which-is-not-bounty-money is connected to our friends at Northbridge Services Group, Ltd.—more on them in a moment.

But Obasanjo will not find it easy to dissuade the US from financing an attempt to kidnap Taylor. In August, an Anglo-American mercenary company, Northbridge Services Group Ltd, was quoted on an American conservative website as offering to attempt to arrest Taylor.

As far as I can tell the conservative website in question is Crosswalk.com—here’s the actual article there. Why they’d want to cite that source, when the Northbridge connection is mentioned elsewhere, is beyond me. But the real sloppiness comes from this article on the World Socialist Web Site, which claims:

According to the British Observer newspaper, an Anglo-American mercenary outfit, Northbridge Services Group Ltd., was quoted on a far-right US website in August offering to arrest Taylor for the sum of $2 million.

It would be oh-so interesting if the $2 million figure really had been quoted by Northbridge and then made its way into the spending bill, because that would strongly imply that the U.S. planned to hire Northbridge to get Taylor. But neither the Observer article or the Crosswalk one actually mentions that specific number. It appears to be a conveniently inserted but unsubstantiated claim.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation doesn’t stink. Northbridge is a “private military company”—basically a mercenary outfit. They’re the newest face on Executive Outcomes, a PMC staffed largely by white South African ex-military types going entrepeneurial with martial skills honed while enforcing the apartheid regime. It’s not clear exactly how much overlap there is between the two companies, but EO was hip-deep in Sierre Leone’s civil strife in the 90’s, and now Northbridge is offering its services to apprehend those wanted by the Special Court. Heck, www.executiveoutcome.com takes you right to Northbridge’s website. Whether those South Africans are out of the picture or whether they’ve simply been airbrushed off the website and corporate image is, for me, the difference between an ethically ambiguous enterprise and a deplorable one. Since I have no way to know for sure, my basic take is that it stinks, and if it turns out that it’s actually true that the $2 million was earmarked (however informally) for Northbridge, it stinks to high heaven.

Thanks to those of you who alerted me to the fact that comments were down briefly. They weren’t the only thing — I wasn’t able to access Movable Type either. “Ed”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/ noted that it was probably a provider issue, and so I emailed “Myacen”:http://www.myacen.com/ and described the problem. They had it fixed in under twenty minutes. They were that fast when I was setting up the blog too. Myacen: highly recommended. All is well now.

A lot of independent roleplaying games are designed with a very narrow narrative scope in mind, much to their advantage. I’ve complained before that the use of a universal system like d20 turns out less than optimal games. Focusing on a genre or subgenre allows you to work in mechanics that reinforce the kinds of stories you want to tell. Games like Sorcerer and My Life With Master take this concept even further—the stories those games are designed to create are constrained tightly by setting, characters, even (and especially) theme.

Another example of this type of game is currently in the works. Ralpha Mazza, co-author of the excellent storytelling game Universalis, has released a playtest version of his new RPG, Robots & Rapiers. It’s a game of android Musketeers. Sort of. The game takes places in a realm called Auvernais, which is your basic Alexander Dumas / Court of the Sun King milieu, except that it’s inhabited entirely by robots who are programmed to believe that they really are the colorful characters they’re portraying. But a small number of robots (including, naturally, the player characters) are slowly becoming aware that they inhabit nothing more than a gigantic, ultra-immersive theme park designed to entertain the humans, who haven’t visited in a century because the planet Auvernais has been out of contact with the rest of the galaxy due to war. The robots keep up their roles in their fictional world because it’s what they’re programmed to do. The story of the game is the story of the characters gradually breaking free of their programming, attaining true sentience, and then deciding what to do about it.

It’s so wacky, and yet so clearly defined, that I suspect it’ll make a fine game. It incorporates some clever mechanics, especially the the counterbalanced traits of Role and Self-Awareness. Robots, it turns out, make great RPG characters, since the necessity of boiling down a personality into a bunch of quantifiable attributes isn’t near as egregious when you’re dealing with a mechanical entity in the first place. Definitely a game to watch—the current version is definitely a rough draft, but one full of potential.

Al Gore gave a speech on “Freedom and Security” at Constitution Hall yesterday, sponsored by “MoveOn”:http://www.moveon.org/ and the “American Constitution Society”:http://www.americanconstitutionsociety.org/. I was actually there, thanks to some tickets that my friend Tom scored. Neither of us had been to to a live political speech for as long as we could remember, so the partisan rah-rahing was a bit overwhelming. I’m plenty partisan — someone who voted for Gore and not just against Bush — but giving Tipper a standing ovation for walking in the room struck me as a tad excessive.

It was a “good speech”:http://www.moveon.org/gore/speech2.html — a little rough in the delivery, but fiery and full of righteous fury against Ashcroft and the rest of the Administration. More of that kind of moxie in 2000 would have made all the difference. The recurrent calls from the audience of “Run, Al, run!” were telling — he definitely has an ineffable _something_ that the nine actual contenders are all missing.

An excerpt:

I want to challenge the Bush Administration�s implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists. Because it is simply not true. In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.

In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.

Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people — while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion.

But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.

When you’re standing there in front of your bookshelf, trying to decide what to read or reread, who knows what may guide your hand? I certainly thought I was being random a couple weeks ago when I picked out Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, but it’s clear in retrospect that unconscious forces were at work. Governor Willie Stark would be right at home in our current age, where news of the politics of manipulation and the manipulation of politics routinely make the front page. Unlike Bush, Stark’s strongarm tactics and underhanded ploys are devoted toward building a free public hospital, not fulfilling a gonzo neoconservative sense of national destiny. But while their ideologies may differ, their tactics are similar. Tiny Duffy and Karl Rove could no doubt spend hours comparing notes. The book also had personal correspondences: Jack Burden, the protagonist, finds himself helping Stark carry out his dirty work because he is somewhat adrift in the world. He got there after abruptly walking away from a dissertation in history.

None of that was on my mind as I yanked the novel off the shelf, but I was curious about whether I would think as highly of it as I had the first time I read it, seven or eight years ago. I walked into my PhD comprehensive exams prepared to defend All the King’s Men as the greatest post-Modern (speaking chronologically, not philosophically) American novel—not that I necessarily believed that in my heart of hearts, but it wasn’t an unreasonable assertion. And while I wasn’t quite as enraptured with it this time around, it certainly holds up as one of the greats. I now know that McCarthy’s Blood Meridian would have to take top honors in that category, but ATKM definitely has a slot in the top five.

A little help here: I’m trying to think of a prior literary example of an observer-protagonist like Jack Burden. In other words, a novel (or other work) that’s about an important public figure, but the story is told through the eyes of a minor player on the historical stage who ends up, in the final analysis, to be the real center of the tale. I hesitate to name Warren the originator of this technique, since as soon as I do I’ll think of an earlier example. But I can’t think of one off the top of my head.

Warren doesn’t have fame these days in sufficient proportion to his accomplishments. In addition to being a strong novelist and an occasionally brilliant poet, he was one of a handful of people who shaped and (arguably) invented the way that literature is taught in American classrooms today. American Literature: The Makers and the Making, edited by Warren and Cleanth Brooks, remains a superlative AmLit anthology chock-full of keen analysis. Too bad it’s long-since out of print.

(I’d say “beware of spoilers,” but that would imply that knowing things about this movie could spoil it even further.)

Dear Andy and Larry,

What in Sam Hill were you thinking? Where, exactly, did you get off the train? I stayed along for the ride through Reloaded. Oh, I saw it, saw it three times, even when very smart people said it wasn’t very good, because I thought that I perceived some overlooked subtleties, some unlocked potential—that you guys were going somewhere and just hadn’t arrived yet. I defended your movie from the criticism of others, even though I knew in my heart that it was a sequel that stumbled. But now we have Revolutions. It’s just plain fallen on its ass.

Were you guys even trying? Oh, I know in some ways you were. There’s occasional flair in the directing—not anything as interesting or innovative as what you did in Bound and the original Matrix, but if we didn’t already expect it from you there were bits that we’d have found impressive. And if I can close my eyes and try real hard to block out all the painful bits, I can recognize the overarching story and see that it’s pretty good. Smith is a virus overtaking both worlds: check. The regular people have to defend Zion: check. Neo has to go to the Machine City, and ends up sacrificing himself to trap Smith—check, and kudos for an unexpected twist, too. But then there’s the dialogue. Here is where I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you guys were not trying. I know this because if I gathered together two dozen of my friends, put them in a circle around me, and then spun around and around and stopped and pointed to one of them at random, that person could have written dialogue that was better then the tripe you foisted on us, your loyal viewers and (until recently) fans. Even if that random person wasn’t a particularly gifted writer, I could have whispered into his or her ear these words—“Try to avoid some of the cliches you hear in movies a lot”—and it would have been enough to improve on your derivative tribute to slapdashery.

Let’s close our eyes and play a little game. This game is called “pretend all the dialogue is replaced with stuff that doesn’t suck.” Even then, your new movie has problems. You never really do explain how Neo’s power has bled from the Matrix into the real world. We don’t get to see near enough of the Matrix itself in this movie—even a transition shot showing Smith taking the place over would have been kind of nice. I could get persnickety here and point out that once Neo is dead the Big Round Machine has no reason other than some vague notion of honor to keep its word and maintain peace with the humans, and it’s a machine, so why would it? I could point out that all your dimestore philosophizing ultimately devolves into platitudes. But pointing these things out is like saying “Bob, don’t let the branch scratch your face” when the whole tree is about to fall down on Bob.

I shouldn’t be making excuses for you guys and the miserable failure your vaunted trilogy has become. But I do have a theory. I know that the producer for these movies is Joel Silver—a quick glance through his credits makes clear that there’s no discernable connection between “movies he has worked on” and “quality.” I remember quite fondly those days before and right after the first movie came out, when an acquaintance of mine worked for the two of you and told stories via e-mail about the film and its production. I specifically recall one tidbit: that in your original script there had been no love interest between Neo and Trinity, that that was the one thing that Silver prevailed on you guys to work in somehow. That sounds like something Joel Silver might do. And then I got to thinking: what if the story of the next two movies is the story of Silver exerting more and more control over production and script, until it got to the point where the two of you were ostensibly at the helm but unable to avert the wreck. If this is true, just drop me a message saying so. It won’t fix your trilogy but maybe—just maybe—I won’t boycott your next film.

To tell the truth, though, I don’t believe you guys got outmaneuvered like rank amateurs by a Hollywood hack. It has to be more sinister than that. I think that one day, during preproduction of Reloaded, Joel Silver called the two of you in for a meeting. You were standing side by side, and with a devilish grin he inserted one of his hands into each of your chests. Your bodies slowly became covered with a metallic grey, viscous substance, which slowly resolved itself, revealing two exact clones of Joel Silver. Then he said: “Go forth and do my bidding.” And you did.

Shame on you.

Sincerely,

Nate Bruinooge

After “last month’s”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000118.html onslaught of new blogs, we’re back down to a more reasonable number of additions:

* Kevin Drum of “Calpundit”:http://calpundit.com/ provides good left-of-center political commentary. And every time I worry that I’m blogging too much about the incidentals of my personal life, I just think: Hey! Kevin blogs about his _cats_!
* “Rock Scissors Blog”:http://rockscissorsblog.blogspot.com/ is a group blog about roleplaying games. Writers include “Bruce Baugh”:http://homepage.mac.com/bbaugh/iblog/index.html and “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/. Not updated near often enough, but definitely worth reading.
* Jonathan Edelstein of “The Head Heeb”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/ blogs about all the world news (especially Third World news) that you don’t hear enough about in U.S. media.
* And the blog I’ve already rolled but that you really ought to be reading: definitely “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/. His page by page broadside against the _Left Behind_ books (still ongoing) is glorious fun.

My TV plate hasn’t been full since a couple years ago, when Buffy was on, Angel was still watchable (sort of), and 24 was in its first flush of youth. One by one, they’ve fallen away. I gave 24 one more chance this season, after watching the premiere, and it didn’t live up—it’s gettin’ the boot. I gave up on Angel a while ago.

All that’s left, other than a healthy Netflix queue, of course, is The West Wing. Like everything Aaron Sorkin’s done, it’s been consistently enjoyable for the dialogue if for no other reason. But West Wing provides other reasons, too, and not just for people who happen to like President Bartlett’s politics. The show is strongest, in fact, when it is least partisan and most involved in the nitty gritty of the characters’ lives.

Which is what has made the past couple episodes so very fine. We’ve had four years to watch our heroes being ever-so-clever, with only occasional dips into their foibles and weaknesses to make things seem, you know, three-dimensional. But the show has recently been all about the ugliness and failure of its protagonists. Josh is the centerpiece, but all the principals are adrift in one way or another. CJ and Toby are wracked with doubt and lack of direction. Bartlett’s marriage is on the rocks. Leo still has it together but you get the feeling his authoritarian streak is going to get everybody in trouble very soon. We see Toby and Josh being downright condescending toward new (and very likable) characters VP Russell and Angela Blake—they don’t come off as charmingly aloof, just petty. Even a moment we might take as Inspiring, like Bartlett among the tornado victims, is undercut by CJ taking him to task for dodging the real responsibilities of his office.

We know that towards the end of the season, the team will somehow be able to pull it all together in a way that is meant to be genuinely uplifting. And if the writers are on their game, it may even be just that. But in any case we’ll like these characters even more for having found reasons not to like them; we’ll care what happens to them more than we would otherwise. And we can rest assured that there’s still one show worth watching on TV.

And now, the obligatory “Which character are you?” tests. Eve Tushnet found one here that’s rather transparent and messy. It pegged me as Sam Seaborn, but lucky Eve got to be Leo—and she doesn’t even watch the show! No fair! This test is a bit more elegant, and pegged me as the Jedman himself. I’m not complaining.

Via “Rock Scissors Blog”:http://rockscissorsblog.blogspot.com/ : an article by John Kim entitled “Story and Narrative Paradigms in Role-Playing Games”:http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html.

Kim distinguishes between regular stories (his term is ‘static narrative’) and RPGs using some basic concepts from Todorov and Genette that gave me unpleasant flashbacks to fruitless dissertation-research avenues. But they work pretty well for what he’s doing: a quick glance at his Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrate how thorny and complicated an RPG is from a narrative perspective.

While I like the framework he sets up in the beginning, I’m less convinced of the usefulness of the two paradigms he draws from it: “Collaborative Storytelling” and “Virtual Experience”. Respectively, the distinction is between those who think that “shared play” — what gets said over the table — comprises a game’s story and those who see it comprised by all elements of the game — notes, character sheets, background stories — in addition to shared play. That’s a valid distinction, but I can’t think of a gamer I know who would fit clearly into one paradigm or another. Further, his Virtual Experience paradigm doesn’t distinguish between the relative value of different game texts when it comes to their importance in the shared story. A gamemaster’s notes obviously have much less importance in that regard than, say, a short story written by one of the players to provide background and insight into their character.

All in all, it’s an essay well worth reading, and will hopefully lead to more fruitful discussion, though the paradigms aren’t near as useful as the “threefold model”:http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/ that Kim helped to shape back in the day.

While we’re on RPG theory, “Ed Heil’s”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/ “Notes Towards a Semiotics of Role-playing Games” is worthwhile too. He’s writing informally, making it up as he goes, but Ed writing this way is way more engaging than most folks writing with polish. The parts so far: “1”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001080.html, “2”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001085.html, “2a”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001087.html, “3”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001090.html, “4”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001095.html, “5”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001096.html. They’re from back in July/August, and I was going to wait for Ed’s thoughts to come to completion before linking to them, but this looks to be one of those ongoing things. Give them a read and encourage him to pick up the thread again. (UPDATE: Ed has added another entry on the subject “here”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001413.html)

UPDATE: Going back to reread Ed’s stuff, I realized that his Part 4 directly touches on some of the issues in Kim’s essay. Ed directly raises the question of whether game texts help _form_ the narrative or just _support_ it. My hunch is that in just about every case, there’s blending going on. I don’t want to relegate game texts to a merely supporting role.