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| Robert Bohl posts 61 6:22 pm November 3, 2009
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58:34 long & 56.2 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) try out a new way of designing and recording. The show will be going biweekly and Joshua & Rob are going to start doing some design before recording, then discuss it. A great deal of headway is made making up the starting characters and mapping out some of their relationships.
Joshua & Rob's pre-show work and formal/structured notes written during the episode.
- Joshua & Rob discuss fucking robots and the uncanny valley
- Jenn from Trapcast is happy to "see" us back
- The setup of the protagonists in a pentagram
- Each iteration of the game will have one of the five characters as protagonist
- Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures has rules for saying who's the protagonist on a per-episode basis, and shock: does it on a per-scene basis; Rob presumes that The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-playing Game has something to handle a main protagonist with back-ups
- Seth Ben Ezra's Dirty Secrets also has one main protagonist
- Vincent Baker's game Synthia
- Emily Care Boss has a game in playtest that adapts Eero Tuovinen's Zombie Cinema (there's a Story Games thread post that discusses it very briefly
- Stealing the qualitative fictional rule-setting from Brennan Taylor's Mortal Coil
- Joshua is reading Not of Woman Born on recommendation from Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
- Joshua and Rob argue over whether police are just another gang
- A discussion including the film L.A. Confidential and the TV show The Wire
- I spoil the 1991 remake of Cape Fear to make a point
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is "Gotta Whizz" by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is "Life During Wartime" by The Talking Heads.
Incidentally, you can find more information about the header image for the blog post at this article about ethnic cosmetic surgery.
 Read original blog post
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Member | lumpley posts 40 11:09 am November 5, 2009
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My thoughts in order:
By "gave it away to somebody" Joshua means "abandoned it at Vincent's house."
I didn't think of the "sin" part either.
I vote yes for "named after people you know" (as if I get a vote). How about this: name your character after a child you know.
If the MP is the protagonist, the soldier is a desperate, violent deserter who'll take hostages and rob banks and shit. Right?
Yes! You're really creating 5 whole unique situations here, made out of superficially similar characters in superficially similar arrangement. Or 10, actually. 15? Good!
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| joshua posts 217 11:20 am November 5, 2009
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Oh, yeah! You tried to give it back once! I put my hands behind my back and said, "Stuck with it! Ha ha!"
I like naming the characters after kids. It puts the story an undefined amount of time in the future, but close in lots of ways. Your vote is rejected as invalid, but the idea is … um… independently arrived at.
If the MP is the protagonist, the soldier is a desperate, violent deserter who'll take hostages and rob banks and shit. Right?
Yeah. Good.
It's 15 fictional people of which at least 2 are real characters at any moment. It could be more depending on how the characters hash out over time.
I'm really digging the Rashamon characteristics of this.
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Member | renatoram Milan, Italy posts 5 7:43 pm November 5, 2009
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Something that occured to me while listening to the episode: you (and Rob, mostly) seemed to struggle with the police/army distinction…
I just wanted to add that this is very much a matter of cultural habit, I'd say. In several countries the police IS military. Or at least one of the police forces.
In Italy we have the Polizia di Stato (State Police) which is civilian and ultimately is subject to the Ministry of the Interior (Ministero degli Interni), and the Carabinieri which were until a few years ago part of the Army. Nowadays they are still military, but they are a separate armed force on their own (like the navy and the air force). The Carabinieri have police type tasks, but they also have an "operative" branch made of combat/war ready soldiers: those are frequently deployed in UN and NATO missions. I think they were in the forefront of the training of the new iraqi police forces, for example.
A similar arrangement is present at the very least in Spain.
All this to say, it's not much of a stretch to have a Policeman that's also a military guy. Plus, in a situation like those of Marayevo or Mogadiscio it's easy to imagine that the normal police is either overrun or simply swapped with better trained for urban warfare military police forces.
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Ciao,
Renato
www.janus-design.it
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| joshua posts 217 10:18 am November 6, 2009
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That's really funny, Renato. I was just looking up the Carabinieri the other day (and wondering what their activities were in the 30s and 40s, which turn out to be complex and interesting) while thinking about Lifeless, figuring our their parallels in the US. They're a lot like our Marshalls, near as I can tell. The Polizia di Stato are more like our FBI, right?
I think the conflation of police and military is appalling but extremely common. When the chips are down, it's just "the guys with guns".
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Member | renatoram Milan, Italy posts 5 3:39 am November 19, 2009
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(a bit late in replying but hey… busy times)
You know, the police forces in the US are pretty confusing, actually, for me. The Carabinieri and Polizia di Stato are practically the same: no real difference in jurisdiction for example. Also, we don't have state borders and both police forces can operate on all the nation's territory. You do have "State Police" in some (all?) of the states, right?
The main difference for some time has been that being the Police non-military they started recruiting women earlier (in the Italian military women have only been present in the last 10 years or so).
Oh a last thought: my impression is that we have a very different "default" perception of the army… in cases of natural disasters (floods, quakes, etc) for example the army is at the forefront of the helping people. They build camps, field hospitals, bring help and use their heavy vehicles to transport stuff. Plus, for a long time after WW2 ours was not a "fighting" army, and even nowadays the perception of Italian's involvement in military actions is very limited; I guess all this colored our perception :)
But I'm digressing, and wildly offtopic :)
I hope to listen to the next ep this evening.
Ciao!
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Ciao,
Renato
www.janus-design.it
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 9:25 am November 19, 2009
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Renato: Our jurisdictional shit for cops is a gigantic mess. Watch Season 2 of The Wire to see how muddled it can get. A body appears in the water and there are like 8 police units that could be responsible: the city police, the county police, the state police, the immigration police, etc.
As I said in the episode we released yesterday, it's my hope that this game is very international and doesn't rely on an understanding of the American system.
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| joshua posts 217 3:12 pm November 20, 2009
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Well, I have to say: it's a labyrinth of jurisdiction because of the potential for abuse when the police, intelligence, and military are a single body.
So, we've got the Marshals, who catch guys; we've got the FBI, which is largely investigative and has served as the primary internal anticommunist body (complete with assassinations); the CIA, which isn't allowed to operate within the US (despite clear evidence that it often has), the state cops and local cops.
Texas also has the Texas Rangers, which are pretty much state cops now, but have a really unsavory history before they were really police. Dogs in the Vineyard is based on them in part.
The distinctions are firewalls for corruption.
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Member | renatoram Milan, Italy posts 5 5:09 pm November 22, 2009
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Well, Italian Polizia and Carabinieri always had a fair bit of competition between themselves, and having more than one police force is another way to insure it will be hard to bribe them ALL… and this is leaving out the OTHER police forces, like the Guardia di Finanza (which is mainly for financial crimes, taxes, and so on… kinda like an investigative/enforcing IRS).
But then, the Guardia di Finanza also has boats, helicopters and planes to fight drug commerce… as do the Carabinieri and Polizia :)
Same goes for "border controls"… it's a big mess. But I'm under the impression that it's like that in most countries.
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Ciao,
Renato
www.janus-design.it
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