Adventure Games

H. P. Lovecraft

The past few months have been crazy.  I am going through a separation with my wife, my daughter has gone off to university, I have moved out of my home, and I am taking a stress leave from work.  However, there have been many opportunities for growth for me during this period.

I am very pleased to have gotten back in touch with friends that I thought I would never hear from again.  One is Kent Haryett.  Kent and I met at the University of Alberta in the early 1980's, and spent a lot of time together socially.  Kent convinced me that I should do a Master's degree in England, and we both ended up going to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.  I finished my Master's, and Kent convinced me to continue to do a PhD.  I did.  Kent went back to Edmonton, completed a law degree, went into private practice, and now has several lawyers working for him in a very successful firm.  

Kent had a kind of magic about him.  One of the things that we did in Newcastle was to play adventure games, like ‘The Call of Cthulu’, a game based generally on the horror stories of the author H.P. Lovecraft. One member of the group is the 'Master', and leads the group through the adventure.  Each player has at least one character with a number of different skills and strengths.

One evening, four of us in our group needed to know whether one of the characters had had his brain eaten by an anthropologist who believed that such behaviour could enhance one's prescience.  It was necessary for us to dig up the grave (this is all done virtually), and exhume the body.  Sure enough, the skull had been stitched, and the brain had been removed.  

That marked the end of that evening's adventure (some of the adventures lasted six months).  I got onto my bicycle and began to ride to the other side of town.  The quickest way back was along Elswick Road, and the very old Gothic era cemetery.  At one point, a fish and chip wrapper flew over the wall of the cemetery and hit my front wheel spokes and went 'Whack!, Whack!, Whack!.  

I nearly jumped out of my skin. It is certainly the most frightening event in my life. 

Transcendent Man

Ray Kurzweil, author of 'The Singularity'

The other day Aidan and I watched the film 'Transcendent Man', and I continue to ponder many of the ideas.  There are several premises that underlie the film.  One is that life on this planet is continually evolving.  Two billion years ago, there were single celled organisms.  Six hundred million years ago multi-celled organisms arose and radiated throughout the oceans and seas.  By the Permian, 230 million years ago, amphibians began climbing onto land.  The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous saw the domination, at least on land, of dinosaurs, with little mammals trying to keep from getting crushed.  About 65 million years ago, a comet hit the earth, and the resulting drop in temperatures wiped out the extremely specialized dinosaurs, and mammals proliferated.  About 55 million years ago, the first primates emerge, living at the top of forest canopies, eating fruits and insects.  About 34 million years ago, an ape ancestor was living mostly on the forest floor.  Twenty two million years ago there was an ape that looked quite a bit like a modern chimp.  About 10 million years ago, our ancestors deviated from chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.  Between 5 and 6 million years ago, our ancestors began to stand uprightly, and moved out of the forest onto the savannah.  The freeing up of the hands eventually allowed the development of tool-making about 2.5 million years ago.  About 2 million years ago, humans walked out of Africa, 1.5 million years ago harnessed fire, and sometime after that began to communicate with verbal language.  It is most likely that about 100,000 years ago, our direct ancestors left Africa again and replaced the various human-like species of the Old World.  About 60,000 years ago humans made it to Australia, and perhaps about 15000 years ago, humans crossed over to and populated the Americas.  About 10,000 years ago, humans began producing their own food.  In the late 18th Century, our ancestors began to harness machines in a way that had not done before, and since then, our technology has been increasing in complexity and the speed of change geometrically.  And so, the technological changes that we see now can be considered part of a greater evolution beginning 2 billion years ago.

The second premise of the film is that the speed and complexity of technological change will bring about a 'Singularity'.  This means the point at which nano technology (the use of machines the size of a human blood cell) and human beings will come together into one being: we will not be human, and we will not be a machine.  Singularity will occur around 2029.  Diseases will be eradicated by these millions of machines, and we will say goodbye to death.

What is more, nano technology will allow the capture of the sun's rays in a way that we cannot really imagine today, and will be so efficient that fossil fuels will no longer be necessary to fuel everything.

This film is very different to the gloom and doom story about the imminent collapse of everything very soon. This film shows us passing from Vitruvian Man towards a Transcendent Man.  Perhaps there is room for hope after all.  Cool beans.

Khadaffi falls

The Colonel Khadaffi

Over the Christmas of 1980, my sister Maggie and I boarded a plane for Libya to visit my father and his wife.  We stopped in Amsterdam along the way, and the city was in full party mode.  We went from club to club, and everywhere people were playing the song ‘The War is Over’ by John Lennon, who had been shot just a few days previously. 

Libya was a strange and wonderful place.  We stayed in my dad's house, which was palatial.  It had been designed to house several servants, and both of us got our own huge bedrooms.  Because supplies to Libya were inconsistent, the home's chest freezer was packed with food stock-piled over many months.  Having survived my first term at university on so little food, it was as if I had entered into paradise.  And it wasn’t just us.   Maggie and I were invited to parties every evening by similar 'dependents' coming ‘home’ for Christmas, many of whom were from the UK.  This was my first real taste of England, even though it was in Libya.  I loved the accent, the ease with which people spoke the language, the clever turns of phrase. We spent New Year’s Eve in Libya, and then went back home.  The holiday had been magical. 

As a 'dependent', I was granted two trips per year to see my father in Libya, and with this in mind, I decided to ‘stop-over’ on my summer trip to Libya and go on an archaeological dig in Italy.  The problem was that I was not able to get a flight with the rest of the dig crew, and Italy in those days was notorious for train worker strikes.  I landed in Rome, not knowing a single word of Italian, and took a train, bus, train and bus to the dig site. 

The dig was spectacular.  The scenery featured lush, beautiful, rolling hills, dotted with villages made of local stone.  The students stayed in a boarding house with a big supper every night.  Into our lives descended two perfect English girls.  One was named Tamsyn, and the other Caroline.  They were both very posh: Tamsyn had finished her first year at Oxford, and was helping with the archaeological survey of the area.  Caroline was the daughter of a country doctor in the Cotswolds of England.  She was shyer, had a wonderful sense of humour, and a perfect turned up nose and blonde hair.  And so, I was there digging a site that was contemporary with the march of Hannibal, who had probably passed with his elephants close by, I was reading the histories in the original Latin, was digging a site that was packed with splendid artifacts, and was head over heels in love.  

Eventually, I made my way to Libya.  During the previous Christmas period, Maggie and I had been met at the Tripoli airport in Libya by Esso employees who guided us all the way to the town in which my father lived.  However, my telex to my dad with the times of my arrival had not gotten to him, and so when I landed in Tripoli, there was no-one there to meet me.  I arrived in the airport around 10:00 AM, and waited.  The restaurant never did open, and so I ate Danish butter cookies from the gift shop.  That evening, I fell asleep on a marble bench in the airport, and was awakened by the muzzle of a gun.  A guard wanted to know why I was there and to see my passport.  I spoke no Arabic, and could only shrug my shoulders and apologize.  In the morning, I hoisted on my back-pack, and headed out the door into blazing heat.  I walked what seemed miles to the ‘Esso’ hangar, and knocked on the door.  The person who answered was astonished to see me, looked both ways, and then pulled me inside.  I told him my story and he said that a plane was leaving for Marc-el-Brega that afternoon.  Once on the plane, I met a man who spoke very good English, and he was concerned that I did not have ‘landing’ papers.  He instructed me to simply skirt around the guards at the airport while he asked them about their families.  It worked, and I went to the my dad's house, only to find it completely deserted.  I went around back, lifted up the heavy ‘sandstorm’ blinds, and entered.  I managed to make contact with my dad over the phone, and he came home out of the desert the next day. 

Sometime just before, or perhaps during my stay in Libya, Ronald Reagan had decided to send the American Sixth Fleet into what Colonel Quadaffi considered Libyan waters (south of a line between Tripoli and Benghazi).  Quadaffi sent out four fighters, and the Americans on the USS Nimitz shot them down just after takeoff.  My dad told me that I was to be officially ‘evacuated’ as the dependent of an employee of an American company.  I flew to London with the rest of the dependents, and the company put us up in a nice hotel for two weeks.  I went to museums, plays, concerts, all on the company’s dime.  

What I remember about Libya is that everything seemed to be regulated by the government.  A 'grocery store' would have perhaps 20 employees, most of whom were simply standing around.  Khadaffi's face was everywhere, and in 1980, he still seemed to be liked by everyone.  Beginning a few months ago, the tribes of eastern Libya, the ancient area of Cyrenaica, rose up against the tribes of the west, those of ancient 'Tripolitania'.  The eastern rebels found an airforce in Nato, and the town where my dad lived became a fulcrum of the civil war, changing hands many times.  Khadaffi had become a dictator, he had not been able to satisfy the tribes of the eastern part of Libya, and Nato stepped in.  The other day Khadaffi was found dead in a culvert.  Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya.  Who will be next?