elanya

That was pretty cool, I think. I will use it for an extra credit film, maybe. Although hey - it has love, betrayal, action, kidnapping, a guy getting thrown of a cliff, fantastic costuming and dance numbers! What more could you want ;)

In less exciting news, my TV is dead so i had to watch ot on my laptop. It won't turn on - there is a whining sound as it tries to power up, but nothing happens, whether I use the button or the remote. Good thing I just bought that VCR eh? :p Ahh well, free tv, you served me well.

Anyway, I tried to find clips form ITLOTWC, but there isn't anything. So instead have this clip of Kwakiutl ceremonial dancing from the 70's. This part is at least in colour, although it is a 2 min clip form a 2 hour dance :p It also mentions the fact that these dances were all proprietary - private property. Ahhh, pacific northwest peoples are so neat!

I do a lot of gaming online. Probably more than I should, if I'm being honest. I should clarify - I mean roleplaying, not video games (in the traditional sense... I'll clarify further in a moment).

I have used a lot of different programs to help - Open RPG (balls!), gametable (simple but effective), Maptool (really great but a fair amount of work for gms to set up), even a home made grid that one of my programming GMs concocted. (Okay, that was exis, I don't have any other programmer gms.) We have used teamspeak and other voice programs to help things along - they can be hit and miss. Voice is a nice complement to traditional internet text media, but it doesn't work as well as a stand-alone gaming format, because there aren't any other cues to work with.

Today, however, one of my groups tried something different. We used a free program called ooVoo, which allows up to six people for video chat conferencing. It's got some issues - people who don't have really great connections can find it a little choppy, and you have the same problems as you always do getting people's set up optimized for chat. You need to minimize feedback, and so forth. But overall, I think this worked out really well. I am in Texas, three of my cohorts are in South Korea, and the other two players were in England (which is why game started early on a Sunday morning, at least for me. Stupid timezones). But I could see them all, and watch them, and talk. The program also has a text chat application as well, so you can supplement that way. It was as close as you can get to face to face tabletop, I think, and the experience pleased me.

Now, there are some disadvantages. Only six people (for now, and for free - they might allow more on the paid version), you probably should get dressed for game, where traditional internet media are more clothing optional (hey, this is a legit issue for some people!). You need to pay closer attention - it is harder to get away with side browsing when you're not directly involved - much like in face to face gaming. You aren't going to get the same kind of useful chat log that you can refer to down the road, which is something that I've personally come to rely on heavily for internet games. You can't take a little longer to work out what you are doing or exactly what you are going to say the way you might in a text based chat. You're still going to need a supplementary program to run any dice scripts you have and to facilitate board based combat. In these ways, you're losing out some of the big advantages over chat based media, and keeping some of the problems.

Some of the problems are the same ones you get in f-t-f gaming though - people not paying attention, no easily kept records, etc. I don't know if you can fairly count those against the *concept*, at least, of this kind of 'video gaming'. It's faster than chat. You can still play with people who are scattered around the globe. You get the useful visual cues of face to face gaming (though mediated some what by the fact that you can't look directly at people) as well as vocal ones (accents are fun!). it is easier to keep focused attention, I find, when I am talking to faces.

Although there are still kinds and it isn't really quite he same as f-t-f play, I really enjoyed this first little experiment. I just thought I would write it up for other people to think about, and discuss, if interested...

(cross posted between my journal and chickswithdice

My dad has google talk now ^-^