HCI = Human Computer Interaction
HHI = Human to Human Interaction

HCI is actually one of the fields that is growing fast.  A lot of universities now have specialty programs for HCI.

Interesting note on the Friday blog entry by Stephen Cheault from Troll Lord Games.

I will release a series of pdf adventures (Dwarven Glory 2, Dwarven Glory 3 and Monsters of Aihrde IV)

Link to blog here.

I thought that follow-ups to Dwarven Glory might interest some people.  

JohnGaunt wrote:Off-topic but in a "vintage" vein . . .

I went to the Metal Masters tour last night:  Testament, Motorhead, Dio-Sabbath, and Judas Priest.  If anyone else is going to see this tour, wear earplugs when Dio-Sabbath hits the stage, and buy the t-shirts when they are half-price after the concert is over.

I don't know if Testament has a connection to the other three bands, but Motorhead and Black Sabbath have toured together before.  And Rob Halford did the vocals for a Sabbath concert a few years back.  This gives the tour an old-school, everyone-knows-everyone-else feeling.

Testament: Chuck Billy (vocals) seemed to be in a good mood, and the band played 80s/90s thrash.  I'm not a big Testament fan, but they rocked.  Opening band = no PA, but the the sound was good anyway.  First time I've seen Testament.

Motorhead: Mickey Dee (Michael Delaouglou) is a superb drummer and showman.  For maybe 30 seconds he played his drums while juggling three or four drumsticks with his right hand.     He didn't miss a beat; it was amazing to see.  This was a few songs after his drum solo.  However, the sound for the rest of the band was terrible.  No PA = sounds like mud.  An odd collection of songs, but they ended with Overkill, complete with its false stops that mess with non-fans.    Fourth time I've seen Motorhead.

Dio-Sabbath: OK, the band is called Heaven and Hell, after the first Dio-Sabbath album.  The PA kicked in, and Tony Iommi tore through my earplugs.  Ronnie James Dio looked like happiest man in the world; he even asked someone in the audience to hold up the album covers for Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell.  Dio sounds better than ever.  Geezer Butler's right hand looked like Cousin It on speed.  This was a "greatest hits" from the three Dio-Sabbath albums.  Second time I've seen Dio, third time I've seen some version of Sabbath.

Judas Priest: Awesome as usual.  The song choices were not all "greatest hits", and only one song from Nostradamus was played.  Some of the stage transitions were smooth, while others had the house lights come up.  Rob Halford must have done half-a-dozen costume changes.  Good God, I've seen Judas Priest five times that I can recall.

How many people in the crowd? The last time I saw Motorhead they played the Stone Balloon in DE. There were 600 people in a bar meant for 300 max.

JohnGaunt wrote:I remember the old Ballard Firehouse in Seattle . . . pretty much the same situation.    Oddly enough, that's where I saw both Dio, Motorhead, and most of a Michael Schenker show.  Ah, I miss those halcyon days . . .

The Metal Masters tour was at the "Superpages.com" Center, formerly the Smirnoff Center, in Dallas.  Googling for information, I see that the seated/covered area holds 7,000, while the open lawn holds 12,000.

At 5:30, a few hundred for Testament.
At 6:30, a few thousand for Motorhead.
At least 7000 people were there by the time Dio-Sabbath hit the stage.  More people arrived to hear Judas Priest.

An amazing amount amount of the audience was less than 30.  Some were well under 16 and with their parents.  No fights, and not as much, uhhh, smoke as I have smelled previously.  And I did not see the security guards "wanding" people at the gate.

That's like the Dead shows. Plenty of people in their 40's but a big contingent of teenagers showing up. I remember the thick blueish cloud that always hung over the lower seats and the floor of enclosed auditoriums. I think everyone was too stoned and melowed out at Dead shows to fight and Motorhead shows were too loud to fight (and that last one was too crowded to do anything but some head bobbing.

I can't believe I missed the entire flame war.  

Page me next time, you bastards, I haven't got a lot else going on.

jasonw1239 wrote:For whatever reason a McCain spokesman took a swipe at D&D players...
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/0 ... n-cam.html

EDIT:      
The McCain spokesman got complaints about his D&D comments and posted a follow-up.

Michael Goldfarb said:

LOL!

I'm going to vote for McCain...more as a symbolic act...because my vote does not count here in Washington State.  (I want to be able to say "I told you so" four years from now.)

Still, that's the thing about D&D people...a demographic that is unusually well educated, well read, articulate and techo-skilled.  

With the entire internet as a retaliatory weapon, you cross gamers at your peril.

Goldfarb probably didn't know that Dungeons and Dragons still exists.  I imagine that someone in his crew quietly helped him draft an apology calculated to soothe gamers.  I can imagine the conversation:

"Um..uh..sir, can I make a suggestion?"

"What?  You dare to speak?"

"Well...yes, sir.  I mean...you just...um....fucked up royally."

"How...? What?  You mean the D&D thing?"

"Yes, sir.  It's hard for me to explain, but...um...these people...like...run the world and stuff."

"You mean...?"

"Yes, sir.  These people...like...run the internet and pretty much every information system in the country.  I think they probably run things in Europe too.  I mean...you're screwed.  At this moment they're writing, like, one million funny and insulting things about what you said.  Oh, and a huge number of them are conservatives...they play...you know...wargames and stuff.  A gigantic chunk of them are current or former military people."

"Oh God!  Help me!"

"Um...yes, sir.  I think if we kind of apologize and make it into a joke the damage might be limited."

"What do I do?"

"Well...I have a few ideas..."

FormCritic wrote:
The use of that term..."lifestyle gamer"...might actually be a positive sign.

It is just possible that WOTC has suddenly realized that there is a core market for Dungeons and Dragons that is literally not buying their most recent Big Ideas.  (See:  Gleemax, demise of)

Perhaps they really have noticed that their branch of Hasbro is all about Magic and Dungeons and Dragons...and that you jettison the core market buyer base of these products at your extreme peril.

I have not tracked at all on the sales of 4th Edition.  I don't know how that's going.  I do know that the rise of games like Pathfinder (purpose built to take away WOTC's core customers) is not not not not not good news for WOTC.

Firing the people who brought us Gleemax might actually be a sign that there has been a market-driven reality check at WOTC.

I may just be an old fogey out of touch, but in experience so far the buzz for 4E has been non-existent. At least when compared to the giant ramp up and explosion of 3E many years ago.

In retrospect, killing Dragon and Dungeon mags may have been the "New Coke" move of WOTC that led to their demise.  No platform for promoting their new game, no buzz, equals no one cares.

This may mean something, or nothing, but Noble Knight's top ten sellers are as follows:

1. Saga of the Rat King
2. The Golden Auroch/Tower of the Black Pearl
3. Dungeon Master's Screen (4th Edition)
4. Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide (4th Edition)
5. #2 w/The Solomons Campaign
6. Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide
7. Shadowfell Trilogy, The #3 - Pyramid of Shadows
8. Saga of the Witch Queen (AD&D 1st Edition 2007 Gen Con Tournament Module)
9. Burma (2nd Printing)
10. Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

Only three of the top ten are 4E...and THREE of the top ten are 1E adventures!  And there is Pathfinder sitting there at #10.   If I'm with WOTC, I'm officially panicking now.  You should be IN CHARGE of the top ten and Pathfinder shouldn't be a gleam in the eye.  Does anyone remember the release of 3E?  Books were flying out of gaming stores as fast as they hit the shelves, both WOTC's and 3rd party 3E books as well. Does not bode well for 4E, IMO.

Mike B.

Pardon me if anyone has posted this earlier:

WOTC has announced that they intend to modify the GSL terms because the third party publishers have pretty much refused to sign on.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4news/20080811

The discussion by the WOTC faithful that follows the announcement is an interesting example of how little those faithful seem to understand about business and/or the RPG market.

Still, when even some of the WOTC faithful are highly critical of the company's recent business moves, one wonders what people over in the Renton offices have been thinking these past months.  

If they really listen to their customers and colleagues one would think that they might act differently.

My own analysis:  The momentum behind Pathfinder has scared the WOTC management into some dead sober second thoughts.

The dumping of Gleemax and firings in the WOTC staff (possibly related to poor performance in their internet department as much as anything else) are signs that WOTC management is waking up.  Gleemax was too impossibly stupid to work.  Really insulting to their customers.  They may have figured that out, but one wonders why they tried it at all.

With 4th Edition modules coming out at the $24.99 price point...competing with modules for Pathfinder at roughly half that price...WOTC is set up for a serious market whooping.  Paizo Publishing does not have to out-sell 4th Edition to seriously hurt WOTC.  All they have to do is choke 4th Edition in the cradle by stealing a chunk of the core market.

It strikes me as entirely possible for WOTC to license 4th Edition publishing rights to companies that they know will not wreck the market with poor and/or offensive products.  I'm sure there are lawyers clever enough to work out a licensing contract that protects everyone.

WOTC also does not really have to make war on the OGL in order to get rid of it.  The existence of a new edition will eventually grind down the hardcopy publishing market.  The D20 print market is already dead.  That leaves just some pdf publishers...which WOTC can pretty much ignore, or totally undercut with inexpensive pdf products of their own.  

There is no need to ban publishers from printing products for multiple editions...they have already stopped printing for 3.5 on their own, with the glaring exception of Paizo and Pathfinder.

If a modified GSL does not lure in third party publishers then I suspect that WOTC's next move will be to sue companies like Green Ronin and Paizo, hoping to wear them out.  This tactic is exactly what killed TSR rivals like New Infinities.  TSR did not need to actually win against New Infinities in order to drive them out of the market.  In fact, TSR was the one that paid in that lawsuit...but they won anyway.

One way WOTC might mend fences (and dominate the market, by the way) would be to return to a hardcopy version of Dragon magazine.  I don't know the economics on that one, but Paizo Publishing seemed to be selling both Dragon and Dungeon at a profit.  When WOTC pulled the publishing rights they left Paizo with an embedded subscriber base that I don't think WOTC was expecting to stick around and buy products.  They did.

The problem for WOTC is what might be called "DM-ographics."  The people who were subscribers to Dragon and Dungeon were almost all active gamers.  They were also most likely the hard core leaders of local gaming groups.  These are what WOTC's recent press release about restructuring refers to as "lifestyle gamers."  (A good sign that WOTC is waking up.)

The basic pattern of gaming groups is for the local leader to acquire a new rulebook, then run games that influence other gamers to buy their own copies.  As the dungeon masters for other gamers, the subscribers each influenced a circle of (best guess) roughly seven other gamers, with multiple connections through conventions and local gaming scenes.  

The consequences of dumping Dragon should have been obvious to people at WOTC.  Gary Gygax could have told WOTC that.  He was a gamer before he was a businessman.  The story of TSR's financial woes and resulting purchase by WOTC should have been a cautionary tale.

My last thought (for the moment) is what must be going through the minds of people over at Goodman Games.  They signed on to the GSL as it stands.  Are they stuck?  Will they be allowed to change over to the new GSL terms?  Do they regret not holding out with the other big third party publishers?  Will they regret dumping product?

My guess about "dumping product" is that Goodman is happy to have found a way to gracefully unload their warehouse stock.  I'm hoping they go whole-hog and trying something like the Green Ronin $2 sale.  Now that would be cool.

There is no guarantee that publishers like Necromancer, Green Ronin and Paizo will want to sign even a modified version of the GSL.  It may be too late for a company like Paizo to reverse course.  Their established market for the Pathfinder modules and rulebook might feel a bit betrayed if Paizo were to switch now.  A lawsuit seems more likely.  

We'll see.

Mark