Black Gate

Not to go all ‘Goth Chick’ on you, but have you ever walked in a graveyard? If your answer is no, I’d put money says that you have but you just didn’t realize it. You see, the internet is really a reflection of our own world, with vibrant and glowing real-estate all along the information super highway. Now if you consider each dedicated website as a ‘town’ along this course, what happens when the site goes dormant? I would like to hypothesize that it, and all the ‘people’ [information] in it dies as well. Sure, you can still visit, and perhaps even find out some cool history there, but in truth you are simply walking over the graves of the dead.

Take a site like Grognardia for example, RIP December 11^th 2012, or Permission Magazine RIP February 2011, or Stephen Fabian.com RIP June 6^th 2010. They still exist, can still be read, but have ceased functioning for all intents and purpose and are now just ghosts in the machine.

Now you might be asking, ‘so what does this morbid topic have to do with Art of the Genre?’ Well, perhaps nothing, but then again, perhaps everything. Each website, no matter how basic, had to have a design, and that design, like a testament to some ancient civilization, is left behind in a kind of ruin that can be viewed by anyone who stumbles off the beaten path into a lost world, but I think I digress, so first let me go back. Seeing these always seems to bring me back to my post here on November 15^th, 2012. In it I spoke about the Art of Disappearing MMORPGs, and for some reason I feel the need to speak on the subject a bit more and I apologize if I reiterate some of the topics of that post but I’m in stream of consciousness right now so humor me.

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I’m not going to stand on a soapbox here and tell you my views on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, that released this past Christmas; but having seen it, I was prompted to once again take out my old Middle-Earth Role-Playing books and relive what I believe to be the prettiest RPG ever created.

Now I’m not saying that New Zealand isn’t gorgeous, but there is a big part of me that believes literature should stay more firmly based in fantasy, thus real actors and real sets somehow diminish the very nature of the words and images that helped define them in the first place.

In the case of The Hobbit, computers, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t rekindle the joy I feel from the images I’ve seen painted and drawn concerning Tolkien’s world throughout my youth.

And speaking of youth, I’m constantly reminded that I’m from a quickly aging generation that now seems incredibly antiquated in the world. Technology is moving so fast, it sometimes makes my head spin to think that I grew up without cable television, cell phones, computers, the Internet, microwave ovens, and a plethora of other standard issue American items in today’s world.

I’d like to say that color was something that was always present in my favorite pastime, gaming, but again that would be fooling myself. It wasn’t really until the turn of the millennia that interior color pages were standard issue in gaming. I well remember, back in the late 1980s, how revolutionary FASA was for bringing out color interior images for games like Battletech and Shadowrun, the latter of which actually used glossy pages now found standard on all gaming material.

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What isn’t to love about The Baroness?  Well, I suppose a great deal if you are on the side of ‘good’, but nonetheless she’s still a character that has captured the imagination of a generation of young men growing up in the 1980s.

I was a fan of action figures, and when Hasbro initially released their G.I. Joe A Real American Hero  line in 1982, I spent three days one weekend catching nightcrawlers (bait worms in southern Indiana speak) by hand with a flashlight at five cents a pop until I had enough to purchase the first run (rough calculation, I caught upwards of 1000 of the slimy little buggers).

At the time, I was eleven, and my G.I. Joe figures provided a great combat story to be told over and over again in the woods by my house, in my sandbox, on the riverbank, and on the floors of various friends living rooms, but I must admit a purely war-driven story can get tiresome without something more meaningful to fight for.

Enter Cobra, the G.I. Joe nemesis. But still, even after you could lay hands on villains to fight, there was something lacking until women were finally added to the story.  The addition of Scarlet was a turning point for me in my action figure storylines, and yet a great deal of imagination had to be used because to this point action figure manufacturing hadn’t really ‘figured women out’.  That is to simply say, female action figures weren’t all that alluring, mostly because you couldn’t effectively produce their hair.

Sure, there was Star Wars, of which I had a nice collection as well, who had Princess Leia, and that figure was fine, but they (the manufacturers) had a huge advantage because of Leia’s famous head-buns.  Those could be sculpted, but free-flowing hair was a much more difficult endeavor and so figures like G.I. Joe alums Scarlet, Lady J, and heaven forbid Covergirl (probably the ugliest figure ever created and based on a model turned soldier of all things!) never really made boys’ hearts go pitter-pat unless you were reading the Marvel comics or watching the animation.

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