News You Can Bruise for 2012 January 24 (entry 0)

(6) Tue Jan 24 2012 09:06 CG Author Commentary #9: "Import System": Last week and this week have some of my favorite Twitter bits (e.g.) because the CDBOEGOACC is finally available in English. Sunday night while working on Loaded Dice I realized that one of the reasons I really like playing around with the BoardGameGeek dataset is it's like a real-life CDBOEGOACC.

The flip side is this chapter doesn't have a lot of plot. But hopefully you're okay with that because of all the fun mini-stories like the Sea Level game/food. It's supposed to represent the design phases of a software project, where you're throwing around a lot of ideas but not much is being produced.

Next week is a set piece, and after that the plot won't let up until the cliffhanger that ends Part One. Before that happens, I need to get some solid exoludology in to bring in topics that are important later, like Sayable Spice and Ariel's unsuccessful attempts to translate it.

Before beginning the chapter 9 commentary, I want to get something off my chest about the first sighting of the Farang in chapter 1. In that chapter, Ariel compares their antennacles to the oral tentacles of a "cerebrophage". In the second draft I just out and said "mind flayer". My writing group said I should change it because readers might not know what a mind flayer is. ("Did you mean: mind flower?") Taking their advice to heart, I changed the reference to a made-up reference that nobody will get. Well, at least we're all in the same boat now!

And here's chapter 9. Vent your egg sacs before reading this commentary:

• This chapter represents the absolute end of the abandoned first draft. Beyond this point everything is from the second or third draft.
• In a questionable move on my part, Ariel gets an Alien computer before he meets any Alien characters, requiring that I introduce you to the species with an infodump ("eight-foot monkey-lizards"). Don't worry, in just a couple weeks, Alien characters will show up and run off with the whole damn book.
• Speaking of infodumps, I want to do a little infodump of my own, about the Ip Shkoy. The Ip Shkoy were an ancient civilization of Aliens, much like the Roman Empire was an ancient civilization of humans. "Ip Shkoy" is not the native-language name for the Alien species. I tried to make this abundantly clear, but I've noticed well-intentioned people calling the Alien species "the Ip Shkoy" or ascribing to modern Aliens the (frequently pretty awful) opinions of the Ip Shkoy. Which would be like Curic thinking that Ariel regularly offers sacrifices to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

  Star Trek has conditioned us to see an ET species as having a single homogenous culture that never changes, and this sort of confusion is why they do that on Star Trek. That said, I don't think this is anyone's fault but my own. If I'd presented modern Alien society in as much detail as I present the Ip Shkoy, the other probably wouldn't crowd out the one. It doesn't help that certain features are shared by both cultures, such as transitive pair bonding (aka polyamory).

• Recapture That Remarkable Taste, the Ip Shkoy remake of Sayable Spice, is not to be confused with the new William Gibson anthology, Distrust That Particular Flavor.
• Charlene Siph is mentioned again, which gives me a good excuse to talk about Alien names. The Aliens on the contact mission have all taken human first names, but their surnames are monosyllables which I usually generated by truncating creepy English words ("siphon", "somnolent") to four letters. The impression I want is of someone who's trying to be accommodating but doesn't quite have it down.

  This is another detail imported from "Vanilla", one that I'm really happy with, one that even becomes important to the plot in one place. And if you like symbolism, check this out: "Ariel Blum" could be an Alien name.

• In the second draft I wrote a whole review of Proty's Big Escape, but turns out it's a dumb idea to insert one game review wholesale into another game review. Let me know if you want the Proty review, and I'll make it the first CG Deleted Scene, even though it's only five paragraphs long.

Be sure to tune in next Tuesday, when Dana will say, "This application will terminate due to suspected theft or circumvention."

Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on @Tetsuo_Milk.

Image credits: Flickr user krusty, Guillaume Piolle, and Flickr user CoffeeGeek.

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Comments:

Posted by zztzed at Tue Jan 24 2012 09:37

Hey, this dice-chucking RPG nerd recognized "Dragon's Dice cerebrophage" as an oblique reference to D&D mind flayers.

Also, that reminds me: there is actually a real game called Dragon Dice -- but it's a collectible dice game, not a tabletop RPG.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Jan 24 2012 09:54

There was another reference to Dragon's Dice in chapter 8, which I removed when I gave a Bruce scene to Bai. Actually it was a reference to "Devil's Polyhedra", an 80s Christian scare movie that tried to convince your parents that Dragon's Dice would turn you into an axe murderer. That got turned into Jenny's "is this a religious ritual", which is a lot better for the scene.

So, good thing I removed it. But that vanished once-removed reference is why this universe has Dragon's Dice instead of D&D, even though I didn't fictionalize other geek touchstones like Star Trek.

Posted by emile at Tue Jan 24 2012 14:26

Re: "Sunday night while working on Loaded Dice I realized that one of the reasons I really like playing around with the BoardGameGeek dataset is it's like a real-life CDBOEGOACC."

This whole time I thought that BGG was your inspiration for the CDBOEGOACC from the start!

Posted by Leonard at Tue Jan 24 2012 15:15

No, my conscious inspirations were the MAME database (which also shows up in "Mallory") and textfiles.com. The thing that makes BGG feel more CDBOEGOACC-ish is it's not only got information about the games, it's got everyone's opinion about the games.

Posted by Susie at Sun Jan 29 2012 12:29

Your blog is becoming kid friendly. Dalton pointed to the picture of the sea anemone and said, "Nemo!"

Posted by Leonard at Sun Jan 29 2012 17:28

I guess as long as the kids don't know how to read, it's kid friendly...