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Jun. 18th, 2012 09:31 pmI'm lagging several weeks behind on reading my Tumblr friendslist, so I've only just got up to the meme where you pick a material and an animal off a pair of lists to get your "Sailor Animamate" name, such as "Sailor Nickel Goose", "Sailor Uranium Chimp", or "Sailor Formica Armadillo".
I'm not really interested in the meme, except that it reminded me of the old Sheri S. Tepper novel about the magic boardgame. Each player gets a piece that's carved out of a mineral into the shape of an alliterative animal - the heroine's piece is a malachite mouse, and there's also a gneissic gnu, a rhenium (or was it rhodium?) rhinoceros, and so on. The choice of piece turns out to be important, because part of the game's magic is that you get sucked into a magical gameworld, and transformed into the corresponding animal. (When Mariane gets sucked in, and her husband comes riding to her rescue, he cheats - which is characteristic of him, really - by eschewing the provided pieces and dice in favour of a dragon-shaped piece he carves himself to his own design, and his own pair of dice, which are enchanted to always roll whatever number he needs even when the number he needs is 1.)
It occasionally occurs to me that the gameworld might make an interesting model for an online multiplayer world - in the story, some of the squares on the board are neutral territory where you can meet and greet with the other players, and most of the squares contain a whole game within a game, in genres ranging from fast-twitch action games to elaborate RPGs, that the player must play through before travelling on to another square. It probably wouldn't be able to keep the animal-mineral motif of the player avatars, though; you'd run out of alliterative pairs pretty quickly if it was any kind of successful, and I suspect having all the different kinds of animal would lead to player balance issues. Another thing that works in a story about being trapped in a magical world but wouldn't transfer well to a game you want people to come back to is the other other squares, the two or three scattered across the board that are neither meeting places nor games but mean instant death to anyone who lands on them...
I'm not really interested in the meme, except that it reminded me of the old Sheri S. Tepper novel about the magic boardgame. Each player gets a piece that's carved out of a mineral into the shape of an alliterative animal - the heroine's piece is a malachite mouse, and there's also a gneissic gnu, a rhenium (or was it rhodium?) rhinoceros, and so on. The choice of piece turns out to be important, because part of the game's magic is that you get sucked into a magical gameworld, and transformed into the corresponding animal. (When Mariane gets sucked in, and her husband comes riding to her rescue, he cheats - which is characteristic of him, really - by eschewing the provided pieces and dice in favour of a dragon-shaped piece he carves himself to his own design, and his own pair of dice, which are enchanted to always roll whatever number he needs even when the number he needs is 1.)
It occasionally occurs to me that the gameworld might make an interesting model for an online multiplayer world - in the story, some of the squares on the board are neutral territory where you can meet and greet with the other players, and most of the squares contain a whole game within a game, in genres ranging from fast-twitch action games to elaborate RPGs, that the player must play through before travelling on to another square. It probably wouldn't be able to keep the animal-mineral motif of the player avatars, though; you'd run out of alliterative pairs pretty quickly if it was any kind of successful, and I suspect having all the different kinds of animal would lead to player balance issues. Another thing that works in a story about being trapped in a magical world but wouldn't transfer well to a game you want people to come back to is the other other squares, the two or three scattered across the board that are neither meeting places nor games but mean instant death to anyone who lands on them...
