Fist bump history -- Wonder Twins?

I'm not really a student of popular culture, but (like everyone) I thought the news coverage of the Obamas' fist bump was sadly unhip. The gesture's been around for years, and I thought was well-known to, well, everyone.

But, it wasn't around when I was a kid, to my knowledge. So where'd it come from? When did it beat out high fives? I was thinking it was a football thing (for a while, some teams were hitting ulnas, kinda like a high five that makes an "X" shape).

But there's an obvious precedent for the fist bump -- "Wonder Twin Powers: Activate!" Other than geeky nostalgia, anyone know of either (a) fist bump gestures preceding the Superfriends cartoon or (b) more justified sources of the fist bump?

As a postscript, a fist bump of sorts was used in the short-lived Thing cartoon ("Thing rings, do your thing!"), but that came after Superfriends and the Thing was fist bumping himself.

Ask, and I receive! I see now (on Boomerang) that "Shazzan" apparently had rings that were put together, fist-bump style, to call the genie. I wonder if some Hanna-Barbera writer liked the imagery, and reiterated with the Wonder Twins?

Avengers/Invaders #2

"Every kid in America, if his country is threatened."

GO BUCKY!

WOLVERINES!!!

The words I wish I got to define

So, a little while ago I posted a query on Curmudgeon Gamer, namely What is Ludology? This was an honest question, but asked with ulterior motives (more on that later). And the answers I got were perfectly reasonable.

But then I had to get all fancy-pants and search the Web. As always, big mistake. Not accidental porn big, but big.

At this point, I will digress by explaining those ulterior motives.

When I was young and naive, I came across a brilliantly excitingly named branch of mathematics called "Game Theory". Naturally I said to myself, "holy crap! Pretty darn smart of me to become a mathematician -- now I'll get to play games for a living!"

In case you aren't aware, "Game Theory" is a bait-and-switch ruse right up there with "Greenland". Somehow they managed to take the field of strategic game-playing and restrict it only to games no one would ever want to play. (Apparently there was some analysis of actual games in there at the beginning, but that was swiftly excised, lest anyone actually enjoy themselves.) Even worse, it turns out Game Theory is actually useful in economics, so there are hundreds of books on super-boring "Game Theory" that are actually not about games at all, just taunting me.

Now, as time went on, my interest in games has actually increased, and I desperately want to make a living from analyzing and studying (and playing) games. Real games, that are fun. But I had learned that "Game Theory" was not that.

So while explicitly I was asking "What is ludology?", implicitly I was pleading "Ludology is the immensely fun and cool analysis and study (and play) of games, right? And someone will pay me to be a ludologist?" I mean, how could it not be? "Ludo" is from the Latin for game (ludus), and "-ology" means "study of", so ludology must mean study of games, which is what I desperately want an official legitimate-type word for, right? (Put your hands down, eager beavers -- we'll get to it!)

Now let's return to that horrible "search the Web" idea.

It turns out "ludology" is in fact a pretty widely used term in the field of "game studies", which is a catchall term which presumably includes analysis of the play of games, but also refers to things like game sociology, game criticism & history, game computer science, and pretty much anything that some academic wants to publish that refers to a game. (How game studies should relate to the design of actual games is a topic of some debate.)

But of course ludology doesn't mean what I want it to mean. Oh no. Ludology is both a field and an ideological position, in opposition to the field/ideological position of narratology. Narratology is meant to encompass the study of essentially anything with a story, abstracted from its medium (so movies and books and soap operas and arguably videogames all use narratives, and can all be understood under the narratology umbrella). Ludology pushes back, saying that games are fundamentally _not_ just narratives. Just like narratives occur in different media, so do games (board games, card games, tv game shows, videogames, etc.) and instead of just lumping them in with the narratives, the ludologists say, the play and rule elements of games set them apart and they should have their own umbrella field that discusses the nature of games (abstracted from the medium) the same way narratology treats narratives. And that field is ludology. (The perspectives with horrible -ology names doesn't necessarily stop there: here's an article promoting a "paradigmological" approach.)

While the five word definition of "ludology" is still "analysis and study of games", the meaning behind that is very different from what _I_ was talking about. It asserts a political standpoint (games aren't narratives), and because of that standpoint it is necessarily chiefly concerned with the ontology of games, which is a fancy way to say trying to answer the question "what is a game?" Furthermore, the conflict between ludology and narratology as disciplines pulls them both further away from usefully relating to actual games, which of course require both gameplay and story.)

I understand that any "-ology" needs to make some effort addressing what they're all about, but that's Chapter One of the Intro to -ology book. (Remember reading the "What is Life?" section of your biology book?) The rest is the interesting stuff. You don't take archaeology and spend the whole time learning about "what is old stuff? what makes this the old stuff we study and that the old stuff we don't study?"

Oh, and am I the only one who's annoyed by taking a random word and putting "-ology" at the end of it? "Narratology" is obviously made up, and the natural counterpart "gameology" is equally stupid (no offense intended). But who thought digging up a Latin word to put before the (Greek) -ology would make it more acceptable?

Thankfully, their failing is my last shot. Someone stole Game Theory, Ludology seemed like a good idea but someone stole that too. However, "pediology" would be more consistently Greek -- although people might think it has to do with studying children and/or feet ("paidia", I am told, means "a childish game or amusement"). Equally confusing would be "scholeology", but perhaps even more appropriate: according to footnote 7 on page 5 of this paper (PDF link), the Latin ludus might have been used as a conscious parallel to the Greek schole, which referred both to leisure time and to school.

So, I coined it, I get to define it: I'm a scholeologist, which means that I analyze and study forms of games and game rule systems, both in terms of objective strategies and results and in terms of entertainment value and human-game interaction. I don't study the role of games in society or the society of gamers (what I would call game anthropology), although we might have useful things to say to each other; and I don't study games solely as vehicles for learning and cognition, although that's exactly what I'll tell the funding bodies when I apply for grants, if they'll buy it.

There might be ludologists who would say what I do is ludology (certainly it's not narratology -- I plan to never use the word "Aristotelian" again, and they seem to like it), and maybe I'll come around, but for the moment it sounds too political and "the nature of game-ness" for me. If the hypothesis "the positive effects of rubber-banding such as in Mario Kart for casual players can be achieved with less negative impressions from competitive players if more information is hidden from the players" isn't ludology, then I'm happy to make it scholeology. (I don't know if it's a true hypothesis or not -- possible future paper? :) )

Just in case there aren't enough links in this post, and/or you got here because of a conjunction of search terms, you might want a summary bibliography of books from various sides of game studies. For that, check out this excerpt from yet another book.

Videogames -- still not evil

Just a little link to direct your panicked parent friends to: in what must be a surprise to everyone, a big 'spensive study found no evidence that violent video games make kids violent. Who'da thunk it?

Baby ability scores

Of course, this is just for cute geekiness, but (also of course) Jacob is compelled to quibble, to wit:

STR is way too high, INT is presumably too low, and for a typical Cute Baby, the CHA is way too low.

Equally unsurprisingly, I can't help but continue the spiral of geekiness. Or at least, it inspires me to reconsider ability scores and what they mean. And to argue. Which is probably a given.

• STR too high: if I had to guess, I'd say these are ye olde Edition of the First stats, where 3 is the minimum. But assuming that a modern baby would be at least 3.5ed, a more appropriate STR would be 1 (same as a toad or bat), 2 at the outside (According the PH, equivalent to a...rat swarm? How am I supposed to interpret that?) Dammit, this whole "arguing with Jacob" plan seems to be falling apart.
• INT too low: ah, now the argument will begin in earnest! D&D INT is sometimes described as "IQ", but it's not potential for learning, reasoning and knowledge. How many languages does a baby speak? What bonus should they get for Knowledge checks? The obvious answers to these questions suggest INT of 6 is far too high, not too low. Animals have INT scores of 1 or 2 (Camels, 1; dog, tiger, horse, 2. Apparently some game designer had a bad camel experience and is exacting retribution.) When the kid's old enough to learn tricks like smiling or the cute waving/fist clenching thing, you can proudly proclaim them to have a 2 INT. Don't fret: it'll go up like a point every 6 months. Then they'll be smarter than you, but don't fret about that either: puberty'll hit and dumb 'em down to your level again. And that's my point -- a little more on that in a sec.
  
• CHA way too low: regardless of ye olde "18 max" rules (you could argue that babyhood is some sort of demigod status), this cuts to the complicated heart of what CHA is supposed to represent. Are babies charismatic? Well, heck yeah: they're fascinating, everyone can't keep their eyes off them, and their powers of persuasion and influence are legendary. But (except family members -- huge circumstance bonus!) do they attract followers? Do they inspire morale in those they lead? Do they lead at all? If I were forced, I'd say CHA of 18 is justifiable (not least because being cute is basically the only thing babies have going for them, and that's half the point of the joke), but more is just going down the "No, you've got a Charisma of a million zillion billion, yes you do!" path of treacly silliness.
  

From this we derive two observations of possible worth. The first is that the D&D ability system is really designed with the short term in mind -- ability scores would dramatically change over a character's whole lifetime, but we generally only see them for a snapshot of a few years or less, and typically the ones whose ability scores matter are in young adulthood, when score changes would be slower than youth or old age. Although the DMG of my youth did have a piece about score changes as one advances through age categories, it almost never got referred to...unless I was trying to abuse the system to generate unreasonable ability scores.

The second is that ability scores are couched in terms that suggest they represent some weird amalgam of many different features, but in game terms are used to represent a relatively small number of effects. "Strength" is supposed to represent how much ya bench, but its greatest game effect is on battle prowess, which presumably involves more than just literal strength. And it's the clearest one. INT, WIS, and CHA are all representations of a host of features, often overlapping: is the ability to present a well-reasoned argument because of INT or CHA? Moreover, all the abilities encompass properties that don't have much correlation: an excellent lockpicker can easily be clumsy or slow, a person's field of knowledge can be deep but narrow, and as has been pointed out a thousand times, ugly people can be powerful leaders.

A fair bit of the time, this "fuzziness" of what the abilities really mean is fine in game terms - we just need a little plus or minus to dice rolls, and the player can describe the source of that little bonus or penalty however they like, whenever it comes up. But every once in a while it exposes the "gaminess" of the rules. It can be hard to countenance when PC A fails at a strength check that NPC B succeeds at due to the luck of the dice, when A is "stronger" than B.

If you don't read comments, here's lots of words!

To actually respond to Grell:

My bad experience with Goodkind was that I heard an audiobook of "Wizard's First Rule" and it was awful. But I realized later that it was an abridged version and they'd hacked it all up, which is why the plot made such little sense. Also, the voice acting was ridiculous. The Dragon Scarlet was a guy saying "I do declah" in falsetto. You see how this would go awfully.

So, I'll give him another try sometime, once that taste's washed out of my mouth.

You're absolutely right that if you don't distinguish cleric-magic and wizard-magic, you just have generic "spellcasters" and that's lame. At the same time, I always thought spell slots for clerics were a bit weird -- why can't they just holler out "Odin, save your loyal servant!" or something? Spell slots for wizards made more sense -- they were memorizing something every morning.

Jacob's the one who wanted to institute a new magic system without spell slots, not me, but the key thing he wanted was for magic to be mysterious and unpredictable, things-man-was-not-meant-to-know type stuff. I think he only wanted to get rid of spell slots to balance out that he was making wizard spells more random.

It's true that in D&D rules, saying "no spell slots" basically just makes sorcerers. Ya gotta remember that back in our day, there weren't no sorcerers, so they're a new thing for us. 3rd ed. lets you have your cake or eat it too: you can have pre-defined spells, or cast-on-the-fly. That's new for us (me anyway), and I didn't think of it at the time of the IMing. Jacob was just suggesting a sorcerer-with-random-effects scheme for magic made more sense to him, or would be fun to play, or something. I think. I really shouldn't put words in his mouth.

So, since you bring up clerics, here's some more random thoughts about that:

If'n I run the circus, I was thinking that cleric-magic should be much more faith-based. Like, when you get healed, you don't actually see wounds heal up or anything (after all, only the last few hp are supposed to be tangible damage: the rest represent luck and blessings of the gods and suchlike.) You get healed (blessed) by a cleric, and have faith that it does something. (And it does, in game terms -- you get hp.)

There's plenty of cleric spells that're already intangible in their effects, we just don't make a big deal about it: blessings and buffs and healings and so forth mostly just affect dice rolls and stats, not something the characters would actually see. I think it'd be good to keep up that facade -- for the most part, you can only assume that cleric spells are doing any good. And maybe, if you're not a devout worshipper, they aren't...

Another thought I have (and now I see this should've been a front-page ramble -- I mean, post) is that wizard-magic is already a little random: how much damage does a fireball do? Depends on what you roll. Sometimes it's kinda lame, and sometimes it's really cool. Ramping up that randomness might achieve the chaotic effect Jacob's going for.

One thing that I always thought should show up more often is fizzling a spell. (Except when I'm casting it, in which case it should always work.) There's always been nods this way or that to provide the chance of spell failure, but the idea is so horrifying that it's usually watered down enough that it almost never happens in practice.

If (a) fizzling spells didn't waste a spell slot and (b) the wizardy classes have some balancing compensation for the fizzling risk, I think it would be really entertaining and make magic much more "wild".

Final note: "spell slot" is a little ambiguous (to me). A sorcerer has a limited number of spells/day, and in that sense has "spell slots", but usually I think of it as meaning "the number of predefined spells for the day I have". Because I'm lazy, I'm going to assume that you can figure out which one I meant wherever I used the term. And if using one meaning makes me sound dumb, I meant it the other way. :)