Who owns you?

The past couple of days have had me thinking about expression, and the purposes behind it.

For those who might not know know, christian over at destination unknown considered giving up his gaming blog, a possibility that very naturally upset a lot of people. He's a great guy, generous and supportive. I for one enjoy reading his posts.

The trigger was ugly comment on a different blog, one that seems to exist mainly for the purpose of personal attacks on others in the community.

I want to believe there's a point to those attacks, a form of satire maybe, a deep insight, but like many I can't see it. That doesn't mean it's not there of course; luckily it doesn't hurt us to give the benefit of the doubt - there are suggestions we just ignore the blog and that seems to me a very reasonable course of action. Maybe reduced attention will help drain the poison and in time we'll see something more constructive going on. 

Then again, there aren't so many other levers in this case. Here's a thought - I wonder how many of us would exercise the power to shut that blog down, assuming we had it?

Anyone following events in the UK will know there's a media, legal and political situation playing out that's been long in development. There are some pretty hair-raising claims going mainstream. Is it possible that the executive and legislative branches - closely linked in the UK - are and have been for around 30 years now in thrall to a powerful international media network, that even the premier law enforcement authority is cowed?

Wouldn't we like to know. There's activity on an unusually broad front that suggests we soon could. For the analogy, one national newspaper is already being shut down.

Setting aside the specifics, we see an intriguing potential. And going deeper, recent history has more evidence of activities which may or may not be illegal, but seem at the very least inconvenient, embarrassing, undermining to current order, often shocking. What goes on in the real world can surprise even those of us used to imaginary.

Where am I going with this? Isn't this a gaming blog? Well, yes, but isn't gaming just an exploration of possibilities? We create worlds and populate them, make histories, solve mysteries, go deep. But we can only go as deep as our imaginations allow. And our imaginations developed and exist here, in this world, on this planet.

To a certain extent we're restricted by our knowledge of that world. How much do we really know of what goes on around us? How much can we know? How much we think about that? Seems natural in creating a world that we don't have all the knowledge we need to do it properly or even well. What kinds of thing might that be? Can we even express the ideas? One obvious thing that does seem missing in gaming is conspiracy. I know certain game systems and settings have lots, but others have next to none.

Recently ckutalik at Hill Cantons looked at how a game called Top Secret does it and how that interaction between characters and scheme could be applied further afield. It's a very interesting starting point. The ongoing machinations of a cabal or cabals motivated by a dark purpose or plain old profit could certainly be the driving force of a campaign, even in wargaming. Maybe especially in wargaming.

Anyway, I've rambled on. This kind of thing has been foremost in mind lately - if you've been following the development updates here, you might know I've been working on a conspiracy system to weave ideas like those for Hogintu into games and allow them to grow organically. I realised a while back the way to do it has been under my nose for weeks, in the Growing a tabletop concept, and I'm having a lot of fun following it up.

If anyone's wondering, the title of the post is riffing off this older one on characters.
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