F:AT Thursday Tales of the Arabian Nights and Physical over Digital

When you walk up to the velvet rope at the door of The Crystal Palace but get told that you aren't cool enough to enter, when you shuffle away with your self esteem in tatters and your spirits low, when you then run into a powerful sorceress who has a proclivity for practical jokes, when you offer to become her assistant but instead she informs you that you shall be her latest punchline as she turns you into a talking donkey, when you then follow your spirit guide in the form of a ghostly mule to the land of the Djinn, and when you then decided that the best way to introduce yourself is by charging into their yearly stockholders meeting and challenging the biggest and baddest of them all to a duel of magic....well you may not be pleased when the Djinn devours your brain like an almond cake and turns the husk of your body into a plaything for it's children until such time as they tire of it and cast the lifeless remains aside but you shouldn't be surprised. After all it's F:AT Thursday.

After a hiatus of several weeks due to various things which I shall not bore you with by relating, the True Believers gathered at the Secret Lair to renew their traditional night of board gaming. Well most of the True Believers were there. Josh was unable to show due to having a case of the "ultra lames".

Ok, ok....his excuse was legit and reasonable but still....

As was subtly implied in the opening paragraph, the game choice this week was Tales of the Arabian Nights. The story telling game of adventure, or more likely misadventure, in the lands of the exotic orient. As I have said before, it is an "experience game" if ever there was one. By which I mean, it is not a game you go into with a competitive spirit hoping to win. Not unless you're "That Guy/Gal".  Don't be "That Guy". You don't ever want to be "That Guy" and if you already are "That Guy", knock it off for Christ's sake.

The story  above is the one that was experienced by Uba and while it is difficult to do it justice on the page, in actuality, it was hilarious. And that is what this game delivers in spades, laughter. 

The thought occurred to me that this is a game dying for an iOS app. Rather than flipping through the large and expensive book to find the appropriate paragraph, you could make an app that has the charts and you just plug in the number and it would bring the appropriate paragraph right up. Other than a lot of typing or scanning, it wouldn't be that complex.

But then I thought again and came to the conclusion that it would be a horrible idea. Let's face it, the biggest draw of this game is to be the reader. The person with that fifty ton book of paragraphs reading out what ever hideous thing has just happened to the next player. Using your best overacting skills and dramatic voice.

If you take that away, if you loose that book, the weight and heft of it, the slick feel of the pages, the game becomes less. This in turn brought to mind the oft discussed question of the digital game over the physical.

Maybe I delude myself, but I don't think digital mediums will ever replace the physical entirely. Like with digital books, digital games may be cheaper, more convenient, take up no space, but it isn't the same. I want to be able to pick up my standie of Aladdin and move him across the map. Just like a real book, the feel and smell of it, provides something an e-reader cannot.

In the after game bull session we discussed weighty matters over which we have no control. We talked of the recent documentary that can be streamed over you-tube called "This is What Winning Looks Like" which gives a clear a-political view of the way things really stand in Afghanistan as the date for US withdrawal nears. I highly recommend it. 

We discussed which is a better situation for people with severe mental illness. The old way of having large state run institutions or the new way with group homes. If you ever had the misfortune to have to visit one of the old institutions when they were still prevalent, you know that they were no utopias. However the new way has led to many sufferers leaving the group home to live as "homeless" out on the streets.

We also attempted to quantify just how awesome Cape Cod brand salt and vinegar potato chips are. Like I said...weighty matters.