Subject: MN: MC: A (single) player's perspective

From: "Wayper, Paul" <WayperP@p...>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 15:46:04 +1000

On Monday, 10 May 1999 20:07, Dunx (Duncan Ellis)
[SMTP:DELLIS@u...] wrote:
> I await with baited breath (sic) for what you can do with the fish, boots
> and black rib nobblers that might be caught in the Thames. 

This causes me to ponder much on the nature of MC. If you'll indulge me
somewhat and bear with me, I hope we'll both come out of this with an idea
of where I'm heading.

The 1997/8/9 WMCC games were played in the very comfortable surroundings
provided by Rob at York. The IMCS workmen must have spent a great deal of
time labouring over the floor alone - the brass inlays in the wood, with the
various line colours in enamel, the beautifully precise symbols, the way MC
was subtly silver where everything else was brassy-gold - it all spoke to me
of the great respect the IMCS and the competitors have of the game. The
leather-upholstered player seats, with their token racks, small pegging
boards, and a Trellis Crescent-Master 2000 tastefully reworked in brass and
oak, were luxury. Even the spectator's galleries, with their comfortable
chairs with plenty of refreshments and old MC Player magazines, added to the
prestigious feel of the game.

Now, this is all a fiction - a little farrago of illusion I allow myself to
play to the standard I believe is expected of me. But, correspondingly, the
idea of players sitting there with token racks, pegging boards, pondering
over the board as white-gloved assistants move the pieces around with
miniature trowels is very much a part of my game of MC. Occasionally, one
requests a point of order from the adjudicator, who quietly types on his
keyboard and retrieves the relevant pages from the IMCS database. Players
make notes on the pads provided, and (rarer these days) enjoy a pipe or
glass of their favourite tipple, and mention occasional encouragements to
their opponents.

By now you're asking me what I'm talking about. My point is that MC is
played by people sitting around a board, with a small number of aids (token
racks, etc) but otherwise (generally) sedate. It is not a game played by
real people tramping across the wilds of London, nor is it a game where
people just yell out any old station on the LU. In general it involves
moving linearly (i.e. progressing through stations sequentially) but not all
the time - and the higher-order plays, such as Hodgkinson's Progression,
Pickerings and Paradoxes (pardon my alliteration), generally move over the
board in a much more complex pattern.

What I'm noticing is that there are an increasing number of proposals that
do not fit in with my illusion. I don't have a little doll sitting in front
of me with miniature clothing, or an IMCS-embossed notepad with a stylised
human to annotate; nor does one need the Trellis Crescent-Master 2000 for
all but the more difficult strunts and mappings. Walking serves the purpose
of moving when other movement is disabled - it does not simulate pulling on
the boots and mac and trudging the streets. Therefore, I find it difficult
to envision these new Proposals in my perception of playing MC.

This is not to say they're useless. I praise Ole and everyone else who has
made MN such an original and thought-provoking game. It takes about as much
time to make a move in MN as it used to take to play a PBM move - and people
charged money for that priveledge! So in a way this letter is recognising
that I have a somewhat old-fashioned and anachronistic view of proceedings.

But this is where I'm coming from, and this is the basis on which I propose
new Rules for the game and on which I vote. I guess my main point here is
that I want to know if other people feel a similar feeling. We've already
been ransacking the Encyclopaedia Morningtonia - should we make a few more
fundamental changes to the way play is performed? Or am I in an
evolutionary dead end?

Your thoughts welcomed,

Paul Wayper -- DPI ITS Computer Systems Officer
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From: kevan@d...
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 09:25:00 -0000

Paul said:-

> to envision these new Proposals in my perception of playing MC. 

As mumbled, I was very hesitant in the earlier days to include Edible
Possessions, since they seemed too much of a step away from
smoking-jacket Crescent - it's rather hard to picture Ruttsborough
pushing four Bronzes back into the Token Pool and requesting a Lukewarm
Burger (actual or symbolised) from the referee. 

However, I suspect our game would probably lose a lot of its current
atmosphere if we replaced food with "Velocity Increase Counters" and
Pigeons with "Park Release Tickets", or simply repealed these elements
because they didn't look right. Having some sort of real-life parallel
makes it easier to see what's going on; although in normal Crescent it's
perfectly reasonable for a player to cry "Aha, I'll cross-hatch the
Northern Line with a few Shifflings, and use couple of temporary
Akers-Douglas Podumes to block eastbound traffic on the Circle!", I'm
not sure that such tactics would be implementable under our Nomic
ruleset; it'd require far too much abstract reference, with players
having to remember the purposes of items with unhelpful names. 

On the other hand, I can't imagine a game of Crescent that didn't have
Striling and Huffing and Maelberg Variances; the arcane jargon is a very
pleasing aspect of the game, and making such things simpler or more
"realistic" (as the disasterous "Ramsay Street" attempted to) would be
far from welcome. 

There's obviously a line in the sand somewhere - I'm just not sure
where. The proposed Garments seem very borderline in their attempts to
create Possessions which behave "realistically"; it may or may not be
better to have a "Token Scoop" instead of Gloves, a "Murchison Targeter"
in place of Spectacles, and whatever. 

But, then again, these don't really work either - if I'm sat playing at
a board in the Diogenes Club, I don't expect to have to gather a little
pile of objects in front of me to keep track of the current game state.
Maybe I can stack a few tokens on the board as an aide memoire, but
little else should be necessary; Mornington Crescent is a game that can
be played and enjoyed over the radio, after all. We don't need Samantha
to latch a yellow metal contraption to Tim Brooke-Taylor's ankle to
remind the audience that he's in Spoon, we just remember it. 

And I think that's probably the key, really - that we need some
memorable shorthand to show that Dunx has been Knidded, that Ole has
paid the Tokens that allow him to pick up an extra Token from each
Station; our solution of "Possessions" seems entirely reasonable. If we
were playing face-to-face then we probably could survive without keeping
track of these, but shifting the game to a medium where a round can take
upwards of a week, we need some way to make note of the state of things.
And if we're going to have "real life" aspects to help us keep track, we
might as well implement amusing or interesting side-effects. 

On reflection, although Garments are taking our version of the game a
little further away from board-playable Crescent (although we've had
Hats for absolutely ages, of course), they add a lot to email- playable
Crescent - by grouping them as items of apparel rather than a mess of
disparate Token Scoops and Murchison Targeters, they give us the ability
to impose general rules for them (you must Wear them to gain their
bonus, you can't Wear more than one of the same type of Garment, etc.),
which is a Good Thing to these eyes. 

Over-realism is, as we've said, just going to get boring, but I think
we'll notice that boundary when we're in danger of hitting it.

Wondering how much of that made sense, so soon before lunch,

Kevan

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