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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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In his nightstand-straining novel Matter, British science fiction author Iain M. Banks wrote an impassioned and thickly-plotted allegory that was not about how to hack reality and cheat at life.
This made no sense whatsoever, given that for more than 500 pages he hinted that the "real" world was nothing more than a simulation, a game, with one character wondering if this were true, then how does one cheat? And all this as a newbie starfaring civilization in britches three sizes too big engages in subterfuge and mass misdirection in order to concentrate their war fleet within first-on-the-scene striking distance of a newly discovered, impossibly ancient alien MacGuffin that may or may not be the Ultimate Cheat Code.
But it isn't, and no more attention is paid to this idea, something that becomes increasingly clear as you begin to run thin on pages before the end, thinking first wow, this is gonna be one slam-bang wrap up with only a hundred pages left! Then, okay, he's got a lot to do in these last 50 pages, but what do I know? I've never won a Hugo or Nebula. And finally, the sick realization that there are just not enough sheets on the roll left to handle the enormous dump you just took.
And so it is with dice.
Dice are platonic solids* that use the interaction of the physical properties of the universe -- gravity, mass, kinetic energy, elastic collisions, friction, and latent psychic ability -- as the machinery with which to generate random numbers.
Which is silly, since we can simulate all that crap on tiny, electronic pocket machines that we can simply tap like a horribly complicated Pop-O-Matic™ bubble to get the same effect.
Fig. 1 -- This is what God sees when he looks down on your "problems".
Or get your friend who got a "real" degree to write a computer program to generate a million random numbers, print them out and simply cross them off one-by-one as you use them up. While it might make you look like a crazy person, such a method should last you your entire gaming life.
It's all the same, right?
I don't know about you, but I want dice for the same reason I prefer honest-to-god pinball machines over simulated ones. A well-timed pelvic thrust will nudge a real ball off course while humping an Xbox is just ridiculous, at least without one of those secret Japanese peripherals.
Also, latent psychic abilities don't work on digital information systems the same way they do on the spinning wheel at the carnival for the simple fact that the powers of the mind are not hosted on sub-levels of the Grand Simulation. They are firmly grounded in reality, requiring at least a weak interaction with actual (non-virtual) luckytron particles.
This is why you can't have other people fondle your dice, or even look at you, when you roll. And everyone knows that if you allow someone else to "call it" the kitten in the box suddenly transforms into a baseball bat-wielding maniac five years down the timestream from you. Can you dodge him? What if you skip brushing your teeth to save an extra couple seconds every day? Or delay the next departure out your front door by 12 counted breaths? Or is destiny a bulldozer fired out of an invisible howitzer beyond a horizon assembled from the clockwork of false choice?
This is the question dice answer. Roll them and they will say:
Fig. 2 -- WHARRGARBL
How can all this be true? Take the Magic 8-Ball™, for example: it's merely an icosahedron bobbing in scry juice. (Don't pry it open -- that crap will make you impotent.) And how often does it give you an answer you can't rationalize? Never, that's how often.
Fig. 3 -- Putting the platonic into solids one wish at a time.
Dice:
 Let you take advantage of the fine granularity programmed into the top-level simulation that is reality
 Can be charged with luckytron particles from your hands
 Are susceptible to psychic "nudge".
Let's see you do that with your so-called "app".
Fig. 4 -- Quick! Make it a three. YOU CAN'T BECAUSE IT'S NOT REAL.
*Except for the 10-sider. I don't know what the hell that thing is.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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HiveGod wrote: *Except for the 10-sider. I don't know what the hell that thing is.
A decagon. But that isn't really relevant to the subject at hand...
Dice.
Deep in the core of your being, past that glowing ember of a soul you imagine you possess, beyond the twisted helix that passes for genetic material encoding your physical nature, penetrating that ephemeral veil of intangible thought you might recognize as your mind, somewhere at the heart of all essence, you are cognizant of a tantalizing possibility of endless promise.
You could, had you the power, control those puissant, pulsing, polyhedrals if only... if only...
In some heightened mental state brought on by terrible excesses of caffeine and the zen crunch of too many cheesy poofs, you witness those hardened gems of possibility arc and tumble through the air as they leave your hand, an impossible dance of chaos theory in a whirl of motion just inside perceptible.
And they land.
And you know it. If you'd tossed them a little differently. If that puff of butterfly wing a thousand years ago on another continent had sustained another microsecond and you, despite your mortal failings, could have accounted for it, then you would have controlled how that die fell.
It has reality. Substance. Meaning. It offers the promise that it could be comprehended. Understood. Subjected to a tightening web of quantum observation that makes Heidegger check his math.
If only.
Then maybe you wouldn't roll like crap. Like you always do.
But that immortal power is only in the hands of Fate. Though it tempts us, entices us, seduces us, it lies within our vision but beyond our control... an El Dorado of chance, just over the next hill, a golden city where the dice always land ones down. In spite of the impossibility of control, the frustration of failure, and the incomprehension of the unknowable, again we throw them.
Good luck.
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Key Locks
United States
Indianapolis
Indiana
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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cosine wrote: HiveGod wrote: *Except for the 10-sider. I don't know what the hell that thing is. A decagon. But that isn't
a Platonic solid. It turns out Plato was a hater of percentile systems.
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Tod Kuykendall
United States
California
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HiveGod wrote: And so it is with dice. Dice are platonic solids*
What that really means is while the dice like you they don't like like you. I mean they like you fine... but not in that way... But we can still be, you know, like completely like platonic friends.
This is the crux of the issue. We really do, in an uncomfortable way we don't usually talk about, have an actual relationship with our dice. In researching dice I found an article on-line written by a guy who had a set of dice he really loved - and they loved him back. He made his crucial roles at crucial moments and they never let him down. He was writing the article because after the bitch goddess that is the dice finally turned on him so badly that he decided to actually bury those dice in his yard to get rid of them. I knew exactly why he was doing it and it didn't seem nearly as weird me as it should have.
Such is a gamer's relationship with his dice and it is an actual relationship. They are physical objects who have participated in - even driven and determined our fates - our non-physical adventures. They are the physical link between this world and the outcomes in our self-inflictedcreated "other" world. Dice are physical manifestations in this world of fate and chance from the "other side". At the worst moments the causal relationship seems to run the other way and they are simply reporting back the results and outcomes from the other side rather than determining it. They might as well be little Ray Harryhausen animated gods that spring to life and narrate the sad tales of our characters fates.
Always remember that while the other gods like you well enough... they don't really like like you.
=Tod
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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Hiredman wrote: They are physical objects who have participated in - even driven and determined our fates - our non-physical adventures.
This made me shudder. Creepy, but true.
Your post made me flash on Borges' The Lottery in Babylon. It's the unsettling "dice reporting back from hidden dimensions" thing. It's not... real, but the brain, being a pattern-recognition device, sure makes it "feel" real.
Now I don't want to touch the damn things.
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Eric Dodd
New Zealand
Martinborough
Wairarapa
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We were playing Nuns on the Run (Nuns on the Run! Lord help us!) last night, and what was the main topic of after game conversation? Was it the overly complicated line of sight mechanism, the slightly creepy pictures of young novices or the odd mixture of "secret wishes they have?
No.
It was all about "if only I had rolled a 5 or a 6 that turn I would have heard Angelica and caught her. I rolled a 1, used up my blessing card to re-roll and then rolled a 2. God wanted the novices to win" No matter how weird the game, it is the dice that make the narrative that lives in our brains after wards.
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Great book review, Chris. I thought he really pulled the punch at the end... it was right out of the what-not-to-do section of Spinrad's SF In The Real World.
I'd like to see your two cents on John Fowles for your next Iron Reviewer entry.
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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I'm the first to admit the link is tenuous. One of the things that excited me about the book (before we get to the exploding head part) was all the intimation of nested realities and layers of simulation, with the most accurate place to do things being hosted in matter, hence the title. Of course, I read waaay too much into it.
But it made me think about dice. You can program a random number generator, or a physics engine that actually "rolls" virtual dice on a screen, or even put slips of paper in a cup... but actually tumbling a physical object across the table is best. Other methods are suspect and unsatisfying. You can't blow on those electrons as they cascade through logic gates. You can't infuse that animated picture of a die with hope.
Touching dice, rolling them, lets us believe we are active agents in determining the outcome -- a lie, yes, but a brilliant, comforting one.
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Calavera Hermosa
United States
Tucson
Arizona
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sbszine wrote: Great book review, Chris. I thought he really pulled the punch at the end... it was right out of the what-not-to-do section of Spinrad's SF In The Real World.
Agreed. I was intensely disappointed by Matter. Squandered potential. But he is always sort of like this. He did the same thing in Consider Phlebas and in The Algebraist.
On the other hand, Dan Simmons' Illium and Olympos sort of deals with the exact same nature of reality meta-question that Banks brings up but fails to answer and does it with a deft and playful ruthlessness. I recommend 'em, if you can get past the robots arguing about Proust. Ooh, and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. But only at the very end. And you have to wade through math monks to get there.
As to the dice? Dramatic event generators. It's not the outcome, good or bad, that the numbers on them come to represent. It's the dramatic tension of not knowing the future, and that joyful or tragic sense of surprise and discovery when they are tossed and come to a rolling halt to reveal the outcome of an event for better or for worse that makes them work at all. There is no similar equivalent to clicking an iPhone or crossing the next number off of a list, because those events have no resonant drama to them. I would argue that it is the moments when a player casts the dice that the game become more than just a game--it is the moment when the artificial reality of the narrative breaks through the the glass ceiling and becomes an event in our world. It's no wonder shamans and witchdoctors used knucklebones as mystical objects for divination.
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Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
