Abstract Art and SC

[Desert Dave]

Abstract Art exploded into human consciousness 'round about the early 20th century, principally due to:

1) Photography. Who could ever paint a picture more definitive than... a photograph? What's the use of keeping on with plain old canvas and paint?

2) Strictures of the Salon. Of course!! creative artists will ALWAYS chafe at petty rules and restrictions... it's what they DO. It's why we are all not... AUTOMATONS.

Who says there needs to be proper perspective, and symbology that is classical, or a proportionality that is... strictly according to a certain... received wisdom?

As dictated by some pretty elitists lounging around a drawing-room, absolutely remote and REMOVED from the flux & flow of steet ruckus?

3) Reaction to Technology. Humans are diminished and even threatened by new machinery and better ways to utilize it. In an industrial State, individual and/or collective consciousness is fragmented and indifferently abused.

4) Emergence of Psychology. Especially dream interpretations and thorough examination of motives and desires and fretful impulses. No longer can we blame the Demons or some other rudimentary superstitions, no matter that some of them are probably... accurate and intutive.

So.

What has this got to do with SC, 1 or 2?

1) Like photography, MANY WW2 GS games are out there, in board or pixel-language.

No need to COPY or IMITATE... anything!!

It doesn't MATTER what some other designer has done, especially if he is merely faithful to some statistical pattern or exacting OOB or "realistic" tank production schedule.

Why make a photograph of ANY other WW2 game? No matter how wildly popular... once upon a distant time?

2) Salon imperatives. There will ALWAYS be self annointed "experts" in any field who will be "guardians" of what they privately believe to be... the good order.

Well, "good order" NEVER makes something... new and world-shaking and life-changing. It just NEVER does. And never will.

Better to ignore all the critics and mimics and staid old Conservatives.

Make something... UNIQUE!! :eek:

3) Computer technology allows... amazing advances in what was, only yesterday, thought impossible. Whether this is in graphics, or AI, or computational calculations, the next game may very well appear... strange and hard to handle... for a while.

Until the staid old game-players can come to terms with the amazing!! new parameters.

4) The "psychology" of it all. Put aside your preconceived notions and pause and consider... WHENEVER you change your habits, or closely examine your dreams (... with an inner eye attuned to ABSTRACT symbols and... what I will call... "soul-art"), then you are... a DIFFERENT person.

So WHAT!!!!

If an airborne brigade doesn't FIT onto a 50 mile hex in the SAME way that an Army does, so what!!

As long as you get the appropriate EFFECT of having this "abstract unit" on the playing field, WHAT DOES IT MATTER if the BRIGADE is smaller than the Corps?

Why are you so AFRAID of... seeing some pattern in a new... GESTALT.

Let's set aside our everyday and ordinary ways of observing visual phenomena... it will set us... FREE!!

To appreciate that the World, whether confined to a hex-map of Europe in WW2, or as you stroll along whistling and singing show-tunes there upon your neighborhood side-walk, is MORPHIC, and EPHEMERAL.

May we... OPEN UP!!

Let the new SC2 ... amaze us, and charm us, and above all else... let it arrive as though it were a fresh and daring approach to WW2 GS gaming.

Pretend that Hubert is... Picasso presenting Guernica to an astonished (... AND, highly resistant public) or Odilon Redon smiling at you from behind an immense and foreboding Cyclops.

In other words, be ready... for... ANYTHING!! :cool:

And forget all that stressful concern & worry that some ABSTRACTION will RUIN our Life.

It won't.

Shoot, we could EVEN allow... mobile artillery, or Recon units, or Destroyers or... a naked Panzerwagen... descending a shimmering glass staircase???

[JerseyJohn]

"a naked Panzerwagen descending a shimmering glass staircase"

by -- Marcel du Cater!

Excellent, Immer.

A lot of that is what I was driving for last year when we had those threads going for an expanded campaign editor and then it went further into an independant War Game Construction Kit. It would be fun to have something with a map generator where the map and unit scale could be varied -- possibly down to simulating a local revolution of irate wives against their husbands, led by General Thurber.

Enjoyed it, hope something develops from these excellent ideas.

[JerseyJohn]

Meanwhile, in a subterrainian cavern, Hubert carefully considers these new and fascinating considerations:

"Panzerwagons descending staircases, variable map and unit scales, wars between husbands and wives --!"

[ February 17, 2004, 11:32 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Les the Sarge 9-1]

Immer if ever we get around to an SC thread Hall of Fame, your first post on this thread is sure deserving as being inductee number One

You said what you said amazingly well (which is odd considering it was you that said it does anyone ever truely understand Immer? ).

I agree fully. Its time designers stopped copying each other methods and ways, and proved they can think beyond compiling mere code.

Any doofus can learn code and programming, but it takes an artist to make it look like anything worth looking at.

I am SICK! ya hear SICK of bloody hearing how 3d will save wargaming. Makes me think of some friggin televangelist everytime I have to stomache listening to it.

I know that hexes are not the center of the universe, they merely work. Nothing special about hexes though.

And turns, they add structure, but so what. Structure is good for holding up a house, but it isn't everything. Its just I find it painfully annoying being told Real time is the only way to move forward. Phooey.

Most revolutionary wargame to date for me, has to be the card using Up Front. No counters, no turns, no map, no hexes, no boundaries. It takes a good poker player to win in a good game of Up Front too. So being a grognard won't always count.

And I have played it against two women who could care less about history or wargames or games at all.

Try saying that about yer gosh darned RTS crappola I say.

Hubert with SC, showed us that a great game is not about cute counters that animate, nor is it about spiffy 3d maps. It's all whether the game is any good at all.

I personally think Hubert with his SC, can easily join the ranks of the guys that gave us Civilization, Close Combat Steel Panthers and Panzer General. All games that were runaway successes because they merely did what they did and did it well.

If it uses real time, it isn't so danged unique. If it's in 3d some what everything is in 3d.

I want something original.

Maybe the next breakthrough with luck will be in AIs. Would be nice.

Think of a wargame that logs every game you play, and every move you make, and data bases all that data, and then lets you teach it how to beat your atypical moves.

Wouldn't it be a hoot if say Rambo couldn't beat his own self in a game heheh.

God that would be funny him whining about houserules against himself hehe

[Desert Dave]

Thank you for the generous comments Les the Sarge, 9-1, ... you are no fallen-away sparrow when it comes to original and apt observations.

And also appreciate the sly Pic from JJ, ... who would remind me, and us,

That the coding and implementation of new!! and mostly amazing!! stuff is... necessarily difficult, if not nigh on IMPOSSIBLE, especially

When you are a one-man game designer, as Hubert is.

I guess I was advising all of us, me included, to be... honestly open and receptive to WHATEVER it is that might arrive and NOT to... LIMIT the gaming possiblities.

However, very true that SC2 MUST resemble other WW2 GS games to some certain extent, since you are not playing Nazi Space Ranger or setting up splashy miniatures for the Boer War. :eek:

I will be truly and tremendously!! happy with ANY dedicated effort that... TRIES to improve on the WW2 GS-genre, HOWEVER it might eventually appear.

[ February 17, 2004, 12:54 PM: Message edited by: Immer Etwas ]

[pzgndr]

I am SICK! ya hear SICK of bloody hearing how 3d will save wargaming. ... I want something original.

3D? How about 10-dimensional Calabi-Yau spaces, G2 manifolds, and such? And rather than arguing about specific unit types and specific capabilities, how about applying the quantum mechanical concept of wave functions to all units where they then become capabale of doing everything with some statistical probability of actual result? And applying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which would allow units to get away with incredibly powerful activities if only for a very short impulse of the turn? But you couldn't actually observe such things during your turn, oh no, because that would disturb the thing you're trying to observe. You'd only get some cryptic summary result message at the end of the turn stating something outrageous. But that ensures replayability, because you wouldn't know what to expect next. :cool:

Just kidding guys! Discussion was getting a little artsy, so nothing like physics to crank it up a notch.

[JerseyJohn]

"...nothing like physics to crank it up a notch!"

[Les the Sarge 9-1]

Crank it up a notch??

Who let Emeril (cook) in the room

[pzgndr]

Ah JerseyJohn, the Binford Model 6100 Atomic Device! Arg, arg, arg!

But's that's all "basic" nuclear physics which is halfway understandable. Some of the new stuff about String Theory and other topics is downright bizarre.

Back on topic and to echo Immer Etwas, we should all be prepared to broaden our minds a bit and evaluate new things based upon their merits. Hubert knows best where all of our many many great suggestions made in the past will intersect with the reality of his computer programming talents. We were impressed once, so we can expect to be impressed again.

[Dragonheart]

JJ your picture looks like what zapp wann do with me and my axis units when he looses air superiority.

[Les the Sarge 9-1]

Picky question for JJ, which kaboom was that kaboom in the picture (I am actually familiar with most kabooms and always like to find new ones).

[JerseyJohn]

pzgndr Glad to have provided the nostalgia -- agree with your point about seeking and welcoming change. Gave up on comprehending physics long ago when a friend put the Big Bang into simple terms for me. I watch the Science Channel alot, mostly uncomprehendingly, but the other night Black Holes warping the fabric of the universe and all that actually started coming to me, I saw it -- almost saw it -- and then a commercial knocked me back down Mt Ignorance leaving me in the Bogg of Bliss.

What I really love is when some guy with ten doctorates gets up in front of the camera, smiles, and says something like, "Picture the Universe as a Huge Blueberry Muffin and our sun is located in a part of one of the Blueberries we see as a group of galaxies ..." I always expect the next part to be, "Now picture a giant taking a bite out of the muffin and our sun is being swallowed ..." I'm not brave enough to watch things like that! :confused:

Dragon Know the feeling, most of my games end up in exactly that same sort of blowout!

Les, I'll have to find which blast it was taken from. As for the bomb itself, pzgndr referred to it, with a freightening tint of affection, as the "Binford Model 6100 Atomic Device!"

This is the link I got the picture from:

http://thumb2.sac.overture.com/image/478944530

when I try going into it it says it isn't available, but when I originally linked it here there was an article with the photo. It came up with the key words nuclear blast. Here's hoping you find yet another Kaboom!

[ February 17, 2004, 07:31 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Les the Sarge 9-1]

Black Holes are predictably interesting, because, well, they eat everything, reality included.

I mean physics supposedly actually breaks down under those incredible conditions.

But what blows me away is the subject of White Holes. Which if I have followed correctly, are lesser not so massive creations.

And while Black Holes are sucking up, White Holes are spewing forth. Or in the case of what I have read, they are not stealing reality and time into a no way back death, they are actually spitting out the past or reverse time.

Which is sure interesting for the ramifications on our portion of reality out here in boring space.

Because what it means, is there is no beginning nor end. Or in other words, the universe now created, will continue to exist indefinitely as Black Holes swallow up, and White Holes return what we call "reality".

Or to annoy the religious crowd. There won't be an end any time soon.

[JerseyJohn]

Okay, and where does that hot blueberry muffin fit in? There was a commercial and I flicked channels -- when I returned they were past the muffin and talking about throwing a zillion grains of sand down an endless, uh, ... :confused:

[Desert Dave]

As originally posted by JerseyJohn:

Okay, and where does that hot blueberry muffin fit in?

Andy Warhol ... that dear departed, dear demented Beaste Artiste ... would

REPLICATE it... 40 times over!! (... as with those dearly-droll Campbell's Soup Cans),

On a silken bed-sheet... retreived from the boudoir of... Candy-Dandy the Uptown Porn Queen,

And drape it, he would... flippantly!!

from a piano-wire clothes-line in

Ash-Can Alley, New York, New York!! ... and so,

The bleeding blueberry residue seeps eventually into common Cogniscente consciousness where it will finally congeal and put an end to 23 little precious Art magazines, practically overnight.

And folks would make pilgramage from all over the Western Art World, and most especially France... IF ONLY

To see this dearly designed Muffin-display... Just the ONCE,

Before they might deprive Crude, Crass Civilization of their own avante garde Art expertise, and die.

This rippling bed-sheet would be all the rage... at least until the next Basquiat might come indolently hip-hopping along, WHO

Would rip that silken travesty (... his own considerably informed opinion, only) from off the drooping clothes-line and wear it in... absolutely scandalous disdain!!

As a head-scarf (... given that his head is necessarily 44 times larger than yer average working stiff who is not privileged to know the inner magnificence of... such esoteric and privately appreciated Post-Apocalyptic... Art.

This answer your question JJ?

[Jim Boggs]

Originally posted by JerseyJohn:

knocked me back down Mt Ignorance leaving me in the Bogg of Bliss.

Next time I would appreciate a phone call in advance of your arrival. :mad: :mad:

[JerseyJohn]

Immer

You've not only answered it, but have somehow magnified it all approximately 44 times!

I will never be able to see a blueberry muffin in quite the same way again!

[ February 18, 2004, 02:31 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[JerseyJohn]

James,

I'd have phoned but I was slipping and sliding and rolling and screaming for help and ...

BTW, it's much nicer down here than on those dizzying heights of enlightenment! Also, Newton, Copernicus and Einstein send their regards.

Those photographs of houses vanishing in sinkholes in the Tampa Thread at GF reminded me of a distant memory from my happier times as a Floridian ...

(And what's with that deranged brainbaked Texan making such a big deal over my saying I thought Houston was drier than Tampa? I did mention I only went through the place a few times 35 years ago, didn't I? But he didn't quote that up there with his rainfall tables -- sick, sick, sick!)

Anyway, getting back to the point, I thought you, being a Floridian, as I wish I presently were, might enjoy this.

When The Empire Strikes Back first came out, viewing it in a large new theater full of viewers, the scene comes along where Luke Skywalker and company go to Yoda's Swamp Planet and land in that, shall we say, pool. The spacecraft sinks with a slurp, slurp, slurp ... The audience, really into the movie, and some wag way back screamed, "They landed in Kissimmee!"

Okay, not much of a memory after all but at least I know you aren't about to post rainfall tables like the guy from Houston and ... I mean, you really aren't about to, right?! :eek:

[ February 18, 2004, 03:42 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]