7:00 – 4:30 ASRC PhD/NASA

• • Listening to repeat of America Abroad Sowing Chaos: Russia’s Disinformation Wars. My original notes are here
  • Finished World without End: The Delta Green Open Campaign Setting, by A. Scott Glancey
    • Overall, this describes the creation of the cannon of the Delta Green playspace. The goal as described was to root the work in existing fiction (Lovecraft’s Cthulhu) and historical fact. This provides the core of the space that players can move out from or fill in. Play does not produce more cannon, so it produces a trajectory that may have high influence for the actual players, but may not move beyond that. The article discusses Agent Angela, as an example of a thumbnail sketch that has become a mythical character, independent of the work of the authors with respect to Cannon. My guess is as the Agent Angela space became “stiffer” that it could also be shared more.
    • As a role-playing game, Delta Green’s narrative differs from the traditional narratives of literature, theater, and film because it offers only plot without characters to drive the story forward. It’s up to the role-players to provide the characters. Role-playing game settings are narratives not built around any specific protagonist, yet capable of accommodating multiple protagonists. Thus, role-playing games, particularly the classic paper-and-dice ones, are by their very nature vast narratives. (page 77)
    • During the designing of the Delta Green vast narrative it was decided that we would publish more open-ended source material than scenarios. Source material is usually built around an enemy of Delta Green with a particular agenda or set of goals, much like a traditional role-playing game scenario is set up, only without the framework of scenes and set pieces designed to channel the players through to a resolution of the scenario. The reason for emphasizing open ended source material over scenarios is that we were trying to encourage Keepers to design their own scenarios without pinning them down with too much canon. That is always a danger with creating a role-playing game background. You want to create a rich environment, but you don’t want to fill in so many details that there is nothing new for the players and Keepers to create with their own games. (Page 81)
    • If the players in a role-playing game campaign start to think that their characters are more disposable than the villain, they are going to feel marginalized After all, whose story is this-theirs or a non-player character’s? The fastest way to alienate a group of players is to give them the impression that they are not the center of the story. If they are not the ones driving the action forward, then what’s the point in playing a role-playing game? They might as well be watching a movie if they cannot affect the pacing, action, and outcome of a story. (Page 83)
  • Going to create a bag of words collection for post subjects and posts that are not from the DM, and then plot the use of the words over time (by sequential post). I think that once stop words are removed, that patterns might be visible.
    • Pulling out the words
    • Have the overall counts
    • Building the count mats
    • Stop words worked, needed to drop punctuation and caps
  • Yoast has an array that looks immediately usable:

    [ "a", "about", "above", "after", "again", "against", "all", "am", "an", "and", "any", "are", "as", "at", "be", "because", "been", "before", "being", "below", "between", "both", "but", "by", "could", "did", "do", "does", "doing", "down", "during", "each", "few", "for", "from", "further", "had", "has", "have", "having", "he", "he'd", "he'll", "he's", "her", "here", "here's", "hers", "herself", "him", "himself", "his", "how", "how's", "i", "i'd", "i'll", "i'm", "i've", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "it's", "its", "itself", "let's", "me", "more", "most", "my", "myself", "nor", "of", "on", "once", "only", "or", "other", "ought", "our", "ours", "ourselves", "out", "over", "own", "same", "she", "she'd", "she'll", "she's", "should", "so", "some", "such", "than", "that", "that's", "the", "their", "theirs", "them", "themselves", "then", "there", "there's", "these", "they", "they'd", "they'll", "they're", "they've", "this", "those", "through", "to", "too", "under", "until", "up", "very", "was", "we", "we'd", "we'll", "we're", "we've", "were", "what", "what's", "when", "when's", "where", "where's", "which", "while", "who", "who's", "whom", "why", "why's", "with", "would", "you", "you'd", "you'll", "you're", "you've", "your", "yours", "yourself", "yourselves" ]

  • Good, progress. I’m using TF-IDF to determine the importance of the term in the timeline. That’s ok, but not great. Here’s a plot: 
  • You can see the three rooms, but they don’t stand out all that well. Maybe a low-pass filter on top of this? Anyway, done for the day.