Only a Game

Games News from June

Some stories from my blog cluster that caught my attention:

• Valve is being sued for not shutting down the gambling at sites such as CSGO lounge, and thus being implicitly involved in illegal gambling. Note that no-one has yet sued them for the internal economy of the drops-with-microtransactions in the game, which could equally be considered infringing on gambling laws from a certain light. (Story via Slashdot).
• At the other end of the economic scale, Gamesbrief has a piece on Hadean Lands a low-rent contemporary text adventure selling on Steam for £8.99, to which you can add DLC to make it £26.99. What’s the DLC? A Certificate you sign to promise you won’t use hints to complete it. Clever marketing for a game that adheres to the puzzle-driven practices of a classic genre.
• Meanwhile, the new publisher of Wikipedia Knows Nothing, ETC Press, has released Volume 1 of Analog Game Studies. While ‘analogue games’ is a foul piece of retroactive slander against boardgames, this is a magnificent collection of scholarly work on the form – and you can get it for free.
• In sadder boardgame news, Goro Hasegawa has died at the age of 83. Hasegawa-san is famous for creating the boardgame Othello, which famously marketed with the phrase “A minute to learn… a lifetime to master”. (Story via Purple Pawn).
• And finally, one of Purple Pawn’s writers, Yehuda, is also my favourite capsule film reviewer. Along with other reviews, check out his dismantlement of X-Men: Apocalypse, which faithfully recreates the tedium of Apocalypse in the comics.

More nonsense soon!

Soon, Everyone Can Know Nothing

As I write, I’ve just clicked ‘send’ on the email that will take the author edited manuscript of Wikipedia Knows Nothing and deliver it to the new publisher. The book is being distributed with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (“Share”) license, making this my first free ebook. With luck, it will be available in time for DiGRA/FDG in August, but we’ll see how the winds of fate are blowing this Summer…

More news on my newest book as and when it comes in!

The Aesthetic Flaws of Games - in Polish

The wonderful Ewa Stasiak has begun work translating some of my work on games into Polish over at a new website Hobo Nest. The first post is based on last year’s The Aesthetics Flaws of Games, which she translates as Wady Estetyczne Gier. Here’s an extract:

Sednem jest, by zrozumieć, że reguły gry, jej mechanika i systemy są reprezentacjami bardzo szczególnego rodzaju – mianowicie reprezentacjami matematycznymi. Ważne jest, by to sobie uświadomić, gdyż nieczęsto zauważamy, że liczby i formuły są u podstaw przedstawieniowe, mimo iż jest to powszechnie przyjęte w ogólnym zarysie. Liczba trzy jest reprezentacją mocy zbioru: każdy zbiór trzech elementów, na przykład trzy reguły światów gier, jest więc reprezentowany przez liczbę trzy. Podobnie kształt krzywej dzwonowej, który przedstawiamy na wykresie funkcji Gaussa dla (powiedzmy) dwóch sześciościennych kostek, reprezentuje dystrybucję rezultatów rzutu nimi. Właśnie dlatego, że matematyka może i musi przedstawiać – przedmioty ścisłe, które wdrażają równania (jak fizyka) są w stanie otrzymywać formuły, które oddają zjawiska takie jak grawitacja i przepływ elektryczny.

So if Polish is the language for you, and you’ve longed to read my work in a Western-Slavonic tongue, head on over to Hobo Nest and check out Wady Estetyczne Gier!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

The Scientific Age?

Do we live in a ‘Scientific Age’? What would that phrase mean, and how could we judge – scientifically – if it were true?

I recently read a piece in The Atlantic on free will that disappointed me. I’d already been checking up on the state of the art for this topic (see Is Free Will Too Cheap?), which has become particularly interesting in recent years. But nothing of that could be found in the piece in The Atlantic, which felt suspiciously more like a poor excuse for a Sam Harris interview. The article closed by tacitly declaring that we live in “the scientific age” – and that rather amused and annoyed me. Because if that were a fair characterisation of our time, would that not be blaming scientists for our rather dreadful global predicament? My sense of this, as a scientist by training, is that there is no empirical basis for such an attribution, and that rhetoric (rather than evidence) is what motivates such an assertion.

To properly explore this, we must first ask: what does it mean to characterise an Age? For the most part, the practice of defining Ages has entailed a historical or mythological assessment. Hence, for instance, the attribution of a Golden Age in ancient Greece, which was a mythic time before humanity messed everything up. The Age of Sail and the Age of Steam were likewise retroactive attributions, albeit in these cases based on historical rather than mythological considerations. It actually makes more sense to make these kinds of assessment after the fact, since only then can the relative competing factors be weighed carefully against each other – although even then, the choice to assign an ‘Age’ shows a bias in focus at the very least.

It is only with the twentieth century that we see attempts to characterise history in the present tense – and even these seem relatively dubious upon later reflection. The Atomic Age built upon fantasies about the future born of the New York World’s Fair of 1939, but as it happened nuclear energy did not characterise much of an Age, since it gave way within decades to the Space Age, which was equally short-lived. The frequent use of ‘space-age’ as a marketing adjective links both these science fiction tales to the flourishing capitalist production line – and indeed to their rhetorical deployment against the Soviet production line that was almost indistinguishable apart from its overriding mythology. Industry, either side of the Iron Curtain, was much more important than science, which was (and is) industry’s bitch.

This analysis is not scientific, of course, but rather historical and political. Our second line of enquiry must then ask: what do we mean by ‘scientific’? The usual invocation here is ‘the scientific method’, the cycle of observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing, and eventual theory. However, empirical observation of scientists at work has not validated this as a general method applied by researchers, and it appears to operate more as a catechism than as a practical methodology. (You would not get very far using solely this method as-stated for a research project!) A key problem is that observations are themselves theory-laden, and as the historian Thomas Kuhn observed it is never the case that observations alone determine how one theory replaces another. The wider philosophical questions here are not vital to the current discussion, however, only that ‘the scientific method’ is not a means of distinguishing what is scientific from its alternatives, regardless of its uses as an educational dogma.

Central to what is deemed ‘scientific’ is evidential reasoning, the process of taking evidence (observations, measurements) and then drawing conclusions from it. Theories form an indispensable element of such reasoning: the theoretical apparatus provided by the periodic table guides evidential reasoning in chemistry, for instance. But by itself, evidential reasoning can only exclude things that are clearly not scientific (such as divine revelation, or faith in free markets), it cannot positively identify a science. It’s notable, for instance, that evidential reasoning is core to the skills of historians, who are not often called scientists, and every branch of the humanities uses evidential reasoning in some role.

What distinguishes most things that are called ‘scientific’ from other disciplines that deploy evidential reasoning is the possibility of verifying judgements, a point discussed at length by Karl Popper. Evidential reasoning in the humanities invites a relationship between propositions and conclusions, yet the propositions themselves entail an element of judgement but not of measurement. Conversely, ethology (study of animal behaviour) entails judgements that are open to verification by further observation. This field, which does not resemble the archetypal ‘scientific method’ at all, nonetheless entails a substantial element of verifiable judgement.

Yet a grey area occurs. Some physicists insist, for instance, upon a quantum multiverse – the existence of which is essentially impossible. (Indeed, the word ‘existence’ has a questionable meaning in these kinds of context). We then might be tempted to extend ‘scientific’ to mean ‘asserted by scientists’, at which point the phrase will cease to distinguish anything useful. Many scientists will assert that George W. Bush was a fool, but that should not be mistaken for a scientific claim: that would require some means of verifying the judgment that was not merely anecdotal. We ought to be careful about this distinction if we value the work of scientists, since the credibility of the term ‘scientific’ is all too easily strained when we start deploying ‘Science says...’ as a form of prophetic persuasion.

Suppose we accept my provisional criteria for determining something as ‘scientific’. We can then ask: what would be required to scientifically judge our time as a ‘Scientific Age’? Immediately it should be clear that it will necessarily fail to qualify for this accolade; firstly because ‘scientific’ is not a criteria that could be applied on a scale beyond specific observations, methods, or practices, and secondly because the characterisation of an ‘Age’ is necessarily a historical judgement, and not one open to verification in the required sense. Of course, this doesn’t rule out the historical judgement in question – but it cannot be a scientific claim in any conventional sense of the term.

So what about the historical judgement? Here, we still have to meet the requirements of evidential reasoning and the evidence is not very convincing. We would presumably expect to see evidence of widespread evidential reasoning in culture at large – something that would be very difficult to produce. Where we do find it – in law, for instance – the trend goes back to before the aforementioned Age of Steam, indeed before the Age of Enlightenment, so using this to characterise our time seems to be extremely misleading.

Not a scientific judgement, not a historical judgement, what is the basis of claiming we live in “the scientific age”? Like the Atomic and Space Age, this appears to be a purely rhetorical move, presumably one intended to contrast our time with an ‘Age of Faith’. But characterising even the Middle Ages as an ‘Age of Faith’ would be a struggle for any honest historian, and until the late nineteenth century the development of the sciences was a quintessentially Christian endeavour (although it was also underwritten by earlier Islamic scholarship, which in turn carried on the work of the ancient Greeks).

The point of claiming that we live in a ‘Scientific Age’ appears to be to continue asserting the alleged war between ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’, and to further imply that ‘Science has won’. But this is simply bad evidential reasoning. As I explore in The Mythology of Evolution, the cultural conflicts that are being spun within this rhetoric occur both within the sciences (e.g. over different evolutionary theories) and between religion and non-religion (e.g. over the theological and atheological implications of said theories). Frankly, it is a hopeless task to treat the terms ‘Science’ or ‘Religion’ as unifying in anything beyond the sketchiest of senses, and even if these generalisations are accepted we ought to take note of Stephen Jay Gould’s objection that there cannot be a conflict between two almost entirely disjunct concepts.

I can find no evidence that positivists, those whose non-religious faith is invested in the sciences, are better or worse people than religious folks. But I can provide evidence that they are alike in many ways, including the example that I have discussed here. Rhetorical tactics such as asserting that we live in “the scientific age” are essentially self-betraying; they do not uphold the evidential values that positivists justifiably venerate. We can gainfully compare this to the reprehensible tendency of some Christians to endorse torture and war against Muslims, thus betraying the moral values of Jesus’ teachings, which they are supposed to venerate, or for a small minority of Muslims to betray Mohammad’s teachings by murdering innocents. If the latter cases are notably more extreme, it’s worth remembering that some positivists have also supported this kind of horrific brutality, it’s just that they are not being overtly hypocritical in doing so, ‘just’ morally repugnant. Every tradition, alas, has its darker side.

What positivists, Christians, and Muslims all have in common is that they are all human. As Charles Taylor argues in his epic tome A Secular Age, one of the most unique characteristics of our time is the sheer range of beliefs and practices on offer, having fractured and diversified in the wake of what he calls ‘the Nova effect’, forming an (all-too-real) phenomenal multiverse. However, as the examples I have given above demonstrate, we could rhetorically dub our time an ‘Age of Confusion’, an era when faithful adherence to the values of any tradition has become increasingly hard to find, while our critical faculties are frequently numbed by the easy appeal of emotive rhetoric – especially when we get to valorise ourselves while denigrating others. If, like me, you think the practices of the sciences deserve our respect, you owe it to yourself to uphold their core values concerning evidential reasoning and not slip into the cognitive biases that flourish as much today as in any other era of human history.

The opening image is Density of States by Dr Regina Valluzzi AKA ‘the Nerdly Painter’, which I found here on her Wordpress site, Nerdly Painter (used here with permission).

Prezi: Cyberfetish and the World of Tomorrow

For those of you who have brought a suitable device to the Red Gallery (or for interested souls not able to make it to the Futurism v Fatalism event), here is my Prezi for my presentation Cyberfetish and the World of Tomorrow so you can explore it with me:

Click the button to start the Prezi, then use the arrows (or arrow keys) to advance the slides, or you can explore the content freely by zooming in and out and dragging the canvas. I also recommend using the button in the bottom right to put it into full screen. You can also view it over at the Prezi website by following this link for the Cyberfetish and the World of Tomorrow Prezi.

Wherefore Philosophy? Whence Emotions?

An open letter to Chris Billows responding to his blog-letter Depths, Mirrors, and Mine Detectors at The Journals of Doc Surge as part of the Republic of Bloggers. Further replies welcome!

Dear Chris,

A particularly disturbing aspect of the era in which we live is the certainty with which some people admit to not understanding something, but then confidently dismiss or condemn it. We have taken to using a suffix derived from the Greek ‘phobos’ – fear – to describe such hatred... homophobia, Islamaphobia and so forth. The arguments against such reactions, which it seems really do involve fear, tend to invoke our ideals of diversity, a move that cannot work in practice and tends to lead to what I have called intolerant tolerance – the hatred of haters.

What a muddle we have all made of things! So it is that you yourself can claim a commitment to diversity, then pour scorn on the practitioners of an entire discipline who are “missing the boat”, engage in activities that are “complicated, prescriptive, and arcane”, “limited” and that amounts to “mental masturbation”. Wow – can’t help but wonder why you would want a discourse with me at all given such a terrible assessment! Joking aside, your phobosophy is not really your unique possession, but in fact a structural problem of our time – one well worth examining. (Doesn’t it seem like it should be ‘philophobia’? But that would be ‘fear of love’, which would be a very different problem!) If you genuinely want to make diversity your ideal, you need to understand how this rejection of philosophy undermines rather than supports your position, and for that I would first have to offer a different image of philosophy.

Hence the first question that heads this letter: ‘Wherefore philosophy?’, meaning ‘What is the purpose or reason for philosophy?’ And here we need to begin by clearing up the confusion we have created around the difference between a person’s philosophy and the discipline (or disciplines) of philosophy. For Brian Eno is correct that you can’t avoid doing philosophy, and thus everybody does it – although often badly. And unfortunately being a philosopher does not necessarily mean that you can help people with their philosophy, in part because of the insane specialisation that infects academia today, which has emerged from the formalisation of the sciences. It can indeed seem that academic philosophy is a waste of time – but that’s also true of a lot of scientific research, which oddly is rarely accused of this. And this points to the first of three crises of contemporary philosophy.

The first crisis is that ever since the sciences split from philosophy there has been a tendency to see this division as making philosophy redundant, instead of seeing that as well as continuing what was once called ‘natural philosophy’, scientists have begun doing other kinds of philosophy badly. Let’s call this the counter-philosophy revolt – the desire to tear down what philosophers do, and to fail to recognise what is replacing it. Secondly, in response to the revolt, philosophers have increasingly allied with those voices in positivism (i.e. elevation of the sciences) most hostile to philosophy, perhaps thinking aiding the sciences is now the only worthwhile task philosophy can perform. Call this collaboration. Lastly, and crucially, philosophy is assumed (as you say) to “make claims to provide a deeper understanding about life and its problems” – call this the authority on life problem.

I take your core complaint to be that philosophy is a poor guide for life if it ignores the emotions. My rebuttal has two elements. Firstly, why would you think philosophy ignores the emotions? In my experience, it is solely the collaborators who fall prey to this. Secondly, why would you think studying philosophical problems would grant authority at all? Perhaps the single greatest achievement of Modern Philosophy (a period, incidentally, that ended about a century ago) was the invention of autonomy, and thus our potential liberation from all centralised claims to authority, like that of the Christian church you criticised two letters ago, or the alleged authority of a rather nebulous thing called ‘Science’ invoked by counter-philosophy.

There may be no better place to start than looking at where contemporary ideas about emotions come from – namely Modern Philosophy. Hence the second part of my title: ‘Whence emotions?’

 

The Passions of Philosophers Past

Both Modern Philosophy and the word ‘emotion’ begins in the 17th century with Descartes. There is not a single philosopher in this era who views the emotions – or, as they are more commonly known at this time, ‘the passions’ – as anything less than an indispensable element of human life. It is Descartes’ 1649 Passions of the Soul that gives us the first systematic study of what we now call the emotions, although that particular word (which Descartes coined) meant little more than ‘motion’ (i.e. movement) at the time. Other terms in use in this century include ‘affect’ (particularly with Spinoza) and ‘sentiment’ (especially among British philosophers). As for the passions, this term was often reserved for those ‘violent’ feelings that were either particularly agitated or unresponsive to reason.

Questions about our emotional lives were the exclusive purview of philosophers at this time, since ‘science’ was just a synonym for ‘knowledge’, and (as I already noted) what we would call ‘science’ was known then as ‘natural philosophy’. A good half of Spinoza’s monumental Ethics in 1675 is concerned with defining and categorising the ‘affects’ and contemplating the possibility of freedom, discussions that obviously built upon Descartes. Spinoza, however, denied we could gain control over our passions – an argument that in many respects lives on today – and had a rather low opinion of every feeling more extreme than the kind of moderate joy that comes from being active. It is Spinoza who first puts reason and the passions into opposition, a tendency than many today – you included – have inherited.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopher (and incorrigible wag) David Hume offered an even more refined account of the passions, which he divided into ‘calm’ and ‘violent’ passions while noting that even calm passions can be strong and violent passions can still be weak. His most innovative idea in this respect may be to suggest that the passions are what motivates all our actions, and that reason would be impossible without them. His infamous remark that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” is still widely discussed today. In addition to his own substantial contributions to philosophy, Hume has the distinction of inspiring Kant, who famously described this experience as being wakened from his “dogmatic slumber”.

At the close of the eighteenth century, Kant develops an anthropology that has three different terms for what we would now call emotions. Two of them – affects and passions – are judged as hindrances, entailing a lack of morality and a motivation towards ‘evil’ respectively. Yet the third, feelings, are viewed as an aid to moral thinking, and indeed conducive to virtuous living. Despite the popular view of Kant as emotionally repressive, he continues the general tradition of Modern Philosophy in holding our emotional constitution essential to a life well-lived.

 

Logical Seduction

So if Modern Philosophy did not, as you erroneously alleged, exclude our emotional lives from importance – and, indeed, placed great value upon this side of being – where did it all go wrong? A full answer to this question goes far beyond what I can hope to cover here, but the shortest answer I can give is that excessive faith in the sciences messed everything up, and is still causing problems today. It is not that the sciences don’t do good work or aren’t useful, but rather there has been a kind of logical seduction that has affected primarily English-language philosophy, collectively termed Analytic Philosophy and contrasted (somewhat derisively) with ‘Continental’ Philosophy. Both Mary Midgley and I tend to point fingers at an early twentieth century movement known as the Logical Positivists, who seemed convinced it would be a simple matter to exorcise humanity of everything that was not the sure and certain revelations of empirical research. They were so very, very wrong about this, yet they still have conceptual descendants today.

The upshot of this is that treating philosophy as a monolithic enterprise and then making general pronouncements about it isn’t going to get anyone very far since the range of different methods and perspectives on offer within the field is vast. Those suffering from logical seduction are quick to make the accusation that the variety of positions within philosophy must show it must be deeply flawed in some way. The assumption is that if there is only one true world, all valid investigations must converge. E.O. Wilson calls this consilience (although the term was originally coined by the Modern Philosopher William Whewell) and there is clearly some validity to the idea of evidence converging. However, I urge anyone truly committed to diversity to be cautious about such simplistic unifying principles, since there is an ever-present risk of claiming a god-like capacity to adjudicate all truth-claims in an absolute manner, in total denial of the plurality of human existence. Here is a context where your concerns about narrow cognitive perspectives can indeed be manifested, and while it is a philosophy, it is one that is primarily peddled by certain scientists and their collaborators.

So wherefore philosophy? What is the reason to persist with an activity that can’t even agree with itself? Well, for a start, nothing is going to make philosophy go away so it would seem prudent for at least a few people to try to do it well. Also, lack of unequivocal consensus doesn’t seem to bother us in art, history, sport, literature and so forth so why single out philosophy? The answer appears to be the aforementioned authority on life problem: people tend to think philosophy is claiming to have the ‘ultimate answers’, even though no philosopher I know ever makes this assertion. The philosopher has been confused with the prophet, to everyone’s loss. Philosophy is so much more about exploring questions than it is about providing unshakeable answers, and the importance of this skill is all too easily missed.

The eclecticism of philosophy stems from the near-infinite space of ideas: rejecting philosophy as a discipline because of that vastness may simplify what a person feels they ‘need to know’, but it can’t plausibly change the true dimensions of the realm of possible concepts. Furthermore, people should not feel – as I fear explains the tendency to phobosophy – that they must oppose philosophy or else be condemned to get involved with its horrendous intricacies, as if no-one could truly claim knowledge without either practicing or negating philosophy. We are happy to defer both empirical and historical research to experts in those fields; we should feel the same way about what might be called the technical problems of philosophy. You are not lacking something essential if you can’t explain how Modern Philosophy established talk about the emotions any more than you are deficit in not being able to explain 14th century crop rotation – nor micro-crystallography for that matter! No-one – quite literally! – can know everything, and that truth does not require anybody to denigrate anything.

In her forthcoming book, What Is Philosophy For? Mary Midgley provides the following explanation of our academic discipline:

...the philosophers’ business is not – as some people mistakenly think – merely to look inward. It is to organise what concerns everybody. Philosophy aims to bring together those aspects of life that have not yet been properly connected so as to make a more coherent, more workable world-picture. And that coherent world-picture is not a private luxury. It’s something we all need for our lives.

The point being, once again, that we all do philosophy, and the philosopher is merely someone who has dedicated more time to it, and has perhaps been drawn into working upon certain specific complexities. Few philosophers are certain that this habit makes them better at living life (like scientists, we tend to get awfully wrapped up in our abstruse problems!), but every philosopher hopes to clear up some persistent confusions, or to provide a better understanding of a certain problem. That’s why Isabelle Stengers and Phillipe Pignarre talk about philosophers as ‘sounders of the depths’ – and isn’t this a form of what you are calling a mine detector?

Let me close with another apposite quote from one of my philosophical correspondents, Allen Wood:

Reason and emotion are not opposites: emotions – even irrational ones – always have some degree of rational content, and healthy emotions are indispensable vehicles of rationality.

For Wood, the ‘cognitive intellect’ probably does count as a primary tool in the human toolbox, as you say in your letter, but even he does not deny the importance of our emotions. I’m not sure who does... maybe the die-hard consequentialists who think morality can be calculated? Whoever it is, it’s certainly not me. I am acutely aware that curiosity, compassion, and satisfaction are core emotional components of my philosophical inclinations. Neither is it enough for me to pursue my work in isolation: if I cannot share it, there is no point in doing it at all. Which is precisely why the letters you and I exchange are so important to me.

With great love and respect,

Chris.

The opening image is an untitled oil painting by KwanHo Shin, which I found here, and which may have originated from his Behance site at www.behance.net/ShinKwangHo. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Futurism v Fatalism: Thursday 16th June

Next week, I'm honoured to be part of a special event as part of the new exhibition by acclaimed DJ, artist, and record producer Justin Robertson. The exhibition is The Explorer's Chronicle, which sounds utterly fascinating:

The cornerstone of the exhibition is the first showing of Justin’s new collection of art - presented in a mixture of media. Drawing on the great tradition of botanical sketching, his inspirational work depicts the flora and fauna of this alternate universe, finding inspiration in the patterns of the natural world. Other themes include magik, possession, the supernatural, fantastical creatures, the history of belief, past times and cultures, uncertainty and alien life forms. A dedicated book of illustration and text and a bespoke soundtrack will accompany the exhibition.

My event, on the second day of the exhibition, is Futurism v Fatalism: Is the Internet liberating or imprisoning?, with free tickets available from the preceding link. I'm thrilled to be on the bill with an array of awesome folks such as:

• John Higgs, author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned A Million Pounds and I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary.
• Gary Lachman, founding member of Blondie (as Gary Valentine) and author of Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen, and The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World.
• Nina Lyon, co-organiser of Hay-on-Wye's How The Light Gets In festival, and author of Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man and Mushroom Season.

I'll be giving a presentation entitled Cyberfetish and the World of Tomorrow, the blurb for which I ran a few weeks back, and asking what we can learn from the Cyberpunk literary movement of the 1980s.

The exhibition is free and doesn't require a ticket, but you need to get tickets for the Futurism v Fatalism event at Ransom Note's eventcube page.

Hope to see you there!

Sound the Bombards!

Back from paternity leave, family now fully upgraded with the arrival of Blake Patrick (9 lbs 6 oz, for those who like such numbers), and getting ready to push forward into the Summer blogging. I have been lax on the Republic of Bloggers thus far this Gregorian year, but thanks to Chris Billows I will be getting back in the saddle next Tuesday with my first blog-letter of the year. More nonsense follows soon afterwards, and tomorrow I'll be plugging the event I'm at in London next week. Hope to see some players of the Game at the Red Gallery!

Oh, and in case the allusion of the title is too obscure, bombards were cannons fired in ancient China to signal the start of an attacking charge on a particular front. So 'sounding the bombards' is roughly equivalent to bellowing 'Charge!'