The Lost Sleeping Tablet

This is the beginning of the latest writing by Peter George Mackie. Please contact him if you want to know more about his works. The first chapter of his piece of travel writing “Flowers of Zagreb”
can also be downloaded at www.authorsonline.co.uk.

The Lost Sleeping Tablet

Dave was pondering over a map of the former Yugoslavia when he landed on Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which he had visited in the summer of 1977 at the age of 20 and had made friends with so many 17-year-olds who were still listening to ’60s music.

Most of them had travelled to the West at some point and were very interested in what he had to say about places he had been to, such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Having known people who had been to this country before, he was only mildly surprised to learn that the locals were able to travel in and out of and all around Yugoslavia at will and felt it to be a country which seemed to be moving forward and whose young inhabitants exhibited what he perceived as a unique friendliness and a liveliness which was quite unlike anything he had ever known before.

He also found that many of them were interested in literature and the arts and it was there that he met his first real love, Elidija, a music student, who was one year younger than himself. Although it was only a one-night stand, that evening when they had made love in her friend’s flat in one of the back streets of Zagreb would always stand out throughout his life as one of his most treasured memories - and he was also very glad that he had been able to satisfy her as she was a virgin at the time.

Dave then found himself transported to the summer of 1986 when he had visited Belgrade for the first time and had met a young art student somewhere in town. They had taken a look in the window of an art workshop where some local artists or students had seemingly hurriedly put an exhibition together and they both agreed that none of the exhibits were very good.

It was a roasting hot day and, when the young student reached the flat where he lived with his parents and sister, after a long walk in the scorching heat, he removed his shirt and shoes.

It was at this point that he introduced Dave to his sister, a good-looking young girl with long black hair, who knelt down in front of him, also in bare feet, and exclaimed, “Serbian girls are the best!!”

The young art student, whose name Dave had probably never learned, then explained that the room in which they were sitting was his and his sister’s bedroom.

It did not seem to Dave all that surprising that, in a poor area of a country like Yugoslavia, a teenage brother and sister would be sharing the same room, which must have also been the case in other countries, probably including Britain, in the past.

At that time, people were keen to emphasise that they were one country and, when Dave visited Sarajevo that same summer, he thought that it was the most beautiful and unusual city he had ever seen - and the last thing that would have occurred to him was that there would be a war there six years later. He was also disappointed that the spool for his camera had run out by this time so that he was unable to take any photographs.

His spirit at this point moved back to the map again where someone or something was trying to tell him that, in the future, the young people in Zagreb and Belgrade would be reconciled again but did not explain how this would be done… but it was found necessary to heal the town of Split, where the Dioclitain palace was falling down……

Dave was presently transported to the back garden in Scotland where he had played as a child in the 1960s.

In later life, he would realise how lucky he was to have heard all the music at that time, when it had first come out, as he considered that something special had happened then, which could only have occurred once in the whole of human history.

His mind moved on to when he was 12 years old, when he had had some very vivid and profound spiritual experiences which people around him at that time had confused with mental illness.

His father had had him incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was to spend two and a half years, and Dave would never to be able to forgive him for having destroyed him spiritually as well as having taken away two and a half years of his youth, which he would never get back, and, due to which, he would never be able to form steady relationships, his courtship with a young girl having been put a stop to by the hospital authorities.

Dave’s mother, on the other hand, was convinced that Dave, who was always the first in the class at Maths at school, was going to be a genius, but his education was neglected in the hospital and he would never be able to make much of his life…..

In fact, throughout his whole life, Dave’s father had never been able to accept the fact that he had ever grown up and would continue to play psychological games with him. For instance, only a few years before, when Dave was in his forties, his father, having lured him back to his house to see whether or not a certain magazine had arrived for him in the post, threatened to call the police because Dave had accidentally dropped a cup and saucer into the sink. This, in turn, brought back all the old traumas of what his father had done to him when he was younger, the memories of which he had been desparately trying to shake off…

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Creating games, a beautiful Art

Andrea Angiolino was born the 27th of April, 1966 in Rome, the city where he still lives. He published many boardgames and books about games, besides developing games for every media. His works appeared in more than a dozen of languages including Korean, Czech and Maltese. He is a game journalist on national magazines, newspapers, radio broadcasts The Italian School and Education Ministry named him “Expert game author”, while the Lucca Comics and Games show gave him the first “Best of Show” prize for lifetime achievements. More info are on his personal site. Here’s what he wrote for our Weblog, about creating games and about his career:

I am what it’s usually called in English a “game designer”, but I prefer “game author” instead. Essentially, I invent games: their rules, their settings, their mechanics.
I love this. It is both a sort of artistic activity and my full time job. Italy is not so a big market for authors of boardgames or role-playing games: so I do every other sort of games for work. It does not matter so much if they are boardgames, card games, role-playing games, tv games, computer games or gambling games for the Italian state: my role is to create them, and sometime to be their editor or translator. I also write articles and books about games: I am at the same time a creative, a historian and a critic. These roles help each other a lot, making me a far more conscious game designer and journalist. Anyway, apart from puzzles and word games (our traditional “enigmistica”) for magazines, the ones where I feel more “author” are boardgames, card games and role-playing games.
A game is a little world with a simplified set of laws, the rules, that its inhabitants, the players, learn and try to master. The author is the God of these worlds. There are abstract boardgames, like - let’s say - draughts, that are like a mathematical model of a little universe. Some of them are very simple. I like “steamlined” and effective games. One of my best-sellers is a book about paper-and-pencil games: very few rules, very simple materials and very intriguing tactics and strategies. Making a simple, original and intriguing game is a difficult exercise for an author: but together with some of our Renaissance artistic geniuses I think that the real art is in taking away, not in adding.
Anyway I prefer games with a setting, as chess, Monopoly or Clue. The stronger the atmosphere is, the more they look “literary” rather than “mathematical”. I am more used to designing boardgames that tell stories - I find them more involving than abstract games. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ said Gustave Flaubert, and I could say ‘Lothar von Richthofen, it’s me!’ if I think to my games about the aces of the first world war. Several of my boardgames are actually just a different way rewriting the story of Ulysses or of telling dark stories of medieval struggles between rising feuds. “Obscura Tempora”, a card games of mine with this last setting, appeared with a short story about a viking raid on the rulebook, and that’s not by chance: the game and the story come from the same suggestions, share the same inspiration, tell the same tale in two different ways.
Sometimes my games are not novels but essays: I design games for teaching, advertising, promotion and such. The last one, “Fair Play”, has ben asked me by Pangea - Niente Troppo, an Italian fair trade organization: they wanted a game that could help to explain all the travel that the cotton does from a seed in a remote field to the T-shirt you are wearing, explaining how we could have have a less polluting and fairer process. In this case I start from the setting and even the message that the game has to bring to players. When I design a game for the fun of it, usually aimed to the generic market of players, I can do the same or just the opposite: I may think about a boardgame with a pawn moved by all the players, instead than one pawn each as in traditional games, and then wonder what - or who - that pawn can be. Maybe Odysseus in the hands of the Gods? Then other rules and detaiuls of the setting are a natural consequence of that choice. This is how the boardgame Ulysses was born.
In these years, there are two main styles in boardgame design. Oversimplifying, the German school has quite abstract games: original mechanics and linear rules with nothing useless. Even if they have a setting, as they often do, it is somehow “pasted on” the rules: There is no strict connection between the setting and the rule system. This is a logical and mathematical approach to game design. The opposite school, quite more “literary” and historical, is the so called American style: plenty of rules to give a detailed simulation of the subject of the game, often coming with plenty of miniatures and gadgets to thrill the kid in everyone of us. But I feel I am part of an “Italian style” instead: a simple frame of rules but strictly connected with the setting, so that everything you do in the game tends to give you the feeling to live in the simulated world. Being able to do that with a “steamlined” rulebook is actually the big challenge.
What I also love of boardgames is that they are a open creative process. Many players of my last card game “Wings of War” share new rules, new scenarios, new game materials all over the net. This help me and my co-author Pier Giorgio to develope new releases in the series. The fans also founded a web discussion group, to exchange opinions and additional stuff for this very game - it has just reached one thousand members. To my eyes this, in the end, is a measure of success greater than just the amount of copies sold or the number of foreign publishers that translated the game into their languages: when so many people decide that my game is their game and put their energies in it, it really means that my lonely work in front of my computer is worth the time spent on it.

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Time Travel

Peter Cajander allowed us to publish this part from his book Fragments of Reality. It talks about life from a personal perspective covering areas ranging from self-realization, meditation, stress, happiness, death, and everyday living. Peter is a writer, philosophical thinker, entrepreneur, strategy consultant, business executive, and author to name a few titles. He has been exploring and experiencing different ways of living and expanding his understanding. Peter has travelled extensively and so far lived in Finland, UK, France, and Spain.

Time Travel

It’s funny that we desire to travel through time. Besides self-
ish interest, what purpose would it serve? We are actually time
travelers all the time. Or should I say channel surfers?

We get carried away either by thinking about our past or
piling up with dreams of the future. These two activities take
most of our time. The actual now moment we are currently
experiencing is something we would rather not like to have.
It’s far better and safer to sail in our dreams, where all the out-
comes are already known and we can speculate with endless
what-if scenarios. The future is even better. For us it has not
happened yet and, therefore, we can make it up any way we
desire. Well, almost. The only limitation is that we cannot just
dream about anything of which we have no knowledge. For
example, in medieval times people did not dream about hav-
ing cars and flying around the world in airplanes. So dream-
ing is also quite boring. All the outcomes are predictable in
one way or another—like LEGO blocks that can only be set
up in a certain way based on their shapes.

Our channel surfing concerns the current living moment.
We seldom stay in the channel. We’d rather jump on and off
many times in a second. This happens by switching either to the
dream or the history channel. Reality TV is something we pre-
fer to consume as a recorded version, just to be on the safe side.

Still, all the action happens in the reality mode. We cannot
change our history and cannot predict the future. We have to
do all the things right now. The paradox is that the only
unpredictable (and therefore nonboring) moment is the fresh
now time, what we are all the time experiencing. And the best
part is that it’s interactive. We can take part in all the activities
and get involved. It’s amazing how many of us are not taking
up this opportunity. People would rather switch to old classics
or sci-fi stories that have predictable endings. They’d rather
opt for something that smells, tastes, and sounds like real life
but is not. Artificial life seems to be the best act in town.

Considering the low ratings for actually living in the
moment, it is amazing that people would even dream of time
traveling. What would they do then if they cannot live now?
Sure it’s a more interactive TV show to go for the future and
know that you are able to come back to the original time
whenever things start to get too serious (or should I say real?).
Time travel would be just another way of surfing channels—
just a sportier version compared to staring at a glass box or
daydreaming from the sofa.

Nevertheless, the basic fact is that we always figure out
new ways to escape reality. We’d rather either skip to our own
natural channels or use the manmade “entertainment”
options. When was the last time you really watched some-
thing on the TV or listened to the radio? Most of the time, we
are desperate to fill up any silent moments by whatever back-
ground noise from TV, radio, or MP3 players we can find.
Still, the fact is that you cannot avoid living in the moment—
you can only pretend you’re not there. How good our skills are
determine how good our private scam is. Our consciousness is
always on, and it is permanently stuck on the reality channel.
And most of us just cannot live without constantly surfing
channels. Restless 24/7 escape from the reality—out now!

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