Some thoughts about the internet

On Friday, 13th of July my Virgin router stopped working. I decided not to report it until I was in work on Monday. After some time on hold I talked to their call centre and they agreed my router had stopped working and agreed to send out a new one. The new one arrived at 5.15pm on Wednesday 18th July. Luckily the carrier sent me an email giving me an esitmated time of delivery, as I ws expecting it Thursday or Friday as the call centre person told me 3-4 working days.

After a fairly long call to another call centre they 'activated' the router and I was all connected by shortly after 6.00pm.

So for just about 4 and half days I was without the internet, except by not very reliable 3G via my IPhone 5, or when I was working. So how was it?

It was hell!

News

I read most of my news online, using the Guardinian site, the local newspaper site, and occasionally the BBC site. I check the news 5 or 6 times a day. I had to watch the news on TV, and while there are 24 hour news channels you cannot choose what news to watch. It just felt so wrong. Before the internet I would check teletext (younger people don't know what I mean) 4 or 5 times a day, but rarely watched news programs,

Facebook

I play a facebook game called Pet Dragons 2. It is in its death throes. Once it had thousands of players and now it has tens of players. However, the game needs lots of checking on your pet dragon, at least twice a day, but I am a bit obessive so I have FB open constantly. This means I see notifactions constantly. I ignore most of the notifactions, but I really missed having them.

Shopping and services

I shop online, home delivery groceries and Amazon mostly, but also takeaways from time to time. I missed all that. I missed checking the Met office website, and the National lottery website.

Staying in touch

I regularly let my phone run out of battery. During term time I switch it to airplane mode when I am lecturing, and some times forget to turn it back on for days or even a week. The single most reliable way to get in touch with me is FB messages. That wasn't true anymore and I was worried. 

Random things

A song pops into my head, I find it on you tube. I hear a word I widon't recognise I search for it on Duck Duck go. I want to check the factuality of something on TV there is the search engine again. All of this was missed.

In summary

I am not addicted to the internet, in the same way I am not addicted to air. I need it for living. That is actually quite shocking.

Suspension of disbelief

I have been thinking about suspension of disbelief, and how it relates to role playing games, story telling (books, films, TV series) and therapy. Not sure exactly where this is going.

Genre buy in

If you do not like a genre you won't normally go out of your way to expose yourself to that genre. I do not particularly like the conventions of play D&D so while I will play one offs I won't commit to a D&D campaign. I don't like basic role play dice mechanics (although they seem to be getting better with the ability to spend luck points), so again I will avoid campaign games in that style. Likewise I don't read romantic novels, and I don't watch slasher horror films. All very understandable.

If/when I need support for mental health there are only two genres freely available (and one with long waiting lists) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and medication. The only choice here is to choose to go private and try to find a therapist who I can work with, but most people don't have the finances to do that.

Of course you can try and force yourself to buy in, despite a disbelief in the genre, with CBT I can normally manage that for the 5-6 weeks necessary. I do take a pragmatic approach most of the time, the actual exercises and interventions are useful even if the claims about how human beings work are not.

One of the things I noticed with the CBT classes run locally (and probably nationally) is they spend a lot of the first session trying to get people to believe in the model. While this might be useful for people who know little about the approaches it becomes a struggle otherwise.

Breaking Immersion

In the Walking Dead they played a game with their audience. One of the major characters appeared to have been eaten by zombies. They removed his name from the credits for a couple of weeks, and then he reappears after making a lucky (off camera) escape. That broke my suspension of disbelief. Since then I have sought out other reasons for not believing in that fictional world, two other things now bug me, the petrol in car petrol tanks should have gone off, and ammunition should be running low. I might watch the show if I am in the house when it is on, but don't seek it out on catch up.

In Tales from the Loop we have been playing through the adventures in the corebook. The third one involved the recurring bad person dragging dinosaurs into the present day. Immersion shattered. I can still play along but it becomes more game than roleplaying at that point.

A friend of mine was in a private therapeutic relationship, seeing someone twice a week, at considerable expense. They discussed with the therapist stepping down to once a week, the therapist saw this as trying to resist the therapy, and suggested they came more often. My friend couldn't afford that and ended up stopping the therapeutic relationship.

Breaking immersion carries heavier penalties in therapy than in leisure activities.

Is there anyway back from breaking immersion

This is the kicker. I am not willing to invest time in Walking Dead (or the Amazon version of Top Gear, the 'Grand Tour'). Role playing groups are about more than just what happens at the table, and we will be switching from Tales from the Loop soon. The more tricky thing is therapeutic relationships.

Will the new reporting guidelines for quantitative studies end the replication crisis

The narrative around the new reporting guidelines is very technocratic but the subtext is all about the much reported replication crisis. Back when I used to teach critical reading of psychology journal articles my approach was if something that should be in the report is missing that is because the authors are covering up a mistake. Hopefully the new guidelines will mean that authors will have to report the dodgy things they are doing, or they will be outright fraudulent. This can only be a good thing.

So lets get into some detail.

Preregistration
 An encouragement to preregister all psychology studies, but an acknowledgement it is only really happening in studies with a clinical application. This really does have to become routine across quantitative psychology.

Sampling

"Describe procedures for selecting participants, including...
• Percentage of sample approached that actually participated
• Whether self-selection into the study occurred (either by individuals or by units, such as schools or clinics)
• Settings and locations where data were collected as well as dates of data collection."

The idea of recording the number of potential participants approached is good, will give some information about possible volunteer bias. Self selection is another way that the characteristics of the participants can be problematic.
The requirement for date and location seems to be an attempt to deal with fraudulent data collection, follow this link for a recent example. 

Measuring instruments

"Define all primary and secondary measures and covariates, including measures collected but not included in this report."

After several failures to replicate 'power posing' findings one of the original authors made the claim that there were a whole bunch of measures that were not reported. That was always poor practice but these reporting conventions make sure that things are reported accurately, or the author(s) deliberately mislead.

Masking

"Report whether participants, those administering the experimental manipulations, and those assessing the outcomes were aware of condition assignments.
If masking took place, provide statement regarding how it was accomplished and if and how the success of masking was evaluated."

Everyone knows it is best that the person talking to the participant doesn't know the hypothesis and conditions, and if there is any chance of human error in scoring it is better that the scorer doesn't as well. But that is difficult to achieve and makes doing psychology experiments more expensive.

  

Analytical strategy

This works best if these are registered in advance.

Describe the analytic strategy for inferential statistics and protection against experiment-wise error for
Primary hypotheses
Secondary hypotheses
Exploratory hypotheses 

One thing that I suspect happens too often is people pretending exploratory hypotheses were the hypothesis they were always looking for. 

Participant Flow
Careful accounting of why any data was dropped, and keeping all the original data so others can look at it, both are necessary.

There is a lot more detail, but these are the things that seem to be important additions. It will be 2-3 years before the impact of this is felt, hopefully it is a step in the right direction. 

 

Reacting to the new APA guidelines for reporting qualitative studies

Yesterday the APA published guidelines for both qualitative and quantitative studies. I have had a quick flick both and am generally very encouraged. I might write about the quantitative guidelines this weekend, but I am going to write about the second paper now.


If you want to read the paper

Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Primary, Qualitative Meta-Analytic, and Mixed Methods Research in Psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force Report,” (PDF, 163KB) by Heidi M. Levitt, PhD, University of Massachusetts Boston,: Michael Bamberg, PhD, Clark University; John W. Creswell, PhD, University of Michigan Medical School; David M. Frost, PhD, University College London; Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, Fielding Graduate University; and Carola Suárez-Orozco, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, American Psychologist, Jan. 18, 2018.

I am just going to concentrate on the qualitative primary reporting standards.

The first eight pages are a good primer for quantitative research. I am very encouraged by the amount of flexibility that Levitt et al suggest is important, a worry before I read this was that they would be too constrained, but that is not a worry.

The main meat of the article is the table that begins on page 34.
The table has three columns, the section/subsection heading, a description of information and notes to reviewers and authors.

Here are some guidance notes I am particularly happy to see.


"Reviewers: The introduction may include case examples, personal narratives, vignettes, or other illustrative material."

"Reviewers: Method sections can be written in a chronological or narrative format." 
 

"Reviewers: Findings section tends to be longer than in quantitative papers because of the demonstrative rhetoric needed to permit the evaluation of the analytic procedure."

"Reviewers: Depending on the approach to inquiry, findings and discussion may be combined or a personalized discursive style might be used to portray the researchers’ involvement in the analysis."

All of these suggestions reinforce the notion that qualitative research is a very different thing to quantitative research and to some extent this should be reflected in how qualitative research is written, rather than mirroring the way that quantitative research is written.

I am very encouraged, and hope we will adopt these guidelines into our teaching practice.

Spoilers for The Last Jedi are ahead.

So I went to see The Last Jedi, at the Screening Rooms, a more expensive experience than the main cinema, but the more comfortable chairs, and smaller number of seats both appealed to me. I didn't take advantage of the wait service to your seat for snacks and drinks, but I think they make a lot of their money that way. Anyway the audience were well behaved, I heard no random talking during the film and the going to the cinema experience was very positive. All of which was good as this is a longish film, not Lord of the Rings long, but apparently the second longest Star Wars film.

I had been carefully avoiding reviews, or even random posts on facebook about the film. So now I am reading them, a couple of positive reviews in the Guardian. Then I came across this one which was the one from the 2601 reviews that IMDB decided to show me.

It is a one star review.

The shameful end of the beloved story.

15 December 2017 | by kuschilop – See all my reviews

The movie seems to be made by a neural network. It's sewn from the same familiar patches: a space battle here, a joke there, a teacher and a student story, a battle between light and dark side of the force. The winner of the battle? A new, SHITTY side of the force.

Evil characters are not serious and just pathetic. The story is not real anymore: it's just another comic book where the laws of the universe are changing on the fly, and there's no real risk. Storylines mostly make no sense, rendering the characters' feelings as fake and overblown, giving the movie a touch of a soap opera.

It's quite obvious that here the director has nothing to say. Seems like a board of executives were voting up and down for every episode, fiddling with the movie in a fear that it won't earn enough. And here we are: the film is a politically correct product of corporate cowardice and creative impotence.

It's all especially painful for those who grew with the pure miracle and magic of the original movies. You know, there's always a faith. But this time it was destroyed in a really mean way.

If you follow the link above the person, or people, using this identity have posted two reviews, the other one spends quite a lot of time praising the Russian empire before the revolutions that led to Soviet Russia. I do find it funny that someone who genuinely thinks an evil empire was the best version of Russia has written a Star Wars review.

So this all got me to thinking about the accusations of "politically correct product of corporate cowardice and creative impotence."

So corporate cowardice, yes it is a shame that many of the films currently being made at this level of blockbuster are franchise movies. I don't think the accusation that each scene was being ruthlessly fiddled with holds water.

So creative impotence and political correctness (spoilers start now).

Lots of strong female characters. Not only that though, Poe Dameron gets told off and demoted for a successful attack on a dreadnought because of the number of rebels killed, and because vice admiral Holdo won't tell him the secret plan he acts like a jerk and almost gets everyone killed. (There are other examples that androcentric people will not have enjoyed.)

The other big politically correct moment is when it becomes apparent that Rey is not descended from some famous Jedi. I know this has stirred up some controversy but I felt this was one of the best ideas in the film.

The other thing I felt was an interesting creative move was the end of the rebel fleet, because now the rebellion will have to be from the ground up.

There were bits I did not like, Leia's use of the force to save herself felt a bit hollow. And the pacing was a bit off.

All in all this is my favourite of the franchise.

 

Furry Pirates Play test review

So how did it play?

Very smoothly, though that was probably helped by the very enthusiastic players. If I run it again I will design a scenario where the characters can do a bit more swashbuckling.

There were no easy to find rules about making crude grenades, and give role players gunpowder they will want to make crude grenades. I decided that in the ship to ship combats the master gunner would be responsible for all the gunnery on the ships. There wasn't a boarding action, but I have no appetite for running a couple of hundred NPCs, so if that crops up it will be major NPCs versus player characters (like the Sid Meier's Pirates computer game) as long as the sides are relatively even. The player with the magic user character found his way round the magic rules easily (but there are Ars Magica players so you would hope so).

There was some role playing around the Furry aspects, especially the only botch of the game which saw the Lynx based Master Gunner being accidentally dumped in the water by an unsuccessful flight spell.

So I am up for running this again, next Grand Tribunal.

Given that I won Unknown Armies in the raffle I might well run a game of that as well.

Furry Pirates Swashbuckling Adventure in the Furry Age of Piracy

Read through review of a roleplaying game

I am going to be running this at Grand Tribunal, because it is published by Atlas games and GT is an Atlas games role playing convention.

After I've run it I might post a play test review.

The physical product

Available from Atlas games, either in PDF or a softcover. I have a softcover to review, loaned to me by C.J. Romer. A quick google search failed to track down a UK based shop with it in stock, but it is still in print at Atlas games.

The book itself is well laid out, plenty of furry themed pirate illustrations throughout, some maps, illustrations of various ships that can be used for and against pirates, and various tables for things like combat and ship to ship combat. If I was running this game regularly I would have a bookmarked PDF for the game mechanics stuff and give the copy of the rule book to the players.

The game

Furries

 There are no humans, only Furry Sapiens. The species that can become Furry Sapiens need to have backbones, also no species that spends most of its life in water can be a Furry. Furry Sapiens are also between 3 and 8 feet tall. The animals that Furry Sapiens are based on (evolved from in game) still exist. In the game world carnivores tend to have higher social status than omnivores, and ominvores higher social status than herbivores. In 'Furry Outlaws' a game by the same authors but set in the 12th Century these class divisions were rigid, but seen as less so in Furry Pirates, also the players are pirates and so might not care too much about social class. In game mechanical terms larger furries are stronger but less agile, and smaller furries are weaker but more agile.

Furries can only have children with others of their own species, although they can fall in love and have sex with any Furry Sapiens.

Game System

The game uses the "Halogen System" which was apparently also used in Furry Outlaws. The system does not seem to have had any traction outside of Furry Pirates.

Characters have nine abilities with a normal range of 3-30. Three of these are called attack abilities (Strength, Dexterity and Ego), three are called defense abilities (Agility, Reason and Constitution) and three are called descriptive (Appearance, Luck, Social). The can be randomly rolled; or a point spend system can be used.

There are a bunch of skills that can be given at character generation, and developed through an experience point system, with a lot of focus on combat skills, some focus on ship handling, a magick system, and the lots of other fairly generic skills. This is what one might expect for a game about being a pirate in a slightly supernatural setting.

A first level character begins with 10 skill points to spend (with the option to start characters at a higher level so at least they are competent).

There are no skills for such things as tactics, seduction, persuasion,  instead these are to be role played.

In combat there will be a combat ability, which is skill level taken away from 50 pitted against a defensive skill by adding the two numbers together. The player has to roll against this number, trying to get higher than the result. It follows that low attack scores and high defense scores are good.

Outside of combat there is skill level taken away from 50 pitted against a difficulty set by the person running the game (GM), again the player has to roll over this number.

There is no system for a player to claim an automatic success or otherwise affect the GMs story.

Characters fumble on a very low roll (01-05 for a first level character, 01-02 at 10th level).

So this reads like a fairly old fashioned system, even for 1999 when it was first printed.

How it plays is of course unknown until I play it.

There is a detailed set of rules for ship to ship combat, which might work best as a game using miniature figures.

Setting

The game takes place in 1690, which despite the existence of Furry Sapiens rather than humans, and the fact that magick is real has had a history identical to Earth. There is a lot of detail in the book about what is happening in the world now which has been furrified. Another review (written in 2003) claims "Furry Pirates provides the most historically accurate and abundant background information" I have no reason to disbelieve the claim. 

Overall

If you're looking for a game about pirates, and want a little bit of magic and the ability to play Furry Sapiens this seems like a good starting point. I would not run this, or play this as a long term game because I think the game mechanics would annoy me and I don't have the space to adequately run the ship to ship combat mini-game.