Mr. Randy Coe, a balding manic hippy, taught World History in an all-boys Catholic high school. "There's only a few dates I want you to memorize," he said. "I don't believe in learning a bunch of dates, because what happened is more important." I'm paraphrasing this, because it's been several whiles since high school, but this was the general thrust of his statement. "The most important date I want you to learn, and which you'll never forget, is 1454. That is the date the Gutenburg Bible was mass produced, and it's essentially the invention of the printing press. And the printing press is the most important invention ever invented."

Yet, when I look at Pathfinder (to pick on the elephant in the room), they focus on which gun technology is available. In one way, this makes sense for a player; an adventurer is going to care about weapons. But, let's look at the printing press and how information travels. I'm referencing Tom Standage's book, Writing On the Wall for most of this.

In the old days, people recopied books and newsletters by hand, and they were distributed by hired people or by friends. Because it was written by hand, people could alter the news (usually to add background information or highlight notes, although an interesting adventure could be made by an improper transcription). Information in a city went fast, but outside it was limited by individual people. Looking at the Greyhawk Rates of Travel, they list 30 miles by foot on a standard road, traveling quickly. This is cut in half for mountains and almost cut in half for forest to 18 miles / hour. By horse, the book gives 60 miles per day on open road. This is useful, but let's look at a few real-life examples: the Pony Express covered 250 miles per day and the Persian couriers covered 200 miles a day by foot. You can use "standard" guesses, but if you put enough people and resources, you can get word out fast.

After the printing press, a single person could print multiple copies and distribute them. This democratized information transfer, but it still limited conversation and news transfer to horseback and couriers. Still, news travels fast in a local setting. For example, six million pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation. As another genre says, "You can't stop the signal." Tom Standage talks about how the equivalent of likes and retweets today was the number of editions of a pamphlet. When people added editions, they added their own comments, turning it into a YouTube comments thread. This also made literacy more important. This is a way a game master can add teeth to the illiteracy disadvantage.

Then, increased readership and distribution, along with radio and television, centralized communication. In the United States, it started with The Sun, sold for one cent. It could sell this cheaply because it relied on advertisement and a large readership. Unlike older printings that had smaller runs, these new newspapers were "equally intended for the great masses of the community — the merchants, mechanic, working people — the private family as well as the public hotel — the journeyman and his employer — the clerk and his principal," according to the founder of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett. The telegraph added range to the newspapers. Another Standage book, The Victorian Internet, goes into detail on how this new technology mirrored the Internet. I recommend it, but it's not quite in scope for this column. But the important thing is the telegraph allowed newspaper reporters to get stories quickly to their editors. "But in practice it greatly concentrated and homogenized the flow of information — and left some people feeling dazed and overwhelmed," according to Standage. To put this concentration in perspective, the Associated Press came along at this point. If you are running a Swashbuckler or Victorian era game, I think it's easy to underestimate the power of press, the Hearsts and Greeleys of the world. They controlled the public, and the player characters end up reacting to all the insinuations of the media.

Finally, the Internet reversed that trend. To place this in perspective, ARPANET started in 1969. Big business and big media eventually joined in on the Internet and World Wide Web, and new businesses and media were created. However, the Internet allowed first the technically proficient, then the wealthy, then anyone with a smartphone to communicate with a mass audience. It's the rise of the blogger. Bloggers saw themselves as an alternative and a corrective to the traditional media. Then as new platforms were created (such as LiveJournal, Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter), it added more content, and much more noise. Sturgeon's Law still applies.

Computers also changed travel. Instead of having to meet people face-to-face, skype and virtual worlds allow us to talk "in person" without being in person. I'm reminded of John Scalzi's novel, Locked In, where the Agora allowed people who were locked in to interact with others. I ran a campaign where the majority of the action took place in a virtual world. This was interesting, because death in the virtual world was merely inconvenient. Of course, you need to have all the players involved in the virtual world; this was one of the problems with Shadowrun deckers. If only one person is interacting with the computer, then the rest of the players are twiddling their thumbs.

A virtual world adds some twists. How are laws handled in the virtual world? In a professional virtual area, harming an avatar may be socially unacceptable as harming a person in real life. In a more wild-west world, it still may be illegal to steal real goods or money that have been virtualized. So if I "buy" a new virtual set of clothes, and if someone takes it, what legal avenues do I have? In a more centralized virtual world, it would have its own laws or service agreements. These laws would include sock accounts (having a person logging in with multiple accounts), shared accounts (having multiple people logged into one avatar), and anonymous accounts. Most current virtual worlds rely on social norms and peer pressure, enforced by service agreements only when necessary. "Since everything is not free, and since you need other people to get the things you want, you had better behave. If you don't, non of the other users will help you get what you want.... A state of anarchy seems to be preserved as a conscious choice of the developers, so as to give maximum possible scope to reputation systems and the informal norms they support." (this is from Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova)

And once you have virtual worlds, you need to deal with the disconnection between real world and the virtual world. We can imagine this, but others have done the research. I'm referencing Sherry Turkle's Life On the Screen, where she interviews people involved in MUDs. "After six months..., Josh has had to settle for a job working on the computer system that maintains inventory records at a large discount store. He considers this a dead end. When a friend tolk him about MUDs, he thought the games sounded diverting enough to give them a try.... Within a week, MUDs had become more than a diversion. Josh had stepped into a new life. Now, Josh spends as much time on MUDs as he can.... In contrast to his life in RL [real life], which he sees as boring and without prospects, Josh's life inside MUDs seems rich and filled with promise." If you introduce a virtual world, make sure you add motivation on why people join. Is it to escape something, for empowerment (like Josh, people will have different statuses in the real world and the virtual world), or more practical reasons (looking again at Lock In, people join it because of physical disabilities). Yes, it may be confusing playing a character who is playing another character, but it's also kind of fun.

To end with some thoughts on virtual reality, Castronova has a list of "riskless predictions" (riskless, because they are inevitable) based on how technology and society is moving to virtual worlds. Note that this book was written in 2005. Some of these predictions could be a launching point for a new campaign:

• It is common to enter synthetic worlds through handheld devices.
• Some people spend so much time onliine that they have not left their homes in over two years.
• Families of 8-10 people meet daily through avatar interfaces, just to keep up.
• A man dies of a stress-induced heart attack after spending several days waging war online.
• A seller of such services to avatars generates an eight-figure annual revenue stream in terms of US dollars (and note that King.com, the king of freemium payments, made $2.260 billion).

Next month, I'll be doing a little piece on maps. Until then, why don't you check out the relatively new Robin Laws column The Keep Near the Gaming Hut. Check it out. Lots of fun.