Vecna's Eye

by Tim Morgan

Has everyone sent in their applications for Survivor II? I have. The due date was last Friday, so it's a little late now to put it together.

Has everyone seen this show? I have to admit that when I first heard the premise, there was no way I was going to watch it . . . 16 people trapped on a desert island and the last one remaining wins a million dollars. It just sounded hokey and uninteresting.

But then my wife made me watch an episode, and I was instantly hooked. This is actually a game being televised! At first, the 16 participants are broken up into two groups. The groups must compete in physical and mental competitions every three days. The loser's group has to vote one of their members off of the island. They also get to compete for other prizes, like food, letters from home and other luxuries. Meanwhile, they have to survive. They have a supply of rice, but any other food they have to catch or gather. It was something else watching these people skin, cook and eat a rat. Or the time one group won three chickens in a contest, only to have a monitor lizard eat half of one . . . and they still ate the other half!

After about half of the people had been kicked off, the two groups were combined, and the politics and alliances among the players began. Now, each of the competitions is individual, and the winner can not be voted off the island at the next vote.

The whole show has been a great example of group mechanics as well as a large multi-player game. How long do you work together? Who do you ally with? Do you vote off the competent people if they are a personal threat to you, or do you keep them around to make living easier?

One of the most amazing things about the show is how dense some of the people are. Here they are, presented with the goals of the game, but they refuse, on moral grounds, to make alliances. Or there's one guy who feels that everyone is his friend, and he doesn't want to vote off one of his friends. So he's voting for people in alphabetical order, one after the other. It was so funny last week, when an alliance of 4 people learned of his system, decided that this was a great opportunity to get rid of the next person on his list. They needed 5 votes to do it, so his strange voting system voted Jenna off the island.

In a way, it reminds me of a game like Diplomacy, Nuclear War or when we used to play large, multi-player games of Magic: The Gathering. Just watching them play has been great fun, and I recommend it to everyone.

It's a great television show for gamers, and there aren't many of them. Another great show was on PBS, called The 1900 House. I don't know if they'll be showing it again, but if they do, it's another must see. In this show, they took a house built in 1900, and converted it to as it was in 1900. Then they got a family to move in and agree to live as people did a century ago. They dressed in Victorian clothes, ate Victorian recipes, cooked, cleaned, gave dinner parties and worked just like a middle-class family would have at the turn of the last century. A great resource for Victorian and Steampunk players and GMs.

--Tim Morgan

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