[UA] Gaslight UA

[Mark Baker]

Gaston Phillips <gaston at math.sunysb.edu> writes
>If you set a game in 'Gaslight' - what's that - 1890?  1920?  Well, either
>way - PostModernism is hard to do before 1980, and I'd say impossible before
>1950.  
>
That's a much more valid reason to my mind than simply saying it would
be harder for players to assimilate two weird/alien elements rather than
just the one. And Postmodernism assumes a definite break with the past
and totally new assumptions about reality: that is what makes UA
difficult to run in any era other than the modern day.

>So, UA by Gaslight would be... just a very different game.  So different as
>to not really be Unknown Armies anymore.  Sure, you could have the
>mechanics, but moving the setting that far back in time would drain the game
>of the PostModern aspects that help make it truly, truly great.
>
There's a good quote in "The Complete Film Dictionary" by Ira Konigsberg
that gives a great definition of postmodernism:
"In 1967, the French social critic Guy Debord wrote an important tract
called _Society of the Spectacle_ in which he proclaimed that ours was
no longer an age 'directly lived' but was instead an age of
representation, of images detached from actuality. Our entire economic
system and concept of reality is motivated by an endless succession of
images of commodities - as soon as one image becomes a possessed object,
another image awakens our longing. Jean Baudrillard, the French apostate
of the postmodern period, divorced these images from economy and
production in the present world by talking about our age as one of
simulacra, of images without a reference to any reality whatsoever. The
truth is that there is no truth - that images and reality have become
indistinguishable. Disneyland, by pretending to be make believe,
performs the function of hiding from us the realisation that the world
surrounding it is one comprised of the hyperreal and simulation. Ours is
a world in which the interface between media and reality breaks down, in
which there finally is no separation between the images on the screen
and everyday reality - we are as much part of the media as the media is
part of us."

If we can find a similar historic era where the image of actuality is
more powerful than the actuality itself, then we could apply UA to that
era; otherwise it is relevant purely to the immediate past, present and
immediate future.

-- 
Mark Baker
Web Pages: http://www.lange.demon.co.uk/Index.html

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