Why we have to learn Danish
I have quite recently been told that the Danish Friform-scene is superior to the Swedish. That didn't lead me to try prove it right or wrong. When Martin Svahn from Frispel told me almost the same thing again during LinCon this weekend I just had to look it up and compare.
If we only count free, dowloadable scenarios the selection in Danish is far beyond the one in Swedish. The largest selection of Swedish scenarios that I know of is Sveroks Scenariobanken. Compare this with Alexandria that claim to feature over 2500 scenarios in Danish (a lot of this is not friform, of course). But don't start there! Instead, go to Project Rlyeh. Their claim to fame is having one hundred of the best scenarios from Danish Cons. Some of these are system based, but most aren't. I haven't look at everything, of course, but what I have seen so far is really impressive. (All these links may be found to the right.)
I will better my Danish. But at the moment learning Turkish takes up most of my learning language-slots.
If we only count free, dowloadable scenarios the selection in Danish is far beyond the one in Swedish. The largest selection of Swedish scenarios that I know of is Sveroks Scenariobanken. Compare this with Alexandria that claim to feature over 2500 scenarios in Danish (a lot of this is not friform, of course). But don't start there! Instead, go to Project Rlyeh. Their claim to fame is having one hundred of the best scenarios from Danish Cons. Some of these are system based, but most aren't. I haven't look at everything, of course, but what I have seen so far is really impressive. (All these links may be found to the right.)
I will better my Danish. But at the moment learning Turkish takes up most of my learning language-slots.
posted by Sven Holmström at 8:05 PM
5 Comments:
Short-time lurker, first-time poster. Just want to make a correction: Alexandria is like the IMDb of Danish roleplay. Its main purpose is that of a RPG/convention/scenario history repository. There are plans to expand the system to include reviews and more, and it's a good place for the writers to link to online scenarios.
Like so:
http://alexandria.dk/data?person=34
Thank you for the input, but I don't see how this is a 'correction'. What you say can quite easily be understood from the homepage, but I choose not to mention that. But your notion is still very important.
It's a very cool project, they seem to really publish most scenarios from Danish cons. I wish we had something like this in Sweden! But I can't see how that would be possible here. There must be a difference betweem Denmark and Sweden.
Question one: Quite a number of the Swedish con-scenarios are made by RPG-crews, where the friform groups often try to sell their scenarios afterwards and the commercial RPG companies probably won't give away their stuff to a webpage like that. Is the situation very different in Denmark?
Question two: Do you think I'm right if I say that con scenarios over al is more important for Danish RPG? Might a reason for this be that Sweden has a lot more of commercial RPG:s in the own language (we have)?
Okay, fair enough - I felt Alexandria was being compared to Sverok. Btw., there are plans to expand Alexandria to Sweden as well.
Good questions, and I will give them some real thought, rather than start guessing on behalf of the whole community. But some general comments:
The convention scene is completely non-commercial (as regards scenarios). As you can probably tell from Alexandria there are plenty of people involved in writing convention scenarios. A large number of these are not tied in to any established system, and a number of those I would label freeform. There are a couple of groupings that help write and run scenarios for each other, but they're not in it for the money.
Most new scenarios have their debut at either Fastaval (in Aarhus) or Viking-con (in Copenhagen), and then the best are rerun at smaller conventions (each of those two con offers approx. 20-30 new scenarios every year). The strong, written scenario-tradition originated at Fastaval. An important turning point was the Otto-institution, started in 1992: the idea was to award prizes to the best scenarios. It might be a silly, painted plaster statue, but it's a strong symbol of peer recognition, and today it has real importance in motivating writers and improving the quality of the scenarios. Apart from the statue, you also get the added bonus of an organised feedback system, with comments from players and critique from the jury.
One current discussion is wheter to include live RPG scenarios in the Ottos. It seems like a natural progression, given how freeform pushes the boundaries on how to roleplay.
"Okay, fair enough - I felt Alexandria was being compared to Sverok. Btw., there are plans to expand Alexandria to Sweden as well."
As often before I didnät express myself clear enough. To role playing Swedes what I wrote should have been clear, but perhaps not for anyone else. My aim with this blog is of course to be readable by Danes, Americans asa well as Swedes. Thanks for the comments, I will shape up!
An expansion to Swedish would be very welcome. At least by me! As i said it might be hard to have the same level of funtionality here.
"The strong, written scenario-tradition originated at Fastaval. An important turning point was the Otto-institution, started in 1992: the idea was to award prizes to the best scenarios."
We would need something like this over here. I can't say for sure that it's true, but I know that I'm not the only one to think that scenarios over all are loosing ground in Swedish cons.
Nice blog. Have you seen your google rating? BlogFlux It's Free and you can add a Little Script to your site that will tell everyone your ranking. I think yours was a 3. I guess you'll have to check it out.
Computer News
In search of the best
Ask.com, Answers.com outperform more popular Web engines
Even as they become more savvy, the Internet's leading search engines still sometimes bog down in befuddlement when a specific kernel of knowledge is sought.
Hoping to fill the gap, Answers.com (from GuruNet Corp.) and Ask.com (from Ask Jeeves Inc.) have pledged to provide more adept responses to vexing but straightforward questions about history, science, geography, pop culture and sports.
Both search engines aim to provide a correct answer explicitly at the top of a search's first results page -- or with a highly placed link to a Web page that contains the information.
Their mission raises a question: Just how knowledgeable are these search engines?
To find out, I staged a very unscientific test consisting of questions culled from a recent edition of Trivial Pursuit.
My mock game pitted the avowed prowess of Answers.com and Ask.com against the Internet's most widely used search engines -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.
The findings: Answers.com and Ask.com appear to be a small step ahead of Google and noticeably smarter than Yahoo and MSN when dealing with such esoteric questions as "What glass beads are created when a meteorite strikes the Earth's surface?"
Both Answers.com and Ask.com guided me to the correct answer (tektites) with the first link on the results page -- an aptitude that both sites displayed with 10 of the 20 questions posed in the theoretical game. When they didn't get the answer with the very first link in response to some questions, both search engines generally came through within the next two links.
Although they performed similarly in our game,-Answers.com and Ask.com rely on different formulas.
Answers.com relies on a combination of Google's search engine and human editors who have stoked its database with answers to frequently asked questions that they've obtained by poring through reference materials.
Ask.com, part of a Web family about to be acquired by e-commerce conglomerate InterActiveCorp for $2 billion, has devised a fully automated approach that fishes through the Internet's sea of information.
Although they are superior to the other search engines at this task, Answers.com and Ask.com rarely realized their ultimate goal -- making things as clear-cut as possible by summarizing the correct response at the very top of the results page so it wouldn't be necessary to click on a link and peruse another Web site.
Ask.com spit out a concise "Web answer" in just two of the 20 questions, while the only time that Answers.com delivered was when I sought the definition of "googol." (It's the number one followed by 100 zeros.)
Google, which drew its name from that mathematical term, fared reasonably well in the competition. The Internet's most popular search engine came up with the correct answer on the first link in eight of the 20 questions (including the one about tektites). That's something Yahoo did just five times and MSN only twice.
None of the sites was omniscient. Answers.com, Ask.com and Google each drew blanks on three questions (I considered it a miss if a link to the correct answer didn't appear within the first three pages of results). Yahoo and MSN each whiffed on six questions.
There was only one question that baffled all the search engines, "Who was the first Cuban defector to play in Major League Baseball?" Although they all contained references to him in their indexes, none of the search engines could figure out it was Rene Arocha, a pitcher who first signed with the St. Louis Cardinals in the early 1990s.
Though it lagged behind the other search engines in this competition, MSN looked brilliant on one question that stumped all the other search engines: What company was acquired in the biggest leveraged buy-out deal of all time? The first link on MSN's results page took me to a site that correctly listed RJR Nabisco.
The test also revealed the disadvantage of depending on search engines -- they sometimes point to sites with conflicting answers.
This occurred most frequently when I asked how many viewers watched the series finale of the TV show M*A*S*H. The search engines pointed to Web sites that variously listed the audience at anywhere from 105.9 million to nearly 125 million. Trivial Pursuit lists the answer as 121.6 million.
To paraphrase M*A*S*H's theme song, searching for online answers still isn't painless.
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