Many social media from Facebook to Flickr live and die by discoverability. It’s the idea that from a casual glance you may find something that you weren’t looking for that engages your attention. Part of what killed the music business was that outlets like radio and MTV stopped playing their product. When this occurred most people stopped discovering new artists — and the result is that the while a Lady Gaga may occur occasionally break out, for the most part you have a stagnant business in sharp decline. And what happened to music CDs is now happening to manga.
Now many folks in Japan read their manga via weekly publications, but for those who aren’t that means that there’s no reason to buy a volume of manga. So an entire market for casual readers will die out over time. Many of the artists published in the self contained volumes of manga are the best of the best, but if a few years go by their series may not be running in a weekly publication anymore. The result is that a kid discovering an older artist for the first time will be stopped dead in their tracks at the shrink-wrap. Add to that fact that Japan is graying so there are less kids to buy the older back titles in the first place. And just so you know many of the titles that were shrink-wrapped were aimed at non-otakus like kids titles and romantic girly girl manga.
The new "D&D Encounters" provides all the materials needed to run a D&D game, but in a relatively short period of time. The goal, said brand director Liz Schuh, is to get those former gamers rolling the dice again.
"We wanted to try and create experiences to fit in their current time frames," Schuh said. "It is also an opportunity to learn the new rules system."
"Encounters" has premade characters and a premade adventure provided to the game's referee and storyteller, the Dungeon Master. Maps, tokens, game pieces and player aids, such as bonus cards, are all included.
The adventure is spread out over 12 weeks, but it only takes about two hours to play each week's encounter. Mark Watkins, a Dungeon Master for the "Encounters" game at Ravens Nest store in Marietta, Georgia, said the new version is simple and timely.
"It is very easy to DM. They give you everything," Watkins said. "This is really good for people to drop in and play."
The first snag you run into is that battery. "Although real-life battery technology is coming along great," Gluesenkamp writes, "we are a long way off from creating handheld batteries with capacities like that the ones found in the lightsaber's diatium power cell." In Star Wars, Jedi didn't have to worry about that because "diatium" is a convenient bit of fiction and are attuned to the Force, so, really, they could do anything.[...]
There's another problem in getting a focused, powerful blade of plasma with an exact length and shape, which is where the concept of a lightsaber gets "really convoluted," according to Gluesenkamp.
"There are also no crystals that can 'direct' a plasma," Gluesenkamp writes, noting that today we use magnetic fields are used, but are limited as the machinery involved has to enclose the plasma. "In fact, a plasma 'being directed' by a crystal lens doesn't make any physical sense anyway. A plasma is really just an ionized gas — a gas in which the electrons have been stripped from their atomic nuclei."
