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[Ed note] Background taken from: The Intercept :
Barrett Brown, whose column received the 2016 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, is an imprisoned U.S. journalist and the founder of Project PM, a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI raided his house, and later that year Barrett was indicted on 12 federal charges relating to the 2011 Stratfor hack. The most controversial charge, linking to the hacked data, was dropped, but in 2015 Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
[/Ed note]
I never really got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of those little German roaches that had colonized my kitchen or having to see "World War Z."
As it happens, I'd actually learned about the prevalence of tabletop games among inmates a few months before my own incarceration, in the days after the FBI first raided both my apartment and my mother's home in March 2012 and seized laptops and papers without yet making an arrest. As they themselves noted in the search warrant, which the late Michael Hastings published at BuzzFeed, the focus of the investigation was my collaborative journalism outfit Project PM as well as echelon2.org, the online repository where we posted our ongoing findings on the still-mysterious "intelligence contracting" sector (which has since been moved here). The warrant listed HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems — two firms on which we'd focused particular attention — as topics for the FBI's search. This was revealing. A year prior, a raid by Anonymous on the servers of HBGary had revealed, among other things, the firm's leading role in a conspiracy by a consortium calling itself Team Themis to conduct an array of covert operations against WikiLeaks and even journalists like Glenn Greenwald, prompting a congressional inquiry that would ultimately be squashed by a Republican committee chairman.
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Bruke on Tuesday October 18 2016, @04:42PM
I played quite a few games during my own 12 year sentence. Mostly GURPS and D&D but also a few others. Magic: The Gathering was also fun for awhile. During that time, I only had one instance of a player going nuts and flipping a table during a game. There's quite a few people there with anger management and impulse control issues but the controlled environment tends to minimize outbursts.
In my experience, there tended to be four types of gamers in prison -
While it's true that you would have some choice of who you play with, it wasn't always obvious which type of game you would be getting when you first sat down. I remember feeling awkward one time at a table where everyone was playing footsie under the table... not judging or saying it's bad but it's not my thing. I remember another time sitting down to learn that only the DM's characters could advance past first level... house rules limited player characters to just first level while most of the DM's NPCs were around ninth. Lots of anecdotes...
It's also worth noting that, for parts of my time (which was served in Michigan), the actual D&D rulebooks were on the banned book list and so we had to make due. I played quite a bit of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed for awhile because it made it through the ban. Several of the guards knew that I was skirting the ban but it was never worth the paperwork for them to write me up so it worked out well.
I hope my perspective was helpful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:45PM
your description of the four type of gaming groups in prison seems like the four types of gaming group outside of prison! i found that funny.
on a serious note, what did you guys use for dice? seems like dice would be banned in prison.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:01PM
on a serious note, what did you guys use for dice?
I was also wondering about this, and I found an instructable: "how to make dice commonly made in prison with just toilet paper, a pen, and some water." [instructables.com]
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:25PM
Reading TFA, it seems Barrett Brown has a different method:
With unlimited paper and pencils provided by the federal government, we had everything we needed except for a set of variously sided dice. It turned out that this was generally handled by making a spinner out of cardboard, a paperclip, and the empty internal plastic tube from an ink pen. This latter item is impaled loosely on the paperclip, itself positioned in the center of the cardboard, on which has been drawn a diminishing series of concentric circles divided into 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 equal segments, respectively.
(Score: 1) by Bruke on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:42PM
Yep. I can confirm that's accurate. I saw quite a few of these over the years.
(Score: 1) by Bruke on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:40PM
Dice were banned, as they were considered gambling paraphernalia. Oddly, poker cards were NOT banned so I built a few decks with just 1-10, 1-8, etc. For a d20, we used the 1-10 cards with the understanding that red cards were +10 to the face value.
Later on, some guys made spinners but I tended to avoid them as most were either deliberately rigged or else fairly easy to use to cheat.
I did actually use dice made from toilet paper that was dampened, shaped, and set into shape but I found them too fragile to use much. Likewise, I sometimes encountered dice made from carved soap but didn't use them much.
In a few instances, I knew people that would flip to random pages in books and look at the last digit of the page number but I never had much faith in that as it seemed to easy to cheat.
Prison is about having lots of time and limited resources... looking back it's quite surprising all the work-arounds we found.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:02PM
Came back to this thread found your post, and just wanted to say thank you for sharing. Very informative.
(Score: 1) by Bruke on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:46PM
You're welcome.
We need a new type of moderation, to mod you up as "gracious".