Lenovo Introduces 27" Table PC

From the Associated Press:

Dismayed that family members are spread out over the house, each with a separate PC or tablet? Lenovo has something it believes will get them back together: a PC the size of a coffee table that works like a gigantic tablet and lets four people use it at once.

Lenovo Group Ltd., one of the world's largest PC makers, is calling the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC the first "interpersonal computer" - as opposed to a "personal computer."

At first glance, it looks like a regular all-in-one machine in the vein of the iMac: It's a 27-inch screen with the innards of a Windows 8 computer built into it, and it can stand up on a table.

But you can pick it up off the table, unhook the power cord and lay it flat for games of "Monopoly." It's big enough to fit four people around it, and the screen can respond to ten fingers touching it at the same time.

There's more at the original article, but the implications for tabletop gaming are clear, and even alluded to in the article. Where monstrosities such as dedicated gaming tables have fallen flat in terms of finding a market, this device might actually have a chance. It's going to start retailing this summer at $1,699, but doubtless that will come down in short order, and discounted prices will be had online as well.

Imagine something like that for playing Cataan. Or displaying a dungeon map, or battle grid with markers for characters and monsters, able to be manipulated in real time by tapping the screen. If this thing does catch on, it veritably screams for someone to put together an application to facilitate generic dungeon crawls, or even system-specific facilitators. Heck, right off the bat it could be used to display large flat image files, which could be good enough for battle-mat applications.

I'll be interested to see whether this gets any traction. It's a high price point, but there's lots of potential there.

The Byte-Sized Middle Ages

I came across a fascinating paper by Courtney Booker (first published in 2004) which describes how modern minds have a somewhat distorted view of the Middle Ages. Rather than internalizing the pervasive religiosity which defined the Medieval era, we seem to have a view of the time as being driven by a sort of secular chivalry.

What makes it particularly apropos for my purposes is that it traces the responsibility for this popular attitude regarding the Middle Ages through Tolkien, then to Gygax and Arneson's D&D (citing heavily from Lawrence Schick's Heroic Worlds), early computer games such as "Adventure", and finally through Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings (which were quite current at the time the paper was originally published). Ms. Booker takes the de rigueur side-trips through James Dallas Egbert III, the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's (even citing my favorite radio evangelist and over-the-phone exorcist, Bob Larson), and B.A.D.D. Her final conclusion is that:

...the popular conception of the Middle Ages is now largely Tolkienesque, it is a conception that will be increasingly based on Jackson’s high-definition “CGI” of Tolkien’s novel, with all the baggage—the history, possibilities, and constraints—that CGI brings with it.

It's a fascinating thesis, albeit one that will quickly become dated when the next big pseudo-Medieval fantasy epic hits the big screen to replace Jackson's films in the collective imagination, but it's a great read, if you're used to the academic style.

Thanks to Medievalists.net for pointing this out! (Currently gracing my blog roll, to the left.)