Storytelling in Games, and a comment on notability

I just got another article published on strange horizons discussing storytelling in games, which brings my body of work on game theory topics to five major pieces so far, as seen in the sidebar. I've written about four areas which share little overlap, the uses of story, music, and puzzles that are unique to games, and issues related to the perceived fairness or balance of multiplayer games. 

I've fleshed out adventure games and abstract puzzles the most, writing two articles talking about the use of interfaces in that genre and the different forms that puzzles take. When writing I spend a lot of time defining what I see as the essential concepts then building from there, which is why writing two article in a specific area such as puzzles has reaped greater rewards than just laying out the groundwork.

Some of my inspiration for writing in this area has been reading some of what's been written about games already in the books First Person, Second Person, Third Person by the MIT Press. First Person was primarily academic criticism and commentary on games, Second Person had a lot more input from game designers on how they made their games and some interesting projects, and Third Person is about the potential and techniques used for long-running stories.

And on a side note, there are roughly 6,706,993,152 living human beings on the planet, 369,285 of whom have passed Wikipedia's standards for notability and earned their own article, which means that roughly one in every eighteen thousand people are "notable", the top .006% of humanity. Assuming you could resist the urge to hover over the stream of facts and misinformation flowing about you, it would be nice to make it in that number.

Writing about gaming, and fairness

So far I've written four major pieces about the underlying theory behind video games, with two more hopefully on the path to publication. I've written two concerning adventure games, discussing them in terms of interfaces and puzzle-solving, I wrote one piece concerning game music and its potential in adapting to gameplay, and most recently I had a piece published talking about issues of fairness and balance in multiplayer games. My future writings relate to storytelling in games among other things, but I'll talk more about that when I get there.

My scope in talking about these things has gradually broadened, I started out just trying to describe a particular genre of game I was familiar with and delve into its underlying concepts and pitfalls, and I've gradually broadened my scope to include other genres of video games, multiplayer games, and eventually came to talk about other types of games aside from just the electronic variety.

Sometimes my writing will be based upon a sudden insight in understanding a particular area, or the fruits of researching a topic and considering all of its aspects, but this most recent essay on fairness is borne of frustration. My own frustration in dealing with unbalanced or skewed gameplay, and my complete dissatisfaction with some of the other pieces I've seen written about this issue, which were largely self-congratulatory and considered the purpose of gaming to be winning at all costs, which I think is missing the point. And rather than vent my grievances through outward displays of emotion or retreat by escaping from my preferred mode of escapism, I chose to channel my angst into marketable prose.

If you've never had the pleasure of dealing with an unbalanced gameplay experience or endured the gloating of uncharitable players, I'd encourage you to hang out in an online game for a while and further your understanding of man's true nature. And for those of you who can relate to feeling like you haven't been dealt a fair hand, my basic goal was to discuss and dissect the issues surrounding fairness in gaming without falling into the trap of showing the arrogance of a winner or the axe-grinding of a loser. And to do that you have to sit back and think about what would be fair to everyone, no matter where they're coming from. It's probably the most widely applicable topic out of all the ones I've covered, I think the feedback on this piece could be the most interesting yet.

Every time I sit down to talk about games and analyze a particular area, I feel the urge to follow up on my tangents and extend the conversation further. A lot of these issues are connected, and just talking about how people relate to multiplayer games has me think of a number of other social and psychological factors that relate to games. Having spent so much time in "research" in this area, I'm glad that I still feel like I have plenty of things to say.

On doing reviews, and the philosophy of taste

I've been writing reviews for an adventure gaming site for a while now, and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how I think they ought to work. This post was inspired by my own experience in trying to write reviews, and a particularly pretentious review I read recently. (in case you're curious, the main reason I wanted to read the review was to learn how well the movie worked as an adaptation and a movie in its own right, and since the bulk of his commentary was expressing his dislike for the original story, I didn't find it informative to someone with my interests)

First of all, I'd just like to say that I hate reviews that feel like their main point is to show off, and prove that "they get it" while no one else does. This can be done by heaping praise on a movie or game that no one else seems to get, or scoffing at a popular work as being shallow and enjoyed by less cultured minds. I want to read a review to find out if I'd like something and what makes it stand out. I don't subscribe to the idea that there is an inherently "good" notion of taste in terms of what people ought to like, and that reviewers and high culture are meant to guide people towards the better things in life. People ought to enjoy what they find enjoyable, not what someone else tells them they ought to like.

In games and movies there's frequently a gulf between what is critically acclaimed and what is popular. There are a couple possible reasons for this: the people who write reviews could have different tastes from the general public and be looking down on what's popular, or the people who write reviews could be better informed than the general public as to what's out there, and often end up preferring titles that didn't get multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns supporting them to make them successful. If someone were to ask me why my tastes often range outside the mainstream, I'd tend to prefer the latter explanation. I'd like to think I'm capable of enjoying the latest blockbuster as much as anyone else, but I might be aware of more obscure titles that didn't get as much attention that I might prefer. Of course, it might also be true that my tastes are slightly off from the general public's to begin with: there's a component of ego involved both in having different preferences from the masses and being better informed, to the point where some people may claim to like something until it gets popular and no longer confers upon them the special status of liking something obscure.

In an ideal world where I was capable of putting ego aside, my own tastes and reviews would reflect as accurately as possible how inherently enjoyable something is, regardless of popularity. And when exposing anyone else to the things that I like, I wouldn't do so by criticizing the things they've found that they like, but by suggesting that there might be some other stuff out there that they're missing out on. Perhaps the most important thing I want to emphasize is that I don't have high hopes of changing people's innate preferences: if someone doesn't like adventure games, I doubt I can convince them to like it in the space of a conversation or review. Taste is certainly adaptive, in many cases the more you get exposed to something the more you learn to appreciate it, particularly in games where being unfamiliar with the basic concepts can make a game frustrating and awkward to play. But I don't want to force my own set of preferences onto other people. The best I can do is describe how well a movie, game, or other piece of art does what it was intended to do: I may not be the world's biggest fan of romantic comedies but I can recognize when one is done well, even if I may cherish more secret glee at seeing a psychological mind-bending flick. To a certain extent any reviewer is tied to their own tastes and preferences, but a particularly bad reviewer is one who is incapable of appreciating something which other people might legitimately enjoy. And my ultimate goal as a reviewer is to answer that basic question: "Would you enjoy this?" by describing my own experience with it, and trying to recognize what it does well in areas that other people might enjoy.

Movie and game reviews could be measured with a two-dimensional metric, a score of how much enjoyment you would get out of it dependent upon your personal preferences in taste and genre. The reality of course that reviews usually get boiled down to a single metric, a star rating, and even these are frequently getting summed up in a meta-metric like Rottentomatoes or Metacritic, which describes what percentage of critics liked something or what the average score is that it's getting. This is subject to a few limitations, a few publications may have very strict standards and hardly ever give out five star reviews, some publications may grade-inflate, the metric may weight popular blogs alongside serious publications, and it may lead to the unfortunate phenomenon that the body of a review, which provides the most detailed information about how enjoyable it might be, would mostly go unread. It's almost an attempt to replace analysis with raw data; rather than relying on a single expert who says whether something is likable, you survey a sufficient mass of experts to see how likable it is on the whole--such sites often even put a summary of what their users thought of something alongside the critics. Works of art and enduring quality can now be evaluated on the basis of how they're received rather than what any one person says, although the jury is still out on if it's better for a movie to be enthusiastically loved by a few or simply enjoyed by everyone. The popularity of review aggregation could diminish the role that experts play and the influence they individually wield, but I still think reviewers serve a purpose in being more readable than the average forum post online, less prone to a selection bias where people only bother to review things they like, and hopefully being a better informed source.

The last point I want to make is in regard to taste is a factor that complicates our ability to know what we like. People often get confused as to what they actually enjoy as opposed to what they think they enjoy, or worse yet what they think they should enjoy. According to Malcom Gladwell's Blink, if you give samples of various jams to people and ask them to select the best ones, the ones they pick will generally correspond to what experts say are the best. But if you ask them to select the ones they think are the best and explain why, they'll get it wrong. People are fine at understanding what they like, until you ask them to explain it, in which case they're likely to get it wrong unless they've trained themselves in understanding their own reactions. A lot of times our internal models of what we think we like bear little resemblance to our own actual reactions, and we can convince ourselves we had a different experience than we did based upon what we thought should have happened. You can have situations where someone enjoys something at the time but underrates their experience later on and declines to try again. Add this on top of the fact that someone's enjoyment of something like a movie may be influenced by a number of factors that have nothing to do with the work itself, such as who they saw it with, and reviewing anything becomes even more subjective.

Having said all that, in describing what makes something enjoyable I'm not necessarily referring just to the immediate visceral experience you get from something, my own taste lies to the intellectual as well as the immediate. I would certainly rank highly works that are particularly original, leave you with something meaningful, or make you think on top of the emotions you directly experience, even though I recognize that that isn't what everyone is looking for. Reviewing and evaluating art is a complicated process that's necessary because getting into a book, movie, or game requires a lot of investment before you discover whether it was worth it for you. It's a tricky task, and frequently very subjective, but I still intend to try.

A Taxonomy of Nerds

A lot of us spend a fair amount of time labeling people and lumping them into categories, possibly for our own mental convenience in thinking about them, and possibly because of that delightfully smug sense of superiority you get when you think you have someone figured out. With that in mind, I'd like to take a stab at fleshing out some of the labels used to sum up personality traits I share. Specifically, "nerd", "geek", and "dork."

These words have gone through a variety of overlapping meanings, "nerd" was a word invented by Dr Seuss for a fanciful animal that gradually took on its current meaning through slang, a "geek" was originally a performer who bit the heads off chickens, and the word "dork" came about as a semi-censored derivative of Richard. You may use these terms in very different senses than I do, but I'd like to set up some distinct definitions I find useful. In short, I think of nerdiness as an obsessive singular interest in a subject, geekiness as an interest in topics outside the mainstream, and dorkiness as being characterized by social awkwardness or lack of relational expertise. You can be all three, or any one of the three and not the others. But let's tackle each in a little more depth.

I prefer to consider "nerdiness" and possessing obsessive interests separate from the other categories because I think it applies to so many fields. My little brother is very much a music nerd, he does a lot of research on songwriting and learning about talented musicians, he's overflowing with information about the stuff he likes, and when he gets into something he pursues it with a passionate single-minded nerdy zeal. I'd consider someone who cares about the minutia of philosophy to be a philosophy nerd--a nerdy interest is something you pursue far past the point to which most people take it, and a nerd is someone who's characterized by that kind of single-minded devotion. It can be in relation to a mainstream topic or an obscure one, whether you prefer fussing over cars or 8-track tapes. And it's probably the most socially acceptable out of the three traits by itself, it takes a certain amount of focus to get ahead in a particular field, although when taken to an extreme you have someone who only cares about their one particular topic.

I prefer to think of geekiness as an interest in topics outside the mainstream. Whereas nerdiness to me carries some connotations of expertise or brains, a geek could just be someone who enjoys video games, science fiction, math, or computers more than the average individual. The frontiers of geekiness are fairly elusive, yesterday's geek is tomorrow's everyman. Three quarters of heads of households play video games, and almost everyone uses the internet and social networking sites like facebook. What were once fairly exclusive hobbyist niches have become more and more mainstream. Geekiness can mean being on the cutting edge of technology, or just someone who pursues obscure stuff before it becomes popular. Lord of the Rings, Batman, and Star Wars are fairly mainstream, they've made a pretty big impact on the larger culture to where people would know what you're talking about if you reference them. Terry Pratchett, Sandman, and Firefly are a little less so.

The main distinction I want to make between nerdiness and geekiness is that I think of nerdiness as being related to expertise in a particular area, and geekiness as simply having interests that fall into the niche of a particular geek culture that's outside the mainstream. You can be a nerd about understanding fitness, and you could be a geek about obscure music. A nerdy geek would be someone who takes their obscure interests and strives to master them and achieve a level of proficiency. Nerds go to college and study obsessively, and geeks buy comic-books and play video games. It's possible to be both, or neither.

The last word in my personal classification is the most derogatory and the one that has the least chance of ever being reclaimed by the nerd community at large. I think of a dork as being someone who's simply socially awkward, slow to pick up on social cues, or generally shy/antisocial. As you may have noticed, all these traits are related: someone who's socially awkward may develop obscure interests since his interests aren't based around what his peers are into, and may be more inclined to focus obsessively on studying a particular subject; someone who's gifted in their ability to focus and study may find more obscure topics more rewarding and have less interest in socializing; and someone who's interests are obscure may find they have less in common to talk with people about, and more of a reason to narrow themselves in on a particular area.

As someone who's been various flavors of shy and awkward over my life, being sociable wasn't something that came naturally without practice, which I suppose is how most people relate to Math. It takes a certain mental leap of realizing that it's as possible for you as anyone, and overcoming your fears of things not turning out well. Whereas Math is about understanding explicit logical rules, socializing involves learning all kinds of implicit and subtle communication involving body language, tone, texture, timing, and understanding all the things people don't communicate directly. Dorkiness to me is a lack of being versed in social norms and not being as skilled at adapting to different social situations. Someone dorky could know they have difficulty fitting in and act shy to compensate, or not be aware that they have a problem and make other people uncomfortable to be around them. Or they might claim to find small talk and socializing less interesting than their own interests. And this is where most of the stigma associated with the trio of traits comes from. People with obscure interests or a passion for a particular subject are often assumed to be outside the social mainstream as well.

In some ways there's a certain tragedy to all this, I've seen a lot of nerdy/geeky people try to strongly disassociate themselves from dork stereotypes or pick on people who are socially awkward to make it clear that they're not like that. Some people can even be self-conscious about admitting to liking something fairly obscure or indulging a nerdy interest in a particular area. I'm aware of far more nerds who've helped people out with their math homework than nerds who've been offered help for all the things they lack expertise in. 

I find a nerdy passion for anything to be more interesting and engaging than simple apathy, even if it can be taken to extremes. Focusing on topics few other people are interested in can be isolating, but it's because people are willing to try stuff out that isn't mainstream yet that people get exposed to anything new. I see my own nerdy obsessions as a dangerous yet powerful force for good or evil, my geeky traits as a personal stamp of pride in my culture and all it brings the world, and my dorky traits as a reason to keep in mind that other people are actually worth it, and it's worthwhile to pursue social ends as well as intellectual ones.

To sum this all up in a bit of self-reference: Writing a blog post analyzing types of people? Nerdy. Writing it about a particular subculture? Geeky. Not being able to get anyone to read it? That would be dorky, but I'll hold out hope.

Update: One thing I've realized since writing this and discussing it with people is that while nerdiness is an absolute scale of obsession, both geekiness and dorkiness are relative to a particular culture. Being into French cinema may be perfectly normal if you live in France, but it would be a little geeky and obscure for someone in America, it's outside mainstream cultural taste. And while some elements of dorkiness are fairly universal in being able to relate to people and communicate well, a large component of dorkiness is how well you're adapted to a particular culture's norms. You may get by fine in America or even an english-speaking country where you're familiar with all the customs, but if you get plopped into a country where you don't know the language as well or understand how people typically interact, you'd be a hopeless dork in that context. And some subcultures can even create their own system of social expectations and interactions, that could leave normal people feeling out of the loop socially. Some people certainly don't put in the effort to adapt socially to their contexts, so there is still an absolute component of how much effort you put into connecting with people, but a large part of how dorkiness comes off is relative to the environment you're trying to fit in with.

Video Game Music

After months of preparation, I've had a piece on video game music published, and subsequently slashdotted. Writing it was a process of collecting my thoughts and continually reorganizing them as I worked on it, getting it ready for publication was partially a matter of tracking down examples and publicly available sources for music, and now it's a matter of promoting it and getting as much feedback and input as I can on it. My last foray into this subject was a bit more technical on the music theory side, this is much more about the gaming side of things.

I'm a big fan of slashdot's discussion system and their ability to filter out the most useful content and posts on a topic, often times the discussion can be more informative than the source, or go off in completely different directions as people weigh in. But it's also an intense vetting process as the audience may be as knowledgeable about a topic as you, I'm having to keep an eye on anything they think I might have missed or wished I had commented on. I think I hit all the broad points I wanted to hit, even if I wasn't able to give a shout-out to every worthy game even out of the ones I played.

One of the things the digital music revolution did for me in particular was increase my awareness of all the music out there, I suddenly had access to game soundtracks as well as arrangements and orchestrated albums that had never even been released in the United States. I gradually became aware that there was a much bigger game music scene out there. The great thing about the internet is, no matter how obscure your niche interest is, there's likely someone who shares it, and someone who's gone to the trouble of writing about it and collecting all the information available on it. (and in the few cases when that isn't true, I try to fill in the gaps myself)

When I took a hiatus from taking lessons in piano to go to college, one of the things I did was pick out a bunch of pieces I wanted to learn on my own. I wanted to get pieces I'd be able to get something out of without assistance, generally ones that I knew already, so I tried my fingers at some of the arrangements from the Final Fantasy piano collections. The nice thing about those books of sheet music is that they're actual arrangements — it's not just a literal transcription of the music as it appears in the game with indefinite repeats and all, as some game music books are, but a well-done arrangement of the basic melodies and progressions in a way that has a clear beginning and end.

I've picked up other books of game music for the Zelda and Chrono series, which take the amusing step of providing sheet music for absolutely every tune featured in a game, even if it's a brief adulatory fanfare. And I've discovered a number of musical treasures, string arrangements of pieces from the zelda series, orchestrations of soundtrack selections, remixes done by fan communities online, and even the original soundtracks themselves can be enjoyable for both their musical merits and nostalgia.

The culmination of my game music experience may have been going to the video games live concert this last year at comic-con. They had a live action version of space invaders where they dragged a guy on stage to play the ship and move around on stage to fire, plenty of arrangements of classic tunes or more recent ones combined with video clips, interviews from game composers, and they brought out some people from the industry to talk briefly about their roles. The dramatic culmination though was probably dragging a guy up on stage to play Guitar Hero for a chance to win a laptop. He was supposed to get through a certain song with a specific score on hard, but he insisted on bumping it up to expert. And I have never seen a crowd go quite as crazy in my life as they did for this man, playing Guitar Hero with live orchestra and choir backing him up, and nailing solos and riffs all to eventually walk away with a new computer. For a few brief minutes up there, he was living the dream.

Video games can be escapist, like all forms of entertainment and music itself. But like anything people do that requires any amount of skill, there's artistry that goes into it, and understanding and truly appreciating it can prove more rewarding than simply being entertained by it.

A Population Bubble?

I've been watching the collapse of the financial markets and marveling at the complete inability of all our largest financial institutions to see it coming, or at least, to resist the urge to make short-term profits in a market with long-term instability. You can do classroom simulations where people will happily invest in a bubble: make up an investment that pays off one dollar every ten minutes over two hours, and let people buy and sell the assets as they please. You can calculate the real value of the investment by how many payments it has left, but even though everyone knows this, they're still willing to trade in it above that value. The idea is that you buy the investment for an inflated price, collect a few payments, and sell it to someone else for possibly a higher price, and you come out ahead. It all works fine, so long as you can cash in on the hot potato and you're not left being the one holding the bag. (which for our financial crisis, would be the US taxpayers)

The problem is that no real wealth is being created, it's only worth that much money so long as there's a bigger idiot out there willing to buy it from you. Most sensible economic activity is a non-zero sum game, you're adding wealth to the economy and everyone can be made better off. Chasing a bubble is just trying to cash in on someone else being a sucker and trying not to be a sucker yourself. And as we've seen, it distorts the whole market when people start assuming prices and values will rise forever, right up until they don't.

All of which got me thinking about what may be the largest area of unfettered human growth and expansion that's led to a lot of investment: population. We had a billion people in 1800, 2 billion people by the roaring twenties, 3 billion by the 60's, and we've been adding roughly a billion every decade since, scheduled to hit 7 billion in 2011 or so. Population, and consequently consumer demand, GDP, and industry are in a never-ending cycle of growth. This is what allows us to continually grow our industries and even do things like borrow money from future generations, since presumably there will always be more of them than there are of us.

This has all held up pretty well so far, and since we've gotten a handle on disease, farming, and war, there have been few obstacles to growth. Half the planet is 28 or younger. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that ceases to be the case, and population ceases to grow or levels off. The indefinite expansion of the population bubble finally bursts. What then?

This would be different from a bubble like the housing market in which things are simply overvalued, it'd be more like computers suddenly hitting a brick wall of progress for how much space they can manage or how fast they can go. Value's still been added, it's just that the predictions of growth without limits prove to be inaccurate, and all the investments and future prospects have to adjust. Our social security system is a pyramid scheme that assumes each level of the pyramid will be larger than all the ones above it, current workers support current retirees, which so long as you're always having more and more people enter the workforce than are retiring, you're fine. Each generation enjoys a better retirement than the previous generation because more people are working and producing things for them to buy. You could even go so far as to say that the tendancy of men to date women younger than themselves is made easier by the fact that the selection is better in every subsequent generation since there are more people. 

A few countries such as Japan and parts of Europe are beginning to see what it looks like when all this isn't the case. In addition to avoiding most of the things that kill people off young, modern societies have gotten excellent at giving people alternatives to breeding large families as their chief source of joy and entertainment. The US's birth rate is just sufficient to replace its population, we grow simply because of immigration, many european countries are substantially lower than that. The prospect of an aging population and dwindling workforce may force people to work longer, no longer expect their standards of living to keep scaling upwards, and limit our ability to keep borrowing against future wealth when we may not always have more of it to spend than we do now. Population growth may be at the core of what makes us assume that indefinite GDP growth and rise in wealth is normal.

The questions are, how likely is all this, and would it be good or bad? Developed nations do tend to have lower birthrates, and as societies and women in particular become more secularized and have access to more options and education, family size tends to decrease. That said, the countries leading the growth of the world's population aren't the developed ones, and there's even a strong demographic element to all this. Religious couples tend to have far more kids than nonreligious ones, the makeup of the world in the future may be composed of people who have the strongest attitudes about believing in large families. Most religions grow more due to having kids than making converts, and in the battle for the survival of the fittest, certain religions may have the necessary traits to guarantee they endure. That said, societies also get less religious and that element is muted as they become more secular, but it's the poorer and heavily Catholic/Muslim parts of the world driving demographic trends at the moment.

Finally, how good or bad is all this, if world populations keep increasing until a country becomes wealthy enough to find better things to do than having kids, then starts declining? Some estimates say that the planet has enough resources for 2 billion people to enjoy the lifestyle of someone living in the United States. The fewer people we have, the more natural resources there are to go around, along with less workers, scientists and engineers to produce other forms of wealth. And who knows if we'll undergo any quantum leaps of technology that make resources less of a factor, or space less of a concern. The United States is in an easier position than a lot of the world when it comes to growth since we're sitting on huge amounts of undeveloped land still, China's gone so far as to violate human rights and mandate a one-child policy, which has resulted in a nasty side effect of "planned births" leaving 5 men for every 4 women. One wonders how the fifth wheel in that situation is going to get by, some societies in the past seemed to resort to war to correct gender imbalances from polygamy.

Right now, the smart money is still being bet on indefinite growth and barring any catastrophes or radical social or technological changes, it may take a long time before things even level out. But if population ever does decline globally, or more dramatically for a particular country, it'll be interesting to see how we react to a world where every generation's core services and businesses have to shrink from what the previous generation was supplying, rather than keep growing forever.

Stigmatizing Math

There was an interesting article in the New York Times (apologies for the required registration, bugmenot has logins) regarding math education in the United States and math culture, compared to other countries. It suggested there are a few problems with the way math is viewed:

• Math is viewed as being an "elite" subject, where some people are simply good at it, and other people simply aren't, rather than as a skill everyone should have which requires effort to perfect. Everyone plays sports and is encouraged for trying no matter how well they do starting out, but people who have a hard time in math decide it's just not for them
• Math reaps few social rewards at a young age and can even face social stigma. The arts and athletics have support communities to encourage people to develop those skills and there's a culture based around valuing exceptional effort in those areas. But being good at math, simply put, rarely makes you popular
• Math skills are stereotyped as being exclusive to certain types of people, Asians and nerds. A large percentage of successful math students in the US are coming from backgrounds and cultures that value math more highly and view it as an accessible skill. Many people, and young women in particular gauge their interest in math based upon the types of people they see being interested in it, and American women have even less of an interest in mathematics than their international peers.
• Mathematics, the sciences, and academics in general get very little media attention compared to the arts or athletics, the entertainment industries. Arts and athletics are often "lottery" fields where everyone wants to get in but only a handful are able to make it, and far more people spend their lives trying to get in and become multimillion dollar superstars than actually make it. Media attention is a finite resource, there's only so much of it to go around, in contrast to potentially unlimited advances that might be able to be made in other fields. But the bottom line is that our culture celebrates the few and the lucky who exhibit talent in a few very visible areas, while a lot of the things done to benefit society as a whole without garnering its attention meet very little accolades.

And one point that I've made myself is that Math is greatly misunderstood. Math is not number-crunching. Computers can crunch numbers. Math is about creativity, insight, and

 reasoning skills. The basics of Math and logic inform my understanding of probability, economics, human nature, and any number of other topics. Math is fundamental to everything, not as an exercise in solving particular types of problems but as an exercise in thinking and abstraction, formalizing a system into precise terms. Mathematics is the poetry with which God has written the universe.

One criticism I've heard related to this is the state of math education. A lot of the people who end up teaching math at an early level primarily studied education and aren't enthusiastic about their subject. Math is often viewed as another exercise in memorization and rote repetition rather than an elegant system of interrelated rules of logic which all build on each other. And even for myself, I failed to see the purpose to a lot of the math I was doing until I began working with its applications and realized I could tackle almost any problem with the right mathematical approach.

I place a lot of value on the arts myself, and the importance of writing and clear expression. But those disciplines have long-running traditions and are embedded in our culture in a way that the importance of mathematics is not. Math is precise, unambiguous, and elegant in a way that few other subjects are, and while there are plenty of other valuable pursuits to forming a well-rounded character, I'm convinced that the significance and importance of Math remains underemphasized in our culture.

(follow-up, the NYT had a recent article about the widening gap in computer science enrollment after years in which enrollment has grown closer in other subjects, they credit the perception of geek and gaming culture as being exclusively male)