Mark Newheiser

The Guinness Book of World Records 2010 Edition

2010-04-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

I mentioned this last year, every year Guinness puts out a book of Video Game World Records that's about one-third history lesson, one-third propaganda for new games by passing off every new game as a record-breaker, and one-third wild speculation. Their "top games" lists were better done than I would have expected since they quoted some objective sources like awards given out, although they did seem a bit biased by the hype of the year. A couple of their picks, Modern Warfare 2 and Scribblenauts received tremendous amounts of hype but I heard a lot of complaints after the fact. They also named Call of Duty one of the most important franchises of all time, when it may be headed for a death spiral thanks to the recent problems between Infinity Ward and Activision.

Their section on Adventure Games was interesting as usual, they squeezed it in as a specific section for a chapter on action-adventure games that covers everything from Tomb Raider to Zelda. Their top 10 adventure games made for a solid list, it referenced the highlights of the LucasArts tradition, the latest adventure games on the DS, and a couple others like Myst. The Sierra games were completely forgotten this year however, since there wasn't even a knockoff Leisure Suit Larry game to reference, there was no point in digging into the Sierra archives. Monkey Island got top billing due to its recent sequel and remake, and Phoenix Wright/Layton were heralded as the up and comers. It looks like if your intellectual property isn't significant in the present, it's not judged to be significant in the past either.

Like I mentioned last year, they refer to the genre as "Point and Click Adventure Games", which is even stranger than you might think, since all of the games they listed can be played on platforms that don't require clicking. Phoenix Wright and Layton in particular are almost completely removed from the tradition of pixel hunts where you point and click on things. Fundamentally the games are about solving abstract puzzles in contrast to real-time puzzles like Tetris. I think calling them "Adventure Games" suffices as a label for most of us, you just have to label Action-Adventure games a little differently.

The Pros and Cons of Kindle Reading

2010-02-01T18:09:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend got me a kindle for Christmas, and having had the chance to read a few books on it so far, I feel it's time to weigh in on what I think of the delightful little gizmo.

The pros:

It's the one thing you need to bring with you when you want something to read. It's lightweight, gives you your whole (digital) library, and lets you pick up where you left off in any book you want to come back to
Pro: It absolutely minimizes physical effort and distraction in the reading process, you don't have to turn pages, or go from one side of a bound book to another, you literally hold the book in one place and hit a button to change pages. It's faster and more convenient than traditional reading.
Pro: I'm starting to think it's the easiest way to read pure text, scrolling on a web browser is awkward for keeping your place and has uncomfortable margins, and it's easier to pick up and set down than a normal book and start reading just at a push of a button.
Pro: This is more of a lack of a problem, but the battery life is well-nigh infinite if you're not downloading books, and can be pretty much forgotten about 99% of the time.
Pro: Having spent so much time reading and watching backlit screens, the digital ink of the kindle is much more comfortable for reading, it feels like reading a normal book. It not being backlit means you need a light source like any other book, but I'm convinced it's the most comfortable way to read, it's essentially a book with one page that keeps changing.
Pro: In theory, you can search for specific text or phrases and annotate, although those seem to be more experimental and less-refined. Skipping to individual chapters from the table of contents is much simpler

Now for the cons:

A number of books have had spotty support for kindle features, pull quotes which are images have ended up in the wrong place depending upon your text size, there are minor transcription errors or incorrectly placed text, and viewing footnotes isn't always as easy as it's supposed to be. Not every book seems to be set up with the same level of quality
Con: Not every book is available in kindle format, it's great for picking up new books or best-sellers, but it's a way to get books on a going-forward basis, while most popular titles I looked for were there, not all were
Con: Amazon is currently fighting over the future of e-books thanks to the iPad promising 15 bucks for an ebook, and publishers not wanting to sell their content cheaply. Amazon tries to push a 10 dollar price point with possible discounts, I think trying to sell a digital book for more than a standard paperback is really unfair to the consumer who doesn't necessarily know how long he can count on a particular format sticking around.
Con: While the size of the device is ideal for what it is, a portable reading device, you are sometimes made aware of the limitations of the smaller screen size and the correspondingly smaller amount of text it can fit before you hit the next page button, I've chosen to go to comparatively smaller text sizes to bite off larger chunks at a time
Con: Picking up where you left off is very easy, but I'm not completely sold on the merits of searching by text or location, paging through a book is still faster than hitting next page even if hitting "next page" is faster than turning a normal page. In one book in particular, the index at the back of the book was useless, non-hyperlinked and the page numbers offered no correspondence to how "locations" were laid out in the book, you had to rely on a text search or guessing by section
Con: You can't lend out a book as easily that I'm aware of, and at the moment trying to show someone something in a book quickly turns into a kindle tech demo as the device overshadows all
Con: It's unsuitable for certain types of information: magazines, strategy guides, comic books, graphic novels, and newspaper articles you might want to tear out or pass on to another person.

Essentially, the kindle is optimized for a very specific process: reading a book, leafing through it one page at a time, and periodically setting it down to pick it up later. It helps accomplish that process better than any invention since Gutenberg. It is significantly less optimized towards the other ways in which people use books: leaving margin notes (although annotations are possible they aren't as intuitive as in a book), skimming through a book and trying to take in large sections at once, or representing other types of content rather than just pure text. (images are possible, but limited)

That said, going off of purely empirical data, the kindle has been an incredible success for me. It's successfully subsumed my normal book reading (excluding graphic novels, and online stuff like the wall street journal), and I'd say it's even increased the rate at which I read books because of its incredible convenience for normal reading, and the ease of just picking up a book where you left off and diving in. Reading books on the kindle is addicting, it gets information to you incredibly fast and you're less intimidated by the size of the tome in question, your progress is tracked at the bottom with a bar but you only ever have a well-measured chunk to deal with.

So while I may not have had the courage to attempt this experiment on my own, I'm sold on the kindle for basic reading, and I'll continue trying to find ways to make it better at the things I want it to do like searching and scanning, and hope it continues to grow in support among publishers. I'm undertaking a certain risk in committing part of my future library to this format, but hopefully it'll prove more resilient than the cheap paperbacks it's effectively replacing.

Topics from Comic-Con: the Philosophy of Adaptations, the Future of Strategy Guides, and the state of nerd culture

2009-12-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

My first article with a round-up of the interesting events/etc from Comic-Con is up, you can read it here. I got to talk to Zach Snyder of Watchmen and 300 about his philosophy of adaptations, the creator of CSI and lonelygirl15 about their new project, and present an overview of all Comic-Con has to offer. For anyone interested btw, four-day passes to the 2010 convention have already sold out, single-day passes go on sale in one week.

An update on Farmville musings

2009-12-04T10:42:00.001-08:00

I've updated my thoughts on Farmville and summarized them in half the space on Gamasutra.

The Strategy and Ethos of Optimized Farmville

2009-11-08T16:11:00.000-08:00

Introducing Farmville

My girlfriend recently became obsessed with a Facebook game called Farmville, which has become the most popular game Facebook has over the last five months, and by way of strengthening our relationship and indulging her casual nerdiness as she does for my more intense variety, I decided to check it out. As a gamer I tend to engage primarily with engrossing long-form gaming experiences. I think of a long form gaming experience as something where you progress through increasing levels of difficulty tied together by a narrative, and in which very often your character or state in the game develops according to choices you make. And I think of an engrossing game as one that demands your full attention, you play the game when you're ready to sit down at home, turn off the lights, unplug your phone, de-wire your doorbell, load up on food for the weekend and hunker down to just play, rather than something you idly mess around with when you're bored.

Exceptions to long form games would include puzzle games or games played competitively, and exceptions to "engrossing" games would include RPGs in some cases(FFXII is the worst offender that I'm aware of, although I certainly play RPGs) as well as a new brand of game exemplified by Facebook's Farmville. Farmville works on a different timetable than most games, it's real-time, but not in the sense of a game like Zelda where an hour takes a minute to pass, it runs on real-world time. You plant crops that you can only come back and harvest after a day, multiple days, or hours. It's not a game designed to be played full-time, it's a game designed to draw you back in spurts all throughout the day.

Farmville and Other Farming Games

Oddly enough, I am no stranger to the world of simulated farming games, I've played games in the Harvest Moon series for a while, which are designed to be played in a sort of "game real time" with no downtime between accomplishing things. You have many of the same features as Farmville, you plow fields, raise animals, make investments in seeds, harvest crops, and then re-buy more seeds to increase your capital, while sometimes investing in larger projects like houses. Farmville takes the farming theme a step further in letting you interact with nearby farms and show off your farms to your friends, while it also leaves out some features in terms of having a secondary system in the game for making friends with people while putting your crops and goods to a secondary purpose as gifts. Unlike the Harvest Moon games the social aspects of Farmville are largely independent of the core economy of the game. There's not a significant world to interact with outside your farm, and it also lacks the mechanics used by the Rune Factory spinoffs which introduce crafting and combat to the world to provide a further purpose for all the money raised and goods produced.

A few parallel elements are handled differently: Harvest Moon makes a big deal out of clearing your field so that you can reclaim all the space to plant crops, Farmville has all the space initially available, the way you increase your usable farmland is to buy more. In Harvest Moon (and a limited-round board game that involves farming called Agricola), a plowed field is plowed forever, you can keep re-using it to plant more crops of different types, while Farmville increases your clicking requirements by making you re-plow a field in between each crop you plant. In Harvest Moon, animals are a useful source of fixed income year-round since you have to deal with seasons when you can't grow certain crops, in Farmville animals seem like almost an afterthought since they provide nothing close to the money gained by crops, which require far more time and maintenance, which is what the game is built to reward. Quite a few features of Farmville simply end up as decorative, sometimes because they are intended as such, and sometimes because they're completely outpaced by other factors of the game in making money.

Farmville and Optimization

My girlfriend and I noticed that people used a wide variety of strategies in playing Farmville, some filling up their field with a single crop, raising a lot of animals or simply none, and their farms ended up looking very different for non-aesthetic reasons. So we decided to run the numbers Harvest Moon style and figure out what crops gave you the best return. There are two main resources you get in Farmville, coins which you use for your investments, and XP, which lets you level up and gain access to more crops and goods. Crops have turn-around times ranging from 2 hours to 4 days, offering larger or smaller returns. So the two things we wanted to calculate were the profit per hour for each crop, the XP per hour, and in some cases the XP per hour per coin, if your goal was to level up as quickly as possible where coins were your limiting factor.

A spreadsheet quickly (relative to the amount of time spent playing Farmville) showed that the lone 2 hour crop had the best profitability simply because of how often you could flip it and re-plant it, although later on in the game the margins of longer-running crops catch up, which also means that the game after a certain point no longer takes regular two hour obsessive re-checking to maximize profitability, you can be on an 8 or 10 hour schedule. We also noticed that some of the worst crops in the game were being heavily used by several players, and that in some cases the next 10 crops you could look forward to unlocking offered no improvements in profitability over the previous ones. Figuring out what crops to plant optimally is a calculation of the most profitable crop you have access to over the time interval at which you next expect to check the game.

While most of the fixed income assets of the game are amazingly inferior in profitability compared to the benefits of planting crops, there is an expensive building that offers more profitability than using the same stretch of land for crops, which raised the question of when it's appropriate to make that investment. We eventually realized that while on a per-square basis, the building beat the benefits of growing crops, it was a worse utilization of capital than using your money to fill your field with crops and harvest them continually. If you were in a situation where squares were a limiting factor and you had enough capital to grow crops on the rest of your field, you should buy the expensive building, but if you were in a situation where capital is the limiting factor and you could either buy the building or fill your field with crops, you should fill your field with crops.

The single most profitable long-term investment is expanding the size of your field to give you more squares to farm, since after a certain point your total assets are too high to be used on your entire field, although obviously buying a larger field is only worth it if you can still fill your field with your leftover capital, or else you're cutting your income for no reason. The only other trade-off worth considering is increasing your XP as quickly as possible to get access to better crops and assets compared to increasing your coins as quickly as possible to gain existing resources. However, those goals overlap closely enough when you use fast growing crops to not represent much of a dilemma. From the track my girlfriend seems to be on, if she keeps re-investing her capital in the most profitable crops and increasing the size of her field, she'll hit the maximal levels of prosperity the game is capable of representing, and at that point have little to do but decorate.

Pursuing the goals of ruthless optimization revealed a few things: the optimal strategy is fairly easy to discover when you run the numbers, and disappointingly predictable: you fill your field with the best crop available to you, which is what we noticed most of the top players doing. A lot of players preferred to keep an area of their farm "just for fun" and fill it with the gameplay features that were decorative by design or hopelessly inefficient, while using the bulk of their field for wealth maximization. There are ribbons and achievements that seem intended to give players incentives to diversify and try out strategies other than the obviously optimal, but because of the way the curve of the game is set up, you're locked out of most of its content until you grind your way to the top, so even if you simply want to make a beautiful farm with the minimal amount of effort, minimizing the time spent grinding via optimal farm-building seems to be the only way to go.

Farmville, Addiction and Money

While Farmville is open to being played intermittently rather than in more focused sessions, playing the game still takes a good chunk of time since it is set up to reward you for coming back regularly to get your small chunk of gameplay in. Its main advantage over the Harvest Moon games for me is its social aspect in showing off your farms and interacting with your friends by giving them help on their farms or gifts, and it benefits from its accessibility to anyone with Facebook and a web browser at all hours of the day.

The points I'd make against it are that I think it's a less deep system than the Harvest Moon games offer in terms of optimizing the use of your time and resources, and the end result of the game in achieving decorations and badges of achievement seems less satisfying than channeling the results of your income into the secondary gameplay systems offered by Harvest Moon. You're able to show off your success, but there isn't anything meaningful to do with it. And while being rewarded for coming back every few hours to play the game and punished when you don't is probably an optimal formula for addiction by creating a regular habit, I prefer my gaming in controlled well-scheduled bursts that don't represent a constant invasion upon my schedule. Farmville is an itch that keeps building and rewards you for scratching it in predictable intervals, I prefer a gaming experience that puts itself entirely at your mercy to control when you reap its rewards rather than demanding real-time effort to keep up.

The last comparison I'd make to Farmville is to massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Second Life. World of Warcraft tries to maintain itself as a meritocracy--buying your way into the upper echelons of the game is a violation of the community ethic, and will get you banned from the game if you're caught selling resources acquired in the game to another player. Second Life makes real world money transactions an essential part of the game, to accomplish anything significant in the game's world you need in-game currency, which can only be obtained by exchanging real dollars. Farmville does a little of both: it has definite meritocracy elements since it's possible to work your way to the top of the heap, but they are perfectly happy to sell in-game perks to players who are willing to throw real money at them. Since the game's entire means of funding itself is getting players to spend money to get ahead, it's arguable that the whole purpose of the grind is to be painful enough to make players consider spending cold hard cash instead of time to unlock the game's content.

Farmville and Casual Gaming

I think of a good game as something you go out of your way to spend some time on, Farmville is the kind of game you stumble your way into getting an addiction for, and use it to fill up internet-enabled downtime. I'm more comfortable with the incentives inherent to a game you pay for in advance in comparison with a game that's "free, unless you want to buy your way to the top", and I prefer attention-focusing experiences in general to attention-splitting ones. I'm very guilty of multi-tasking my day, but I recognize that focusing all your attention on a book, movie, or game will get you a lot more out of it than juggling it with a number of other activities.

Now granted, every game is ultimately a waste of time, the only real metrics of comparison are how enjoyably it wastes that time and how meaningful the challenges are. 64 million people are playing Farmville, which eclipses the entire sales of the Harvest Moon series and its spinoffs by more than a factor of 10. I think the perfect Facebook farming game would have a meaningful interactive economy where users could exchange and directly deal in the game's goods themselves, a better defined end-game with a purpose for all the wealth gained, include more meaningful incentives for specialization vs diversification, and allow for more complex strategy than the game currently affords. However, that may not be compatible with the financial incentives of the developer: allowing players to have an economy between them directly could allow players to "buy into" the system from each other rather than the developer, Farmville is already wildly popular with mechanics that involve a fairly simple grind, and the ultimate purpose of the game is to make spending money on it seem like a better deal than spending time.

Casual gaming has opened up the world of simulated entertainment to people who don't normally consider themselves gamers, and have never honed the reflexes, the three dimensional spatial awareness, or the drive for eternally optimizing strategies that the hardcore gamers possess. Ultimately I hope it ends up filling a niche as a gateway for people to dip their toes into what games are capable of, rather than eclipsing and replacing the existing world of games catered to dedicated obsessives. But until that day comes when I have to rally the troops, my girl and I will keep farming away.

Update: Two other things I've noticed about farmville's addictive potential: investing your entire field in crops can be a risky move if your internet goes down or if you lose access, which has caused some people to recruit Farmville babysitters to harvest their crops so they don't rot. And Farmville is very clever about getting you to market it to your friends and draw you back in: occasionally a black sheep will show up and Farmville will beg you to ask your friends to "adopt" it and start a game, and if you go idle for a long time you'll receive notifications about all the people who are helping out on your deserted farm. But with all that said, I think Farmville is more of a triumph of social psychology and addiction than gaming quality.

A letter to Valve about Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal, and their response

2009-11-03T22:05:00.000-08:00

About a year and a half ago after playing through the Orange Box I wrote a letter to the head honchos at Valve and they were kind enough to give me a reply, I figured I'd toss it up here as a record of my thoughts:

Gabe, aka the G-Man,

You mentioned in your commentary tracks that you read every e-mail you get, so I feel significantly more motivated to write one to you. So, let me just go into some things I did and didn't like:

Some General Pros:

Achievements. Considering that you deliver short, tightly focused games that are meant to be beaten relatively quickly, having an extra means of tracking stats, and measuring the extent to which the player has explored the world to its fullest provides some useful feedback and encourages getting more out of the experience than a single playthrough.
Commentary. Always fun, hearing about the evolution of the game's design is particularly interesting, and all the mistakes made.
As always, your game design style favors novelty over grinds and experiencing unique challenges over long and painful stretches of the same old thing

Some General Cons:

Turnaround time, a good deal of expansion packs and sequels running on the same engine as their original game have delivered more gameplay content (in terms of time) for the number of years spent in development. The schedule may have very well passed your expectations as well as ours, they're great games, but the trickled out pace is slow compared to a lot of series
New content in each title. Your strategy appears to be taking all your cast of characters, your weapons, enemies, and NPCs, and developing them further by placing them in new environments and settings. Since HL2 in the two episodes, we've seen one variation on a zombie, the hunters, acid spitters, and no new weapons. We've gotten some great environments like the antlion caves, but largely the same cast of characters otherwise, I would typically expect a bit more from an expansion pack, the undersea monster from the teleportation mishap in HL2 has never even shown up.

Some game specific comments:

Episode Two:

The antlion caves were gorgeous, the texturing felt a lot more real than the typical narrow corriders
The open-ended battle at the end of the game fighting the striders is one of my favorite moments in the series, it makes practical use of a vehicle, involves some larger scale strategy and resource allocation, and feels more like you're involved in a real large-scale battle rather than a one-man skirmish
Never been a fan of crossing radioactive waste, or sentry guns that can you for standing up, it makes movement uncomfortable and inspires a lot of quickload for taking a wrong step, much more so than typical gameplay

Portal:

Great use of the basic game mechanic to set up puzzles, and from the fire onwards it turned from a straight-up puzzle game to an engaging story
The vast majority of levels are basically setup and training for the game's mechanics and their consequences. For those of us who didn't have a problem figuring out Narbacular Drop for ourselves it takes a bit to get into the meat of the game. What was there was short, and extremely sweet, and feels like a great tech demo, you just wish there was more
Sparse use of basic actors/element of gameplay: crates, buttons, turrets, those glowy ping pong balls and receptacles. All of which were used to great effect, but for future titles it seems you'll have to involve new elements to keep the gameplay fresh: deal with portals in relation to moving enemies you may have to trick or trap, possibly dealing with an enemy who has access to portals, and maybe even allowing your portal gun to have a "memory" and maintain more than one set of portals

Anyway, keep it up, and thanks for your time in reading this and in developing.

Sincerely,

Mark Newheiser

Anyway, after what looked like some brief forward in the email chain between Gabe Newell and a designer, I got this response:

Dear Mark

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. We’ll keep it all in mind as we go forward, at our usual tortuous pace.

Yours,

Marc Laidlaw

Sending out emails to major game developers is a little bit like writing a personal blog in terms of tossing feedback out into the great googlish void of the internet and hoping someone notices, but it was an encouraging moment for me, back before I was doing any serious writing related to games. Valve is apparently well-known for doing stuff like this in general, they send back custom feedback forms related to fans who mail stuff related to Team Fortress 2, and have mocked up custom comics around their content for the sole purpose of interacting with fans.

Along with Blizzard, they're a company that has an excellent reputation for taking as long as they damn well please to make a game, but ultimately turning out something amazing. And while I'm not sure if the Half-Life 2 episodes really qualify as episodic gaming anymore in any meaningful sense, they've managed to turn out a caliber of game that I'll probably be introducing my kids to many years from now as I gripe at them to check out the classics of my era.

The Philosophy and Ethics of Chrono Trigger

2009-10-25T10:37:00.001-07:00

I ran into a book recently called Final Fantasy and Philosophy, part of a series analyzing popular works of media in the light of their philosophical underpinnings. In this title based on the Final Fantasy series of video game RPGs, they talked about the nihilism of its villains, the occasional identity crises of its heroes, how often characters ended up duped and simply used as a tool by someone else, and how players fill in the gaps for the story of a game in a way that's different from other media. But the section I found the most interesting was analyzing the ethics of Final Fantasy characters according to the views of different philosophers: Thomas Hobbes would apparently have been disgusted by the irrational altruism of some fantasy heroes, John Stuart Mill as a utilitarian would have judged them solely on the consequences of their actions, and Aristotle would have dealt out approval or disapproval based upon the purity of the motives for which they engaged in their heroic deeds.

It was interesting seeing the entertainment of my generation dissected in a fairly readable fashion by writers who were clearly fans of the games themselves. One title from a sister series I wish they had taken a

crack at is Chrono Trigger, my love affair with which is documented elsewhere, and which I've recently gotten my girlfriend addicted to through a bit of geek evangelism. So in that same spirit, I figured I'd try to do a similar analysis for Chrono Trigger. Spoilers will ensue, but if you haven't played the game at any point during the last 14 years in which it's seen release on the Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo DS, drastic measures will probably be necessary to motivate you. For the uninitiated who need a recap, you could start with the game's Wikipedia article, although I'll explain most of the important points as I go.

One of the interesting features to Chrono Trigger is the extent to which your choices have actual consequences in the story. Video games are notorious for letting you get away with anything, it's assumed that anything in the world you can interact with you're supposed to. You can typically burst into people's houses and take anything that's not nailed down (or if it is, pry it loose), and help people or ignore them as you see fit. Early on in Chrono Trigger you're put on trial for "kidnapping" a princess when she simply ran off with you, and whether or not you're declared innocent or guilty depends upon a variety of actions you might have done or not done. If you tried to sell off the princess's pendant that's a strike against you, likewise if you stole someone's lunch, and the extent to which you're honest about the mistakes you made also affects the result. It puts you in a reflexive state of mind very early on in the game, the decisions you make very well could have consequences, you're not necessarily just going to watch the story play out for itself, your actions could conceivably change the course of events.

This idea reaches its culmination in a variety of "what-if" scenarios that make up the game's endings. Your heroes are technically capable of doing what it takes to save the world at almost any point in the game's story, and the point at which you decide to do so and short-circuit the game's plot decides what ending you'll get. As a result of your meddling in time you can end up changing the family history of one of your main characters, cause humans to no longer be the dominant species on the planet, or set off a battle to the death between two of your potential protagonists.

But concerning the questions of ethics that Final Fantasy and Philosophy raised: how defensible are all of the heroes of the game in their motivations for trying to change the fate of the world? The trio of characters you start the game with, Crono, Marle, and Lucca eventually learn that the future is a wasteland with humanity virtually destroyed because of a planetary parasite named Lavos, and they decide to devote themselves to stopping that from happening. They aren't exactly fighting for their own lives, the disaster which ruins the planet occurs a thousand years after the time in which they live, they could theoretically live out their entire lives along with the next fifty generations after them before the human race is placed on the verge of extinction.

In The Last Question, Isaac Asimov makes the point that all human civilization is doomed to eventually die: unless entropy could somehow be reversed, all the usable energy in the universe will eventually be spent and humanity will die out. Humanity's lifespan is limited by the amount of available energy in the universe making the death of the human race inevitable. If Crono and company could go far enough into the future they might always find be able to find a post apocalyptic state where humanity has died out. Still, intervening in the events connected to Lavos could buy the human race millions or billions of years, at the risk of endangering the lifetimes of Crono and his friends. From a utilitarian standpoint, the trade-off is clearly worth it, but does it past the test of Hobbes' self-interested morality?

When Crono and his friends make the decision to save the future, they're fugitives from the law in their own time—Crono as a result of a false kidnapping charge, Lucca for breaking him out of prison, and Marle for abandoning her kingdom for the sake of her friends. Although they could ignore the coming crisis and simply live out their lives, they have very little to lose in terms of their connections to the present. As far as their connections to other time periods are concerned, at that point, they could either live out their lives in the past, which they already learned might prevent them from being born in the future if they alter events, or they could live in the post-apocalyptic future they're trying to prevent. In a sense, their quest to save the world is also about finding a world for themselves that they could live in. Both because they're unwilling to accept a timeline in which their world is destroyed, and because nothing else in their lives shows any promise at that point.

From the point of view of pure self-interest, their most viable way to improve their lives might be to find a point in time where their actions couldn't erase their own existences and in which they could live out their lives without interference. Much like the specter of global warming or environmental disaster centuries off in the future, it's hard to argue for why anyone would devote their lives to preventing a far off calamity at their personal expense, other than feelings of self-righteousness or a strong psychological need to know the future will be viable for much longer than you and your children's children will be around. In the end their motives probably aren't purely selfish, or purely noble, they're leaving behind one world to try to fix another.

The next character to join the group's quest is Robo, a robot abandoned in the future by his creators and originally part of a group of AIs intent on cleansing the planet of humans and making it a viable place for Lavos's spawn to breed. He turns on his fellow AIs and joins Crono and the gang on their quest, motivated initially not by abstract moral principles or even a concern for the human species, but simply out of loyalty to his friends who had helped him. Much like the others, he has few connections to the world which are even worth severing, and joining Crono and the others simply gives him something to do with his life. A life that may even be effectively immortal: at one point the party is able to drop him off in the past to help repair a forest and pick him up four hundred years later. In Robo's case, living out his life apart from the influence of Lavos' destuction of the world may not even be a possibility, at some point he might simply be forced to either live in a future in which he is one of a handful of intelligent life forms or create a different future for himself to live in.

Another character who joins the party does so largely out of loyalty to the group, a woman in pre-historic times, Ayla, helps the party recover their means for travelling through time, which gets her tribe in trouble and causes the party to help her in return. After that point she simply is along for the ride, it's not even clear she understands the full significance of the quest her friends are involved in other than her loyalty to them for their assistance.

The last pair of characters face the most complicated tangle of moral choices. Frog was cursed by the magician Magus and turned into a frog-like creature, and joins Crono at first simply for the sake of revenge and to end the war that has harmed the people of his time period. When Magus and Crono's party are hurled through time as a result of their battle, Frog stays on to seek his nemesis, and eventually comes to stay with Crono's group out of loyalty to Crono for his assistance and presumably sharing in their goal of saving the future.

The last playable character in the game is Magus, who could be seen as either a villain playing at being a hero or a hero playing at being a villain. His role is unique in that you have the option to either kill him or let him join your party. The reasons for killing him would be that he's regarded as an evil man who's responsible for a lot of misery and death: he started a war between humans and magic users, he killed Frog's best friend and turned Frog himself into an amphibian—a curse that can only be removed with Magus's death. The reasons for letting Magus live are a little more complicated. Magus was originally a prince of a kingdom in the distant past that had discovered a way to siphon off Lavos's energy and turn it into magic and other amazing abilities. He was virtually abandoned by his mother in her quest for immortality, left with only his sister and his cat for company, and after Lavos finally awoke and destroyed their civilization he was hurled into the future. Finding himself abandoned as a child in the middle ages, he sought to acquire enough power to get his revenge upon Lavos, only to be hurled back in time to his kingdom before the disaster as a result of the fight with Frog and Crono, whereupon he tried to defeat Lavos himself unsuccessfully.

Are Magus's actions defensible from a utilitarian standpoint? Possibly, if only because his actions had the potential to cause more good than harm, even if his own motives were essentially driven by a selfish desire for revenge, and offset by his sadism and cruelty in dealing with those less powerful than himself. Whether or not Magus's crimes outweigh his potential for good is a choice that's left up to the player. Frog can either kill him and avenge his friend, or let him live, in which case Magus offers his services to the group in trying to save the world.

Unlike Crono and the others, Magus has very few human connections motivating him—when you see him as a child he's an emotionally stunted and withdrawn youth, and when you encounter him as an adult he's a detached and cynical man. As a child he only cared about his sister and his cat, as an adult he even ignores his cat when it runs up to him. However, he is willing to risk his life to protect his sister and listens to her wishes (and those of his younger self) in sparing Crono and his friends when given the chance to kill them. There's not even any evidence he forms any attachment to the group if he joins Crono's side: when Robo lists his friends that have changed him Magus isn't included in the list, and if the group saves the world alongside him, Marle asks if he plans to go search for his sister, and Magus leaves without saying a word. The only things Magus does to redeem himself is to tell the party how they can save Crono in the event that Frog chooses to kill Magus, and to offer his help to the group in rescuing Crono and defeating Lavos in the event that you spare him.

Magus approaches pure nihilism at some points in the game. In one ending he states: "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to be destroyed, I must simply laugh." But in spite of his apparent resignation to futility, he follows it up by saying "I'm coming, Lavos." Similarly, after telling Crono's friends that all who oppose Lavos meet certain doom, he chooses to join them in their quest regardless. Faced with confronting a being who represents the very source of his own power, he considers it an impossible task but chooses to try anyway.

The game gives you the option to kill him or not because either choice is understandable in a sense—after you finally hear Magus's story, you know enough about him to decide for yourself whether or not it excuses his actions and whether or not making Frog whole, achieving revenge, or having the help of a powerful wizard in saving the world is more important. The choice as presented to the player isn't even whether or not to kill him or have him join your party: it's simply whether to kill him or not. If Frog refuses to take Magus's life and abandons his quest for revenge, Frog simply walks away, and Magus soon chases after him to offer his assistance. The player has to decide whether they feel more sympathy for improving Frog's situation or Magus's, and to determine whether Magus's campaign of revenge can be forgiven, and whether the consequences of Frog achieving his revenge are worth it.

Going back to the different views of ethics, how would the famous thinkers of the past have weighed this modern fable? Plato believed that revenge should not be executed for the sake of achieving justice but to prevent offenses from recurring, which would make Lavos a fitting target for revenge but Magus an unworthy one. Aristotle similarly believed that revenge had to be exercised in moderation against appropriate targets, while Christian philosophers would say that undertaking revenge was the domain of governments and God, and best left to a higher power, whereas acting in defense of others would be acceptable. John Stuart Mill might argue that killing Magus would only be worthwhile if the good done by it outweighs the evil, and that unless you could claim that turning Frog back into a human outweighs taking a life, the sacrifice would not be worth it. And Immanuel Kant might simply argue that every evil action deserves a proportionate consequence, and that Magus ultimately deserves to die for his actions in ending the lives of others.

Ultimately however, the only opinion that matters in the game is the player's, and the game both sets up the moral challenge and allows the player to resolve it as they see fit. The player fills in a story in a few ways, making choices to affect the plot, and naming each of the game's characters, although as previously stated, with only three exceptions, the characters have an underlying identity and name behind the one you give them, your ability to make them your own is necessarily limited.

Chrono Trigger ends with a bit of self-interpretation: the initial explanation presented for your ability to travel through time is that Lavos's energy creates distortions in time that your party is able to use. At the end, the characters suggest that it may be a different phenemenon, that you may be experiencing the planet watching its life flash before its eyes after it was destroyed by Lavos, based on the fact that all the time periods you visit are a reflection on important events connected to Lavos and the fate of the planet. In the game the desire to travel through time is really just a desire to fix your mistakes and correct what went wrong, and by the end of the game you have a chance to set a number of events right and help repair the lives of each of your main characters. Crono and his friends come to face with death several times, sometimes being forced to accept it, and sometimes being able to overturn it.

Chrono Trigger is a game that's enjoyable both to play and to reflect on, it isn't simply all nuggets of philosophy to chew on or an enjoyable transient experience that shines purely in the moment, but a little of both. It's a well-executed game that manages to get a number of things right at the same time, and I'd still point to it as the best example of its particular class of game that there is.

For those who want more, this author has come up with an existentialist reading of Chrono Trigger that looks in depth at the whole plot of the game, not just the main characters and their motivations.

Long-running Movie Franchises and Comparing Game Reviews to Movies

2009-08-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

I've written in the past about trilogies, and the different patterns their relative popularities take, often falling off with each movie. (in many cases, you could argue that if the movies didn't get worse they would have kept making more and it wouldn't just be a trilogy. Similarly if the first movie wasn't exceptionally good in the first place it wouldn't have gotten any sequels) Recently I was poking around rottentomatoes and decided to look at the patterns for long-running movie franchises.

Star Trek is a well known example, the rule of thumb is that the odd movies are terrible and the even movies are good, although the most recent two break the rule: (I'm usingrottentomatoes ratings for this. I prefer rottentomatoes to imdb because imdb is user-driven rather than critic-driven, and is wildly skewed towards newer movies, although surveying critics you still have the problem that older movies tend to have fewer reviews available, and a much bigger selection bias)

Star Trek I The Motion Picture: 50%
Star Trek II The Wrath of Kahn: 90%
Star Trek III The Search for Spock: 76%
Star Trek IV The Voyage Home: 84%
Star Trek V The Final Frontier: 21%
Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country: 81%
Star Trek VII Generations: 48%
Star Trek VIII First Contact: 92%
Star Trek IX Insurrection: 54%
Star Trek X Nemesis: 36%
Star Trek XI (2009): 95%

By contrast, the Harry Potter movies have all done decently well critically without falling off, and the strengths of the movies seem to compare to those of the books:

Harry Potter 1: The Sorceror's Stone: 78%

Harry Potter 2: The Chamber of Secrets: 82%

Harry Potter 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban: 89%
Harry Potter 4: The Goblet of Fire: 88%
Harry Potter 5: The Order of the Phoenix: 77%

Harry Potter 6: The Half-Blood Prince: 83%

In contrast, the Bond movies:

Bond 1: Dr. No: [Sean Connery] 98%

Bond 2: From Russia with Love: 96%

Bond 3: Goldfinger: 96%

Bond 4: Thunderball: 91%

Bond 5: You Only Live Twice: 70%

Bond 6: On Her Majesty's Secret Service: [George Lazenby] 81%

Bond 7: Diamonds are Forever: [Sean Connery] 67%

Bond 8: Live and Let Die: [Roger Moore] 64%

Bond 9: The Man With the Golden Gun: 50%

Bond 10: The Spy Who Loved Me: 78%

Bond 11: Moonraker: 64%

Bond 12: For Your Eyes Only: 71%

Bond 13: Octopussy: 47%

Bond 14: A View to a Kill: 39%

Bond 15: The Living Daylights: [Timothy Dalton] 73%

Bond 16: License to Kill: 73%

Bond 17: Goldeneye: [Pierce Brosnan] 80%

Bond 18: Tomorrow Never Dies: 56%

Bond 19: The World is Not Enough 52%

Bond 20: Die Another Day: 59%

Bond 21: Casino Royale: [Daniel Craig] 94%

Bond 22: Quantum of Solace: 64%

And just for good measure, a marathon video game series (it's worth noting that these stats are from meta-critic, which uses a weighted average of reviews rather than simply the percentage that are positive):

FFI & II: (PS1) 79%, (GBA) 79%

FFII: (PSP) 63%

FFIII: (DS) 77%

FFIV: (DS), 85% (GBA) 85%

FFV: (GBA) 83%

FFVI: (GBA) 92%

FFVII: (PS1) 92%

FFVIII: (PS1) 90%

FFIX: (PS1) 94%

FFX: (PS2) 92%

FFX-2: (PS2) 85%

FFXI: (X360) 66%, (PS2) 85%

FFXII: (PS2) 92%

Part of the problem with game reviews is that they seem to be clustered in a much tighter space than movie reviews. Final Fantasy VI, VII, X and XII are very different games and are probably not even preferred by the same people but they all received identical scores. I've also heard X-2 particularly reviled by fans of the series, but it's hard to gauge what an 85% means for games.

Or for another franchise:

Secret of Monkey Island (remake): (PC) 85%, (X360) 87%

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: N/A

Curse of Monkey Island: (PC) 89%

Escape from Monkey Island: (PC) 86%

Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: (PC) 79%, (Wii) 79%

In the Guinness book mentioned below, I saw an interview with the creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, saying he liked Curse of Monkey Island but wasn't a big fan of Escape, but you wouldn't know the difference from looking at their scores.

And one final comparison:

Zelda I: (GBA) 84%

Zelda II, The Adventure of Link: (GBA) 73%

Zelda: Link to the Past: (GBA) 95%

Zelda: Ocarina of Time: (GC) 91%, (N64)99%

Zelda: Majora's Mask: (N64) 95%

Zelda: Four Swords: (GC) 86%

Zelda: Minish Cap: (GBA) 89%

Zelda: Wind Waker: (GC) 96%

Zelda: Twilight Princess: (Wii) 95%, (GC) 96%

Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: (DS) 90%

This list makes marginally more sense, since Zelda II is kind of reviled as the oddball cousin of the series, but it still has a score that would be pretty good for a movie. So the question is, why are game scores more concentrated? You could argue that the quality of a movie is strongly related to how good its story and acting are, factors which are very hard to get right and get progressively trickier the longer a franchise runs. Games on the other hand are often judged by gameplay which could be comparatively easier to optimize and perfect, you could certainly make the case that in the world of games there are more people who know how to design a fun game to play than tell a good story.

But it still seems like scores for games are weighted higher. From the entire history of film, 59 movies have a metacritic score of 90 or above, 37 from the last 9 years. 85 PC games claim the same honor, 65 from the last 9 years. There are 5 DS games over 90, 60 Xbox360 games, 32 Xbox Games 12 PS3 games, 63 PS2 games, 29 PS1 games, 8 Wii Games, 14 GBA games, 26 GameCube Games, 17 N64 games, with no data on earlier consoles. Considering that there's probably some overlap, you're still looking at a list of 351 must-play games, which would take a lot longer than the aforementioned 59 top-rated movies.

To try to get a sense for how large the world of movies and games is, IMDB lists 700k movies, GameFAQs has 17788 PC games, 2891 DS games, 1559 Xbox360 games, 1259 xbox games, 831 PS3 games, 4723 PS2 games, 4397 Playstation games, 1849 Wii Games, 1756 GBA games, 804 gamecube games, 400 N64 games. So your total game library for those consoles is something like 38,257 games. Metacritic for comparison has 11805 games and 6339 films. So that gives you something like .008% of all movies are must watch and .9% of all games if you consider them out of the total pool, and out of metacritic's pool there's roughly 3% must-play games and 1% must-watch movies.

IMDB has a very different methodology for movies since their ratings are user rather than critic-driven, 3 movies have a 9.0 or above, 250 have an 8.0 or above, but unfortunately it's difficult to do an apples to apples comparison for how they rate games since the site isn't primarily designed around both.

Out of the 11805 games on metacritic, 2549 do not have sufficient reviews for a ranking, 125 have a 30 or below, 436 have a 40 or below, 1136 have a 50 or below, 2446 have a 60 or below, 4688 have a 70 or below, 7250 have an 80 or below, 8914 have an 90 or below, and of course, 9256 have a 100 or below.

For the 6339 movies on metacritic, 366 do not have sufficient views for a ranking, 483 have a 30 or below, 1162 have a 40 or below, 2052 have a 50 or below, 3176 have a 60 or below, 4431 have a 70 or below, 5420 have an 80 or below, 5878 have a 90 or below, and 5973 have a 100 or below.

To look at this another way:

Games:

N/A: 21%

0-30: 1%

30-40: 3%

40-50: 6%

50-60: 11%

60-70: 19%

70-80: 22%

80-90: 14%

90-100: 3%

Movies:

N/A: 6%

0-30: 8%

30-40: 11%

40-50: 14%

50-60: 18%

60-70: 20%

70-80: 16%

80-90: 7%

90-100: 1%

Metacritic sets its bars for overall positive at 60 for movies, 75 for games, which seems to be the midpoints of both distributions. I'm struck by a few oddities: it seems like games are always getting better on a strictly objective track, they're getting more content, better production values, and presumably game designers are getting more skilled--while storytelling in movies doesn't change at nearly as fast of a pace. Do games have less granularity for review scores because we're still seeing the first generation of a lot of technologies and reviewers aren't qualified to distinguish between similar efforts yet? A game is also a very specialized experience, a movie may be intended for almost anyone to watch and passively experience, whereas someone who is not any good at a first-person shooter will get next to no enjoyment out of it. Games tend to be reviewed by their hard-core fans in a particular genre, and reviews are written to inform fans of that genre, it may be that games don't face a wider swath of scathing reviews simply because it's already assumed the market is specialized towards the people who want to play that particular type of game.

And of course the most obvious criticism is that gaming journalism is extremely dependent upon gaming advertisers compared to critics in other media who have other sources of support, with examples cited of game reviewers being fired after trashing a game from a big sponsor. And the gaming press needs to keep their readers interested to stay afloat, and good news about upcoming hype for games always sounds better than bad.

This isn't purely academic, I myself write reviews for adventureclassicgaming, on a discrete 1-5 star basis. I consciously seek out games I'm more likely to enjoy playing and reviewing, and the scores I give out have to be weighted to the scores I've given in the past, and the expectations of the industry of a whole. We may just be at a point where a four/five star game means an excellent effort that people will enjoy rather than an absolute timeless masterpiece everyone must play.

The Guinness Book of World Records on Adventure Games, 2009

2009-08-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

I stopped into a Barnes and Noble today and spotted a copy of "The Guinness Book of World Records, Gamer's Edition 2009". It's a fairly silly concept, the records seem to be determined by a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one. They're not based around the sort of questions you would naturally ask like "What's the best-selling PC game of all time?" They invent categories to fit their content rather than content to fit their categories, like when they have a record for the game with the largest number of recorded dialogue segments when discussing The Longest Journey. It feels more like a book of game-related trivia disguised as earth-shattering records than anything else, and more done arm-in-arm with game creators as a promotional outlet than for the sake of genuine research. But such is gaming journalism.

They had an interview with Al Lowe about Leisure Suit Larry that I appreciated, Al had been nice enough to chat with me in the past about some of the things I'd written about adventure games out of the blue, and I appreciated that they let him get a dig in at the current "interpretations" of Leisure Suit Larry that he's unfortunately uninvolved with. One thing that struck me as particularly interesting was that they labelled the whole genre as "Point 'n' Click Adventure Games". Again, I write about adventure games myself, the name unfortunately shares some overlap with games like Zelda that are thought of as "adventures" in the exploration/puzzle-solving sense. I prefer to define adventure games by their gameplay mechanics, saying that they're chiefly concerned with solving related abstract puzzles connected by a story, whereas its closest cousins in the world of genres put the focus chiefly on action or on solving self-contained puzzles for their own sake.

Adventure Games are almost certainly best known for their days in point and click, but the chapter in the Guinness book talked about everything from parser games to games on the Wii and the DS. The basis of an adventure game obviously isn't the point and click interaction, although that's been a huge part of a lot of games on the PC, it's about puzzle-solving. I suppose there's really no completely self-evident term to describe it since "puzzle games" like Tetris are all about real-time dexterity rather than abstract puzzles, but it's odd to see the community described according to terms they don't normally use themselves.

Storytelling in Games, and a comment on notability

2009-05-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T23:57:00.003-07:00

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

2009-03-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-13T23:07:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-11-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

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)

Upon being published, video games, and adventure games

2008-08-04T00:08:00.000-07:00

I have been published. Not in the trivial self-publishing sense of the word, which even this blog would qualify for. Everyone seems to be getting in on vanity e-publishing to the point where it seems like we have more people generating content than reading it. I've been published in the sense that someone has been kind enough to seek out something I've written, offer me financial remuneration for my efforts, and present the edited work to a forum which has a wider audience than my immediate friends and curious onlookers. The result can be seen here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080804/newheiser-a.shtml

I realize there's even a fair chance you've stumbled across this blog thanks to the article, and find this level of personal insight into my character to be somewhat unnerving, like being offered into a stranger's home or unmarked white van only seconds after he hands you a screenplay. If that's the case, welcome aboard, and I promise you'll find less self-aware musing on things you already know throughout the rest of my content.

The piece that's been published is a fairly academic discussion of adventure games, which had its roots in a project I did for a course on interfaces I took while pursuing my master's three years ago, and morphed into something approaching an exhaustive encyclopedia I've had self-published on my website for the last couple years, where I've been trying to promote it to the world. Since I spent every word they gave me in the article laying out precise formal details of the genre, it seems appropriate to tell the personal side of my story in this medium.

When I was a kid, I played games very differently than I do now. For one thing, I was almost never able to beat them, despite having more time to invest on my failed attempts. Any of you who aren't gamers but can only look on wistfully into our world of magical delights can probably relate to this: a video game for me was just a flashier, somewhat less socially acceptable version of any other toy. It could be a fun little sandbox-like activity to mess around with, but I had nowhere near my present state of honed reflexes, keen spacial awareness, or prized penchant for puzzle-solving. Like a kid fumbling around with a Rubik's cube, I could mess around with it a bit but I was only able to a small fraction of all the things I was supposed to be able to do. But for whatever reason, I persisted, until I reached the point where I came to see games as interesting challenges I knew I was able to master, sometimes even as engaging story-telling experiences, and ultimately appreciate them as a kind of art and interesting exercise in design.

But even in my earliest days, adventure games held a certain interest for me. It's a genre composed almost entirely out of puzzles and riddles, you're placed in a world with a number of problems to be solved and have to figure them out, sometimes by participating in some classic-form games such as sliding-tile puzzles, but mostly by building up a collection of useful items and figuring out which one could be used to solve a particular dilemma.

But the unique thing about an adventure game is that you don't have to complete several minute-long reflex-intensive sequences to get through them, you just have to know what to do. I can't tell you how to beat Super Mario Bros without expecting you to put in a lot of practice stomping koopas and timing jumps. But I can tell you pretty much everything you need to know to beat Myst, and expect you to have no trouble doing it, so long as you know the answers to the puzzles you'll need.

My immersion into the genre came right around the fledgling days of the internet, just as communities around hobbies like video games began to form. I spent some time seeking out answers to puzzles and even corresponded over email with fellow adventure gamers, although I was still a little too early to enjoy the fruits of walkthroughs available on all imaginable topics. And in the days before I had the resources to look up the answers, a few games lay fallow and unexplored in my collection, possibly due to a lack of ingenuity on the part of my younger self or because of the devious machinations of adventure game designers determined to make a killing on hint books or charge by the minute hint lines. In the modern era I suppose, that's all changed. You can railroad yourself through any adventure game if you're willing to sin against your conscience and simply look up the solutions you need in a walkthrough. But once you've made that devil's bargain, it's hard to ever go back and view the game with untainted eyes as you slip deeper and deeper into an abyss where you're no longer truly playing the game, but living a dull echo of a gaming experience where you race through puzzles you never truly tried to solve, and will never get a chance to.

These days, I can call myself an actual gamer with enough experience and tricks up my sleeve to where I'm probably pretty far above the curve compared to what's expected of the average button-presser, which has given me ample opportunity to reflect and consider games and gaming less as a player and more as a designer. And it's in that mode of thought that I decided to pick a topic I know well, Adventure Games, to write up for the benefit of the world, even as I try to deal with my last minute stage fright for a moment that's been three years coming. It's been an interesting trip, and it's an interesting field, and I hope to see you on this blog again to talk about the next piece I should be getting published, on video game music.

Modes and Video Games Music

2008-02-28T19:25:00.000-08:00

There's a very useful classification of music which helps explain why pieces sound dramatically more happy or sad: the major and minor scales. The major scale is the staging ground for most of the peaceful or upbeat music you'll hear, whereas the minor is a little darker and used for more music with some conflict or sorrow inherent to it. Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars and Captain Jack Sparrow's theme from Pirates of the Caribbean are both written in a minor key, and the major key dominates the lullaby scene and most tension free music.

The reason music sounds so different depending on which scale it's written in has to do with the different notes that make up the scales, the minor scale has a few lowered notes which give it a less pleasant sound. The root chord, which is what a piece has to end on in order to sound resolved, has a darker sound in the minor scale, and the two different scales work out to different chords and progressions appearing in the music, such as the major scale's classic "A-men" IV-I progression, which appears in a lot of hymns.

The vast majority of music falls into one of those two categories, and our system of musical notation is designed around the properties of those two types of scales. However, those two types of scales are just two examples of a general type of scale called a mode, and including those two, there are seven types of modes that have been historically utilized in music, as far back as the Greek Era.

The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, in pontificating about the way people ought to live took the trouble to recommend certain modes over others, believing some to have properties best suited to laziness or drinking songs, and others more fit for inspiring music in times of warfare. While scholars are not entirely convinced of how their seven modes relate to our modern ones, Greek philosophy being easier to come by than Greek music, popular interpretation suggests that our modern major mode was of a type Aristotle specifically condemned as making people stupid, and both philosophers favored only using the Dorian and Phrygian, two modes which are largely extinct in popular music, for worship and times of war respectively.

A few technical points, three modes have a major root chord: the Ionian(or major), the Lydian, and Mixolydian, and those last two differ from the major only by a single note(all three characterized by Plato as too light, incidentally). Three modes have a minor root chord: the Aeolian(or minor), Dorian, and Phrygian, and those last two differ from the minor by a single note as well. The seventh mode is the Locrian, it differs from the minor by two notes, has a diminished root chord, and is largely theoretical simply because it's so uncomfortable to work with.

Some styles of jazz make use of the atypical modes, and artists like the Beatles have been known to explore the different scales, but for this entry I'd like to give examples of the different modal possibilities from a different branch of popular music, video game music. Well-known for songs that have to stand up to inordinate amounts of repetition and being forced to rely on synthesizers in the days before hardware and budgets allowed for orchestral renditions or licensing out pop artists, video game music happens to be something I'm quite familiar with, am in an easy position to analyze, and possesses a surprising amount of variety.

It has some similarity to TV and movie soundtracks, with pieces being written for specific settings and scenes, and frequently uses leitmotifs as a recurring cue to mark the presence of a character, a device dating back to opera. But while video-games can focus on story and character like other mediums, video-game music is unique in that it is written to accompany an activity rather than a fixed story, and it often times has to be dynamic, randomly choosing which section to play next, or changing in instrumentation/speed/tone depending upon feedback from the player. The following seven pieces represent music designed for six consoles and six series's, and aside from the absence of a good heroic theme, I think it serves as a good representation of some of the medium's musical styles.

i. Ionian(or major) (C D E F G A B C) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI Still Alive- Portal(PC). This is the game industry equivalent of a credits song, and the only one of this set that doesn't accompany actual gameplay. It's played upon the successful conclusion to the game, although the melody itself is foreshadowed in the game. It is sung by a major character in the game to represent their last bit of character development, which in context may remind the well-informed of a scene from Kubrick's 2001 A Space Oddysey. It's written in two major keys, and the lyrics provide an interesting contrast to the otherwise happy/peaceful melody.

ii. Dorian (D E F G A B C D) http://youtube.com/watch?v=nRPOX0iO_Zg Temple of Time - Zelda: Ocarina of Time(Nintendo 64). This one is a chantish/worshipful sounding piece. One feature of this particular game which influenced its music: a few songs, including this one, had to be performed by the player on a virtual instrument tuned to the key of C, making relying on alternate modes a natural way to vary the styles of the music.

iii. Phrygian (E F G A B C D E) http://youtube.com/watch?v=yhnBUd6R31k Magus's Theme - Chrono Trigger(Super Nintendo). The major scale has a half step from its seventh note to its root, which makes hearing the seventh note slightly tense because you're expecting it to resolve into the root since it's so close. This mode, with a lowered second, has a similar effect in reverse, with a half step leading down into the root. This piece is an intense/dark theme serving as the motif for a sinister yet not entirely evil character.

iv. Lydian (F G A B C D E F) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHLw8G190a0 Space Junk Galaxy - Super Mario Galaxy(Wii). Back into major-related territory, this is a mellow piece which, like a lot of these songs, uses an atypical mode to create an ethereal or exotic sound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_mode Wikipedia is of the opinion that the Lydian mode is most often used for dreamlike music in soundtracks and video games, and while the game above uses it a few times, I haven't noticed that many other instances.

v. Mixolydian (G A B C D E F G) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5EF5bI-blA Home Termina - Chrono Cross(Playstation). This piece serves as the background music for a city in its game, and is meant for a different style of explorative gameplay than most of the others in this set. I tend to associate the Mixolydian mode with this style of folk music, which has a certain dance-like quality to it. Lowering just one note on the major scale allows a number of interesting chord progressions to appear that you don't otherwise get.

vi. Aeolian(or minor) (A B C D E F G A) The classic minor key. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_MW65XxS7s One Winged Angel - Final Fantasy VII(An orchestrated version of a Playstation piece). While this one is a bit more chromatic than your typical minor piece, the main themes are clearly identifiable as minor. It also happens to be one of the more popular modern video game pieces, apparently serving as the encore for at least two video-game themed concerts. With a few lyrics "borrowed" from the Carmina Burana, this is the theme for the villain of the game.

vii. Locrian (B C D E F G A B) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r08jlBT4ZVU YYZ - Rush - Guitar Hero 2(Playstation 2). The bane of music students everywhere, the Locrian mode is largely considered theoretical just because everything naturally sounds dissonant, and the closest example I could find from the video game world is a rock piece, used in the guitar hero soundtrack, which has a locrian synthesizer part. If you know of any better examples, or feel like writing one, feel free to let me know!

And finally, in researching these examples, I came across a couple video game pieces that don't belong to any of the seven classic/medieval modes:

Phrygish(aka Phrygian Dominant or Spanish Gypsy Scale)(E F G# A B C D E): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=322V5rD6ko4 Forest Temple - Zelda:Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) This mode differs from all the modes above in that it has three half-steps between its second and third notes, which is a longer interval than is allowed for in any of the classical modes. It bears some similarities to the Phrygian, from which it gets its name, it's essentially a Phrygian mode with a raised third, which puts it in a major root chord again. The lowered second and the long interval give it an unusual sound, and it's apparently used in some Middle-Eastern music, particularly Hungarian music and the works of Franz List.

Mixolydian Flat Sixth (G A B C D Eb F G): http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Chamber/8189/ff3daryl.mid Daryll's Theme -Final Fantasy VI (Super Nintendo)

and http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Chamber/8189/ff3setzer.mid Setzer's Theme - Final Fantasy VI (Super Nintendo)

This mode could be characterized in a few ways, it resembles a major with a lowered sixth and seventh, or a minor a with raised third which would essentially put it in the major, or even a mixolydian with a flat sixth, as the "official" name would suggest. Regardless, its root chord is major, but the sixth and seventh notes which typically distinguish the major from the minor, match the minor key. The first is a bit of a bittersweet melody, and the second is a somewhat triumphant variation which still has a bit of tension, it's an interesting mix.

This article led me to a number of other thoughts about music/modes, and the number of modes that are even possible, but since it gets extremely technical, I chose to place it on my main webpage instead for those interested: http://newheiser.googlepages.com/musicandmodes

Multitasking

2008-01-30T09:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

The above is an interesting article very critical of multitasking and trying to do too many things at once in the modern era.

My personal opinion on it is that multi-tasking can simply help use up boring congitive downtime in our lives, filling car trips with music, walking and talking on a cell phone, listening to the news over a meal, etc. A lot of activities by themselves simply don't engage or fully stimulate my brain in the ways it's been trained to crave. The dangers of it can include seeking out a constant shallow attention fix of something new and interesting to focus on without delving too deep into anything in particular, seeking constant interruptions for the sake of distraction, and dividing up one's time between critical tasks that really should just be focused on to their fullest extent one at a time. I'll sometimes poke fun at people for not devoting their full attention to a good movie the way you would in a theater, or envy the leagues of college students taking performing-enhancing perscription drugs to improve their own ability to focus.

That said, there are values to the methodology, in the process of writing a blog entry I may constantly pause to look something up, reference other sources, in the hope that that will save me time in the long run. And there are dangers to obsessively focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, you can miss alternate solutions and ideas or simply get stuck without having a fresh concept to spark your imagination. I sometimes go on spurts of very intense work where I focus on one thing while ignoring all other concerns, physical or mental, which is the basis of my best productive flow, and it's probably a very engineerish trait to have the ability to focus on problems that can take hours to solve. But ultimately some tasks and situations need that kind of obsessive focus, and for others there may be benefits to dividing up your time and attention. As with most things, there's no categorical benefit to one over the other, sometimes you need to shut everything else out and sometimes you need a break.

(in thinking about this, I'd want to draw a distinction between context switching between activities all related to a central task, like possibly looking up references for something while writing or tracking down a problem by different methods, as opposed to absorbing multiple types of information at once or constantly toggling back and forth between two tasks. The former is a neccessary part of tackling some complex problems, whereas the latter is more of a juggling act to presumably save time)

Everything Bad is Good for You

2008-01-21T00:30:00.000-08:00

Every Christmas I try to pick up a weighty non-fiction book I've heard good things about and delve into it, for personal self-betterment. Freakanomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Collapse-How Societies Succeed or Fail, Blink-Split Second Decision Making, and prior to that a lot of the works of Thomas Sowell, an economist. Along with my typical pattern of picking up a huge slew of nerd/pop culture stuff when Comic-Con arrives, it helps round out my year and gives me some interesting ideas to consume for mental fodder.

This year's self-selected title is Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. With a premise like that, I'm on board and ready to accept everything he says before he spits out a single word. His argument is that television, movies, and video games are not "mindless mush" in the sense often described by cultural critics that encourage the brain to disengage and vegetate. The brain craves complexity and challenge, and the level of sophistication in the culture consumed in American society has continually risen over the last 30 years.

A large part of the point to his book is that you have to evaluate the pros and cons of a medium on its own terms. Books and the written word are excellent for discussing abstract concepts, presenting an argument, and dealing with organized information in fashion that the reader is expected to continually check back and reference things. Television is much better suited for relaying events, images and situations, even if its ability to fully develop an argument is limited to what it could portray in a conversation. And games are something different altogether, analyzing a game according to the richness of its plot or aesthetics of its world is often missing the point, since the fundamental structure of a game is a system of rules and interactions which the player is intended to probe, explore, and develop strategies around.

Television and movies have grown more subtle in his estimation by spelling things out less explicitly for the viewer and more naturally, and incorporating an ever-increasing number of relationships and subplots the viewer is expected to keep track of. In addition, the rise of syndication, and dvd box sets of tv shows has changed the market to where it pays to develop a show that stands up well to repeated viewings, and shows can make an entire season based around continuity and developing a single storyline.

The author doesn't get into this as much, but the rise of the internet in particular seems to have encouraging implications for media. A series can flop on TV to be picked up by a hardcore fanbase later and possibly bring it back or develop a buzz for it without going through normal channels. Songs can become chart-toppers without receiving any radio play, and it's easier than ever to filter out the stuff that would be of particular interest to you.

He cites the fact that IQ scores measuring abstract problem solving ability have risen over the last thirty years, even as tests measuring our math/verbal skills have stayed stagnant. It's an interesting take on different mediums and how they've evolved, and it's always encouraging to see some trends that appear to be moving in the right direction.

The next level of 3D

2007-12-21T15:45:00.001-08:00

I hate to give anyone else more screen time on this blog than myself, but this video is simply amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

It's a hack using the camera on the Wii Remote to track the position of a user's head, and use that to adjust the screen so you get the experience of actually looking through a window, that zooms out or rotates with your perspective. It's limited to being tied to a single person's perspective, but the potential here is incredible.

Wikipedia is not an Encyclopedia

2007-12-20T13:10:00.000-08:00

An Encyclopedia, such as the Britannica, is a resource which summarizes sourced material on a topic to present an overview accessible to the general public. The most recent edition of the Britannica contains 700 articles covered in a great deal of depth with named contributors and identified sources, and 65,000 articles covered less extensively with the vast majority (97%) containing less than 750 words, no listed contributors, and no references.

For contrast, Wikipedia, the "online encylopedia that anyone can edit", has over two million articles as of the writing of this blog. 1,773 have been promoted to "Featured" status: meaning that they been reviewed by the community, and confirmed to be accurate, well-referenced, and readable. An additional 3,234 articles have been identified as "good", meaning that they're reasonably well-referenced, accurate, and readable, but not at the point of an ideal article yet. In total, out of the vast mass of user-generated content Wikipedia has about 5,007 articles that they trust, about 1 in 420. To put this in perspective, the Britannica has around 2,650 articles with any sources at all.

Wikipedia is basically a giant community that edits, summarizes, and compiles information together from other sources. It's not a research community in the purely scientific sense of uncovering new knowledge—the question always arises why you should trust some random person on the internet to to give you good information. The answer is, of course, that you shouldn't. If that person wants their information to stick in the article, they have to provide a trustworthy source for it, so the ideal article is simply an accurate representation of all the information you could find elsewhere. It's not a perfect system, there are topics on which objectivity is hard to establish relating to politics and religion, and sometimes articles are reduced to simply explaining the various viewpoints or having a "Criticism" section to compile dissenting opinions. And while articles are ideally always improving and gaining in useful information and sources there is occasional vandalism, and most articles aren't at the point where all their information can be confirmed elsewhere.

That said, it's a very useful tool due to the extent to which articles are connected—you can click any highlighted word in an article to instantly view an article on that topic, allowing you to investigate all the related information you would need to understand something. And its most impressive feature is its breadth: anything that anyone on the internet finds particularly notable and is easily researched is likely to have an article, and a lot of early articles start out simply as collections of facts and trivia that random people on the web found interesting, and these gradually evolve into a more structured discussion of the topic. It's everything the internet should be, useful information without massive redundancy/inaccuracy, and not written wholly out of bias.

From the sheer volume of information contained in Wikipedia, it's obvious that it's not a typical Encyclopedia. Rather than restricting itself for the sake of space and time to writing articles on the most important scientific and historical topics, it's filled up with information on anything people today realistically care about. There are articles on every episode from the TV show House, every significant video game release, and articles describing in depth the plots and characters from all sorts of fantasy worlds. In addition to the serious stuff, it's the greatest repository for fictional and pop culture trivia that the world has ever seen.

Some people bemoan the signal to noise ratio and the fact that we apparently have a much better understanding of Tolkien's Middle-Earth than of India, but I don't think exhaustively researched non-academic subjects are a serious problem. Hard-drive space is trivially cheap, and limitations of space and the concerns about the percentage of content devoted to a particular topic simply don't apply to an online Encyclopedia. Any topic covered deserves the best treatment it can get, and if a large number of people feel most qualified and interested in developing their areas of interest over the broader fount of human knowledge, it does not harm anyone else.

The reason why I've chosen to write this (thus far generally supportive) rant, is because of a trend in the recent policy of Wikipedia to treat strictly fictional articles as non-notable, attempting to apply stricter "traditional encyclopedia" rules for content. Previously Wikipedia had contained an article on each "Pokemon" from the Nintendo series, with its own article describing it in relation to its fictional universe and the real world. A few of these articles had even been featured and showcased on the front page of Wikipedia as an example of the finest work the editors had produced. A process is currently underway to delete most of these articles and summarize them all in a list, believing that level of detail to be inappropriate for a feature of a fictional universe.

One possible criteria for notability is to say that it has to have crossed over into real-world media sources to deserve an article, so that there's an objective source to gather information from. Obviously, every person creating an article on themselves would simply be ridiculous, but restricting fictional articles to require independent media sources rather than its own primary source material (Tolkein's Lord of the Rings books serving as a source for Middle Earth, for example), puts Wikipedia in the position of constantly playing catch-up to real world media. In one example, a video blog by a youtube user, lonelygirl15, had its article initially deleted on Wikipedia for being non-notable despite having hundreds of thousands of viewers. It was only after the phenomenon began to catch the notice of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, was featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, made an appearance on Jay Leno, and had the actress herself hired by the United Nations to do a commercial that it was re-assessed and undeleted. In my opinion, it should never have been scrapped in the first place: there was enough verifiable information there for a real article, and a necessarily incomplete or even poorly sourced article is generally better than none at all.

Other recent deletion crusades include attempts to clear out articles based upon TV shows, elements of fictional universes, and webcomics. While the point is often made that the information can always be moved somewhere else, to follow these policies all the way through would mean that Wikipedia would have to give up its status as the Encyclopedia where you can look up absolutely anything. Without the breadth of topics that Wikipedia offers and its current status as the single best place to find online information, it'll simply be a Britannica written by laymen. Encyclopedias which try to cover only the most important areas of human knowledge have been useful tools for the last few hundred years. But Wikipedia has the potential to be much more besides.

Engineer, Scientist, and Mathematician Jokes

2007-09-26T12:58:00.001-07:00

Engineers, Scientists, and Mathematicians... these three disciplines are responsible for making your life something other than a daily quest to forage enough food to survive while trying to kill off your neighbors. And the lack of respect given to these world shaping intellectual titans by the general public is only matched by the mutual contempt in which they hold each other. They form an awkward three way alliance against the forces of chaos: Mathematicians develop consistent abstract structures and formal languages with precise meaning, Scientists use these formulae to describe reality, and Engineers use this understanding of reality to try and do something useful. Or to put it another way:

An engineer thinks that equations are an approximation to reality. A physicist thinks reality is an approximation to equations. And a mathematician just doesn't care.

By way of example, what follows is a series of jokes contrasting the professions at each other's expense, along with some others. Hopefully these will still be funny/comprehensible to someone without a stake in this competition for intellectual bragging rights.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are shown a pasture with a herd of sheep, and told to put them inside the smallest possible amount of fence.

The engineer is first. He makes a square fence around the sheep, declaring it to be the simplest to build.

The physicist is next, and he creates a circular fence around the sheep, arguing that it offers the greatest area for the smallest amount of fence.

The mathematician is last. After giving the problem a little thought, he builds a fence around himself and defines himself to be on the outside.
A mathematician and his best friend, an engineer, attend a public lecture on geometry in thirteen-dimensional space. "How did you like it?" the mathematician wants to know after the talk.

"My head's spinning", the engineer confesses. "How can you develop any intuition for thirteen-dimensional space?"

"Well, it's not even difficult. All I do is visualize the situation in arbitrary N-dimensional space and then set N = 13."
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician on a train crossing the border into Canada. As they look out the window of the train, they see a single black sheep standing in a field.

The engineer says "Aha, all sheep in Canada are black!"

The physicist looks pained and replies "No no no, we can only say that some sheep in Canada are black".

The mathematician scoffs at this, and says "No. All we can truly say is that in Canada there is one sheep which is black on one side."
One day a mathematician decides that he is sick of math. So, he walks down to the fire department and announces that he wants to become a fireman.The fire chief says, "Well, you look like a good guy. I'd be glad to hire you, but first I have to give you a little test."

The firechief takes the mathematician to the alley behind the fire department which contains a dumpster, a spigot, and a hose. The chief then says, "OK, you're walking in the alley and you see the dumpster here is on fire. What do you do?"

The mathematician replies, "Well, I hook up the hose to the spigot, turn the water on, and put out the fire."The chief says, "That's great... perfect. Now I have to ask you just one more question. What do you do if you're walking down the alley and you see the dumpster is not on fire?"

The mathematician puzzles over the question for awhile and he finally says, "I light the dumpster on fire."

The chief yells, "What? That's horrible! Why would you light the dumpster on fire?"

The mathematician replies, "Well, that way I reduce the problem to one I've already solved."
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.

The mathematician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.

The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement.

The engineer grabbed his reference manual, looked up the model of the ball and checked the serial numbers in his ball manufacturers table, cross-referencing the columns for "red" and "rubber" to look up the answer.
A math and engineering convention was being held. On the train to the convention, there were both math majors and engineering majors. Each of the math majors had his/her own train ticket. But the Engineers had only ONE ticket for all of them. The math majors started laughing and snickering. The engineers ignored the laughter.

Then, one of the engineers said, "Here comes the conductor". All of the engineers piled into the bathroom. The math majors were puzzled. The conductor came aboard and collected tickets from all the math majors. He went to the bathroom, knocked on the door, and said, "Tickets Please". An engineer stuck their only ticket under the door. The conductor took the ticket and left. A few minutes later, the engineers emerged from the bathroom. The math majors felt really stupid.

On the way back from the convention, the group of math majors had ONE ticket for their group. They started snickering at the engineers, who had NO tickets amongst them.

When the engineer lookout shouted, "Conductor coming!", all the engineers again piled into a bathroom. All of the math majors went into another bathroom. Then, before the conductor came on board, one of the engineers left the bathroom, knocked on the other bathroom, and said, "Ticket please."

And with that, some more general engineering jokes:

There are three engineers in a car: An electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a computer engineer. Suddenly the car just stops by the side of the road, and the three engineers look at each other wondering what could be wrong.

The electrical engineer suggests stripping down the electronics of the car and trying to trace where a fault might have occurred.

The chemical engineer suggests that maybe the fuel is becoming emulsified and getting blocked somewhere.

Then, the computer engineer suggests, "Look, why don't we close all the windows, get out, get back in, open the windows again, and maybe it'll work!"
A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, "What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!" The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!" The pastor said, "Hey, here comes the greens keeper. Let's have a word with him."

"Hi George. Say, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?" The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes, that's a group of blind firefighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group was silent for a moment. The pastor said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight." The doctor said, "Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them. "The engineer thought for a second and said, "Why can't these guys play at night?"
A boy was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The boy took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want." Again the boy took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The boy said, "Look I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool!"
Several scientists were all posed the following question: "What is two plus two?"

The mathematician stares blankly at the interviewer for a second, then says "four."

The engineer whips out his slide rule (so it's old) and shuffles it back and forth, and finally announces "3.99".

The physicist consults his technical references, sets up the problem on his computer, and announces "it lies between 3.98 and 4.02".

The philosopher cogitates for a while, then announces: "I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, an answer exists!".

The Logician replies: "Please define two plus two more precisely."

The sociologist: "I don't know, but isn't it nice talking about it?"

The Medical Student says "4" All the others look at him astonished and say: "How did you know?" The Medical Student replies: "I memorized it."

The economist looks at the interviewer cautiously, shuts the door, pulls down the shades, and whispers: "What would you like it to be?"
Two bytes are sitting at a bar, and the first byte says to the second byte "Hey is something wrong with you?" and the second byte says "Yeah I have a parity error!" So the first byte says "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off!
An engineer, a physicist, and a computer scientist were discussing what was the oldest profession.

The engineer claimed priority. "Look at all that matter engineered into amazing constructs like galaxies, stars, and planets."

The physicist disagreed. "Before there were planets, the matter had to be made from chaos. Physics is responsible for all the quarks, gluons, photons, and electrons."

The computer scientist coughed modestly. "Ah, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
A doctor, a lawyer and an engineer were discussing the relative merits of having a wife or a mistress.

The lawyer says: "For sure a mistress is better. If you have a wife and want a divorce, it causes all sorts of legal problems."

The doctor says: "It's better to have a wife because the sense of security lowers your stress and is good for your health."

The engineer says: "You're both wrong. It's best to have both so that the wife thinks you're with the mistress and the mistress thinks you're with your wife --- then you can sneak off to the lab and get some work done."

Updates:

A mathematician is someone who has a knack for numbers, but just doesn't have the personality to be an accountant.
The difference between an introvert and extrovert engineer is thus: An introvert engineer looks at his shoes while talking to you. An extrovert engineer looks at your shoes.
The dean of a college was complaining about the difficulties in funding all the engineering departments. "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."

Final Thoughts on Popularity

2007-09-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

Having thus far established that popularity is a zero-sum game and a giant hamster wheel of wasted energy that collectively gets us nowhere and individually can take us anywhere, also having considered its staying power relative to different media, it's time to discuss how you actually achieve it.

The key is promotion, which in this mass-media world is commonplace enough to feel like a constant buzzing cry for attention undergirding real life. When people have something to sell they appear on talk shows, buy media time, try to feed off of the success of someone more well known, draw on community support to create buzz, or just try to offend or shock people so their ideas stick around and are talked about. This can take skill, money, connections, or just a willingness to do what no one else has yet. In this case of my brother we've tried working off of the facebook networks and friends we had to begin with, tying into different online communities, and hoping that it catches on with people. Ideally a "viral" meme motivates people to spread it themselves and build up a fanbase for you, for the fun of being in on the joke. There are plenty of forums and portals which try to filter out interesting content like what we're doing, and making it in any one of these communities can spark you off towards being noteworthy.

The final stage of the game comes after you manage to win the rat race, stand out from the crowd and have an audience for yourself... just what you do with it? Do you capitalize on your success, hobnob with people higher on the fame food chain than you, or become increasingly desperate as you try harder and harder to repeat your early successes. You have to deal with standing out from the imitators of your style that are sure to spring up, and make a sophomore effort that's consistent with your style but not overly derivative itself or a rehash.

We haven't experienced that stage of the game yet but I'm sure it'd be just as entertaining as the rest. It's a game not everyone can hope to win, or even should try to play, but it does serve its purpose, and there's no denying the appeal of the "lottery winner" professions.

Online popularity

2007-09-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Online popularity is a weird special case of celebrity, and popularity in general. My little brother has a facebook group dedicated to winning the add of a junior high ex-girlfriend, and we're trying to spiral him into recognition through it. He's got 211 members so far, which is not bad at all for a random student musician, but not exactly breakout material or meme-worthy yet. http://facebook.com/group.php?gid=5794577819

Online popularity has far less inertia than real world/mass media fame. Garfield, despite massive print and commercial success is far from being the most popular online comic, possibly because it hasn't been funny in a long time. Popularity can rise and fall quickly, and fads exist in an accelerated cycle. A youtube video with millions of hits can achieve some real world fame and be forgotten just as quickly.

Ideally this system allows the cream to rise to the top. Popularity still reinforces itself, but more channels of distribution and no central authority judging who's popular means that no one really cares who you are, just what you've done for them lately. This allows people to become semi-famous overnight just on the basis of being funny or original, but unless they keep it up they'll just be part of a field strewn with one-hit wonders.

Bringing it back to my brother, he's trying to garner some attention by working off of his friends and contacts initially to give him a little boost, and hoping he can get noticed by more and more people. But the internet is a very fickle audience. It recognizes creative works far more than their creators, knock-offs and variations on anything popular quickly spring up, and if your quality drops off, you can disappear, there are precious few online "syndication" deals. They're the ultimate early adopters for anything popular, and if you can attract enough unbiased eyes here, you can make it anywhere.

Random Thoughts on Celebrity

2007-09-08T22:47:00.000-07:00

Those of you who check my blog every day, doubtlessly feeling abandoned by the lack of updates will no doubt be glad to hear that my blog has been picked up for another season. I was trying to do something close to an entry every month, so I'll see if I can't find some things worth writing about right now.

Celebrity

It's odd that celebrities get as much attention as they do in our society. I don't think they even serve as role-models so much as objects of envy. People don't want to be who Paris Hilton is, they want to have what she has, the fame, wealth and influence. There is no conceivable way you could live your life that could guarantee you'd enjoy the success that they do. It's like making lottery winners famous. Oddly enough it would make more sense to turn businessmen, inventors, and CEO's into superstars, since they at least might have skills or personality traits which are more conducive to success. But instead we focus our attention on the pretty and the lucky.

Granted, it can take a lot of skill to be a good actor, musician, or politician. And it's a highly competitive situation where thousands of people are competing for a limited number of positions—the public only has so much time and attention to divvy up to entertainment and there are only so many high-profile political jobs. One consequence of the fields being so crowded with aspirants is that one person breaking through to popularity is often a result of a whole team of people, with producers, managers, and writers all working together to give a single person an image that propels them to the top. You have musicians performing other people's songs, and politicians reciting someone else's lines and taking positions determined in advance by committee.

Celebrating multi-millionaire actors and musicians just seems odd since there's no way everyone envying them can hope to enjoy that lifestyle, and imitating them doesn't seem likely to get you anywhere. Celebrity is a zero-sum game, there's only so much of it to go around. In contrast, there's not really a foreseeable limit to expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, improving how the world works, and helping make people's lives better. Not everyone can be famous, but everyone can make the world a better place.

Skill vs Luck

2007-05-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

I like games. I enjoy playing them with other people, or just using them as an excuse to unwind. I also have a compulsive need to understand and categorize everything in my life, so to that end, here's a little classification I came up with for classifying games on a spectrum of skill vs luck.

On the one hand you have games that are Pure Luck. No strategic choices are made at any point, and an expert should win no more often than a complete newbie. Candy Land, Snakes and Ladders, and War are all "pure luck" games, where unless you cheat you're really just sitting back and watching the game unfold randomly. Playing War is low pressure since there's really nothing to be competitive about or strategies to worry over, and anyone can pick it up, follow the rules, and do equally well.

At the other end of the spectrum you have games that are Pure Skill. No random chance is involved, no dice rolling or drawing cards from a deck, and there's no uncertainty. Both players have an equal awareness of all the specifics of the game and a better player will almost always beat a worse one. Chess, Checkers, Go, and Othello are all examples of this type of game, and a lot of A.I. research has been invested in teaching computers to play them since they tend to map out the most logically, a fast enough computer could play any of these games perfectly, there's no unpredictable social aspects.

Coming from the other side of things, I'd think of Go Fish as a game that's about 10% Skill, 90% Luck. Most of how the game turns out comes down to the luck of the draw, although there is some memorization involved and you do have a choice of what cards to reveal to the other players. I'd say that's enough for a better player to win more often than average, but not by much.

Sorry! would be a game I'd think of as being closer to 20% Skill. The only choice you get to make is which piece to move when you have more than one out, and most of the time your options are pretty obvious, although not completely trivial. Similarly, Uno/Crazy Eight's and Masterpiece all take some basic strategy, but most of the game is in the luck of the draw and it's not at all unusual for a beginning player to master the game or win on their first try.

Above that, I'd put Monopoly, Careers, and Clue in the 30% Skill range. Most of your gameplay in Monopoly comes down to where you roll, the rest of it is about your tolerance for risk in where you put your money. There's some strategic trading in that game as in Careers. Clue is another game where you can play mostly on autopilot with a basic strategy, although it's possible to infer some of the evidence based upon what clues other people are shown.

I think of the basic trick-taking card games like Hearts, Spades, and Pitch as being in the 40% Skill range. A lot of the time your play is constrained by what suit is being led and you don't spend a lot of the time in control of where the game is going. There are some significant strategic choices however and while it's certainly possible to get lucky, skilled/experienced players would tend to win more often over the long run

Right smack dab in the middle of the spectrum I'd put Liar's Dice, Half Skill and Half Luck. With a large enough group of people there's some complex probabilities to keep track of as the game goes through its rounds, and it involves a lot of the same bluffing and social aspects as a good poker game. Anyone CAN win, but the better players tend to make it to the end pretty reliably.

Above Liar's Dice I'd place the class of board strategy games like Risk or Axis and Allies, with an arbitrary figure of 60% Skill. There's clearly a lot of strategic choices being made, even though a lot of it does come down to your tolerance for "risk". But so much of the game is social and depends upon the other player's willingness to avoid ganging up on you that it's hard to imagine it being used for serious tournament/competitive play.

Poker I'd place below the board strategy games, so I'll call it 70% Skill for now. It's clearly a game in which expert players can dominate weaker ones over the long run, but it's not a game in which the same players win the tournaments every year. After a certain level of play it seems to come down to the luck of the cards.

Bridge I think of in the 80% Skill range. It's the most heavily analyzed out of any of the games of chance, to the point where there are bridge columns in the newspaper. All of the players are aware of half of the cards during gameplay, meaning you're only guessing on a few variables as to how the cards are divided up. There's a fair amount of depth to the strategy in bidding too, and it seems to be quite complex for all its unpredictability.

Stratego is a game I'd consider to be about 90% Skill. While all the battles and movements are decided by non-randomly by the players themselves, neither player has full information about the pieces held by the other side. One player can certainly get lucky and strike down the correct path to find the flag early on or simply guess right about where his opponent is set up, but a skilled player still certainly has an edge almost all of the time. It ranks below the pure skill games just because the setup is unknown, but it still involves a heavy amount of strategy.

And there you have it. The more random a game is, the more your strategy becomes about weighing risk vs potential payoff rather than considering all possible outcomes, and the more you focus on anticipating and outguessing what other people will do. You can teach a computer to play Poker perfectly just by the numbers and going with the best odds, but you can't teach it to read people. Games of skill are predictable, just complex. Technically the outcome of a game of Chess can already be determined in advance if both players play perfectly. In Connect Four, for example, the first player can always win with a perfect strategy. It's just that most games of pure skill haven't been completely analyzed yet.

Oh, and just for fun, the graphic at the top is a classification of games by number of players, not sure what I'd want to do with it yet.

Movie Trilogies

2007-05-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Every movie trilogy can be classified into one of six types, depending upon how they all rank against each other in terms of quality.

Trilogies of declining quality ( 1 > 2 > 3)
This is usually typical of a series where the first movie stands on its own and makes a lot of money, then a few sequels are tacked on to play off of that. I'd think of the Matrix "Trilogy" in this category, Pirates of the Caribbean, probably Back to the Future as well.
Trilogies with a strong first movie, and a weak middle movie(1 > 3 > 2)
I think of the Mission Impossible movies in this category, the first movie was excellent, the second film was a Matrix/James Bond clone, and the third movie did a good job of getting the series back to its roots.
Trilogies of increasing quality (3 > 2 > 1)
This is the case when the moviemaking or general quality gets better as you go. Typically in trilogies with tacked on sequels the story tends to wear thin as the special effects get better, so this may be more rare. The prequel star wars trilogy seems to fit this pattern, although that may be a special case since it took them three movies to get to the plot. The man with no name trilogy is another possible contender (the good, the bad, and the ugly series)
Trilogies with a strong third movie, and a weak second movie. (3 > 1 > 2)
Another example of a weak middle chapter that made up for it later. The Indiana Jones trilogy (so far) fits this one for me, the temple of doom didn't have the same intrigue or significance as the other two, and the last crusade was simply great, you can't go wrong with both Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.
Trilogies with a strong second movie, and a weak third movie (2 > 1 > 3)
The original star wars trilogy is the classic example of this one, the empire strikes back fared the best critically and a lot of people think the series jumped the shark with the ewok-a-thon in Return of the Jedi, even if it is warm and fuzzy when you're a kid.
Trilogies with a strong second movie, and a weak first movie (2 > 3 > 1)
This one is even rarer, since it's not very often than the first title in a series is the weakest since that's usually the one to justify all the others. I think the x-men movies are a good candidate though, with adaptations from comic-books you have so much source material to draw from you can really make any number of movies before you get the right story, and the first film didn't do as good of a job with the characters as the other two.

I'm still somewhat undecided on how I'd rank the Lord of the Rings films or the Spiderman movies. My intuition is that for most trilogies the first movie is the best, although it may be different if the entire trilogy is conceived in advance, as in the case of Lord of the Rings, or if the trilogy is composed with a two part sequel, as in the case of Back to the Future, The Matrix, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Update: Rottentomatoes (a site which aggregates ratings from actual critics) rates Spiderman, X-men, and the original Star Wars trilogy 2>1>3, LOTR and the Star Wars prequels 3>2>1, Back to the Future, Austin Powers and Indiana Jones 1>3>2, The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean and Spiderman 1>2>3, and Mission Impossible 3>1>2. Wasn't able to find any trilogies that were ranked 2>3>1.

Further Update: The Five Harry Potter movies so far are ranked 3>4>2>1>5, which is probably the order I would rank the first five books as well.

Time marches on

2007-02-23T23:46:00.000-08:00

Dear Internet,

This entry is more random and autobiographical than most, but a few people have been complaining about a lack of new content, so I figured I'd let them complain about my quality instead.

I have a solar powered watch, which is nice because it keeps me on time, requires absolutely no maintenance and can take a great deal of abuse. (which is hopefully where the comparisons to my love life end) It has an alarm set for 8:15 every morning, which probably dates back to when I was taking a class where I had to be up at around that time. This has been utterly irrelevant for almost a year I suspect. It is also currently seven minutes fast, something I've noticed since every watch I've ever owned has gradually outraced the imaginary clock tick of the universe until it claims to be a few minutes in the future. It actually turns out that if I let my current watch run for another 200 years it'll actually be on time again. I suppose I'd rather have a watch that was fast than slow, and I generally get by with pretending I'm later to everything than I actually am and practice my arithmetic daily to figure out what the actual time is.

This watch, like I said, is solar-powered--it requires a small exposure to light (natural or artificial) to stay fully charged, and has a power gauge which ranges from zero to four bars to serve as an indicator for how much actual sunlight I've been actually getting. It would never get below four bars when I was up at school and forced to endure the sun's harsh rays for a few minutes every day, but since I've gotten a desk job it's been dropping steadily below three with no signs of improving. I may just want to leave the poor thing in the sun all day soon, I feel like I'm starving it.

It has not escaped my attention that most people don't own a watch. Whatever computer you're using to read this is probably showing you the time in the bottom right corner, synchronized to a website every evening. Your cell phone gets a wireless signal which can tell you the time accurately down to the second, and there's really no shortage of time-keeping devices anywhere. But owning a watch has allowed me to pinpoint my ever-shifting temporal location without wasting precious seconds, keep track of what day of the week/month it is since I'm liable to forget, and be in the position of the one guy who's always expected to know what time it is.

One last bit of trivia is that I wear the watch on my right-hand, making that hand do double duty on a lot of things. I've occasionally switched it out, but my left-handed dexterity has just never caught up despite all the typing, piano playing, and video games exercising my whole range of motion. I've worn a watch for most of my life, and along with my ring and glasses it's a staple of my wardrobe.

One thing I've noticed from a friend who doesn't wear a watch is that my sense of the passage of time isn't as strong as his. He has an easier time telling the difference between minutes and hours passing, intuitively guessing the time of day or keeping himself on track for things when he can't reference how much time is passing. I've never needed to develop those skills, so I guess I just haven't. My own biological clock has also been less focused as I've gotten older, my sense of being able to wake up when I need to without an alarm and knowing when to sleep without making a conscious effort... all that hasn't been on track for a while now. Falling asleep is the trickiest thing, since I'll tend to be more tired and unfocused when I wake up than when I went to bed, so giving up and going to bed always feels like a losing proposition.

One last note, this week we lost an hour of our lives thanks to daylight savings time, forcing most of the world to spend today getting over some minor jet-lag. This isn't nearly as fun as getting an extra hour to sleep over the weekend, which every week deserves to have. Personally I'd be in favor of getting rid of the whole daylight savings time idea AND time zones themselves, and force the whole world to live on California time so we're all synced up. Sure, people in Australia would have to work in the dead of the night and sleep outside if they wanted a tan, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

I own a Wii

2007-01-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Internet,

Two months, searches at six retail franchises, one cancelled order, and the U.S. equivalent of eleven thousand rupees have all led up to me being one of the first three million proud owners of a Nintendo Wii. Just a few things to get out of the way:

Yes, the name is silly. It's weird enough to stick in your head, and you can't discuss it in polite conversation without snickering a little bit. Every joke that could possibly be made about the name has already been exhausted by nerds way ahead of the technology curve. At this point it's just a meaningless syllable.
Yes, it's fun. No, you can't have mine. The main gimmick to the system is motion sensitivity, swinging a remote like a tennis racket, tossing it like a bowling ball or punching with it like a boxing glove. It has a chance of getting people who fear and mistrust video games to try one out, and it replicates a few basic sports to the point where you wonder why you're not just doing the real thing.
Yes, it's obsolete as soon as you open the box. Hardware wise, it's a last generation system with a next-generation control scheme. They're gambling on people caring about the system's innovative means of input more than all the flashy bells and whistles that make up its output, and it's a cool direction to see being taken.

I skipped a generation of the video game console wars, and I'm hoping it'll be fun to jump back into things and host a few gaming sessions. It's gratifying as someone who thinks of technology as a positive uplifting spiritual force to see examples of games getting better, and smarter in terms of gameplay rather than just prettier. Now, I'm all about "prettier", just ask anyone, but it's nice to see it used as an introduction to something worth getting to know better, rather than an end unto itself.

I could write a whole post on the latest Zelda, if I didn't think the segment of my target audience which didn't include myself wouldn't get a whole lot out of it. But there are some interesting examples of technological improvements being able to improve the gameplay and all the possibilities therein. Just being able to do dynamic light sources allows them to design a lantern which you can use get to through dark areas and ignite torches, a concept which had to wait eight years in order to make the jump to 3D. It's a very well-engineered game that takes some serious puzzling to get through. Granted, I would have done a few things differently, but no one's perfect.

Having a controller in your hand that vibrates when you hit a ball and lets you hear the crack of a bat when you make contact changes the way you think about gaming. It doesn't have to be something where you focus all of your attention and all of your senses on a very small set of controls and visual cues, ignoring everything but a handful of flickering LED's. Instead, you can cavort around your own living room like an overly enthusiastic mime, and throw punches at digital avatars of the entire 2008 presidential lineup. What more could you ask for?

The most paranoid time of the year

2006-12-24T14:46:00.000-08:00

When you're a kid, Christmas can be a very weird time. Most of us are raised to believe in a secret society of diminutive magical creatures ruled over by a pleasantly obese man in a red suit. These "elves" monitor our behavior year-round and annually pronounce judgment on us in the form of gifts ideally suited to our moral character. Rare are the stories of some kid having his stocking filled with coal or fossil fuels, but there's always the threat hanging over you that if you don't shape up you'll be the only kid without any candycanes to his name come December 26th.

Of course, everyone knew the system was rigged. The rich kids next door always wound up with the best stuff, even when you knew for a fact they hadn't been any less naughty than you all year. And no matter how much trouble your siblings got into on the days prior to Christmas, the fat man always seemed to come through for them.

As you start getting tall enough to peer over your pile of presents to see the strings being pulled from above, you begin to realize the real nature of the game. Christmas was invented to keep us in line. The one dimensional naughty-nice continuum turns out to be a philosophical fiction, just a way for the powers-that-be to get you staring over your own shoulder and policing yourself for once. And if the other kids don't catch up with you first, your parents just come right out and tell you that the flying caribou and sweatshop gremlins with whom you had this complex love/hate/fear relationship for years aren't even real. So you turn your back on the whole myth until it's time to repeat the cycle yourself and pass on the lie for another generation.

Or so they would have you believe. Despite decades of scientific progress and putting a man on the moon, there are corners of the North Pole left unexplored. Every year hundreds of thousands of children write letters to the man in red-- pouring out their hearts, baring their selfish little souls, and possibly dropping some dirt on the naughty habits of their peers. The end result is enough marketing data to predict the purchasing habits of the entire world, and a collection of secrets regarding the juvenile offenders of our globe that Big Brother could only dream about.

Ask yourself for a second exactly why you assume Santa isn't real. Thousands of agents with his exact likeness are spotted every year at department stores around the country. NASA claims to help direct him across the globe, and articles detailing his holiday plans slip unnoticed past the radar of most news junkies. The most exhaustive network of kid informants in the world report in to the north pole come Christmas time, and everyone still assumes it's all about charity. Who do you think picks up those royalty checks on all the merchandise, all the self-inflating giant Santas which float over people's lawns like jolly gargoyles and all the countless ornamental and ornamented facsimiles of the supposedly omniscient chimney climbing toy tycoon? The thing is, Christmas's real business isn't in gifts. The fat man deals in information. And he has more of it than you could possibly imagine.

The greatest trick Santa ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And just like that, poof, he's gone.

Person of the Year

2006-12-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Internet,

Time Magazine has once again chosen its person of the year, and they couldn't have picked a more worthy recepient: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/12/16/time.you.tm/index.html

Honestly, I really feel like this has been a long time coming. For years I've chafed as celebrities and world leaders claimed the title of "Person of the Year" while my exploits have gone uncelebrated by all but my closest friends. Well, move over Rudy Guliani, Yasser Arafat, and Adolf Hitler. My year has come at least. Time Magazine just informed me that "You" have (has?) been chosen as person of the year.

At first I was worried about all the interviews I would be expected to give and how my flowering celebrity might wilt under the harsh glare of the cynical media. For better or for worse however, I'll probably just be expected to share the title. Time Magazine has effectively given the award to anyone who bothers to look at a copy of their magazine. In a way, this kind of feels like cheating to me. It's like when you ask someone to name their favorite movie and they just say "All of them." Couldn't Time Magazine at least have named some people who didn't deserve the "Person of the Year" honor this year? How about Tom Cruise? Couldn't they just have agreed to give the person of the year title to every human being on the planet except for Tom Cruise? I know it would make me feel kind of special.

I still feel if you're going to sell a magazine on the premise that your crack team of reporters picked out the one person most responsible for influencing the world, you should at least have the guts to name somebody. In all fairness, this is not the first time they've given the recognition to a purely abstract concept. Previous winners include the American Soldier, "Whistleblowers", The Computer, American Women, Middle Americans, The Generation Twenty-Five and Under, and the Planet Earth itself. These are all kind of a stretch, but you could still do worse. It's like asking someone to name their favorite movie, and they reply with the entire genre of zombie horror movies. You at least get a feel for where they're coming from, even if you shake your head over their inability to settle on anything in particular.

The rationale for this one is tied in with the whole distributed nature of the internet, with blogs like this one starting to get more attention over traditional media sources, user-contributed videos on YouTube becoming an emerging form of entertainment, and Wikipedia—an entire encyclopedia written by and for the everyman. I can see where they're coming from, it just erodes at the relevance of the whole "person of the year" concept. And if the likelihood of one individual dominating the global stage for a whole year continues to decline, there may very well be a good reason for that.

Tags: Time Magazine Person of the Year

Letters to the future

2006-12-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Internet,

A couple of things have caught my attention recently. The first is a post-rapture delivery service. In the unlikely event that all born-again Christians are evacuated from the Earth to chill out in heaven while the Earth is plauged with countless torments, this group of athiests have cheerfully agreed to deliver your mail for you.

Their business model is simple. They sell you gift cards in the style of "I told you so" messages or the simple "repent before it's too late!", as well as giving you the opportunity to write custom notes to those less fortunate than yourself. If you are suddenly zapped into heaven while the remainder of mankind is prepared for tribulation, they will deliver all the mail you requested of them, since they'll be in fear of losing their own souls. Payment is of course requested in advance, and no refunds are given.

This opens up a whole slew of possibilities. Getting your athiest lawyer to write up a "rapture will" for how to dispose of your assets among all the unsaved, or looking into "wicked" investment strategies that ensures that your stock portfolio will survive the disappearance of the Christian community. Sure, you may be rapture-ready, but what about the rest of the world? By definition, they won't be.

The second thing I picked up recently is a little more practical, and will probably have a more immediate application. It's a website, futureme.org, that allows you to send letters to the future. Compose a letter, pick an e-mail and a date, and it will send it out on the day you request. I've already sent the future version of Mark Newheiser some nagging e-mails about doing his Christmas shopping on time for once.

Since you can send these e-mails to absolutely anyone, you could use this service to take care of your Christmas cards for the next thirty years, or ensure that you'll never forget anyone's birthday ever again. Do you despise your roomate, and wish he'd drop off the face of the earth? Send him a heartfelt e-mail expressing your feelings... to be delivered in the FUTURE! By the time he gets to read it, odds are you'll have resolved all your issues. And if you haven't, well, he needed to hear it anyway. Is your heart an emotional monsoon swirling with unexpressed emotions and secret longings ready to send you spiraling into a whirlpool of despair? Confess your true feelings and let it all out. Don't worry about the consequences, that's something your future self will have to live with. Sucks to be him!

Possible downsides to this service are that they don't yet offer a feature to send letters to the past, so you'll be limited to one-way conversations with the future version of you. And of course, you may not keep the same e-mail address by the time your letter goes out, and the entire internet/economy/world could collapse and leave the promises of this website to deliver your letter as a rather cruel and forgotten joke. So before you ship out your digital time capsule to congratulate your future persona on living until thirty or chide them for having not discovered true love yet, give some serious thought to resolving whatever issues, hopes, or dreams you may have in the present. That way by the time you catch up with your future self, you can be sure you'll have something worth talking about.

Tags: rapture future

More on phones, and starting your life over

2006-10-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Internet,

Before I get going, here are some stats on myself that might be interesting:

On my old cell phone, which I had running for a period of 3 years or so, I had 255 hours logged total, a good 10 days of solid conversation. 145 hours of that figure consisted of me calling other people, 110 hours was me getting called. From this you can either conclude that I'm just a social, outgoing person, or I just happen to like other people more than they like me.

My current phone, which has been in operation for roughly half a year, has 17 hours logged so far, spread over 444 calls (average call time 2.5 minutes). My future biographers, looking at this data, would no doubt be able to conclude that tele-communicative activity has slowed down considerably in my life. I live much closer to the people I know, and the phone's become a way to co-ordinate things rather than serve as a means of actual conversation in my life.

I'm really not much good on the phone these days. Back three or four years ago that was mostly how I kept in touch with people in social circles defined by digital rather than physical boundaries. At that point it was easier to talk or get some conversations out over the phone than in person, because I was used to really long, focused conversations. These days it's more of the opposite, I'm more comfortable in a situation where if a topic runs out we can just do something else or focus on something different. I've basically traded a long-distance relationship skill where I focus on one person at a time and talk about everything in the space of an hour or two, to having more of a group personality where I try to focus on everything at once.

One topic of conversation caught my eye recently. Someone asked, if you could go back in time and tell your twelve year old self anything, what would it be? It's interesting because you have to think about what you've learned over the years, or even what advice you'd have to offer to someone growing up in your position.

I don't think I could tell myself how to get out of every problem I'd run into. The most valuable thing I've gotten out of my life so far is the experience of it. I couldn't tell myself how to never mess up, break my heart, or make a fool out of myself. The experience and the knowledge you get from doing those things are worth more to me in the long run than anything I've been through.

The best bit of advice I could probably give myself is to do more than I'm comfortable with. Most of the things I've learned how to do socially or academically have been because I've had to, in spite of feeling uncomfortable and out of my element. I've been at my most creative and learned the most when I've forced myself to change something about my life despite not knowing how.

I might tell myself to try to figure out earlier this time that not everyone is going to like you, that you can learn how to do anything if you're willing to fail enough times, and that you can get something out of any situation if you spend more time dealing with life as it is rather than how it should be.

I try not to get too nostalgic or play "what-if" too much. Starting my life over would just set me back from where I am today. You still have the chance to change anything about your life or yourself, but time only goes forward. Every year hopefully you get a little bit smarter and a little bit wiser at dealing with life. You never get a chance to meet yourself and see how you'd get along, but you do live your life around people farther along that road and people who are still trying to reach where you are. The closest you get to seeing the future and the past is keeping in touch with the people on both sides of you.

Tags: cell phones past

Hello World. Also featuring cell phone woes and hurrahs

2006-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Internet,

Today I registered for a blog, which is basically an online diary used by people to self-medicate their own deep-seated psychological issues. People also use these things to post intimate details of their life for the presumed benefit of future historians, or perhaps their bored grandkids.

Since I've never been the type for unsolicited and undirected emotional outpourings, I'll probably just use this space to have a record of the events in my life and my thoughts, rather than my feelings. If any hints at my underlying personality or emotional state leak through, you have my sincerest apologies for burdening you with the sentiments of an emotionally unfocused engineer.

Today's blog-worthy event is resurrecting a camera phone from a year-long hibernation. Being the suave and smooth fellow that I am, I originally put it out of commission by wading into a hot tub with it innocently resting in my pocket. I strolled into the watery expanse, happy as a boiling clam, only to have a vague feeling wash over me that something wasn't right, as forgotten lessons about the interaction between water and complex electronics resurfaced in my memory. My cell phone, previously the social hub of my world—brightening my life with pictures,wacky ringtones, and serving as my outlet to a world of friends, family, and telemarketers—was reduced to a flickering white screen bravely trying to eke out its function while a tide of water flooded its circuitry. With one last warbling chirp reminiscent of happier days, my phone gurgled its way into obsolescence.

But no more. Time heals all wounds (and wounds all heels) and my flip phone camera has been resurrected from its watery grave, and reborn into a world where it rests proudly at my side, able to once again serve as my vessel for connecting with humanity.

I'd gotten a bit accustomed to my original cell phone after being forced to use it again for a year and it was not without its advantages:

A very bright blue screen capable of serving as a flashlight under unusual circumstances
An easy-to-grip candy-bar shape that was also easy to twirl in the air or use in an awkward form of self-defense
An exhaustive list of contacts accumulated from the days when I thought getting someone's number guaranteed me a place in their social circle

In all fairness to my newly de-waterlogged phone of course, it definitely qualifies as an upgrade:

The screen is actually rendered in bright cheery colors, impressing the visually oriented members of our species
It flips open and shut, so I don't accidentally speed-dial those closest to me at the wrong moments.
I get to take pictures, listen to ringtones other than "vibrate", and other activities associated with the hip, tech-savvy youth of today.
The battery lasts for more than a few hours

All in all, a definite win.

Tags: cell phones