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In its heyday, the European nobility allowed itself a particular conceit: that they were inherently better at the various tasks of government.

In purely practical terms, of course, the nobility was suited to governance, but only because most everyone else was too poor, and therefore too busy trying not to starve to death, to learn the basics of how to govern: rhetoric, writing, history, that sort of thing. In principle, there wasn’t anything in the person of the king and court to make them the proper choice to govern, or to enjoy the many privileges that came with being in charge.

No, to secure these things, the nobility had to create a myth that good governance lied inseparably in the nobility itself. They began with the notion of the divine right of kings: the king was directly anointed by God, the final and unquestionable authority, and the nobility rightfully enjoyed its powers and privileges through delegation. The king’s judgment was presumed sound; if he wasn’t capable of delegating properly, God would not have anointed him. QED. A lifetime of success in a field was okay in that field, but the nod of the king left you able to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than the whim of a king.

The progressing Enlightenment forced a radical reformulation of the idea. Every now and then, with the coming of gunpowder, a king would be toppled by an ordinary commoner. Even if the commoner decided to eschew a formal crown, he put the nobility in an uncomfortable position. If God chose the rulers, then he was, every now and then, choosing one of which the nobility did not approve, and with whom the nobility did not identify. So God was jettisoned, to be replaced by the myth of breeding: leaders were not made, but born. Good leadership was passed through blood lines. A specific ruler might be better or worse than another, but the ability to rule was inborn, and heritable, and concentrated in the nobility. The notion reached its peak in 19th Century Britain, when Darwinian theories were abused—as they were by so many others, for their so many purposes—to justify the theory, and the final word on entitlement was good breeding. A lifetime of work at a trade was okay for that trade, but being born a baronet made you able to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than having an earl for an uncle.

Aristocrats unfortunate enough to live in the US couldn’t really adopt the good breeding theory; they didn’t have any. The US, having thrown off monarchial rule, committed itself against the very notion of nobility. Visiting nobles were welcomed as celebrities, but immigrating nobles were viewed with a suspicion that left them on equal footing in the bourgeois society. Naturally, our aristocracy grew out of successful merchants, few of whom had blood lines any better than a factory worker. They needed an entitlement myth of their own. Instead of claiming superior birth, they seized upon one small facet of good breeding: the gentleman’s education. In Europe, the gentleman’s education was merely a byproduct of good breeding, something aristocrats did because they could afford it. In America, it was taken as the justification for privilege: only a liberal education, it was reasoned, only an exposure to the great thinkers of history, could train someone effectively to govern. Top marks in a technical subject was okay within that subject, but reciting Ovid trained you to do anything competently. And people were accepted to positions of power and privilege on no more grounds than having completed a liberal education.

Notably, any education would not do. An engineering degree, for example, might be very well in a machinist’s shop, but was presumed not to address the lofty intellectual heights necessary to run a country. Tradesmen could afford an engineering degree, knowing they could make a living from it. To get a proper liberal education, you really had to inherit a bit of wealth, to be free to study without worrying whether writing in Greek would allow you to support yourself after college. So it was the liberal education specifically to which the myth of entitlement was attached, ideally a liberal education from an expensive east coast school.

The meteoric rise of America in the 20th century, and especially after the Second World War, began to undermine even this flimsy preserve of the aristocracy began to crumble. Returning GIs took advantage of educational bills, and families on the rising tide of American wealth could afford to send their children all the way through college. Some of them even got degrees in English, and the fine arts, and rhetoric. And, while the Ivy League still has legacy students, all too many are accepted on merit for the comfort of the aristocrats. How then to justify granting leadership and access only to the sons and daughters—well, okay, sons—of the upper class?

Enter the myth of management. We’ve heard it repeatedly in the past twenty or thirty years: experience in managing a large organization is pretty much the same as managing any other large organization. The nature of the organization—an oil corporation, a cabinet department, a baseball league, even watching lawyers manage a large inherited estate in a pinch—is presumed to be immaterial; all organizations are, according to this theory, interchangeable from the perspective at the top. The success of the organization under a given individual’s leadership is immaterial as well; bankrupting the Texas treasury is an unforeseeable accident of market forces, and investigations into shady loans are written off as the fault of some underling, as long as you qualify as a member of the old boys’ network. How one rose to the top of the organization is immaterial, too; getting plunked in the CEO’s office by Daddy, or catapulted into office by a massive media blitz is every bit as good as working your way up the ladder, and really mastering the organization. Even better—a pure, fungible perspective of the omnicompetent manager should be unsullied by too much time in a single job. (Besides, multiple golden parachutes beat one any day.) A lifetime of public service is all well and good, but a couple years in the corner office prepares you to handle anything.

And so we have accepted people into positions of power and privilege on no more basis than that they have managed something else, possibly quite badly, sometime in their lives. The results have been predictable. Donald Rumsfeld had no background as a military man; he was a business executive. He ran the army like a business, cutting jobs and expenses to look good on the ledgers, while spinning a good power point presentation. Our failure in Iraq is largely a direct product of fighting a war on the cheap. Dick Cheney had no background as a lawyer, much less a writer of laws; he was a profiteer, and runs the White House for maximum personal profit. Our decaying rule of law is a direct product of the conflict between just governance and a fast buck. George Bush had no background in politics before being set upon the Texan throne in his blissful ignorance; he was an heir, and a failed one at that, three times over. Having made a proper mess of Texas in turn, he was judged fit to handle the entire country. His disastrous presidency is a direct product of getting handed jobs for which he was unqualified, because it wouldn’t do to hand the presidency to a mere commoner, or to leave the son of an oil magnate with nothing to do.

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took the new SimCity Societies game out for a test run the day before Thanksgiving. This being the holiday season, a time of cheer and good will toward man, I want to focus on the positives.

Well, it was pretty.

Beyond the expected face-lift to keep up with continuing progress in the graphic capabilities of home computers, the buildings’ designs were well done, and considerable attention has been given to creating several “matched sets” of buildings from which to choose. You can thus design cities with a real feel to them, from sleepy country towns to 1984-style police states, or you can create hybrids to suit your aesthetics: surround State U campus with resentful trailer parks, or couple your upper-class playground to the kind of manufacturing that can fuel it. The engine cooperates by subtly altering background colors and noises to match, so you’ll see rich sunsets in a Norman Rockwell church town, and trash will dot the sidewalks of an industrial hell.

I watched over someone’s shoulder and got very enthused at the prospect. It looked great! We got our own disk the next day.

Yes, sir, the game sure is pretty.

Yup.

[…]

Oh, who am I kidding? Graphics don’t make a game; gameplay does. There’s no gameplay here. Any significan goal is insultingly easy. I achieved every goal the game provides—all ten themed goals reached and all buildings unlocked—on my first town, the one that’s supposed to be riddled with stupid errors committed while learning how to handle the game properly, avoiding pitfalls and taking full advantage of opportunities. Each building made available (“unlocked”) by reaching minimum requirements remain unlocked for every game played thereafter; you can start your second game with high-rise apartments and megamalls, skipping individual houses and corner stores entirely. Each achievement entitles you to a small cash income in every future game.

Not that you’d need it. The only expense Societies mayors suffer is new construction. Gone are the maintenance costs for power plants, the costs of funding hospitals and police stations, the need to watch your budget. You literally cannot overbuild: housing, businesses, or entertainment venues may go unused, but they cost you nothing to keep. Massive over- or under-employment is no concern; your sims don’t care a fig whether they work, nor whether they can afford the consumer venues they visit. Indeed, work is entirely for your benefit; the city’s income comes strictly from income tax, collected at the end of every working day at a rate that would make Croesus blush. If you build faster than your budget can sustain, wait a week; your new Olymmpic stadium will be ready.

Maxis included some potential for strategy in the form of building synergies: a corporate tower, for example, might periodically generate a manager who will temporarily raise the income of the first building he enters, or a museum might beautify its immediate neighbors. You have good reason, then, to plan your construction to maximize these small perks, surrounding the corporate tower with high-income buildings that would benefit most from a consultation, or the museum by cheap housing whose residents suffer poor esthetics. Unfortunately, you don’t need these benefits, some of which act as a positive distraction from the more profitable occupation of slapping out more buildings.

The old residential-commercial-industrial zoning system has received a makeover. In place of the RCI triad are houses, workplaces, and venues. Workplaces are your source of tax income, housing provides workers to staff it, and venues, mostly shops and entertainment, boost worker happiness to the point where they will continue working. Working slowly lowers happiness, although certain events can do so as well; once a worker gets sufficiently unhappy, he’ll leave his workplace to buy some ice cream or go dancing. The happier you keep workers, the more income tax they’ll provide. Because any venue will do, keeping your sims in a perpetual state of pants-wetting ecstasy is a doddle.

Traffic could, theoretically, provide some strategic interest. Traffic jams eat up your sims’ time, preventing them from working a full day or fully juicing up their happiness between work and home. Until you discover subways, which are dirt cheap, have a tiny footprint, and automatically connect to every other subway—then, traffic is whisked into the dustbin of history. And even before you discover subways, your sims travel pretty quickly on foot, without actually needing roads. Never mind the cars.

Maxis has succeeded on its philosophy of creating “toys” instead of “games,” that is, open-ended simulations in which you set your own goals. It has also suffered from complaints that everything is too easy, which it is for players seeking a challenge. Enabling wild experimentation means refusing to punish what might reasonably be a losing strategy in a more goal-oriented simulation. Societies suffers from this shortcoming in spades. Maxis has worked so hard to make sure the city of your dreams can survive, no matter how nonsensical, no matter how ill-conceived or ill-managed, that there is no challenge of any kind. Every city works. Want a city staffed with nothing but clowns and cheerleaders, where everyone lives in tree houses? No problem. Want a city where your trailer trash visit the nightly opera? No problem. But because every city works, no matter how badly you screw it up, there’s no sense of achievement in managing a successful city.

SimCity got its inspirational beginning as a design utility for another game. Will Wright was designing a typical shooting game, wherein the player piloted a bomber over enemy countryside. To speed the process, he created a small utility to help design the landscape, placing target buildings and trees and so on. To his surprise, he found he liked laying out buildings in a realistic or esthetically pleasing fashion using the utility better than he liked bombing them into pixilated oblivion in the actual game. So inspired, Wright developed the first SimCity, and went on to fame and fortune. With Societies, the SimCity line has come full circle: the title goes so far in removing all challenge to give you the maximum ability to put any building wherever you want that the latest CivCity in CivNation is not a management sim; it’s a city drawing utility.

Posted by at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found myself thinking yesterday about an unfortunate truism concerning military forces. The qualities that make a good wartime general are not the same as those that make a good peacetime general. There’s considerable overlap, to be sure, but considerable divergence, as well. Most notably, the men who win wars need to address problems head-on and with eyes open, deliver unambiguous orders and inform superiors frankly, while generals who rise to the top in peacetime are the people who rise in any hierarchy, good at political maneuvering, winning budget support, speaking diplomatically. The two are not wholly incompatible, but it’s hard to find both in a single person: one requires a warrior, the other a politician.

As a result, long periods of peace or war produce a preponderance of the appropriate kind of general, which can cause problems when the sands of history shift. The disconnect works in both directions: generals too used to war can undermine, deliberately or incidentally, desirable political efforts once the war is over, but the truism more often laments pencil-pushers emotionally or intellectually unsuited for war when it comes.

All this popped into mind during a radio report on the latest efforts to pacify Iraq, and specifically an American officer apologizing to an Iraqi family for intruding on their home life even as they dragged the head of the household away in chains. It was a strange moment, reminiscent of the bureaucratic disconnects satirized in the movie Brazil. And I found myself thinking that selling that kind of doublethink bullshit requires a true politician, the kind that’s supposed to thrive in a peacetime military, and is supposed to be so harmful to war efforts.

Maybe a politico is doing the harm right now, with this half-baked idea that an apology will turn aside the anger of war victims. But then again, perhaps a politically savvy military is exactly what we need. Great power wars may be a thing of the past. I wouldn’t say nuclear weapons and a consistent history of war between major powers doing more harm than good means big wars are gone forever, but they seem to be gone from the perceptible future. What we have instead—and what war looks to be like for generations to come—are either small, asymmetrical wars between mighty occupying power and guerilla resistance, or nasty little feuds between factions sharing some minor nation.

Both kinds of conflict depend at least as much upon political as upon military strategy. Occupying powers can get nowhere without winning hearts and minds of the occupied; insurgents cannot survive without turning native sympathies against the occupation. Intrafactional disputes face a similar dilemma, plus the added concern of crossing some invisibly shifting line of perception concerning atrocityI, and triggering the unwelcome intrusion of the UN, US, or EU. Arms will not—cannot—decide these wars; the very use of sufficient force is likely to turn the indispensable general populace against one. They will be decided by politicians, with political tools.

Perhaps for the first time in history, the ideal wartime general is the same as the ideal peacetime general, someone skilled at speaking in euphemisms and capable of looking like everyone’s friend. Patton, Sherman, and Genghis Khan are not the men to win these smoldering brush wars. Now we need generals who can be everyone’s friend, even while bombing them into poverty, desperation, and an early grave.

Posted by at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I attended the animated Neil Gaiman/Roger Avary film adaptation of Beowulf with sharply divided expectations. As you might expect, given my take on the rules of Fairyland, I was less interested in the technical quality of the graphics—which, incidentally, were generally good—than in the story line.

I’d seen the trailer, and had some cause for concern. Casting Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother, and Grendel’s mother as a sexpot temptress smelled suspiciously like the kind of revision that crosses the line between reinterpreting a beloved story and merely pretending to do so. Telling an entirely different story with somebody else’s character names is an easy way to score some cheap marketing, the kind of process that produces ripoff stinkers like The Magnificent Seven Returns, or the blessedly imaginary “Lord of the Rings II: Vengeance of Frodo.”

On the other hand, Gaiman has an extraordinary touch with myth, able to revisit the old tales in a way that tells an original story while preserving and respecting the narrative demands of mythology: when his gods walk the modern world, they may wear a suit, but they will not reveal themselves as ancient UFO aliens suffering a case of mistaken identity. He is also a literary chameleon, easily shifting tone to match his collaborators, living or long dead. Beowulf is a surprisingly short tale for such a milestone of literature, with an enormous gap between slaying Grendel and kin in Beowulf’s youth and slaying a dragon as a form of suicide in his old age. If anyone could flesh this saga out into a full-length movie without doing wrong by it, Gaiman is the man. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Avary’s input, although Eileene muttered darkly.

They almost pull it off.

Where they stick to the original, they capture the Beowulf esthetic in ways of which the Danes and Geats would approve. The setting is not reworked into fairy tale beauty; Hrothgar’s mead hall is rewardingly crude, as are his jarls, and Hrothgar himself, for that matter. The landscape is all gray skies and gray slate.

Where Gaiman and Avary take small deviations from the original, they are clever and skillful. An ancient revision, by which literate Christian scholars overlaid a veneer of Christian virtue on a pre-literate pagan tale, is cunningly reworked into a creeping advance of Christianity itself into Denmark, with Unferth the principle proponent. Wealthow plays a larger role but remains properly in the background, reinforcing the setting by throwing light on historical sexual mores, gender roles, and the privileges of a king. That Grendel speaks in old English is a nice touch, reinforcing his alien qualities despite being the one to use speech of the period. The battle with the dragon is more engaging in the movie, although in leaving his cave to strike the mead-hall Heorot, he steals a little too much from Smaug in The Hobbit.

The script takes a huge turn from the original with Grendel’s mother. The writers take advantage of the fact that Beowulf himself is the only witness to his encounter with Grendel’s mother; by casting him as an unreliable witness, they justify her complete transformation into a temptress, who seduces warriors to breed monster children. In the movie, Grendel is Hrothgar’s own shameful son, which prevents either from killing the other, and the dragon is Beowulf’s. With both Beowulf and the dragon dead at the film’s end, she moves on to Wiglaf, staring alluringly from the fjord into which Beowulf’s burning funereal ship has just sailed. We are left to guess whether Wiglaf succumbs.

The original saga doesn’t tell us much about Grendel’s mother, through Beowulf or otherwise, but the omniscient narrator does tell us that she is hideous, so the movie departs significantly in this respect, pursuing a Freudian sex-is-violence theme Gaiman first raised in his short story “Bay Wolf.” It wasn’t satisfying there, either. The decision to recast Grendel’s mother stretches unwelcome fingers through the movie in big ways and small.

One small but stupidly jarring way the change intrudes: Grendel’s mother has stiletto heels. Not high-heeled shoes, mind you, but actual heels grown to a spike Prada would approve, and given their own loving close-up shot. Most impractical for life in a rough cavern, and hardly something Beowulf would find appealing—he doesn’t share our cultural sense of the sexual icon. Grendel’s mother can change her shape, so why grow heels at all? You can almost imagine some studio doofus thinking, “Grendel’s mom is a hot chick? Oh, Angelina Jolie! Yeah, she’s hot. Let’s draw her walking around the cavern in nothing but spiked pumps. Woot!” Probably the same guy who felt Beowulf’s retainers should look like biker dudes instead of warriors from the Dark Ages.

One big way the change intrudes: Beowulf ceases to be a heroic saga at all. Grendel’s mother becomes the driving force behind the whole story, not the hero. Not only is Beowulf himself shown to be weak-willed, an opportunist and a liar—we might have suspected as much from his long-winded tale of sea monsters to excuse his loss in a swimming contest—but Hrothgar is, as well. We are left to guess whether Wiglaf succumbs; it is unclear whether his scowl in the closing frames is of contempt or frustration at his helplessness, but if Hrothgar and Beowulf fell to temptation, can Wiglaf, or someone like him, be far behind? The hero fails; evil survives; the hero kills a dragon, but he doesn’t kill the dragon. The warrior hero is portrayed not as master of his fate, but as helpless pawn, no better than the rest of us mortals. The litany that the song (of heroic deeds) survives is small compensation; the fact becomes deplorable when the song is a barefaced lie.

The big intrusions treat the classic tale like a more modern slasher flick, wherein the monster holds all the cards, and remains available for a sequel. The change may seem intriguing on paper. The new story could be interesting in its own right, could stand on its own, and should; it isn’t Beowulf, and does a disservice to the legend.

Posted by at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several months after learning of World War Z and its critical acclaim, I’m finally getting around to reading it. So far the book, a fictional account of a worldwide zombie outbreak presented in the format of a historical documentary, is really, really good.

Max Brooks eschews the standard horror treatment we inherited from Night of the Living Dead for a science-fictional one, or at least a social science-fictional one. Wisely avoiding the question of exactly how zombies appeared, or how they can exist at all, he otherwise focuses on meaningful questions and does his level best to answer them plausibly. How would various national governments react to the outbreak: fighting it, denying it, or ineffectively blaming it on someone else? How quickly, and how thoroughly, would the story propagate through news media, and how would the news be received? How would populations react once the evidence grew too large to ignore—often upon the point of zombies smashing in the living room window? After the initial panic, what would survivors do to dig in and continue surviving, and even reclaim the planet? Survivors would face hard decisions; who would make them, and what would happen to those who did, and those who didn’t?

It’s this matter-of-fact approach that makes the account so gripping. World War Z figures that, no matter how widespread the zombie epidemic, somebody, somewhere, is going to regroup and dig in. Armies may fail to stop the tide, news services may inform the public too late, the highways may become deathtraps when traffic jams slow cars below zombie speed, and unarmed populations may be easy prey, but the sheer variety of local conditions guarantees that someone gets attacked last, that they get enough of the news in time, that they can fling up a perimeter against attackers who, let’s face it, aren’t going to exhibit the sharpest military tactics. Maybe one in a hundred thousand outruns the crowd, but that leaves a minimum sixty thousand people. Some towns are isolated enough to see the dreadful CNN reports and dig in before the zombies, traveling by Brownian motion, arrive. Some communities inhabit conditions harsh enough to freeze the zombies, or dehydrate them, or whatever, before they can get to the people inside. Somebody has to survive. Then what?

Without pursuing that final question, the book would be pointless. We’ve seen zombie movies already: the hopeless last stand, the front door smashing in, the mumbling of “Braaaains…” Carried to its logical extreme, that would be a short tale: zombies eat everyone, then slowly fall apart from entropy. The end. Retelling the same scenario in every corner of the globe would get old fast. Presuming instead that someone survives in a self-sustaining fashion, and asking “Then what?” is a fascinating thought experiment. Brooks pursues it intelligently enough to keep me hooked, with a curious side effect.

Impressionable people sometimes complain that they don’t like watching horror movies, or reading horror stories, because it gives them nightmares. I was never much prone to this, or even taking horror movies seriously in the first place. Horror tends to break my fragile suspension of disbelief: how on earth did the stalker know to hide in that particular closet, and what could allow a creature to survive complete disintegration, and why in the name of Ned would martians want to mate with our women? No matter how vivid the portrayal of such monsters, they’re not plausible. Not plausible, not real. Not real, not scary. Nor do zombies scare me. I know too much about anatomy and biochemistry.

Nonetheless, I’m dreaming about the zombie menace: each of four nights after reading a bit of the book, a zombie nightmare. Not of shambling corpses breaking through the hedges and trying to eat me, but of supply chains and work rotations. What skill sets are necessary to preserve a town built out of a military strong point? How much of your limited supply of skilled labor do you put to work on the defenses, and how much do you set aside to train a bigger usable labor pool? How do you keep food stores safe, if you’ve got modern science but pre-industrial tools? Is there any reason to consider linking up with other outposts as a high priority? Are bullets a cost-effective weapon compared to, say, chopping zombie skulls with an axe when you have to manufacture them from scarce materials with scarce machinery? At what point do you decide the unfit present an unacceptable strain on (and risk to) the community, and what do you do with them, and how do you get the general populace to agree? Answering these questions quickly and effectively is a civic planner’s nightmare, a nightmare that gets under my skin far more than the thought of the living dead themselves. I dream horrible dreams of resource management. I find this perversity of my subconscious response highly comical.

Posted by at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s official: I am cured of the World of Warcraft virus. Last night, I joined my guild on a raid. Despite enjoying the company, and even despite the opportunity to offer fresh tactical ideas, I was bored stiff.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did. It’s the end of a long line of steps away from an intensely engaging hobby of two years. Online strategy guides took a lot of fun out of it: most players want to win more than they want to grapple with figuring strategies out for themselves, so raids felt too much like just following instructions. I stopped attending raids when it became clear I couldn’t play enough to get ahead of the exploration curve and see stuff before the strategies got posted. Our weekly 5-man sessions, dubbed the Kneecappers, disbanded when one member couldn’t handle work conflicts, and his wife decided to depart with him. I lost all interest in grinding materials to craft a powerful outfit.

Each step left me less eager to play, until I dropped out entirely. Last night’s run was my first in months, and even then, my participation was a favor to friends in my guild, which needed to fill out a roster, rather than for my own entertainment.

I don’t really want to leave my online friends behind. To my surprise, playing in regular groups, mastering tactics together, is quite engaging. Unfortunately, there’s no longer enough game to serve as a foundation for my participation.

I’m not alone. MMORPGs are addictive, and WoW is the best of the lot, but people still get bored and drift away. Blizzard works hard and well to produce new material, but “been there, done that” complaints are on the rise. The difficulty of meeting an insatiable appetite for new content is compounded by the simplicity which made WoW such a success in the first place; tactics are not evolving fast enough to keep tacticians like me engaged. Player population (in English-speaking nations) has finally crested, and is on the decline. So now that I’m done with WoW, perhaps I can take my cue from departing players who have gone through the discovery-exploration-boredom-departure cycle before.

And there’s the mystery: where do those players go when they’re done with WoW? Some drift back to games other than MMORPGs: 4x games for the strategists, shooters for the twitch players. But where do the players who specifically like MMORPGs go, when there’s only one game in town?

That’s something of an exaggeration; other MMORPGs have carved out niches around WoW, offering much more technical play for the perfectionists, more grinding for the masochists, even a combat-free game for the pacifists. A Lord of the Rings game has earned some critical success, and Guild Wars is hanging on to its perch. Nonetheless, they remain very much niche games, and their populations are either stable or shrinking, too; they aren’t absorbing recruits from WoW. That means that joining now would leave me still behind the curve, still playing catch-up with players with more accumulated abilities and direct experience, just in a new environment. And it still doesn’t answer the question of where the retiring WoW players are going.

Apparently, they’re going back to living. Leaving behind the addiction of WoW, they may be rediscovering all the interests that went ignored under years of pressure to level up, or to completing a set of powerful gear. Thinking it over, that’s my cue, too, isn’t it? Instead of following players to a new MMORPG, it’s time to follow them back into the light of daily life: family, work, noble causes.

Posted by at 6:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had to hit the mall last weekend to refresh my wardrobe—underwear, socks, and casual pants. We separated at one point, Eileene to get some food, me to get my socks. Some guy stopped me on my way from sock shopping to the food court.

It’s hard to hear in the Garden State Mall, although the noise level doesn’t seem very high. I suspect they pump white noise through the building. In any case, I had a hard time figuring out what this stranger wanted, so I didn’t realize he was a booth vendor, and wanted to ply his schtick until after he’d already grabbed my hand and energetically buffed the nail on the middle finger of my left hand. He had been asking me for a finger to demonstrate his product, a nail-buffing sponge.

His patter—what I could hear of it—needed some work. When he chirped that I could have shiny fingernails with only a few minutes work every month, I replied that I didn’t want shiny fingernails at all, and that I didn’t want to do any work on them every month, which left him non-plussed. His choice of target needed a lot of work; I’m not the kind of guy who worries about the finer details of his appearance, nor am I the kind of guy to buy something just to get a salesman out of my hair. I like argument, and I’m good at it, and I despise the hard sell. Out of sheer cussedness, I turn on hard-sell salesmen and do my best both to make them look foolish and to make them waste as much time as possible trying to squeeze blood from a stone, instead of fleecing an easier mark. Ask the evangelists who ring my doorbell every month or two. When the nail guy insisted that shiny fingernails are impressive, and I asked point blank who I should impress, he paused and replied “nobody.” A good salesman would have had a ready answer.

But most of all, his presentation needed work. I ended up with one shiny fingernail. It did not look good. It did not match the other nine, and that kind of thing just gets up my anal-retentive nose, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. If all ten nails had been buffed, I probably wouldn’t notice or care, but if I did, they would strike my middle-American sensibilities as…how shall I put this? Not entirely masculine. Silly. Nothing wrong with shiny fingernails on a guy, just my mild knee-jerk prejudice kicking in, and frankly I’d rather not inflict my own mild knee-jerk prejudices on myself; it’s bad enough that I inflict them on others. But because he didn’t have a product to put the structural ridges back onto my nail, I’m stuck with this one until it grows for its entire length and I can clip it off, requiring maybe half a year.

One shiny fingernail, at least in my book, has negative advertising value; that is, seeing it makes me less likely to want shiny fingernails, not more. Salesmen: if you want to sell your product, present it in a way that makes your customer think it looks good, not in a way that makes them think it looks worse than its absence. Duh.

The salesman asked for my finger. That’s what I should have given him.

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the letters are going out to publishers, and to agents. And they are coming back. The cycle is surprisingly long, at least in my mind. After repeated lectures on the importance of prompt responses to business associates, it seems strange that it should take from four to six weeks to learn whether someone would be interested in seeing my manuscript. Not to respond to the manuscript itself, mind you, but simply a query into whether to send one. But that’s how the business runs, I guess. I do not envy editors so pressed with letters for permission to send a manuscript. I shudder to think of the workload the manuscripts themselves present.

But at my end, things are quiet. I’ve had five refusals to date. Four were mere form letters, one was much, much more heartening: an apology from an agent too busy to take the manuscript himself, but a suggestion to send it to one of his colleagues, who handles “books in that vein.”

The refusals do not sting. I long ago hardened myself to the notion of endldess “No”s before receiving a yes, and I accepted the common claim that an interested “No” is practically a success. Much of the reason the book has taken me so long is that I am my own harshest critic, and have a hard time believing, deep down, that I have something worth saying, despite the very concrete evidence of wanting to read the book before finding myself forced to write it, since nobody else would. That 99% or more of the literary world is disinterested neither surprises nor bothers me; it is the remaining 1% I seek.

That’s not quite true. Refusals bother me in one respect. Every time I get a “No,” it means I have to send out another query letter. For reasons I can’t fathom, much less explain, asking remains a gut-wrenching terror. What’s the worst that can happen? A refusal? No problem. Got them, shrugged, moved on. A response? No problem.

I think what I fear is a “Yes.”

My writer’s group takes pride in being critical, instead of a mutual support society full of warm fuzzies. That suits me just fine. I enjoy ripping up a stretch of text, that it can be made better. But now, as I move from writing to salesmanship, I find I need a little more in the way of emotional support. Editing doesn’t hurt; it’s stepping out into unknown territory that bothers me. I’m grateful that my writing group is prepared to mock my caution. The sense of perspective it brings hardens me.

Posted by at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unbelievable. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino has taken Musharraf to task for his reverse coup, his attempt to hold his office through extraconstitutional means. Taking several pages directly from Bush’s playbook, Musharraf has framed his coup as a method of fighting terrorism (with very little actual terrorism evident), blaming activist judges for necessitating his move to abandon the constitution.

It’s put the White House in a delicate situation: although Musharraf has obligingly kept out of Bush and company’s efforts to make a wretched mess of the Mideast, publicly approving of his methods would prove beyond the slightest doubt that they have no interest whatever in bringing democracy anywhere.

So, speaking through Perino, they wagged a finger at him. Perino told the press that Bush would be speaking to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, and that Bush would also receive a report on the safety of consumer products. But the press was most interested in our president’s position on events in Pakistan. Perino danced around condemning Musharraf, but certainly didn’t embrace him. Eventually, they reached this exchange:

Q But what he says what he's doing is against the terrorists, that is
necessary to preserve stability there against terrorist organizations?

MS. PERINO: In our opinion, no.

Unbelievable. Unbefucking lievable.

Once again we bump up against a statement so transparently false, so asinine, that we have to wonder whether our leaders are truly that blind to their misconduct, or whether they truly think we might be. Neither seems possible.

Posted by at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene has taken up “A Tale in the Desert” (ATitD), a MMORPG set in ancient Egypt. ATitD diverges from the normal line of MMORPGs in many ways, but primarily in that it revolves around crafting, instead of killing. You act as a one-man technological revolution, working your way up from Paleolithic hunter/gatherer to classical era master craftsman. You can do other things besides, like becoming a traveling merchant earning his keep by carting stuff around and saving craftsman the chore, or becoming a political leader if you can get enough support from your fellow players, but the heart of the game is crafting. As best I can tell, looking over the skill trees, combat doesn’t enter the game at all.

I haven’t seen much of the game, so take that (and everything else I have to say) with a grain of salt. What I know I learned by looking over Eileene’s shoulder as she tended a small plot of flax, but it’s clear that the crafting system is insanely robust. Barely out of the tutorial, she already collects mud, sand, slate, grass, flax, wood, and possibly other things I haven’t seen. To leave the tutorial, she had to make a boat. For this, she needed planks. For planks, she needed a plane to shave boards from timber. For the plane, she needed a number of easily broken slate blades, which she had to flake herself from slate stones scavenged from scattered locations on the river bank. Likewise sail, linen, loom, rope, machines to make the linen and rope, materials for the machines, flax for the linen, machines to process the flax into tow, the town into linen, bricks for a small building to house the machines, wooden frames to make the bricks, mud for the bricks, straw for the bricks, a machine to process the straw from flax…you get the idea.

The game appeals only to a niche of players, but to these, there is no substitute. I’ve already mentioned that the game de-emphasizes, and possibly eschews, combat. There’s something rewarding about earning a name for yourself by making the finest outfits available, potentially as satisfying as murdering a dozen people in the next town over for the crime of hanging the wrong banner over their houses. This can be an enormous draw for players bored with an eternity of glorified muggings, or for players who find the idea of advancement through brutality distasteful. This latter can include parents who frown on exposing their children to casual game violence.

Speaking of the kiddies, the game has obvious educational purposes, too, despite conflating widely disparate historical periods. The sheer detail of the crafting mechanics can’t help but be educational: how things were made before the industrial revolution. Such subjects are sadly neglected in history classes, in favor of the more glamorous game of thrones, when they have as much impact as anything on human life. It’s too late to see the bootstrapping of a trade economy, but I’m sure it was instructive to those involved.

Both of these attractions are strong for me. I like historicity, which the stale “histories” of fantasy realms can never duplicate, favoring as they do endless clashes of arms between nations with endless reserves of soldiers and treacherous rulers. I’m interested in watching a simplified, yet realistic economy at work, and especially in watching its genesis from unrelated resources. The bronze age, where the twining branches of trade, technology, and politics began, is a subject of particular personal interest; seeing it in practice would be nifty.

But at what cost? Watching over Eileene’s shoulder, I realized that recreating all of this as a first-person experience was an exercise in tedium, despite being orders of magnitude faster and easier than the actual building of Egypt. Plant some flax. Weed it. Weed it again. Don’t harvest it for linen; you need to let it go to seed and build your reserve. Repeat. Repeat. Now you can grow some flax for linen. Do this hundreds of times, and you’ll have enough to make thread for a loom. Then you can start growing more linen to weave. Egad. I’ve read complaints about many games, notably including the Sims, that they are too much like real life: “We already work a daily grind, why would we want a game about getting up, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, watching TV, and going to bed?” ATitD measures up to this complaint in spades. As educational as it might be, ATitD looks less like a game than like a virtual life, and that in a period when “not going hungry” was a mark of wealth.

Some things are better learned through books. This looks like a recipe for killing interest, not creating it.

Posted by at 7:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So Musharraf has decided that his prospects under elections are too slim for his tastes, and declared himself dictator. Excuse me, declared martial law to keep order, the only chaos in evidence being that people are considering a change of leader. Armed thugs patrol the streets, seeking dissenters. Scary times in Pakistan.

The military dictator is operating under a tight schedule; Bhutto is proving more popular than he expected, and if he doesn’t stamp opposition out now, he’s likely to face a popular revolt. Although the individual people in popular revolts often lose, and quite badly, “The People” always win, once they’ve decided they’re willing to die for it. So Musharraf has to make people good and frightened, right now, and keep them there, before things snowball beyond his control.

What bothers me the most about his coup is his choice of primary target. What he’s doing is flatly illegal—unconstitutional—so anyone who understands the law is dangerous. As corrupt as the country’s government generally might be, the courts still understand that the law is to be taken literally, and the legal profession has already proven itself willing to play by the rules in declaring last year that the constitution demands Musharraf stand for general election. He has, therefore, with perfect logic, decided upon judges and lawyers as his first target. Whether a lawyer, or worse, a judge, supports or opposes Musharraf is immaterial; simply being a lawyer means knowing that he is breaking the law. Knowing Pakistani law is, almost by definition, a crime. Arguing that it be upheld has become a crime. Simply wearing the professional garb has become an invitation to beating, jailing, or execution by armed mob.

With their situation put that starkly, whatever lawyers and judges had not already cast their lot against the warlord have done so now; or rather, it was cast for them. And that means Musharraf, if he remains in power, can do so only by eliminating the courts. And what then? How is a country to operate at all when the only law is the word of a military dictator? He can’t take care of every case to arise, and he will have eliminated those who can. He’s likely to give the job to whatever thugs are handy. They, in turn, will simply use their new posts to take everything they can. Someone will be sitting on the bench, but the court will be closed. In the absence of justice and the law, the country will collapse, economically if not geographically. Order will exist only where Musharraf’s loyalists stand, weapons in hand. Everywhere else, chaos—a far grimmer chaos than he pretends to be acting to avoid.

Musharraf has another option, however: he can employ Muslim clerics. Islam is a highly legalistic religion, after all, even more so than its mother and sister religions of Judaism and Christianity, written by a merchant with a merchant’s sense of justice. Islamic scholarship operates with the same careful dicing of words and ideas that the law does, and with a similar tendency to take the law broadly or narrowly, according to whichever serves your momentary interests. Islamic scholars can operate as makeshift judges, albeit not very good ones. They must inevitably be unaware of certain stretches of civil law, and will inevitably employ Islamic law to fill the gaps. The tyranny will be terrible to witness, the more so when it becomes apparent that the clerics are the only proof against collapse. Suddenly, Musharraf will find he is beholden to a power block that the general populace holds in some esteem, higher esteem than he enjoys, himself. He may be allowed to remain in the saddle, but the imams will hold the reins of power.

Had Musharraf simply stepped down graciously, there is every chance the opposition would quickly destroy itself through its own corruption, and he could return in exactly the fashion in which he once arose. There is even some chance he could win further elections legally. He could rely upon the courts as an ally against that corruption, and to uphold legal elections. Instead, he has made his bid to retain power, and justifies it with the need to preserve order. Very shortly, he must relinquish one. If he is not careful, he will have neither.

When that sorry state is reached, we in the US will have another object lesson on what happens when questioning the leadership is criminalized. I doubt, by that time, that we will be paying much attention, at least to the lesson. By that time, things may be going so badly in Pakistan that we begin looking at another imperial encroachment, and begin another round of silencing the thoughtful in our own country, the better to pursue it.

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)