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I’m starving amid plenty.

We got the latest issue of Games for Windows today. The cover story reads “Too many games! PC games invasion.” As far as that statement goes, it’s entirely true, but it fails to depict the computer game landscape accurately.

By all accounts, 2007 has been an extraordinarily good year for computer games. Contrary to the usual pattern of mediocre-to-good offerings surrounded by wild hype, this year we were treated to a long list of smash successes, the kind of thing that has players skipping meals and calling in late for work. Bioshock did a lot with a little, brilliantly turning the limitation of linearity into a driving narrative element. I haven’t seen Gears of War, Half-Life 3, or Halo 3, nor would I be qualified to judge them if I did, but all are getting stellar reviews. Delayed games have been declared worth the wait. Hardcore fans suspicious of any deviation with the Team Fortress formula have decided that Team Fortress 2 was right to remove grenades, and otherwise reduce technical variations. Mass Effect is doing for consoles what these are doing for computers, bringing a compelling narrative and tactical depth to what would otherwise be a stale genre.

Unfortunately, one can’t help but notice a pattern here. All these games are first-person shooters (often abbreviated to “FPS,” or just “shooters.”) Of the seven games named on the cover of this month’s GFW, five are shooters; one is the failed SimCity Societies (see my review), and one is a garden-variety RTS. When Eileene and I visited Best Buy this week, the games section read: shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter, Sims, shooter, Civ4, shooter, shooter, Sims, shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter, WoW, shooter. It's like going to the grocery store and finding eleven aisles of pasta but only broccoli in the produce department.

If you like shooters, welcome to hog heaven. The shelves are packed with shooters, and many of them, I’m told, are excellent. About the only drawback to this embarrassment of riches is that it’s hardly possible to enjoy them all properly before they become obsolete.

If you’re not into shooters, however, you’re up the creek. World of Warcraft scored a hit with its Outland expansion, with the same across-the-board quality that made the original such a success, but it is, ultimately, an expansion. Despite the consistently high quality of the WoW line, I quit this month out of boredom; you can only drill through an end raid so many times once you hit the level cap. Strategy gamers like me have had to warm themselves by the single light of a Civilization expansion. The most original game of the year, and possibly its best, is Portal, combining black humor with teleportation puzzles, and it was a spin-off of a shooter, built entirely around a special gun deemed to powerful for its Half-Life parent.

This, too, shall pass. There’s no guarantee that the pendulum will swing back; it might swing off towards an entirely new genre I can’t conceive—but it will swing somewhere when shooters run out of fresh ideas. Still, in a game industry fallen prey to a blockbuster mentality, hungry to exploit both PC and console for revenue, and eager to exploit the vast promise of ever-broader internet bands, the shooter is choking the life out of other game genres. And for those of us huddled around the embers of Civilization, pickings look to grow even slimmer.

Posted by at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just in case there was any doubt, here is further proof that inspiration can be found anywhere. I came across this website through a Lovecraft fan, but there’s so much more to appreciate than just a nod to Dead Cthulhu.

Someone stumbled onto the fact that, in addition to its staples of books, music, and videos, Amazon.com sells ballpoint pens, and, because Amazon decided to use the same template for the pens as it does for all its other products, the page devoted to purchasing your pens through Amazon includes an invitation to comment. Doubtless, many people stumbled onto the same fact and thought nothing of it. What is there to say about cheap, disposable ballpoints, in a design that’s been around since at leas my infancy?

What indeed. Not satisfied with merely clicking “back” or “add to shopping cart,” one enterprising customer took the comments box as a challenge: produce useful, or at least interesting, customer feedback on a product only slightly less mundane than gravel.

The results were not, one must admit, useful, and they were only interesting in a “meta” sense—the interest lies not in what he has to say about the pen, but that he chose to say anything. Good enough! Others, inspired by his example, took up the glove and tried to outdo this first offering, in style or substance. And, since there isn’t much to say about disposable ballpoints, the field has quickly become crowded; at this point, it’s a fair challenge simply to produce substantially different text, let alone superior comments. Additional meta humor lies in the fact that these idle fancies are far, far more more interesting, more extensive, and more numerous than those devoted almost any other Amazon product.

Of course, once that particular joke’s been done, there’s no point in imitating it. You’ll need to think of another to make a mark. But I still take heart at this reminder that a good verbal riff can come from anywhere.

Posted by at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When a computer generates a random number, what comes out is not, technically, random. Mathematicians, who worry about such things, call such numbers “pseudo-random.” A pseudo-random phenomenon is produced by an arbitrary and unpredictable process, a function so arbitrary and complicated that it is essentially impossible to predict the output without reproducing the function itself. For most purposes, the output may as well be random, but it is not truly random, because the same input will invariably produce the same output.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, suppose you needed a random number from your computer—to shuffle a deck for your next Windows solitaire game, for example. Your computer might do something like this: read the internal clock, express that time as a single number, divide that number by the number of milliseconds your computer has been on since its last boot, divide that quotient by pi, and take the hundred thousandth digit of the result. If it needed more “random” numbers, your computer could continue with the hundred thousand and first digit, and so on. Arbitrary input values, like the clock times in this example, are called “seeds.” Technically, the results are not random, since anyone starting with the same seeds, that is, asking for a random deck shuffle at exactly that time, after running their computer exactly that long, would get the same deck. But for all practical purposes, the chances of any two players getting those same numbers are so low, and the results are so unpredictable, that the deck generated by such a process may as well be random.

Pseudo-random behavior is not limited to computers. You can see it as well in any chaotic system, like the swinging of a pendulum dangling from the end of another pendulum, or the curls of cream poured into a swirling cup of tea. Theoretically, the behavior is reproducible, but in practice, microscopic changes in input generate huge changes in output, and actually reproducing the result is impossible. The apparent randomness stems from the extraordinarily complicated nature of the function. The Mandelbrot set consists of complex numbers which result in convergent behavior when employed as a starting point in the iterated function z2+c. There is nothing special about the function z2+c; other functions, like 2z2+c, or z3+c, possess equally complicated and elegant sets of convergent starting points.

Simple systems can produce surprisingly complicated—and often beautiful—results. Small changes to such systems can produce equally complicated and beautiful results, or they may cause some kind of catastrophic failure. The entire result is typically more esthetically appealing in explicit form, but the information is quite literally contained within the function and the starting point(s) upon which it acts.

I bring up beauty in order to apply the notion of pseudo-random behavior to describe my preferred metaphor for the music of J. S. Bach, my favorite composer. Bach’s work often strikes me as the musical equivalent of the Mandelbrot set, an abstract beauty generated from simple seeds. This is not entirely accidental; baroque-era composers often used a very similar seed technique to produce their music. Take a handful of promising starting notes; these define the basic theme of the music. Extend the phrase by adding the most appealing note you can find to the end, and another, and another. After a measure or two, introduce harmonic lines to your growing melody, and away you go. Rigid rules define which notes may be used next: no parallel fifths, no octaves, no repeated notes. As long as you stick to the permitted notes, you’re guaranteed of producing something acceptable.

What distinguishes Bach from his colleagues is that he seems always to choose the “right” note to use next, instead of merely choosing a permissible one. Lacking Bach’s ear, other composers picked legal notes, but not always the best ones; as a result, they wrote music that merely sounds all right. Bach wrote music that sounds right. The metaphor is an illusion, of course. Bach himself could and did produce entirely different pieces from the same starting notes, often as a form of exercise. But his sure skill makes his pieces seem like the only possible result. Even when he does not employ this technique, the result seems like he has. It’s as though all the beauty of the music lay packed within the first few notes, and he has merely unfolded it for the rest of us to hear.

It is not for the pious themes of much of his music that Bach’s work is often called “the music of God.” Rather, it is for the way his music seems to replicate the Creation, spinning vast, complicated beauty from the simplest starting point, as theologians often imagine God unfolding the universe with clockwork precision.

Posted by at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On December 9, the Washington Post published this link, revealing that members of Congress from both parties were briefed on the interrogation program to be used on prisoners suspected of terrorist involvement, and that this briefing included notice of waterboarding, which has since become emblematic of US use of torture on its prisoners. Significantly, the article claims that none of the Congresspeople leveled any official protest at the time. The general tenor of the article suggests that Congress was complicit in the executive policy, and that Democrats were complicit with the Republicans who put the program in place.

I have to point out that this is only a partial story, and seems carefully crafted to imply that the blame for US torture of its prisoners lies equally with elements of government outside the White House.

Note, for example, the way that we are informed that two of the four Congresspeople party to that first briefing actually encouraged the use of harsher techniques. The implication, as the group is described only as “bipartisan,” is that Democrats were just as bloodthirsty as Republicans on the matter. This need not be so. Four members of Congress were briefed; two suggested harsher methods. Which two? The article doesn’t say.

The article reports that waterboarding was described at the time. The implication is that attention was called to the practice, which was described in detail. Was it? The entire briefing, including a tour of the facility, lasted an hour. That’s a short time for a lot of policy to be described. Was waterboarding mentioned by name? Was it described in detail? Did the Congresspeople see it in action? The article doesn’t say.

The briefing included a “virtual tour” of the facility, meaning the CIA showed nothing it didn’t feel like showing. There was no chance to ask to see something in more detail on the initiative of those briefed. Since the article mentions no protest, the implication is that Congressional representatives actively approved of the facility in its totality. This is not necessarily the case. There was no way to see something less savory while passing between stopping points on the official tour. A picture tour cannot capture even the nature of what it does show, since temperature, smells, screams, and other non-visual data are left out, and, as human rights inspectors can tell you, what it does show can be sanitized beyond recognition. Were the Congressional representatives given an accurate picture of the facility? The article doesn’t say.

All these details, and more like them, are essential in determining just how strong a protest would be an appropriate response to the briefing.

What form of protest would even be legal is a little unclear. Congressional representatives, as Pelosi is quoted noting, were bound by secrecy oaths, forbidden to reveal what they witnessed; a public protest would have been impossible. (This observation does not appear until page 3; the Post apparently considers a legal ban on effective protest a relatively unimportant detail to the story. The political realities of the time, namely a Republican majority in both houses, is not mentioned at all.

I do not raise these objections to defend either Congress or Democrats from complicity in US interrogation programs. If they knew in detail that torture was being used, they deserve exposure and prosecution, just as surely as the bastards in the White House who crafted the program. Revealing details of the program might have violated secrecy oaths, but objecting Democrats might have tried pushing legislation at the time, along the lines of “The definition of torture in US law forbidding torture shall be taken to include waterboarding.” The effort would have amounted to no more than an ethical gesture, but that gesture should have been made.

The Post does not specify where their knowledge of the briefing came from, whether official statement or unofficial leak, so I don’t know where it came from. But it has the reek of a dirty trick. The structure of the story, and especially the very specific use of partial detail to imply equal blame, suggests very strongly to me that their data came from either the CIA itself, or from the White House, and that the data was very carefully crafted to spread the blame. Our current president, his vice president, his cabinet and staff, and senior officials in the executive branch have done some very, very ugly things over the past seven years. They have another year before someone else is in charge. Given the general disgust among voters, there is a distinct possibility that that someone else might ask some embarrassing questions, or let someone else ask them, and generally let some very nasty skeletons out of some very dark closets. The Post article feels like a form of insurance for one of these officials. My nose tells me that, through a few discreet leaks, someone is trying to reduce the chance of jail time by making sure that those who might seek to bring him to justice come under fire, too.

May the powers that be grant that we get to hear someone on the stand offer that defense. “I’m not responsible! I only issued orders to which others acquiesced!”

Posted by at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft last week. Effectively, I’d dropped out a couple months ago, but canceling the subscription is the formal break. After two and a half years of play, and moving heaven and earth to create the best dang product they could, Blizzard just ran out of sufficient variation to hold my interest. But that’s two and a half years. Ain’t nothing wrong with WoW, apart from the fact that I’ve already played it. (Maybe not every last boss, class, race, and quest, but close enough.) Much to my surprise, I miss it. Or, more precisely, I miss the sense of exploration and tactical experimentation that I once enjoyed in WoW. So I’m looking toward the horizon for what might duplicate that earlier sense of discovery.

Future is the operative word here. Though WoW gets all the attention, a half dozen MMOs with respectable critical success and a stable population still survive in its shadow, catering to certain niches. The problem with joining any of these now is the level curve.

The heart of the misnamed “computer RPG,” multiplayer or otherwise, is a treadmill of “leveling up,” borrowed from the old D&D game, played with dice and paper. By achieving various game goals, mostly killing disposable enemies and looting their corpses, you collect points of “experience.” Collect enough experience points, and you gain a new level, and with it a greater capacity to pursue game goals, again mostly killing disposable enemies and looting their corpses. The bigger and buffer you get, the bigger an enemy you can take on, yielding even larger experience rewards, so you can take on bigger enemies, and so on. This cycle is duplicated in gear: every corpse you loot may have a piece of gear, usually a weapon or piece of armor, better than your own. Equipping this new, more powerful gear allows you to take on bigger enemies, who drop even better gear, and so on. Bad guys are conveniently sorted by threat level; at level 10, you fight bad guys who present a challenge to level 10 skills, and who drop rewards suitable to level 10 muggers. You’re safe from bad guys appropriate to level 20s until you travel past the mountains into the land where level 20s hang out, and from there to the Marshes of Level 30 Peril.

This creates a strong obstacle to players who join an MMO significantly after the first rush of players at the launch. MMOs want people to play together; if they all play separately, there’s little reason to participate online, suffering lag and other technical problems, and exposed to the occasional twerp spoiling your fun. Good MMOs are designed to reward group play, usually through a better reward-to-risk or reward-to-effort ratio. But that only works for players of comparable level; teammates of grossly mismatched levels are dealing with bad guys who either butcher the lower player or offer insufficient reward to the higher one. So players who join an MMO late may find it difficult to join in the kind of group activity that makes MMOs worthwhile. They may find certain challenges ruined by hints from fellow players who have been there, done that. They may also suffer in MMOs with a strong player-versus-player component, perpetual victims of players who started earlier and hold higher levels.

That’s why I’m looking to the future, instead of current successes: MMOs are plagued by disincentives to late arrivals. The view from here is not very promising; the blockbuster mentality which has taken over the computer game industry discourages challengers to WoW, which sucks the oxygen right out of the market. But we might see something worthwhile in Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s got John Tynes behind the design, which is good; I’m a longtime fan of Tynes’s pen-and-paper RPG work. On the other hand, Sony Online Entertainment is writing the checks, which can’t help but raise fears of another meltdown like they induced in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is still in development, so the official website is a little light on detail. They’ve clearly learned an important lesson—there must be both a robust player-versus-player (PvP) experience and a robust solo (PvE) experience—and they seek to cover their bases. It looks like both styles can be played in a more cerebral ship-to-ship arena or a reflex-driven video game of individual fencing. Information on the supporting economy is considerably less concrete, probably because it hasn’t all been worked out, yet. That’s too bad, because SWG had a robust economic model, one which could support players who did nothing but craft, if that was their thing, and I’m interested in how much of that survives from the rape of SWG to the newer title. Whether each person runs his own ship, or whether ships can be crewed by multiple players is unclear. So is the question of how much of one’s ship is vulnerable to capture by pirates or enemy warships—the cargo, the guns and gear, maybe even the ship itself. Nor is it clear how, having lost a battle, one goes about recouping the loss.

So I’m forced to fill many gaps in the official press with personal speculation as to how it all will fit together. Curiously—and this is the point I’m finally getting to—given what I know about Pirates of the Burning Sea, all the gaps could sensibly be filled in with something very similar to Puzzle Pirates.

Puzzle Pirates is an MMO, too, with a small but loyal following. It differs dramatically from typical MMOs by replacing the heroic combat simulation with a variety of highly abstracted games more or less akin to Tetris. You don’t so much try to outfence that scurvy dog; you try to fill in yellow columns and blue rows of sword icons faster than he can. Add a character design that resembles yellow, blocky, perpetually-smiling Lego people, and it’s easy to mistake Puzzle Pirates for something shallow. It’s not. The economics were reasonably sophisticated, and the strategic thinking behind securing a stretch of productive territory for yourself, or more likely your guild, could get quite sophisticated. I never got into it—never even played it—because I don’t like Tetris and its relatives. But attach the background economic engine to a game more personally involving than tumbling blocks, and I could get hooked. We’ll see.

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’re all long used to cross-waving in national politics. It’s practically political suicide not to profess your profound commitment to the Lord: you galvanize the right wing against you, and engender vague alienation in the center. Ah, but which Lord, exactly? This is America, rooted in Puritan intolerance; a churchgoer is even more suspect in the eyes of the religious right if he goes to the wrong church than if he attended no church at all.

That’s the pickle Mitt Romney finds himself in. Sentiment is strong against the Republican party generally. To win the presidency, any candidate they put forward will have to win the core constituency, and win it big, to offset losses among the independent voters. And, like John Kennedy before him, Romney found it necessary to deliver a speech explaining that, while deeply religious himself, he has no intention of bringing his particular religion to the White House.

(Personally, I felt the speech oozed insincerity. Romney is no more religious than any politician, and far less than some. Unfortunately, he can’t simply cut loose with an honest statement admitting to a secular life, because of that political suicide thing. It seems to me that anyone acknowledging the existence of an all-powerful, all-wise deity would be crazy, and willfully commit evil, to put mere human law before such a deity’s commands. But religious hypocrisy is nothing new, neither in politics nor outside it.)

Such reassurances to a secular left would be entirely appropriate. Making them to the religious right is downright weird. As a group, the Mormons look pretty much identical to fundamentalist Christians. They eschew little vices like alcohol and extramarital sex and uppity women leaving the kitchen, or even talking about the possibility of such things, and employ aggressive social pressure to remove them from society. At the same time, they are willing to turn a blind eye toward big vices like war and corporate greed and neglecting the needy. One would think that quibbles like whether human souls go to an invisible heaven or to an impossibly distant planet, or whether one’s favorite angel is named Gabriel or Moroni wouldn’t need smoothing over. But they do.

To help explain the reasons for such distrust between religious sects, NPR had a fundamentalist minister on recently. He didn’t highlight and denounce some of the wackier ideas of Mormonism, which would have been easy enough, and I respect him for it. Maybe he’s simply a noble soul, although I suspect a keen awareness of public sentiment towards some of the wackier ideas of Christian fundamentalism may have played a part. Nor did he focus on some of the more cult-like qualities of the Mormon Church, which also would have been easy. Maybe he simply feels the Mormons themselves are simply doing the best they can to bring their children up in the ways of their fathers, and to spread the good word, although, again, I suspect a keen awareness of some of the more cult-like qualities of the evangelical movement may have played a part. Nor did he focus on some of the less savory acts of the Mormon church, like murdering passing settlers for their possessions and children, which also would have been easy. Perhaps he was practicing Christian virtue in forgiving sinners without condemning their ideals, although I suspect a keen awareness of Christian participation in horrors like the Crusades and Inquisition may have played a part. No, instead, he grounded his objections entirely in the doctrinal credentials of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The essential problem, he explained, was that the Mormons were revisionists. They came along a couple thousand years after the establishment of the One True Religion revealed to us through God’s mortal agent, elevated some self-appointed theologian to the status of divinity, manufactured a tale of an angelic vision endorsing this prophet, and, while not exactly dismissing the age-old religion as entirely wrong, nonetheless added an entire body of text to its holy scriptures, completely altering their meaning. Mormons weren’t bad people, but they followed an arbitrary revision of religious tradition.

I had to wonder: what on earth could this guest minister think of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and what could Jewish listeners think of him?

Posted by at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a small mishap last night, with effects out of proportion to the cause. Our kitchen garbage can filled, and I decided to double-bag the lot, partially because some of the contents were pretty old, and partially because I needed the extra space for the turkey carcass and some other odds and ends. The package contained a lot of food, some of it drippy, so a second, heavy-duty yard bag was clearly a smart idea.

Not smart enough, events proved: both bags sprang leaks, and some of the drippier contents dribbled out, creating a twisty trail of garbage juice across the kitchen floor, down the stairs, and out onto the porch. We didn’t realize the problem immediately, but eventually we traced the smell. I first scrubbed the floor with a radiation-green Mr. Clean product akin to Pine-Sol, but that proved insufficient; the odor softened, but still lingered. I had to go a second round with bleach, which took care of it. That’s all right for our tiled kitchen floor, but I’m afraid of what bleach will do to our darkly stained wood stairs—thank heavens they aren’t carpeted.

I may not have any choice. Between the lingering smells of garbage juice and the cleanser, our entryway has developed a tang that irrepressibly takes me back fifteen years, when my refrigerator went on the fritz. The problem was that I was in Eileene’s apartment at the time—she was away to visit her family, and asked me to house-sit in order to satisfy her parents’ paranoia. I lived in a less comfortable efficiency, so I was happy to stay there for the duration. Only upon returning to my own apartment did I discover the power was out. That was easily fixed; my landlord was a decent guy. From him, I learned that the whole building had shut down the day after I went to Eileene’s place, something about a broken line somewhere, and I hadn’t been there to confirm that my power had been restored when the time came.

So far, so good. Only afterwards did I notice the unpleasant smell. After a couple minutes spent sniffing around the apartment, I traced it to the fridge. The lower section was bad enough, but the freezer had a half-inch puddle of putrid meat juice. The stench as I opened the door was horrible, but not so horrible as the ordeal of trying to clean it out afterwards. It wasn’t my fridge; it came with the apartment. And, as I said, the landlord was a nice guy, so I didn’t want to saddle him with the cost of replacement.

So I scrubbed. And scrubbed. I used baking soda, Pine-Sol, bleach, vinegar, soapy water (hot and cold), everything. Nothing worked. I took suggestions from my friends. I pretty well wore out a box of scouring pads and another of sponges, which kept snagging on internal edges. My hands were raw for a week afterwards.

Smell is supposed to be the sense most closely tied to memory; the right scent can transport one more quickly and more completely to the past than any other stimulus. Perhaps so. I can certainly confirm that the first whiff I get as I enter the stairwell instantly takes me back to days of fruitless scrubbing and airing. Such a shame that the smell doesn’t whisk me away to a happier memory. Younger days, perhaps, but not a happier time, certainly not those few days. But then, what could I expect? It’s stinking garbage! If my happiest memories were associated with stinking garbage, I’d be a sad fellow indeed.

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)