January 2008 Archives

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
—George Washington

Leonard Lopate had a guest on today who described the State Department’s and the Defense Department’s treatment of its own whistle-blowers. The details were deeply disturbing: at least one had to be placed under the witness program; another very nearly found asylum in Canada, which had just (accurately) placed the US on its list of nations that practice torture. According to the guest, Rumsfeld himself “outed” a dissenter to his staff, singling him out for vindictive treatment. As something of a break, Lopate then had a novelist on, but the next story after that described a lawsuit in which NASA employees are being subjected to inappropriate and unjustified background checks, quite possibly in retaliation for recognizing the considerable evidence for global warming, against the wishes of the current administration.

These cases are fairly spectacular for their proximity to high-level executives, and for the fact that they are directed at people—high-level officers and scientists—who should be above politicization of objective fact, but they are hardly unique in our culture. Political cronyism is nothing new in US government, but for decades the Republican party has waged a massive and largely successful campaign to replace dedicated professionals with party loyalists. They have done so passively, by appointing no one but party loyalists, and aggressively, by destroying the careers of those who were not party loyalists, or simply dismissing them without cause.

Remember the federal prosecutors fired for prosecuting Republican politicians? Remember Valerie Plame’s exposure for her husband’s criticism of White House policy? Remember how Colin Powell was ejected and replaced by Condaleezza Rice, when he stopped pretending the WMDs were surely to be found in Iraq any minute? Remember how Christine Whitman was dismissed for thinking the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to protect the environment? These are big, public cases, but it’s been happening all the way down the line, too, right down to Illinois DMV employees who refused to swear a loyalty oath, and it’s been happening for twenty years or more.

I think I’m finally reaching Eileene, who has inherited a firm law-and-order mentality from her parents, convincing her that the innocent do indeed have something to fear when authorities are permitted unnecessary access to personal information. Careers are ruined, reputations smeared, incomes withheld, embarrassing or even dangerous secrets exposed when some brave soul decides to do the right thing instead of simply following orders he knows to be wrong. Ethics obviously don’t protect whistle-blowers; if those in power had reliable ethics, we wouldn’t need whistle-blowing.

Sadly, even the law cannot be counted upon. Most cases never make it to court. Evidence hidden behind a wall of silence, or a security clearance, or a presidential pardon for anyone who takes the fall, is no evidence at all, as far as the courts are concerned; witness the difficulty we see today in establishing accountability for blanket warrantless wiretaps of the nation’s phone systems, and the Supreme Court's increasing willigness to dispense with the Fourth Amendment. Of those that make it to court, most are dismissed, as the Rasul v. Myers case I reported last week. Of those that are tried and secure a conviction, we cannot be sure that the sentence will be executed; just ask Scooter Libby. If, by some miracle, justice is done to executives who intimidate their underlings into toeing a party-political line, it’s too little, too late, too rarely, to do any good for the victims. Even if the bastards fry, the intimidation techniques continue to do their work: whistle-blowers know they will be made to suffer for doing right. We haven’t seen anything else since Nixon.

These are gross abuses of authority, and deeply harmful to our country. Loyalty oaths were a blight on our country in the Red Scare, and they are a blight today. When the many, many government employees we rely on are held accountable to the politics of the ruling party, and the party aggressively fights to make them unaccountable to anything else, government has ceased to be a dangerous servant and has instead become a fearful master.

I learned this morning of John Edwards’ expected departure from the presidential race this afternoon. I’m sorry to see him go; he was my favorite of all the significant contenders. He was the most pugnacious where it counted—overthrowing the gross abuses of power the neocons have visited upon the nation for fifteen years or more.

To some extent, he was a victim of his own strategy, failing to peddle his message aggressively enough to draw in a large war chest for the campaign trail. But he was even more victim to the self-fulfilling nature of media attention. Edwards suffered a virtual media blackout, ignored by news media who saw more exciting, more controversial stories in a woman, a black man, a former first lady, the new kid with a real pitching arm. What can you do against post-Iowa headlines that read “Obama Wins It; Hillary Comes In Third”?

I am sorry, too, to see Edwards go just now. It’s been clear (to me, at least) for some time that he could not win the nomination, not even sailing up the middle of a potential bloodletting between Clinton and Obama. Nonetheless, pulling in ten to twenty percent of the vote, he forced the discussion farther toward badly needed populist initiatives, and could have continued to pull it in that direction. Even in defeat, he could have done much more good in defining the national discourse by fighting on. He could at least have stuck it out another week, past Super Tuesday.

I think I am most sorry to see him go without endorsing someone else. Edwards has the power to swing a close contest only for a very limited time before the news media forget his existence altogether. And if he must go now, then the few days before Super Tuesday is the most powerful moment to deliver an endorsement, while all those delegates remain undeclared.

I have a definite preference for his choice of endorsement. Like Edwards, Clinton has proven pugnacious, as well, but only in her willingness to sabotage other Democratic contenders. When it came to putting up a fight against Bush and company, or Gingrich and Delay before them, she failed miserably. Obama is more of an unknown; with so little time in the Senate, there’s precious little record by which to separate his actual intentions from appealing but empty rhetoric. Still, hope springs eternal, and we may hope he will show a backbone where Clinton has not, and demonstrate a better understanding of who his enemies are. Obama also shows more respect for the rules than Clinton, as she attempts to get her Michigan and Florida votes counted, ex post facto. More importantly, this country needs a Democratic landslide victory in 2008 if it is to reverse the terrible damage of the past decade; Obama may be able to lead such a landslide victory, but Clinton, despised by many Democrats as well as Republicans, decidedly does not. Above all, I believe Obama can beat any of the likely Republicans, while Clinton could well lose to McCain, or even Romney or Huckabee.

If Edwards must go now, therefore, I wish he would endorse Obama, as his tone in the debates suggests he would, if forced to choose, and do it quickly. But whoever he might choose to endorse, now is the time to do it, while his endorsement can still earn him some major political favors, before Super Tuesday establishes a clear front runner without him. Those favors could translate into planks in the national platform, or the Attorney General’s office, or even, fates willing, a seat on the Supreme Court. If anything can end a principled but unsuccessful campaign on a high note, it would be this.

Farewell, John. You will be missed.

But it’s not all bad news today. Rudy Giuliani, he of the barefaced lies and the police state mentality and the ceaseless, ceaseless nostalgia for 9/11, has also taken a loss in Florida as his cue to bow out, showing more grace in doing so than I ever saw from him in his entire political career. I won’t say he should be fade from memory; supposedly dead political careers have a way of resurrecting themselves in appointive posts and lobbying firms, and we would do well to remember Giuliani and remain watchful. Rather, let us hope he fades from reality, taking with him his record of race politics, forcing the emergency services into offices in the WTC, threatening protestors with snipers, awarding his own businesses contracts, and using all the powers of his office to harass his political enemies, and even those he considered insufficient friends.

New York learned long ago that this was a greedy, egotistical, vindictive, and downright evil man. Propelled onto the national stage, he managed to alienate voters wherever he went. The more they saw of Giuliani, the less they liked him, and with good reason. Some people bring smiles wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

Get out, Rudy. Try not to ooze anything on the carpet as you leave.

Eileene called my attention to a web page listing someone’s 50 favorite atheist bumper sticker/t-shirt aphorisms. Being a know-it-all atheist myself, I enjoyed the list. Some were at least passably clever, others passably funny, and a healthy, visible expression of atheism is good for a society with an ugly streak of religious zealotry.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t put any of them on my car.

My scruples here insist that almost none were healthy expressions of atheism. Oh, a couple might be all right, taken in isolation, but some of the bumper stickers were downright mean-spirited, taking their pot-shots at theists instead of at theism itself, and their callousness taints my perception of the whole list.

“WWJD—We Won. Jesus Died.”
“No God. No mullets.”
“Too stupid to understand science? Try religion.”
“Jesus saves…you from thinking for yourself.”
“Honk if your religious beliefs make you an asshole.”
“God doesn’t exist. So, I guess nobody loves you.”

Slapping that kind of stuff on the back of your car, and into the public forum, won’t do atheists or the cause of atheistic recognition in society any good. The slogans are angry and nasty, and make atheists themselves look angry and nasty, too, easy for devoted theists, or even secular church-goers to dismiss as worthy of neither attention nor respect. Yes, yes, no single atheist speaks for the lot, certainly not through a one-liner, but the general population demonstrates dubious forensic discipline, and theists perhaps still less. Why encourage the widespread sentiment that atheists are unpleasant, or feed into the belief that atheism, lacking God as a moral compass, makes people unpleasant?

More disappointing, the meaner slogans on the list are guilty of precisely the same tribalistic impulse that makes theistic politics so ugly, and fuels atheists’ indignation: they conflate theism, luddites, stupidity, child molestation, torture, poor fashion sense, and other shortcomings together in one ugly, ad hominem package. Certainly, religion has been used as justification for some very ugly behavior; it might even be said to have caused some ugly behavior, though just which unseemly acts religion caused and which ones merely used religion as a convenient excuse is a matter open to question. That doesn’t justifying attacking theism on the grounds that some believers are creeps.

“They’re all the same,” is the obvious sentiment. “Because some theists are child molesters, child molestation is a product of theism, and anyone who approves of one approves of the other.” This makes no more sense than my friend’s sentiment, about which I complained so bitterly last week, that only Jews can be humanists, nor any more sense than the bible-thumper’s equation of evolutionary theory, homosexuality, witchcraft, terrorism, and the feminist movement. Taken as a whole, the 50-slogan list aims less to embrace atheism than to draw battle lines, us against them, no middle ground, and no conduct off limits, as long as you support the guys in your camp and rubbish the others.

Theism stands on ridiculously flimsy evidence, or even no evidence at all for those who really get into the notion of faith. Insofar as one can disprove a hypothetical negative, atheism enjoys the authority of theoretical and empirical proof. Surely the silliness of a belief in an omnipotent invisible creator, true and righteous judge of all humanity, can be exposed without resorting to insulting the theists themselves. Even better targets, of course, are the bigotry and repressive impulses theists all too often embrace. These, too, are better attacked directly, without confusing the issue by bringing God into the mess. One of my favorite bumper stickers directly attacks the religious right’s hypocrisy while remaining true, polite, and spot on target: “Hatred is not a family value.”

It’s not an atheistic value, either, for that matter. If anything, atheists should be nicer than anyone else; we know there’s no father figure to save us from ourselves, so it’s all up to us.

Among RPG enthusiasts, the most abhorred form of player misbehavior is munchkinism, immortalized in lists like this. (GMs who feeds their egos by destroying his hapless players’ characters are worse while they last, but happily they don’t last long.)

Unfortunately, the term “munchkin” is a fuzzy one. Like “fascism,” it has been corrupted through overuse, coming very nearly to mean “any behavior the speaker doesn’t like,” with a half dozen or so symptomatic behaviors mistakenly equated with the real thing. Arguments break out over who is and is not a munchkin; it’s entirely possible for two different players, or groups of players, to look down upon one another as munchkins.

That’s something of a shame, because players can benefit from discussions of good and bad play styles. This does not mean that there is only one true, right, “good” way to play; anyone group that is having fun is playing well. Still, it’s always possible to get better, and sometimes a bad player—possibly a munchkin—can ruin everyone else’s fun. So talking about munchkinism can be useful. In the interest of healthier discussion, I’d like to put forth a working definition, along with some other behaviors related to, and often confused with, munchkinism:

RPGs are a story-telling medium. A munchkin is a player who pursues self-glorification to the detriment, or even to the complete destruction, of a story told via an RPG.

Munchkinism usually takes the form of an immature insistence on winning, easily and often. “Winning” is measured in some form of accumulated “points.” These points may take many forms. Gold pieces. Experience levels. Ever deadlier weapons. Honor points. Kills. But whatever form they take, a munchkin loses sight of the fact that these points are abstractions, a rough guide to how well he’s done, and begins to mistake the points themselves as the goal. Everything, including murder, betrayal, and generally psychopathic behavior by the character, and even outright cheating on the part of the player himself, are okay as long as he gets points for it.

This attitude is closely linked to, but still distinct form, some other game phenomena.

A power gamer is not the same as a munchkin. A power gamer prefers the kind of epic stories enshrined in myth and Hollywood blockbusters, and characters with abilities vastly beyond those of ordinary people: superheroes, D&D characters past level 20 or so, and anything ever published by White Wolf. As long as the power gamer expects, and even desires, to square off against equally powerful antagonists, with a reasonable danger of getting beaten, he’s just telling stories of epic heroism. If the power gamer just wants all that power so he can lord it over helpless mortals, he’s probably a munchkin.

A combat-obsessed player is not the same as a munchkin. Some players come home from a hard day at the office, or some other aggravating issue, and just want the vicarious release of killing things. Others aren’t really into RPGs in the first place, treating them as mutant wargames, and their own characters as fungible units. Such players may produce dull narratives, but as long as they accept death and/or losing gracefully, they can’t be considered munchkins. Munchkins do, however, tend to love combat, because it’s an easy way to score victories, certainly easier than negotiating with NPCs. (GMs who indulge this style of munchkinism find it easier to portray NPCs with single-minded bloodthirstiness, too.) In the munchkin’s mind, he never truly loses as long as he gets to kill anyone who makes him look bad. Besides, in many systems, killing things is the most efficient way to rack up points.

A rules lawyer is not the same as a munchkin. A rules lawyer treats the rules as more important than the story, arguing for the grossly implausible because “that’s what the rules say.” Swinging a seven-foot halberd in each hand, automatically successful dodges, carrying obscenely bulky gear because the rules only address weight—these are the province of the rules lawyer. Sometimes, a rules lawyer just enjoys an argument, which is another problem at the gaming table. Other times, he just wants to be sure everyone is following the same rules, and that he isn’t being “punished” for decisions he’s made in expectation of certain rules applying. A decent rules lawyer will argue just as hard against his interests if that’s what the rules say, instead of conveniently ignoring such cases. But yeah, most rules lawyers are munchkins, and vice versa, seeking to overrule both common sense and GM prerogative to their own advantage.

A minimaxer is not the same as a munchkin. Minimaxing is a process of getting maximum return for minimum expense within fixed limiting conditions—in an RPG context, this usually means designing a character within the limits of the rules for maximum effectiveness, through a judicious choice of mutually reinforcing skills or of disadvantages (which grant character points that can be spent on desirable abilities). On a small scale, minimaxing is not only reasonable, but healthy; you do it every time you budget your groceries. It’s only reasonable that the protagonists of an RPG story would try to achieve their heroic deeds with a minimum of risk or a maximum chance of getting rich, famous, and beloved. A player who takes things to extremes, however, turns his character into a rule-twisting monstrosity, and a character who takes things to extremes becomes a cold mercenary, undercutting the heroic tone that many RPGs strive for. Unhealthy minimaxing is often coupled to rules lawyering and/or combat-obsessed play: if your minimaxer takes the “missing hand” disad per finger because it’s worth more points, or if he lives in a cardboard box and eats dumpster remnants in order to save the character points for a marksman skill of 99%, he’s probably a munchkin.

Finally, a child or an adolescent is not the same as a munchkin, although that is the origin of the word—adult players, encountering children who played selfishly and badly, coined the term in reference to their height. Believe me: immature play is shockingly common among adults. Conversely, some kids catch on to the idea of team play and sharing the metaphorical “camera time” right off the bat, especially if they start their experience surrounded by good players. Nevertheless, a disproportionate number of munchkins are adolescent twerps. Happily, most of them grow out of it.

Happily, too, the RPG community can grow out of it, too. Munchkinism has been part of RPGs since the dawn of the hobby—the original Dungeons & Dragons was almost purely a munchkin exercise: characters defined by how they killed things, success measured in experience points, complex yet poorly tested rules to abuse, a presumption of a basically hostile relationship between player and GM, and between player and player, for that matter, if the payoff was big enough. Munchkinism will remain with us as long as the hobby survives. But the strong trend, with a bit of backsliding here and there, has been to move RPGs from point-collecting tactical exercise to narrative. The grinding collection of points moved to the computer game market, where computers (and consoles) can handle the job for people who enjoy that kind of game. And the most recent leaders of the console games, in turn, have begun seeking to replace grind with narrative, too: Mass Effect, Half-Life 2, Halo3, and even Portal.

Onward!

I found a webpage today with a list of the most offensive board games ever. The list is brief, and rather subjective. Most of the games just treat sensitive subjects, mostly in an insensitive way, although I’d have to agree that “Juden Raus”—a Nazi-era board game depicting the eviction of Jews—belongs at the top of the list.

Disgusting to a gamer, if not exactly offensive, the list is half composed of tasteless adaptations of Monopoly. Monopoly is a fine game, especially in light of game design philosophy in its era, but its tired old imitations have been done to death. The shelves are littered with board games designed as a marketing ploy, for cities, sports teams, or whatever. Littered, too, with remakes that merely aim at becoming unwanted gifts for, replacing the familiar names of Boardwalk and Baltic Ave. with dog breeds, wines, whatever hobbies can be expected to make a fast buck. These cheap little turds of game design are turned out by people who don’t care a tinker’s damn about games; if they knew anything about games, they’d know that games other than monopoly and chess exist, and would present some actual selection now and then. If they understood games, they’d try designing their own, with rules to reflect the actual subject. If they liked games, they wouldn’t insult us with these lame retreads.

That’s why Frischfleisch (German for “fresh meat”) caught my eye. It stands apart from the other titles on the list, in that it might actually be a decent game. The page doesn’t show the game itself, just the box, but explains that the basic theme is one of cannibalism: people are stranded on a desert island, and can eat a variety of foods to remain alive until rescue arrives. But desert islands being notably devoid of supermarkets, sometimes the coconuts and mahi mahi run short, and the castaways have to turn to eating one another. (Just how the vital mechanic by which you determine which player’s tokens get eaten doesn’t make the game description.) Gruesome, yes, but it could also make a perfectly decent game, in the tradition of equally morbid titles like Kill Doctor Lucky or Zombies!, usually small titles, cheaply produced and worth a silly evening’s entertainment, quickly forgotten. The multiple award winner Puerto Rico includes the importation of slaves to work the plantations, although it decorously renames them “colonists.” But nobody worries about the slave economy; as long as the mechanics work, as long as the play is rich, the game can be a good one.

On January 11, in Rasul v. Myers (06-5209), a federal appeals court ruled against four British citizens bringing suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and various military officers. The suit alleges systematic torture and violation of the plaintiffs’ religious rights during two years’ detention at Guantanamo Bay after their apprehension in Afghanistan.

All charges but one were rejected by a lower court, on the grounds that the detainees’ mistreatment was “foreseeable,” that such torture lay within the scope of then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s certification of interrogation techniques, and is therefore held to be excusable. Not content to uphold these rulings, the appellate court also overturned the one charge admitted by the lower court: that the detainees’ religious rights had been abused in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the government from “substantially burdening a person’s religion.”

If true, the plaintiffs’ accusations of forced shaving of their beards, banning or interrupting their prayers, denying them copies of the Quran, and throwing a copy of the Quran in a toilet bucket qualify as substantially burdening their religion. In order to rule that the RFRA does not apply, the appellate court turned to extreme measures to dismiss this last charge, ruling that “Because the plaintiffs are aliens and were located outside sovereign United States territory at the time their alleged RFRA claim arose, they do not fall within the definition of ‘person.’”

The RFRA (42 U.S.C. 2000bb) makes no exclusion for aliens, nor for persons located outside US territory. (The Supreme Court ruling in Rasul v. Bush holds that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to due process, regardless.) Nor does the RFRA even define “person,” despite taking the time for finicky definitions of several other terms. The court’s ruling that the plaintiffs are not people comes not from the law itself, nor even from a twisted reading of the law, but directly from the justices themselves.

In the bad old days of slavery, when United States law recognized the treatment of human beings as property, the Constitution nevertheless labeled such human beings as “persons”: Article 1, section 2 infamously counts “three fifths of all other persons” for purposes of allocating congressional seats, and Article 1, section 9 addresses the levying of taxes on the “importation of such persons.” Even slaves were persons under US law.

Now two justices appointed by former president George H. W. Bush and one appointed by current president George W. Bush seek to free the current administration from accountability for its actions by declaring a class of humans somehow not to be “people.” To declare a human being, for any reason, not to be a legal person is unconscionable. Dehumanizing a person is a precursor to inflicting inhuman treatment upon him. To deny him legal status afterwards is to sanction and perpetuate that treatment. These are the acts of a government that considers itself above the law, or indeed above human decency.

Bad day today. I screwed up, got justifiably bawled out, and I continue to beat myself up over it long after Eileene has let the matter rest. I don’t really want to talk about it.

But that places me in something of a dilemma, because I don’t seem able to think about anything else. The daily entry has to go out, and the only subject on my mind is one I’m embarrassed to share, and which is unhealthy to fixate on, anyway. What to do?

The writers’ code, which is nebulously defined because I just made it up, using some beliefs widespread among writers, holds that everything should be put down on paper. Web page. Whatever. Everything is grist for the mill, and the writing takes priority over everything else, except perhaps urgent matters of literal life-and-death, and even those are debatable. That means the writing takes priority over ego, and over correcting neuroses. The writers’ code holds that there are no off-limit topics, and the stronger you feel about one, the more firmly that demonstrates something worthy of being read.

Maybe. That’s probably true of fiction in some second- or third-hand fashion, and the writers’ code draws pretty heavily on advice for writing fiction, because most of the advice is geared toward novelist wannabes. (Maybe non-fiction writers have less trouble getting started. I dunno.) Not everything is worth reading, but anything could be taken as inspiration for something worthwhile.

Even if true in some second- or third-hand fashion, however, sometimes “grist for the mill” takes some heavy grinding before becoming useful. This particular bad day isn’t there yet. If nothing else, I suppose, one can write about not writing. Like a stairmaster, it gets old fast, but even that can help keep people in shape for tomorrow, when something better comes along.

Tomorrow is always where the best ideas live, anyway.

Our president’s handlers have sent him off on a grand tour of the Middle East, killing two birds with one stone.

The nominal focus of the trip, launching a new round of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, is pure fantasy. No one, except perhaps Bush himself, have any illusions about his chances of improving the situation. If he shoots his mouth off, he might even hurt the screw it up further. (Hard to imagine it getting any worse, yes, but we are talking about Dubya.) The fundamental issue, that two people want to inhabit the same land and won’t share—has confounded sharper minds than George’s for decades, even when those minds were bent mightily and for long periods towards producing a peace. Bush publicly wrote off Israeli-Palestinian relations early in his presidency as a waste of his time, and, until now, never brought the subject up again. He turns to it now because, after seven years of failure on every front and approval numbers somewhat lower than those of bubonic plague, he has nowhere else to turn to leave something resembling a positive legacy.

But he has been a good boy, and provided a useful rallying point for the neoconservatives, so he is being indulged, as indeed he has been indulged his whole life. He has read the speeches handed to him, ever more stiffly and less frequently as it became apparent that even reading prepared speeches strained his limited facilities, but he has read them. He has protected his own, pardoning Libby for corrupting the presidential office. He has stuffed the cabinet and the military and the justice department and even the Supreme Court with those who could be trusted to approve authoritarianism and turn a blind eye to corruption, no matter what. He has jettisoned moderate voices and dissenting opinions, ensuring that no voice but the neoconservative was heard. He never quailed at blatant lies when they could be made to serve ugly agenda, never doubted that America does not employ torture, even when the photos hit the front page, never troubled himself over an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution when a friend thought it might be convenient to trammel it now and again. George has been a good boy, and so he will get his sweetie.

If he wants to spend his last year playing at peacemaker, as he has spent the rest of his presidency at playing general, so be it. If, bereft of any other scrap of a positive legacy, he wants to roll the dice on the long, long odds against peace in the West Bank, so be it. If Tel Aviv must go without power for an evening so that he may better see an Israeli sunset, so be it. George has been a good boy, and he will be denied nothing.

And yet…is the trip entirely for the benefit of our president’s boundless ego? I can’t believe so.

We are reaching the end of twenty-eight years of rising power for authoritarians and robber barons, twenty-eight years of emptying the nation’s treasury and mailing it off to the wealthy, twenty-eight years of abridging, curtailing, and outright denying Constitutional law, twenty-eight years of removing accountability from elected office, Bill Clinton’s presidency notwithstanding. Twenty-eight years of corruption has produced some ugly effects; long-term costs are coming due, and the peasants are at last beginning to sense, however dimly, that things are not going well for them. They are angry, and change is in the wind. Bush has overseen the most audacious grab for power since the Sedition acts of 1793; the bastards have taken they could have dreamed. Now it’s time to dig in and prevent anyone from taking it back.

As a lame duck, Bush is now merely a reminder—indeed, the crowning glory—of a generation of pride and corruption. Allowing him to remain in the public spotlight can do nothing but hurt the prospects of his successor to hold the line against public sentiment. Best to shunt him off the national stage, far from the election cameras, and far, far from the GOP campaigns. Somewhere so screwed up that he can do no more harm, which admittedly is awfully hard to find. You’d practically need somewhere that’s been embroiled in war as long as living memory.

Such as…

Personal emotional responses to Hillary Clinton constitute a debate that continues to simmer on an internet politics forum to which I subscribe. The battle lines show a sharp gender division. Men in the forum may or may not like Clinton personally, and may or may not like her politics; many can distinguish between the two issues. Women in the forum are universally behind her, feel she is treated unfairly by the media, and can’t understand why anyone might dislike her.

Even setting aside the right-wing attack dogs, news media often treat Clinton unfairly. For example, she’s often caught between the rock of a “hard-assed bitch” label and the hard place of a “typical emotional woman” label, or charged—by the same people who embraced Bush the lesser!—as undeserving of office, winning one only through family influence. That doesn’t mean every obstacle she finds in media coverage is unfair. Asking Clinton tough questions, like how she can justify voting for the Patriot Act, is not a sexist attack; it’s healthy political discourse, and an attempt at public accountability.

The likeability question is far more slippery. The women participating in this particular forum, unable to understand why someone may not like her personally, leap to the conclusion that the distaste must be unjustified. In the interests of making a negative emotional response to Clinton more plausible, I offer my own emotional response to a candidate poll.

On Dec 26, the Rockford Register Star printed an AP poll of the candidates: what food do you hate? This is a complete and utter “fluff” question, entirely without political merit. I use it precisely because it is fluff, because no sane person would base their vote on a question of what food a candidate dislikes, or what the candidate claims to dislike, and so remove my political prejudices from the analysis.

In brief, the answers were:

Clinton: none, really.
Edwards: mushrooms.
Richardson: mushrooms.
Obama: beets.
Giuliani: liver.
Huckabee: carrots.
Romney: eggplant.

Clinton’s response in full reads: “I like nearly everything. I don’t like, you know, things that are still alive.”

My instantaneous reaction was: what a fake. Even to an utterly meaningless question, the answer seems crafted for political effect. In that instant, I read it as “I don’t want to piss off the mushroom, beet, and eggplant growers, or the sushi enthusiasts, or anything immigrant families love, or accidentally mention an official state vegetable. What do you like? Yes, I like that, too. Oh, and I’m PETA-friendly.”

This gut reaction passed, and reason returned quickly to the fore. Clinton was surely not thinking the words I just put into her mouth, and her claim not to like eating things that are still alive is surely true. Still, reason could only excuse her non-answer only so far. Everyone has foods they dislike. My wife eats damned near everything, from fermented fish paste to the cartilaginous ends of chicken bones to the plastic strips you’re supposed to peel off of sliced bologna, and even she has a food she will not eat and cannot bring herself to like (celery). Instead of just sharing with a curious public a bit of her personality, she reflexively replied in a way designed to agree with everyone. A lifetime of politics does that to people, training them to give a safe answer before an honest one. But come on. Playing safe about yucky vegetables?

That answer wasn’t even the smart one: Bush the elder scored a few points with an unsympathetic public when he disparaged broccoli; it made him seem more human, more like someone we could all relate to. But Clinton couldn’t help herself. It took the exhaustion of a grueling Iowa primary to break down that shell enough for Clinton to show some humanity, and even then, the shell was right back up seconds later. True story: Clinton’s instantaneous lapse of composure won support among voters generally for exposing a human side, but the woman who triggered the little jag went on to vote for Obama; she saw more of the exchange, and was put off by seeing Clinton return to a crafted public mask to consider the catch in Clinton’s voice genuine.

Multiply that insignificant moment by hundreds of brief, individually meaningless episodes: interviews, stump speeches, non-binding congressional resolutions, debate quips, responses to fluff questions. Collectively, moments like that—and Clinton is pretty consistent in her noncommittal behavior—create a strong perception of artificiality. The nature of the artificiality of this particular case feeds, rightly or wrongly, into an emotional sense that Democrats work so hard at including everyone that they can’t or won’t get anything done, and that they place each demographic constituency’s feelings ahead of objective truth. Writ large, it reflects both Clintons’ style of government by opinion poll, which has produced some disastrous results, including voting for war in Iraq and approving the Patriot Act, according to whichever ways the political winds were blowing at the time, instead of moral imperatives.

Before I’m accused of overstating the case, let me explicitly recognize that a tiny bit of waffling on a fluff question is no proof of unfitness for the presidency, nor even that a candidate is dislikeable. Nobody should judge Clinton by her claim, quite possibly true, to eat nearly everything. I don’t want to proceed from a fluff poll to any sweeping statements; I merely call it up as concrete example, representative of a consistent pattern of a palpably artificial personality. All successful politicians need to craft such a personality to some degree, and Clinton is no exception. But she lacks a talent for making that artificial personality feel genuine. Many people pick up on that, and dislike her for it. It has nothing to do with sexism; Mitt Romney gives off the same creepy “fake” vibe, and suffers even more for it in the polls.

Male or female, Democrat or Republican, politicians have a reputation for agreeing with everyone, but failing to serve their constituents once in office. Clinton’s voting record justifies such a reputation in her case. But for those who want to set aside her actual career and embrace her for emotional reasons, I think it’s important to recognize that Clinton’s emotional appeal is not universal, even among fair-minded voters, nor is there any reason to think it should be.

I received not one, but two light books on philosophy this Christmas. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar… seeks to teach the rudiments of philosophy through borscht-belt jokes. “Why is an elephant large, grey, and wrinkled? Because if it were small, white, and round, it would be an aspirin.”—a rather silly expression of essentialism. The Pig that Wants to be Eaten tries to do the same with old chestnuts: is it moral to eat a pig that has been bred to enjoy being slaughtered and eaten? When you wake up, how do you know you aren’t just dreaming you’ve woken up?

My wife and my sister-in-law’s fiancée bought them, and I’m pretty sure they did so independently. I’m not really sure why, except that I’m “the smart one” in the family—not actually the smartest, mind you, but smart, and definitely the most cerebral. And philosophy is for smart people, right?

Well, no, not really. The more I know about philosophy, the more certain I become that 95% of it—as measured by subject—is pretty easy, straightforward stuff. As the books above show, the basic concepts are simple enough that anyone can grasp them. If anyone can manage the basic rules of reasoning, like how to form a syllogism, they can work out reasonable answers, too.

Take this quick home test. All cats are mammals. Socrates is a cat. Therefore…?

All cats are mammals. Socrates is a mammal. Therefore…?

If you answered “Socrates is a mammal” for the first question, and “Therefore nothing” for the second, congratulations! You are now prepared to master 95% of what makes philosophy worthwhile. Philosophy has a reputation for being the province of brainiacs because 95% of it—as measured by volume of print—is highly abstruse navel-gazing, a painstaking attempt to prove the blindingly obvious through volumes of finicky definition.

That doesn’t mean that philosophy isn’t worth studying. Not at all! If everyone mastered some basic philosophy, they’d be able to recognize a lot of the sloppy thinking we’re exposed to on a daily basis: advertisers who argue that you should buy a CrudCo widget because lots of other people bought CrudCo widgets, religious hucksters who argue that you can earn a place in a nebulous heaven after you die if only you send the televangelist some very real money here and now, politicians who argue that criticizing the president is tantamount to treason. The ability to distinguish truth from lie, or from groundless assertion, is a vital skill in a world filled with lies and groundless assertions, in big ways and in little ones. And anyone can handle most of it, if only they try, with an honest willingness to follow the questions philosophy raises wherever they lead, whether or not the answers are palatable.

I may have made a boo-boo.

We’re a few days into the Pirates of the Burning Seas game. Upon creating your first character, you must choose from four factions: British, French, Spanish, or the unaligned pirates. Strangely, although you may create more than one character, and they may follow different professions, they must all belong to the same faction. So your first character is a heavy commitment. You can scrap all characters’ collective progress and start from scratch at any time, but that decision gets ever costlier as time passes.

The three national factions have nothing to choose between them in any technical sense. On a contrarian impulse, I went with the French. Here’s why:

World of Warcraft has been my only MMO experience to date. WoW has only two factions, the Alliance and the Horde. You can play any of five (once four) races from either side, and you can play characters on both sides of the fence if you like, and some do, but most players find themselves gravitating to one or two characters in a single faction. The Alliance is considerably more popular than the Horde, despite little material difference between the two.

The big difference is a reflexive, and largely unjustified, sense that the races of the Alliance are the “good guys,” while Hordies are the “bad guys.” To some degree, this reflects a background stemming from the original Warcraft game, in which orcs were the aggressors (albeit unwillingly) and humans the more-or-less noble defenders. But mostly, it’s a matter of looks: Alliance races are largely attractive, or at least cute, while the bulk of the Horde looks monstrous.

The beauty gap has a couple ramifications. One is that casual players, the ones who just play one or two nights a week, tend to favor the Alliance, swelling their ranks. More surprisingly, the kind of immature, power-hungry twit, often in early adolescence, who plagues online play also tends to favor the Alliance, although the particularly evil-looking undead on the Horde side attracts its share, too. Twerps pollute both sides of the game, but the twerp index is much higher on the Alliance side.

By contrast, the Horde tends to attract the serious gamer, the ones who like the challenge of being outnumbered and/or relish the sense of distinguishing themselves from the crowd. The fractionally higher niceness quotient breeds fractionally more cooperative behavior, a reputation which is mildly self-reinforcing.

The difference really made itself felt once PvP battlegrounds opened up, and the battlegrounds permitted fixed and equal teams. The numerous Alliance players found themselves competing for the opportunity to participate, while the outnumbered Horde players never had to wait for an opening to the battlegrounds. The Horde, therefore, got a lot more practice in the early days, and continued to benefit from greater exposure to the same teammates, and a chance to get used to other Hordies’ tactics.

The overall impact of this difference in players and experience gave the Horde a reputation for being a close-knit cadre of skilled players, while the Alliance got a reputation as losers. This was not a rigid rule by any means! The Horde had twerps, too, though they did less damage to their own side. The Alliance had dedicated players, but these found themselves more dispersed and less able to hook up into their own disciplined cadre.

Although I dabbled with several low-level characters to decide what I most enjoyed, I eventually settled into a gnomish mage, which put me on the Alliance side. That was fine. I was a casual player myself, and never expected to belong to an elite cadre in any case, but I did vaguely envy the grass on the other side of the fence.

As I said, WoW has been my only MMO experience to date, so I naturally imagined PotBS might be something like it. I correctly reasoned that the Brits would be the most popular faction, fuelled by the historical success of Britain, their romantic attitude toward piracy, and a US predisposition to Britain. Likewise, I correctly predicted a low French turnout. So—why not?—I went French, hoping to reproduce the Horde’s greater cohesion, and I dragged my friends, equally indifferent to nationality, along with me.

That may have been a mistake.

WoW is a very static game; the quests and territory remain in place in perpetuity. PotBS, by contrast, is meant to be fluid, and far more responsive to broad movements of PvP play. After all, if you want pirates, you need something for the pirates to prey upon. That, in turn, means you need to provide reasons for players to ship goods from point A to point B. A lot. And PotBS is designed to reward players for organized pressure on the ports which produce all those goods. At the beginning of the game, the Caribbean world is divided roughly in thirds between Britain, Spain, and France, with a very few pirate ports tossed into the mix. Extended military pressure can change ports from one nation’s control to another, with economic benefits for the ruling power in the form of lower taxes on goods bought or booty sold in a friendly port.

In short, WoW protected the outnumbered Horde from the outsized Alliance; PotBS does no such thing for its disadvantaged nations. In short order, the numerous Limeys will begin seizing French ports, squeezing us into a smaller and smaller base of natural resources. This could suck.

Pirates of the Burning Seas, a pirate-themed MMO, is open for business, and swashbuckler wannabes are making their awkward way through the tutorial missions on their various Caribbean isles. At the moment, it’s a semi-private party: only players who pre-ordered their copies are allowed on, enjoying a two-week grace period (or head start, if you prefer) as an incentive to pre-order. Technically, the game opened yesterday, but the download times were quite long—overnight for us—so traffic is just beginning to pick up today.

For most players, the race is on to start working that treadmill of completing missions, earning new character abilities, collecting ever-better gear, taking full advantage of their head start over the general mass of players. Right now, they’re sailing small and flimsy ships, and enjoy no tactical edges; their game will improve as they get more stuff, and their power to conquer the environment—or lay the beat-down on rival players—increases.

To a different mindset, however, this is a golden time.

The game’s official opening also marks the effective end of the non-disclosure agreements that surround beta-testing, and it is now possible to get a look at the guts of the game. Already, wikis are sprouting up with game statistics: ship data, skills, crafting and production values. Shortly, we’ll see discussions about how to optimize performance: skill suites and tactics. Months of idle speculation about what the game might be like have been replaced with fairly substantial advice from beta testers about which type of character to create in order to pursue one’s preferred gaming style. Designer notes have progressed from vague statements of design goals (“We wanted to create a game with interesting things to do for both sailors and tavern brawlers.”) to hard data from which we can determine what the design really does address.

This is the figuring-out stage, the time when nobody really knows what’s going on or what ideas are going to work. The designers, who put the thing together, and the beta testers, who tried out the rough drafts, have a clue, but they don’t really know. The game will inevitably change with an influx of players, partly because volume alone will create a very different structure on which the game economy, and from that the game dynamics, will grow; partly because the average quality of player will shift rapidly from die-hard fan and genre fiend to casual gamer and anachronistic yarbo. Combat abilities that nobody noticed before will suddenly prove invincible in combinations that nobody ever considered before, simply because there weren’t enough players to consider them all. Last-minute changes will produced unexpected effects. And, best of all, most of the players around don’t even have a beta tester’s experience.

For those who stand on the frontier of game launch, this is a moment of promise, when clever players can outdo those who have simply logged more hours or, worse, equipped themselves with undeserved gear bought through sleazy “gold farming” companies. This is a time where every player makes his own decisions, instead of reading some online hint book written by someone who did it all first, when players willing to read hint books have no advantage over those with the self-discipline to try it themselves, when it’s possible to figure out a problem before some twerp shouts the answer across an open chat channel.

In time, satisfaction with mastering the game will replace anticipation of mastering it. The camaraderie of fighting besides brothers-in-arms will replace a sense of being master of one’s own destiny. These are rewarding, too, and worth looking forward to. But for now, let me savor the promise of a new game, and imagining I can make my mark before being overwhelmed by twelve-year-olds with nothing better to do.

Chatting around the game table last night, Terry Pratchett came up in conversation, specifically a line from his book Thud!. In it, a dwarf speaks of dwarfish gods, and contrasts dwarfish customs with those of humans, saying (more or less): “We dwarfs have a god who created us and commanded us to think, but He did not command us to think about Him.” Dave quoted it as best he could from memory, and I doubt I quoted Dave perfectly, but the line is substantially correct. On hearing this sentiment, Jen perked up and announced that whoever wrote that must be Jewish.

Greg, a recently confirmed Unitarian minister, objected immediately, and so did I.

Greg objected that freedom from a commandment to think about a creator God was not a particularly Jewish notion, and he has a point. No doubt one can find one or even a hundred passages of Judaic writings suggesting to a greater or lesser degree that God does not command people—or rather, his chosen people—to think about Him, but surely some hugely significant Judaic writings suggest He does. The Ten Commandments, for example, hold that we should spend one day in seven in religious observance. That’s a lot of time God calls upon us to think about Him. And if the fundamental principle of Judaism is to love God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbor as one’s self, then the fundamental principle of Judaism involves thinking about God. A lot.

But the discussion was tabled at that point, partly out of a desire to get the game underway and partly in the interests of peace and harmony. Greg had an intellectual objection, but I had a stronger, emotional one.

I found Jen’s conclusion upsetting for a more profound reason, in that it equates humanistic virtue with Judaism. She engaged in a classic fallacy, often put forward in this form to highlight the fallacy:

1. All cats die.
2. Socrates died.
3. Therefore, Socrates was a cat.

That is, it is a mistake to equate two things because they have one quality in common.

Similarly, upon hearing Greg’s and my wails of protest, Jen said that a similar sentiment can be found in her religious lessons. In essence, she argued that:

1. Judaism de-emphasizes God the creator as an object of unthinking worship.
2. Pratchett expressed the notion that the dwarfs’ creator God not be an object of worship.
3. Therefore, Pratchett is a Jew.

I have encountered this kind of sentiment before, identifying all virtue with the speaker’s religion. A Christian, surprised to hear I am an atheist, once told me to my face that I could not be an atheist because I’m so friendly and patient. (How little she knows me, eh?) It’s bad enough to deny my beliefs, but the implicit assumption—that only Christians can be nice—is blatantly wrong and deeply offensive. Yet she persisted in the claim even over my protestations, claiming that I’m a Christian even if I don’t know it yet. She found it impossible to believe that a likeable person could not be Christian, so completely impossible that she felt entitled to dictate my religious beliefs to me. I am not alone in this experience.

Because ours is a largely Christian nation, we tend to hear this kind of thing most often from Christians: all virtues are Christian virtues; all decent people are Christians; all good in the world comes from the Christian god. But it doesn’t sound any better coming from a different religious quarter. These claims are offensive. No reasonable person would try to make the same claims about Judaism. I know Jen wouldn’t; she has explicitly expressed a belief that other people have other, equally valid ways. Yet she saw nothing wrong last night with the idea that if someone expresses a humanist thought, there is no explanation for it but that he must be Jewish.

It made me feel like I did talking to the Christian who figured only Christians could be decent people. And it bothers me to hear that kind of thinking from a friend.

Jen is a recent convert, glad to find religion again, after reluctantly giving up Catholicism for its steadfast condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality. (She pretends that the kind of chauvinism that led devout Jews to thank God daily not to have been born slaves or women is somehow not part of her new religion.) Naturally enough, she is enthusiastic for her new religion, and looks for reasons to reinforce her belief; to reinforce her identity with a new tribe. Over the past several months, she has been eager to talk about the many great achievements of Jews—and there are many—and even to exaggerate the historical record, or to understate achievements of gentiles, or to find favorable comparisons between Jews and gentiles. That’s okay; she needed religion in her life, and this initial rush of enthusiasm will recede to a healthier level soon, though not soon enough for me. But it’s not an excuse for deciding Pratchett must be Jewish, simply on the evidence that one of his fictional characters doesn’t feel compelled to think much about God.

Loving one’s new religion a little too much is okay, for a little while. Loving it to the point of believing that all insightful religious commentary, all wisdom, all good belongs exclusively to that religion is not.

I’m delighted with the outcome of the Iowa caucuses. High turnout is a promising indicator for the 2008 general election, but the balance of that high turnout is even more promising—Republican participation is up 30% over 2000, but Democratic participation is something like three times what it was in 2000. Iowa is considered something of a swing state, maybe a touch red; the massive blue interest may be a sign of a massive turnover not only in the presidency, but in Congress as well. We desperately need that kind of sea change: not only must the villains currently running the Republican party and the country be taught a harsh lesson in the limits of authority, but we need a Congress both willing and able to reverse the shameful political trends of the past eight years, right over the top of Republican resistance.

While a huge turnover in national politics is the vital issue, news services aren’t paying that possibility much attention; instead, they’re all focused on Obama’s upset of Clinton. I suppose I can see why; it’s a more immediate issue, and therefore more likely to sell papers. So, after a firm reminder of what really counts here, let me join the pack and talk about Barack and Hillary.

Here, too, I see much cause for celebration. Edwards is my favorite, and he’s getting short shrift. But failing an Edwards nomination, I’d rather see Obama run than Clinton. Not only do I remain suspicious of Clinton’s ability, or even desire, to reverse the profound damage the Bush presidency and unfettered corporate greed have done to our country, but Clinton engenders too much distaste in the swing voters. She alone is the one major Democratic candidate who couldn’t plaster any and all of the major Republican candidates in a general election; she alone of the Democrats could lose the election, and she certainly can’t sweep a Democratic Congress in on her coat-tails.

As weak as she is as a general candidate, she has been a strong candidate among Democrats, on a strange sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: she took an early lead as the party’s anointed, and has largely campaigned on a tacit presumption that her nomination is inevitable. Voters love a winner, so as long as she was winning, she was likely to keep winning. More to the point, lobbyists love a winner—losers can’t pay them back—so as long as Clinton was winning, her war chest swelled. It didn’t hurt that news media love a winner, and the attention lavished on the front-runner lends an air of validation to his (or her) primacy. Clinton remained the front-runner largely because she was the front-runner, and not for legitimate reasons like her voting record, campaign promises, or chances of winning the general.

More valuable than the support of Iowa itself, Obama’s victory in Iowa has shattered the notion that Clinton is inevitable. Had we seen the three-way tie pundits predicted before the caucus, Clinton could easily have recovered as the action moved to the larger, national forum, where she still holds a lead. Her sharp loss in Iowa, however, coming behind even poor, overlooked Edwards means she can no longer campaign above the issues. She’s going to have to provide reasons more substantial than “the party embraces me, along with some hefty corporate donors” for the party to embrace her, along with some hefty corporate donors.

This can go two ways.

If Clinton has something under the hood, we’re about to see her bring it out. So far she’s been coasting on the natural advantage of being out in front, and until Iowa, it’s worked pretty well. In other states, it may continue to work well. She’s had no need to put forth substantial arguments; why, then, pull them out and expose herself? If she brings out material she’s been saving for just such a reverse (or, more likely, for the general election), she could launch herself right back into the front. She’ll need to hurry. Best to get it out before the momentum shifts and the front-runner’s halo begins working for someone else.

If, on the other hand, Clinton has nothing under the hood, and she really does sway with the breeze of every new poll, she’s going to fade very quickly from the spotlight. People are angry, and need a direction for that anger. They’re angry at the president and the whole rotten structure that supports him, but they’re angry, too, at Democrats who didn’t stand up to Bush and company. If Clinton can’t galvanize that anger behind more than a sense that she’s a poster-girl for the Democratic party we all know, she’s sunk.

She sounded whipped in her post-Iowa speech, belatedly telling her supporters that she, too, is a candidate for change—a hollow claim, but somebody else’s winning slogan of the day, which reinforced the sense that she was out of step and trying to catch up. But I wouldn’t count on her continuing to sound as she did in last night’s speech: Clinton is a smart campaigner, and last night was one day in a year-long process. She’s allowed a bad day after that kind of shock. Tomorrow we’ll see her come out fighting.

If that means sniping at her Democratic colleagues, she’ll hurt herself more than anyone. If that means taking a positive stance of some kind, and especially if it means laying out a program to repair the damage our country has suffered in the past decade, it can only be for the good, whether or not she is eventually elected.

My friend Tim, a fan of the Fallout series and excited about the upcoming Fallout 3, rummaged up a collective package of Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics as a gift supplement. I fired it up and started playing. I’ve been having a rough time; if Mel Gibson is the “Road Warrior,” I’d be known by the post-apocalyptic handle “Purina Rat Chow.” The fate of an isolated fallout shelter community depends on me, and they might as well find a nice patch of plants to fertilize. My attempts to date to save the residents of Vault 13 from the breakdown of the water system look something like this:

Game 1: Receive mission to recover parts for the water purification system, trekking across a hundred miles of radioactive waste to beg, barter, or steal the parts from distant Vault 15. Exit Vault 13. Meet hostile rats in the entryway. Die within sight of the vault door.

Game 2: Receive mission, etc. Barely escape vicious rats infesting Vault 13 entry. Begin trek. Immediately fall into desert canyon filled with radscorpions. Die.

Discover game manual by accident. Read it. Learn to sneak and how to equip a weapon. Learn that the dots in the information bar are not my health, but my movement allowance for the turn.

Game 3: Receive mission, etc. Sneak past vicious rats infesting Vault 13 entry, forfeiting valuable experience. Trek across the radioactive waste. Arrive at Vault 15, to discover it is abandoned. Search it anyway. Fight every rat in the place in order to search, looking for some kind of indication of anything to do next. Find none. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn that I should be using an elevator somewhere in the vault.

Game 4: Receive mission, etc. Arrive at Vault 15 and kill all rats. Search for elevator, eventually discovering that the isometric view conceals the elevator behind a solid wall. Realize I’ve been playing hunt-the-pixel, and that the game designers didn’t even draw the damn pixel. Fiddle with the invisible elevator shaft for half an hour, eventually to conclude the only way down is with a rope, which I don’t have. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn that rope can be found in some random village whose existence the mission briefing has not bothered to mention.

Game 5: Receive mission, etc. Search for random village. Search village for rope. Find none. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn rope can be bought from some guy named Seth, who isn’t even a merchant—until this moment, Seth’s only apparent purpose in life was to direct me to a cave infested with radscorpions.

Game 6: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village. Talk to Seth. Discover I have no money to buy rope. Accept mission to radscorpion cave without promise of payment in the wild hope that Seth will give me his rope in gratitude. Fight radscorpions. Run out of ammunition. Die.

Game 7: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village. Go to radscorpion cave. Kill only one radscorpion, then run away. Sell the antivenom reward for money to buy rope. Trek to Vault 15. Kill rats. Run out of ammunition. Finish off last five rats with knife. Spend forty-five minutes trying to apply the rope to the invisible elevator shaft. Descend. Using only a knife, fight somewhat larger pigrats. Die.

Game 8: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village, kill radscorpions, sell antivenom to buy rope. Trek across radioactive waste. Stumble on caravan. Accidentally join caravan back to random village, missing the opportunity to buy anything, not that I have much cash. Trek a second time across radioactive waste to Vault 15 while time ticks away. Kill rats. Run out of ammunition. Descend invisible elevator shaft. Die.

Conclude I need more ammunition. Read online walkthrough. Discover nowhere (that I can reach) where I can buy more ammunition.

…
Game 14: Through a combination of sheer bloody-minded brute force and online hint pages, memorize every point of interest between Vaults 13 and 15, including gravel-sized specks, and where to steal enough goods to hire a bodyguard, who proves three times more combat effective than my own heroic self. Receive mission, etc. Strip random village of unwatched goods and sell them back to the former owners. Hire bodyguard. Clear radscorpions. Clear Vault 15. Discover through sheer bloody-minded clicking of every space that there is no replacement part in the Vault. Return to Vault 13; report failure. Receive orders to keep trying. Realize that I will have to wander blindly through the radioactive wastes, hoping to stumble on a location which does have a replacement part, a place which no one knows about, or at least no one is willing to tell me about. Quit.

So basically, I’m still working my way through the first mission, and it’s become clear that the only way to play this game is with a mouse in one hand and a cheat book in the other, which rather defeats the purpose. I don’t think it’s going to get any better; the pervasive game design philosophy is that restoring games is expected, so forcing players to explore everything by trial and error is okay. Finding a little brown fleck against a brown background is “exploration,” ammunition starvation is “part of the challenge,” and it’s only reasonable for the player, on vital mission X and under time pressure, to make decisions like, “Hey, why don’t I wander off to random location Y first, and sell my gear to purchase some random item in Y, just in case I might need it?”

There’s a puzzle—not quite old enough to be called an old chestnut—involving probability and non-transitivity. In abbreviated form:

Two people each choose a three-element series of heads and tails, for example, heads-heads-tails or tails-heads-tails or heads-heads-heads. They then begin flipping a coin. The first person to see his three-element combination in consecutive flips of the coin wins. Is the bet fair?

The answer is no; the bet favors whoever selects his three-element string second. Your intuition might tell you the bet is fair, on the grounds that each three-flip string is equally likely. This is so within a fixed string of three tosses—each combination happens one eighth of the time—but it is not true over an extended string of flips. To illustrate the imbalance, consider an extreme mismatch: HHH versus THH.

One time in eight, the first three flips will all be heads, and the first player wins. On any other first three throws, however, a tail appears before three consecutive heads. Once this happens, THH must appear before HHH; after HHH fails on the first three tosses, the next time HHH appears will be after a tail, which means the second player has already won; that tail and the next two heads form a winning THH. So the second player wins seven times out of eight.

The relationship is non-transitive, however: every sequence beats some other sequences, but every sequence loses to some other sequences, too. So no matter what the first player picks, the second player can pick a combination more than 50% likely to appear first. If the second player selects blindly, he has no advantage, but if he’s clever, he’ll pick a superior combination, with odds of winning between 2/3 and 7/8.

I first encountered this problem in a Martin Gardner book. I sensed the bet wasn’t fair, but I was far too young to work out the entire answer on my own. But I remembered the answer, and, now that I’m older, and I’ve learned about Markov chains and network analysis and a lot of similarly scary-sounding topics, I can work out a complete solution: what is each combination’s odds of beating every other combination?

Well, almost. The reason this puzzle isn’t an old chestnut is that a complete answer depends on methods that didn’t exist before electronic calculation. With proper programming, a cheap computer utility can work out the answer in the blink of an eye. But I no longer have those utilities available; my copies are either corrupted or designed for out-of-date Macs. So if I want a complete answer, I have to crank out all 64 possibilities by hand. It’s not quite so bad as that, because symmetry cuts down on my work—HHH versus HHT, for example, has equal chances as TTT versus TTH, and HHT versus HHH is the same problem as HHH versus HHT and TTH versus TTT is the same as TTT versus TTH, so I only have to work out one answer for all four matches. Still, a complete solution involves working out some infinite sums by hand, and it’s taking me a while.

I keep with the task in part out of stubbornness. But mostly, I do it to relive my college days, to experience again the challenge of a problem set (which might well include something like this), and to exercise skills of which I was once proud, but which are now largely atrophied. The calculations are at once tedious and invigorating.

Maybe I should dig out some old textbooks and work some of the problem sets. Maybe you should dig out your old textbooks, too—it might be more fun than you expect.