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Once upon a time, computer strategy games were well documented. They were designed by number-crunchers, for number-crunchers, who would object to unit descriptions limited to “A long-range ship with light armor.” How long a range? How light the armor, relative to other ships’ armor? How light the armor, relative to other ships’ guns? Print was once cheaper than disk space, so we’d get actual manuals to our games, instead of a little pamphlet with no more information than you can read on the box cover, and a note to consult the in-game tutorial. Such in-game tutorials might tell you how to do everything—and sometimes, they fail even to cover all those bases—but they rarely tell you why to do it.

Such is the case with SoaSE. I’m graduating from the clueless noob phase into the plain-old noob phase; I’ve mastered the functions of the game and have some ideas how to use them, ideas which need to be tested in the heat of battle. I have a dim sense of what kinds of tactics work, at least against a computer opponent, developed ad hoc from experience, rather than grounded in sound analysis. And only now, and that with considerable help from the official forum, am I beginning to understand the relative strengths of the three factions, because what Stardock generously calls a “manual” didn’t bother to explain them.

Perhaps they felt the faction differences would be obvious from in-game information, but if so, they were wrong.

The three factions employ different tech trees, for example. You can’t look at all three side-by-side, but if you’ve got a good memory or can write yourself very quick notes, you could make your own tech reference. If your memory is less reliable, or if you’re too busy fending off enemy fleets to browse the tech trees in a leisurely fashion, you might note that most of the techs are the same for all three factions, albeit arranged in a slightly different order and tagged with different labels. You might be forgiven for seeing little difference. An “advanced locator satellite network” that spots enemies one system jump away is no different from “telepathic sensitives,” which do the same job. “Desert slave colonies” that boost your population maxima on desert planets by 10% are no different from “Monastic fervor” that does the same. But buried in the middle-to-late stages of the trees, where you might not even reach them if you start (as I did) with small maps lie a variety of technologies specific to individual ships, and especially to the cruiser class. You might likewise never see cruisers if you play small, quick games; you must devote scarce resources to researching cruisers, while several frigate-class and capital ships are available as soon as you set your military docks.

Until you start investing in these ship-specific technologies, the differences between the ships of different factions are small, and quantitative. Perhaps one faction’s basic frigates cost 240 credits and enjoy 100-point shields, while another’s cost only 200 credits and suffer 90-point shields, but they are employed the same way. Work your way up to cruisers, however, and one faction might have a repair ship and another a ship that can temporarily deactivate enemy abilities. Whole tactical theories can be built around that kind of difference. I look forward to building some.

Other faction differences exist, to be sure. Small, quantitative differences have their impact, too. I suspect that I have more trouble with the Vasari faction because their ships tend to be a bit heavier and a bit more expensive. If something goes wrong, it’s harder for the Vasari to recover than it is for the Advent to churn out somewhat cheaper replacements. Delaying a 5% boost to metal production for one faction by burying it one step deeper in the tree can have an subtle but profound impact on the game. The TEC seem to have an edge in producing the resources that go into making everything else. The Vasari seem designed to depend on offense, with very few ships or techs designed to improve defensive stats. I’ve found that the Vasari tend to run out of metal, while the Advent and TEC run out of crystal, though I don’t know why. (And, of course, there’s the voice acting—dealing with the hissing, villainous Vasari unit voices is almost enough to make me abandon that faction right there; it sounds like my fleets are run by Cobra Commander from the G. I. Joe cartoons.)

I’m no stranger to number-crunching, nor to strategy games, nor to employing one on the other. I’m a low-grade guru for Civ and a few other titles, the guy my friends turn to for advice, and sufficiently knowledgeable to recognize conceptual and statistical mistakes in those wretched “official strategy guides.” Nonetheless, the more elegant functions that other fans have found beneath the surface of SoaSE remain opaque to me. They won’t remain so forever, but that’s beside the point.

There’s a substantial difference between a game that contains mysteries because it has a rich structure, and a game that contains mysteries because the designers couldn’t be bothered to document it properly. I have to object to the latter. When neither guidebook nor tutorial bother to mention that your first capital ship is free, with the obvious corollary that you should build a capital shipyard pretty darn quick to take advantage of it, there’s something wrong.

Posted by at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I continue to plumb the shallows of Sins of a Solar Empire, the RTS that seeks to capture the slow, strategic thinking of turn-based 4X games. The depths will have to come later; SoaSE is a multifaceted game, with a steep learning curve. I’m making progress; I can reliably beat a single, easy computer opponent on a small map, although I still find playing as the Vasari tricky. Buoyed by this success, I threw caution to the winds and sampled a three-cornered game—it was either that, or move up to medium difficulty. The results were not pretty.

The first few minutes of the game were no different from a two-player game: pop out some essential basic structures, send a scout to explore the map, build a small fleet and a colony ship to snatch up some neighboring real estate. Then things began to go to pot.

Problem one: my scout reached my rivals’ home territory, and they seemed to be way ahead of me. Perhaps their positions held hidden weaknesses, but the visible signs of growth looked bad: whereas I had a single, semi-developed homeworld and was just beginning to settle some outlying planets, both my opponents had two heavily developed worlds, with three or four defensive platforms apiece (I had none, even on my homeworld) a couple research stations (I had one), and an extra shipbuilding facility. I didn’t bump into any starter fleets in this time, but either my opponents had built some, or they got their initial colonies without a fight. Over the long haul, the resources required to build these things are rather small, but in the short time we’d all had from the game’s beginning, they represented somewhere in the neighborhood of two or three times my own resources. I’m reluctant to cry “Cheat!” before getting knowing the game more intimately…but it certainly looked like an arbitrary and sizeable imbalance of starting resources. (As I’ve written elsewhere, that’s appropriate for games played on a “hard” setting, but not an “easy” one.) With more insight into the game, I might find a build order that increases my early resource output by 20-50%, maybe enough to develop my single homeworld to the point my rivals had developed two worlds, or enough to get bare infrastructure on two or three worlds. No degree of increased efficiency would allow me to afford the kind of buildup my neighbors had. Not that quickly.

Problem two: about the time my material disadvantages were showing, my rivals began making demands. This was new to me. “Diplomatic” demands are a way to earn favor with your neighbors; they set you periodic tasks, and if you complete them, they like you better. Some of the tasks are quite simple—which is not the same as easy—“Give us 1000 credits,” for example. Some are much more complicated: “Destroy two research stations belonging to player X” doesn’t just require enough ships to blow up the stations, but enough ships to survive the fleet that comes to their rescue. I did the first one, earning some brownie points from enemy X, but really had no chance of doing the second one, so I blew it off, earning disfavor from enemy Y. 1000 credits was a painful fee that early in the game, but I figured it would earn me preference from X, if not eternal friendship. My hope was that X would then focus his efforts on Y, reasoning that he, X, might not like me, but he disliked Y even more.

No such luck. Remember how I’d just launched fledgling colonies at the time? Well, X began bombing one immediately, using a ship he’d had to research as well as build. (I didn’t have the resources to do even the research.) No, the 1000 credit bribe wouldn’t explain this siege fleet; research and building take time, time he didn’t have between receiving his payola and attacking me. Not only had X built a fleet capable of taking out the small ships defending his early colonies, but an additional fleet designed to bomb planets. Hm.

A couple more attempts at the same map produced the same results: two enemies with a huge head start, extorting serious demands from me, and not paying much attention when I agreed but definitely taking note when I refused. Nor could I return the disfavor; there is no mechanism to make similar demands of computer opponents. Simply doesn’t exist. Like the pirates I complained of earlier, this game element effectively only works one direction.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the “diplomatic” system is insuperable; I know other players have managed to perform enough missions to transform one or more enemies into allies, although keeping an ally happy becomes problematic as his demands to strike distant foes in a timely fashion increase, and two allies will each almost certainly ask you to attack the other. Presumably, as I get better at SoaSE, I’ll be able to win allies to my side, too. I’m already getting better at manipulating the pirates, to the point where I’ve won a few early bids, although they remain a distinct advantage for the computer. (Happily, they aren’t in every scenario.) No doubt the alliance system will likewise get easier. But the alliance system remains arbitrarily asymmetric, and that bugs me.

Quantitative computer advantages are bad enough, a way to conceal weak AI; qualitative computer advantages are just bad design in a 4X game.

Posted by at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Demetri Martin has a joke about metal detectors, that he’d like to get a batch of hand-crafted metal urns marked “Get a life!” and bury them in scattered locations. Makes sense.

I got a metal detector when I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old. I asked for it. Out of all the wonders the world has to offer, I wanted a metal detector for my birthday. Even now, I’m not entirely sure why; it just seemed so…neat. The portable jobs were coming into mass production, and were advertised on local stations on Sundays, when the airwaves were cheap. They like to imply that the world was littered with buried pirate treasure, and all that stood between you and a fortune was the inability to sense metal inches below the surface of the ground. Even if you were so unfortunate as to have a back yard utterly lacking in chests from a Spanish galleon, a small fortune could be made in finding small change that had dropped out of pockets. And think of what a relief it would be to find those lost car keys!

Those ads were pretty shifty, even to my innocent eyes. Not many Spanish galleons made it to suburban Illinois, and even fewer sank there. I confess I did harbor fantasies of recovering car keys inexplicably dropped back near the lilac bushes, instead of right next to the car. But if the opportunity never arose, that was okay, too. I didn’t expect to get rich; I just thought it would be neat to go finding stuff. Pocket change would be nice, but I’d be happy with old, rusty washers and springs, too. I was driven by a nascent geekiness, the pleasure of handling something needlessly technological.

The real disappointment was that the metal detector didn’t do that all too well, either. Technically, of course, metal detectors do not detect metal, but rather regions of high conductivity. They project a magnetic field, and highly conductive materials—like metal—alter the field as it passes over them. And those regions are continuous, not discrete, so the signal is likewise a matter of degree. It’s not so much silence…silence…silence…beep! quarter…silence…silence as staticstaticstaticstaticstaticcracklestaticstatic. That barely audible crackle could be a bottle cap, or it could be the product of holding the metal detector’s antenna a quarter inch closer to the ground than you did on the last pass, or it could be Jupiter rising in Sagittarius. Wave the detector past again, and you might get a different result. Not very reliable. Often, it registered a positive when there was nothing to be found; we had a dog, and I suspect dog wee-wee is a fair conductor. After a little frustration, we discovered the machine didn’t give a clear signal when deliberately passed over a keyring. Add the general unpleasantness of the continual static buzz, and the fact that the lightweight, portable mechanism was still awkwardly large for a seven-year-old, and I lost interest quickly.

I was a quicker learner than some guys. For a few years afterwards, you could still see somebody, usually a seedy adult, waving one about any large beach. Periodically, they’d stop and pick something out of the sand, but this was a time when the pop-tops did not remain attached to soda cans, so I can’t believe they ever found much—certainly not enough to repay the endless hours of waving detector around while everybody else was swimming or playing volleyball or climbing dunes. When I spotted one of these guys, I mostly thought, “sucker.” But some part of me still wistfully wished I could find something with mine.

For a long time, I looked back on my metal detector as one of the lousiest gifts I’d ever received, despite being at my own request. It didn’t’ work, and for years clogged my closet as a reminder of my own gullibility. But with the perspective of age, I may need to rethink that assessment. Certainly, I remember it better than most of my birthday presents—the excitement at unwrapping it and taking it out for a test run, if nothing else. And it was a powerful lesson in the value of a critical eye towards advertising. Ah, wisdom. Perhaps the greatest gift of all.

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

Eileene got me a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire last week. I think she did it out of pity; I can’t find anyone to play Pirates of the Burning Sea with me.

Sins has received a lot of attention as the long-awaited melding of a traditional RTS and the traditional 4x game. It’s not really; it’s just an RTS that plays…very…slowly, giving you some time to think about your next move, instead of clicking “create grunt” until your index finger snaps. That part, I like. A lot. It’s a game that can absorb all your attention for hours at a stretch, to the exclusion of meals, sleep, work, potty breaks. I’m sure to have lots more to say about Sins in the future, as I tease apart its working elements, but right now, I just want to address one of its more distinctive elements: the pirates.

The basic idea is that, in addition to the various major factions, there’s a neutral faction for hire. The pirates occupy a single planet, at least in small maps, and do not expand. Players can bribe the pirates to hit someone else; when the ten-minute timer runs out, the pirates attack whoever has the largest total bid against them. (Even if the total bid is zero, the pirates hit somebody.) The larger the bribe, the bigger the pirate force that sails out to wreak havoc. Existing bids remain in place; whenever the pirates destroy something, they reduce the standing bid against the owning player—who might not be the player they target, if they happen to blow something else up on the way there.

On paper, it looks pretty good: an unpredictable element with enough player input not to seem arbitrary. In practice, I’m less impressed, although to be fair, I’ve only played against one computer opponent to date. Perhaps pirates function better in a multiplayer game, allowing players another way to stick it to the current leader, although I’ve read a pirate exploit for single-human-multiple-computer games.

In one-on-one games with a computer opponent, the pirates are just a huge wrench in the works.

The computer opponent can pretty well always sic the pirates on the human. It’s got the twin advantages of instant reflexes and multitasking. As the timer counts down to the next pirate raid, the computer can instantly raise its bid by just enough to win, and can do so without switching to the pirate screen and ignoring other critical matters. A human who hovers over the pirate timer is ignoring his fleets and planets. Add a small lag, maybe ten or fifteen seconds, between the announcement that the pirates are about to depart and their actual departure, in which the timer simply blinks an angry red 0:00, and a human player can’t even time his bid. About the only way to win a bid is to have so much more money than the computer that it can’t bid any more at the last second—a condition realized only after the human has accumulated a large enough advantage to make victory a foregone conclusion.

Even then, the computer might surprise you; those cash reserves can seem limitless, even after reducing the computer to a rump empire in one corner of the system. Guess wrongly that the computer is out of money, and you’re only magnifying your difficulties with a big, fat bid that fails to exceed the computer’s total budget.

That’s not as bad as actually winning a bid after breaking the computer’s budget, only to see the pirates attack you anyway. The pirates don’t discriminate. They might show up in a Vasari border planet only to find your fleet in place, mopping up a conquest, and lay into your fleet, disrupting the operation. You’ve just paid for the privilege of having the pirates attack you. Whoopee!

You can eliminate the pirates from the game, if you like. All you have to do is assemble a fleet twice the size you’d need to destroy your enemy and invade the pirate base, a useless asteroid lying in a vast cloud of pirate defenses. Better to just send that fleet after the enemy.

Perhaps worst of all, I’ve found the pirates slow the game down after the conclusion becomes inevitable, precisely the time when the game should speed up. They are strong enough to cause problems in the early phases of the game, maybe enough to tip the balance. Later, they become a nuisance, not strong enough to cause any real damage, but strong enough that you need to employ a fleet to make sure they don’t—a fleet which should be closing on final victory. Since the pirates do no serious damage, high bids remain quite high, and the raids continue to be quite large. If you’re rich enough to guarantee pirate control, you begin to get careful about invading enemy systems, lest the pirates strike that same enemy system, and end up shooting you. At this point, with unstoppable military and economic superiority, you should be free to move in and finish off the computer opponent, and with it, the game. In my first victory (fourth try against a single, easy opponent!), a curiosity of geography left a narrow corridor of attack between myself and the computer, and the pirates bordered them all. An earlier bidding war left the pirates richer than Croesus, so they had enough ships to gum up anything they touched.

Working my way to the enemy homeworld was a hellish slog, bad enough that I’ve been experimenting with making no bids on the pirates, ever. It works pretty well, but there’s a down side. Well, two. First, I’m guaranteed to suck up all the pirate attacks in the early game, when they can really hurt. Second, there’s a whole game element I don’t dare touch. In one-on-one games, at least, the pirates exist only to hurt me, the classic “bad design” asymmetry.

Posted by at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m in the habit of reading myself to sleep, usually old RPG rules and supplements. I don’t have many new ones: product lines are much reduced in both scale and number from the heyday of the early ‘90s, and what remains is almost entirely d20, which I detest, and White Wolf, which has become redundant. So I stick to well-thumbed material. I worried once that I might cycle through too fast, to the point where I was re-reading material every couple months, but that isn’t the case; with age, the time between getting into bed and turning out the light has become so short, and my memory sufficiently un-steel-traplike that I can safely flip through bedtime material I haven’t perused in years.

Anyway. I’m currently rereading the original Torg manual, an old West End Games mashup of various genres into one setting, where raiders from alternate realities show up and try to conquer earth for its mystical possibility energy. The US is overrun by a dinosaur universe where miracles work but guns and automobiles don’t, while France is conquered by a cyberpunk pope, and Indonesia becomes the province of Victorian horrors and Victorian-style imperialism, to name a few invaders. It’s an intriguing setting, although one that would require a lot of time to pull off successfully; I’m rooting around for inspiration, trying to come up with a way to use the cool parts in some future campaign without committing to something my friends and I could never finish.

Running Torg has long been a fantasy for me (unlikely ever to be fulfilled), so the bedtime reading is a trip down memory lane. West End, which once gave us Paranoia, as well as the d6 version of Star Wars much superior to the d20 version now on the shelves, was perhaps the best of the RPG companies with great vision and lousy business sense, and that vision was utterly, unflinchingly devoted to popcorn-crunching movie fun. They pissed away a lot of money on movie licenses nobody wanted. (Does anyone remember the Tank Girl RPG? Hell, does anyone remember the movie? Didn’t think so.) They thought a lot about how to bring the action of movies to the table, and employed intriguing ideas to do it. The action deck, for example, was a set of cards designed to reward exciting but tactically inferior actions, and to throw the advantage back and forth in a way common to action movies and uncommon in by-the-numbers RPG fights. They wrote a lot of good popcorn-crunching adventures. They also wrote a lot of bad adventures that were supposed to be mysteries, or subtle political dances, but somehow turned into action scenes anyway, with a lot of broad hints and melodramatic villains, because their desire to get past all that roleplaying to the “good stuff” of car chases and gunfights got the better of them—an attitude that eventually took over Torg, too, turning whole universes into self-parodies. They wrote a lot of terrific advice for novice GMs on how to bring excitement and pacing to an RPG session; Star Wars remains a signal effort in newbie pointers. Unfortunately, that advice also tended very strongly to subvert some equally important lessons for good GMing.

I refer particularly to West End’s limitless fascination with the narrative technique called in media res, literally “in the middle of things,” in which a story starts after the action is already underway, kicking off with a gripping scene, then filling in the narrative later through flashbacks or exposition. The original Star Wars movie uses this technique, with stormtroopers shooting their way aboard a space vessel to recapture plans to the “death star;” only later is the nature of the death star, along with its significance in a larger galactic civil war, made clear. West End loved in media res absolutely to death; I’ve seen half a dozen products where it is embraced as the single, best way to run an adventure.

Poppycock. I tried it a couple times, and it didn’t work, for one very good reason. In a novel or movie script, the characters behave consistently with the as-yet-unspecified background. It’s easy for them to do so, because the person who controls their behavior—the writer—is also the person in charge of creating that background; he already knows what’s going on, even if the audience doesn’t. In an RPG, the protagonists are in the hands of the players, who are also the audience to whom the background is to be revealed. The guy in charge of the background, the GM, doesn’t have direct control over the PCs; if he did, it would defeat the whole purpose of telling the story as a game in the first place, with various players controlling various characters and surprising one another with their actions. As a result, the players don’t simply jump into the action; they ask a lot of questions instead. What’s my motivation in this scene? Would my character consider shooting at a space frigate a reasonable action, or is it insanely dangerous? Should I be slaughtering these mooks, or would that kind of bloodlust be decidedly unheroic? Wait, why am I in this war again?

Mostly, it’s natural player self-interest. They don’t want to do something they’ll suffer for later, and figure their chances are better if they stop the action and pester the GM with a lot of questions to feel out the best (safest) course of action. Partly, it’s natural caution towards creating inconsistencies of character or plot: “my character would never have done X if he’d known Y.” Either way, my players have never, ever wanted anything to do with West End’s favorite narrative technique, and when I forced them to live with it, the results were dismal.

I retain a warm spot in my heart for West End. I love them to death for their enthusiasm, for their inventive if clumsy mechanisms, and for their efforts to cast an ever-wider net to draw in players who would never consider playing that D&D game they remember hearing something about. But moderation in all things: not every action movie technique is appropriate to an RPG. In media res belongs only in a very few, very carefully selected RPG adventures.

Postscript to “New York International Children’s Film Festival”:
The festival is over, the awards given, and the NYICFF is now free to put several 2008 entries on the site. I particularly recommend “X,” “Mind the Gap,” and “Zhiharka.” Happily, the short we most enjoyed—“Crankballs”—is also up; sadly, it doesn’t survive the translation to tiny screen very well. Its humor depends on the suddenly manic crankball transformed by a bit of floating happiness looking disturbing and menacing. It certainly was on the big screen, but less so when it’s the size of a quarter on my monitor.

Posted by at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Honest injun: I don’t want to keep harping on politics. I’ve got a small text file of reminders of blog subjects that strike me during the day, and very few of them are political. But politics is topical, and issues must be handled either as they arise, or not at all, and the damn things keep popping up.

The story du jour is the report that three “independent contractors”—funny how those guys who were supposed to make government efficient and accountable keep cropping up, isn’t it?—illegally searched Barack Obama’s private passport records. The incident looks disturbingly similar to a similarly illegal examination of Bill Clinton’s records back when he was running against Bush senior in ’92, an attempt to dig up dirt suggesting Clinton may have tried to travel overseas to dodge the Vietnam draft. It’s not merely dirty politics, it’s downright illegal politics, and what really bugs me is that the powers that be don’t seem concerned.

CNN reports that, of the three contractors, who breached the personal records on at least three separate occasions (Jan 9, Feb 21, Mar 14), two were fired and one was “disciplined by the contractor’s company,” whatever that means, according to State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. And that’s as far as McCormack and the state department feel the discipline need go. Certainly no investigation is necessary. They’re writing off the intrusion as “impudent curiosity” on the part of the workers themselves.

Those scamps! Boys will be boys; sometimes a contractor just can’t help himself but spy upon politically prominent citizens. No sense in cracking down on an innocent prank. And they didn’t find anything anyway, so what’s the big deal? (Of course, if the crooks had found something, the same voices would insist we have more important things to worry about than a couple Watergate-style burglars. They might even consider the crime positively heroic.)

The Justice Department agrees. Remember the Justice Department? The one that’s been packed with Republican party loyalists while prosecutors with the audacity to pursue Republicans when the evidence warranted it were fired? The one that wants us to trust them to run their own blanket investigations of American citizens without warrants? The one that argues that catching the bad guys by any means is more important than preserving fundamental civil liberties? Yes, that Department of Justice has declined to investigate. No prosecution is pending.

To date, the White House has declined comment.

I didn’t intend to bring this article up; it seemed a little too far into conspiracy territory for me, in that it connects dots on no more evidence than the “cui bono.” The idea that Spitzer was targeted purely to remove a political obstacle isn’t grounded in much evidence, but it’s entirely plausible for an administration that continues to twist our law enforcement agencies into party-run political weapons.

Stuff like this needs to come to light, and it won’t happen unless the little fish are hit with the biggest hammers in the book. Bloody, vicious prosecution and sentencing is the only threat sufficient to get them to squeal on whoever hired them, and the only consideration these creeps would consider a deterrent. Certainly ethics aren’t. In the legal environment we now inhabit, the innocent do have something to fear, because the authorities won’t play by their own security rules, and make no distinction between indiscretions and felonies. They pursue political enemies’ embarrassments as though they were felonies, and dismiss their own felonies as minor embarrassments, better forgotten if they can’t be ignored altogether. The party of law and order.

The Watergate break-in in ’72 eventually toppled a corrupt president. Nixon could not stand on his executive privilege because Archibald Cox, appointed by the president to investigate his own misdeeds, proved to have principles. So did two attorney generals Nixon compelled to resign for refusing to fire Cox. The staff and aides surrounding Nixon, including Dick Cheney, learned from his experience, and have consistently, for a generation or more, worked to replace justice with personal and party loyalty. They have largely succeeded. No matter how ugly this gets, I can’t expect that anyone will get his just desserts for it.

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I write this, a small sort-of-Irish folk band is playing nearby, as part of a general effort by the local library to host small lectures and performances. They’re a little late for Saint Patrick’s Day, if that was the intent.

I say “sort-of-Irish” because they don’t always play actual Irish folk songs; sometimes it’s their own compositions, employing some of the same musical vocabulary as traditional Irish music. The lyrics occasionally slip into a sort of new age-y celebration of nature; instead of complaining about how the British came over and ruined everyone’s lives in the colonial era, it’s about those nasty Christians coming over and spoiling the beatific wicca lifestyle, when everyone loved everyone and communed with the mother goddess and lived in harmony with nature.

Well, okay, if that’s what you’re into. Pure fabrication, of course, but hey, what myth isn’t? The Irish folk version of history isn’t above bending the historical truth to indulge in self-pity and blame The Man, either—but I’m not sure how it got dragged into a piece with the wicca myth. This observation, coupled with the fact that I’ve just been rereading a few old essays about RPGs, and some advice for writers this morning, has me thinking about White Wolf’s submission guidelines.

They’re great—or rather, they were once; I just looked them up again to quote them, and the glorious rant has been removed. That rant didn’t mince words about passable grammar and spelling: if you can’t handle both at a professional level, you’re out; White Wolf has neither time nor budget to micro-edit submissions. They didn’t want to hear yet another iteration of Vampire Prince blah-blah rise to power blah-blah Ventrue behind the scenes blah-blah-blah. They didn’t want a thinly-veiled writeup of your own game, with your own PCs overshadowing the PCs which another GM/customer will take through the adventure. They didn’t want what they called something like "goobcon ‘94," in which the latest geek culture fad gets the spotlight just because the author is into it and can’t recognize that other gamers are decidedly NOT. The guidelines are delivered in a shamelessly snarky tone, savaging some of their most dedicated (if not talented) supporters—probably as a form of self-defense for an office flooded by just these travesties of unsolicited game design.

I can’t help but notice, however, that White Wolf doesn’t exactly take its own advice. Their grammar and spelling may be adequate, but their editing still produces those dreaded “see page XX” comments that made it to print. Their adventures read like self-caricatures: one of every faction maneuver over some McGuffin, living up to every stereotype of that faction while simultaneously sniping about one another’s shortcomings. (And yes, the Ventrue do blah-blah in WW adventures.) Relying as heavily as they do on pigeon-holing characters into stereotypes—some would prefer “archetypes,” but I’m talking attitudes, not narrative function—causes these adventures to write themselves; deviations from the stereotype would feel jarring. White Wolf also regularly employs metaplots: world designs in which huge events over which the PCs have little control shape the world they operate in, and continue to shape it as new products come out. Unsurprisingly, the major hitters in the metaplot are the writers’ own characters or former characters. Several of their central rulebooks employ goobfest descriptions. Mage includes a magical tradition that consists of nothing but being goth-y, since goths were rather “in” when the rulebook came out. Other traditions must draw their powers from a vengeful god, or elaborate ritual, or self-destructive excesses; for the goths, just being goth is enough, and they aren’t restricted in their choice of magical schools, either—think the author was playing favorites? Werewolf has an entire clan whose purpose is to be Celtic. Other clans are spiritualists, or technocrats, or work with the lowest rungs of human society; but since Celtic was the hot thing in geek culture when the rules came out, there’s a whole clan built around drinking, whoring, singing, and brawling (with one another, not the bad guys)—it not only serves an ill-defined purpose, it’s a racist sterotype.

I don’t suppose my little rant will have any impact; WW adventures are full of arrogant control freaks because the WW staff, judging by its editorials, can really relate to arrogant control freaks, and they aren’t going to change just because somebody calls them on failing to meet their own standards. But the page still galls me, and it feels good to gripe about it publicly.

Posted by at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was in a conversation recently that turned to some starlet or other—I don’t remember who—and Jen declared her to be really cute. Jen was surprised when I muttered lukewarm agreement: “If that doesn’t qualify as cute, you must have some really high standards!”

Well, yeah. For cheesecake starlets, I have extraordinarily high standards. Let me tell you why.

First, pop culture, whether movies, television, or pop music, selects very heavily for beauty. Reluctantly, some room is made for actual talent, but homely people, male or female, are pretty much doomed to remain in art films and indie labels. Not to knock George Clooney, but he gets to make blockbusters while Steve Buscemi gets to make art-house films, and the culture of beauty is far more demanding of women than of men. Sex sells, and the entertainment industry likes to sell. How many current starlets are household names? A few hundred? Out of a population of hundreds of millions, the ones we see stamped all over the magazine stand are literally one in a million, and there’s no shortage of young beauties to replace starlets who are treated as crones once they hit 35.

Second, stars are somewhat self-selecting for beauty, themselves. Knowing their careers depend on looking good, they tend to work harder at it than we do; it’s a professional requirement, rather than a personal vanity. Muscle-toning exercise, diet (reinforced by tabloid reports on how the diet is going), and cosmetic surgery are par for the course.

Third, once a starlet edges out in front of her million rivals into that big role, and even before, she’s given a lot of professional help in looking good. Studios employ full-time staffs of cosmeticians and hairdressers, producing what would be thousand-dollar (or more) makeup jobs out in the consumer market. Lighting and cameras are aimed for best effect. Depending on the venue, the starlet may get a do-over; she gets only one chance to deliver an Oscar speech, but she might get a half dozen takes in a movie, and thousands of shots for a magazine spread. We in the audience only get to see the best takes, of course.

And whatever shortcomings survive all that can still be massaged out with a bit of Photoshop. I’m not talking a little acne touchup or erasing an out-of place lock of hair, either; Photoshop is routinely employed to enlarge eyes, lengthen necks, flatten tummies—structural changes that may not exist together in any human. The images are literally unreal; the camera may not lie, but what we receive isn’t always what the camera has to say.

Under those circumstances, do I have high standards of beauty? You bet! Given all that, anything short of eye-popping gorgeous is an underachievement.

For ordinary humans, the kind we meet in daily life, my standards of human beauty are much more reasonable, and I pay attention to keeping them that way. We all should. If you’d like a little help maintaining some perspective, watch “Evolution,” a powerful short funded by Dove to do just that.

Posted by at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know whether to be angry but cynically resigned over the recent Bear-Stearns deal, or whether to be very, very frightened.

Bear-Stearns got itself into trouble by leveraging beyond all reason: a 38-to-1 ratio of debt to assets, if memory serves. Leveraging is essentially a means of increasing profit by increasing risk: money is borrowed for reinvestment; in extreme cases, the investment itself is used as collateral for further borrowing, in an exponential cycle. While the market is on the upswing, this is a great way to rake in the dough, but when the market turns, all that exponential function operates in the other direction. Bear-Stearns was too dependent on all those bad housing loans an easy credit we’ve heard so much about recently, and when lenders got spooked and called in some of that debt, Bear-Stearns found all that leverage pushing back. On the verge of collapse, Bear-Stearns sold out to JPMorgan-Chase for $2 a share, in a del brokered by the US government, but not before the government pumped a whole lot of money in to Bear-Stearns and promised to take on its risk and bad debt. In short, JPMorgan-Chase bought out one of its few remaining competitors for pennies on the dollar, and the US taxpayer paid them to do it.

I’m angry because we have here another case where the dangers of the free market apply only to the little guy; the fat cats are immune to their mistakes, including the mistakes they make with other people’s money—all while profiting from other people’s money. Secretary Paulson took three repetitions before he could no longer pretend he didn’t understand the question in his CNBC interview yesterday: is there any comparable rescue coming for the homeowners? After a few hems and haws, he eventually admitted to speaking with Project Hope for 45 minutes about the matter, not that anything concrete came out of it, but Paulson sure feels for those folks who are losing their homes. After all, the government can hardly protect them from their own mistakes; it wouldn’t be proper. Irresponsible bankers and speculators, however, are another matter: they can’t be allowed to fail, so they’re allowed to gamble over and over, with other people’s money, rake in huge profits if they win, and receive huge bailouts if they lose, on top of enormous salaries.

But more than this, I’m frightened for our economy. Bear-Stearns isn’t the only company out there to leverage itself into peril of utter collapse. And the government no longer has the assets to bail out the banks even if it wants to, regardless of the morality of the situation. Remember the deficit? We’ve been pissing away our national assets to tax cuts for the rich, and in a pointless war. The country is in hock up to its eyeballs, because the very wealthy figured it would be nice to take the national treasury for themselves, and our president agreed, with the firm support of a friendly Congress. Printing money won’t help; we’re already headed into a recession along with a sinking dollar—the stagflation our president and his staff insist doesn’t exist. Accelerating inflation by pumping more money into the system only lowers the dollar further and encourages our foreign creditors to call in the debt before they lose big, speeding the collapse. Meanwhile, it’s the American consumer who loses buying power in order to insulate bad managers from their misbehavior.

Massive debt, leveraged into even more massive debt on hopes of a market bubble, rampant deregulation that made it possible, declining trade despite a falling dollar. We have been here before. With good leadership, and some bitter medicine, we’ve successfully pulled of the nosedive.

But we have also failed to avoid the looming crisis once before, when our leadership was too committed to an economic ideology that the business of America is business, that what is good for captains of industry is necessarily good for the country, that everyone is fit for sacrifice on the altar of the free market except for the very wealthy who would take everyone down with them as they fell. The president built his political career as Secretary of Commerce, arrogating powers from other branches of government to serve his belief that the proper role of government is to serve big business. As the economic crisis he’d helped to create unfolded, a president unwilling to help the average citizen found himself less and less popular, and therefore ever more reliant on a shrinking circle of supporters—the robber barons and banking magnates—to the point where he could not kick out the only support he had. The president, unwilling to subordinate the free market to the interests of the citizenry, resorted to lies, insisting that there was nothing to worry about, that the crisis was essentially over: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

He was wrong. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred within months, and the nation—and the world—spiraled into the Great Depression.

We could get out of this mess with programs honestly designed to do so. I’m frightened when I consider the chances our current leader, either unwilling or unable to recognize the crisis exists at all, will adopt them. To date, his response has been to call not for a reversal of his destructive policies, but an acceleration, as though we might outrun stagflation, a recession, or even a depression by speeding into it. I can see that leading only one place. The only question is how much damage can be done before someone else’s hand is on the tiller, and out of the till.

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Making Light website has an interesting thread up, inviting participants to lay out a Tarot-style spread for a well-known person—living, dead, or fictional—using books, movies, and/or other creative works in place of the Tarot cards. Although we are invited to employ any Tarot layout we want, it’s clear that all participants will use a Celtic Cross layout; it’s a popular layout, it’s what Abi Sutherland used for his examples, and, above all, it’s at hand, requiring no one to go look up other variants.

The only rule is not to be boring. It proved so compelling an exercise that I blew my my writing time budget on it, so that’s what you get here today.

I’m afraid I made an obvious, and therefore boring, choice of subject, but I hope the theme makes up for it. As someone who has never accomplished any meaningful thing on his own, and little given to introspection, I thought a list of self-help titles would be appreciated, especially since they don’t tax the intellect quite as much as actual literature does. I took all these titles from Amazon.com; I cut several subtitles in the interests of brevity and humor.

Card 1: This covers him, defining the situation in which he finds himself—The Logic of Failure

Card 2: This crosses him, defining obstacles with which he must contend—You Don’t Have to Learn Everything the Hard Way

Card 3: This crowns him, representing the best possible outcome from the situation—Enforcing International Law

Card 4: This is beneath him, the foundation of the situation, which the querent has embraced and made his own—Laws of the Jungle

Card 5: This is behind him, his past activity: More Scames from the Great Beyond!: How to Make Even More Money Off the Creationism, Evolution, Environmentalism, Fringe Politics, Weird Science, the Occult, and Other Strange Beliefs

Card 6: This is before him: What Color is Your Parachute?

Card 7: The significator, the querent or subject himself—The 12 Steps to Self-Parenting for Adult Children

Card 8: His house, the (social) environment in which he operates and which made him what he is—Self Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

Card 9: His hopes and fears—Burying the Secret

Card 10: Culmination, the final conclusion of the subject under consideration—The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child.

You don’t need any hints, do you?

Posted by at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not long ago, a number of senators and congrescritters were shocked, yes shocked! and dismayed at the news that the US military had awarded a large contract for air tankers, those planes that act as flying gas stations for other planes, to Airbus parent company EADS, with a little slice of the pie to Northrup-Grumman. The objection lies in the fact that EADS is a European company, fer crissakes, and the contract did not go to good old American mom-and-apple-pie Boeing.

Well! You can just imagine how upset these elected officials were, and especially the ones from constituencies with an interest in Boeing. The howl of wounded patriotic pride went up immediately, accompanied by hand-wringing over how we could be shipping jobs and money overseas, especially in this worrying economic climate.

Unfortunately for these pillars of American interests, the contract went to Airbus for some very good reasons. For one thing, they had the low bid. For another, their air tanker actually worked. That’s right, the Boeing entry didn’t even meet the Air Force’s technical requirements. Finally, the USAF didn’t have any choice in the matter; It was required by law to accept the best product at the lowest cost.

The law seemed rather sensible at the time it was passed (2003), and still does today. It was part of a general package of opening our economy to free trade and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Free trade is a mixed blessing, lowering production costs while harming the working class by opening markets to products produced in lower wage environments. It increases overall prosperity, but distributes that prosperity heavily towards the wealthy. That’s just fine by the corporations who were calling the shots in 2003, with plenty of warm fuzzies flying between the military-industrial complex, the White House, and a Republican-dominated Congress. The law fit well with the mantra that free markets are good for everyone, and not just big business, and in a wild abandon fueled by the massive profits to be made in our adventure in Iraq, this contract, at least, was opened to bidding, in contrast to, say, Halliburton’s. Little did anyone realize that Boeing might actually lose the contract.

Well, it did. And suddenly, the very same neocon assholes who figure it’s okay to sacrifice your paycheck on the altar of global capitalism don’t think it’s okay to subject their own political prospects to the same market forces. Free trade, right Congressman? The efficiency of the market only works by virtue of actual competition, after all; gotta admit the possibility of losing contracts when the competition is real, right, Congressman?. Those who can’t compete in the market deserve to go under, don’t they, Congressman?

Posted by at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Geraldine Ferraro is stepping down from her role in the Clinton campaign after her public statements that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is,” began to sound just a wee bit racist.

The Clintons are working a tricky dance, deliberately appealing to racists while trying to avoid looking like they’re deliberately appealing to racists, which would lose more votes among the general electorate than it would gain among the Archie Bunkers. This ugly tactic was once meat and potatoes for southern Democrats until LBJ rightly drove it from the party, at which point Republicans were happy to sup with the devil over this particular dish, building a successful coalition on Nixon’s “law and order,” Regan’s “welfare mothers,” and Bush the elder’s Willy Horton campaign. Working to create racial divisions within the party is a betrayal of its ideals, and incidentally hurts the Democratic party by alienating voters who might otherwise rally around candidates for offices other than president. It is deeply shameful. None of this does not appear to bother the Clintons, who blacks once viewed as champions, but Senator Clinton is savvy enough to realize that she can’t be seen making such statements herself, so she makes them by proxy: through regional campaign managers, through Bill, through Ferraro. That way, if the public takes right and proper umbrage at racist innuendo, she can deny the statement, or, if pressed, throw her proxy under the bus, as she did Ferraro…after waiting long enough for the innuendo to enter the national discussion, of course.

Ferraro refuses to apologize, instead insisting that others should apologize to her for taking her statement out of context (which it wasn’t), and painting it as racist (which it is). She nonetheless stepped down from her participation as a major fundraiser for the Clinton campaign. Clinton recognizes the damage Ferraro’s statement does, even if Ferraro won’t.

Still, I hear Clinton supporters defending Ferraro by pulling the “Well, it’s literally true, isn’t it?” line. I suppose. In the context of the statement, of course, Obama’s race has been a hindrance, not an unfair advantage—dark skin might help win a seat in some inner-city ward of some metropolis, but it doesn’t help on the national scene, nor in white-bread Illinois state, nor, I think, even in Chicago, which has elected precisely one black mayor. If Obama has succeeded, it is despite his race, and by some combination of political savvy, skillful oratory, and legislative performance, all of which are assets, and not because of it. But in the vague, solipsistic sense that we are all the product of a lifetime’s accumulation of inborn traits, experiences, and external perceptions of us, Obama might in some sense “not be in this position” if he looked different, had been born in different circumstances, belonged to a different demographic.

Okay, so Ferraro’s statement is true in its most literal sense. Now that that’s established, I’m sure we can look forward to Clinton supporters cheerfully agreeing that Hillary Clinton is only where she is by virtue of being married to Bill. Isn’t that precisely the message she’d like spread across the headlines?

Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, the internet. The information superhighway. Pretty much every organization more sophisticated than “Me and my drinking buddy Drake” has a web site, allowing you to learn any and all information they could provide you in person, more conveniently (no business hours), more quickly (one click away !) and more consistently (everyone gets the same web page, after all). The web is so undeniably useful that even the government, which created the thing in the first place, is imitating the people who figured out how to use it, posting whatever you need to know about your government agencies.

So goes the theory. In practice, it doesn’t always work that well. Even limiting ourselves to those government documents Cheney hasn’t yet classified, the information supplied in official government websites can leave a lot to be desired. I learned this by pursuing a license to teach in New Jersey. A short search turned up their official, three-step program to licensing, marked out with bullet points and everything. Great; looks handy—until you read it in detail.

Step one is “Certificate of Eligibility.” The paragraphs that follow this header consist of expansions on the theme “certificate of eligibility” with expansive definitions, like “The CE permits the applicant to seek and accept employment in positions requiring certification.” Note that this step does not contain any imperative verbs; it’s unclear whether they mean “get a certificate of eligibility from the state,” or “get a certificate of eligibility from somewhere else to present to the state,” or “fill out your own certificate of eligibility, which you can download here, or what. Nor does it tell you which jobs require certification, or what is required to satisfy certification. Just know that a certificate of eligibility certifies your eligibility for jobs requiring a certificate of eligibility. Step two is “Legalizing Employment and Induction – Provisional Certificate.” Step three is “Becoming Permanently Certified – Standard Certification.” I won’t quote the paragraphs following these headings, but suffice to say they have no imperative verbs, either.

Increasingly, organizations are turning to the internet not only to disseminate information, but to handle direct interaction, as well. MSU, just down the road, can provide the education courses necessary for certification, so I turned to them, not only to pursue the courses but as an external source of information on certification, since they handle a lot of education majors. MSU has staff willing to answer questions, if you simply must show up in person to pester them, but they really prefer you to apply entirely online. Their web site tells you so. That way, you can start paying tuition without the hassle of learning about fees, tuition, student support, and similar important questions. In exchange for avoiding human contact, you get five benefits: It’s easier. And faster. And there’s no delay in the mail, so it’s faster. And it’s faster. And you can track how soon they’ll be done. Yeah, I’ll bet. Bureaucracies do find things go a lot more smoothly when those pesky patrons are dropped into an automated limbo instead of hanging around trying to find out the answers they actually need, instead of whatever answers the bureaucrats guess patrons are probably looking for. Managers like the system too; it’s a lot cheaper to employ an automated phone tree than actual people with actual training. And it’s faster.

That’d be fine…if automated services were more comprehensive, and more comprehensible. Technical writers are not merely a corporate status symbol; they are essential to any instructions you want people to follow without direct human guidance. If a government web page chintzes on its technical writing budget, then people end up calling the department anyway, negating the whole point of making all that information readily available on the web in the first place. Worse, they call when they’re cranky, having endured half an hour’s frustration of digging through instructions that don’t make any sense. Bet that makes everyone’s day.

Posted by at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple weeks ago, I reported gleefully on my intention to gouge the Caribbean zinc market in the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. I did not know then whether it would work, but considered it worth a try.

Well, it didn’t work. Players were not willing to buy my zinc ore at grossly inflated prices, despite the fact that I was (and remain) the only person selling zinc in the region. In itself, that’s okay. If people were willing to pay that much, chances are some other supplier would already be in that market, and it’s certain that others would enter shortly after seeing me succeed, quickly driving down the price. After all, I’d hoped to feed off of foolish, desperate, or lazy players who hadn’t done their market homework; the absence of such players could be considered a good sign.

Sadly, my scheme didn’t collapse from an absence of foolish buyers, but from an absence of buyers entirely. Nobody bought my zinc ore at modest markups, either, and hardly anyone touched it at cost. And that is a very worrying sign indeed.

See, every MMO depends on a certain basic minimum of players. More is always better—if the population outgrows the server’s processing power, the host company can afford a new server to which players can emigrate. Small can be good, too, if it fosters intimacy, but until and unless an MMO population crosses a certain tipping point, it cannot sustain the community which is the raison d’etre of online games in the first place. Players can log in only to find a half dozen people online, and those unwilling or unable or simply unwelcome to play together. If server population is too low, it can be hard to find a circle of like-minded friends to form a guild. If server population is really low, it can be hard to find someone to play with at all. “Anybody want to go questing anywhere? Send me a personal message. I’m up for anything” is more a cry of desperation than eagerness, and if all the querent gets in reply is silence or a few grunts about level discrepancy, the game is in trouble. Just as people join popular games, whether to play with friends who are already on or simply to see what the excitement is about, people abandon games that have to struggle to reach critical mass. It’s a vicious cycle.

All this is true of any MMO. PotBS is more prone than some titles (notably WoW) to the problems caused by a low population, for two big reasons. First, this is an economic game. If pirates are to have something to prey on, players need to be encouraged to act as prey on occasion, and so they are: the players produce (almost) all their own equipment, and the production trees are robust, so they need to trade a lot. Also, while you can earn cash by hunting other ships, the real money lies in production and sale. Sadly, when too few players are available to pursue all the branches of those robust production trees, the economy grinds to a halt: critical goods are absent, prices swing wildly from lack of liquidity, and buyers and sellers both refuse balanced prices in anticipation of an advantageous swing. If you can’t be sure anyone will buy your rigging at a reasonable price, or if you can’t find a hemp supplier, you stop making rigging altogether. Things fall apart.

The other exacerbating factor is that the military portion of the game rewards high populations. A few skillful and dedicated players can make their mark, certainly, but victory goes to the nation with the most players—even if they can’t win in battle. The power of smugglers (part of the incentive to produce and ship goods) requires no skill and outweighs the power of fighting ships to decide a battle, so the side with the most wins. On my server, and on most servers, the French are the underdogs. Although some players will always be attracted to the losing side, most players like to win, and win easily (not that they’ll admit it), so national imbalances operate on a vicious cycle, too: players on the losing side get discouraged and quit, or even change flags, which throws the balance of power even further.

Maybe things are better for the Spanish and British camps, but I’m in the French camp of the Antigua server, and I see players bleeding away from a population that can’t support itself as it is. And if the French vanish, apart from a few stubborn whipping-boys, how long can a game predicated on a three-cornered struggle survive, even for the winners? At login, a chart lists the dozen or so active servers and the faction populations currently playing on each server: low, medium, or high. The pirates and Brits reach “high” populations on the most active servers, but only during peak hours; most servers don’t reach “high” population levels ever. The French population on my server only hit “medium” for the first time a few days ago—but not because players joined. Rather, the developers redefined population density, cutting the scale in half, so if it took 200 players to reach “medium” population before, it now takes only 100. Such phony image management, without real changes to back it up, is a bad omen, no matter how you slice it. Even the winning sides seem to be slipping, though it’s hard to be sure.

PotBS is a new launch, and going through some reasonable and expected teething problems, but it’s got a good engine. The sea battles are engrossing, and the economy is rich, even moreso than Eve Online and Star Wars Galaxies, or so I’m told. Nonetheless, the game is in trouble simply out of a failure to attract players. I dread it becoming a textbook example of a product that fails despite itself. I’ll keep you posted.

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CNN’s website has a map menu that allows you to examine voting patterns for the primaries by state, displaying who won each district within either party. Tinkering around with this toy, I’ve noticed a peculiar trend in the distribution of votes between Clinton and Obama.

Obama tends strongly to win the smaller, less urbanized states, particularly states that reliably go Republican in the general elections. Although Clinton’s tendency to win in large, urbanized states is less clear—because Illinois, New York, Florida, and Michigan must be set aside as special cases—it’s there: she took California, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. While polls suggest a Michigan vote would be up for grabs, Clinton is expected to win a proper Florida primary, as well, if either is held. Contrary to this voting trend among states, however, Obama tends to win the large, urban precincts within states, while Clinton tends to take the outlying rural districts.

Pundits aren’t addressing this contradiction. The same talking heads who explained Obama’s wins in Iowa, Idaho, and South Carolina in terms of his appeal to moderate Republican and conservative Democratic swing voters explained Clinton’s wins in Ohio and Texas in terms of her appeal to blue-collar conservative Democrats without batting an eye—which shows how far you should trust pundits to interpret elections.

I can’t claim any particular expertise, but my insight is as good as the other pundits, so let me put forth an alternate explanation for these victories: it’s the money.

Clinton has adopted Rove’s 50% plus 1 strategy, targeting her campaign dollars at what she calculates to be just enough to win. Where those dollars were spent, Clinton has scored victories, albeit by narrow margins in many cases. Areas she wrote off turned sharply towards Obama, who has adopted Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.

I take two lessons from this observation. First, anyone who argues that money doesn’t determine elections is out of touch with political reality. Second, that Dean’s strategy is the way to go. Clinton started with 100% name recognition and apparently bottomless war chests. Where she emptied those chests, she’s won, but the sheer inefficiency of overloading select contests while ignoring the rest ended up pissing away what should have been an insuperable lead. Rove put Bush in the White House twice with his 50% plus 1, but it must be noted that he was up against Gore and Kerry, who employed similarly targeted campaigning, and that in both elections, Bush did only get that slimmest of margins. If the Dems had sought to win every state in 2000, as Dean had wanted, instead of writing off anything that wasn’t a liberal stronghold, we might not have had to endure the disaster of Bush the lesser. More to the point, if we don’t want to endure another four years under McCain’s promise to maintain Bush’s policies—tax cuts for the wealthy, pointless war in Iraq, and the kind of business deregulation that’s given us the housing crisis—it’s time for Dems to grab disaffected states whose political leanings they once took for granted.

Posted by at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Texas and Ohio’s primaries have come and gone, and the fight continues to drag on; Clinton’s firewall states performed as she’d planned. But, topical as they are, my thoughts on the matter are going to have to wait, because I can’t let the death of E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of and driving force behind Dungeons & Dragons go by without comment.

I am strongly ambivalent about Gygax. On the one hand, he deserves all kinds of credit for his creation and the industry it spawned. Viewed in hindsight, the original D&D was unbelievably primitive, both as tools and as narrative—but no more so than early television, board games pre-monopoly, or the contrived plots and dialogue of Everyman plays and ancient Greek theater. Simply that they were made, and worked, at all was a monumental and visionary achievement. RPGs have improved incrementally but steadily since D&D was first published, but none of them would exist without that first incredible leap of imagination: that people could play a game as a free-form story, using fictionalized alter-egos as protagonists, instead of as a fixed set of tokens limited to pursuing a fixed goal by fixed means.

That said, I have to speak up, too, about what I think of Gygax himself. Having performed the mighty deed of getting the RPG ball rolling, Gygax soon proved generally poisonous to the industry, fueled by limitless egotism. Gossip has it that egotism drove him to push D&D co-creator Dave Arneson from the business. It was at least partially responsible for a lot of predatory lawsuits, which sought and failed to establish that Gygax owned not only the rights to D&D, but to all role-playing gaming. TSR lawyers, while never reaching the sheer litigative power of, say, Microsoft and Disney, nonetheless had an equal power to destroy competitors unfairly, because new RPG titles usually came from microscopic vanity presses, barely able to retain a single lawyer, if that. Lawsuits, or even the threats of lawsuit, throttled a lot of good ideas and good products in the crib. Gygax’s sexism infected RPGs for far too long. Certainly, ego fueled his loud and perpetual assertion that D&D was the product of intensive playtesting and revision, and that any other RPG was, at best, inferior to D&D, and at worst worthless, an argument that ignores the playtesting that other games got, or could get, and ignores too the way that D&D playtesting often enshrined bad ideas instead of improving upon them. Gygax considered himself the sole authority on what role-playing should be.

Those who listened perpetuated a lot of bad ideas; Gygax thought the only acceptable form of role-playing was the dungeon crawl, with a lot of arbitrary events, especially arbitrary deaths. Death-trap dungeons. Design by random table. Crap-shoot story elements, like indistinguishable poisons and poitions, the Deck of Many Things, and NPCs who would aid or betray the party without motive, and certainly offering no way to tell the difference before they had. Rules lawyering, because Gygax’s official rules were more important than common sense. A presumption that an RPG narrative must progress from weakness and anonymity to earth-cracking personal power. A presumption that the only worthy motivators were personal power, as measured in money, gear, and experience points. A presumption of player-GM hostility, and that players had to be kept in line by any means necessary, including death without saving throw, powerful NPCs who just happened to be ready to save the town from violent PCs but not to help the PCs save the town from an external threat, and some very weird monsters indeed. (Rust monster, anyone?) Eventually, and reluctantly, Gygax stepped down from his pedestal (or, if you prefer, was replaced by people voicing opinions that could not be denied), but not before he did a lot of damage to the craft of RPGs, to TSR, and to the RPG community as a whole.

Still, no matter what gamer geeks think of D&D or of Gygax himself, we owe him big-time for creating the RPG, and indirectly for spinoffs like MMOs, video games like Final Fantasy and Diablo, and an awful lot of mediocre fantasy novels. Supreme egotism is almost a necessity for successful visionaries. Without that conviction and desire for public acknowledgement, visionary projects would never enter the public consciousness. Just as we must accept the less admirable baggage that came with Orson Wells, Pablo Picasso, and Thomas Edison, we must accept Gygax’s shortcomings. He deserves the praise he is receiving in memoriam. Anyone who doubts that is referred to the sheer number of fans who are ready to speak at length about rolling a 20 just when they needed it, their eccentric gnomish ranger/illusionist, or how a bunch of 5th-level characters managed to off the evil wizard with three tons of iron rations, not to mention those of us who are still playing D&D and its many offspring. (My favorite memorial is Crisper’s proposal that “...every gamer nerd on the planet should chip in some dough and we should build Gary Gygax an enormous tomb filled with the deadliest traps ever devised.” Nothing could be more appropriate.)

Good-bye, Gary. Thanks for a lot of unforgettable experiences.

Posted by at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not long ago, our bathroom sink developed a drip, which soon progressed to a proper leak, and I fixed it. That may not seem like any big deal to you, but I, like Dave Barry, suffer from an absence of what he calls the “Mr. Goodwrench gene.” I am not handy with tools, electronics, modeling kits, or basically any kind of construction or repair work. I blame a lifetime of mathematical abstraction: all my education has presumed arbitrarily strong attachments, an absence of friction, point masses, and other fictions of convenience. There’s a world of difference between an idealized joint that won’t loosen and wobble under stress and a real carpenter’s joint, which will. The only thing a semester of shop class taught me, back in ’82, was to fear power tools; I figured if our shop teacher (who was—no joke—named “Mr. Stump”) could lose a finger to a circular saw, I had no business being near one. So it’s emotionally rewarding when I can fix something properly. It makes me feel manful.

I have a bit of an advantage when it comes to plumbing: while in college, I earned a modest salary as a clerk in the plumbing department of Menard’s hardware. Exposure to the many bits and pieces of a plumber’s trade is nothing like being exposed to plumbing, but I did pick up enough to make educated guesses when the need arises.

But common sense and educated guesses only take you so far. Case in point: the sink under discussion. A drip turning into a leak suggests a bad seal, quite possibly due to a dried, cracked or otherwise damaged gasket. So with considerable effort, I unhooked the faucet from the basin and looked for a way in to where the cold-water gasket would be. To all appearances, this meant removing a large, plastic plate from the bottom of the faucet casing, which in turn required a square bit, which I do not own, because god forbid the manufacturer should employ a Philips-head screw like everyone else on the planet. I trekked down to the neighborhood hardware store, which had no square bits, and had to travel to Home Depot, which did, but only for power drills, which I also do not own. I made do with a pair of pliers, twisting the bit manually. After removing the plate and looking around inside the faucet casing, I eventually concluded one could not get into the guts of the faucet this way. Relying more on logic than mechanics, I eventually determined where a carefully concealed secret compartment could be found, and found it, exposing Philips-head screws that held the taps together. Removing these allowed me to look over the gaskets and mechanisms at the heart of the faucet but revealed nothing: the gasket was whole and flexible, the solid parts showed no wear, and there was no evidence of foreign material lodging where it would interfere with the seal. I dropped by the local hardware store nevertheless, and bought a little box of gaskets as replacements. Reassembling the whole faucet unit, I found it once again worked properly. Knowing now where the secret compartment was, it was easy to put back the original gasket, so I did, and the faucet continued to work properly.

The only problem was that repeated twisting had loosened the screw that held the cold-water tap together. Loosening this broke the seal on the tap. If I’d known what to do from the start, the whole operation wouldn’t have taken me five minutes: open the secret compartment, tighten the screw, close the secret compartment. But I didn’t know what to do from the start, so I only got there in a roundabout fashion, taking five hours, exposing me to Home Depot (which I hate), and costing $9 or so.

I still count it a success. For one thing, $9 is way less than a professional plumber would charge, and, while he might take two minutes to do the job, we’d nonetheless be waiting on him for five hours to arrive and do it. Proving able to do it at all is a victory for a general education and general smarts. This is my third successful plumbing repair, and Eileene, who won’t trust me with other handiwork, has determined that I do basically know what I’m doing when it comes to pipes.

Posted by at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Saturday, Eileene and I attended the New York International Children’s Film Festival, an annual event that has to stretch over three weekends because there’s too much material to squeeze into one. We won’t be able to attend the whole thing (nor would I particularly want to), so we limited ourselves to two collections of short films, mostly animated, and a full-length Japanese animated feature titled Five Centimeters Per Second. Of the three, the morning collection of shorts was far and away the best.

This was somewhat surprising, given that each event comes with a recommendation for audience age, and our favorite had the lowest recommended age bracket of the three: ages 5 to 10. One might expect to find more sophisticated content in films for older kids, and with it material more likely to please adults, as well. But this was not at all the case. Why?

I don’t know. But that’s not going to stop me from offering two observations that bear on the answer.

First, the short films selected for the 8-14 bracket weren’t merely material that 8-14-year-olds could understand; it was material specifically aimed at pre-teens, with several shorts revolving around kids subverting authority (and not always in a healthy way, either). Teachers in particular were treated as villains and/or targets of ridicule. The shorts in this group were more likely to include morals, and when they did, presented them with a subtlety designed for early adolescents, and thus too preachy adult sensibilities. In contrast, the films selected for the 5-10 bracket were far more playful, and far more eager to do something that looked really cool, instead of getting The Message across. It was as though the films for 8-14-year-olds were, like their audience, so worried about looking uncool that they stuck with safer, but far less entertaining, moralizing cliché.

Second, many of the shorts for older kids fell into the trap of believing that films about teens and pre-teens are necessarily films for teens and pre-teens, and vice versa. This attitude is pervasive in our culture, and I’ve complained about its effect on books. Whoever selected Five Centimeters Per Second makes the same mistake; the movie revolves around a couple of high school students, who remain in love for years after circumstances separate them to remote homes in Japan. Although teens can certainly understand the theme of coming to terms with romantic loss on some level, the story is obviously presented from an adult’s perspective, someone who has experienced his own loss and seen the stages of grief we experience, and can examine them from a sufficiently mature distance to add perspectives the protagonists themselves could not possibly see. It’s a film about teens, but not for teens; it’s for adults who have gotten past a broken heart and can now look back on teen romance with sadder but wiser eyes. By contrast, the shorts selected for younger kids make no particular effort to portray kids: two are about small children, and two are about older ones, but the rest are about abstracted clay balls, an astronaut, a goat, microbes, Disney’s Goofy, video game icons, and a bee. Instead of trying to spin the story to a target audience, they just try to tell a story and see where it goes.

By stepping away from the audience and trying to do something cool, they end up doing something cool, and where inserting a moral would be easy, they turn aside to moral ambiguity, a situation that defuses the moral’s relevance, or simply end on a note of “Oh my god. What happens now?” These endings were far more satisfying to jaded adults. In both ways, self-conscious marketing produced an inferior product, while making art for everyone ended up producing an inferior product for everyone, including children.

I don’t know whether the shorts we saw will be available elsewhere any time soon. But you might want to look for some of our favorites online or, if you’re lucky, in an extraordinarily good video outlet:

Crank Balls:Three grouchy clay balls are infected with happiness, albeit a form of happiness which is somewhat disturbing in its own right.
X: An astronaut gets snatched up by an alien…something, and is dismayed to find it belching out copies of him and his ship, all of whom insist they are the original.
Zhiharka: A little girl, ignoring the warnings of her guardian cat and bird, plays with a fox intent on eating her. Note how Zhiharka is neither the hapless heroine of Grimm’s fairy tales nor the self-empowering heroine of modern rewrites, but simply an ebullient little girl with a short attention span.
Shhh…: A boy in a library learns a trick from his grandfather, irked at noise-makers. With a flick of his thumb, he can make people disappear. Sort of.

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