August 2009 Archives

So Obama is making more conciliatory noises on health care, hinting that he’s willing to give up universal coverage, the feature he considered essential to reform, in order to bring people on board. How long until he and the Democratic majority realize they’re dealing with opponents who will not compromise, at all, ever, over anything, and that every concession wins no votes, but merely offers another opportunity to move the supposed “middle ground” farther and farther away?

The other side of this debate isn’t composed of reasonable dissenters and a loyal opposition; it’s composed of a coalition bound and determined (for a variety of motives) to see reform fail entirely and the crazy 27%. Reform will never win over the former; as Mencken dryly observed, it’s hard to get someone to understand something when his income depends on not understanding it. A similar logic applies to a party whose future votes depend on their opponents being unable to enact a hugely popular program. Nor, I suppose, will reform ever win over the crazy 27%; by definition, they have left the realm of facts and arguments and objective assessment.

But if Dems can find the long-lost nerve to go ahead and push the program through, they could get the crazy 27% to shut up. Just go ahead and pass some kind of reform. Don’t worry about bringing the opposition aboard first; they wouldn’t come aboard for a pink Cadillac and a sackful of diamonds with the personal invitation of Jehovah and a chorus of angels. Just go ahead and pass the reform you want without them.

And when, six months or a year or five years down the road, grandma isn’t executed by death panels, and nobody is forcibly removed from the health care they currently enjoy, and those who sign on begin showing the 72% approval ratings we see for Medicare, the debate will be over.

This approach comes with a second, arguably superior, benefit: the crazies will be even further marginalized. Maybe we’ll even see some of the obstructionist politicians voted out of office for standing on foolish positions, though I wouldn’t hold my breath. Indulging them isn’t working; it just encourages them to push harder. Mocking them isn’t working; it just fuels their rage and increases turnout. Let’s try ignoring them and governing sensibly, and see how that flies with the remaining 73%.

On my first drive to our temporary quarters here in Holmdel while our house in Montclair is being refurbished, my windshield got smashed. Happily, it happened on the passenger’s seat. It took me a few minutes to realize what had happened; it was nearly midnight after an RPG session, so dark, and the sound of it wasn’t what I’d expect—much more “pop” than “crash,” followed by the soft patter of glass bits settling on the seat below. And the pop sounded like it had come from the floor, not the windshield, so my first thought was that a tightly closed plastic bottle I use for water had exploded, or possibly imploded, under some kind of temperature-pressure change down in the seat well and sprinkled fragments of plastic around.

Admittedly, that didn’t seem likely even at the time; having set off a few nitrogen bombs in my life, I’m used to plastic bottles splitting along a sort of corkscrew seam, not shattering. I just didn’t have any better ideas. But shortly, I felt a warm spot on my knuckles and traced it up to a tiny, tiny vent of hot summer air coming trough a tiny, tiny hole, surrounded by a circle of shattered windshield about eight inches across.

I don’t know what caused it, specifically. Some piece of debris knocked from the overpass as I drove beneath, perhaps, or a small chunk of concrete crumbling loose, or maybe some punk trying to get drivers on the Garden State Parkway killed before summer is over and he has to go back to classes. (If it’s this last, I hope he’s caught and strung up by his thumbs.)

Still, it’s pretty neat to see just how effective protections against shattering glass can be. The windshield looks like glass, feels like glass, but what we touch is all plastic, a layer of stretchy film that does its job extremely well. Can’t cost more than a few bucks per car, and that more for the extra step on the assembly line than for the materials. Whoever came up with the idea in the first place deserved a whopping big Christmas bonus in his paycheck that year.

Listening to reports on the Afghani national elections is rather exciting, moreso than even the Iraqi elections, despite the similarities.

The Iraqi elections were held in the same flush of excitement among voters, and with the same eager invitation of the national government, and were marked by the same “plucky little country that could” anecdotes about how the country is trying to work around limitations like villages so isolated that they can only receive ballots by donkey.

It’s all very inspiring, despite the very serious problems. The elections can’t be free and fair, despite the government’s best intentions, because the government can’t guarantee the safety of voters. Worse, voters’ safety can be preserved only unevenly among the various districts, so those least heard are likely to be those with the biggest reason to dissent. News reports on violence at the polls are to be suppressed, for fear of voters staying home—perhaps the best that can be done in the circumstances, though any form of suppression of accurate reporting is at best suspect, and sets a bad precedent. I note, too, that Kharzai is expected to win, along with his supporters generally. A generous attitude towards free elections is much easier for leaders who expect to win free elections, and that attitude might change come the next election cycle. Still, allowing independent observers to report on, and ultimately to judge, the elections’ many shortcomings indicates a desire to do right—something even the US doesn’t do. (We refused UN election monitors any special privileges here in the US, despite increasing evidence and complaints of vote tampering in the past decade…)

But on top of all that Afghanistan itself might do, these elections are more interesting because the occupying power—us—is pointedly avoiding any interference in the elections’ execution or in the public messages, and seems willing to recognize the results of the elections, no matter who wins. Again, that’s somewhat easier to do when the faction with reason to thank the US is expected to win, but the Obama administration seems much more prepared to let democracy run its course than the Bush administration ever was. The Bush administration’s attitude toward free and fair elections, in Palestine and Pakistan as well as Iraq, was that they are free and fair only if a pro-US faction comes out on top; if the “bad guys” win, the elections couldn’t have been free and fair. QED. There can be no doubt that, had Iraqi elections gone a direction that displeased the White House, the Bush administration would simply continue running the country in its capacity as occupying power as it saw fit…in the interests of democracy, of course. Knowing that the elections aren’t just aiming for democracy, but that the results might actually matter, makes the early Afghani efforts in real democracy far more exciting than those of Iraq ever could have been.

Postscript: So the elections didn’t exhibit a certain unavoidable minimum of fraud, but plenty and to spare. And Obama is stuck with the dilemma of backing a murderous crook or abandoning the country to chaos. Pity. It won’t be the first time America’s faced that choice, and it’s looking like it won’t be the first time we’ve gone with the murderous crook.

I registered for my classes today, putting an end to my summer. Oh, the weather is summer hot—hotter than the unseasonably cool peak of the season this year—and promises to continue. Classes don’t start until September, so I still have free time. But registration triggered a mental shift for me, anticipating the start of the school year in a magnified version of the way that Sunday night doesn’t seem like the weekend, while Friday evening does. For the rest of the summer, my attention will be focused on its end.

My parents will recognize that inability to live in the moment. I typically visit twice a year, around six days at a time. And roughly twelve hours before I have to leave again to catch my plane, I begin to shut down the personal contact mentality of the visit and think of nothing but packing and timing and making sure tickets are in hand. Can’t help it. And yes, I’ve tried.

Zen is supposed to help with that, training one to be in the moment all the time. Unfortunately, really succeeding at a zen mentality is liable to leave me entirely unable to meet deadlines. Not a formula for success in a guy trying to reconstruct work habits.

Last night we watched District 9, something of a debut film for director Neill Blomkamp. Before watching, I was told the critics don’t quite know what to make of it; after watching, I understand why. The film doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of itself. Somewhere near the halfway mark, it takes a sharp turn from social commentary to action shoot-‘em-up, and feels like halves of two different movies spliced together like the genetics of the accidental human-alien protagonist.

District 9 opens with a documentary style, expert interviewees discussing the arrival of aliens to earth and hinting at the tragedy we are about to see. (The experts speak as to a fictional audience that already knows the outlines of events.) The aliens are neither the benevolent overlords nor the technologically advanced conquerors we’ve come to expect from science fiction: something has gone wrong on the ship, and the aliens are confused, malnourished, unable even to exit their ship until humans cut their way in. One expert interviewee suggests the aliens are born into a specialized caste, like hive insects, and something has happened to the intelligent “leader” caste while leaving the docile, stupid, but technically proficient “workers” intact. The aliens, unable to operate on their own, quickly become wards of the state, ghetto-ized in a sprawling shanty-town outside Johannesburg, feared and detested in equal parts by humans and derogatorily dubbed “prawns.” The movie begins by portraying the South African government’s attempt to move a million or more prawns from the shanty-town to an internment camp farther from Johannesburg, taking advantage of the prawns’ lack of intelligence and organization, following along with the team handling the affair.

This first half of the movie is terrific: intelligent and disturbing, masterfully treating the prawns as truly alien and vaguely menacing even with humanity’s collective boot on its neck yet simultaneously letting the prawns stand in for dispossessed people everywhere—apartheid blacks in Africa, ghettoized Jews in Europe, untouchables in India, migrant workers in America, North Korean coolies in China and South Korea, Aborigines in Australia.

Then something goes wrong and the contemptible bureaucrat leading the effort to herd the prawns into camps becomes infected with invasive, assimilative DNA—and the story degenerates into the kind of half-baked back story we see in violent video games. Turns out an eeeeevil arms corporation is performing inhumane experiments on prawns and humans to perfect a hybrid that can use alien weapons, which only respond to alien flesh on the trigger. (Yes. The secret of space travel is before us, and the powers that be are only interested in slightly deadlier personal weaponry.) And the bureaucrat, with an alien arm growing out of his shoulder becomes first experimental subject, then desperate escapee, then high-tech supersoldier fighting on behalf of the lone prawn with both intelligence and tools to get the alien mothership working. This unique prawn turns out to be noble and kind and a good daddy, and the moral ambiguities of the movie’s first half get flattened along with the prawns’ genuinely alien nature into a cardboard cutout of goodies-versus-baddies. The villain’s henchman gloats over fallen foes and revels in his sadism, just to make sure you get the point.

The tone of the second half is no accident. District 9 followed a twisty path to its creation, and Blomkamp was originally tapped to make a movie based on popular video game Halo, until the producers got cold feet and pulled the plug on the project when they discovered it was not Peter Jackson, but merely one of Jackson’s filmmaker friends who would be directing. Jackson tapped Blomkamp to do the film in the first place because of a brilliant independent short depicting aliens as unwanted welfare bums, and, when the Halo project fell through, encouraged Blomkamp to expand the short into a full length movie.

I don’t know exactly how the two got melded into a single film. Perhaps some new production company or investor demanded some action for the fans. Perhaps Blomkamp—writer as well as director—didn’t have time to expand the short properly, or perhaps he was unable to let his work on Halo go, or just decided to cut corners by sweeping the two projects together. But the split halfway through is obvious, and, because the really good stuff comes first, deeply disappointing.

District 9 is still worth watching. The gun-blazing conclusion is competently filmed, and would have been an adequate popcorn flick on its own. The social commentary is brilliant, and worth the price of admission alone. If the film was intended to introduce Blomkamp to the world and earn him investors, it succeeded; District 9 has generated the needed buzz, and I certainly want to see what he can do with both a budget and freedom from the limitations of a licensing agreement for something that shouldn’t have been a movie in the first place.

We bought the complete Middleman series on DVD. I can already use the word “complete” because the show was cancelled after a single season—the common fate of clever, novel television.

Middleman, if you haven’t seen it, is a close relative to the old Batman serial, or MiB: a hypercompetent duo dispatches a variety of supernatural, extra-terrestrial, and hypertechnological threats to humanity, all the while keeping their efforts out of the public eye and tossing off one-liners like grain strewn on an open field. The comedy consists almost entirely of pop- and geek-culture reference humor, with a bit of self-parody mixed in for good measure. The humor can get fairly risqué for the ABC Family Channel, but they can get away with it because it’s reference humor: if you realize they’re talking about something naughty, your mind was already exposed to the corruption before you sat down to watch. The dialogue is sharp and obviously written by geeks with an encyclopedic appetite for all things geeky.

So obviously it had to be taken off the air. We were pretty cheesed off at the news.

In a way, though, the show may have been done a left-handed sort of favor. This kind of reference humor has a limited life-span; you can only cover so many shows enshrined in the Fanboy Hall of Fame before you run out, start repeating yourself, or begin picking among material a little too obscure for the jokes. Lasting only one season, Middleman will never have the opportunity to go stale. But frankly, I’d prefer a few more seasons of really talented TV to being spared a shark-jumping. There’s disappointment either way, and waiting for the show to jump the shark leaves you with a lot more good stuff to reminisce over.

I loaded an old copy of Pharaoh into my laptop, and am slowly working through the campaigns. Doing so has reminded me how frustrating early titles in the city-builder series could be, before the refinements of Zeus and Emperor came out, and especially when buggy behavior still hiccupped through the system.

(I’m having a lot of trouble, particularly, with my granaries simply shutting down for no apparent reason as a scenario progresses. They have easy access to labor—forced access, really, as I build them between huts, so whichever way the labor contractor goes to find workers, he finds some—and there’s a labor surplus, and I’ve set food production and distribution to a high labor priority, so the granaries should stay staffed 24/7. But after several years, labor abruptly stops appearing in the granaries. And without labor, the granaries don’t work. Without working granaries, the markets can’t get food. Without food, housing collapses disastrously to primitive huts, my labor pool evaporates, and the whole scenario grinds to a halt. Very frustrating.)

Nevertheless, it’s rewarding to see the granaries fill, the treasury grow, the houses improve, and the pyramids rise from the desert. After a brief setup phase, I hardly have to pay attention; there’s a long delay between building a functioning city and victory, simply because it takes so long to accumulate materials for a monument, especially if the materials must be imported from limited suppliers. I can let the game run in the background while I work on other stuff for the local library.

It’s this, I suspect, which condemned the city-builder series to the lower shelves, despite a rich structure worthy of the famed SimCity series, which, in part, it deliberately emulates. Not enough action. Most people don’t go in for a game that you can let run for a half hour without fiddling with it. Other titles in the series were more engaging, but Pharaoh makes a virtue of watching the pyramids slowly rise. I find it peaceful. Like bonsai, it’s a slow art form, sculpting a pixilated city which responds to your input, but will only be bent so far—if you push the system in a direction it doesn’t want to go, the city withers and dies. It’s an exercise in patience and adaptability unlike the control and conquest more common to computer games, and good for the soul.

We’re moving out of the house for several weeks, while our bedroom-attic is restructured. Among other things, this means we won’t be able to keep careful track of the ants crawling about. Apparently the poison traps did a good job of decimating the nests, because the ant traffic has dropped off dramatically. But the traps didn’t wipe out the nests entirely, because the ants never entirely disappeared. (It’s possible the barrier of poison granules contributed, too, but the continuing low-level infestation makes me doubt that; ants are amazingly efficient at exploiting small entry points, and that kind of barrier should be an all-or-nothing proposition.) The critters still converge pretty quickly on foods they find appealing, and have found our garbage can more than once, sometimes by alternate routes when the old path had vanished.

So I’m curious how the ants will fare while we’re out of the house. They aren’t getting directly into packaged food in the fridge or cupboards, just the garbage can or countertop spills. While we’re gone, the ants won’t have garbage or spills to draw them in, so I expect the invasion to peter out. But it will be difficult to distinguish a dropoff in ants due to our absence from a dropoff in ants due to advancing cold weather. Winter won’t hit before we return, but fall will, and with it a general reduction in all insect activity. I’ll be able to keep tabs on the general (expected) reduction when I drop in to get the mail or check on the attic’s progress, but I won’t be around to observe emerging patterns, so there’s no way to make useful judgements about whether the poisons are working, and how well, and whether to expect the ants back next year, and whether more drastic measures are called for.

I bring this up because it’s my own microcosmic version of the scientist’s quandary on matters of political significance. Ideally, we should be settling questions of global warming, habitat destruction, the threat of swine flu, and so on through scientific investigation. Unfortunately for the cause of truth in politics, the political cycle operates much faster than science. Science enjoys the authority it does by virtue of taking slow, careful study: taking data over the course of several seasons, or even decades, to weed short-term spikes out of broader data trends; checking and rechecking the results through peer review; throwing results out entirely and starting over when even tiny irregularities disrupt the experiment, and starting fresh with every new question to be answered. Scientific study could only produce faster results by abandoning the elaborate safeguards against error on which its reliability depends.

Which leaves even compelling scientific arguments vulnerable to counterattack in political fora. An experiment is designed to answer a very specific question. Change “Is the sulfur content of diesel fuel more destructive to animal ability to breathe the air than increased acidity from CO2 emissions?” to “Is the sulfur content of diesel fuel more destructive to human ability to breathe the air than increased acidity from CO2 emissions?” and the scientists have to start over. Obstructionists with stunted ethics—which aren’t hard to find lobbying Congress, or bloviating on Fox “news,” or stampeding town hall meetings—need only harp on a slightly different question—a difference the casual voter won’t distinguish—and the debate falls apart. Even worse, propaganda machines that will cheerfully, shamelessly, bare-facedly lie can crank out those lies much faster than scientific examination can dismiss them. The lies don’t have to stand up to scrutiny; they merely have to keep people confused long enough for legislation to be passed or defeated.

So, much of the time, voters end up deciding who they trust and just accepting that viewpoint, rather than trying to sift through the evidence. Like our ants, questions of greater import may have to be decided before all the information is in. And sadly, there’s always a few people with scientific credentials willing to whore themselves out to the propaganda machines, so titles and degrees mean little to nothing when evaluating a talking head. One valuable tool for deciding which experts to trust on matters of politically sensitive science is to trust the guys who carefully isolate the results of their research from educated guesswork. A trustworthy scientist will be reluctant to step beyond his own research or that of colleagues he properly understands, and, if he bows to an interviewer’s pressure to hazard a guess, will be careful to admit he’s moving into guessing territory. The untrustworthy ones don’t bother with the niceties of qualifying their claims. That’s about the best I can do to sift gold from dross in expert opinion.

I got dragged to the G. I. Joe movie last night. Eileene pretended it was at Stan and Ella’s invitation, but really it was Eileene who wanted to watch it. She’d been influenced by movie reviews whose consensus was that, while nothing like high art, Joe wasn’t nearly as bad as you might expect, good acting offsetting a bad script.

Well, it ain’t true. I think the reviewers allowed themselves to think the movie was better than it was, because they’d expected it to be so dreadfully bad. And, apart from an expertly choreographed fight between ten-year-olds in a monestary kitchen, it’s just plain bad.

Loud, too. Very, very loud. Presumably noise was considered an adequate substitute for story line. And the acting that’s supposed to make up for a bad script? Well… Joseph Gordon Levitt is a wonderful actor, and we love him to death, but we also love Jeremy Irons despite his appearance in Dungeons and Dragons (the movie). Yeah. Jonathan Pryce plays the US President, complete with British accent. Yeah. And there’s lesser performances, as well. Ohhh, yeah.

The only room for contention lies in the perennial argument over what qualifies as camp. Corny is bad, and Joe is definitely corny…but done cleverly, with a wink to the audience, corn can be transformed into camp, and the line between the two is nebulous, a matter of debate and individual opinion. Joe often dances along that edge; whether its on the sidewalk or slipped into the gutter at any given moment is open to debate. And sometimes, Joe just gathers up its desert camo skirts and flings itself down an open sewer. The movie is full of stupid: the climax involves a secret base that is to be destroyed by blowing up the tons of polar ice beneath which it hovers—the north pole being composed of a special kind of ice that sinks when shattered. Plot immunity runs rampant: soldiers shoot targets clad in impervious super-armor while ignoring the unarmored Baroness who is clearly giving the orders, and Rip Cord is invited into the Joes despite failing the entry tests because…um…because he is. Every action figure gets its camera time, whether or not the camera should be paying attention to something more important, instead.

So, to help you decide whether you might find G. I. Joe entertaining camp or just plain stupid, I’ve devised a simple, one-question test. The movie contains the following line, delivered without any visible sense of irony:

“Oh my god. They’re going to use him to weaponize the warheads.”

Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the movie, right there. How does that line make you feel? If it makes you die a little inside, steer clear. If, on the other hand, you don’t see anything wrong with it, well, “Yo, Joe!” to you, too.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon playing web games, specifically the subgenre of point-and-click puzzles called “locked room” or “room escape” or simply “escape” games. These games plunk you into a locked room, and challenge you to escape, usually by rummaging around in the desk drawers and under the cushions of the couch for useful tools like screwdrivers, keys, and scraps of paper with combinations written on them.

These games don’t offer much variety; I suspect they are so common because they’re easy to design and code. Sometimes you get an amnesiac narrator nattering on about how confused he is. The puzzles are almost identical, the only real difference being the skill with which the coder calls your attention to significant items...and the range of competence in this crucial design element is astounding.

Graphic adventures have been with us for a few decades now, long enough for everyone with the slightest interest in making or playing them to be familiar with “find the pixel” and know it is a grievous sin in game design. “Find the pixel” is a puzzle that requires you to click on the appropriate pixel with inadequate (or totally absent) motivation. Clicking on the right test tube among an entire warehouse-sized lab is a typical example, or picking up the right fist-sized rock from a desert landscape, or clicking on the dollar bill that just looks like a tiny, tiny smudge of green because the dollar bill is almost entirely concealed under a stack of books. The pros work to set important objects apart from the background, isolating them from background noise and highlighting them with high-contrast colors; alternately, they can provide instructions elsewhere, like a photo of the chemistry lab with the appropriate test tube circled. The amateurs don’t. Often they simply expect you to click on a spot that doesn’t look any different from the rest of the room—in locked room games, the seam where the wall meets the floor is particularly popular, being the vantage point from which you can look under furniture or behind potted plants. (In one game I played yesterday, one end of one support strut of a plain-looking end table slides out of the rest of the strut to become a screwdriver. Of course! Don’t all your end tables conceal screwdrivers? No, the other three struts don’t do anything at all. Don’t be silly. Why would you need a second screwdriver?) The real amateurs may even require you to click that spot several times, as you might batter down a door that doesn’t give on the first slam. If the first click doesn’t offer the player some feedback like crumbling plaster or bending hinges, he’s pretty well screwed, because the rational response is to think, “Well, that didn’t work; I should try something else.”

Naturally, badly designed games aren’t any fun to play. But they do more damage than merely wasting your time. They also make other, similar games less enjoyable!

Imagine sitting down to one of these games and clicking about a bit, making some small progress on the obvious elements, and eventually getting stuck. Ideally, this is the most stimulating part of a puzzle game, when you are forced to stretch your perceptions or find creative approaches to obstacles. In a good game, persistence will pay off, and success will be all the sweeter for it. In a bad game, though, a reasonable amount of persistence won’t get you anywhere, because the pixel you need to click is unfairly hidden. Sorry, you didn’t click the proper square inch of this blank wall. Barring fabulous luck or compulsive clicking that borders on a mental disorder, you must either quit and walk away from the game or look up the answer in one of the walkthroughs readily available online, probably feeling slightly soiled. Chances are your conscience will soon be assuaged by an answer so unreasonable that you would never in a million years have considered it.

But! There’s always the chance that you’re playing a well-made game, in which case you’ve just spoiled a good, challenging puzzle by looking up the answer too quickly. (Or by walking away from the puzzle, forever unsure whether the payoff was just one small mental leap away.) And there’s no way to tell which you’re dealing with without looking up the answer, by which time it’s too late.

Badly designed puzzles spoil the trust between player and designer that good puzzles both deserve and depend on. I wish the low-grade coders would think about that before deciding they, too, can make a complete game by duplicating everyone else’s puzzle elements, shuffling them into a new order, and padding out the “challenge” by replacing actual, clever puzzle design with a shortage of information.

My laptop is an IBM ThinkPad. In addition to the standard selection of PC keys, on/off switch, and disk eject button, there’s seven buttons whose function is a little more obscure.

Two buttons tucked off on the left edge for each of two slots right next to them, eject cards from those slots after the card has been inserted. A wireless link card fits in either slot, but two wireless connections seems redundant, so maybe a variety of boosters can fit in there—additional memory, graphics cards, I don’t know.

Three more buttons control the built-in speakers: volume up, volume down, and mute. They have little icons on them: as long as you can recognize a trapezoid as a speaker, the up arrow, down arrow, and negation bar make their purpose obvious. If you can’t, then pushing them causes a bright green message to flash on the screen telling you how the sound has been adjusted, so that’s okay.

A sixth button is a little knob without a label that sends the laptop into sleep mode—which, for this laptop, might as well be called “off,” given its reluctance to wake up. I discovered this button’s purpose the hard way by pushing it. Too late, I realized that there’s a little knob affixed to the screen panel that pushes it when the case is closed, and had to restart my laptop entirely.

And then there’s the button off to the side of the speaker controls, a flat rectangle that matches them in size and shape, but is set a little apart, and is black rather than gray. It’s labeled “ThinkPad,” which doesn’t explain much of anything at all. Pushing it doesn’t seem to do much of anything at all, either. My natural expectations were for something akin to a power switch—maybe to return to the login screen, or to wake the laptop from sleep mode, which, as I’ve noted, is a deep, deep sleep, but no luck. Something that would access a technical menu of use only for getting into the figurative guts of the machine would make sense, too. But no, it doesn’t seem to do anything, whether the machine is on or off or somewhere in between.

I have no manual; the ThinkPad was a hand-me-down from my father-in-law. So I asked him. He didn’t know either, despite a lifetime handling a company’s varied and evolving computer network. It’s like Steven Wright’s joke about a light switch that didn’t do anything. Maybe if I pressed it more often, I’d get a call from a woman in Germany telling me to cut it out.

I realized as I wrote yesterday’s essay that I don’t have the vocabulary for describing MMOs. All I really have is the vocabulary for describing World of Warcraft.

Technically, I’ve been exposed to MMOs other than WoW. In college, I dabbled with a MUD for a bit—MUDs being the direct ancestors of the modern MMO, lacking only the graphics. I dipped my toes into a more freeform MUSH for only a week or two before realizing it wasn’t going to do anything faster than I could write my own novel. I tinkered with Star Wars Galaxies for literally a few days, likewise Warhammer 40,000, and the playtest for Champions Online; my interest in Conan lasted a day. I enjoyed Pirates of the Burning Sea until it became clear nobody but me was playing—rather giving the lie to “massive multiplayer”—and gave up. None of these experiences lasted long enough to pick up the games’ vocabulary, however, neither in a literal nor in a metaphorical sense: I don’t know firsthand how the social structures operate, or what the biggest challenges are like, or what the developers really committed to implementing.

To date, WoW was my first and only real exposure to an MMO, a couple years during which I joined 40-man raids, joined and even led 5-man groups, reached the level cap, tried (and sucked enormously at) PvP, and generally saw what there was to see. As a result, I think of all MMOs in relation to WoW, my first and only real entry into MMOs. In my mind, every other MMO is “like WoW, except for elements X, Y, and Z.” I judge other MMOs on scales like graphic quality, silliness, degree of violence, PvP/PvE balance, and so on against WoW; thus, games that are more playful than WoW are “silly” in my mind, while games that are less playful are “gritty.”

This limited point of view may not lead me far down the path of inaccurate descriptions. I gather that Blizzard did very little innovation for WoW, at least in the broad strokes of how an MMO works. They didn’t so much produce anything new in relation to Ultima Online and Everquest as fine-tune the familiar mechanics very, very well, turning out a game so polished and accessible and downright fun that all but the most specialized palates are now playing WoW—all other MMOs are treated (fairly or not) almost axiomatically as a niche market. Between adopting the common vocabulary of MMOs in the first place and then growing to become the popular conception of “what an MMO is,” I can probably get away with comparing every other MMO to WoW; anyone who cares will have seen enough of WoW to share the vocabulary and point of reference.