Author: admin

I was talking with some students today about massively multiplayer on-line role playing games (MMORPG’s) such as Ultima Online and Worlds of Warcraft. One of the students was complaining about a particular characteristic of most MMORPGs: Unlike single player games, the sheer number of participants in an MMORPG does not allow the average player to be a heroic figure.

Even leveling players up, as the Star Wars games did, doesn’t solve the problem. In a world filled with Jedi Knights, it’s not all that special to be a Jedi Knight.

I argued that the answer might be to go the other way — rather than think big, think small. In real life, we are all heroes in our own story, and for the most part our respective heroic journeys through life do not ruin it for each other.

This quality of shared human experience has found its way into other art forms. For example, great novelists are able to weave together perhaps dozens of characters, each of whom is the center of his or her own unique dramatic arc. The key is not to make the individual characters very large, but rather to make the world large enough to accommodate all of those simultaneous dramatic journeys.

I think Will Wright’s original version of THE SIMS got it right. You may have been merely a suburban home-owner, but in your own way you were on a quest, which felt quite important to you as a player. Eric Zimmerman did something similar with Diner Dash. Your character may just have been a harried waitress, but as that waitress you were very much the center of your corner of the universe.

If THE SIMS had kept with this strategy when it went multi-player (rather than morphing, rather unfortunately, into a chat-space), it could have been a prime example of a game consisting of multiple intersecting heroic narratives. You would have been aware of other players as home-owners down the block, or perhaps as co-workers or parents of your children’s friends, but each of you would have been able to experience this shared world as the center of your own personal narrative.

Maybe there is a MMORPG out there that does this well already. If so, please let me know. After all (in the immortal words of Dr. Horrible): Everyone’s a hero, in their own way.

I generally have a very long laundry list of things I need to do. Phone meetings, papers to review, proposals to work on — to say nothing of those “other” chores like laundry and paying bills and tidying up the place.

Usually it’s a mad scramble, with various things falling by the wayside, not quite getting done, or getting done just well enough. Sadly, the activities that get shoved off the list are often the really fun ones. After all, the thing about chores that must be done, is that they must be done. Chalk it up to the cruel logic of tautology.

But every once in a while plans get unexpectedly canceled. They may even have been fun plans, something I’d been looking forward to. But now they are canceled, and I have extra time.

Whenever possible I try to spend that extra time on the fun things, the cool little creative projects and ideas I’d been saving for some unknown time in the future when I would miraculously have enough time.

And whenever I have the presence of mind, and the force of will, to push aside the usual chores and use that extra time to make something fun, I always end up feeling happier.

Today I went to see a wonderful exhibition of giant walking robot vehicles. They are still a work in progress, but when these machines are complete, their operator will be able strap into a kind of control harness, and stride around on enormous electrically powered legs. I know of similar projects elsewhere, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen in person.

And it got me thinking about what modern life would have been like if we had never invented wheeled vehicles.

The Maya civilization built a great many things without the invention of wheeled vehicles — except as children’s toys. What if, for whatever reason, our own civilization had gone the same way? In particular, suppose we had developed electric motors, internal combustion engines, integrated circuits, and and a host of other modern advances, but not the rolling wheel as the basis for moving people around.

In this alternate version of history, might we be walking around on power-assisted legs? Would we have devised industrial walker drones to carry our freight across earthly terrain? Just how far could an advanced civilization evolve on that basis? And in such a world, what would have been the steps along the way to modernity?

Maybe such questions — how technologies that never ended up existing might have evolved — belong to a field of study that could be called crypto-techno-evolution.

I wonder, in that alternate version of reality, whether people would be flying around in ornithopters.

I took a ferry yesterday with a friend to visit a beautiful island, and I noticed, as is usual in such places, that the most spectacular houses were the ones right on the water. I mean, the other island homes were all lovely, but one look at the houses on the water made it clear that their inhabitants are operating in a whole different economic realm.

Which makes sense. Not only are the views from the shore spectacular, but such land lots also constitute a distinctly limited commodity, a result of simple geometry: The number of houses you can fit on the perimeter of any landmass, even a modest sized island, is far smaller than the number that can fit in the interior.

And because my mind works in odd directions, the first thing I asked myself was how all this would play out in a four dimensional world. In that case, the “real estate” on an island would be some sort of solid volumetric shape within the three dimensional “surface” of a hyperspherical planet.

The shore would not form an undulating shoreline, like it does for islands in our world, but rather some sort of undulating two dimensional “shoreplane”. A lot of houses would be able to fit on the volumetric interior surface of the island, but far fewer houses would be able to fit on its bounding shoreplane.

In such a world, the total number of houses on even a smallish island would probably be vastly greater than could ever fit on one of our islands. And from our perspective, there would also be room for a lot of houses on the shoreplane.

But you can be sure that the people who lived right on that shoreplane, with their fancy views of the volumetric waves, would be the wealthiest of all the hyperfolk.

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Doug Engelbart. As many of you know, he co-invented many things we now take for granted, including the computer mouse, hypertext, graphical user interfaces, and computer networking.

But more important than any of these individual contributions was his influence in a powerful view of computer technology: That the true betterment of society through technology cannot come from innovations within a handful of companies. Rather, what is required is literacy on a massive scale. The citizenry needs to be fully engaged in using such technology for the creation of original ideas, of new ways of thinking and doing things.

I fully believe in this vision. After all, we already live in a world where millions of citizens are able contribute to our culture of music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. Powerful works in these media emerge from the “long tail” of the citizenry on a regular basis.

And only in the last five years we have seen a transformation in the production of film and video. Thanks to wide adoption of recently developed technologies for digital video production and distribution, young people today have a fluency in creating works for this medium that would have been unthinkable less than a generation ago.

Sometime in the coming decade, this revolution will extend to procedural creation, when a new generation of young people will be able to draw on computer programming to help in the creation of new cultural works and the expression of original ideas.

And when that happens, somewhere the spirit of Doug Engelbart will be smiling.

When we experience an author’s work, we often feel the echoes of some earlier work. Sometimes we can be sure that the influence was real, as in the influence of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” on Laurents’ “West Side Story”. In this case, the former was itself an adaptation of a tale by Matteo Bandello, by way of Pierre Boaistuau, by way of Arthur Brooke.

But sometimes these echoes are far more subjective. For example, I often hear strong chains of influence between music from different historical eras, and I am left wondering whether the connection actually existed in the mind of the composer.

Here’s one such chain, listed in forward chronological order:

NAME OF WORK	COMPOSER	NATURE OF INFLUENCE
Erbarme Dich, mein Gott!	Johann Sebastian Bach
Manhã de Carnaval	Luiz Bonfá	Harmonic/Melodic
Fantasy	Earth Wind and Fire	Melodic
Lucky	Daft Punk	Textural/Rhythmic

To be sure, there is great aesthetic change from each piece to the one below it. Just two steps suffice to make the connections disappear. Yet to me the chain of influence from each work to the next feels very strong.

Your mileage may vary.

Unicode is the standard decided upon by the computing industry for representing text in almost all of the world’s writing systems. So far, it contains well over one hundred thousand characters, and it’s still growing.

But one little subset of Unicode completely fascinates me, because it has a particular kind of resonance. That is the set of 112 Unicode identifiers reserved for arrows. How they decided that 112 was the right number is a bit of a mystery to me, but I do know the Unicode committees like to organize things into multiples of sixteen, since that makes for nice hexadecimal divisions. I guess somehow they decided that six groups of sixteen were not quite enough, eight were too many, and seven were just right.

Anyway, here they are, in all their pointed glory:

←	↑	→	↓	↔	↕	↖	↗	↘	↙	↚	↛	↜	↝	↞	↟
↠	↡	↢	↣	↤	↥	↦	↧	↨	↩	↪	↫	↬	↭	↮	↯
↰	↱	↲	↳	↴	↵	↶	↷	↸	↹	↺	↻	↼	↽	↾	↿
⇀	⇁	⇂	⇃	⇄	⇅	⇆	⇇	⇈	⇉	⇊	⇋	⇌	⇍	⇎	⇏
⇐	⇑	⇒	⇓	⇔	⇕	⇖	⇗	⇘	⇙	⇚	⇛	⇜	⇝	⇞	⇟
⇠	⇡	⇢	⇣	⇤	⇥	⇦	⇧	⇨	⇩	⇪	⇫	⇬	⇭	⇮	⇯
⇰	⇱	⇲	⇳	⇴	⇵	⇶	⇷	⇸	⇹	⇺	⇻	⇼	⇽	⇾	⇿

 
What I love about this set of shapes is that it represents all sorts of ways that one thing can relate to another, without saying anything at all about what those things might be. You can take this as a vocabulary for relating power relationships, or political affiliations, or perhaps types of love.

In fact, simply looking at some of these arrows suggests ideas about how things could relate to each other. One can imagine, say, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince penning an album of songs with some of these evocative symbols as titles. For example, the rightmost arrow in the fourth row could be interpreted as meaning, roughly, “Nothing compares 2 U”.

You might want to try your hand at mapping these suggestively sagittate glyphs into some meaning structure near and dear to your heart, whether it be battles of the American Civil War, concepts of quantum physics, or the daimonica in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.

I’ve generally thought of Vampires and Zombies as being on opposite ends of the pop culture spectrum, and I’ve written before in these pages about the dialectic created by such perfectly contrasting monsters.

But I’ve just discovered the wonderful gem Lifeforce. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist), with visual effects supervised by John Dykstra (Star Wars) and music by Henry Mancini (just about everything), in its own cheesy way this neglected 1985 film is a pop-cultural masterpiece.

It is, in the grand tradition, a space opera / monsters from outer space movie.

But it is also a wonderful vampire movie.

And it is also a wonderful zombie movie.

It is also, I am happy to say, an example of a movie that just gets kookier and more out there as it goes along. Watching it was a hoot. Just when I thought things couldn’t get more nutty, they got more nutty. Highly recommended.

If you’ve ever wondered how a vampire movie and a zombie movie can be seamlessly combined into one sublimely crazy package, you definitely need to check this out.

Happy Canada Day!

In 2012 I contributed money to the reelection of Barack Obama. And while I am not happy with everything our president has done since the election, I am satisfied that on balance the actions of this administration remain far more aligned with my vision for our country than anything I had heard from the opposition party.

However, I have been comparing notes with my friends, and have discovered that we share one unfortunate collateral effect of our collective generosity: many emails a day from all sorts of political groups aligned with the Democratic party.

I get emails from concerned groups in Iowa, from Indiana, and from many other places in the U.S. far from where I live, all explaining that my $2 contribution is the only thing saving the great state of [fill in the blank] from political ruin.

I get urgent personal emails from Barack Obama, or Michelle Obama, or some famous rock star, all of which leave me wondering whether these so-called correspondents even know that such emails are being written in their names.

I receive emails wondering why I have not yet jumped on the absolutely free opportunity to meet Barack Obama. That particular gambit is clearly a way to gather “higher quality” names. If you respond, then you can be tagged as far more likely to donate money.

A few of these groups give you a way to opt out of their list, but most do not. The only way I know of to fight the rising tide is to add filters to my email program. But the people who do this apparently thought of that, because they keep switching the sender’s name and email address. Which makes me wonder — do they think I will send money just because I enjoy being annoyed?

I propose to start a Political Action Committee whose sole mission is to help people fight email spam from their own political party. Unlike most PACs, I believe this one will be equally popular with Republicans and Democrats, with those on the left and those on the right of the political spectrum.

At last, a cause behind which everyone can rally, a truly unifying mission to bring together our sadly divided nation.

We are going to raise so much money. 🙂

I had a conversation this week with a game designer who targets her games specifically toward female players. The underlying premise of her game design approach is based on studies showing that, on average, girls and women are better at keeping track of large numbers of objects, whereas, on average, boys and men are better at keeping track of moving objects.

Much current game design privileges the latter skill, hence the common perception that boys are better than girls at playing computer games. Her argument is that alternate game mechanics based on “discovering things”, rather than “shooting things”, would be more interesting and fun for female players.

I suggested that this disparity might also explain some other cultural phenomena. For example, on average, boys seem to enjoy action films more than girls, whereas girls seem to enjoy romantic comedies more than boys. Perhaps, I said, this is because action films require an interest in following moving targets. A romance, in contrast, does not usually involve lots of objects flying around on the screen. But taken as a whole, it involves a much greater degree of complexity.

For example, to properly follow a Transformers film, you must be motivated to observe and understand the movements and locations of a large number of flying robots. But to properly follow “Pride and Prejudice”, you need to be motivated, and able, to observe and understand far more salient details than will ever be found in an action film.

To my game designer acquaintance this seemed like a plausible theory. Of course it has no scientific validity until somebody does a well designed controlled study. I wonder who would fund such a study?