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In a computer game or on-line virtual world, an “Avatar” is a representation of you. For example, Mario and Lara Croft are avatars, because they are supposed to be you in the game world – on a psychological level the idea is that they are doing what you would do if you were a mustachioed plumber or a superhero chick in each game’s respective fantasy world.

This is in contrast to a “Non-player character”, which simulates other people in the fantasy world. Like all those nice people you run over with your car (or who get out of the way just in time) in Grand Theft Auto. Or the undead fiends who run at you and try to eat you before you blow them away in Doom and its many progeny. Those are all NPC’s. You don’t control them because they are not representations of you.

Avatars – representions in a game of oneself – are powerful, but I’ve always found them to be a bit problematic. There is something uncanny about them. Yes, I understand that is supposed to be “me” in the computer, but it’s also a thing that’s clearly not alive – in some ways it’s more like the little car or thimble that you march around a Monopoly board than like a representation of self.

I got into a conversation today about what would be the perfect avatar. I mean in an ideal virtual world in which there were no technology limitations. Let’s say it’s fifty years in the future – the year 2058 – and you are playing a computer game. By then games will have moved way beyond the technical hurdles of today, such as realistic simulation of human movement, or accurate speech recognition. In this future game world, what should your game avatar be like?

I would argue that the ideal is what you’d get if you had an actual trained actor – a real human being – there in your computer. The actor could have super powers, if that’s what the game called for, but the important thing is that he/she would be able take stage directions flawlessly.

For example, if I’m racing through the city of Metropolis, in the middle of chasing after Bizarro Superman, and then I realize that it’s getting late, and that I have to get to the bank vault before it closes to retrieve my stash of purple Kryptonite, I would probably want my avatar to look at his watch with concern, and convincingly portray somebody who is genuinely worried that he might not make it to the bank on time.

Today’s avatars do nothing like this. They will do what you tell them to, but they never convincingly express an impression of humanity, a sense that “this is me in this game world, feeling all of the feelings I would feel at this point”.

I’m not suggesting that we will get to the point where avatars will become indistinguishable from real people. What I’m saying is that as a design target, as something to shoot for while we continue to develop these curious virtual creatures, the figure we should keep in mind to guide us is a real person – a trained actor – trying their best to follow our narrative direction while expressing the appropriate emotions.

When I am able to buy into my avatar’s performance – his performance as me – the way I now suspend my disbelief while watching a great actor in a movie, then I think games will start to engage us and to move us in new and far more powerful ways.

Democracy works in many ways, some of them sillier than others. Today my friend Cynthia sent me the following link to a musical comedy written and performed by Jack Black, John C. Reilly and friends, a little bit of protest theatre called:

Prop 8: The Musical

 

Whatever your views on this issue, you might appreciate the sheer nuttiness of the venture. Rather than march in the streets, hurl accusations, shout angry slogans or call for boycotts of their cultural opposites, these people have chosen to put on funny costumes, find a willing orchestra, and do a little song and dance.

Imagine if the world worked this day. If rather than brutally mowing down innocent civilians with semi-automatic weapons in the streets of Mumbai, Muslim terrorists had to form a kickline and sing their protests along the street, while dodging motorcycle rickshaws. Or if American soldiers in Iraq and their Shia insurgent enemy were required to reenact the Sharks/Jets song-and-dance from “West Side Story”.

Call me crazy, but I think Jack Black and his friends might just be on to something here.

Has anybody noticed the similarity between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Russell Crowe’s Maximus in “Gladiator”? In a sense they are selling the same soap: You’ve got a brooding, tragic guy, who is clearly a man’s man. Men respect him, women draw to him like flies. He’s a guy who understands that he has responsibilities, a code of honor he must live by. But at heart he’s really good at one thing: Killing people. Not just killing people, but killing lots and lots of people. He kills efficiently, balletically, forehand, backhand, left and right. He could probably kill just fine with his eyes closed. It’s what he does.

But so far we’re describing lots of action heroes. What sets these two apart, what makes them brothers under the skin, is that both Craig’s and Crowe’s action heroes are very sorrowful that they have to kill all those people. A lot of time is spent in both movies on loving closeups of the hero’s face, brooding, looking inward, searching his tormented soul, a soul which is tough on the outside but tender as a little fluffy bunny on the inside. Because he feels really sad that he needs to spend the rest of the time wielding a big weapon, like a Ninja from hell, causing buckets of blood to spurt from the freshly dismembered bodies of his opponents. Really, really sad.

I think we’re supposed to see the poetry within the wistful, ruefully contemplative eyes of these two men. We’re supposed to feel their pain. And it’s important that we do. Because if we can all get together and feel their pain, then we will realize that deep down they are not killers of countless people, on a scale so large that it borders on the obscene. No, we can forget about the body count, the holes through bleeding torsos, the body parts flying off in all directions, that hired guard unlucky enough to work for the wrong side who ends up blinded, convulsing, screaming in agony and maimed for life because in one scene he happened to be in our hero’s way.

Instead we remember that melancholy look in the hero’s eyes, his poetically regretful gaze, his soft inward sigh at the burden he must carry. And we realize that it’s ok, that we don’t need to worry about all of those casually severed body parts and brutally hacked off limbs.

Because this is the good guy.

I got into a conversation yesterday about amoebae, in which I confessed to having always been fascinated by these little critters. For one thing, an amoeba multiplies by dividing, which appeals to the punster mathematician in me. For another, all members of an amoeba species have the same genetic makeup. After all, when two amoebae split, they each retain the original DNA.

And this last point leads to another wonderful paradoxical question: Is a species of amoebae a collection of some of the world’s tiniest animals, or is it actually a single geographically distributed individual, which would make it one of the world’s largest individual creatures on earth?

I was inspired by these musings to try to make an animated amoeba. Nothing like the real one, which is all gnarly with weird little textured spots, but rather a sort of cartoon version, an impression of an amoeba to match the not very accurate image of an amoeba that I’ve carried around in my head since I was about seven years old.

In my typical fashion, I made my amoeba friend last night as a Java applet. If you have a Java-enabled Web browser, you can play with it for yourself. It just kind of hangs out in its space, until you drag your mouse near it, and then it tries to chase your mouse cursor.

I have a sort of “amoeba-cam” trained on it, a camera that is always centered on the amoeba. Otherwise it might just ooze right out of the applet frame and devastate the countryside.

You can play with my new little friend here.

He sediment a topiary
Tried alluviated, vary
Islip agent, Cyprus flu
No friend me – benighted too
Nicked the center, pressed aboard
Canned to go and in accord
Wended frame deliberant
All as many ready spent
Novel sand, or so we go
Frighted may as maybe so
Try to home despairing how
Crisp the sniper, catch the cow
    None descend as freight is why
    Bar as later said, now die

 

Or at least, that was my impression of Charlie Kaufman’s fun new movie. I hope this makes everything clear.

Speaking of being surprised … not all that long ago I was at a National Science Foundation workshop with about fifty educators – mostly educators from various universities around the U.S. In one of the talks the speaker asked who among us uses the Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, about fifty hands went up. As we all know, everyone uses the Wikipedia.

But then the speaker asked who has edited an article in the Wikipedia. I put my hand up, not really thinking about it. And then after a moment I realized that only two of us in the room had our hands up. She and I looked at each other – we, apparently, were unusual.

So what’s up with this? Why is it that in a room of highly educated people – people who teach our college and graduate students – almost none have ever edited an article on Wikipedia, a resource that they themselves use every day? I would have asked them directly, but I couldn’t figure out a suitably non-confrontational way to frame the question.

It seems to me like the most natural thing in the world: If I happen to see an error I fix it, just to make it a little better for the next reader. It’s very easy to do, and it seems like the right way to treat a common resource.

Do I just have a fundamentally different view of the Wikipedia than most people?

In his comment on my Nov 28 post, Ross made the following sensible suggestion:

I boil it down to one question: can you list three cogent pros/cons for each candidate? If the answer is “no”, then you’ve fed for too long at the trough of Hannity or Olbermann. If the answer is “yes”, then let’s talk.

After reading this, I discussed it with somebody I know who tends to be quite levelheaded, a brilliant man whose opinions I generally respect quite a lot. He seemed to agree with Ross’s suggestion, until I said “for example, it would be interesting to try to come up with three cogent reasons why John McCain might have been a good candidate to vote for.” In about ten seconds, my conversant went into what can only be described as a controlled rage, incensed at the very suggestion that there could be a “cogent argument” for McCain, and clearly quite annoyed at me for proposing such a thing.

I tried to tell him that if you’re going to sway people who are on the fence on an issue, you need to understand what parts of the opposing arguments they are buying into, at least well enough to counter those arguments. But he was no longer listening. Within about thirty seconds he had angrily fled the room.

I was surprised, to say the least. I am sticking to my guns on this one – I might strongly disagree with the opinions of one hundred million of my fellow citizens, but I’m not willing to simply – or dismissively – label them all as deluded idiots. Some of these people are thoughtful, intelligent individuals, however much I may disagree with theim. I think I need to understand how they reached their conclusions, even if only to understand my own conclusions with greater clarity and perspective.

Are there really so few of us who are willing to reach across the aisle?

This being Thanksgiving weekend, tradition dictated that we take my nephews to a truly silly action movie. The film du jour is the new Bond flick – “Quantum of Solice”. It’s mostly an excuse to see a gun-wielding Daniel Craig, as well as an army of stunt doubles computer graphic stand-ins, run, jump, leap from burning building to speeding boat to flying plane to swinging girder to whatever fast-moving object looks really cool in the shot. Nothing else in the movie really matters, but then, nothing else in the movie is really supposed to matter. Yes, of course various bad guys and beautiful women get killed and slept with (actually, only the women get slept with – the bad guys just get killed), but that’s all just a kind of background window dressing for the real action: watching James Bond do all these amazing feats of running, leaping, etc., while somehow managing to not drop his gun.

It all worked splendidly for my nephews, and for me as well, except for one place in the movie. There was a scene where James and his beautiful yet mysterious lady of the moment are falling out of an airplane, one parachute pack between them. There’s a tense moment when they try to reach each other while plunging through the air, and then – just in time – they come together, the chute opens, and they land without getting smashed like bugs.

The problem for me is that, unlike just about everybody in the targeted audience, I’ve actually been skydiving. So unfortunately I know first-hand that if you’re not around ten thousand feet up in the air when you pull the chord to open the chute, you’re going to get squashed like a bug anyway. In the movie they were about twelve feet in the air when the chute opened. The odd thing about this for me was the realization that if I had not actually ever been skydiving, this entire sequence would have worked perfectly for me. I wouldn’t have given this flagrant violation of the known laws of physics a second thought. “It’s James Bond,” I probably would have told myself. “Of course he can land safely in a parachute that has just opened a mere twelve feet off the ground.”

And of course that realization calls into question all the other parts of the fantasy – the jumping in and out of speeding boats, the falling onto cars from the top of a building, the getting blown out of a fiery bad-guy hotel just as it’s about to explode. Maybe even James Bond couldn’t do such things, I start to wonder, and I start to feel the entire edifice of my willing suspension of disbelief beginning to crumble.

And then I remember the most important thing that makes it all ok: It’s only a movie.

When I was a child I saw Thanksgiving as the great unifier. There were always other families around us in which the kids grew up with different beliefs and different ways of life. The list of religious school holidays was so long and varied – these kids get off of school on this day, those kids on that day – that it all came to seem, in my young mind, like some sort of elaborate joke.

But Thanksgiving was different. Just who we were giving thanks to was presented vaguely enough that you didn’t actually need to invoke any particular religion or deity – you could just go home and enjoy spending time with your family. You would eat a big meal cooked by your mom, and you knew that all of your friends, whatever their religion or background, were doing exactly the same thing. To me it was this inter-cultural solidarity, the sense of joining hands across subcultures, that was the most comforting aspect of the whole ritual.

This year I find myself reaching across a divide within Thanksgiving itself. I spent the entire morning today cooking various vegan dishes, which I brought to my mom’s house. Yes, there were non-vegan dishes there as well, but I was very touched by the mutual respect with which everyone approached this particular cultural divide. Because I was there, my sister made yummy dark-chocolate vegan brownies, awesome fresh vegan rolls, and delicious vegan potato and sweet potato latkes that were just to die for.

I think back upon that very first Thanksgiving, when the harvest for the new settlers to these shores consisted of beans, corn, squash and garden vegetables – the foods for which those pilgrims originally gave thanks. It feels good to realize that my family is so gracious in joining me to make room for these old ways of celebrating the bounty of the earth.

The fever pitch of the recent election season brought me back to another election season – 2004, the time of John Kerry’s unsuccessful bid to topple Bush 43 (it seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?). Because I live and work in Manhattan, you can well imagine that the conversations leading up to the election were extremely monotonous – everyone here backed Kerry so strongly that they could not imagine anyone voting for Bush. By the end of October, all political discussions had the flavor of religious or tribal ceremonies. We would all repeat the same shared opinions to each other ad nauseum, until the very words began to lose any meaning.

Clearly there were other parts of the country where political conversations were monotonous for precisely the opposite reason – right-leaning places where everyone so thoroughly agreed that Bush was the better candidate, that there was nothing much left for anyone to say.

This contrast was nicely illustrated by Troy’s recent comment on my “Broken Glass” post, when he said: “I do believe that the majority of people out there that are fighting non-traditional marriage are not raising a family of their own.” On the contrary, I know many people around here who are raising families, and every single one of those parents was appalled and horrified by the passage of Proposition 8, and made a point of saying so. I suspect that where Troy lives things are quite different. Here in Manhattan (as well as in all the University towns I visit) one uniformly finds sense of outrage on the part of parents that their friends and colleagues, people they like and respect, are denied the right and responsibility of raising children. I’m not arguing right or wrong here, I’m just pointing out the vast difference between our respective subcultures.

When people from two such opposing subcultures begin a conversation, things can get weird. Each side knows the other is wrong. The kindest thing we each tend to think about the other is that they are well-meaning but deluded, the victim of some cleverly pitched self-serving lies or spin that have clouded their better judgement.

In some sense, you can say that in such situations we have all – both left and right – gone over the edge from rational discourse to religious thinking and tribal warfare. We are all so used to the general lockstep agreement in our respective enclaves, that when we meet someone from “the other side” it feels like an encounter with an apostate. Our reaction is no longer intellectual, but rather is dominated by a irrational sense of emotional discomfort at encountering the otherness of an enemy tribe.

In October 2004, at height of the Kerry/Bush mania, my colleague Robert Dewar made what I think is the most perceptive observation I have ever heard on the subject. He proposed a simple test to determine whether your own views on a subject were in the realm of reasoned argument or in the realm of religious indoctrination. The test is simple: Attempt to seriously argue the other point of view. If you can do that effectively (even if you don’t ultimately agree with your own arguments) then you are still in the realm of the rational. If not, then your thinking has gone over into religious/tribal territory.

Go ahead, try it.