Ken’s Blog

At the FMX conference in Stuttgart this week, a conversation with a colleague turned to the differences between the culture of movie lovers and the culture of game lovers. My colleague told me that he thought movie people are far more likely to look back toward earlier work and genres, whereas the culture of gaming has a greater tendency to look forward, rather than back.

I can certainly think of counterexamples to this (eg: the game “Arcadia Remix” by GameLab), but as a general tendency I tihnk it’s valid. In fact, the moment he said it, I flashed back to a vivid memory. In 2001 the Baz Luhrmann film “Moulin Rouge” had just come out. If ever a work celebrated earlier genres – reveled in them, in fact – that would be it. I eagerly saw this film on its opening weekend, and loved it. Then I showed up at work on Monday in New York to find that just about everyone else – almost everybody I worked with – had also raced out to see it, and had also loved it. We hadn’t talked especially about it with each other beforehand – it was just something that we New York film lovers were bound to love.

It happened that the very same week I was flying out to visit a major game development company in Seattle, with whom I worked from time to time. I couldn’t wait to compare notes with my Gamer friends, since we’d had long conversations on all kinds of cool topics, and this was definitely the cool topic du jour. The day I got there I eagerly asked people what they had thought of the new Baz Luhrmann film. Most of them just looked at me quizzically. They all knew about it, but it hadn’t occurred to any of them to go see it.

Except for one guy. He told me that he and his wife had gone to see it, at his wife’s suggestion. But they had both hated it so much that they’d walked out of the theatre after only twenty minutes.

I changed the subject, but somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I had stumbled upon some fundamental difference. In New York City we had revelled in this film, and all of its brazenly backward looking genre-mixing references. Apparently this aesthetic value does not translate to gamer culture. Perhaps it’s an oversimplification to say “game culture looks forward, film culture looks back”, but clearly there is something going on here.

I received a lovely coffee maker from good friends I’d never met.

An odd turn of events, but nonetheless, there it is. Over time we became friends over this blog, but had not actually met until this week, as I now happen to be on a trip to Germany, where they live.

Throughout most of human existence friendship was inextricably bound to physical presence. We see each others’ eyes move, and the subtle motions of the head. We watch facial expressions, and we can smell each others’ sweat. Our brains have great capacity to work with this information, to figure out what is going on between the lines of what has been said.

And yet in cyberspace we willingly forego this vast channel of useful data. We build trust and friendships upon just the words, bereft of all that rich interstitial information conveyed by the physical person.

And so here I find myself, face to face with good friends I’ve never met, and in possession of a delightful coffee pot – a very symbol, in the ritual it embodies, of our existence on this planet as physical beings, not merely as disembodied minds. A gift that was chosen, I am sure, for this very reason.

Later this week I look forward to spending time with my newly corporal old friends. And meanwhile, I think I’m going to make myself some coffee. 🙂

As far as I know, nobody has ever commented on the strange shifft in cultural norms around the question of where your shoulders should be – back or forward.

Most people alive today take it for granted that “shoulders back” is good. You don’t get to be a movie star – or even a movie star wannabe – unless you accept this simple truism.

And yet, if you look back into cinematic history – think of Jean Harlow, for example, or Joan Blondell – you find that our great sirens of the silver screen expressed their sexual languor by thrusting their shoulders forward – a display of bad posture that today would be utterly unacceptable.

When I look at a film from, say, 1933, I can intellectually understand that the pretty young woman with the alarmingly curved spine – shoulders thrust so far forward that they enter a room before the rest of her – is supposed to be sexy, carefree, conveying an attitude of “I don’t care – I don’t have to.” It’s basically the equivalent of Wynona Ryder or Natalie Portman deliberately dressing like a ragdoll, and the audience understanding that this nonchalance is really an expression of power, of sexual chic.

But intellectual understanding is one thing – visceral response is another. I can see what’s going on, but I’m still thinking “straighten up girl!” As a form of cultural meme, this use of bad posture to convey insoucience just doesn’t work anymore.

One of the interesting things about this is shift in acceptable posture is that it makes it almost impossible for modern actresses to effectively emulate the sirens of the early silver screen. When you see a film that tries to recreate the atmosphere of early Depression era cinema, you always know that you’re not watching the real thing. The film makers might get everything else firht – film stock, lighting, set design, costumes, even the cigarette holder – but you know, deep down, that it’s fake.

And the reason is that no modern American actress will deliberately thrust her shoulders forward, curve her spine, and assume a physical attitude that will come across to her audience as unsexy. She won’t do it, and her director won’t ask her to do it. The whole point of the movie is that we’re supposed to find her sexy. If we don’t, the film won’t sell tickets – and therefore those scenes will not get shot.

And so, there it is. As Mr. Hardy said, you can’t go home again. We move on, and cultures don’t go back. Or at the very least, shoulders don’t.

About twenty odd years ago there was a very popular TV show in the U.S. called “Murder She Wrote”. The idea was quite simple. Jessica Fletcher (played wonderfully by Angela Lansbury) was a mystery writer. Every week it would happen that somebody had been murdered in real life, and she would be caled upon to use her great powers of deduction – honed from years of writing murder mysteries – to uncover the criminal.

The odd thing about this set-up, as entertaining as it was, is that wherever she went – strange cities, foreign countries, resort communities – somebody, like clockwork, would be murdered. Of course this plot device was necessary – otherwise there would have been no show that week.

And yet, after a while, the whole thing began to seem strangely unseemly. I began to wonder whether all those people would still have been murdered if Jessica had not been there. What if her plane to New Jersey had been diverted to Ohio? Would somebody in, say, Newark, have found a miraculous reprieve from foul play, while some other poor soul in Cleveland bit the dust?

These mysteries, thoughts I hadn’t entertained for years, planted themselves firmly in my mind as I contemplated the latest Broadway revival of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” – a performance I am very looking forward to seeing.

The entire point of “Godot” is that the artifice of a well rounded plot arc is just that – an artifice. We have become so used to expecting a tidy structure – a conflict introduced at the outset, and then gradually nursed first to climax and then resolution – that we tend to forget that it bears no relationship to our own lives.

The most horrific monster movie or slasher film is as strangely reassuring as a visit with Jessica Fletcher’s little TV universe. All are based on the polite fiction that the flow of time actually makes sense – that the events around us are not, in fact, random.

Beckett dares to pull the veil away from theis comforting fictional conceit. Vladimir and Estragon do not have the luxury of defining themselves against a neatly packaged Deus ex Machina. In their world, not only is there no Deus, there is not even a Machina.

And that, perhaps is where we can find a defining line between the pleasures of mere entertainment and the challenge of art. Jessica Fletcher has the luxury of being in a position to make sense of her world, to tend the comforting fire that keeps at bay the howling monsters of random chance – the inchoate reality that lurks beyond the cave door.

Vladimir and Estragon must live every moment amidst those howling monsters. They must create whatever meaning is to be had for themselves, by themselves. And that is why Beckett’s play, unlike the comforting fare we usually flock to on TV or at the Cineplex, achieves greatness.

“Godot” does not bring us out of ourselves, but rather toward ourselves, by reminding us that life does not create meaning for us. We must create that meaning for ourselves, every day, out of the raw materials at hand: the howling winds of random cicumstance – and each other.

It would take far too much time to explain the back story for this strange little ditty. Long personal story. So feel free to make one up for yourself, if you’d like…

The captain takes the sailors to the deck before the mast
His signet ring has fallen in the seas of alabast
No longer can the spectral winds delay – the die is cast
To take you when the wind be turned, oh ho.

Tally ho, tally ho, the sailors steal an hour ‘fore the crow
Tally ho, tally ho, and before you know you’re taken down below

Although you’d never know to see me now, ‘fore I set sail
I’d never sold my soul until I ran the devil’s gale
Behind the eyes of sailors lies a vision of the Grail
Forsaken when the wind be turned, oh ho.

Tally ho, tally ho, how death will steal an hour ‘fore the crow
Tally ho, tally ho, and before you know you’re taken down below

I was in a conversation today about the differences between cultures. For example, the things that make a city in one country different from a city in another. Not the differences you can see simply by looking at people – styles of dress, cuisineim, advertising signs – those are obvious, but they are not the most interesting differences.

No, I mean the differences inside the heads of the people. You find out after awhile that the people walking around Mumbai or São Paulo or Tokyo are generally experiencing a very different reality from the people in New York. The unspoken rules are different, the tacit understandings on the street or in the metro.

One of the ways this shows itself is in the negotiation between pedestrians and traffic. In São Paulo the cars don’t slow down for pedestrians. As an American friend of mine once said the first time he visited, there is only one rule of etiquette between pedestrians and drivers in São Paulo: “The fender is harder than your leg.”

In Mumbai something entirely different is going on. In most of the city there are no traffic lights. Pedestrians cross the street right into the middle of traffic, while the cars just drive around them, zooming along at high speed without ever slowing down. Yet there seems to be a general equality between the two forces. Somehow everybody manages to get where they are going – the pedestrians streaming across the busy roadway, the cars along it – without any collisions. The first time I was there, it took me quite a while, with a lot of advice and encouragement from highly amused bystanders, to figure out how to cross the street. But eventually I got the hang of it.

But perhaps my most dramatic and surprising experience with traffic culture shock occurred the first time I visited Tokyo. I was in the heart of Shibuya – roughly the equivalent of New Yorks Times Square – perhaps a block or two from Shibuya Station. It was a lovely night, and thousands upon thousands of Japanese surged along the busy crowded sidewalks, in a scene that seemed very familiar to a New Yorker – although on a somewhat more massive scale. I felt right at home.

I flowed along with the vast crowd, nearing the busy and broad intersection. In front of me the massive throng was streaming across the avenue. Just as I was getting to the intersection, the traffic lights started to change.

And then something extraordinary happened. By the time the lights had finished changing, there were no pedestrians at all in the street before me. Those people who had not yet gotten to the curb while the lights were changing had simply stopped dead in their tracks, before stepping off the curb.

To a boy from New York, this was completely astonishing. New Yorkers don’t stop for red lights, unless there is imminent danger of being run over. And drivers know this, so they expect random pedestrians to be dashing across the intersection at any opportunity.

But to see thousands of pedestrians coming to a complete standstill at the same moment, with not even one foot stepping off the curb, this to me was a great miracle. I could not have been much more surprised if Jesus himself had descended down from the sky in a top hat and tails, and performed a song and dance routine from “Hello Dolly”.

And in that moment I understood, standing there in that eerily law abiding crowd, that I was far from home.

When I was around 13 years old there was this guy in my class whose name I cannot for the life of me remember. But I do remember that he was brilliant – off the charts brilliant – and that he shared my love for all things mathematical. He also had abnormally large thumbs. Which might not be important, but it seems worth mentioning.

One day he introduced me to a game which I later realized was one of the best computer games I’ve ever played – except that it did not require a computer.

The idea was simple: Start with a piece of graph paper. Draw a picture of a race track on the graph paper. Make sure to draw a line showing the starting line and another line showing the finish line. Then place two “racers” on the paper – pencil marks denoting some starting position.

Here are the rules: At every move, your racer is allowed to accelerate in either X (left/right)) or Y (up/down) by either -1, 0, or +1. So if your racer was travelling at a speed of, say, (1, 2) in the previous move, then it can now travel between 0 and 2 units in X, and between 1 and 3 units in Y.

You need to get your racer around the track first – before your opponent gets his racer around the track – without going outside of the race track boundaries.

One thing that makes this game so cool is that slight variations in how you draw the outline of the racetrack can result in big changes in the best path around the track.

In the above picture, the track is shown in black. The two “racers”, about to start their way around the track, are shown, respectively, in red and green.

So here was a “computer game” without computers. By playing it we learned about velocity, accelaration and strategic planning. And it cost only about two cents a game – the cost of a sheet of fresh graph paper.

I was at the dentist this week, with nothing in particular to do except sit back, watch all the flashing and whirring equipment, and hope that the local anaesthetic would continue working. While I freely admit that the injection of feel-good chemicals may have clouded my thinking, it does not completely account for the fact that my mind was turning to thoughts of Woody Allen.

Not just any thoughts of Woody Allen, mind you, but specifically thoughts about a moment in his 2006 comedy “Scoop” in which Scarlett Johansson is playing a dental hygenicist who has reinvented herself as an investigative journalist.

The particular moment I flashed on, while desperately trying to ignore the very loud vibrating drill in my mouth, was when Ms. Johansson’s character, trying to distract the bad guy with some improvised femme fatale patter, started talking about “the lower sixth” – suddenly reverting to her inner dental hygenicist.

It happens that I had seen my dentist the day after seeing this film, and I’d mentioned that Woody Allen was making dentist jokes, relating this little bit of dialog. My dentist replied that it was a very odd dentist joke, since the sixth is actually an upper tooth. There is no lower sixth.

Now, I’m pretty sure that Woody Allen knows this perfectly well. He’s been exploring the humor in dentistry at least since his wonderful essay “If the Impressionists had been Dentists” (in “Without Feathers”, 1975). So just what is he up to here?

My theory is that it’s an inside joke – a deliberate shout-out to dentists. He’s telling them “This one’s for you. Nobody will get this joke who isn’t a dentist. Just wanted you guys to know I was thinking about you.” What makers of computer games call an “Easter Egg” – a hidden message that is visible only if you have some inside knowledge about where to look.

And this makes me wonder – how many other examples are there out there in popular books and films? What coded messages for just the few are hiding in plain sight, snuck in there by an artist, just for the fun of it? The Mickey Mouse head near the end of TRON comes to mind, but to me Woody Allen’s “lower sixth” joke seems a lot weirder – perversely surreal – and therefore more fun.

Yes, yes I know that we’ve got a good head of steam going with this discussion about programming languages, and we will get back to it, I promise. But I feel in need of a day off from serious conversation.

And so today I will just ask the following question: Why is it that Zachary Quinto, as the monstrous Syler on the TV show “Heroes”, reminds me so damned much of Leonard Cohen?

This just seems wrong. Very, very wrong…

Back to our old friend Fibonacci, poised precariously between human conversation and computer programming. The more I think about the Fibonacci sequence as a way in to the question of a lingua franca for introducing people to ideas about how to program, the more intriguing it gets.

In this post I’m going to write things mathematically, foregoing the wordy english versions, since I think we’re all agreed that the concepts are what ultimately matter here, not the syntax. Once we’ve worked out the best conceptual approaches, then we can go back and make things more “natural-language friendly”.

One question that comes up is how soon you should introduce variables. When you say:

    F(n)   ←   if   n ≤ 1   then   n   else   F(n-1)+F(n-2)

you are assuming your student is ready to understand and use variables like “n”.

In contrast, here is a description of the Fibonacci sequence without variables, stated as two “production rules”:
 
    F   ←   [ 0 , 1 ]

    F   ←   F   append   F_last + F_last-1

This doesn’t just return a number – it builds the whole sequence. Is this approach conceptually clearer and more intuitive? Is it closer to the way people already think?