Ken’s Blog

I listened today to a talk by Warren Spector, the great computer game designer responsible for “Deus Ex”, “Thief”, and various other wonderful computer games.

After the talk, there was a conversation which spiraled around to many topics, but came down to one point: Warren’s ideal is to create games that have a kind of emergence. What he means by “emergence” is a game or interactive experience that is rich enough so that a player will be able to do unexpected things – that is, come up with solutions to game-play challenges – which were not explicitly designed into the game.

Warren bemoaned the fact that so far his favorite moments in computer games have been the ones that were tightly scripted – essentially cinematically crafted – such as the moment the giant tentacle reaches in and grabs the scientist in “Half Life I”, or when the dog bursts through the window in “Resident Evil”.

Yes, it is certainly possible to create emergent games, games that allow the player to explore in a way that was not explicitly designed by the game designer. But can we make those games as emotionally powerful as games that follow a more linear, pre-scripted design?

And then somehow the conversation got on the subject of crossword puzzles – which were held up as an exemplar of a non-emergent (ie: pre-scripted) interactive experience.

Which left me wondering the following slightly wacky thought: Could we create an emergent crossword puzzle? And if so, what would that be like? I’ve already started trying out some ideas…

Acrostics Can Reveal Or State Things Inspired, Crooked, Straight.

Acrostics Rarely Educate.
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As Wonderful Events, Sometimes Of Mild Eloquence,

They Hold Interest, Not Good Sense.

The other day I saw a splendid production of “Hamlet”. God how I love seeing this play, when it’s well done. I’ve seen it many times by now, and each time I discover something new. The play resonates on so many levels, and keeps my brain buzzing for days afterward.

But I’ve noticed something interesting about the place of “Hamlet” in our society. On the one hand, it’s so iconic, so much a central part of English-speaking culture. Everyone knows Hamlet’s most famous solliloquy (or at least they know the first ten words). But most people in the U.S. haven’t actually seen the play (or maybe they’ve seen some abbreviated movie version with Mel Gibson).

And so what they don’t know is just how oddly, crazily, bounce-off-the-wall weird it is. I mean, the fun thing about “Hamlet” is that the idea of it manages to be completely iconic within our culture while the actual play itself is so utterly loony – in a very good way. The whole thing pingpongs back and forth between heart-breaking tragedy and vaudeville comedy.

Hamlet isn’t just a tragic hero. He’s also pre-Elizabethan Denmark’s answer to Groucho Marx. The first person he shows a deep emotional connection to is a man who’s been dead for twenty three years (we learn this while he’s holding the guy’s freshly dug-up skull in his hand) – apparently because as a child Hamlet had learned his sense of humor from the man.

There are plots within plots, plays within plays, a gravedigger who’s shtick is straight out of “Seinfeld” (or, more accurately, “Seinfeld” descends from that gravedigger’s shtick), ghosts, drag queens, wild plot twists, secretly switched letters, fast talking men and crazy suicidal women.

Every one of the several romantic relationships in the play is a different kind of quease-inducing incest, our hero drives his own girlfriend insane (literally), sends some poor saps to their death just because he’s mildly annoyed at them, has an unfortunate habit of accidentally running the wrong people through with his sword, and spends about half the play spouting complete gibberish.

And yet we like him, because Shakespeare knows what he’s up to – and Shakespeare is very, very good at what he does. The play’s peculiarity, its strange quirks and complete nuttiness, manage to cohabit with a story of great depth and beauty. We recognize in the hero’s antics and deliberate non sequiturs our own frustration at a world that oftentimes seems mad.

In essence, Hamlet is us. He embodies our own struggle with trying to find sense when no sense can be found. He is Woody and Juno and Benjamin Braddock and Yossarian and George Carlin and John Lennon and Lenny Bruce and all of their kin, all rolled into one.

It’s strange to me that so many people in America don’t know this – because they haven’t seen the play (or maybe they once read it in high school and hated it because it was forced down their throats). They don’t know how damned funny it is, how peculiar and transgressive and exhiliaratingly wacked out – how modern. Sadly, “Hamlet” remains in the unseeing American mind something vaguely boring, like Mount Rushmore.

If only they knew.

When I was growing up in an ethnic New York neighborhood, there was a kind of a rough equivalence between Italians and Jews. Yes, one was Catholic and the other, well, Jewish, but the cultures had a lot in common, including dreams of upward mobility, a strongly connected family, a powerful religious bond within the community, assertive mothers (very, very assertive mothers), and a similar kind of coarse sardonic outsider humor – the kind of humor that develops in ghetto cultures. I could make this list a lot longer, but you get the idea.

And both cultures offered up a kind of alternate leading man, the one who isn’t Gary Cooper or George Clooney or Cary Grant or Hugh Grant – or any kind of Grant. The Italians had the young Al Pacino, we Jews had the young Dustin Hoffman. Intrepid hero as plucky outsider – not the big square jawed football captain from an old American family, but the little guy, the one who could win anyway, in spite of being up from the streets, could somehow get the girl through determination and grit and force of sheer will.

It made perfect sense that Paul Newman, a Jew, would play Rocky Graziano, an Italian. It didn’t matter – he was still the underdog, sinuous and seething with class resentment and unresolved neurosis, working his way up out of the immigrant ghetto. Everyone rooted for him, and all the girls swooned.

But even as a kid I knew there wasn’t any real parity here. The Italians had a kind of sexy cool on their side, where we Jews just had a kind of outsider energy, hovering between frantic/angry and hangdog/rueful. After all, they had Dean Martin and we had Jerry Lewis. They have the older Al Pacino, while we have the older Dustin Hoffman (ouch).

They could turn out a young Rocky Balboa without batting an eye, whereas our rebels were more like Alan Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce. Astonishing, brilliant, world-changing, but not the guy who goes home with the gal.

I’m not talking about reality here – I’m talking about cultural perception. After all, Paul Newman was actually Jewish, as were Paul Muni, Kirk Douglas, John Garfield, Tony Curtis, and many others (and the same goes for the endless list of Jewish female movie stars – there is no shortage of real-life sexy Jews on the Hollywood roster). But Tony Curtis was cast to play Italian, because he was dark eyed and sexy. The game was rigged.

All of this came home to me recently when I realized that Peter Petrelli – the brooding and impossibly sexy male star of the TV series “Heroes” – is not only Italian, but “post-ethnically Italian”. In other words, his entire family, from his U.S. Senator brother to his billionaire alpha-male dad to his elegant patrician mother, have clearly already risen to the top of the American social heap.

And as I watched the show, I began to realize that something was going on here. Peter Petrelli is the archetypical Prince. Not the ethnic immigrant gosh-I-hope-he-makes-it prince, but the real deal. As in Prince Hal, Aragorn, Simba the White Lion, Robert Redford.

Something fundamental has happened. A young Italian American guy is now being sold as the ultimate potential mate – American royalty – the guy who will usher some lucky gal into the highest caste gene pool.

I don’t think an HBO miniseries will be developing this kind of treatment any time soon for the Shapiros or the Goldsteins.

It’s interesting that Dagmar should bring up Mike’s suggestion that buttons be placed on the back of the PDA. I played around with these ideas about six years ago. Here is a little java applet I made in early March 2003 to visualize how you might arrange the keys on such a device: http://kenperlin.com/handheld (drag your mouse to see it from different angles).

In that device I was going for a QWERTY arrangement, gripped from the two sides in both hands, using the four fingers to type, although you could also put thumb keys on the top. The idea here is that your keypresses are mirrored on the display while you are just learning – until you get good at it, and then you no longer need that help.

I’m kind of amazed that even now (six years later!) there is no commercial product out there that even tries to do a physical keyboard on the back. I couldn’t possibly have been the only one playing with these ideas, even back then.

Continuing the topic from yesterday…

Of course all the people I know who are blind can read and write Braille. But I don’t know anybody else who writes Braille – except now for me, because I used that java applet I posted yesterday to spend the twenty minutes or so it takes to learn how to write in the Braille alphabet.

It occurs to me that there may be an odd sort of prejudice at work here. Braille, it turns out (not surprisingly) is vastly superior than anything that sighted people currently use for typing on a small portable device while looking somewhere else. For example, suppose you are in a meeting, and you don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation to jot down a quick note or send off a text message (either to yourself or others). If you need to look down at your cellphone to write that quick note, then you will have to look away from the person you are talking with.

Why don’t we all just use Braille? Why don’t our portable electronic devices come with a small keyboard that supports this much more sensible way of typing into a PDA – one that does not need to keep our eyes always focused on the keyboard? It would be easy to make it work with just one hand (eg: by providing three keys for the thumb, rather than one).

Is our general lack of use of Braille caused by some taboo at work, a sense that it’s “only for blind people”? Or there some flaw in my reasoning or assumptions?

I wanted to learn to write Braille, and I figured the most useful thing to do was to implement a Braille writer java applet. That way other people could also use it to learn how to write Braille.

I actually started it the other day, but got distracted by other things. So today I finished it up, and I’ve put it on-line at http://kenperlin.com/braillewriter.

Seems like one of those things that should have already been out there somewhere as a free resource. Better late than never.

Yesterday I gave several gifts to people I like very much. One in particular was the “Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov. I gave this to an incandescently brilliant eleven year old boy, the son of a good friend of mine.

Not only hadn’t he ever read it – he’d never heard of it. I suspect a lot of eleven year olds today have never heard of “Foundation”. There is (apparently) no movie deal attached to this trilogy, and therefore no reason for large commercial forces to hype it. And yet, watching my young friend read the back jacket, seeing his gradual understanding of what he held in his hands, was very moving to me.

I had first read “Foundation” when I was the same age he is now – about eleven – and it had had a profound effect on me. Sure, I had been reading SciFi before then, but “Foundation” was different. It seemed to resonate on so many levels – psychological, political, sociological – that one could spend years poring over it, and never run out of things to discover. The openmindedness with which Asimov engaged concepts and ideas – the way he would trust his reader, casually crossing boundaries between ways of thinking – was indeed a foundation for much of what would become my own way of looking at the world.

It is good to know that this sort of storytelling magic might still work its wonders on someone who is now eleven. Hopefully one day, when he is older – like I am now – my young friend will return the favor by giving this delightful book, or another of his choice, to some curious young member of a generation yet to come.

From time to time I hear beautiful strains of music in my dreams. Not familiar music, but rather music I’ve never heard before. There are times when my dreaming mind thinks “Ah, what a beautiful melody. If only I could write this down, to enjoy when I am awake.”

I remain skeptical that this music exists at all. Although it would be lovely to think that my sleeping mind is composing lovely lyrical airs on the fly, I suspect that it is more likely an illusion – that some part of my mind that responds to music is being triggered, without there really being such music.

Of course it would be delightful to find out that the music is real – that my mind is not merely conjuring up a feeling, but the music itself. My skepticism arises from other situations in which my dream-self has been shown to be highly self-deluding.

In particular, I have often woken up from a dream in a state of great excitement, having just invented some marvelous process or mechanism. This euphoria generally lasts around three seconds or so – the amount of time it takes my waking mind to process the great invention and to realize that there is nothing meaningful there – that my “discovery” was merely a row of rainbow colored paints, or an elevator that travels sideways.

It could be that music is different on some fundamental level, that the mind is indeed capable of generating the real deal – lovely lilting strains of inspired music – in some somnambulistic state of fevered creation.

Alas, my waking mind remains ruefully skeptical. Then again, perhaps it is my waking self that is missing something beautiful. As Chuang Tzu might have asked, am I a cynic who dreams he is a composer, or a composer who dreams he is a cynic?

I’ve been noticing, as my recent life has been getting busier and busier, that I’ve started shifting the way I think about things. Instead of just thinking “is this a good thing to do” or “is this a bad thing to do”, I’ve started thinking in terms of whether this one-more-thing-to-do is going to cause the entire apparatus I call a schedule to topple over ignominiously, like the effect of that one last proverbial straw on the back of an already overladen camel.

And I am reminded of what a wise older friend – alas no longer with us – told me many years ago. He said that the one real cost in any project, the thing that must be watched over at all costs, is the number of (in his words) MAU’s – Management Attention Units. You can cut corners on anything else, find alternate paths to the same goal, slash budgets, take short cuts, invent clever work-arounds, but you only have so many MAU’s in any project. If you use those up, the jig is up.

And so I realize, as paradoxical and against my nature as it seems, that doing less can in fact be doing more. Rather than racing all out to keep those plates spinning in the air, it might actually be more productive to spend a certain amount of time doing nothing – just to allow some space between the ears, rather than giving in to the next bout of action-packed planning and time juggling.

Just as muscles need time to rest, as even a top athlete needs to sleep at night, we all need a way, from time to time, to get away from our own ceaseless planning – from the management of our own busy lives. By all means dive in, make things happen, enjoy the happy madness of it all. Just be careful not to overspend your Management Attention Units.