"Survival" Horror

Okay, I give up. I'm not going to complete The Last of Us, although I think I'm in the final chapter. I think it's probably my last ever purchase of a survival horror game.

The problem I have with TLoU is the same problem I have with any other modern "survival" "horror" game, and it's gotten so bad that I think I have to give up the genre.

To me, survival horror is about knowing that you can't win if you try to fight straight on. It's a struggle to survive on the outskirts of the monster's attention. You scrounge up resources, avoid fights, and plan things out carefully.

There are actually a large number of games like this. Obviously System Shock II, but also the early Resident Evil games and a bunch of "strategic" zombie flash games where you have to recapture a city. Also: games like Minecraft.

The problem I have with the modern "survival "horror" game is that you aren't skirting around the edge of disaster. The writers just toss you into the disaster and... you find it's not really that disastrous. It's just some tedious quicktime events to not die, plus some running around. Don't worry, in the likely event that you can't muster up the energy to try to survive, it'll happily respawn you a few seconds earlier so you can try again.

What part of that is "survival"?

Well, they have the "horror" down, I suppose. Forcing me to fight human characters in incredibly gory cutscenes so I can watch humans torture each other. If I was even vaguely allowed to actually act on my own recognizance, I would just jump out a window like the hundreds of windows I've jumped out of before... but, no, these windows are the mysterious "have a little bit of a wood plank across the outside" variety, and therefore cannot be jumped through.

The railroading is painfully obvious. You know exactly when the writers have decided that you need to have an "exciting" sequence, because you suddenly lose the ability to actually play the game. All your avenues of exploration are closed off, all your mobility is locked in, and you are funneled politely into a batch of stupid. Even in-game, the characters clearly know that they are walking into a trap.

Then... why? Just leave.

Just leave.

Just go away and survive.

In earlier generations, I could allow for the funneled-in boss fights and encounters, but those were the days when the world was coarse and simplistic. You could forgive scripts that spawned enemies to ambush you, because you knew that was the limit of the technology.

But in these new games, the world is vast and beautiful. You can go so many great places. All the potential threats have hearing and vision and pathing and all sorts of wonderful simulations that make them actually interactive. And just as you begin to revel in it - WHOOSH, all the windows are replaced by decals and you're on a rickety bridge one foot too high above the dry riverbed to jump down. And enemies pop into existence!

This is not only a cheap holdover from earlier times, it's actually even worse. Few of those early survival horror games ever featured cutscenes where you torture people, or people torture you. They didn't really have the ability to show humans being ripped apart in quite that much detail, so they were forced to actually have gameplay.

So I keep buying survival horror games hoping to find a game where I try to survive, but all I find are action games where surviving doesn't matter and you're just tossed into the horror straightaway. And, of course, you find that the writers have "added depth" to their game by taking control away from you and rubbing your face in torture porn.

It's a crappy genre.

And what really gets me - what really makes me mad - is I could literally just wander around in the world doing nothing.

These are amazing set pieces. These are astounding works of art. They outshine all the classic masterpieces of canvas and sculpture - detailed, varied, gorgeous. Everything - light, color, sound... it's all masterful and it would be great to just dwell there. Live there. Just sit around in that place and I dunno, play the guitar.

BOOM POW NOW YOU'RE SHOVING A HOOK THROUGH A GUY'S EYEBALL ARE YOU HAVING A DEEP EXPERIENCE YET?

Farewell to Consoles

It's a little depressing to see something that was the foundation of my entertainment life veering away from me.

It'd be nice to think of myself as a computer gamer, but that was really only true for a few years - when computer games were good. Then came a vast wasteland of real time strategy games followed by MMORPGs - none of which are even vaguely interesting to me. I guess you could say that Blizzard killed my interest in computer games, and then killed my interest in MMORPGs. Pretty impressive for a company that actually produces good products!

So I've mostly been a console gamer. Kinda skipped the Playstation, because that's when computer games were good, but before and after that... consoles. Sure, a steady diet of indie PC games, and games that are ubiquitous cross-platform releases on the computer for modding purposes... but mostly console-oriented.

Of course I knew the PS4, NameStillStupidEvenAfterFiveYearsU, and the XBox Fucking Stupidname were all going to be aimed away from me. I'm not a "bro gamer", nor am I the "living room audience".

But seeing the consoles actually announced, seeing them come out and just totally say "BRO GAMER LIVING ROOM BRO BRO LIVING ROOM" is incredibly depressing. It really hammered home: not only am I not the core audience, they are actively blocking me out. Their features are actively things that annoy me and drive me away, and they are building their whole business strategy around telling me to go away.

I hate TV. I hate always-on social bullshit. I hate trophies. I hate water coolers. I hate that when you want to build an emotional attachment in a bro game, you have to make the buddy a dog because your humans are so inhuman that you can't bond with them. I'm interested in a tiny science fiction subset of bro shooters... oh, wait, they're going to be TV shows instead.

I hate TV.

The hardware is awesome. I want to play games on it.

But I can't. There aren't going to be any games I can play. Even the games aimed vaguely in my direction, such as RPGs or indie titles on their inevitable indie marketplace, are going to be poisoned by the "features" they must use. This isn't some kind of paranoid fantasy: games on the PS3 and 360 are already poisoned by trophy popups, scoreboards, ambient friend noise, another layer of trophies... and, of course, the omnipresent obsession with dehumanization that bleeds into every game on the console, even games which aren't about murdering people.

People thought Bioshock Infinite was awesome. To me, it was a ruined game. It was a shit game with shit mechanics further ruined by shit add-ins required to support shit social play... the part that everyone loved was the tiny kernel of humanity hiding beneath all that crap.

Well, if you released it on the computer, you wouldn't have needed the bullshit. It could have been a much shorter, more human game. But the console's restriction on content, length, trophies, marketing requirements... all of them destroyed the game. And this is the current generation of console.

The next generation of consoles literally came out and said "yeah, a lot more of that."

... Well, no.

I'm sorry, consoles. I love standalone games. I love the ritual of popping in a CD and booting up a machine and grabbing a controller. I love immersing myself in a world where there is no alt-tabbing, no keyboard, no mouse.

But that world doesn't exist any more. Those consoles don't exist any more.

There is nothing for me in this new world of big media companies force-feeding you bullshit all day. I don't like TV.

I don't like games that try to be TV.

I don't like these new consoles.

I guess I'm a computer gamer "for realz", now.

The only problem is that most of the computer games I play are small, indie games. The fat, poly-heavy AAA titles are all console-based. I need me some eye glitter from time to time.

Sure, those games come out cross-platform. But they're poisoned by consoles. The current generation consoles already stain these games with requirements for crappy play, marketing-demanded content, DLC, trophies, social play... you can take the game out of the console, but you can never take the console out of the game.

Are there going to be any epic, high-quality games on the PC in the upcoming generation?

Oh, right, MMORPGs. Just as fucking bad.

... Sigh...

I really hope indies start putting out serious eye candy, or I'll be getting plenty of vegetables but no meat in my gaming diet.

Actually, I guess that summarizes the argument. I love my older consoles. They're meat. The new consoles are high fructose corn syrup soda drinks.

I cannot deal with that. I can't pretend it's not happening, or just be okay with it. It's not the same thing, it tastes bad, and it's a company actively pushing bad shit on you in an attempt to make money more easily.

No! Gimme meat!

Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!

Big Data = Big Abuses

I've had a rough time defending myself on G+: I think that targeted ads are bad, except when they are explicitly asked for. I also think that corporations need to be shackled, legally, from tracking their customers.

These are pretty severe opinions, and I caught a lot of flak from people who disagree. Which is fine. The arguments can get heated, but it's not like a political argument: there are points being made and disagreed with, rather than opinions simply being stuck to. However, since my opinion is apparently pretty far from the norm, it needs a fairly large amount of defense.

Let me start by establishing that big data != small data.

The first line of defense against my opinions is that companies have had all this data forever, they're just using it more effectively now, and that's fine.

That doesn't hold water for me. Having something you can't use and having something you can use are simply different categories. If you have an old musket your great-great-grandaddy used in the revolutionary war and your neighbor has an AK47 they use to shoot crows, are you going to argue those are the same situation?

Whether you are for or against gun control, you need to acknowledge that those are different categories of gun ownership and use.

It's the same with data: having a giant stack of receipts you use to file taxes as opposed to having a giant database you use to predict exactly what each individual customer, by name, will buy this week... those are fundamentally different. Whether you are for or against the right to do such a thing, you still have to acknowledge that they are fundamentally different categories of data possession and use.

Now let me argue that big data = big abuses.

Our current economic woes come from big data.

Let's start with the sub-prime mortgage crisis. This was a situation only made possible because of big data. The massive amount of storage, networking, and communication required to analyze, package, resell, and distribute mortgages is fundamentally big data.

If they had to shuffle actual papers around, it would have been impossible to bundle and resell these mortgages in quantity. Because of this, it would have been impossible to shift and seemingly diminish risk, and fewer such mortgages would have been approved. The crisis may have still happened to some extent, but it wouldn't have been a bubble popping, just a pinprick on ordinary economic skin.

It's probably still a tender topic, so I imagine some readers may take offense to what I just wrote. Instead of spending a day on that one topic, I'll just move on to other topics with the same fundamental situation: big data causing big abuses.

In my opinion, the largest big data abuse is algorithmic trading, specifically high-frenquency microsecond transactions. Algorithmic trading has played a role in, and arguably been the cause of, several of the more recent stock market disasters.

The trading of stocks to take advantage of moment-to-moment price fluctuations is the way to make money on the market, as you'll see at those Wikipedia links. There is no law against it, and people have become great successes because of it. "Quants" are mathematicians turned billionaires.

So, why would you hate that? Why would you hate success? Are you some kind of horrible success-hating freak, you freak?

My reason is simple: it is success at the price of the market. "Zero sum" success. Their success did not come from making the world or the market better. It comes at the price of making it worse. Abusing it. On the best of days, it's a tax on people who are trading for real reasons related to the actual performance of the company in question. On the worst of days, it crashes the market entirely.

The argument can be made that this is effectively stealing. If a bully takes a geek's lunch money, we don't call that success. We call it stealing, even if all we see is the bully making a gesture and the long-suffering geek timidly handing over cash. Wow, sure looks voluntary, why are you complaining about it?

We can argue that what the bully does is illegal and what the quants do is legal, but let's leave aside the question of legal and talk about the question of benefit. The money HFT nets you... where does it come from? It comes from people who are participating in the market in the way the market was intended to work. It comes out of their pocket, without their permission. (It may also come from other HFT, but for the sake of argument, we'll consider that a closed pool of "HFT cash".)

How does that benefit the market?

It doesn't. Actual participants are made poorer for the sake of some people who have found a nice loophole. The loophole of big data.

With enough data, they can figure out what trades will happen when, at what prices, and hop on top of that. They can always be on top, skimming the cream off the milk everyone else is buying.

I hope that my point is clear: I'm considering everything from the perspective of a healthy market and economy. Rather than just hailing anyone with cash as a "success", I only hail those that actually improve things as a success. You can make as much money as you want, as long as you do so by offering better products or services. Otherwise, you're a burden on humanity and I want you gone.

I've used financial examples for big data, because that's the industry that's had big data the longest. However, there are other examples, such as the RIAA's persecution of its users based on data obtained from sifting through endless thousands of torrents and data transmission records. Once again, big data allowing for a big abuse, although the big abuse in this case was less devastating than crashing the world economy.

You can argue that not all big data automatically results in a big abuse. That's true: big data can have a positive result, especially in medical data, where it can lead to fairly serious breakthroughs as we discover the links between similar and dissimilar cases.

But the point is that you can't simply ignore big data. If there is data, it can be mined. For example, here is Target mining data. The data they are mining? Strictly the things you've purchased from them recently. Surely you can't fault them that! It's barely even "big data"!

That's right. With what I would consider the smallest, sparest kind of big data, Target has figured out how to tell when your baby is due - without you even buying pregnancy-related goods from them, or telling them you're pregnant. This isn't proof that Target is evil, or even an example of evil big data. It is an example of the sorts of things you can tell from even a relatively small amount of data.

We can't treat data as if it is unimportant. We need to consider any data to be a danger, just like any gun is a danger, just like any moving vehicle is a danger, any poison is a danger. In any given case, the data may be secured and well-behaved, just as in most cases a gun, car, and jar of rat poison is secure and well-behaved. But, on the other hand, we consider it illegal to wave a gun around while asking for more money.

Now, big data cannot be opted out of.

A lot of people want to "vote with your feet". If you don't like big data being used against you, stick to suppliers that don't use big data against you!

There's a lot of problems with that. The first is that it relies on you to know which places are going to use big data against you. Many of the big data applications are subtle enough that you won't notice.

The second is that opting out usually doesn't accomplish anything. For example, I don't use Facebook, but they still track me. Moreover, the fact that everyone I know uses Facebook extends their reach to me even if I don't use them - games released for Facebook only, posts only available to Facebook members, and so on. It is the same with Google, Steam, Microsoft, Apple - opting out of their services does nothing to actually stop them from affecting you.

The third problem with opting out is that you really can't. Big data is everywhere. What cell phone provider will you use that doesn't abuse their data? What internet provider? There are no innocent parties. The corporate culture doesn't allow for it.

You can argue that when abuses get bad enough, enough people will vote with their feet. I would say that's unlikely. Classically, corporations have been extremely good about maintaining a grip on their abused customers. Humans can get used to anything - for example, we've gotten used to high-frequency trading.

"Then what's the problem, if people aren't upset?"

... well, go back and read the essay again. The problem is that big data causes big abuses. What you don't fear can still hurt you. We weren't afraid of HFT, or sub-prime mortgages, or music distributors. They still caused us a lot of problems - even if we weren't even participating!

...

Oh, right, targeted ads.

I think that any targeted ads you didn't ask for are just like high frequency trading. It's a situation where the company is data mining to figure out the sort of things you might be about to do, and then pressuring you to do them in its favor. You were about to do them anyway, the market was about to function fine, this is just them stepping in to take their cut because they know you.

I won't argue that it's evil, but I will argue that it is anticompetitive. It is very difficult for a newcomer to compete with that. It'll get more difficult as established megacorporations band together to share your data, forming pan-industry teams to lock down their dominance.

There are some situations where it could theoretically benefit you - for example, if they are having a sale on something and you happen to want that something, you could get it at a lower price. However, if they are truly someplace you want to shop, you should be giving them explicit permission to send you notifications on that sort of sale.

Otherwise, it's them using their market share to pressure you to spend more and to wall out their competition. I consider that bad for the market and bad for the consumer. I consider it almost identical to HFT: taking advantage of someone participating in a useful (but predictable) manner.

It's not at HFT scale yet, but it's the same fundamental kind of thing, to me.

Degradation of Privacy

I guess this stance is an unpopular one - or, rather, an unfashionable one - but I really hate when companies gather data about me and my friends.

I'm bringing this up here because I catch a lot of flak about it from even fairly geeky friends. So let me explain why I am against corporations collecting and retaining information. More specifically, why I think it should be illegal for corporations to use facial recognition software or otherwise "deanonymize" information.

Let's start small.

Point one: corporations cannot be trusted to keep data safely. Corporate IT practices are notoriously poor, and there have been hundreds of examples of accounts (even ones with financial information such as credit card numbers) being stolen by the hundreds of thousands. Sony is the most recent loud example, but Citibank and others show it is hardly a black swan.

So, even before we get to things like privacy, corporations can't even be trusted to keep the data they actually need to operate day to day safe. There are plenty of practices that can keep user data safe even if the corporate database is hacked or leaked. These all involve not keeping data. Only keeping hashes, discarding the credit card number except perhaps the last four digits for identification, and so on.

Some data are less critical. It's a pain when someone steals 500,000 client email addresses, but it's probably not going to result in your clients actually being harmed significantly - just an uptick in the amount of useless spam being caught by the filters. Except that's not actually true: that data can help deanonymize other data, which is a problem most people don't bother considering.

Point two: Data give corporations advantages. Corporations are businesses, 99.99999% of which are out to get as much money as possible. Even without any information about you, corporations build their products to lock you in and drill your pockets as much as possible.

While I don't like this much, I understand that it's not feasible to magically make corporations stop doing that. So let's proceed with the idea that any advantage the corporation can get will go to mining its consumers as much as possible.

Normally, this is moderated by competition. If one company is too abusive, you can switch to a competitor that offers a very similar product.

However, data are nontransferable value. It's best to think of data as the on-line equivalent of "location, location, location!" The reason eBay is popular is because eBay is popular: the mass of data it has - the number of transactions, the ratings history, and so on - makes it more valuable to post your stuff to eBay than a smaller competitor. The only competitors likely to succeed are those specializing in very limited fields where the noise on eBay is actually a downside.

This is true of social data as well. A big difficulty for most people moving from Facebook to Google+ was the need to recreate their social network. Google+ reduced this difficulty by offering up suggestions based on your email history. Google was able to (somewhat) overcome the mass of Facebook's data by leveraging its own, similar data. However, a social site such as Appleseed does not have data to leverage, and is therefore at a tremendous disadvantage.

This is not simply value-add data, either. Having information about your users allows you to advertise to them as well as actually make their experience better. Amazon is a great example of this, where it will advertise hundreds of targeted ads at you every page - "also bought X" "if you like Y, try Z" "EVERYONE IS BUYING A KINDLE OH GOD WHY WON'T YOU BUY A KINDLE YOU BASTARD LOOK HERE IS EVERY KINDLE EVER JUST PICK ONE BUY IT PLEEEEEEEEAAAASE!"

And so on.

This is a business advantage. Better advertising of related services and products is an advantage. It can generate revenue via ad fees or via higher conversion rates on direct sales.

Summary: think of data as location. The more data someone has, the closer they are to your house. That means that you're more likely to shop there, and if they open another store in their mall, you'll be more likely to shop at that new store. Data are a direct business advantage, and you're not likely to drive an hour to go to some interesting new place no matter how fancy-pants it is in comparison.

Point three: data can be combined, and it is easier to do so if you have more data. Some of you may have noticed I've been sticking to "data as plural", normally a pedantic and irritating choice. This is because I think one detail most people miss about data is that it is plural. Data is not like a bouncy ball. Data are like water in a cup.

Companies can combine data. This is one reason why companies frequently sell data to each other. To date, 99% of the data on the web about you has been more or less the same: your name and email address are the details that can get sold, your home address and credit card information are the details that cannot be sold.

But these days, there are a lot more details out there than you might think. What movies you like to rent, where you shop, who you phoned, what topics of conversation are common in your emails and social network chats, what kind of porn you surf for, which aliases are yours and not somebody else's, what your political preferences are, what kind of stupid shit you said ten years ago.

Most of this data is pretty useless to most people. Most corporations don't even care about it. But it is out there. It is really easy to trawl your Facebook or Twitter or Google+ account to collect a list of everyone you talk to and who talks to you.

Right now, your Amazon.com account is tied to an email address. Your Google+ address, probably. So Amazon can automatically, with no humans involved, look to see who is in your circles and visa-versa. And, next time you go to Amazon.com, it'll say "Hey, Greg bought this book, you should buy it too!" Of course, Greg bought "Animal Sex and You: A Practical Guide", so it might be a popup you wish you'd never seen...

Think it's outlandish? Here's a fun experiment! Go to Amazon.com, and search for wishlist. Just randomly punch in people's gmail accounts. I got a hit rate of around 20%.

Point four: no, really, data can be combined. I'm not joking. I don't really think I stressed this enough. Data can be automatically aggregated and combined. Even if you're not involved.

For example, if one of my friends posts a picture of me and then labels my face, I am now in the datastream. Especially if he labels me by email address or other unique identifier. Moreover, with fun facial recognition software, it's possible to then go and find out other pictures that are likely to be about me. Even if I'm not in the system as a user, the system has information about me.

Ever link to someone? "Oh, my friend Jerry posted this on Facebook: kalinkylinky". Congrats, your friend Jerry has now been linked to you, even if he's not even on the same service as you. Even if he has you blocked because you're a creepy stalker.

Think making your privacy settings strict will save you? Nope, it's pretty easy for me to reconstruct your social network using your friends who do NOT have strict privacy settings.

Let me make that clear: even if you set your account to strict privacy or don't participate at all, if you have any connections to other people who aren't quite so strict, your data can be easily reconstructed.

This is the same concept as "deanonymization". It's easy to take data that is supposed to be private or anonymous and link it up to a particular person using data from another source (or from the same source but another vector - IE, your friends' accounts).

Point five: data may be used to discriminate against you. Assuming that you don't care about all that above, let me remind you that data can be used against you, and already probably is.

Most employers will at least perform a simple search on your name when you interview them. Many employ a "drilling" service that will trawl for all accounts that can be linked to you and then trawl through their posts, looking for references to things like drugs.

These are services which already exist and are used reasonably frequently. It's only half a step to finding your circle of friends and, even if your account posts are private, finding what THEIR posts are about and what kind of comments you've left to their posts.

I use this as an introductory problem because it is one most people realize exists already. However, it is flat-out minor in comparison to other discriminatory activities. And here I don't mean racial discrimination, but the more general term meaning "judgment based on details or categories".

For example, we've already seen a few cases where people have gotten in trouble for Facebook pictures showing them carousing when they should be unable to work. Posts about your health are apparently court-worthy evidence when it comes to not paying out health insurance.

You have a side of you that employers, parents, government officials, and Amazon.com shouldn't know about? Well, your aliases are a fragile anonymity. Once broken, pseudonyms disintegrate. If you posted pornographic Twilight fanfic as a high school student under a pseudonym, the minute that pseudonym is linked to your adult identity, you are forever labeled as someone who has really, really shitty taste forever.

To those of us in a pretty swank position of privilege, this seems like a rather minor inconvenience. A) It's not, it's a major lifestyle change to give up all privacy to everyone who might want to track you for any reason. B) People who aren't rich white guys are much more subject to problems due to this kind of privacy invasion, so their issues will be 10x worse.

Anyway, the only solution I can see is to make it illegal for companies to deanonymize data or leverage publicly available data on their consumers. Otherwise, this stuff will happen if even a few of your friends are lax in their privacy settings.

Of course, that illegality doesn't spread to things like foreign companies and governments. But it should slow the spread if most of the major players that normally accrue data (such as Google, Amazon, etc) aren't allowed to accrue it in ways that endanger you. Having to compile all that data themselves is a significant stumbling block to any oppressive foreign power seeking to crack down on, say, demonstrations against them.

Most of us live in a very cushy world where we can't imagine data being used against us in any significant way. "It's just ads!" That's nearsighted and egotistical.

The New Internet Economy

Like everyone, the release of Google+ has got me in a bit of a state. I don't use Facebook, because it's a nightmarish piece of social spyware. Instead of infecting your computer, it infects your life.

The lists comparing Google+ to Facebook are endless, and they always come out in Google's favor. This makes sense, Facebook is ancient and cobbled together out of random crap, while Google+ is a polished, modern, unified piece of code.

But in those lists somewhere is one "advantage to Google+" that really bothers me. It is this: "Google makes a better steward for your personal data than Facebook."

People are talking about "the attention economy" as if it's some far-distant future thing. But that economy is already here. Anyone who creates web content for a living already knows that. Google certainly knows it, better than anyone.

Google+ is a weapon in this economy. It is used to leverage attention: while it may not increase the amount of attention poured out by Google's userbase, it can deploy it far more effectively. Facebook could be said to be part of this "attention economy", but it wasn't weaponized. Google+ is weaponized Facebook.

This bothers me. The utter lack of privacy isn't really what bothers me, it's the utter lack of concern over it. Everyone's rushing to Google+ with glee. "What's the problem?" they say, "it's basically just Facebook, and I already used that!"

Google+ is weaponized. Google+ is not Facebook. It is a new layer of internet.

Google already tracks your searches, your youtube video views, your installed Chrome apps, your email buddies, the contents of your emails... it does this to better serve you. Ads.

While it is possible to block or ignore the resulting ads, you cannot block the monitoring. If you go out of your way, you can browse in privacy mode or such, but then you can't participate in the many kinds of content that rely on you having a valid (monitored) login. For example, YouTube won't allow you to view any videos with higher than G-rated content unless you let them (and Google) monitor you.

Google+ is simply the next step, helpfully allowing the users to build a context web. The contents of the internet as well as the individual Google users will be put into a vast and highly detailed web. Perfect for pushing ads, sure, and I think most people are thinking that. They go, "Okay, I don't really care, serve me some ads."

But the problem is the context web. This is an extremely valuable web of connections and preferences that can make your internet experience much more fluid and enjoyable. Unfortunately, the web of connections is wholly owned by Google.

Exporting your data won't help much, and Google knows it. It's not just about who your friends are, any more than your personality is about what genes you have. It's about the billions of links and cross-posts and retweets and conversations thrown about and followed.

That's the problem I have with Google+: it is an effort to build a new kind of social internet. I wouldn't mind if that internet were public - I think it's a fantastic idea. But they are aiming to build a Google-owned social internet.

Nobody seems to care.

Fear Campaigns

This is chief Paul macMillan, lord high defender of the MBTA. I'd like to remind you that danger is everywhere, and any of the hundreds of pieces of litter and forgotten bags could be terrorist plots to kill you. Despite the fact that the MBTA has never been a terrorist target and, in fact, no American buses ever have, I'm going to spend the next 55 seconds loudly telling you to be afraid.

It is our hope that with so many people looking for terrorists, you will be too busy to complain about what an incompetent job the MBTA does. Since the number of complaints about incompetence have been rising and the number of terrified peasants begging for protection has been falling, we have once again called upon the "fear" branch of our "baseless propaganda" division. You will notice that not only have we added an additional 10 seconds to this speech, we've added a 15-foot cube directly in the middle of the walking path and labeled it "it's never this obvious". Which is true, because things that don't exist aren't obvious.

So please, everyone, participate in our "hear something, fear something" campaign and carefully look at the floor around you, your fellow passengers, anywhere but up.

The Things I Don't Have

Today I read Seth Godin's opinion on why I really hate hearing about Steam and iPad games: because I'm jealous and regretful that I chose not to participate in these things.

To be specific, he says "The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know about what you've got on offer. They actively decided to take themselves out of the running for this magic event, this extraordinary product, and marketing it to them belittles their choice."

It's true that I choose not to buy iWidgets, use Facebook, or use Steam. And it's true that I hate it when a cool game comes out that's only for iWidgeteers, Facebookies, and Steamfolks, and it's paraded in front of my nose day after day.

This is not because I regret not getting those things. In fact, two out of three of them are free. If I wanted to, I could get them right now. No difficulty at all. Seth says I'm upset because I'm a special kind of pampered jerk who chose not to get them and am now regretful.

I can't agree. Sure, I'm a pampered jerk. But the reasons I don't want to use those things isn't because I chose incorrectly or short-sightedly. I don't use those platforms because they are vile platforms.

Interesting things come out on those platforms, and I'm regretful that the publishers didn't bother to make their thing work on platforms that don't require me to get assfucked. I'm angry when I hear about Terraria because an otherwise awesome game requires me to cuddle up with a third-party piece of bloatware that exists solely to grab my hair painfully tight and scream ads into my ear while eating up my RAM, tracking my every move, and installing mandatory patches that never make things any better and usually make things significantly worse.

A platform is not simply a method for distributing or running software or games. It has good and bad points on its own. The idea Seth posits is that if they release good enough software and games, I should at some point be agreeable to them, want to use the platform.

That's a willingness to bargain away your freedom and privacy for a product. Really? You want to espouse the idea that, if only the things we were offered were a little bit higher quality, we would be happy to sell ourselves, our freedom, our privacy?

How about we come from the other direction, and say that a product is not enough to compromise our person. How about we point out that these platforms are not all equal, and many of them exist specifically to cut apart their users, extract anything they can, and either sell it or abuse it for the sake of further profit?

The Opt-Out

This is a rant. Maybe an unfair one, who knows.

So, I made a purchase from Etsy for Christmas gifts. I kinda like the place, and I have friends that do quite a bit of business through them. Today, I get an email from Etsy.

"We recently launched a new feature, Circles, that lets you connect with other people on Etsy. When you add someone to your Etsy circle, you can follow along with their favorites in your activity feed. It's illuminating!

Right now it's hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that's sad. Well, we're changing that. We're making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.

(If you don't want people you know to be able to find you, you will be able easily to opt out through your account privacy settings.)"

Wow, that is not at all something I'm even vaguely interested in. Okay, lost of good sites have features I don't care about. But read carefully: this is not a feature I don't care about. Turns out, I care deeply!

Let's review the severe problems in this message.

The only obvious issue is that they have decided to make my email address a public part of my account. This only becomes a real issue because they also automatically opt you into sharing your purchase history. Well, brilliant.

I can see how many people would find this a good new feature. For example, my friends that do a lot of sales through Etsy. But me? I find this an extreme breach of privacy. To the point where I am now significantly less likely to use Etsy.

I logged in and opted out of all that shit. Turns out there's no "delete account" option, by the way.

"Easy to opt out" is an oxymoron. "Opt out" is a poison term, it already means you raised a barrier specifically to make it more likely people will participate. Nothing can be "easy to opt out", because that's called "opt in". "Opt in" is the only responsible, ethical way to reveal client information.

The only points Etsy gets here is that they sent this email before enabling the new feature - it doesn't go live until next month. I don't think Etsy was trying to be sleazy... But linking personal email addresses to their purchase history in public? Yeah, that's not shady!

I'd stop using Amazon in a heartbeat if they did that, and I practically live through them.

Of course, I'm pretty touchy on privacy. I'm the guy who refuses to get a Facebook account. And I'm not really Etsy's target audience, or even a good customer. Still, it's a shame they took a sleazy route. I guess most people don't mind an utter and almost criminal lack of privacy. At least, I hope so, or Etsy's in trouble.

It's possible this is not sleazy, and they've just been really horrible about explaining it. However, that seems vanishingly unlikely given the reckless disregard for privacy shown by nearly every company these days.

Grrrr.

Connectivity

I was watching this archived webcast today. It gets contentious about halfway in, but I like that, it makes me want to write about the subject. This is a borderline rant, I guess, but I hope you enjoy it.

A lot of the conversations we have about the nature of technology stresses, well, stress. Just as an easy example, the author of that webcast specifically calls it "panic architecture" which, like many other terms, is coined to make a point rather than be useful.

Assuming you don't want to listen to the hour of webcast, I'll cover the bits I touch on. In this case, "panic architecture" is used to refer to the theoretical stimulus overload from tweets and emails and IMs all popping up at you all the time.

I can't help but turn down this kind of shallow analysis. Not only is there no real evidence to support it, but there's also no sign that these clumsy first-generation implementations are the only ones we're going to see.

We've developed tools to let us share with everyone, everywhere, instantly. We're now using tools that let us "hear" without having to be listening.

Every kind of "panic architecture" interaction is actually asynchronous. That is, the computer tells you that there's a new message, and you can get around to reading it whenever you like. Some pieces of software are worse than others - Twitter is only barely asynchronous, since if you wait more than an hour or so, you'll have a backlog too deep to sift through. So you lose a lot of data down the tubes if you wait.

I guess you could say that's a high-pressure environment, but not really. The only reason it's high-pressure is because you've tricked yourself into thinking it's important to view everything, and view it fast. Trying to make sure you don't miss any tweets is sort of like trying to make absolutely sure you see every single person who passes by the Starbucks. It's not a sensible reaction.

If we feel stressed by these "always on" tools, it's because we've tricked ourselves into viewing them in the wrong way. Part of that might be pure neurochemistry, but I think it's mostly a cultural maladaptation which will fade in time as we get used to the technology and learn, as a populace, that it's okay to let the river flow by without trying to drink it all.

Also, there is another generation of tools past these "hear without listening" tools.

Phone calls extend our ears so we can talk over long distances. But that's only this very instant. So we use emails, RSS and the like to extend our memory: we can think about something long after it has been said.

And now we're going to get a new breed of tool: one which extends our thinking about something across vast distances. Already, we're seeing it. We don't get all our emails: we get only the emails our outboard brain doesn't discard as spam. Many of us have dozens of rules about which emails are further flagged and sorted. This lets us determine whether something needs to be read soon, or whether it can be put off until we feel vaguely curious.

In the future, more intelligent tools will have a system for cuing things up. If it's important, it tells you immediately. If it's interesting but not important, it'll bother you with a quick line and link every few days. If it's something good for you that you can't seem to sit down and get through, it'll keep pestering you.

Essentially, this new breed of tool is a computerized version of the thing in our brains that says "hey, the roof is leaking, maybe we should fix that before it rains again."

Right now, we often try to deal with a true deluge of information right against our brains. I agree that this is not really a very good idea. At the very least, it sets a very low upper limit to the amount of things we can consider. By creating smart tools to deal with that deluge for us, we can consider terabytes of information every hour.

I need to stress that this isn't some fantasy tale of strong AI. We already do this to a great extent by using RSS feeds - we sign up for the news outlets we like, whether they're brand names or individuals with blogs. We use them as our roof-is-leaking engines. I'm simply pointing forward and saying "there's gonna be more of this." For example: Priority Inbox

It is true that humans sometimes feel lost and confused by advances. But this is nothing new. People felt lost and confused when the king changed, or weirdos with funny accents started settling in their alluvial plains. Change makes people feel stressed out, regardless of whether it's technology or culture or any other source.

So, yes, a lot of people feel stressed out by the "constant bombardment" of our "always on" culture. Except that it's not constant bombardment, it's not always on, and the tools for dealing with it gracefully are evolving as we speak. As always, we adapt to our situations and find out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities we are offered.

To me, the real "panic architecture" is the way soft sciences and media outlets continuously scream about dangers that never arrive, dangers that were never even dangers. It interferes with adult's acceptance of change when you scream that every change is a disaster. Kids don't give a shit - a kid will use Twitter and Facebook even if their parents think it is pure poison. But adults have to work to learn these tools, to integrate them into their life even a little bit, and panicking about them just makes the task that much more difficult.

I don't, by the way, think that the webcast I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that kind of panicky statement. I don't know enough about the author to say anything about her, and at worst, the webcast itself is kind of ambivalent on the subject. It's just a handy turn of phrase to steal her words and make another point with them.

There are actually a lot of other things I want to argue about that were covered in that webcast, but this is long enough already.

(By the way, I'm going to coin a term in opposition to the normal way of coining a term. "Roof-is-leaking engines", or RILEs: that's a term that could be useful, but it isn't very good at making a point. )

Skyrim

I posted a very dismissive comment on Skyrim, and I've gotten a fair number of people telling me not to be so dismissive. So, I'm going to talk about it a bit. By "talk", I mean "rant". (Edit: I really mean rant. This is a way over-the-top rant. I only clarify this because now there's some outside links leading here. This is not a measured discussion of merit. It is a rant.)

First, I'm sure Skyrim is going to be an extremely popular game with very high ratings. It'll certainly get game of the year. What I'm saying is that you will enjoy Skyrim if you're even vaguely the sort of person who likes things like Oblivion or Fallout 3. Hell, even I might enjoy it, maybe. It's not a gamble, it's not a mystery, there's not even any need to see gameplay videos. It's a well-funded game from an experienced studio that has put out many of the most successful games in this genre.

But let me tell you why I don't like it.

There's a stench crawling up from below, and I smell it in every press release and article. The stench of... streamlining.

Let me start with the most obvious example: they've taken out the the "restrictive class system" and allow you to gain points in skills just as you use them. Of course, the earlier games had a class system... and still improved your skills as you use them. So we can ignore the "improve your skills as you use them" chaff. All they're doing is explicitly removing classes.

At first glance, you shrug and say "why not? Sounds fine. A lot of successful games like Fallout 3 don't have classes. They're an outdated design philosophy."

So, let me ask a simple question: what was your favorite part of Oblivion and Morrowind?

So far, most of the people I've asked have said either "the first ten hours" or "character customization". Which are basically the same answer.

I played Oblivion for at least two hundred hours. The vast majority of those hours were the first ten hours over and over. This was possible for several reasons. One: character design is fun and has ramifications. So you can simply change your design and be playing a different game, right from the start. Two: you can easily strike off into the world in any way you like, so you're not stapled to the same starting narrative. We'll leave that bit alone for now, except to say that you'll probably be stapled to a starting narrative in Skyrim.

Character design - choosing not just your visual look but also your stats - is a core part of RPG gameplay. The "class" was simply an extension of this, allowing you to radically alter your growth curve and quickly develop different ways to play the game. If I want to play a warrior, I walk out the door as a warrior and do warrior things right away. If I want to play as a thief-mage, I roll it up and run with it.

On the other hand, in Skyrim that's not what you do. At least according to the press releases, you start with potential in everything. Like Fable, perhaps.

It is still possible to become a warrior, or a mage, or whatever. But not until you're ten hours into the game. The first ten hours are almost always nearly identical. You can't skip them: you need to grind character skills during them.

Oh, yes, those restrictive straightjacket classes. Oh how I hated the way they let me play the game any way I wanted. I really hated being allowed to be competent right from the starting gate. It's much better to ditch replay value in favor of locking characters into a sluggish, long-term path that you won't know whether you like or not until ten hours in.

...

I guess that might seem a bit overstating it, but it's not. That's the purpose classes serve, and the damage done by ditching them.

There are a million things I react poorly to. For example, they say that there are X spells - a specific number, something like thirty.

Whut.

Um, why? Where did spell creation go? I really hated being able to create my own fun custom spells! I especially hated being able to enchant stuff, I hope that's gone, too.

They mention there is a focus on blunting and preventing exploits.

Um, why? A single player game doesn't have to be balanced. The exploits are a big part of why all the other Elder Scrolls games were fun. The only reason I can think of to aggressively balance the game is that there will be some kind of ranked multiplayer situation where game balance suddenly matters. I actually hope that they just did it out of a random brain fart instead.

They mention they dropped mysticism. Because who needs a school of magic about magic? Well, obviously, not our avatar. Since he can't roll his own spells or anything.

Three fewer skills? Stinks the same way. Let's guess: is alchemy one of these missing skills, or is it just blunted to the point where you might as well just buy healing potions from the shop?

My complaints could go on basically forever. I have loads of more tenuous concerns. For example, this being a cross-platform RPG, it will almost certainly have "the Console Blight". This is a disease where custom content is verboten, and PC installs come with a gig of malware to keep you from accidentally having any fun. Sure the earlier games didn't have it so bad, but that was then. There's a universal trend towards the console blight, I hardly expect this game to ignore it.

The menu system is mentioned as being more "in game". Like with Fable III and its hilariously, game-breakingly bad "in game" menus? They mention the "horrible" menus from Oblivion. Which menus were those? The ones that let me see the things I needed to see within two clicks using distinct icons? The ones that didn't make my character seem like he was having a psychotic hallucination? The ones that didn't take a second to scroll between submenus? The ones that actually allowed for complex gameplay?

Ugh!

So, yes, Skyrim. Game of the year, guaranteed. You'll love it. Maybe I'll even like it. But it throws away a lot of good stuff in the name of "streamlining".

Because players are retards! We hate designing our characters, having fun with exploits, and playing with complexity. I mean, sure, those'r universally considered the best parts of your earlier games, but those people were all deluded.

... it's been a while since I've done quite so much ranting on this blog. I'm probably the only person on the internet who dislikes what I see about this game. 50% marketing speak and 50% lowest-common-denominator game design. Ugh.

An Apple an Hour

A word of warning, I'm not a fan of Apple. If you are, this is probably going to sound pretty bitter, and you'll probably have the overwhelming urge to try and defend them. I'd prefer it if you just don't bother reading this particular essay, since you certainly aren't going to convince me.

On the other hand, this is not about why Apple sucks. This is, instead, about tweeting.

One of the things I've noticed since the iPad came out is that I've had to drop some people from my Twitter "follow" list, and are considering dropping more. Also, I've had to stop reading Penny Arcade news and a few other things I normally read. Because the only thing they talk about is the iPad.

I was really flummoxed by this. The iPad really isn't that much better than a tablet computer in my opinion - an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one. But these people are... well, the only euphemisms that come to mind are unnecessarily graphic. They're really, really, really hot for the iPad.

Well, maybe they think it's just that good?

No, not really. These same people don't tweet so consistently about things they undeniably worship, or use every day with great ease and functionality. Similarly, the tweeters I follow who constantly post about shoes and cars don't have anything to say about the iPad, even if they have one.

These are people who never post on the same subject more than twice a week, suddenly they have a post a day - frequently six or seven - specifically about their iPad. I don't think this is because it's merely awesome, since they didn't have that frequency of posts about Obama's election, which they were generally pretty opinionated about.

More than that, the iPhone was a hell of a lot more innovative by any standard. And there seemed to be a lot less personal tweeting about it and a lot more articles, blog posts, etc.

After thinking a bit, I realized why I'm seeing so many frothing tweets: the iPad is built for tweeting.

The iPhone can tweet, sure. But it's a goal-driven machine. You want to make a call, or play a game, or find directions, or post naked pictures of yourself to the internet. If you didn't have something to do, the phone stays in your pocket.

The iPad is more like a regular computer in that many of its uses don't have a strong goal orientation. But, even more than other tablet PCs, the iPad is easy to pull out at any vaguely bored moment and fuss with, encouraging its use. And, of course, you'll use it for the things you would use a laptop for, which is occasionally goal oriented but usually more open-ended. IE, "let's surf the internet a bit", or "I wonder what's happening on Slashdot", or "let's get some writing done."

Like any other tablet PC without a keyboard, the iPad really isn't very good for writers, and it's not very good for work like art or programming, either. But a lot of the tweets are "I enjoy working on my iPad!" and "I'm using my iPad RIGHT NOW!" and "I'm tweeting this with my dick, because I'm just that good with it!"

The answer, to me, is that the iPad is actually pretty crap for WORKING on. Even if your work task is just answering emails, it's still easier to use a keyboard and mouse. But the barrier to entry is very low. So John Writer pulls out his iPad to do a little writing, he does a little writing, but he drifts off into not-writing land. The actual work is a little more troublesome to do than it normally is, so he finds himself unconsciously stopping more often than he normally would. And what does he do during those breaks?

He tweets.

He tweets about how awesome his iPad is.

Even if he doesn't think of himself as a fanboy, he's got to do something with his not-writing time, and the easiest thing to tweet about... is the device he's tweeting with.

With that explained, I feel a little better about the unending waves of chatter about the iPad. I still wish they'd stop the internet equivalent of creepily dry-humping it, but now that I've come up with a plausible cause, I can try to focus on their other posts. When they have some.

Mass Effect 2 and Wide, Flat Gaming

Haven't played as much Mass Effect 2 as I would like. But I have some things to say.

They made some really oddball gameplay choices. Like everyone, they're trending towards "packet gaming". The idea seems to be that we would prefer each encounter to be its own little game with no connection between them. Why they think we prefer this, I don't know.

It is like many other games of its quality, such as Doom III. At the end of a firefight, you are instantly restored to maximum. Your health regenerates in five seconds (literally), and you always find plenty of ammo for your guns. In fact, there is so much ammo, the only thing I've ever run out of ammo for is my sniper rifle. This is only because in order to make the fights challenging, they have to throw fifty enemies at you at once.

This style of game is becoming ever more common. They write attrition out of the game entirely. Presumably, this is so that they have a much clearer idea of how encounters will progress. In horrible games like Doom, System Shock 2, and Riddick, why, they had to actually design levels instead of designing encounters. That's why those games were so terrible! Man, can you imagine a game like Half Life 2 coming out today? Who wants levels? Pshaw.

This lack of attrition radically reduces the depth of ME2. Not having to worry about resources means that the game plays out super-linearly. Explore a level, hit a fight. If you lose the fight, try again. If you win the fight, no matter how narrowly, you'll be back and at full long before the next fight. This basically reduces the game to an adventure game, except without any puzzles.

ME2 has reduced depth along every category of gameplay except, perhaps, the ship navigation.

Apparently they took our whining about "guns in everything" to heart, because now there is almost nothing in the way of inventory management. Instead, you pick up endless Amounts of Elements, such as "500 iridium". While this is arguably better than finding guns in trash bins, it is a flat gameplay experience. It turns searching for loot into walking over money. Because, essentially, each element is simply a different kind of money. So 95% of the level's pickups are money and ammo. Worse, the ammo is "generiammo", to insure you never ever have to worry about pesky issues like managing your combat loadout. Or thinking.

I'm not sure why ME2 went this way. They have grossly simplified every aspect of the game. While many areas have been broadened (Shephard's armor), they are not very deep (only Shephard's armor, not anyone else's). They seem to have decided that players can't handle a game with any depth.

So I'm replaying Disgaea. Tell me when a game with some gameplay comes out.

White Knight

I occasionally read Penny Arcade news, and sometimes I even agree with them. So I looked at the White Knight Chronicles trailer they posted. I'm not deriding them. Frankly, I don't care if they sell ads for tooth whiteners.

But I have the opposite opinion that they do. Everything the trailer shows makes me more uninterested in the game.

If I saw it sitting on the store shelf, looking forlorn, I'd probably buy it. I buy a lot of games, including just about every RPG.

However, the trailer shows a "customizable city" which is descended straight from Dark Cloud to the point where they use the same terminology. In fact, it's actually smaller and more limited than Dark Cloud's city building, despite the fact that Dark Cloud came out ten years ago. Yes, Dark Cloud also had people you brought back to your town. Dark Cloud 2 went even further.

So I see that this game lets you customize your city, but it actually points out how shallow and limited such customization is. Then it says I can visit other people's cities? Why? What's the point? There's no density or variation to these cities. No personality can be expressed by the player.

The trailer goes on to tell me that I can make my city specialize in building goods and selling goods. But given the limitation of the cities, this seems to be an add-on that doesn't add anything. The fact that it seems to be a primary motivation for building a city is actually damning with faint praise. Sort of like looking at someone's baby pictures and commenting on how nice the paper they're printed on is. The crafting is sure to be painfully shallow and pointless.

However, even those two things aren't enough to sink a game. After all, those are just worthless features. They don't actually damage the rest of the game by existing, except by saying that there will be no unique crafts.

What sinks the game for me is the on-line play.

If your RPG has "on-line play" that means your RPG has to have play that can be on-line. This restricts you to very specific avenues, which it is clear White Knight Chronicles follows.

On-line RPGs have to be either turn based or very, very slow real time (IE, turn based). On-line RPGs have to have identical, uncustomizable equipment and be less about skill and more about wasted time. On-line RPGs downplay maneuvering and precise controls. On-line RPGs have to have shitty animations. I'm not sure why on those last two.

But worst, on-line RPGs always inherit the treadmill. The endless, pointless sidequesting with no hint of plot or character advancement in sight.

And they're touting it as "how cool! Yaaaay! On line play!"

This is the second RPG I've actually not bought specifically because it has on line play. Such RPGs are always terrible. They're inevitably even-worse-than-usual MMORPGs.

I love Level-5. If I hadn't seen the trailer, I would have bought the game. Why don't they just make the insanely good RPGs they've always made before? Why mix chocolate with shit? Shit and chocolate don't mix.

How do you feel about these things?

MBTA

(Editors note: this is about the Boston public transport system, the MBTA. They're known for two things. A) Their astounding budgetary incompetence. B) Their continuous announcements that you should be afraid. Their main announcement on the subject is called the "see something, say something" program. I sent this letter to them. They actually required my name and email addy, so I may catch flak. We'll see.)

I was writing to congratulate you.

I was ecstatic when I didn't hear them. It made my commute so much more bearable. Was it a sign that the MBTA had new blood? Really was changing direction? I almost wrote to congratulate you then, but I decided to give you a week. That week was up today.

And you blew it.

Today I heard them again. Oozing out of the speakers like wet maggots. Had I just been lucky for the week? Usually, it surrounds me, echoing from the walls, seven or eight times a day. Terror propaganda.

I call it your "hear something, fear something" campaign. Normally, I would call it security theater. Except this isn't security theater. It's insecurity theater. Your painfully transparent and pointless announcements are simply the vapid handwaving of people that clutch at every political crutch and "opportunity" your scabby little hands can get at.

The worst part is that your fearmongering is so amateurish. I strongly recommend leaving fearmongering to the masters: you simply don't have the talent for it. There are plenty of other things on your plate, anyway. There's no reason to continuously blather on about something that is, statistically, less likely than getting run over by one of your buses. Twice. In one day.

Please stop your terror propaganda. It's pathetic and infuriating.

Can Not Do the Research

Like many of the skeptical and sciency community, I'm also irritated at Randi. He Did Not Do the Research and posted an opinion. When experts - not even strangers, but friends and acquaintances - called him on it, instead of Doing the Research he did a song and dance. Poor.

That got me thinking. A lot of denialists for any given scientific theory are driven by religious or financial bias, but some, especially young ones, are actually just clueless. How difficult is it to Do the Research, from scratch, without a long history of reading and researching sciency stuff?

Well, me, my first stop is Wikipedia. But while Wikipedia is an excellent resource for me, it occurs to me that it's a painful thing for folks who aren't science geeks. Scientific Wikipedia articles are generally pretty close to accurate, but they are dry as dust, and have so many blue links that lead to other places that are dry as dust. Easy to choke on a Wikipedia entry.

Fortunately, there's an alternative! Youtube! Instead of us reading the research, we can have the research read to us. Some really excellent teachers using really excellent visual techniques can teach even a schoolchild the basics of both the science and controversy surrounding any theory!

Unfortunately, none of these folks are on the first page of a search. Or the second. Or the fifth.

Let's pretend we're James Randi in an alternate universe, and we want to know about global warming. Searching for global warming gives us a stack of ancient videos, conversations by politicians, and Glenn Beckites. We don't want the controversy yet, we don't even know what a greenhouse gas is.

Maybe we'll watch a few of these, with the understanding that these are the same people who would side with spoon-benders under different situations. We've spent 114 years of our life fighting this kind of nonsense: ever since we retired from magic shows. At the age of 72. Okay, I'm making old jokes. I'm upset with Randi.

Anyway, we want something with science to it. We could just pop off to Potholer's channel, but the point is to get to something like that from scratch.

Let's change the search terms. Science of global warming.

Okay, now it's 90% denialists.

Suddenly I, the author, amn't as upset as I was. It does appear that science is fractured, that there is a debate.

This is, unfortunately, not true. The problem is that Goog-era search engines function on some measure of popularity rather than usefulness. Great if you want cats riding bicycles, terrible if you're looking up something with an objective truth.

Don't be fooled, our fake Randi in an alternate dimension! There must be science here somewhere! These videos we're looking at now are cherry-picked from a wide, wide field. Just because they've been promoted to the front doesn't mean they deserve to be there. It certainly doesn't mean they are representative of the science!

"Global warming explained" is no better, youtube doesn't know what "explained" means, and returns basically the same videos despite their lack of the word "explained". "Global warming skeptic" is even worse, of course.

No, no... none of these searches lead anywhere!

I, the imaginary James Randi, give up! Why I don't ask any of the tens of thousands of experts that would happily spend the day explaining it to me, I don't know. But limiting ourselves to anonymous explainers - IE Youtube - is a failure. Because Youtube's search is SO BAD.

What you want is there, but Youtube search doesn't know that.

This is not optimal.

Pirates!

_{I'm writing this with a cracked rib, so I may be a bit off from my usual.}

Today - again - one of the blogs in my feed posted about piracy. It seems like every day that one of the geeks I generally listen to posts about the ebbils of this horrifying method of theft. Frankly, it irritates me.

I think it's perfectly okay to think software/music piracy is wrong. But I think it's important to realize where this thought comes from. It's been injected into your head. It did not arise there magically, and I'm damn sure you didn't decide it on your own, because by the time you were old enough to think rationally on the matter, you had already been taught about it.

Now, that doesn't inherently mean that the thought is wrong. There are lots of things you get taught that are correct. And I'm not even going to argue one way or the other. What I am going to do is point out that arguing about it is like pissing in the ocean.

The fate of the "copying is theft" meme will not be decided using our minds or our culture or our rhetoric because it has no strong inherent morality. It will be decided by reality. The reality of the situation is that, no matter how you feel about it, it is simply impossible to even slow down the advance of "piracy". There is no way to magically turn back time. People will steal software. More and more.

You can, if you wish, argue with them. Brand them evil, or at least jerks. But it's already more than half of the people you know. In ten years, basically everyone under 30 in a first-world nation will be a pirate. Already, I would wager that it's over 50%, at least in cities. Hell, I bet there are destitute Africans downloading illegal ring tones to their shared village phones.

You can brand them all jerks and criminals. But that seems kind of retarded.

Whether or not copying is theft at the moment, in ten years, nobody under thirty will consider it to be significant. In twenty years, everyone under thirty will be amazed anyone ever thought it was immoral.

So before you judge for or against, how about you stop and think about how things are, rather than how your fantasies want the world to be. Your business model had damn well better not conflict with pirates, or you'll go out of business faster than an honest politician.

Blue Mars

Well, I'm going to rag on Blue Mars a bit. If you're a Blue Mars fan (or employee), don't take it hard, I rag on everything. I'm just one of the internet's many assholes.

I understand that Blue Mars is in early beta, but there are core design decisions that don't change, and those are what I'm going to rag on. Even if Blue Mars was fully populated and had a larger feature set, I would still find it disappointing for many reasons, all of which revolve around the idea of empowering your user base.

Blue Mars is occasionally compared to SecondLife. Usually in the form of, "Unlike SecondLife, Blue Mars does not allow content creation". It's important to realize that not only is Blue Mars technically incapable of allowing the kind of content creation SecondLife allows, it's also a corporate-mindset money guzzler with no intention of allowing ordinary users to create mediocre content, instead starting right from the get go by explicitly focusing only on well-funded teams of professional content developers. As Blue Mars will find, that is not a viable path into the future. You gotta eat your veggies before you get any dessert.

Like the other 3D chat rooms running around, Blue Mars is a game of pure luxuries, where the only thing to do is dress yourself up and cyber. Of course, Blue Mars "isn't sure" about this "adult content" thing, so it's illegal to do that. Leaving you with basically nothing to do. Oh, "the Cryengine supports advanced gameplay, so you can make good games within the context of the Blue Mars space"... my ass.

People who think that way have obviously never tried to make a game. It takes a lot of tweaking down in the guts to get a game engine - even a really good one - to respond properly. If Blue Mars is counting on the Cryengine to allow for the development of immersive games in their space, they're counting eggs that ain't ever gonna hatch. They will, however, have no problem creating samey spaces for people to extremely clumsily stagger around in. Why they decided not to use Cryengine's navigation, and instead went with a painfully nasty implementation of their own, is never really explained.

I don't think that Blue Mars is bad. I just think that there's no reason to choose it over, say, IMVU, which is easier to make content for, has more fluid animations, and you can see people's faces.

My bitterness is at least in part because I'm a Mars terraforming fanboy, and now that these berks have put their corporate thumbs into the "Blue Mars" name, it'll be decades before anyone else can make a game with that name that does the concept some justice.

No, I don't see any reason to play Blue Mars. I imagine it will do well enough, because advertising blitzes aimed at the non-geeks they're really intending to target will generally yield dividends. But as a replacement for SecondLife, it is totally not an option. And I hate SecondLife. So that's saying something.

...

There's just something wrong with this whole idea of commoditizing game elements. They don't even bother pretending there's any gameplay. They flat out state that it's a micropayment beast that exists solely to make you pay out the nose for any content they deem worthy. This whole thing - not just Blue Mars, but all these games - these are a huge step backwards.

When are we going to start stepping forwards again?

This Will Not End Well

Today I decided not to bother finishing Overlord II. This adds to a long list of recent games where I quite literally get to the final boss and say, "ehh, whatever. I'm done."

I'm trying to figure out why this is.

At first I thought it might be a singularly uncompelling narrative. There haven't been many modern games where I've actually said, "I wonder what happens next?" It's all too predictable, too pat. But that can't be it, because there are lots of older games where the narrative was even worse and I happily completed them. Like every JRPG since FFVI.

I think it's because I've been wounded to my very soul by cheap-ass cop-out endings that have nothing to do with the rest of the game.

It's this "good vs evil" crap, where you can be "good" or "evil". (Really, you can be "insufferable pansy" or "idiotic twelve-year-old pyromaniac".) These "choices" over the course of the game end up literally never mattering: at the end of the game you are ALWAYS allowed to choose ANY of the endings you prefer. I understand why the decision to do that was made, but it's a bad decision. It robs the ending of any meaning, any connection to what I've actually done over the course of the game. It gives me agency, and then spits in my face and tells me my choices don't matter, they never mattered.

I think that this has destroyed my respect for video game endings. I spent so long getting spat on by them that now I can't muster up any excitement over the idea of getting spat on again. Even if I know the game won't pull that cheap-ass idiocy, I'm still trained to hate.

Narrative can still be used to guide me through the end of the game, as Portal did. But it can't be a beacon at the end of the tunnel: it has to be a series of runner-lights that are with me the whole way. Because when I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I presume it's a giant bucket of spit.

...

The other factor here is one of gameplay. Modern games are much too long for the amount of gameplay they actually offer, with very few exceptions. Any way you cut it, when you're in the final level, there are no new avenues of play left to explore. So all the designers can do either is make things unreasonable, be boring, or both.

But I can't blame everything on final gameplay, because I frequently give up before I even see it.

...

Edit: Actually, I think the narrative thing really IS it. I think I've become trained to see when someone's pulling a "string of pearls" narrative design and instinctively distrust it. That gap between the pearls is very easy to see... so easy, you might not actually notice that you're noticing it.

The BBC Doesn't Get It

The BBC has an article on Twitter which is embarrassingly unresearched.

Not in the facts they present, which are okay, but in the way they present them, as if the fact that few users make the majority of the content is somehow unusual, or a bad thing.

Hey, how about you freakin' research ANY other social networking site? Flickr is the same way. Facebook is the same way. Secondlife is the same way. Every forum - INCLUDING THE BBC FORUM - is the same way.

"Bill Heil" has evidently said that on a normal social network, the top 10% only account for 30% of the content. Bill Heil is wrong. Or, more accurately, Bill Heil is probably talking about a theoretical physical social network. Which is the same as being wrong, especially when the BBC lumps it in as if it's some kind of valid comparison. "Apples have two dozen seeds. Why, that's far more seeds than most other fruits, especially when we posit that a rock is a kind of fruit!"

I don't really like saying that someone is wrong. It might come back and bite me on the ass. But in this case, I doubt it. Bill's just about to graduate with his masters in business, and he doesn't have any papers on line, just a fluffy article on the Harvard business blog with some thoroughly unconvincing graphs. Including one with a line labeled "A social network". Presumably, that's the theoretical social network the BBC was confused by? Being shown as if it's an actual data set, no less. Even if it were labeled more precisely, I would still call bullshit.

Now there are differences between Twitter and, say, any given existing social network site like MySpace. But these differences are matters of a few percent. There is no social networking site which I'm aware of that disobeys this classic percentage of top 10% creating 90% of the content. That's The Dynamic. That's How Things Are. Even in meatspace social networks such as the PTA or a church, they still follow that 10%-90% dynamic.

A lot of time is spent by some developers trying to increase the amount that the lower 90% creates, but in doing so, they empower the upper 10% to create correspondingly more.

I really fucking hate it when someone tries to misrepresent the situation. I don't know whether Bill misrepresented it on purpose or not, but the BBC - which has developed a NOXIOUSLY bad technology section in the past decade - certainly ran with the ball. Ugh.

UGH.

A Linear Discussion

So, I got a comment on my post about linearization that brought up some issues I'd like to discuss. These are issues of flow and narrative.

Oldschool RPGs tended to have a very specific kind of play style, and that play style was "play for an hour, realize you built your party wrong, restart, play for two hours, realize you built your party wrong, restart, play for five hours, realize you built..."

Of course, during the play you also tended to do a lot of random wandering around, essentially meaning that there was some downtime.

These days, all those "dead ends" have been polished off.

I say that's a bad move.

I say those dead ends are part of the enjoyment of the game for a substantial number of games. A game designer can't think of a player restarting the game as failure, because the player isn't actually starting from the beginning. The player is starting with a lot more knowledge than they originally possessed.

They have, in essence, just cleared level one of the "party building" game, and are now moving on to level two.

Perhaps it can be taken too far, sure, but there's a lot to be said for it. The best ten hours of Oblivion are the first ten hours, and I've played them more than a dozen times. That's where all the play density is.



Now, Greg's comment pointed out that it is often in everyone's best interests to prevent the player from make bad narrative decisions (such as, say, wandering off into the middle of nowhere instead of doing something cool).

I say this thinking is what is wrong with so many of today's games. There is an inherent arrogance in this kind of narrativist thinking, a kind of "play the game like I tell you" vibe. It's become so common that it's hard to see because we're in the thick of it.

The essence of my argument is that if you have to limit a player in order to insure they have the best experience, you're not designing a game. You're designing a movie.

Games, by their nature, have limits. You can't create a game where the player can do anything, because it would be (A) boring very quickly and (B) impossible to program. But limits come in a lot of different varieties.

Some limits make the game deeper. For example, in Daggerfall you can equip shoes, pants, a shirt, and a cloak (if I remember right). You can't equip eighteen pairs of shoes.

These limits make the gameplay denser, because they make you have to choose between the options you are faced with. If you have shoes that let you walk on water and shoes that give you an armor bonus, which will you wear? It really matters, unlike the choices between shoes that give you 2% better armor or shoes that give you 2% better mana regen. Why bother making a choice with such boring and inconsequential results?

These gameplay decisions allow (or prevent) you to express yourself as a player. I doubt any two people ever played Daggerfall and ended up with the same character. There are just so many ways to express your preferences and choose your path... even if the plot is linear. The limits on the gameplay are designed to make the gameplay deeper.

But there are other kinds of limits, and we're seeing them more and more these days. Every RPG these days features fewer components, fewer choices, more "carefully balanced" so that you can't possibly make a WRONG choice. We're seeing the glorification of time - your power level depends 99% on how long you spend grinding. Sure, you can spend all that time and end up with a shitty character, but only if you have the brain of an eight year old with severe head trauma. The path to normalcy is quite clear.

So the fact that old games had linear stories and some modern games don't is irrelevant. The amount of freedom and agency you get by being able to choose good or evil in the last ten minutes of the game pales in comparison to having to balance eight pieces of equipment for each of your four party members. That it can even be considered a step up shows that mainstream designers have a pathetic lack of understanding as to what a game is.

There is certainly room for games of physical skill, where you're jumping and aiming and so forth. In those games, it is less important to have this kind of deeper statistical gameplay.

But why is it that even Fallout 3 has shitty statistical gameplay? Even Fallout 3 is dumbed down to the point where you can't express yourself because the dominant strategies are so clear. This, the "paragon" of "open world games", with all the gameplay of a buried ET cartridge. Carefully dumbed down so you won't ever feel TOO challenged.

That's crap! It's crap! You don't PLAY modern games, you EXPERIENCE them. That's worthless! Why am I watching this 45-hour-long movie where I have to push buttons?

Is it any wonder that I've begun to hate RPGs in favor of action titles? Because action titles put that shitty complexity on top of a skill challenge, while RPGs just have the shitty complexity?

Give me back my paintbrush. Let me excel. Let me fail. I don't even care if your story is as linear and nonsensical as a marmoset fired from a cannon.