Monday, January 14, 2008

Sins committed while inside the womb

It turns out that the Clinton win in the greatest show on earth is actually impossible to explain using modern statistical methods, after all. More anomalous incompetence associated with Diebold machines and their handlers, perhaps.

As with things of this type, there appears to be at least a little misinformation and confused statisticians floating around; but the above link seems a little more reliable than most.

Alien of Extraordinary Ability

I'm posting this because it says "tempus incognito." That is all.

Except for this:

The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The School of Athens


Recently there have been some reports floating around about a married couple who found out, in a classic and horrible twist of Oedipusian fate, that they are actually twin brother and sister, separated at birth. It must have been terribly traumatic for them, something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. After, all, one of the most important social taboos disallows incest, it's also outlawed in the bible and, of course, there are the detrimental generic consequences. The couple have since separated, and and I'm sure we all hope they learn to come to terms with the revelation and get on with their lives happily.

Social taboos are a bit of an interesting thing. Clearly, this one is very positive for society, due to the need for genetic diversity in reproduction so that the gene pool adapts and strengthens. But have you ever wondered how this taboo came about? Presumedly it has been around for a long time, if there is a ban in the bible. But, even though I imagine the church would have been a very forwarding thinking and culturally advanced institution back in the early years AD, the study of genetics and the theory of natural selection were still along way off. So what inspired this brilliant leap of logic? How did we end up with such a reasonable taboo? Were genetic defects in the first born incestuous generation so immediately obvious and attributable that there was no question of cause and effect? And if so, did anyone stop to ask why?

My best guess is that this was early Christianity's way of distinguishing itself from other societies of the time that were perhaps heavily inbred. It seems that Christianity imposed a number of precepts to social change away from behaviours it saw as counter-productive. For example, the religion initially outlawed all idols--because this was the preferred mode of worship of Roman pagans. That law seemed to only last as long as it was useful, however, and as paganism in the west declined, idolatry became an important part of the church. Similarly--and I'm speculating here--homophobia in the early church may have been a reaction against all male societies of the time, such as some very early groups of Jewish men, around the time of the writing of the dead sea scrolls.

Now; the proper form of Japanese discourse involves never actually mentioning what you're really talking about until you're almost done. The Japanese are much more skillful with it, but I'm just going to jump across to another topic.

Modern online games have become a bit of a microcosm of real world societies; and following that, they tend to start to display strange habits that seem somehow familiar. For instance, in World of Warcraft, many social rules that developed, above and beyond the rules of the game. These come from no specific source, seem to develop independently on different servers, so that they sometimes exhibit discrepancies from one place to another. There is no central authority (that is, assuming playing with a group composed of the general public, rather than an internal guild group), so these rules are not maintained and recorded in any place; instead they are just accepted by convention, and there is an unsaid expectation that everyone knows them, agrees with them, and will abide by them. This leads to a certain vagueness, and sometimes contention. As a result, the game can sometimes be an exercise in diplomacy. Furthermore, since they are not enforced by the game, the rules can be broken. When that happens, there is no clear recourse, except to publicly condemn the offender before a generally disinterested audience.

And yet, despite the lack of enforcement, the general vagueness, and the location specific; these rules, these taboos, as followed surprisingly well. But the truly surprising thing is, they don't tend to benefit the powerful or well connected. Instead, they tend to even out the playing field. The purpose of the taboos is to make the game more fair than even the "hard-coded" rules would do, and given everyone an equal opportunity to profit. In short, these social rules, which have sprung up naturally and uncalled for universally and across cultural and language boundaries, have not done so to benefit any specific group or social strata. They're there exclusively to make the game more fair for one and all.

The types of rules that fit this form are things like: the "all pass" rule, rules that determine was is appropriate use of "need" and "greed", rules about which classes can legitimately bid on which items, legitimate and illegitimate tactics in AV, and others. One of the most important is the taboo against paid leveling services and use of real cash to purchase gold. These shouldn't be confused with another class of rules--those that determine guild behaviour. Extra-game mechanics such as "DKP," "Suicide Kings," and "Loot Councils". These are very different because there is a central authority. They have been developed to meet specific goals, and are actively researched so that their relative benefits are understood at a conscious level. As a result, these rules are written down, and actually have names.

Now, what's curious about these online taboos is that some people do break them intentionally. It's habitual racism to label some of these people Chinese, but the reality is some are actually Chinese. Being culturally distinct, there are some things they just don't agree with. Or, in the (fondly-intentioned) words of the link below...

on group missions they do not like to respect the tacit rules of profit division. For those "pedantic" European and American gamers, Chinese players are like fearsome pagans...Chinese gamers are better suited to jungle-style gaming.

So imagine my delight to discover that some bright types have found a way to capitalise on that tendency. And in this case, "capitalise" is the right world, because it seems in the Chinese online game "ZT Online," character progress can and must be bought with real money. In other words, the more you spend, the better your character is and the more you enjoy the game. Combine that with a overtly competitive gameplay and desirable social rewards for the powerful, and you've got a compelling, addictive money sink where anything goes.

Here's the link from danwei.org. I haven't read it all, but it's worth a scan.

Ah, here we go. This sound more like the society I know! A game for the wealthy, by the (soon to be) wealthy. These guys know what side of the bread has the butter on it.

This isn't the first example this type of real-wealth sponsored gameplay, either. One of the particularly curious aspects of online games is they open the door to many different funding schemes. A few years back there was a humble web-based space trading style massively multiplayer game that required people to buy fuel for their space craft using real money. Again, the more your spend, the more mobile you are and the quicker you can progress and compete. Straight from the pragmatically capitalist minds of a couple of young American entrepreneurs.

Well, then. So much for socially responsible taboos that arise organically and inexplicably from a diverse society. Clearly it's time for some game developers to step in with a bit of reality of their sleeves, is it not?

That then, brings me finally, and happily, to the last paragraph. Because, as well as delighting my sense of incentive-based economics, these games highlight very clearly what might become a very serious issue for all online games in the near future. That is, at some point, it's difficult to distinguish between an online massively multiplayer game and an online casino type game--even without further innovation in the field. Once that line is blurred, the legislation surrounding online casino games could very quickly bring the oh-so-critical massively multiplayer genre to an abrupt halt. This is, as I understand it, the fundamental reason why Blizzard doesn't allow trading of World of Warcraft items and characters for real money, why tournaments with cash rewards are regarded cautiously, and why in-game simulated casino games between players, for virtual game currency, are strictly banned. The mischaracterisation of WoW as an online casino game is the spectre haunting the massively multiplayer segment of the industry; it seems inevitable that sooner or later there will be public debate about what these games can and cannot do; and, regrettably, every passing quarter it seems more likely, and more worrying. Because exposing children to adult concepts is another taboo, be it within the microcosm, or without.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

The Big Sleep Hotel

Apparently, the recent result of the New Hampshire caucus voting is so astonishing, that it's beyond the realms of modern statistical understanding... Or so it would seem. Anomalies like this tend to make me wonder about the effect polling has on the voting process. Presumedly there's an observer effect style influence caused by the polls on voter behaviour—and perhaps, in this case, it wasn't fully accounted for. That is, did New Hampshirites, on seeing the results from Iowa and New Hampshire polls, decide that the relative success of the candidates did seem right, and therefore tried to, on an individual basis, balance it out?


I sometimes, in idle moments wonder what the majority of people think about when deciding how to vote, generally. I can imagine that there are two primary approaches one could take—that is, a voter could either ask “which candidate would benefit the country more,” or “which candidate would benefit me more?”


If everyone considered on the later, we would expect to end up with the candidate that was most focused on the interests and morality of the majority of people. It would seem logical that this would lead to each voter having a smaller range of issues to considering, making it an easier choice, which hopefully equates to a decision better made. Similarly, you might also expect this method to be less susceptible to anomalies on the campaign, and other unexpected occurrences.


But, we end up with a bit of a prisoner's dilemma, in that we only get the best result if everyone votes this way. Furthermore, and perhaps most worryingly, if everyone voted this way, no consideration would be taking into account of the relative significance of the decision for different people. That is for some people, the outcome of an election might have very significant and long term consequences on their lives—particularly when there are major issues at stake (you know the ones; in the US this might be abortions, healthcare, gay marriages, war, and plenty others). However, you would expect that the people who are most effected by policy change will always be a minority. That is to say, for the majority of people in a stable country, the difference between one candidate and other will have only relatively minor impact on their lives. And yet, while in many government schemes votes are effectively weighted by various means, we would never expect them to be weighted to meet this ideal of consequentiality.


On the flip side attempting to vote in the best interests of the country is, presumedly, error prone, open to subjective judgements and vulnerable to aberrations and overly powerful rhetoric. I wonder if we misjudge the ways in which the interests of the majority can often benefit the minority. History has a cruel sense of irony about it; perhaps the indecisiveness of society comes from the realisation that sometimes our benevolence only makes things worse.


A depressingly extreme example involves a chap named Malthus who, at the end of the eighteenth century, proved that the Poor Law (in which donations were given to the unskilled poor) could never, ever improve the living conditions of the English poor. It should be noted that the beneficiaries of the Poor Law, as I understand it, were far better off than today's homeless. Malthus even came to the gloomy conclusion of eternal subsistence for the great majority. Fortunately he was proven wrong by the industrial revolution. However, ironically enough, this may not have occurred in England at all if it wasn't for the inequality of income and living conditions.


While the Malthusian Trap isn't yet a thing of the past, let's hope that its own observer effect, and the fact that we can recognise and understand it, will soon lead to it being so. But, it's got to make you wonder what other great ironies might lie under the surface of voter and government behaviour. Perhaps, back in the modern world, we end up with a compromise between both schemes--wherein those who do not feel compelled to vote for strong personal reasons, instead take on the overwhelming and massively challenging task of deciding which minority group deserves their attentions. Do we then inherit the worse of both sides? Does every voter then have to deal with the uncertainty that is central to the prisoner's dilemma?


The economy is perhaps a special issue in many elections. They say that it's the primary issue in the American presidential election at the moment--which I assume means that people will vote for the candidate they believe might correct issues with the economy, even if don't believe in that candidate's other policies, even those those seen as morality issues. In Australia, the liberal government retained power for many years, despite considerable animosity, apparently based on its economic promises. But that style of voting brings with it other worries, particularly if you consider that we can't reasonably expect the majority of voters to understand macroeconomics and government fiscal and monetary policy to the extent required to correctly decide on the policies that will most benefit themselves, or the country as a whole. Are we then forced to rely on analysis and opinion from the media? Or do we pick the candidate who blinks less? Furthermore, do we fully understand what controls the different houses and branches of government have over the country? Are we at all concerned that we can't, in the US or Australia, pick out our favourite people to run the central bank? Is it more true the the system of government and the private sector control the economy, rather than any particular elected individual or party? Is it the system as a whole that truly determines prosperity, in such a way that the system's ability to ensure that various powerful people's capabilities and education are up to standard is a far more important determiner of economic prosperity than any decision the general public might make? Surely we would prefer that to be the case.


Ok, perhaps it's not enough to make me lie awake at night, or delve deep into studying democracies; but at least it might serve to help feed the voice in the back of my head that sometimes says, when it comes to election time at home, “surely this can never work.”

Sunday, January 06, 2008

The long, dark teatime of the soul

I'm not sure who Teclisen is, but his slagging off of the developers of Vanguard here is pretty classy.

To prove that it's worth the click, a quote:

Brad Mcquaid didn't do shit. (News Flash?) He's had an opiate addiction for years now, which only got progressively worse as the project failed. His cumulative face time with sigil designers in the most crucial final years of development? Approx: 15 minutes. And some of the time was spent begging for legitimately acquired narcotics (Or in times of desperation, jacking them from people's desk).

You know, people say that game developers need to lead more glomous and exciting lives to being to appeal to the public conscience. I guess Brad's getting a head start on us.

The invincible palatial empire of Mycenae

In the south of Australia there is a little state, about the size of England, called Victoria. This state, and it's local games industry, makes for an interesting little case study. Here almost half the game development in Australia takes place, largely a result of the 27 year old legacy of the greatest Australian game ever produced. Much of the rest of the Australian industry is located in Queensland. These two local industries are quite distinct from each other. Somehow the many thousands of kilometres between them has created a divide over which very little travels.


There are many curiosities about the Victoria industry, and many ways in which it appears different to the Queensland industry. However, one particularly crucial idiosyncrasy comes to mind, and that is this: the Victorian industry is very fragmented. There are many small studios, each hopeful, energetic and optimistic about their own grand future. Consequentially, there is a lack of large, established studios.


One obvious cause is the long culture of splinters companies and off shoots—this isn't unusual in the industry worldwide, but seems particularly common in Victoria. The experienced local players seem to have a habit of gravitating away from each other, as if caught in magnetic fields. The end result is fairly easy to predict: a situation in which most of the experienced talent in the state, after having cordoned off their own little personal section of the local industry, doesn't have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to compete on the world stage. In other words, it requires large teams with big, long term, budgets to make a mainstream game; but when everyone ends up starting their own little studios, no one ends up with enough collective credibility to reach those heights. So while the Victorian industry as a whole probably has the wealth of talent and experience to make a top five blockbuster, in the last twenty years it's never even got close.


I imagine that the reason behind this is fairly straightforward: the local industry has never had a leader strong enough to unite the most talented and convince them to work towards the same goal. Perhaps one person came close once—but he, in the grandest of ironies, is also the most hated person to ever work in the local industry.


Another possibility is that were missing a component in the works, and upon recognising that, we become disillusioned. Game design, for example, has been typically underwhelming locally. Or perhaps the lack of a local publisher with global ambitions—this has been pointed out as a glaring inadequacy.


One of the reasons that this splintering has caught my attention is it highlights a basic conflict in the industry. That is, a conflict between our practical needs and our creative needs. On a practical level we need to join together in groups and work as a single unit; because this is what is required to compete for the shelves in Wal-Mart. This is the very hardest thing to deal with in the modern industry: teams are massive, and each team member must bring with him or her much skill and love for the project. No one is simply a labourer, each gives his part, and each must give of himself with the most wholehearted belief of the project and of those around him.


Unfortunately, no group of people works so well together: it's just the nature of us. So conflict arises and must be resolved in some way. And while some conflict can lead to great creativity, unfortunately it tends not to. Conflict can also lead to the arrival of great leaders; but again it appears it hasn't in this corner of the world, and instead we somehow end up with a system whereby, to my great dissatisfaction, leaders who cause conflict percolate to the top.


Hence, it's our creative needs that drive us apart. Each of us has our own god-forsaken idea for a game, our own mode of expression, our own reasons to despite and ignore the ideas of others. Sometime our sense of creativity is strengthened by our sense of being lost in the medium. We don't understand our path through this darkness, can't apply rational reasoning to it, so we light our way through arbitrarily, and call whatever void we arrive at “art.”


And so, our creative needs cause us to splinter. While the ways in which we got here might be despicable, the end result is right for the cause. We need an industry of many small time independent developers if we are to start to understand the medium. Shotgun style experimentation and a massive variety of ideas competing for attention is a great way to expand the industry and discover the medium more fully. This is the simple social Darwinism that leads to a meritocracy; that is, after the flood of failure, disaster and chaos in which our hearts become predominantly broken and trodden over.


The disaster of Victoria is that we don't have this, either. In reality, we're caught somewhere in between. On one hand, our practical needs encourage us to clump into groups and attempt to compete for production quality. On the other hand, we're encouraged to splinter, to compete with the creativity of our souls. The end result is many studios that are too small for top five games, and too big to operate purely out of love for the medium. We're caught in dissonance, unresolved conflict and misplaced aggression. Our spirit is gimped and our talent is crippled, and we can muster neither the sweat of our brow, nor the spark of our minds.


So, how do you solve it? Not so long ago, I would have sad that the only solution would be for the local industry to finally, out of mutual need, resolve its differences and consolidate together into fewer, larger, studios. This is, of course, the pragmatic, practical course of action. Not so long ago, I would have said this was the only reasonable course of action, and that any other course would simply compound the issue, and drive us closer and closer to the inevitability of total collapse of the local industry. This excessive splintering is—I would have said—both a symptom of, and cause of, our great failure. These were my thoughts, for example, when Evelyn Richardson appeals to the industry to put aside their differences in her last speech before leaving the industry association.


However, what if there was another possibility, at the other end of the scale? After all, I'm sure many of us hope that, one day, the “boutique studio” model will become dominant in the worldwide industry. Could it be, that by splintering the industry we're foreseeing this change? Perhaps I've been looking at this the wrong way; perhaps our small studios just aren't small enough? What if the problem with our small studios is they see themselves as big studios in the making? Perhaps, rather than missing our chance at the top-shelves, we're actually missing our opportunity to be a cultural focus of the world industry?


There's an obvious problem, however. How do we reasonable appeal to a mainstream gamer audience without big-studio production quality? How could we attract the already dubious attention of international investment? If the industry isn't yet really for a larger presence of boutique studios, there's no using in attempting to force it into that mould.


Well, perhaps this would be a question better answered by Infinite Interactive, or SSG. It strikes be now that they are perhaps the model of a small developer.


It seems, however, that mobile phone games aren't the answer. And WiiWare, Xbox Arcade and the rest are, as yet, still questionable propositions. The indy industry doesn't seem to work; whatever hopes we may have had for it are unfulfilled, as it's fallen on its face. How could we ever possibly hope to reach even the somewhat shallow levels of sophistication and emotional intensity of the big studio industry?


Well, it's a heck of an anticlimax, but I don't quite have the answer to that. But if the answer is anywhere, it's hidden within the nature of the product itself. Ico is the example to point to here. That game was thoroughly accepted into mainstream gaming; and though in truth it was made on a largish budget—it looks like it wasn't. It seems to have exactly the right sense of minimalism you might expect to see in a creative work that has been crushed by an impossible. At the time, it shined for me as a kind of distant hope—a sign of a more agile industry on the horizon. Yet no one took on the bold opportunity that the game seemed to so clearly hint at.


We can also point to the work of the local government, and particularly the Digital Media Fund. A fund like this seems tailor made for sparking off a boutique industry—in fact, its very existence may work against the large established industry. And yet, contradictorily, the goals of that fund seem to be to spark large scale growth.


One things for sure, though. Victoria is a great place to run a developer services company. By that I essentially mean professionals who work on short term contract. This aspect of the industry has been growing recently, and we've seen a number of successful enterprises—I'd like to see more. As there are so many small studios, there is very commonly a demand for some time of expertise on a fixed term basis—perhaps to meet a difficult milestone, or develop a pitch, or polish one final aspect. This type of model suits the prevalence of small studios, because these studios can't reasonably afford to keep staff for all specialisations on full time. I'd really like to see a greater amount of contractors about locally—I think this is a great way for the industry to smooth out some of the bumps, and grow.


All in all, even if we accept the possibility of a functional boutique industry, we're still faced with a great challenge, a great problem. But, in this industry, we're never that far from the next impossible mountain to climb. We might wax fanciful and declare that art only arises when presented with an impossible challenge; without that we become too lazy and indulgent to really stretch our thoughts and our spirit to new places. But we're so beset by difficulties in the industry that perhaps we've somehow misjudged the economies of strife. Maybe after all our hardships, we've forgotten what's truly difficult? Could we have mistaken a valley for the hills? Or as Seneca had it: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.