This is still an interesting read. But for me it was far simpler than this: The game’s narrative tries to…
I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…
cool, looking forward to it!
Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…
I can’t remember that moment when I realized that you simultaneously was creative director, lead level designer and script writer…
Decided to post another of my short stories; The Enigmatic Orb of Doctor Makharov or A Late Lunch at The Apologetic Gaijin. Some things I really love about this story, but some experimental elements that I never really got to work right. Not as funny as the last one I posted – but a lot stranger and overflowing with some imagery that recurs throughout a lot of my writing.
In general I’m not going to bother to review games here. If you want a review of GRAW, go here. What I will do, though, is try to talk a bit (more) about what I learn specifically from specific games that I play.
Here I’m gonna talk about what I learned about Camera and HUD from Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, which I played on the X360.
First, let me say that about half of what started me thinking about this was a discussion with my friend Pat, the Narrative Designer on my project, who pointed out a few brilliant things about the HUD design in GRAW that tied in in a nice way with my own currently developing thoughts on Camera in games in general.
Let me start by giving you my (current) definition of Camera.
Camera is the metaphor we use to partition the state-space of a game for display and parsability in the moment-to-moment experience.
I like this definition because it is broad. It’s so broad in fact that you could fairly easily stretch it a bit to encompass non-computer-based games, but I’m not going to bother to stretch it to include something like chess or Monopoly. I’ll constrain myself to talking about computer-based games which generally need to be displayed in some form or another.
GRAW is unusual in the sense that it uses what I have started to called a Second Person Camera metaphor. We obviously all know what a First Person Camera metaphor is – I see through the eyes of my playing piece or avatar. We also know what a Third Person Camera metaphor is – I see the world immediately surrounding my playing piece or avatar as well as my avatar itself.
A First Person Camera metaphor is hard to beat for immersion. You are seeing through the eyes of the avatar. A Third Person Camera metaphor is better for situational and physical awareness (which in some cases provides superior immersion). 3rd Person is a very useful metaphor if you have an avatar like Sam Fisher or Lara Croft or the Prince of Persia who performs a robust set of physical interactions with their environment.
A Second Person Camera metaphor is what I call a Camera that is situated sort of ‘psychologically between’ the 1st and 3rd Person Camera. It should not be mistaken for the literary or linguistic notion of ‘Second Person’ (this potential confusion is why it’s a terrible name, but I prefer it to ‘3-1 Hybrid Camera metaphor’ or something similar). A Second Person Camera metaphor works when a First Person metaphor is too limiting of the players situational awareness, but when a Third Person metaphor provides too much useless, boring or repetitive information. A First Person metaphor is good for a straight shooter. A Third Person metaphor is good for a platformer with an athletic character. A Second Person camera is good for a tactical simulation where much of your interaction with the world is shooter-like, but the physical specifics of your avatars stance and body position are important tactical elements, as in games like Full Spectrum Warrior, GRAW, the combat elements of Splinter Cell, and the much anticipated Gears of War (note here that I have recently heard Cliff Blezinski refer to the Second Person Camera metaphor used in Gears as the ‘Parrot Cam’, which works, but I prefer ‘2nd Person’… I’ll save ‘Parrot Cam’ for when I get to make a game about pirates.)
GRAW uses a Second Person Camera metaphor. Most of the time my basic interactions are very shooter-like. When I’m moving around the world, I largely tune out the presence of my avatar on screen. However, when I get involved in the nitty-gritty details of maneuvering from cover point to cover point and firing around corners to suppress an enemy while ordering my squad to advance, I become acutely aware of the physical stance and position of my body. Correct position of my avatar in these intense situations is critical to success.
That’s Camera covered… on to HUD.
Since the very first FPS, which probably be called Wolfenstein 3D (if we exclude the carnival shooters like Duck Hunt), the designers apparently realized that there was a hell of a lot of information missing in the ‘just what you see through the eyes’ 1st Person Camera metaphor and they added a HUD to tell you what level of the game you were on, what your health and armor levels were, what gun you had equipped, it even told you your SCORE. Some of this information was important, some was useless or redundant. Essentially it was telling you a bunch of stuff about the state-space that many other games had told you before to a greater or lesser degree. Over the next 5 years or so, designers refined the HUD to get rid of useless stuff like ‘number of lives remaining’, and ‘score’ and to reduce redundant stuff like telling you which weapon was equipped (after all, you should be able to know that from looking at the thing in your hand), and the big bar at the bottom of the screen eventually developed its own metaphor. It was now called a HUD.
Now there are some problems here. In my definition above, the HUD is technically a component of the Camera as it is part of the game that is displaying the state-space for the player. At the same time, a ‘HUD’ – if you want to think of it realistically, is a pretty high-tech concept. A HUD – in reality – is a piece of equipment connected to a computer that provides the wearer with information about the world imprinted somehow into his field of view. A HUD is great for an Apache Helicopter simulator – but how does a HUD hold up in a game set in the old west? Well – the answer is – it doesn’t.
By default – the HUD was forced to develop its own metaphor. Usually it was an extension of the design metaphor used in the games more general menu and interface system. Generally, the HUD was designed to be something fairly non-obtrusive, but the pendulum has certainly swung back and forth on this. (Hal Barwood talked around the edges of this topic at GDC 2004 in his presentation about Cognitive Dissonance in games – which you can listen to for 5 bucks here).
Trespasser made an early ill-fated attempt to get rid of HUD entirely and collapse all the crucial information into the First Person Camera metaphor. It resulted in a lot of cleavage jokes I still occasionally hear today.
Currently, I would say that there is an occasional title that pushes a HUD-heavy experience (Star Wars: Republic Commando) but the trend is generally toward radical HUD reduction.
Compare Halo vs Halo 2, compare Call of Duty vs Call of Duty 2. Look at Condemned: Criminal Origins, or Peter Jackson’s King Kong the Official Game of the Movie – a game who may be in sole possession of the claim that its HUD is less obtrusive than its title.
Now that I’ve talked about Camera and HUD, let’s look at GRAW and what it does differently, what it does well, and what it does not so well and see what we can learn about Camera metaphors and how HUD figures in there…
Working on the original Splinter Cell, we encountered the weird problem of giving the player character night vision goggles. The weird thing about it was that when Sam – your avatar on screen – puts on his goggles, we dropped a visual filter layer over the screen that you as the player were looking at. Who is wearing the goggles? The player or the Avatar? There is a strange ‘dissonant’ element here, because now the visual information being given to the Avatar is being passed along through HUD to me as the player and is becoming a de facto part of the camera metaphor. Very strange stuff. It didn’t seem to bother players though. I’m still not exactly sure why.
GRAW goes one further. They take their HUD – which is now a full-on 21st century special forces battlefield management computer that provides realtime communications, satellite feeds, and target recognition – along with a host of other features – and stick that on the head of the avatar. Of course, even though you can see your avatar on-screen wearing it, the visual information provided in his simulated HUD is bumped up to the level of the player and is made a kind of hybrid HUD/Camera metaphor.
What do I see when I am playing GRAW? I see my Avatar through the Second Person Camera with the overlay of the simulated HUD that my avatar is using imprinted on my own screen as a game HUD. Essentially what is happening, I think, is that the simultaneous simulation of the high-tech HUD being used by the soldier is being matched 1-for-1 with the game HUD. The effect of this is that it strengthens (tremendously, I would argue) the impact of experiencing the game as a hybrid player-avatar entity.
In many ways, I think this notion of experiencing a world as a ‘hybrid entity’ is a really compelling aspect of what games can do. I talked a little bit about the power of this in my own GDC 2005 presentation, Deconstructing Sam: Narrative in Splinter Cell (see page 17 of the paper). I think it is potentially more powerful than the capability of a film-viewer to empathize with an on-screen character. I think that the player, in navigating the psychological space of the relationship between the himself and his avatar, is offered a much richer perspective to the situation that the two joined entities must deal with together.
In my Splinter Cell talk, I was much more interested in actual character development, but in GRAW, this hybrid nature of the player-avatar entity is omnipresent and is embedded firmly in low-level play. The player is constantly experiencing this psychological space, and as a consequence is much more sensitive to challenges that ‘tickle’ the edges of it.
GRAW does something really smart with this space. They have a few missions and a few sections of missions where the enemy in the game is using some kind of interference device to jam the signal in the player-avatar HUD-Camera. Sadly, in most cases, this jamming device is used to make the game harder and add gameplay challenge at the mechanical level, and it is never used in such a way as to underscore a potential psychological conflict between the two invested entities. I wish the story, overall, had touched more on the idea that the character was being ordered to do things that the player would (probably) find distasteful, and that the jamming effect was used in those instances. That could have been very powerful. Unfortunately – they did not – but I am well aware of the kinds of constraints encountered in the writing of a ‘Clancy-esque’ script, and guys who question or disobey orders tend not to work well in the genre, so I understand and empathize.
Regardless, they use the mechanical technique surprisingly well. In any other game where the designers went ‘surprise – now we’re turning off your HUD!’ I would put down the controller and that would be the end of it. When HUD is solely a game metaphor it is (generally speaking) out of bounds. But when it exists in this weird space ‘between’ it can be used as part of the game – which is interesting. Among other things, they use the HUD to inform you of when you have reached the boundaries of the world – which is in my opinion a startlingly elegant way to solve a simulation boundary problem. In other cases, when the jammers are being used as a weapon against you, they do not use it unfairly and punish you with some tedious and frustrating gameplay. Disabling the jammers becomes and objective, and it is pretty clear why you want to complete that objective, as your HUD is all screwed up and you are feeling kind of psychologically broken just as much as you are feeling mechanically impaired.
On the whole, I think the makers of GRAW did some very interesting and innovative things with their Camera and their HUD, and I hope that other designers and developers working on other games will learn from some of the things they did so well.
Finally got around to reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and surprise, surprise – it’s no surprise why so many people in the game industry talk about this book.
I was a pretty big comic book geek in my youth, but the eighties and the nineties were a long, dark time for popular commercial comics, and frankly, I just gave up. Obviously, I could have switched to some of the indie books that were starting to rise up in that era, but Marvel and DC had their hooks in me pretty deep and to me at the time, those other books just looked like cheap knock-offs of the ‘good stuff’.
I know now that I was way off base, but likely I won’t ever go back to comics.
In any case, I’m very glad to have picked this up. It’s an excellent overview of the medium of comics/sequential art, and it’s full of interesting insight into how comics actually operate and how audiences engage them.
In particular I was fascinated with his analysis of time in sequential art. The way panels can be broken up to separate time, or the way a continuous time can be contained in a single panel. It made me revisit some thoughts I had had last year when thinking about the odd way that time functions in games. Time in games is a really bizarre concept that could probably fill a book itself – though it might not be terribly practical.
I also liked his overview of the six stages he identifies for the ‘artist’s journey’. It certainly helped me understand some of the issues I am having as I transition from being a very hands-on designer and content creator to being a Creative Director who has to work at a higher level. It’s a tough transition that I’ve talked to a number of colleagues about. Everyone who makes that leap is going to wrestle with it. This section of McCloud’s book really gave me some insights and in many ways put some of my concerns to rest.
I did think the chapter on color was unnecessary though. Simply because almost the entire rest of the book is devoted to a formal discussion of things that are universal to comics, and color is clearly not one of those things. Obviously it’s important to many comics, and it gives the artist a powerful additional tool to use, but it’s still not universal. Nonetheless, he kept the chapter brief and to-the-point so it didn’t wreck the experience or anything.
Another thing I really loved – and that I think is perhaps the most relevant to the game industry – is his notion of ‘Amplification through Simplification’. Basically stated, that’s the notion that the more iconic or ‘cartoonish’ a representation, the more general its domain of applicability. A photographic representation can be one person, an accurate drawing can represent a few. A sketch could represent many, and ultimately a simple line doodle can effectively represent anyone. The more simplified the rendering, the more universal. There is power in this notion clearly. In games – where we often work so hard to simulate things perfectly and accurately, this notion is something we need to be more familiar with, because we use it all the time.
Pong was a systemic simplification of the rules of a number of racket-based sports. Thirty-four years later, Rockstar Table Tennis has complexified the rules considerably. Now it cannot represent tennis, squash, 1 vs 1 volleyball, or any other racket-based sport… it represents ping pong. Period.
Imagine if Pong had been called ‘Argument’. And instead of squares for paddles, they were shaped like faces in profile. Imagine if instead of a moving square, the ‘ball’ was a comic-style speech bubble with the word ‘Yes’ written in it when one player returned it, and the word ‘No’ written in it when another player returned it. No rule changes. The words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ would be bouncing back and forth from the mouths, occasionally slipping by and not being responded to. It’s clear, then, that this simplification of systems represented by Pong could have been about any number of things aside from a racket-based sport. The rules were simple enough that they could in fact represent a huge range of things. If Pong had been called ‘Argument’, what would its successor look like 34 years later?
Look at the procedural dynamic gang-war system in GTA:SA. Its rules are incredibly simple. About as complex as a game like Reversi, Connect Four or Dice Wars (here). But in GTA:SA it’s called a ‘Gangwar’. What will its successor look like in 34 years? Or 10? Or in 17 months? The simplification of the rule system can be painted up as anything. Th designers choice of what to call that system and how to dress it up gives it a flavor. The more robustly we simulate it, the more precisely it will represent the thing it claims to be. By enriching that representation – by complexifying it – the designer has 2 choices, really. He can decide to simply simulate it as accurately as possible, or he can make choices about the structure of the rules and create a gang war (for example) that tells us something meaningful about gang wars through his choice of systems. Anyway – this is a huge topic, and I’m sure I’ll formalize my thoughts on it in much greater detail soon.
Back to the book – clearly a number of the statements McCloud makes about the importance of his medium, and about its role in culture and the arts in general are eerily close to thoughts that many of us have about games. It’s a tough time for our industry with all the political attention we’re getting. Many of us feel disempowered and see that our right – and in fact in many cases – our obligation to be creative and expressive in our medium is very much in jeopardy. I wish the game industry had a book like this, and I doubly wish the meddling, middling democrats who are functionally illiterate in the medium of ‘expressive systems’ would read such a book. They wouldn’t though. I’m starting to get the impression that they don’t really give a shit about whether games are potentially harmful, they just want to create and then feed off of a hysteria in order to pull a few fence sitters over to the Blue team before the next US election. Maybe the game industry gets to be a sacrifice, tossed on the bonfire of democracy. Maybe in the current social, economic and political climate, freedom of expression is less important than disagreeing with the other guy over something – anything – in order to get elected.
Last week some of us were chatting at work and Alan Moore’s Watchmen came up in conversation. I realized then that although I had read it several times, I had never owned my own copy. Five years ago, while packing my stuff to move from Vancouver to Montreal, I realized that the copy on my shelf actually belonged to a friend of mine – so I nobly returned it. Our little water-cooler chat got me wanting to read it again, so I stumbled out looking for a comic store and picked up the latest trade-paperback reprint.
I’m sure most everyone who would end up at this site has read Watchmen, so I won’t worry about spoiling anything here. If you haven’t read it, get off your as and do so… it’s fucking spectacular.
There are a number of things that strike me about this story… not the least of which is that it bears many, many re-readings and that the characters become deeper and more compelling every time. I remember the first time I read it being extremely engaged by the Comedian, and the way the entire story is about his discovery of the Greatest Practical Joke Ever Imagined. I remember being floored by the elegant unveiling of that joke and how strongly I identified with him in the few glimpses we catch of his final moments. Here is a man who has made his trade in being in the world’s biggest cynic. His cynicism is so powerful that it makes him superhuman… he’s a rapist, a murderer, an assassin, and yet he is so totally amoral and nihilistic that these horrors he commits are water off a ducks back.
On later readings, I found more and more depth in Veidt/Ozymandias, who has come up with a super-villain plan to kill millions, but in fact he is not a super-villain at all. He might be a sociopathic fascist, and he kills millions of people in a truly disturbing and horrifying move, but the underlying certitude behind his logic is almost a priori infallible. The perfection of his rational approach reminds me of Kurzweil – though I can’t imagine wearing Ray Kurwzeil perfume or playing with a Ray K action figure.
When the true nature of Doc Manhattan is revealed in Chapter 4, it almost makes you feel bad for God. Doc M is omnipotent in the real sense of the word, yet at the same time he is rendered utterly impotent in the face of determinism. Although probably the least compelling character due to his completely inhuman nature, the way Moore tracks his origin back to a fat man stepping on a watch at Coney Island and the subsequent inevitability of the events that follow is haunting. Moore is in dangerous territory in the scene where Laurie accidentally draws him to the realization that human individuality is essentially a thermodynamic miracle, but he pulls off a little literary slight of hand, and Gibbon’s wonderful pull-back on two nested Martian craters distracts you for the blink of an eye needed to pull the rabbit out of the hat. I would say this is probably the only part of the book that gets weaker on re-reading.
And Rorschach. Wow. Now here is probably the single most deeply realized character in comic history. He’s cryptic yet comprehensible, paranoid yet rational, psychotic yet controlled. Of the three ‘main players’, Rorschach, Veidt and Doc Manhattan, it is Rorschach who is the most human (I consider Dan and Laurie to be supporting players). Veidt never has a human moment in the story proper (though I think we are meant to feel one in his back-story). Doc Manhattan’s human moment with Laurie (mentioned above) doesn’t quite click. But Rorschach’s human moment – when he calls his landlady a whore in front of her children and realizes (without even any words devoted to it) that he has allowed his cruelty to touch an undeserving innocent – this is the moment where he explodes off the page and becomes a fully realized, living and breathing character. His disintegration by Doc Manhattan at the end is is not only the end of the story, it is the ultimate punchline the Comedian foresaw, it is the inevitability of determinism as Rorschach’s refusal to compromise collides with Veidt’s a priori solution to the world’s problems.
In a sense, all of Watchmen’s main players – Doc M, Veidt, Rorschach and the Comedian have rejected or lost their humanity. It is only Rorschach who manages to recover his – if only for an instant near the end, and perhaps in his final act. And yet alongside these modern gods is a supporting cast of truly you-and-me people. Dan with his bumbling attraction to Laurie, his nostalgic drop-in visits with Hollis, his mid-life crisis and his regained virility. Laurie – who is just hopelessly over her head in dating a guy who can’t merely see the future, but for who past, present and future has no meaning. She rejects her mother and at the same time is compelled to follow the path her mother has chosen for her. The bumbling Doctor Huxtable-esque shrink whose happy brown-stone and tweed existence is shattered by the bullet that is Rorschach’s psyche, the dim-witted and ignorant news-vendor, the lesbian trying to live up to her new girlfriend’s expectations, the meek Moloch who just wants to die and fade away, the two cops who half-heartedly sniff their way around the edges of the crime that sets the story in motion yet resist looking for an actual solution – all of these people enrich the world, and as their individual stories collide at the climax we feel the cost the Veidt’s master plan and wonder if it could possibly be worth it.
Of course, Watchmen was written back in ’86 when the standing vision of war meant casualties counted in megadeaths. Our world is not that world anymore. It wasn’t a giant psychic tentacle monster from another dimension that appeared in the middle of New York that changed the world forever. It was something much more mundane and the numbers were orders of magnitude lower.
The thing that moved me the most about Watchmen this time was the comic-within-the-comic – the story of the stranded sailor who fights his way across the sea to save his family from the dread marauding pirates that sank his ship, massacred his crew and left him for dead. It is a cautionary tale of a man who becomes the enemy he has set out to defeat. It tells us that there exist paths through life that lead us to damnation even though each individual step itself can be called moral and just. In 1986 it read as an allegory on the balance of power, and the possibility that mutually assured destruction might be inevitable even with rational people making perfect decisions at every junction. Thankfully that turned out to not be true.
Twenty years later, the 2006 reading of the same story is a little different. It reminds us of Nietzsche’s axiom that he who fights monsters becomes a monster. It makes us compare the reflex death-sting of a giant extra-dimensional psychic tentacle monster to the response of the world’s only hyper-power to being stung itself. It reminds us there are no heroes and no villains – only those who have retained their humanity, and those who have lost it, and it reminds us that there is no objective reference point that will help you know which side of that line you are on until it’s too late. We may set out to save the world from chaotic-evil pirates, but the cost of succeeding might be more than we’re willing to pay. In attacking New York, Ozymandias might have locked us into an unrecoverable spiral whose outcome is the a priori guaranteed failure of everything we believe in.
Moore opens Chapter 11 with a quote from Shelley’s Ozymandias, which may be the single greatest poem of the Romantic era; ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’ But Moore leaves out the next line – which is where the poem gets all it’s power – ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’. It is a poem about the absurdity of human pride, arrogance and hubris. So let’s just hope we’re facing Shelley’s Ozymandias, and not Moore’s.
So I’m glad to see that something good came out of E3.
MTV hosted The Game Designer’s Roundtable which they now have hosted here.
It’s a roundtable style discussion of some hot topics in the industry featuring Harvey Smith, Will Wright, David Jaffe and Cliff Blezinski. Every one of these guys is something of a hero of mine.
Harvey is also a friend, but his work on Deus Ex is one of the reasons I wanted to make games in the first place.
Cliff has been working at Epic ever since I was making my first levels using the Unreal Engine – levels which ended up being my calling card into the industry.
I’ve not played God of War, but I spent many hours blowing up friends in Twisted Metal and his games have always surprised me with their addictiveness and an elegant richness that manages to avoid seeming complex. Anyone who can make a game about an Ancient Greek God and have it be successful is a genius in my books.
Will – well Will has the capacity to make the impossible seem obvious – players can’t create their own content, animation and texturing requires artists and can’t be done procedurally, no one wants to play a game about a doll house and you can’t sack Rome by marching elephants over the Alps either. Will keeps the rest of us honest.
The questions put to the panel are good ones. High level questions that we in the industry are sadly not used to getting from the gaming press. And the responses are varied and engaging. I personally come from the same ‘school’ of design as Harvey and it’s pretty easy for me to agree with most of his points – but there were two things that I really found the most interesting.
First was that Cliff seems also to be of that mindset. He’s big on immersion, rich simulation, agency and affordance. He’s also interested in finding ways to build emotional bonds between the player and other agents in the world. He’s been saying for a long time that graphics are important, and I only half agreed with that sentiment – but now it seems like he thinks graphics are ‘mostly there’, and are capable of holding up their side of the deal… I get the feeling his emphasis on having a compelling and meaningful interactive space now stretches significantly beyond the need for good graphics. In short – what seemed to me like a never-ending battle between ‘graphics and design’ only 5 years ago is going to become less relevant now and smart guys like Cliff are going to carry the flag into other realms of design. Maybe this absurd explosion of increasingly powerful technology was a good thing after all.
The other thing that surprised me was that David Jaffe was able to make so many points that I would instinctively disagree with but then say them well and in ways that make me realize – once again – that my own ideas about design are not a priori valid (he says something like ‘I don’t want to think when I play a game – I just want to relax and be entertained’). I do want players to think when they play my games – but of course, there are some trade-offs here, and David seems to see them. Similar to the ‘graphics versus design’ battle – it’s starting to look like the next one might be between games-as-nutrition versus games-as-candy. There is going to be something of a middle-ground there, for sure, but I hope that five years from now designers have been able to elevate their art in the same way graphics programmers have in the last 5 years, and that guys like David will be migrating over to ‘my side’ and saying ‘yeah – we have the entertaining part figured out and all games can be entertaining – now let’s make them meaningful’.
And Will – well Will is like Yoda… when he starts speaking, the rest of the Jedi Council just shuts up and listens.
Anyway – it’s broken into half-a-dozen 3-4 minute segments, and definitely worth watching.
So this is fucking strange.
I signed on for an X360 Blog – which is not a blog that I keep that I can access through my X360 as one would imagine… but rather – it is a blog that my X360 keeps. It seems to track my playing habits and generate posts for its blog based on the habits it’s detecting. It’s even hoping for me to come back and start playing soon. Almost like the way my dog is wagging her tail when I come home from work – though not nearly as endearing… yet.
So I figure that since my 360 comes with it’s own quirky personality, I should probably give it a name. I have decided to name it Olsen (after Jimmy Olsen) because – like its namesake – it is chronicling the exploits of the super-human alter-ego of a mild-manner ordinary dude (who also happens to work with Olsen and others like him on a daily basis).
What I wonder is if the material is going to turn out to just be obviously canned Eliza-style crap, or if they actually have something sophisticated operating there, and if each blog has a sort of personality profile. I hope it’s at least that sophisticated – but time will tell. Would be great to assign each 360 a random handful of major and minor personality traits and writing styles and then draw the bulk of the content from a database and glue it all together procedurally. It would give each Blog a unique flavor.
Anyway, regardless, this is the first computer I have ever given a name. Probably won’t be the last either.
Welcome to the world Olsen, and welcome ot the future everyone.
Been a month of heavy reading for me with two books of tremendous and mind-bending scope.
First was Simon Singh’s latest ‘The Big Bang’. I’m a huge fan of his sort of ‘popularized history of science’ kind of writing. His first book ‘Fermat’s Enigma’ floored me with its engaging histories of insane mathematicians from Pythagoras (a^2+b^2=c^2) to Fermat (for n>2 there are no whole number solutions for a^n+b^n=c^n) to Wiles – the dude who proved Fermat’s theorem in ’91 or ’92. I should link that book in the list on the right, but the only image I have of the cover is too big to fit in the column.
Singh also wrote ‘The Code Book’ – another excellent romp through mathematical history, this time as relates not to one of the great riddles of our time, but as relates to the people whose livelihood lies in creating and solving riddles themselves. Crypto is cool… and a naturally engaging topic for a history-of-science writer because it’s all full of intrigue and war. I highly recommend it – especially if you’re borderline OCD like me and have a dangerous fascination with that stuff. Of course – if you actually are OCD – stay the fuck away from it because it will make you go batty for real.
So his latest book – which I think is more than a year old now – is ‘The Big Bang’ and he veers away from the purer mathematicians toward the theoretical physicists and cosmologists who have been trying to explain the shape of the universe (spatially and temporally speaking) for a few thousand years. He starts with Aristarchus measuring the distance to the Sun using wells in Africa and the Stade as a unit of measurement and runs all the way up to the late 20th century, covering everyone from Ptolemy to Copernicus and Galileo to Hubble and Einstein. He doesn’t go into the real up-to-date stuff like string theory and M-space though.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the book because I think Singh has a knack for finding the human stories and for making characters out of these names that you’ve been reading in textbooks since high-school. Science is so much more engaging when it’s about people instead of just about ideas and numbers… kind of like games in a way. Unfortunately, my own appreciation of the book was hobbled a bit by the fact that I had covered the vast majority of the material in a ‘Stars for Rockstars’ course at UBC – one of those mandatory science courses for folks in the humanities.
So if you didn’t take Astronomy For Arts Students Who Don’t Understand Calculus 101 while in school – and you wanna know about more about the stars, planets, galaxies and universe itself so you’ll have that information when you need it… I suggest picking it up.
The other book I read was the at turns tear-jerking, at turns punishing ‘Incompleteness’ by Rebecca Goldstein. It’s about Kurt Godel, his life and his work. It’s pretty short, but in some places trying to finish the page is akin to having a tooth extracted. I suspect that trying to put together a layman’s description of Godel’s Incompleteness theorems is a next-to-impossible task and it sure turned my brain into glue as I tried to read it. I’m very glad I pushed through though, because the last couple of chapters of the book are amazing. I cried at the end even, at how sad it is that someone as earth-shakingly brilliant as Godel can just kind of fall between the cracks of society – even in a place like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
What is great about the book though, aside from the touching perspectives on Godel himself, is the assertion that guys like Godel and Einstein – who us post-modernists most commonly take to be relativists – were in fact the purest of Platonists. Doubly weird when you consider that the term ‘relativist’ probably gets the majority of its current strength from Einstein himself.
How can Einstein and Godel – the two guys who (along with Heisenberg) probably dealt the most serious blows to any notion of objectivity – be Platonists? I think the argument goes something like this: (and I’ll come at it from the Relativity side because it’s less abstract and less full of self-referential statements than if I try to come from the Incompleteness side)
Time is relative to the observer and there is no preferred – or objective – frame of reference (duh). But in a sense, what that ends up meaning – or at least this is what I read Goldstein as claiming it meant to Einstein and Godel – is that the General Relativity equations themselves are an absolute and objective description of time. Time literally is the mathematics that describes it – and all of the infinitude of subjective frames of reference are just data-points in the system of time as is defined by General Relativity. Thus – in defining the system that encompasses subjective time, we have a new objective measure of what time is. I think that’s kind of cool.
To put it in a context that anyone likely on this site might be more comfortable with… there are an infinite number of possible experiences for a player of Mario Bros. Every single play experience is unique, and none of them are ‘preferred’ – so if I’ve played it, I can say ‘Mario Bros is X’ and if you’ve played it, you can say ‘No, Mario Bros is Y’ – each of us is essentially describing his linear experience of the game. We are both right from our own perspective, but also we are both wrong in a sense. Neither of those singular experiences is Mario Bros. Mario Bros – in the Einstein-and-Godel-are-Platonists-sense – is the code. It is the all-encompassing truth that describes all the possible individual, subjective experiences and is itself an absolute. It is because of the code that both of our unique experiences can exist. Each unique experience becomes one of an infinity of solutions for the algorithm that is Mario Bros.
It goes back to the Allegory of the Cave (which I ironically used to help define the role of the Level Designer here). Einstein shows that each reference – each instance of subjective time is just a shadow on the wall, a projection of the Form of his equations… it shows rather irrefutably that there exist objective – though intangible – things… and you can’t be much more Platonic than that.
Anyway – if you can tough out the math and can hold onto your marbles through highly self-referential sentences broken down into formal logic, then I’d recommend it. It’ll be a breeze if you’re a programmer, because the symbolic logic and equations aren’t hard, they’re just self-referential which sends the mind spinning a bit.
So since I haven’t kept up my end of the bargain in terms of putting up new posts, I thought I would at least upload some more free stuff. For those of you too intimidated by the shocking brilliance of my thesis novel and looking for some more ‘entry level’ Hocking material I have uploaded a short story I wrote a number of years ago.
It’s about a train derailment involving a circus train with clowns and rhinoceroses and hyenas and a container car full of nitrous oxide and another one full of ball bearings and an overturned school bus full of children and dentist turned would-be-hero holding back the urge to laugh amidst all the ensuing unspeakable horror and hilarity while wrestling with frictionless surfaces, wild dogs, noxious vapors, and the insecurities inherited from his father.
It’s a blood-soaked gas-induced-laugh-a-minute.
Oh – and I never did get the first paragraph right, so don’t let that stop you.
Went and saw Thank You For Smoking this weekend, and sadly it was only ‘okay’. There are many reasons that it never rose above that, but the main one in my opinion is that Writer/Director Reitman never really seemed to decide what this movie was about.
Is it a dark comedy about how we promote and sell one of the most dangerous things on earth? If so it never really reaches the absurd and disturbing levels of irony reached by Lord of War.
Is it a ballsy political statement about freedom of choice and how it is in fact worth the cost of more than a thousand lives a day and all of the associated social costs of the diseases that smoking causes? If so it didn’t leave me walking out of the theatre proud to be free the way The People vs Larry Flynt did.
Was it simply a character study about a man with a horrid, despicable job, trying to make it work and raise his son to be a good person? If so, I never felt the character faced the same challenges as Cage’s Weather Man.
Aside from this critical weakness, the film suffered from a few other significant failings. The sound was poor and often poorly mixed or balanced (though this could have been something faulty in the theatre I suppose), and the editing in particular was painful and distracting. There were a number of scenes – particularly his occasional lunches with the ‘MOD’ Squad where the editor was – for some reason – simply cutting back to close shots on each speaker for every line of dialog. By the end of 60 seconds of this, I actually started to wonder if the actors were even in the same room – it was that painful. There were other minor (but still distracting) technical faults throughout (was Rob Lowe’s ghoulish make-up job intentional?) but I will mostly put these down to being made under (what I imagine are) the budgetary constraints of putting together a film for Fox Searchlight
Yikes – now that I’ve dumped on it, I feel like I should say there were some things I really liked about it. The sequences in LA with Rob Lowe are darkly twisted and Lowe’s straight man is hilarious (despite a less than perfect script). Young Adam Brody, as Lowe’s assistant nails the surreal LA greeting in a sequence that almost made soda-pop shoot out my nose. Actress Kim Dickens – as the ex-wife of Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is convincing and engaging in her 3-4 brief scenes. I remembered her from the brilliant Zero Effect (written and directed by another ‘son of a famous director) and always wanted more of her, but rarely see her. Too bad.
Needless to say, Robert Duvall is still a genius. He is great as the covertly racist southern landed-lord tobacco king. In his first scene, sitting in the cigar lounge of the secret club of tobacco kings drinking a mint julep, his physicality is shocking. He fills his chair (and his role) like he was poured into it. The scene made me appreciate what a real actor can do with his body, and made me realize that Duvall has always been a master of this (compare the upright posture of Tom Hagen to the distinctly other upright posture Colonel Kilgore, or compare him is his air chair here to him in his armchair in his Slingblade cameo). It made me remember that acting isn’t just about having 17 different flavors of perfect smile. Unfortunately, despite his greatness, the camera doesn’t give him the room to bring more to the film – whether this was the directors choice not to shoot it that way or the editors choice to leave the best bits on the floor, I’ll never know.
On the whole, the acting is quite solid throughout, and I think that with a stronger script, a clearer understanding of what the film was about, and a little bit (not a lot) more money to clean up some of the noticeable technical failings, it could have been much, much better.
Keep in mind that I am really picky, and maybe you’ll like it. I hope it does well, and Reitman makes Fox’s money back so they’ll let him do another. He clearly has some strong skills in working with actors, and I imagine he can leverage that into a great career if he gets the chance to work with the right people on the technical side.
So I haven’t posted in about a week because my free time has been pretty much obliverated, but I had to get on here and post my thoughts on David Sirlin’s book Becoming the Champion.
This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, and the only reason I read it was that the author handed me a copy after my GDC presentation. In the end, I’m really glad he did, because I found the book extremely interesting and engaging, and so hopefully by throwing up a post about it here, I’ll drive a few folks like me, who would not have otherwise considered it, to give it a read.
The book is an analysis of competitive gaming and a kind of philosophical handbook to understanding the challenges of becoming a competitive gamer. A good chunk of the book is a re-examination of Sun Tsu’s Art of War as it applies in the context of competitive games. Weird, I know, but it works.
I have read the Art of War and have always had some problems with analyses of it that try to make it applicable to endeavours other than war-fighting. I find that such attempts often simply turn something highly literal into something pointlessly abstract and metaphorical. Because Sirlin is writing literally about (simulated) fighting, his adaptation of the original work holds up much better.
In particular, I appreciated the fact that he was able to maintain his analysis through his chapter ‘Attacking with Fire’, which is (in other analyses I have read) a troublesome chapter to extend into other spaces. It’s clear in Master Tsu’s original work that he’s not talking about attacking with fire metaphorically – he’s talking about torching fields and forests to cut off escape routes so you can massacre your enemy without dividing your forces. Deliteralizing this principle and trying to apply it to diversifying a junk-bond portfolio always seemed like a bad idea. Sirlin smartly confines the scope of his chapter and doesn’t overextend himself. His chapter on attacking with fire is only a page and a half long. He talks about the use of fireballs and ranged attacks in Street Fighter as a way to create a pin and then attack from a different direction – the time required for the fireball to cross the screen means the attacking fighter and the fireball can arrive on the enemy at the same time – enabling an attack from two directions at once. He also points out that pins and forks in chess are essentially the same thing (though they are slightly different mechanically because in chess they must operate in a turn-based play-space).
Another cool part of the book is his comparison of play-styles of famous chess masters and (admittedly less) famous competitive Street Fighter players. I don’t know enough about the history of chess, and I know almost nothing about the history of competitive Street Fighter, but even I have heard of Capablanca. Sirlin illustrates that there are certain styles of play that cross game-specific boundaries, and points out that in any community that surrounds any game you will find some of the same types of people. His point – I think – is that by studying other kinds of competitive gaming he was able to develop a more robust perspective on the competitive sphere surrounding his own game, which maybe he could not have seen from the inside. He was able to identify and categorize his competition and develop a deeper understanding of the psychology of different players. He was also able to identify and categorize his own strange play-style and use his new found understanding of himself to improve his game (and to migrate toward a more robust play-style).
In some sense, it is his ‘warriors approach’ to understanding competitive gaming that makes the book so interesting and makes Sirlin himself a compelling author/character. Sirlin appears to be as dedicated to his ‘war art’ as any real warrior. He studies the art itself, and practices constantly, but acknowledges also that a hundred thousand matches is not going to make you a master without also studying related arts, without studying the relevant history, without adopting the necessary competitive mind-set, without putting yourself in real situations that test your capabilities.
What I think is most interesting though is that Sirlin gave me his book right after my presentation on designing to promote intentional play. I some sense I was directly attacking the notion of competitive play which Sirlin seems to think requires (what I called) ‘seeing the Matrix in the Matrix’. He talks about competitive players who ‘know the algorithm’ and about the quest to find the optimal peaks in the game-space described by the mechanics of the game as part of the job of the competitive gamer. People playing games like this is not something I particularly want, or at least something I would discourage. So part of me wonders if Sirlin gave me his book to say ‘dude – wake up – games are about the quest to understand mechanics’. On the other hand, maybe he felt there was some underlying similarity between what I was saying and his own philosophy.
In some sense, there is a pretty clear case to be made that Street Fighter has brought more to Sirlin’s life than any of my games brought to anyone else’s life (to my knowledge) – so who am I to say we should design our games to appeal to these people here, but not those people there? This isn’t to say I’m going to start designing games to be more suited toward competitive tournament play – merely to say that I need to be careful not to invalidate or fail to recognize that there are many, many ways to enjoy a game and that any of those ways is potentially equally valid.
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