Jedi are assholes

It's a common sentiment among those not sensitive to the Force that Jedi are arrogant and distant.  I tended to regard these sentiments as stupid. Of course they're arrogant relative to the weak and unwise. Who wouldn't come across as a bit arrogant when they can predict the future, read minds, and use a lightsaber?

Yet now I understand. I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic II again. I'm noticing things that apparently escaped my notice the first time around. Such as how absurdly arrogant and douchy the Jedi are.

I see one in a cage and break him out. He yells at me about how I just rushed into action and didn't think about the consequences. What? Apparently I was supposed to know that they were allied with the Exchange and planning to attack the settlers. And that they were only delaying attacking because they had a Jedi prisoner. Because somehow that makes sense. And somehow leaving him in the cage was going to fix the problem.

I'd played KOTOR before and should have picked up on this, that many Jedi seem to regard any action, ever, as hasty action happening too soon. They'd rather sit around and see what happens. The Mandalorians were destroying the Republic and the Jedi response was to wait. And then exile anyone who went to defend the Republic. I wonder how things might have gone if the leadership had joined the war, had been there to provide some guidance. War might have still been corrupting, but if that corruption had been noticed and dealt with, things might have gone better. Surely it is better to know what is going wrong than to reject all opposition and then be caught off-guard when it turns on you.

Maybe it's the medium. I do not think the Jedi in the movies were quite so stupid. When apprehending Palpatine they correctly determined that the smart thing to do was to kill him on the spot, and moved to do so. Though they were stopped from doing so by a ridiculously impulsive and arrogant little brat. In The Empire Strikes Back Yoda tried to keep Luke from rushing off, which, far from being excessively cautious, was smart. Even if it hadn't been an intentional trap, the travel time involved meant that by the time he got there he'd be too late. Better to plan things out a bit, train some more. Maybe Yoda would have helped if it looked like something more than an impulsive suicide mission.

Maybe it's excessively far sight. The Jedi know that impulsive action will eventually become a really bad, dangerous, awful thing. So starting thousands of years in the past they work to remove impulsiveness. Unfortunately, they end up just being slow-moving idiots. Perhaps they were too quick to not be quick.

All the Adventure with half the Violence

I'm not sure what magical creature to blame for this, but somehow this post, fully-written, sat as a draft, unpublished (redundancy ensures that you have enough).

We've previously established that I like violence in games.  Shooting, smashing, smashing with objects normally reserved for shooting, and of course shooting smashing things (gravity gun) are all great violence.  Sometimes slicing substitutes for smashing.  Explosions!

At times I'd wonder if adventure required violence.  After all, without the fight, what is left?  Travel time and story.  Yet what is the story except the adventure itself, and therefore nothing without the conflict?  It's like circular logic swirling into a black hole.

Yet here I am playing Don't Starve and having a blast.  It's a dangerous world, yet it's not a world of battles.  I avoid fights.  Except with spiders, because spiders are jerks in this game.  But even then, how violent can you be when it hurts?  My meat-drying operation means that I can keep my health up, but it's not a solution if I rush into mindless conflict.  A log suit only gets you so far.  I only have a football helmet because a tree killed a pig.  I suspect that was my fault, for riling up the tree with all my chopping.  It had no appreciation for the classics.

Death is dangerously close to permanent.  I've only found one touch stone.  It's not too far away, and I did take the wise step of leaving an old log suit, some earmuffs, and some small jerky in a chest near it.  That's what I learned after I nearly froze to death trying to recover my items in an earlier game.  Maybe the real lesson is not to get in fights with birds twice your height.  Once summer returns, I'm only about halfway through winter, I can shave my magnificent beard for a meat effigy.

The rewards aren't so great either, at least not where I am. I wanted some spider silk so I could make some beehouses, which require catching some live bees.  Hunting spiders is a pain.  Then just to add insulting irony to it all, right after I made the houses winter hit and they've so far done nothing at all.  A few days later I went to fight more spiders, hoping to get more silk for bird traps.  I found enraged beefalos wrecking the nest and I just walked in to get the silk and spider egg.  A few minutes sooner and maybe I'd have just been trapped between a dozen spiders and a dozen beefalos.

I worry much more about freezing to death.  This means carefully-planned runs for wood and rabbits, without time to spare for random combat.  Of course that's when I hear the growling of the hounds...

The first lesson I take away is that combat is most games is far too rewarding relative to the costs.  Save points and respawning mean that there is little incentive to avoid a fight unless the mission is specifically designed for stealth.  The result is that in a sense the violence isn't even as violent, being reduced to an immortal fighting mortal opponents until the latter are all dead or the former is frustrated, yet still entirely alive and unscathed.  That's slaughter, not violence.  Of course so many games are deigned to be entirely about combat, so it's no surprise that they're designed so that combat is inevitable and always winnable.

The second lesson is that danger does not require violence.  The environment can be the danger.  Basic survival can be the danger.  It's not as glamorous as mowing down rows of Zombie Muslim CommuNazis, but it's fun in its own way.  This has been a gameplay element for a long time.  How much did Mario fight relative to time spend jumping over pits of lava?  The jumping puzzles are a different expression of the same concept.  More recently, there is the world of Stalker, in which anomolies like to wait, nearly invisible, before turning you inside out.  They don't add to the action, but rather invert it, forcing an otherwise-uncharacteristic level of caution.

Maybe the problem is one of challenge.  A violent world can have action without challenge.  A non- or less-violent world can end up seeming as if nothing is happening.  Making survival challenging brings back the adventure, yet the challenge may drive people away.  I can imagine a great deal of frustration in a game like Don't Starve, where you can build up and up, only to leave yourself in the cold a little too long, stray a little too far, eat a little too infrequently.  Suddenly it all comes crashing down.

Cave "Mengele" Johnson

The other day I wrote about how we as players may casually commit what would in real life be genocide, war crimes, or some other varied form of evil. This led me back to an idea that has been floating around in my head for some time, though I only recently understood it fully: GLaDOS is not the villain of Portal. Nor is Weatley. Instead, the true is evil The Old One, a being who was so profoundly evil that it still permeates all aspects of the institutions and structures that he created. GLaDOS is merely a tool, as is Weatley, and the player. They are also all the victims of this evil.

Think of GLaDOS and her compulsive need to test. She couldn't not test. Yet, what was testing? It was about as scientific as shooting the floor while ordering someone to dance.

This first test involves something the lab-boys call repulsion gel. You're not part of the control group by the way - you get the gel. Last poor son of a gun got blue paint, ha ha ha! All joking aside, that did happen. Broke every bone in his legs - tragic. But informative! Or so I'm told.

This isn't reckless pursuit of knowledge. This isn't a man driven to know, regardless of the consequences. He is instead a man driven by the consequences.

Just a heads up, we're gonna have a super conductor turned up full blast and pointed at you for the duration of this next test. I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do.

Science isn't about why, it's about why not. You ask: why is so much of our science dangerous? I say: why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you in the butt on the way out, because you are fired.

There is nothing to learn here. There is nothing to learn from substitution repulsion gel for blue paint. There is nothing to learn from creating AI that are tortured if they are not torturing.

What we see here is a man creating an institution of evil. He fired all who dissented, who even hinted at the concept of human rights. He created the AI. He forced employees to be both torturers and victims thereof.

Ha! I like your style, you make up your own rules just like me.

No one said that the Übermensch would be a moral person by any measure that we can comprehend. Yet he is clearly an immoral person by many measures that we can comprehend.

When I stop and think about it, Portal is a profoundly disturbing game series. It feels so light-hearted in its presentation. It is silly. Yet it is a game set in a world with a horribly twisted history. We can set aside the part where Portal takes place in the same alien-occupied world as Half Life; Aperture is terrible enough. I suppose it's true what they say, that comedy is tragedy plus time.

Casual evil in video games

We all know that we can do bad things in games. I'm not referring to people an asshole on xbox live or something like that, but to the actual gameplay. It's not even the obvious stuff that bugs me. Yes, in Grand Theft Auto games you can rob and murder people and that's bad, but what would the game be without that? Without the horrible things you can do the GTA series is really just a bad third person shooter blended with a bad driving simulator. I'm instead concerned about the incidental evil, the bad things you can do that the developers might have not even thought of. Yet it is there.

Take the Elder Scrolls games, for example. As in all fictional worlds, there are no psychiatrists. If you're traumatized, that's it; your mind is done for. Your best option at that point is to just embrace it, join a demonic murder cult, and do what comes naturally. And of course you cannot kill the children. You can, of course, kill their parents. In front of them. And then when the guards come you can kill them too. That kid is done for.

Or in the Civilization series there are the casually-committed war crimes. In Civ III I used to intentionally starve foreign cities I don't know if that actually helped with the cultural conversion, but there were definitely fewer foreigners after I got done with them. I tended to run a thriving slave trade as well. These weren't written into the game to fit some karma meter. There is no karma meter. The closest thing is being a warmongering menace to the world and odds are, whoever is calling you that is himself a warmongering menace to the world. It's the pot calling the can of black paint black.

There's another thing: you can shoot at anything if you're at war with it. Generals, well of course! Admirals, duh. Those are both obvious. And then there are the workers. Guys are just trying to build roads and you're ordering air strikes on then. Maybe a missionary wanders by and what do you do? Open fire!

The best part, at least as I roleplay it, is the reason why: they're bored. There aren't any enemy military units, so they're just firing at anything in sight. Some guy is trying to save souls and they're just lobbing shells at him. Odds are his civilization is some backward dump and he's got this great opportunity to leave and we're just shelling everything in sight. It makes me miss how in Civ IV you could use air strikes against improvements. I'd be doing that constantly. Just shoot up all the farms; get jet fighters with the depleted uranium rounds.

This is all beside the times when I go full Honor and get gold from killing units. At that point I see no reason to ever end a war. Why wouldn't I just keep slaughtering people? It's not costing me anything. I need my army anyway, since I need to defend myself from all the people who are mad that I keep starting wars.

[edit] And since posting this I've destroyed the Zulu empire for the sole purpose of stealing their art.

Interpreting something from nothing is miscommunication

This article from Slate caught my attention:
What the ...
Why everyone and your mother started using ellipses ... everywhere.

First off, I'm not a fan of over-ellipsification. This is mostly because I'm a judgmental jerk. The dots feel lazy, as if the person writing them didn't bother to complete their thought. They feel stupid, as if the writer could not complete their thought. They feel hostile at times. Consider the following exchange:

Hi.
Hello.

Pretty dull, isn't it? Let's try this one.

Hi.
Hello...

Now that's exciting! Maybe that second person is backing away slowly. That's what I'm picturing. Maybe they're reaching for their mace (I will hit you with said mace if you criticize my use of "they" as an ungendered singular). On the other hand, maybe they're purring it seductively, in which case, use the phrase "purring seductively" rather than ellipses. And then stop writing talking cat porn because that's weird.

In general I'm opposed to the "writing as speech" notion. Speech is allowed to be vague for two reasons. First, there is body language. Second, there is immediate feedback from the reader. Writing has neither of those. Obviously the body language is a lost cause outside of a few smilies, which we should use more often, but don't, as you can see demonstrated here. The quick feedback is also a lost cause, for two reasons. First, written communication is meant to be understood (Captain Obvious is guest writing this sentence), which should mean that the writer writes it well, but in practice often means that the reader feels dumb. Second, the response is going to be delayed. The person writing text-as-speech is probably distracted by something more interesting than you, such as crashing their car.

The dot dot dot also tends to break up the writing. It's not a substitute for the ums and uhs. Those aren't supposed to be in text at all. They're not in verbal speech! Oh, you think they are? When we talk we ignore all of those, recognizing that they are not thoughts, ideas, or feelings. Of course if there are a dozen uhs in a row we'll notice that since it's a sign of something wrong with either the idea or the person's mental state (flustered, not crazy). Injecting all those pauses into written speech means putting them straight into our heads, bypassing the filter that would normally get rid of them.

If you practice for a presentation what is the primary piece of feedback you'll get? Odds are, it's to stop saying um so often. It makes you sound like you're unsure of yourself and your knowledge. It makes you sound disorganized and confused. Why would you intentionally add that in to your writing? You might as well just preface every message with "I have no idea what I'm trying to say, but here are a bunch of letters, some of which might form words, but which should not be interpreted as actual thoughts."

Trying to sound stupid is useful at times, such as during comedy or a Senate hearing (either side), but it shouldn't be a standard of behavior.

Onward to the article. Here's what stood out for me.

So I decided to run a little experiment. One night I sent a bunch of potentially confusing, ellipsis-infused text messages to those I interact with regularly and waited to see what happened.

[writer's note: at this point I would normally use ellipses to indicate that I'm taking nearby, but not quite continuous blocks of text, but I was worried that it would look like I or the writer were using ellipses. See how everything has been ruined?]

Next I sent an even vaguer text to my mom: “All Star Game………….” Who knows what I meant by that one. I didn’t, certainly. Sure, the All-Star game was on TV at the time, but beyond that, what was I getting at? Mom wasn’t fazed in the least: “I’m falling asleep…Really tired. Cutch struck out.” Four or five additional texts to assorted friends and family members resulted in similarly uneventful back-and-forth communications.

At no point did anyone reply with, “What the hell are you talking about?” or “Could you please give me a bit more information here?” And of course none of those folks mentioned anything about the ellipses. It would appear that when we are communicating with friends and others possessing the requisite context to understand our ellipsified ramblings, message recipients tend to make do just fine.

 Did you catch it? He sent a message that was meant to communicate nothing, yet he got a response. It's a Rorschach text dot test. I've just coined that phrase, by the way. Take the ellipses and fill them in with anything. Have back and forth exchanges in which you say nothing, yet somehow think that you did.

 I don't think that ellipses are a bad idea. That dot dot dot can be effective, in certain situations. Someone does or says something dumb. Sure, you could put in all the effort to say how dumb they are. Or you could just send a dot dot dot...

Interface is destiny

How we interact with information will influence what we do with it. For these purposes, interface refers to both the display of information, the ability to interact with it, and how we input commands.

While my graduate work is done, the report I wrote (with an excellent group) on eliminating the taxation of retirement income was good enough that our school wanted to release another version of it. This would be much shorter, about a third the length, and would encourage us to take a more direct stance rather than merely laying out the facts, which did point toward an obvious conclusion, but we were meant to be analyzing, not advocating. The shorter version would also have to be more interesting and wouldn't need to waste space on basic concepts.

Most of the group was employed by then (darn go-getters), so the two unemployed of the group remained: me and someone else. Our first attempt took the form of roughly chopping up the report. We'd remove explanations that seemed unnecessary. We'd remove areas of the literature review that seemed dull or repetitive. Some of the redundancy, of looking at the same result from different angles, was removed.After some time we sent in a draft and received a scathing review. I was a bit peeved, since surely it wasn't so awful, given that the original was not.

Enter: interface. We'd been in the habit of using our separate computers. We did this because it's really annoying to have someone sitting over your shoulder, or to sit over someone's shoulder, squinting at the text, unsure if it makes no sense because it's bad or because you cannot see it clearly. Yet this created another problem, that we couldn't fully see what the other was doing. Of course we could read it, after the fact, but that spawned two problems. First, we're lazy. Second, this meant that feedback carried a delay and was consequently forgotten, confused, or by then irrelevant because they'd changed it already. Having one's own computer handy, and an excuse to use it, also made it far too easy to be distracted. Is it a surprise then that our draft was terrible?

So we did what we should have done in the first place: got a big screen. The library features study rooms with nice big TV screens hooked up to computers, so we can work together. While this is an exceptionally unproductive and annoying process with five people, with two it works quite well. We keep each other on task, laptops off to the size, always on the same page, able to highlight what we're talking about and edit it together. The flow of information in all directions is improved. As a result, I believe the second attempt is far better, with improved narrative flow, consistent phrasing, and much bigger, more readable text (I fear that last one is unique to the display we were using).

Which of course brings me to Civilization V. While Gods & Kings fixed up the diplomacy, tweaked the combat, added another layer to the game, and generally made just about everything better (I swear the load time is slightly faster even), it still uses an interface for building that is inferior to that of Civ IV. In Civ IV I'd happily queue up the next buildings or units, even setting repeating unit production, which is great for an army. In Civ V I avoid it. It's more of a hassle to use the queue than to click the production query every few turns. The result is that I put more places on pure gold or science than I would otherwise, with fewer units produced and less culture, not because that is the better decision, but because it is the less annoying decision.

If an interface is annoying enough, then people won't use it.

I have a complaint for you too, Guild Wars 2. It's about my engineer. I like using everything that is useful, so I switch weapons a lot: pistols, flamethrower, green squirty gun. It's nifty all the things I can do. What isn't nifty is that they're essentially all nested in menus. Of course menus make for a nice interface, hiding away all that stuff that you're not clicking at this very moment, but they make it harder to get to the ability I'm trying to use. I don't understand the point of one-click shopping, but one-click shooting is perfectly logical.

 All of this is also why I dislike mobile things. On a computer I can use hotkeys, scroll wheels, and all manner of methods of interaction. Touch doesn't allow that. Sure, I can do a lot of hand gestures, and mobile interfaces inspire some, but there are only so many different ways to swipe. This is also why I think consoles are silly. Or maybe I just lack a TV to justify one. While we're at it, there is my repeating whine about Skyrim, that the interface is designed for very few input options, thereby forcing everything into the inconvenient abyss of menus. I wonder why I don't play a caster once I get beyond firethrowing.

Another strike against mobile things: they're small. Again, everything has to be shoved off-screen into little menus or other screens. Information ends up scattered and harder to take in. Then again, I once used three screens for a single program once. Who wouldn't want one screen for the data definitions, another for the stata input, and another to see what wrong answer it is giving this time (by which I mean that I typed something in wrong). Ideally I'd have had a fourth screen to look up syntax. I really hate switching screens. Because of all my screens, stata was one of the few times I was actually more productive working at home.

In conclusion, I once tried to play Starcraft 2 on my laptop without a mouse and it was a terrible experience.

I'm a terrible MMO blogger

I don't think it's a leap to say that if you're going to write well about a game or genre you should play or have played that game or genre. Recent experience is important too. Which all adds up to me being a terrible MMO blogger. This is not a new thing.

I've never been an MMO player. You heard that right, in whatever voice you use to read this blog. Hopefully it's not too whiny.

I played World of Warcraft for years. I've tried some MMOs. But I've never really played them, gotten deep into them, worked out all the little bits and community.

Of course WoW is an MMO, which would seem to make me an MMO player, for having played it for so long. Yet I see it as primarily being WoW, a genre unto itself. Why else would there be the WoW tourist who wanders away to look at these others games, yet never stays? Surely other MMOs have something to offer. Maybe they're newer, prettier, have slightly more suitable mechanics (an individual thing, of course).

The factor there is that they, like me, are not  MMO players. Rather, they are WoW players. Of course there are many MMO players who play or have played WoW and will play other MMOs. I don't think I'm one of them.

This could be due to entirely different factors. Social factors. While everyone plays or has played WoW, other MMOs have not had the same broad audience. If I go to one of the other games I may find myself alone. Of course there will be other players, but they are strangers and those are terrifying. They're like zombies: they look human, but are dangerously different. Some of them run quickly too. Most don't bite as often.

Everyone is, has, or will

Two friends from college got married today. At the reception I met a friend I'd not seen in person since college, a nerd friend of his, and the nerd college roommate of one of my friends. We nerded it up. We had been placed at the same table as well, so of course we do some nerding there.

One of us says something like, "be glad you never became a nerd" to the other guys at the table. I started to argue that it's great (though not without some downsides, particularly early on). Their responses? To join right in with the nerd talk. Before long everyone as the table was recounting tales of WoW.

I think it's amazing when you can throw together some random people from Chicago to Arkansas and they've all lived together in the same world.