Echo Bazaar: non-linearity as virtue

EB hasn't yet brought me to a state of self-ruining obsession, so it's not quite WOW-level addicting, but it's pretty gosh darn fun. It's well-written--atmospheric, evocative, and even funny. That's not why it works as a game, though: the tricks it uses to pull the player into the world, to make us care about it, build on its narrative strengths but are operating on a different plane. They're some of them borrowed from pre-existing RPG traditions, but some of them are new.

Take EB's morality system. It's become de rigeur for RPGs to offer a way for players to become good or evil over the course of play, and typically the choices extend precisely that far. For someone like me, who is psychologically incapable of playing as an evil character, this is minimally interesting. Eb does things very differently: rather than imposing a binary good/evil morality system, there's a number of non-linear "personality traits" that one can cultivate over time, ranging from moral qualities like "Magnanimous" and "Ruthless" to more expressive "Melancholic" or "Hedonistic." Note that it's possible to have two conflicting characteristics, though the game does present you with situations that force you towards one or another. It's a quietly brilliant idea: my best alternative to simple moral binaries was to complicate them with a second axis (selfishness versus altruism? religious versus atheistic?), but this does away with oppositional choices in favor of a free flowing personality quiz, blending morality and role-playing most deliciously.

On a somewhat similar vein, the game takes a remarkably agnostic view of the game world's epistemology. Who are you? Where are you from? What has happened in your past? Most RPGs, if they let you choose at all, force these choices on you at the very beginning of the game. EB lets these facts emerge gradually, with a substantial level of input from the player. I wonder if the approach could be taken further? What if the player could affect the truth of the game universe? Do this, and the thief has a heart of gold. Choose this, and he was a bad egg all along. Why not?

Both of these present a far richer variety of combinations and situations than traditional RPG approaches allow. Who expected this kind of invention from a Twitter game?

Echo Bazaar: Ludonarrative and the Grind

Echo Bazaar is a terribly fun browser-based text game. It's got great atmosphere and has adapted the basic RPG "adventure, gain XP and loot, sell and heal, adventure" formula remarkably well to its medium. However, in one place the formula really grates: the quest grind. In general the game offers a broad palette of actions to advance your story, allowing you to pick whichever at any time. But a few are more directed and quest-like: you get a goal, and you have to repeat the same action (or two) until you build up enough successes to progress. It's the age-old quest grind, merely transposed to a new medium--which is why it's surprising how poorly it works. It's really, really annoying to click that same button over and over. It's instantly mind-numbing in its repetition.

This got me thinking: why isn't the quest grind as annoying in other RPGs? After all, it's equally repetitive. It's because in most RPGs, the action you're being asked to repeat is inherently fun--you're killing a monster, solving a puzzle, whatever. But there's nothing inherently rewarding about clicking a button. The only reward is the text description you get and the progress you make. Once the novelty has worn off, it's bare boring waiting-for-the-screen-to-load.

Games, especially RPGs, draw their strength from being fun on multiple time scales. To some degree fun on one level can be sacrificed to fun at another (as anyone who has spent an hour getting their party inventory in order can tell you), but there's a limit to how far that can go. Grinds need to be balanced out by grinding an action that's intrinsically rewarding.

Review: Extra Lives

Extra Lives promised so much more than it delivered it's difficult to be kind. From the subtitle, "Why video games matter" I gathered that the book would be about--well, why video games matter. Not about whether or not games are art.* Not about whether we ought to be embarrassed about playing them. Not about whether playing them is like snorting coke.** Not about whether games matter, because I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes, yes they do, now that we've settled that let's talk about things like how and why they matter. Instead, Bissell spends an awful lot of time exploring the deep and troubling problem of why Tom Bissell has a love-hate relationship with games, which only occasionally transcends the borders of his own psyche.

In the first chapter, Bissell starts by introducing a quite interesting and central paradox of gaming, which is that they're often simultaneously totally engaging and totally enraging. Working towards that point, he writes this:

It is difficult to describe Oblivion without atavistic fears of being savaged by the same jean-jacketed dullards who in 1985 threw my AD&D Monster Manual II in Lake Michigan. (That I did not even play D&D, and only had the book because I like to look at the pictures, left my assailants unmoved.)

Well thank goodness you didn't actually play D&D, Tom! That would be NERDY! Similar defensiveness is scattered throughout the book, making for a bizarre series of juxtapositions: on one page he assures us that gaming is important and meaningful; on the next he undermines his claim with a snide comment. At the end of the paragraph the first quote begins, Bissell writes of Oblivion: "It was an extra life, and I was grateful to have it."

The failure of Extra Lives is that it has too much of the former and not enough of the latter, and what falls between them is inconclusive musings. I kept hoping, hoping that Bissell would pull the wandering threads together and whip out a thundering conclusion explaining why games matter, but it never came. Every discussion of how different games had spoken to him petered off into silence (or snideness) rather than elucidating how this reflected on games as a whole, how it pointed the way towards better games, what it said about human beings as a game-playing species. In describing the most epic moment in his game career, where he risks his life to save his teammates against crushing odds, he says something remarkable: "I realized, then, vividly, that Left 4 Dead offered a rare example in which a game's theme (cooperation) was also what was encouraged in the actual flow of gameplay." Yes, narrative and ludonarrative† have to complement each other! That's something worth thinking about! How about other games? How does it work or not work in them? But it's not a thread he returns to, even when discussing ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock. Instead, he continues to gnaw fruitlessly at the question of whether games ought to have a narrative.††

All of this frustration is topped by a wonderfully infuriating cherry: rampant, unquestioned sexism. Bissell never mentions his girlfriends except to note how they never supported or participated in his gaming habit, and his idea of a "surprisingly funny awards host" is one who tells any woman unable to get laid at the gaming conference to "hang up their vagina." At one point he is shocked to find attractive young women at a game company's offices. Had they branched out into modeling or escort services, he wonders? This, plus his anti-nerd digs and his literary pretensions is why I'm thoroughly convinced that I wouldn't want to hang out with the author.

In the end, Tom Bissell seems more interested in Tom Bissell than in the games he's playing, and really, I was in it for the games. People ought to be writing books on why games matter, and what we as a society can learn from them. But they shouldn't be writing books like this one.

* I will be interested in this question just as soon as someone can ask it without using it as a bludgeon to forward either their complaint about Kids These Days or their whine about Those People Who Think They're So Cool.

** Only if the game is GTA IV, apparently.

† Meaning the narrative that emerges from play.

†† Is "some games should! Other games shouldn't!" too obvious an answer?

Leaky Abstractions and Uploading

The human experience of the world is built on layers and layers of abstractions--for instance, the human eye doesn't actually perceive movement. It shoots a series of little snapshots, and then your brain reassembles them, does a little calculation and tells you if things are moving. You don't actually see anything move. Also, you have a tiny blind spot in the middle of your eye where the optic nerve attaches to your retina. Also, your peripheral vision is a) blurry as all get out and b) color-blind. Your brain just fills in the blurriness for you

Now, mostly none of this actually matters. You mostly can tell when things are moving, and you mostly don't care that there's a tiny spot you can't see in the center of your eye. They're a good abstractions: they don't distract you with extraneous details, and leave you the information you need. Mostly. Sometimes though, knowing that there's a tiny blindspot in the center of your eye is important. Like when you're trying to look at a tiny, tiny speck of light--a star, say. Then it's useful to know that looking a few degrees to the left or right will get you a much clearer and brighter image.

The point of all this is: abstractions leak. Biological abstractions, software abstractions, mental abstractions, physical abstractions--all of them. When they leak, things can go wrong really fast. Auto-immune disorders, buggy code, phantom pains, dogmatism, faulty scientific theories; all of these can be traced to abstractions that have sprung a leak.

There's not really a solution for this problem. We need abstractions. Without them all there is is a mass of chaotic, incoherent data screaming at us. Without abstractions, we can't function. Before acting on anything, first we have to create an abstraction of it. The only solution is to be aware of the existence of our abstractions and be wary of their capacity to trick us. The map is not the territory, etc. If we're lucky, maybe we come up with a better abstraction every once and a while.

So what does this have to do with uploading? Well, think about it--uploading is moving our entire existence into an abstraction. Instead of moving our real arm through real space to manipulate real objects, we move an abstraction of an arm through an abstraction of space to manipulate abstractions of objects--all of which has to be processed through code running on real hardware, which may or may not have a piece of conductive dust fall across an important component. Simply put, the possibility for catastrophic abstraction failure becomes enormous. Our physical bodies have a multitude of feedbacks, some quite extreme, to keep our abstractions in line with reality--the senses, pain, hunger, exhaustion, etc. Uploading will quite deliberately trade those meaningful feeds for user-generated ones. Instead of keeping tabs on what's happening to the real physical substrate for our existence, we'll be drinking virtual champagne while having virtual sex with each other.

It strikes me as a scenario with some pretty striking fail states.

The Simulation Argument

It goes like this: "Pretty soon we're going to have really powerful computers. One of the things that people will want to do with these really powerful computers is run simulations--simulations of their own societies. Then those simulations will probably also want to run simulations! And so on. In fact, there will likely be far, far more simulated people than actual people. Wait, did I say 'will?' I meant are. Yeah, it's statistically likely that it's happening right now, and we're the simulations."

The problem I have with that is this: how can you build a computer that can simulate the existence of (as many or) more molecules than are used to build the computer? Electro-magnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravitic forces would all have to be simulated, and the number of calculations necessary to work all that math out for a single molecule would almost certainly take more than one molecule. Take the gravitic force in particular--gravitic force extends over a monstrously huge area, so that every molecule in the entire Earth exerts a gravitic effect on every other--every molecule in the solar system, every molecule in the galaxy, every molecule in the universe. Simply working out the gravitic interactions in my left hand could take a solar system's weight in computronium.

Assuming that we are ourselves a simulation, that leaves two possibilities. Either our experience of the universe is semi-illusory, and individual atoms don't actually exist unless unless they have to in order to maintain the illusion. (Wouldn't that be an interesting explanation for the wave/particle duality!) Or alternatively, the laws of physics in our universe are grossly simplified versions of those in the simulating universe.

Now, step two of the simulation argument is that the simulations will probably run simulations of their own. So what happens if we, semi-illusory/drastically simplified simu-verse, try to run our own simulation? Either we build a computer according to the faked laws of physics and, unable to pull off a simulated quantum computer, our universe crashes. Or we are forced to simplify the governing laws of our own simulation, either by making it much smaller molecule-wise than our own, or by faking some stuff.

Imagine matrioshka dolls (those Russian nesting dolls): just as each one is smaller than the one that contains it, so too is each simulation smaller than its progenitor. Depending on how efficiently universes can be simulated, each one may be vastly smaller--an order of magnitude smaller or more. If this number is large enough, it can very much bork the entire premise.

Representation and Taxation

I had a little epiphany just now: it's not taxation that necessitates representation, it's economic entanglement.

Sure, in the American colonies taxation was the flash point for revolution. It wasn't, however, the real problem: the real issue was that America was being run as a raw resource exporter/finished goods importer to drive England's economic growth. The taxation of tea was just one of dozens of ways the colonies were milked for wealth. For every cent of taxation, dollars and dollars were extracted via private companies: furs, timber, slaves, sugar, and so on. Taxes were just the government's way of skimming a bit of those massive privatized profits off for itself.

At that point England's economy was built on the backs of its colonies and outposts in America, Asia and Africa. Together they constituted a single economic system: without the colonies to provide resources and markets, England's domestic economy would have collapsed, and the economies of the colonies were similarly dependent (deliberately and systematically so) on England for essential goods. And that's where the lack of representation became so pressing: As long as political power was concentrated in the hands of the English, they had every incentive to design a system that rewarded only themselves. Only if political power is distributed throughout the whole economic tangle is there any political incentive to spread wealth with anything approaching fairness. Economic involvement without representation leads to exploitation.

Copyright Fallacies

I'm wary of real-world analogies when discussing copyright. One of the big problems with copyright, as I see it, is that it just doesn't map onto physical reality particularly well. The idea of something that can be infinitely replicated without any additional cost is pretty alien to our real-world experience, and it tends to get pushed under the rug a lot. When questions of intellectual property come up, the reaction has almost invariably been to try to treat it like it's a physical object. Reasoning by analogy is a fundamental part of our legal system, and it really bites us in the ass when it comes to copyright. (This is, I think, essentially where the concept of Fair Use comes from: once you've bought it, you can do more or less whatever to want with it--carry it around, give or lend it to someone else, use it as much or as little as you like; anything, that is, except exploit its ease of reproduction. You can use it in all the ways that it's like a thing, but in none of the ways it's like an idea.)

This "common sense" position worked as long as there were substantial costs to reproduction. Making and buying a CD was enough like making and buying a pot or a hammer that the analogy held. Now, not so much. What used to take an entire industry of reproduction and distribution has been replaced by desktop-publishing and the internet. This has exposed the huge, gaping difference between any real-world analogy and intellectual property: if you "sell" your IP, you still have it. If I "steal" your IP, you still have it. The incentive for individual users not to distribute is absent, in a way that's impossible to duplicate in the material realm.

This is why I think that real-world analogies make for poor arguments. Copyright in the digital age is so different from what we are familiar with that any analogy can't help but mislead.

Really, the power-grab underway by the companies in the recording and distribution business is a far more honest recognition of the realities of digital reproduction than the defense of the blurry concept of Fair Use. The only people who really get the realities of the media are the recording companies and the pirates--everyone else is still trying to treat intellectual property like it's a thing. The record companies, for all their flaws, have at least figured that much out. Sure, their proposed legal framework is obviously rapacious and terrible for consumers, but at least it responds to the reality of intellectual property, and not to a poorly thought-out analogy from the material world.