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Baby Birds

Hustling from the car into the schoolyard this morning, it turns out I wasn’t too rushed to pause for some birdwatching. A cluster of five birds hopped across one of the tiny patches of grass Newark still affords, foraging. I don’t know what kind of bird they were— the shiny black birds ubiquitous temperate, urban areas, just a little bigger than and often found foraging among sparrows.

Or rather, three of them were shiny and black. Two of them were grey-brown and very fuzzy, molting their baby feathers. They were far too big to be babies; indeed, if it weren’t for the molting, they’d look like adults. They moved with adult strength and coordination. They were entirely capable of picking through the grass; I know this because they did, a bit. But mostly they pestered mom (Dad? They look too much alike…) to provide, as she had in the nest. In the twenty or thirty seconds I’d watched, mom responded with simplified gestures resembling the giving of food, but didn’t actually give any up.

It was time for the kids to grow up. Almost adults, capable of doing their own work but not yet mastering either the technique or the self-discipline to do it, still trying to be spoon-fed because it’s easier that way.

Then I left the birdwatching behind and went inside to teach fifteen-year-olds how to calculate a grocery bill.

2011 05 31 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

John Scalzi: Writer

We attended a panel of sorts this week, which proved to be more of a book reading. Three authors read selections from the novels they’re pushing. The fourth, John Scalzi, read instead a joke project, about a page of deliberately bad fantasy writing, the story behind it, and anecdotes from the aftermath.

In short, someone had done a statistical survey of fantasy and scifi novel titles, and concluded that the ultimate, sure-fire selling title would be “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons—book I: the Dead City.” Scalzi claimed the title as his own and, with the help of publisher Tor, offered the first three abominable sentences of the book on April fools as a teaser. They were funny, suitable to the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. Even funnier were accounts of the reporters seeking interviews about the upcoming trilogy and, ultimately, the movie deal for a book that was never to be, as Scalzi expects blood would spray from his temples on attempting an entire book of writing this bad. Apparently this was a guaranteed selling title!

Despite the entertainment value of his segment, or perhaps because of it, I came away from the reading feeling what had been a mild impression strongly enhanced: that Scalzi is not really a writer. He’s got several books in print, and even a couple Hugos, so he must surely be a writer! But that’s not his profession. He’s a personality, making a living primarily by being John Scalzi, called upon for speaking engagements and web site attention more often than for novels. (I read Old Man’s War, with its shameless thefts from Starship Troopers and The Forever War. It was okay. Didn’t measure up to the hype.) The writing, and especially his blog, are simply his tool for projecting that personality to adoring fans in the geek community.

So perhaps it’s fairer to say he’s a new kind of writer, one that could exist before the information age, but only among the independently wealthy, like Shelley and Byron. Mass print made newspaper personalities possible, but it’s the advent of the internet that really enable personalities quickly to build an adoring fan base.

And more power to him. He’s genuinely talented, maybe even genuinely talented as a writer—the kind of writer who writes blogs.

2011 05 27 mdlake Writing Comments (0) Permalink

Reliving the Past

I dream about school all the time, now. Hardly surprising when half my day is spent there. What bothers me, though, is that most of my dream classes are at least partially filled, sometimes entirely filled, with kids from my own high school days and not the kids I’m now teaching.

What does it mean? A carry-over from eight times the exposure (four years as opposed to one as-yet-incomplete semester)? A case of first learned, last forgotten? Or does it reflect something more sinister—unresolved issues from my youth? (I think my unresolved issues date back to college, not high school, but…)

And why am I so much younger in my dreams? Still the teacher, but once again seventeen. I’m ready for teaching to become sufficiently routine that my dreams settle down to the much more mundane stuff I’m used to; this is all too evocative. Especially since I’m not sure what it evokes.

2011 05 26 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

The “I” of “It”

Okay, that was cute. “The I of It” is a freebie web game that might loosely be called a platform jumper, even though there’s no actual jumping. You control a capital I, separated from and looking for its soulmate, a small t. In place of the jump button, you can choose to elongate or shorten the I, and in place of jumping, you must maneuver about the screen by stretching the I, hooking its serifs onto fixed objects, then shrinking so as to lift the I over obstacles. Shrinking to duck under barriers is important, too.

The graphics are simple but clean. A narrator introduces each screen (or retry) with a little phrase like “Meanwhile…” as though introducing chapters of a drama. The voice can be amusing or irritating, largely as a function of how much trouble you’re having at the moment. Unless you suffer inordinate difficulty with one of the levels, though, there shouldn’t be time to get too irritated; the game is short because there’s only so many variations on the stretch-and-shrink mechanism you can explore, and the designer wisely refuses to outstay his welcome. He merely lets you try everything once then walk away with a small but genuine sense of achievement.

2011 05 25 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Show ‘n’ Tell

As our current RPG campaign approaches a (somewhat premature) close, we must once again enter a round of negotiations over what to play next. This is somewhat difficult for our group, because we split on our preferences for all the major axes distinguishing styles of play: upbeat/downbeat, internal/external conflict, first-person/third-person narration, all those labels that gamers apply to gaming style. Or, to borrow Robin Laws’ definitions, we’ve got one (1) method actor, one storyteller, one tactician, one specialist, one casual player—all we need is for the power gamer to return to our table and we’d have a complete set.

As part of these negotiations, I found myself trying to express frustration with another player’s preferred style—it isn’t wrong, any more than my preferred style is, but the two styles are largely incompatible.

For Jen, the fun of RPGs is the state of being: she likes to imagine herself being a particular archetype and, to a lesser extent, deciding how she feels about events in game. It’s a very passive style, one that does little to move the action forward, or at all, and it’s very popular with tragedians, for whom being trapped in unfortunate circumstances is the whole point. Start doing heroic things, and you’re no longer trapped in a tragic life. Again, it isn’t wrong, but it is a style very much at odds with a style that emphasizes doing: shooting bad guys, deciphering ancient manuscripts, persuading the faerie queen to free a mortal prisoner. Get a table full of tragedians together, and they’ll have a grand old time commiserating. Mix them with players who want external plot instead of internal monologue, and there will be trouble.

Nigel Snivelton-dithers, romantic gentleman: I was born the scion of a noble family, but I’ve been disowned. My father would never countenance merely looking at a servant girl, much less marrying one. Sadly, my Annabelle died of tuberculosis not ten months from our elopement. What little money remained I spent making her comfortable in her last moments. Now I am reduced to whiling away the days by drinking absinthe and playing cards for pocket money, but I have lost all hope.

Rick Caliber, international man of action: Wow. That’s terrible. So what are you going to do about it?

Nigel: Do?

Rick: Yeah, do. Like, do you want to get revenge on your father or something?

Nigel: I am a gentleman, sir! Reprehensible though his attitude may be, he was within his rights to disown me, and I would not stoop to petty revenge.

Rick: Oh. Well, I tell you what. I’ve got a biplane held together with bubblegum and prayer, fueled and on the runway. Let’s head off to the Amazon and find you a native princess to save.

Nigel: Thank you my friend, but my heart belongs forever to my departed Annabelle.

Rick: How about we see about recovering your title? We can get together a mercenary band, carve out a kingdom in the Sudan…

Nigel: Society would never have it. Besides, I quite clearly told you I’d lost all hope.

Rick: So you did.

Nigel: That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I’m a tragic figure. If you go around trying to fix that, you’re denying my concept. I’m shackled to this fate.

Rick: Sucks to be you then.

Nigel: Indeed. [He sighs, and gazes into the middle distance.]

Rick’s player: Okay, that campaign took…six minutes. What’ll we do next week?

Or, more likely, the action moves on and leaves Nigel behind, because Nigel’s internal monologue, as entertaining as it may be to Nigel’s player, isn’t doing anything to entertain the rest of the table. All too often, Nigel begins wondering at this point why he’s wasting time with these rubes. (It’s at this point that Jen begins scheming to replace her character with a new one, no matter how that might disrupt the rest of the game. Perplexingly, the new character is often virtually identical to the old.)

In articulating my desire for a different approach, a pithy characterization struck me: the difference between an external, plot-driven style in gaming and an internal, character-driven one is closely analogous to the old writer’s adage, “Show, don’t tell.”

Show the story through events rather than telling it with narration. Demonstrate Bob’s frustration by having him lash out, rather than writing “Bob was frustrated.” Even the most repressed Victorian tale of a helpless heroine is best told through events that illustrate her helplessness—arranged marriages, weeping fits, arguments that threaten to become duels—and not simply sitting around waiting for something to happen. The events are the story. Similarly, the events at the RPG table are the story. Who the characters are, and how they feel about the events is only important insofar as it causes something to happen.

2011 05 24 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

You Just Need More Bullets

Perhaps it’s just because I heard a clip from “This American Life” last night portraying the geniuses of Wall Street as the most self-pitying sons of bitches in the universe. They haven’t been victimized so much as the remaining 99% of America, much citizens of developing nations upon which the US squats, but they see themselves as unfairly targeted, standing right in the crosshairs of a witch hunt led by President Obama of all people, to destroy America starting with the wizards of Wall Street.

Recorded conversations from the show captured an almost pathological inability to recognize that Wall Street failed, that it was rescued at public expense, or that a lot of little people were severely hurt in the fallout even as Wall Street was rescued from its own greed and irresponsible behavior. There is no gratitude, no sense of having dodged a bullet, no sense of responsibility, either in having made the mess or to help recover from it. The closest the interviewees come is an abrasive, even abusive belief that they came out on top because they’re “smarter” than the rest of the country—that is, they ripped us off more skillfully than the rest of us could rip off someone else. Coupled, of course, with an unassailable sense of the unfairness of the general public trying to get some of the money back, like some kind of rip-off.

The journalist reporting on these abusive little turds likened them to the former inner circle of Saddam Hussein, on which he’d also reported, thieves and murderers who consider themselves the greatest victims in the world. It was an infuriating expose, and pushed a lot of my buttons.

So maybe I’m just hyper-sensitive right now to the presumption of privilege as a fundamental right among the privileged. Maybe I’m already primed to notice it in the game community after reading a complaint about Dragon Age II spending too much attention on anyone but straight males. Or maybe, as a fan of dead and buried 4x and puzzle-adventure genres, I’d get cheesed off anyway. But the leading letter to the editors inPC Gamer magazine this month cheesed me off. It begins, “Is it just me, or has the PC been experiencing a dearth of decent shooters lately?” and goes on to accuse shooters of being Call of Duty clones and decry the lack of novelty.

Cry me a river, shooter boy. Imagine what it must feel like to the rest of the game world, as first-person shooters, and fantasy games made with a FPS engine, and puzzle games made with an FPS engine, and adventure games made with an FPS engine, have taken up 95% or more of the gaming shelves for, oh… the past ten years. And if it isn’t a shooter, it’s a first-person stabber. If there’s no innovation in FPS, perhaps it’s because there’s nothing left to innovate. It’s been done! Because almost every big budget game in the world is a shooter! You’ve got FPS in renaissance Italy, FPS in outer space, FPS in the wild west, FPS with bows, FPS with bazookas, FPS with zombies, FPS with robots, FPS with flashlights, FPS upside-down, FPS with respawning, FPS with scoring, FPS with teams, FPS online, FPS in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, and then all over again in reverse alphabetical order just for the nostalgia of it. Shooters, with a little help from WoW, have sucked all the air, and money, out of the gaming industry, and you’re the poor guy who isn’t getting enough attention? Boo fucking hoo.

2011 05 23 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Poor Newt. Nobody understands him.

There he was, ambushed in a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press by being allowed to speak at length. And in one tiny slip of the tongue, a slip of the tongue that lasted about a minute, Newt clarified the substance of the current Republican plan for Medicare (“get rid of it”) as “imposing radical change from the right” and “too big a jump.” Oh, how conservatives howled to be so betrayed on this litmus test issue. And Newt, later realizing that what he said wasn’t what he meant to be held accountable for at all, renounced his mini-lecture by going on the offensive: “Any ad which quotes what I said Sunday is a falsehood.”

Any quotation at all. Quoting a Republican—verbatim, in toto, and in context—is a lie, if it makes that Republican look bad. As absurd as that sounds, this claim isn’t exactly an isolated case. We get the same world view from Jon Kyl: caught in a blatant assertion that “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does” is abortion, Kyl’s office responded that “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.” You don’t say. We get the same denial of reality with Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) introducing legislation to repeal EPA scientific conclusions about carbon dioxide, as if an act of Congress could repeal the law of gravity, or revalue pi.

This isn’t the kind of shady half-truth that politicians of all stripes engage in, like budgetary flim-flam or tarring with a broad brush. (Not that I minimize the harm that such misdirection can cause.) Nor is it restricted to the nutjob fringe where Bachmann, Beck, and Robertson live; it’s coming from the supposedly sober leadership. It’s a frank admission, party-wide, to lying, and lying big—and so what? “Go fuck yourself,” as Dick Cheney would say. You’re still expected to believe the party line, as it’s restructured day by day, or even minute by minute, rather than believe what you can observe yourself. You are to believe it just as long as convenient for the conservative program, after which you’re expected to forget it. Oceania is at war with Eastasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. And if you don’t believe that, if you go back and look at the historical record, well, you’re some kind of goddamn liar, picking on honest right-wing swindlers delivering honest right-wing disinformation just because it isn’t true and it’s on record and hurts people for personal gain.

Poor Newt. Nobody understands him. Or perhaps they understand him too well. Which, in the conservative mindset, is the same thing.

2011 05 20 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

For Valhalla!

We watched Thor last night, which confirmed my original suspicions. Thor wasn’t an appealing comic book, and I didn’t expect much from the movie, but friends of friends became very enthusiastic after watching, so Eileene and I allowed ourselves to hope it had risen above its origins.

It didn’t. It wasn’t out-and-out bad, but it was pretty lame—simultaneously nonsensical and unimaginative, which is something of a feat. Good actors tried to carry bad dialogue, only succeeding sporadically. (Chris Hemsworth, particularly, carries the lead role as convincingly as anyone might.) The comic relief moments, in which Thor fails to adapt to mortal social norms, are predictable but nevertheless charmingly delivered. The big chest-thumping heroic moments are bland and really rather pointless if you think about them…so the film does its best to prevent you from thinking with booming music and splashy CGI. A yawner that isn’t justified by the suggestion that all these origin movies are a necessary groundwork to The Avengers, featuring the combined might of Thor, Iron Man, et al. Is there any reason, really, to think The Avengers is going to feature any more talent and art than the rest of the flood of Marvel comic-movie crossovers? If there’s better writing talent available, why isn’t it being used now?

In that sense, the movies are true to their source: the writing in comic books is generally bad, although we should remain conscious of the many stellar exceptions, and the writing of early Marvel comics was very nearly always dreadful. Personally, as someone who’s read Norse mythology and values fidelity to the classics, I had trouble getting past the way the movie played merry havoc with the original mythology, but that shouldn’t be considered a failing of the film; I’m pretty confident Thor comics weren’t true to the mythology, either.

I bring it up because Eileene feels she’s missed something, perhaps something big, through ignorance of Norse mythology, and I suspect others might feel the same way. If you come out of the theater likewise suspecting you’ve missed something, don’t. The characters of the film (and, presumably, comic books) have nothing in common with the original mythology than their names and a taste for battle. Everything else is up for grabs. Sif isn’t Thor’s wife here; she’s just a battle companion. Asgard is apparently only at war with the frost giants of Niflheim and not the giants of Muspelheim or other monsters. At the movie’s opening, Odin is actually stepping down from the throne to name Thor king. (Odin did, in later myths, become something of an absentee ruler of the gods as he searched the world for some way to prevent or at least ameliorate Ragnarok, but he never abdicated, and certainly would not have made Thor his successor!) If the producers are going to mess with basic elements like this, theater-goers who haven’t read the Heimskringla or Volungsaga or attended a full performance of the Niebelungenslied aren’t missing anything. This is brainless popcorn-crunching spectacle; either enjoy it as such or skip it entirely.

2011 05 19 mdlake Review Comments (0) Permalink

It’s Not You; It’s Me

When I took calculus in high school, it was with a poor teacher. She took questions as threats, perhaps because she wasn’t quite firm on the material herself—I’m told she flunked calc at ECC. I learned straight from the textbook. Fortunately I could. Still, on the first test I scored only a B. Three other students got D’s. The rest failed. Results like that are not a failure on the students’ part; it’s a failure on the teacher’s.

I bring this up because my students performed quite badly on these first homework assignments in probability, in a way that indicates the problem lies with me. That’s not as hard to take as the bored stares or, worse, bored lack of eye contact, but it’s still hard. So I have work to do. I have to rack my brains for a new approach. I have to backtrack and handle this twice, as the semester clock ticks away. And I’ll have to start with an admission that I’m the weak link here.

Maybe that admission will help with bonding; the kids have reacted well in the past to an admission that I’m under scrutiny, just as worried as they are. A novice teacher’s grace period doesn’t last forever, but it can motivate students. Regardless of whether I can exploit that bit of psychology, however, it’s important to reassure the kids that the trouble they’re having doesn’t lie in themselves. I’d rather have them lose confidence in me than in their own ability to do math. And my ego be damned.

So I guess I learned something from my high school calc teacher after all.

2011 05 18 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Dominant Species

This month’s game day was something of a bust in one respect: we only had two guests, who already hang out often with each other (and with Eileene), so there wasn’t much in the way of contact with distant friends. But that shortcoming had a silver lining, in that Tor and Nik are both willing to tackle somewhat larger, more complicated games than most of our regular crowd. We spent virtually the whole time on a game called Dominant Species, which Nik owns and Eileene was eager to try.

Evolution seems to be a natural subject for games to explore, especially lying as it does in the sociopolitical “safe zone” of warlike competition without actually being a war, which can be a touchy, unpopular subject for German/European game market. Yet evolution-themed games as a class have historically been disappointing for a variety of reasons: too much luck, too much silliness, poor production values, religious politics and a hilarious attempt to “prove” creationism, and perhaps above all the pitfalls of deciding just how to simulate evolution as a game. Should players represent one or more species, or should they be trying to fill their biomes with a desirable mix drawn from a common pool? Should they be try to outpopulate their rivals or race for an advanced state of evolution? How frequent and catastrophic should environmental changes be? How do you simulate the haphazard nature of evolution in a game when games by definition imply intelligent design in the form of player strategies?

Dominant Species does a pretty good job of navigating these pitfalls. Players each randomly select an animal class—insects, birds, mammals, etc.—with minor bonuses such as speedier migration or free population growth. Their starting populations are seeded into a starter map of hexes defined by terrain type and “element” chips that determine which species can dominate a hex and whether a species can survive there at all. Animals don’t adapt to terrains; they adapt to the elements present in those terrains.

The turn order is long and fairly complex. Some effects happen automatically, but most are player choices. At the beginning of the turn, players take turns reserving game actions including such choices as adding a new terrain hex, wiping out an old hex with glaciers, adding population markers (“species”) to the board, altering elements on either board or animal, and scoring select hexes. Once all players have committed their action markers, the results are worked out in strict order.

Victory goes to the player with the highest point total at game’s end. One can earn points from a variety of sources, but the biggest source of points is the occupation and scoring of territory. Fertile tiles like wetlands and seas score many points, while deserts and mountains score few, with the lion’s share of either going to the player with the most species therein. Distinct from population, a player may “dominate” a hex by matching his animal’s elements to those on the hex; domination itself earns no points, but does entitle the dominating player to execute a special, one-time action that can range from wonderful to wimpy, depending on timing and board conditions.

Most of the strategy in the game, then, lies in maneuvering to populate and score the most valuable hexes. Players can’t simply populate and score, however; they must keep a sharp eye to matching elements, either to dominate a hex and earn that special action or simply to survive—an animal whose elements match none of a hex’s elements dies off. Getting caught without supporting elements is frighteningly easy, as I twice (!) discovered to my horror.

Dominant Species is an adequate simulation of biological competition, apart from its eagerness in German/European style to offer substantial bonus points for everything, including otherwise pointless or self-destructive actions. (“+10 points for occupying the most tundra! Good for you!”) More to the point, it’s a very good game of biological competition. Your limited budget of actions is tense without going so far as to be frustrating, as games relying on a limited action mechanic often do. (Usually. If you screw up like I did and lose two thirds of your population, you mght find yourself unable to score no matter how you twist, but that’s your fault.) Advancing glaciation and the constant churn of elements keep the territorial scramble fluid. The luck element is significant but kept well under control; relying on luck is a sign of trying to recover an earlier blunder. Point values are well balanced, though a first-time player will misjudge often how aggressively to pursue various objectives.

On the down side, Dominant Species requires a commitment. As novices, we spent six hours on the game, and I doubt play time will ever shrink to the advertized three hours. As Tor observed, the game is prone to analysis paralysis, the often illusory sense that you can improve your performance through painstaking and time-consuming analysis. (See 1830, Agricola, and Axis & Allies for other examples.) For devoted gamers, Dominant Species will repay commitment with a rich, continuing challenge, but casual gamers will find they’ve bitten off more than they want to chew.

2011 05 16 mdlake Games
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