Arts & Letters

Tasting Notes…

2 Comments / Arts & Letters, Movies, Video Games / /

Another edition of Tasting Notes, a series of quick hits on a variety of topics that don’t really warrant a full post [Previous Editions: part 1 | part 2]. So here’s what I’ve been watching/playing/reading/drinking lately:

Television

  • The Walking Dead has been an agreeable series so far, though I do have one major issue with it. Indeed, it’s one of the things that always bothers me about zombie movies. In short, nothing of import actually happens, and this series is a good example. It starts out promisingly enough, with the sheriff waking in a hospital (a la 28 Days Later…) and setting out on a mission to find his family during the zombie apocalypse. But then he finds them in, like, the second episode, leaving no real purpose to the series. Everyone is so reactive, and that’s where all the tension comes from. That’s fine for what it is, and each episode seems pretty well constructed, but the focus is more on characters rather than any sort of story. What’s more, I don’t really see an overarching story emerging since zombies are uniformly boring antagonists and the notion that “humans are the real monsters” is just as lame if not even more boring. The show is entertaining enough, but I’m not really in the “Best New Show!” camp just yet either (then again, of the “new” shows, it’s the only one I’m really watching, so maybe I should be in that camp…)
  • Courtesy of WatchTrek.com, I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. Not sure how long this site will be up (it certainly doesn’t seem official), but it’s pretty damn cool. Favorite revisited episode: Peak Performance.

Video Games

  • I’ve started Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and it’s quite good! If you’ve played the first game, you pretty much know what you’re in for, but it’s still a lot of fun. The biggest observation I have about the game is a more general one about how sequels always need to strip you of all your abilities and weapons, then gradually give them back. The God of War games are the worst in this respect (I mean, really? Kratos forgot how to spin around with his blades of whatever?), but Uncharted has that too – you start the game without any weapon, then a dart gun, then a pistol, gradually working back up to the more powerful guns. Of course, that’s only about the first hour, but still. I hate that. It’s a big part of why I never got into GTA IV either – lame cars, lame weapons, etc… start the game, which is boring. I’ve already played the same game like 5 times before, why do I need to keep going through the paces?
  • Now that the hockey season is in full swing, NHL 10 has entered the playing rotation again. It’s amazing that something so repetitive can continually keep my interest, but there you have it.
  • Has anyone played the new Goldeneye for the Wii? Is it worth picking up? I’m hearing good things, but I’m almost always disappointed by games for the Wii these days…

Movies

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is fine, I guess, but like the past couple of films in the series, I can’t really shake the feeling of filmmakers simply going through the motions (minor spoilers for the rest of the paragraph). I understand that there’s a certain difficulty in adapting such beloved source material, but I think the final book could probably have used some liberal editing when being translated to the screen. Do we really need to portray all 7 horcruxes in the movies? Do we really need to break the last book into two movies? Indeed, I think that’s the biggest problem with this movie, which is that it’s incomplete. They chose a decent place to end the first part, I guess. There’s a meaningful death… but then, the really strange thing is that the death that happens in this movie is probably given more attention and fanfare as Dumbledore in the previous film. And while I always liked the character who died and was sad to see him go, I don’t think he needed quite so heroic a sendoff. In any case, there were plenty of things to like about the movie – it’s quite beautifully shot, there’s a great animated sequence in the film, and for the section of the film intended to be all about character building, there are a few decent action sequences (there is, for instance, a nifty “shootout” in a coffee shop that I rather enjoyed). I’m looking forward to the last film, but then, I still think the fourth film is probably the most fun…
  • The Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright commentary track on Hot Fuzz is amazing and worth the price of the BD alone. (Update: Ohhh, there’s a page that neatly collects all the films referenced in the commentary – 190 in total, which is pretty astounding.)

Books

  • Currently reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It’s great, and it reminds me that I need to revisit that (planned) series of posts that touches on this subject…
  • My recent beer brewing adventures were preceded by some books on the subject, notably How to Brew by John Palmer (also available online for free) and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition by Charles Papazian. They’re both pretty good, though I’d probably recommend the Palmer book for those just getting started (as I was). Papazian’s book is good too, though I have to admit that his frequent advice to “relax… don’t worry… and have a homebrew” is really annoying for the first timer (as, you know, I don’t have any homebrew yet, and why don’t you just rub it in some more!?) I think he might address that situation once, claiming that bottled beer is ok for the first timer, but it’s still annoying. Anyway, while the beginner’s section could use some work, the rest of the book is rather interesting (though I have yet to read the final sections on Advanced All Grain brewing) and there’s lots of detailed information and recipes and whatnot (I think my next beer will be based on his recipe for a Belgian-style Tripel – page 191).

The Finer Things

And that about wraps up this edition of tasting notes!

Mute

6 Weeks of Halloween, Arts & Letters, Culture / /

Earlier in the year, I had noticed a pile of books building up on the shelf and have made a concerted effort to get through them. This has gone smoothly at times, and at other times it’s ground to a halt. Then there’s the fact that I can’t seem to stop buying new books to read. Case in point, during the Six Weeks of Halloween, I thought it might be nice to read some horror, and realized that most of what I had on my shelf was science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, or non-fiction (history, technology, biography, etc…) So I went out and picked up a collection of Richard Matheson short stories called Button, Button (the title story was the source material for a very loose film adaptation, The Box).

It was a very interesting collection of stories, many of which play on variations of the moral dilemma most famous in the title story, Button, Button:

“If you push the button,” Mr Steward told him, “somewhere in the world, someone you don’t know will die. In return for which you will receive fifty thousand dollars.”

In the film adaptation, the “reward” was raised to a million dollars, but then, they also added a ton of other stuff to what really amounts for a tight, 12 page story. Anyway, there are lots of other stories, most containing some sort of moral dilemma along those lines (or someone exploiting such a dilemma). In particular, I enjoyed A Flourish of Strumpets and No Such Thing as a Vampire, but I found myself most intrigued by one of the longer stories, titled Mute. I suppose mild spoilers ahead, if this is something you think you might want to read.

The story concerns a child named Paal. His parents were recent immigrants and he was homeschooled, but his parents died in a fire, leaving Paal to the care of the local Sheriff and his wife. Paal is a mute, and the community is quite upset by this. Paal ends up being sent to school, but his seeming lack of communication skills cause issues, and the adults continually attempt to get Paal to talk.

I will leave it at that for now, but if you’re at all familiar with Matheson, you can kinda see where this was going. What struck me most was how much a sign of the times this story was. Of course, all art is a product of its cultural and historical context, but for horror stories, that must be doubly so. Most of the stories in this collection were written and published in the 1950s and early 1960s, which I find interesting. With respect to this story, it’s primarily about the crushing pressure of conformity, something that was surely on Matheson’s mind after having just finished of the uniformity of the 1950s. The cultural norms of the 50s were perhaps overly traditional, but after having witnessed the deadliest conflict in human history in the 1940s, you can hardly blame people for wanting some semblance of tradition and stability in their lives. Of course, that sort of uniformity isn’t really natural evil, and like a pendulum, things swing from one extreme to the other, until eventually things settle down. Or not.

Anyway, writing in the early 60s (or maybe even the late 50s), Matheson was clearly disturbed by the impulse to force conformity, and Mute is a clear expression of this anxiety. Interestingly, the story is almost as horrific in today’s context, but for different reasons. Matheson was writing in response to a society that had been emphasizing conformity and had no doubt witness such abuses himself. Interestingly, the end of the story is somewhat bittersweet. It’s not entirely tragic, and it’s almost an acknowledgement that conformity isn’t necessarily evil.

It was not something easily judged, he was thinking. There was no right or wrong of it. Definitely, it was not a case of evil versus good. Mrs. Wheeler, the sheriff, the boy’s teacher, the people of German Corners – they had, probably, all meant well. Understandably, they had been outraged at the idea of a seven-year-old boy not having been taught to speak by his parents. Their actions were, in light of that, justifiable and good.

It was simply that, so often, evil could come of misguided good.

In today’s world, we see the opposite of the 1950s in many ways. Emphasis is no longer placed on conformity (well, perhaps it still is in some places), but rather a rugged individuality. There are no one-size fits all pieces of culture anymore. We’ve got hundreds of varieties of spaghetti sauce, thousands of music choices that can fit on a device the size of a business card, movies that are designed to appeal to small demographics, and so on. We deal with problems like the paradox of choice, and the internet has given rise to the niche and concepts like the Long Tail. Of course, rigid non-conformity is, in itself, a form of conformity, but I can’t imagine a story like Mute being written in this day and age. A comparable story would be about how lost someone becomes when they don’t conform to societal norms…

More SF Pet Peeves

2 Comments / Science Fiction / /

Sunday’s post on the Unquestioned Assumptions of SF was a little strange as the post I was referencing was really more about pet peeves than unquestioned assumptions, so I figured that I should rename this post to add my own pet peeves to Matt Johnsons’s list. So without further ado:

  • Aliens That Aren’t Really Alien: Most alien species you see in SF are basically humans with weird ears or bumps on their forehead. In other words, they’re just humans with superficial differences. Sure many of them will have strange customs or psychological ticks, but most of the time, such differences aren’t even as severe as cultural differences here on earth. The most egregious violator of this is Star Trek. Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans… they’re all just humans with various traits magnified (impatient aggression, steadfast logic, and passionate cunning, respectively). One notable exception in the world of film is Alien (though sequels tend to diminish the more alien qualities). In the world of literature, the big exception is Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought books, A Fire Upon The Deep (reviewed on this blog a while back) and A Deepness in the Sky (which I also wrote about once). Fire‘s wolflike aliens, in particular, were great examples of what is possible, but rarely even attempted in SF. Regardless, examples of human-like alien races far outweigh the truly alien aliens in SF, and that’s always bothered me. To be sure, this does present something of a challenge to authors, as it requires them to think in ways unaccustomed to humans.
  • Monolithic Planet Ecologies: Star Wars is particularly bad in this respect – the ice moon of Hoth, the desert planet of Tatooine, the forest moon Endor, etc… The thought of an entire planet with only one type of climate almost boggles the mind. I’m sure there are some planets like this, but if Star Wars was any indication, every planet has one and only one dominant climate. Sometimes this sort of conceit can be used to good effect, as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent The Left Hand of Darkness, but it’s still a pet peeve of mine.
  • Language: Rarely is language used as anything more than simple flavor in a story with alien species. Most of the time there is some sort of unexplained technology, typically called the “Universal Translator” or something, that will automatically translate alien languages. Rarely does the translation aspect receive any scrutiny. At best, we get some sort of throwaway reference to the universal translator, then the story moves on to other things. If you think of the way all the various human languages interact with one another and the inadequacies of translations, it seems really unlikely that alien species would even come close to being easily understood. For instance, human translators working to convert a text from one human language to another aren’t working in a vacuum – they bring their own cultural and historical context into the picture when translating that text. Take a Greek word like pathos; there isn’t really a single English word that corresponds with what Pathos represents. You rarely get that sort of depth in SF. One notable exception to this is Mary Doria Russell’s exceptional novel, The Sparrow. The novel has many themes, but the way it uses language to precipitate a tragic outcome is unsurpassed. Interestingly, Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash has a more thorough exploration of the nature of language than most stories with alien species (and Snow Crash doesn’t even feature any aliens!)
  • Artificial Gravity: Another concept often relegated to a throwaway reference, there exists a lot of potential here that goes untapped. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to control gravity as that if we had that ability, the applications would extend far beyond being able to stand on the floor of a spaceship. Implications for weaponry are enormous, and energy manipulation in general seems ripe for this sort of technology. But no, we’ll just use it to simulate earth level gravity, thanks. I guess tractor beams could be explained in such a way, and a lot of SF does at least attempt to account for this by explaining that the spaceship is spinning in such a way as to simulate earth gravity, but it’s still a bothersome trope.

I think that’s all for now. I was going to write one for manned interstellar travel, but that topic is just too large (for example, it encompasses FTL travel, which is, in itself, a rather large subject) for a quick paragraph (Nevertheless, the way interstellar travel is depicted in SF is often tiresome and thoroughly unrealistic – one notable exception, Greg Egan’s Diaspora). One interesting thing about writing this post that I didn’t really expect were the number of exceptions to each of the above pet peeves. It turns out that there are a lot of books that really do address these issues (perhaps another reason why the phrase “Unquestioned Assumptions” is not appropriate for this discussion).

Unquestioned Assumptions

5 Comments / Science Fiction / /

Matthew Johnson lists out several Unquestioned Assumptions of Science Fiction. It’s an interesting list, though it suffers from the same problems all lists suffer from: I don’t agree with some of them, and I think there are some rather notable omissions. So let’s get started:

  • Bionics: Johnson is basically saying that we have seen no evidence that a superhuman bionic man/woman could be created. He mentions the increasingly sophisticated use of prosthetics, but is correct in noting that there are weak spots in that chain, and thus someone with a bionic arm won’t really be guaranteed any advantage unless they become one of them full-replacement cyborgs from Ghost in the Shell. I’ll admit that SF has probably gotten a lot of this wrong, but there’s much more to bionics than just superhuman beings. In a more general sense, bionics is about applying natural biological systems and methods to the engineering of electronic or mechanical technology. And in general, this is something we’ve already done a lot of (for instance, velcro and lots of flight related innovations derived from birds). Even in terms of medicine, stuff like cochlear implants are rapidly approaching the point where the deaf can hear better than unmodified humans (there are, of course, other drawbacks to this). I know nanotechnology is used as a form of magic in some movies, but there is a ton of potential there. And something like a Respirocyte could theoretically result in “superhuman” powers simply by increasing the amount of oxygen stored in red blood cells. So no, I don’t see the bionic man or woman anytime soon, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable topic for SF.
  • Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Johnson notes that this isn’t impossible, just that they’re also not “any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you”. This is an excellent point, and I do believe he’s very right. While I’m willing to go along with the ride in a book like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, I seriously doubt the subjective experience would be anything like what Scalzi describes (he handwaves the whole thing by explaining that consciousness is transferred, so it’s like a cut-and-paste, as oposed to a copy-and-paste – there’s nothing left in the old body. I can see how that sort of thing would be appealing to people though.) Interestingly, Scalzi proposes something completely different in The Android’s Dream, where the artificial consciousness is most definitely a copy (and we’re never entirely sure how good that copy really is). Anyway, Johnson does wonder why anyone would even want to do such a thing, and I do take a bit of an issue with that. I’ll expand on this later in the post, but interstellar space travel seems much more hospitable to some sort of electronic being than it does to biological lifeforms (again, more on this later). Another reason, assuming that the artificial construct can sustain creative thought, it might be nice to keep some folks around after they are gone. Maybe that would be a disaster – maybe Einstein would be a tremendous douchebag if he were still alive in mechanical form today, but it’s probably something worth trying. In the end, I certainly wouldn’t call this an unquestioned assumption. There exist lots of counter-examples, including the recently reviewd Diaspora, where artificial consciousness seems to have lots of advantages over biology (more on this in a bit).
  • Sensors: I completely agree with Johnson here. The non-trivial challenges to sensors are numerous and I don’t see them ever working the way they’re portrayed on tv or in movies (books tend to be better, but still).
  • Space Combat: Another one I mostly agree with, especially given the way it’s portrayed in most SF. This is a topic already covered on this blog (and others mentioned my post) years ago, so I’ll leave it at that. I do think there’s a fantastic movie to be made in the mold of The Enemy Below, but in space and with realistic physics (with some handwaving around the energy and motivational aspects of the whole thing – it could be entertaining, but it probably couldn’t be wholly accurate).
  • Sol III: Quite frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one before. The convention of naming the star, and then each planet around the star getting a number (i.e. the eighth planet orbiting the star Omicron Persei is referred to as Omicron Persei 8) does seem common, though I don’t find it all that troubling. I can see how it would be a pet peeve of someone though.

So that covers Johnson’s list. There are, of course, lots of omissions here. Perhaps I’ll cover those in a later post.

SF Book Review, Part 5

Arts & Letters, Science Fiction / /

Still working my way through the book queue, here are a few SF books I’ve read recently. [See also: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4]

  • Diaspora by Greg Egan: One way to divvy up the various scientific disciplines is to make a distinction between hard science (natural sciences like physics) and soft science (social sciences like psychology). Given this popular notion, it thus follows that science fiction is also divided in such a way, with hard science fiction focusing on the nuts-and-bolts details of technology and science (and stories that progress in a logical fashion), and soft science fiction focusing much less on science (if there’s any science at all) and more human behavior. Of course, given a specific SF story, it will probably fall somewhere around inbetween these two arbitrary poles. However, Greg Egan’s Diaspora veers strongly in the direction of hard SF and rarely looks back. This is most certainly not a book for beginners, but if you don’t mind lengthy discussions of mathematics, geometry, particle physics, and even more complicated notions, then this is the book for you.

    The story begins about a thousand years from now. Humanity has fragmented considerably. Some, called statics, exist mostly in the same way we do today. Others are still made of flesh and bone, but have been genetically augmented, sometimes in quite thorough ways. There are Gleisner robots, which are individual AI beings that nevertheless choose to mostly operate in the physical world via mechanical bodies. And finally, there are polises, which are basically networks of distinct artificial consciousnesses. Most citizens of a polis were uploaded from a human, but there are occasionally “orphans”, which are citizens that are created without any ancestor. The main character of the book is Yatima, an orphan, and most of the action is told from the point of view of polis citizens, which is interesting because said citizens can’t quite be categorized as human. Indeed, Egan uses gender-neutral pronouns (Ve, Vis, Ver) to refer to most citizens (there are some recent converts that cling to their original gender).

    The setting alone provides a rich space for speculation and exploration, but once the basics of the universe are settled, Egan starts to throw various crises at our characters, and that’s when things start to get really interesting. I won’t go into detail here, but Egan has crafted an exceptionally ambitious tale here. The scope and scale of the story grows exponentially, with Egan casually skipping past hundreds or thousands of years at a time and by the end, time pretty much ceases to have much meaning. This is audacious stuff, and probably the “hardest” SF I’ve ever read (again, this is not “hard” in a sense of difficulty, just in the way science is treated). It’s not all “hard” stuff, of course. It still exists on that continuum, it’s just way more hard than it is soft. There’s a lot of depth to this book, and a short blog post like this isn’t even beginning to scratch the surface of the ideas and issues that arise out of the paradigm that Egan has set up (I’ve already written a bit of a deeper exploration of some ideas, but there are lots of other things that could be fleshed out). For the purposes of this post, I’ll just say that this is among the most ambitious and audacious SF novels I’ve ever read, and if you’re not scared away by a little (ok, a lot of) math, it is definitely worth a read.

  • The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke: Since The Matrix came out in 1999, I’ve often found myself recognizing bits and pieces of other media as being part of the formula that created The Matrix. Indeed, one of the big reasons the movie is so great is that it pulls on a large number of diverse sources and mashes them together into something seemingly new and exciting. Of course, it’s not, and that’s why I keep seeing pieces of it, even in 60 year old novels like The City and the Stars. The story takes place about a billion years in the future, in an insular city named Diaspar. No one has left or come into the city for as long as anyone can remember, and most citizens have lived many lives within the city. It’s a sort of utopia, and most of its residents are perfectly content. However, there is one man, a “unique” in that he has had no past lives, who doesn’t fear the universe outside the city. He makes plans to exit the city to see what he can find, but it seems that no one even really knows how to leave. To accomplish his task, he enlists the help of “the Jester”, and this is where the Matrix series really takes from.

    Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull. Crime, however, from the nature of things, could not be guaranteed to remain at the optimum level which the social equation demanded. If it was licensed and regulated, it ceased to be crime.

    The office of Jester was the solution – at first sight naive, yet actually profoundly subtle – which the city had evolved. … On rare and unforeseeable occasions, the Jester would turn the city upside-down by some prank which might be no more than an elaborate practical joke, or which might be a calculated assault on some currently cherished belief or way of life. All things considered, the name “Jester” was a highly appropriate one. There had once been med with very similar duties, operating with the same license, in the days when there were courts and kings.

    (Sound familiar? On the other hand, Clarke himself was clearly drawing on longstanding traditions himself.) Then we find out that this “unique” is actually part of a long line of “uniques”, only this time, things are different. He opts to go further and do more than any other unique, and he essentially breaks down the walls of the city (sorry, I guess that’s a spoiler, but it’s necessary to keep up the comparison to The Matrix, and in specific Neo). It’s a really wonderful SF book and it’s aged pretty well. There are some inconsistencies and Clarke’s prose might strike some modern readers as being a bit sparse, but that’s characteristic of the era in which he was writing. The ideas are great and thought provoking, and that’s what a good SF book needs.

  • Conquerors’ Pride by Timothy Zahn: Zahn has been the workhorse of my SF reading over the past few years. I can always count on Zahn to turn the pages and trot out some interesting ideas along the way, which is more than you can say for a lot of supposedly better written novels. I actually read this series about 15 years ago when they came out, but I wanted to re-read them, as I remember enjoying the books a lot, but some of the things I liked back then aren’t as great as I remember. I’m happy to report that this series is about as good as I remember. This book is the first in the series, and it begins as a first contact story. Things don’t go well, as the alien ships immediately attack, quickly obliterating an entire human fleet (in a ruthless move, they even attack escape pods). So now humans are at war with a new and deadly species, and the Cavanagh family is caught in the middle. When Commander Pheylan Cavanagh is captured by the aliens, his family leaps into action to mount a rescue mission. What follows is another compelling Space Opera from Zahn, whose storytelling skills have never been better. I have some minor complaints about some of the plot details, but it’s otherwise an above average page-turner. Being the first in a series can sometimes be a challenge, but Zahn finds a way to end this one in a satisfying fashion.
  • Conquerors’ Heritage by Timothy Zahn: The second book in the series is interesting in that it is told entirely from the perspective of the “Conquerors” (i.e. that aliens). This does tend to slow things down a bit, but that’s common in the middle book of a series, and at least Zahn does keep things moving forward by continuing where we left off in the last book (i.e. he doesn’t retell the first book from another perspective, he keeps progressing the story.) Switching perspectives makes for an interesting plot device, though I guess you could call it gimmicky, and like a lot of alien species in SF, it seems like these are just humans with slightly different faces and sharp tongues. There is one social component that is unique though, which is that Conquerors have something called a Fsss organ. After a Conqueror’s body dies, they live on in an incorporeal form that is tied to the fsss organ. If you split the organ in two, the spirit can move between the two cuttings nearly instantaneously, which gives the Conquerors FTL communication capabilities. This is an interesting idea, and Zahn plays a bit with the social and psychological consequences of such a system. Since there’s a whole book dedicated to their perspective, I guess it’s not a spoiler to say that we’re meant to have a sympathetic relationship with even the Conquerors (who, ironically, refer to the humans as Conquerors as well), though saying how Zahn pulls it off would most certainly be a spoiler. In the end, it’s a solid middle entry and it moves the story forward, albeit not as quickly as the first book (I still managed to read it in only a couple of days, so it’s still a page turner).
  • Conquerors’ Legacy by Timothy Zahn: The final book in the series is told from mixture of perspectives, and now that Zahn has all the pieces in place, he drives the plot forward quickly and relentlessly. I don’t want to give anything away here, but it’s got a satisfying ending and most of what I said about the first two books apply to this one as well. It’s a fast-paced, page-turning conclusing to a solid Space Opera series. This isn’t deep or overly hard SF, but it’s an above-average SF tale and well worth reading if you like this sort of thing.

I’m currently reading Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and have a few others to finish up from my current book queue. My next book post will probably be about non-fiction books though, as there are a few I’ve read and some others on the queue that I’d like to finish off.

Game Boys

Arts & Letters, Video Games / /

Back when I first got my PS3 and started looking for good gaming podcasts, one of the things I found was the already defunct (but awesome) GFW radio (If you’re not familiar, this 4 hour best-of compilation will keep you busy for a while and is well worth a listen). Despite the fact that all the regulars had left 1up to pursue other careers, I delved a bit into their back catalog of podcasts, and in one episode they mentioned an interesting book called Game Boys: Professional Videogaming’s Rise from the Basement to the Big Time by Michael Kane. It sounded interesting so I ordered a copy and promptly put it on my shelf, where it gathered dust and got buried under other books. Earlier this year, I vowed to clear off my shelf and read these suckers (7 out of 10 down and only 2 new books added in the meantime!), and I just finished reading Game Boys last week.

The book delves into the world of competitive video gaming and essentially follows two teams of Counter-Strike players as they vie to become the best US gaming team. One team, called 3D, has heavyweight sponsors like Intel and Nvidia. Their players tend to pull in around $30k a year in salary, plus any winnings from tournaments. At the start of the book, they’re pretty much the uncontested champions of the US circuit. After all, most players at tournaments are talented amateurs playing for the love of the game. They can’t really compete with professional players who spend full workday’s practicing CS. But then we find out about team compLexity. This team also plays its players a salary, but it doesn’t have any major sponsors. Their manager/coach, Jason Lake, is funding the entire enterprise out of pocket because he believes that professional gaming is the way of the future and he wants to get in on the ground floor. As the book progresses, we see Lake struggle to find sponsors and when we find out that he’s sunk in about $200k of his own cash, we can’t help but feel a little bad for the guy. He’s middle aged, has a family and a successful law practice, but his passion seems to be getting professional gaming off the ground.

Lake fancies himself a coach and he seems to be a stereotypical jock. He paces behind his team, cheering them on and generally getting fired up as the matches progress. Interestingly, one of the angles that the author highlights frequently is how gamers at this level aren’t necessarily the fat slobs who spend all their time in the basement staring at their computer – indeed, many seem to be former jocks who realized they couldn’t cut it at their sport of choice and turned to video games as something they could do really well. Kane perhaps goes a bit overboard with this angle at times, but it’s interesting that the biggest competitors in video gaming tend to come from actual physical gaming backgrounds.

The author, Michael Kane, didn’t really come from a video gaming background. He was a sports journalist who did a story on competitive gaming and got intrigued. As such, the book reads like a standard sports underdog story, with Lake’s compLexity taking the role of the scrappy, underrated upstarts, while team 3D (lead by manager Craig Levine, who doesn’t take the same “coach”-like role that Lake does) are portrayed as the unbeatable champions. As one player describes, 3D is like the Yankees and compLexity is like the Red Sox. Of course, that’s not exactly the case, but the human drama represented by that dynamic is one of the interesting things that draws you in when reading the book.

As a sports journalist, Kane does an exceptional job explaining the game, whether that be describing the intricacies of the CS maps, the strategies (or strats) used by the teams, or the blow-by-blow accounts of various matches. I’ve never played CS, but by the end of this book, I think I had a pretty good idea about what makes the game tick. Kane also does a good job describing the interpersonal relationships and team dynamics that drive the competition. He falters a bit when describing biographical details of each player, but while such asides can break the momentum of the book from time to time, it’s still good information and gives the later chapters more of a sense of urgency.

The most interesting thing about the book is Kane’s description of competition at the highest level, and how gaming was constantly struggling to break into the mainstream. As previously mentioned, the players aren’t quite the pimply nerd types as you might assume, and the way Kane describes their various talents is interesting. Team 3D seems to have a more tumultuous lineup, as their manager, Craig Levine, will ruthlessly replace players who don’t play well. Towards the beginning of the book, team 3D suffers a setback and Levine shakes things up by rehiring a former player, with the gamer handle of Moto. Moto is 23 years old and while he was once a top player (Kane describes one infamous game which has coined the term Moto Box), his skills have declined considerably. To make up for these shortcomings, he is able to devise complicated strategies and formal drills for his team that can give them a bit of an edge. Moto also seems to be much better at handling media attention than any other player, and this is something that Levine was counting on… Levine seems to be a savvy businessman. He’s recognized that there’s money to be made from gaming, and he sees 3D as one part of a larger scheme. Having Moto on the team is not so much about 3D winning as it is about getting gaming to a mainstream audience. This, of course, doesn’t sit so well with teammate Rambo, who has a much different philosophy. As one of the elite players, he doesn’t care for the precision strategies designed for Moto – he’s much more of a run-and-gunnner, and he’s got the skills to pull it off. Moto and Rambo clash for most of the book, and it presents an interesting dynamic.

Team compLexity, on the other hand, seems to have a tighter-knit crew of players. The star of the team, and perhaps the best player in the world (at the time), is fRoD, and the team basically revolves around him. fRoD has an amazing kill ratio and is unstoppable with a sniper rifle. Storm takes on the thankless role of defense, but I think Kane does an exceptional job describing the value of Storm’s defensive prowess. Warden seems like the team leader, holding the five players together (and late in the book, he single-handedly keeps compLexity alive). Towards the end of the book, at a big, fancy tournament being put on by DirecTV, one of the precursor events is a series of drills meant to test each players skills – things like speed and tracking.

No one from compLexity cracked the top five, a further testament that their success comes more from teamwork and coordination than individual skills. Either that or they tanked it on purpose… (page 232)

The rivalry between 3D and compLexity is the center of the book, but along the way, we’re treated to lots of other amusing details about the game, culture, and the goings on at various tournaments. Highlights include an embarrassing appearance by born-again Christian Stephen Baldwin (page 106), the gamers of the Mug N Mouse team (amateur players with drug habits and probably criminal records who share a practice venue with team 3D), and amusing gamer tags (my favorite of which appears on page 136: “Ryan’s alias was ‘TedDanson,’ which may be the greatest gamer tag ever on the grounds of weirdness alone.”)

This is surprisingly compelling stuff. As previously mentioned, the pacing is sometimes a bit uneven, but once Kane has established the players and the details of the game, it becomes riveting. There are some occasional mistakes (for instance, early in the book, Kane mentions that Halo 3 sold something like 4 billion copies in the first day) as well, but overall, Kane has done an exceptional job capturing what it’s like to play video games at the highest level. As with anything involving that level of skill, there are fascinating intricacies and unintended consequences when you see players at that level. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in video games or even if you just like a well written sports story.

As someone mentioned in the podcast referenced above, this seems like ideal fodder for the documentary crew that made The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. There’s a surprising amount of drama in the book, especially towards the end, as DirecTV seems poised to launch gaming as a mainstream event. Of course, the book was published in 2008 and covers events leading up to the establishment of 2007’s DirecTV gaming league. Here in 2010, we know that DirecTV has cancelled the league and while the gaming tournaments continue, there isn’t as much interest in mainstream competitive gaming on TV these days.

The events leading up to DirecTV’s kickoff event are interesting to read because presenting a game of Counter-Strike to a mainstream audience presents numerous challenges. First of all, watching people play video games has never been a particularly entertaining venture. The game does allow a sorta free-roaming camera for spectators, but it’s still a challenge – there’s 10 people playing, and you never know where the excitement will happen. Then you have to consider that most people in a potential mainstream audience won’t have any idea what’s going on in the game. Long-time players will recognize the maps, the strats, the weapons, and so on, but a newcoming won’t have any of that shared background.

The events of the book were happening just after poker had exploded onto television. But the difference between poker and Counter-Strike is that everyone knows what’s happening in poker. Comparatively few people know the intricacies of CS. The problem with professional gaming in the long run is that it has to feature a game that nearly everyone is familiar with. In Korea, nearly everyone plays StarCraft, so it makes some sort of sense when you watch a video like this (ok, no, that video still blows my mind – look at their uniforms! Look at the crowd!) Such a thing isn’t really possible in the US because while video games in general are quite popular, there’s no single game that everyone can get on board with.

Kane’s book proves that Counter-Strike can be made accessible to just about anyone (his sports writing background ensures that sort of tone), but I just can’t see that translating to a full blown sports league that people will tune into every week. That being said, the book works well for what it is, and it covers an interesting and seemingly pivotal period of gaming.

Tasting Notes…

Arts & Letters, Beer, Culture, Movies, Video Games / /

So Nick from CHUD recently revived the idea of a “Tasting Notes…” post that features a bunch of disconnected, scattershot notes on a variety of topics that don’t really warrant a full post. It sounds like fun, so here are a few tasting notes…

Television

  • The latest season of True Blood seems to be collapsing under the weight of all the new characters and plotlines. It’s still good, but the biggest issue with the series is that nothing seems to happen from week to week. That’s the problem when you have a series with 15 different subplots, I guess. The motif for this season seems to be to end each episode with Vampire Bill doing something absurdly crazy. I still have hope for the series, but it was much better when I was watching it on DVD/On Demand, when all the episodes are available so you don’t have to wait a week between each episode.
  • Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: The Dresden Files. An underappreciated Sci-Fi (er, SyFy) original series based on a series of novels by Jim Butcher, this focuses on that other magician named Harry. This one takes the form of a creature-of-the-week series mixed with a bit of a police procedural, and it’s actually pretty good. We’re not talking groundbreaking or anything, but it’s great disposable entertainment and well worth a watch if you like magic and/or police procedurals. Unfortunately, it only lasted about 12 episodes, so there’s still some loose threads and whatnot, but it’s still a fun series.

Video Games

  • A little late to the party (but not as late as some others), I’ve started playing Grand Theft Auto IV recently. It’s a fine game, I guess, but I’ve had this problem with the GTA series ever since I played GTA III: There doesn’t seem to be anything new or interesting in the game. GTA III was a fantastic game, and it seems like all of the myriad sequels since then have added approximately nothing to its legacy. Vice City and San Andreas added some minor improvements to various gameplay mechanics and whatnot, but they were ultimately the same game with some minor improvements. GTA IV seems basically like the same game, but with HD graphics. Also, is it me, or is it harder to drive around town without constantly spinning out? Maybe Burnout Paradise ruined me on GTA driving, which I used to think of as a lot of fun.
  • I have to admit that this year’s E3 seems like a bit of a bust for me. Microsoft had Kinect, which looks like it will be a silly failure (not that it really matters for me, as I have a PS3). Sony has finally caught up to where the Wii was a few years ago with Move, and I don’t particularly care, as motion control games have consistently disappointed me. Sony also seems to have bet the farm on 3D gaming, but that would require me to purchase a new $5,000 TV and $100 glasses for anyone who wants to watch. Also, there’s the fact that I could care less about 3D. Speaking of which, Nintendo announced the 3DS, which is a portable gaming system with 3D that doesn’t require glasses. This is neat, I guess, but I could really care less about portable systems. There are a couple of interesting games for the Wii, namely the new Goldeneye and the new Zelda, but in both cases, I’m a little wary. My big problem with Nintendo this generation has been that they didn”t do anything new or interesting after Wii Sports (and possibly Wii Fit). Everything else has been retreads of old games. There is a certain nostalgia value there, and I can enjoy some of those retreads (Mario Kart Wii was fun, but it’s not really that different from a game that came out about 20 years ago, ditto for New Super Mario Brothers Wii, and about 10 other games), but at the same time, I’m getting sick of all that.
  • One game that was announced at E3 that I am looking forward to is called Journey. It’s made by the same team as Flower and will hopefully be just as good.
  • Otherwise, I’ll probably play a little more of GTA IV, just so I can get far enough to really cause some mayhem in Liberty City (this is another problem with a lot of sequels – you often start the sequel powered-down and have to build up various abilities that you’re used to having) and pick up some games from last year, like Uncharted 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Movies

  • I saw Predators last weekend, and despite being a member of this year’s illustrious Top 5 Movies I Want To See Even Though I Know They’ll Suck list, I actually enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not fine cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it knows where its bread is buttered and it hits all the appropriate beats. As MovieBob notes, this movie fills in the expected sequel trajectory of the Alien series. It’s Aliens to <a href="Predator“>Predator‘s Alien, if that makes any sense. In other words, it’s Predator but with multiple predators and higher stakes. It’s ultimately derivative in the extreme, but I really enjoyed the first movie, so that’s not that bad. I mean, you’ve got the guy with the gatling gun, the tough ethnic girl who recognizes the predators, the tough ethnic guy who pulls off his shirt and faces the predator with a sword in hand to hand combat, and so on. Again, it’s a fun movie, and probably the best since the original (although, that’s not really saying much). Just don’t hope for much in the way of anything new or exciting.
  • Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for reasons expounded upon in Sunday’s post.
  • Looking forward to Inception this weekend. Early reviews are positive, but I’m not really hoping for that much. Still in a light year for movies, this looks decent.

The Finer Things

  • A couple weekends ago, I went out on my deck on a gorgeous night and drank a beer whilst smoking a cigar. I’m pretty good with beer, so I feel confident in telling you that if you get the chance, Affligem Dubbel is an great beer. It has a dark amber color and a great, full bodied taste. It’s as smooth as can be, but carbonated enough that it doesn’t taste flat. All in all, one of my favorite recent discoveries. I know absolutely nothing about cigars, but I had an Avo Uvezian Notturno XO (it came in an orange tube). It’s a bit smaller than most other cigars I’ve had, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Again, a cigar connoisseur, I am not, so take this with a grain of salt.
  • I just got back from my monthly beer club meeting. A decent selection tonight, with the standout and surprise winner being The Woodwork Series – Acasia Barreled. It’s a tasty double style beer (perhaps not as good as the aforementioned Affligem, but still quite good) and well worth a try (I’m now interested in trying the other styles, which all seem to be based around the type of barrel the beer is stored in). Other standouts included a homebrewed Triple (nice work Dana!), and, of course, someone brought Ommegang Abby Ale (another Dubbel!) which is a longtime favorite of mine. The beer I brought was a Guldenberg (Belgian tripel), but it must not have liked the car ride as it pretty much exploded when we opened it. I think it tasted a bit flat after that, but it had a great flavor and I think I will certainly have to try this again (preferably not shaking it around so much before I open it).

And I think that just about wraps up this edition of Tasting Notes, which I rather enjoyed writing and will probably try again at some point.

The Clockwork Orange Fallacy

2 Comments / Science Fiction / /

I’ve been reading a science fiction novel called Diaspora, by Greg Egan. The novel is initially set about a thousand years in the future, which is enough time to allow Egan to postulate all sorts of things without really having to explicitly delve into the morality of gene-splicing or consciousness transferral, etc… However, those sorts of questions emerge anyway because we, the readers, are still living our contemporary lives, where these issues are as relevant as ever.

The novel begins in a “Polis”, which is basically a network of artificial consciousnesses. Some of these are humans who have uploaded themselves, others are entirely artificial. Alternatively, there were apparently a lot of people who transferred themselves into human-shaped robots called Gleisners. Regular human beings are still around, and they’re referred to as “Fleshers” (for obvious reasons). At this point, there are tons of genetically altered humans, to the point where many of the variants can no longer communicate with one another (another class of humans, calling themselves “Bridgers” have been bred specifically to solve the problem of communication). Humans without any sort of genetic tampering are referred to as “Statics”, and don’t seem to be doing well.

In the story, the industrious but apparently suspicious gleisners have discovered an odd astrophysical event which could prove disasterous to Earth (at least, to its fleshers). Two of the characters go down to the planet to warn the fleshers, but they’re met with paranoia and disbelief. One of the characters, Yatima, is a completely random mutation from a polis (he has no “parents”, even artificial ones), and he (or, I should say “ve” as they seem to be quasi-asexual, though even the artificial pronouns sometimes seem to have a gender connotation, but that’s a different discussion) is having some trouble understanding the objections to his suggestion that anyone who wants to can upload themselves to his Polis. In the scene below, he’s speaking with a static human and Francesca, who is a human bridger.

He gazed down at them with a fascinated loathing. ‘Why can’t you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.’

Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators.

Ve whispered to Francesca, dismayed, ‘I thought religion was long gone, even among the statics.’

‘God is dead, but the platitudes linger.’ Yatima couldn’t bring verself to ask whether torture and slavery also lingered, but Francesca seemed to read vis face, and added, ‘Including a lot of confused rhetoric about free will. Most statics aren’t violent, but they view the possibility of atrocities as essential for virtue – what philosophers call “the Clockwork Orange fallacy”. So in their eyes, autonomy makes the polises a kind of amoral hell, masquerading as Eden.’ (page 119 in my edition)

The reference to A Clockwork Orange was interesting, as this isn’t a novel that’s been filled with pop culture references, but the concept itself is a common theme in SF (and, for that matter, philosophy). It’s not hard to see why, especially when it comes to something like a Polis. What does morality mean in a Polis? A consciousness living in a Polis is essentially living in an entirely virtual environment – there are minimal physical limits, property doesn’t really exist as a concept, and so on. The inhabitants of any given Polis are modeled after humans, in a fashion, and yet many of our limitations are not applicable. Some polises have a profound respect for the physical world around them. Others have retreated into their virtual reality, some going as far as abandoning the laws of physics altogether in an effort to better understand the elegance of mathematics. Would it be moral to upload yourself into a Polis? Or would that be the cowards way out and represent the evasion of responsibility that free will provides? Would one still have a free will if their consciousness was run by a computer? Once in a Polis, is it necessary to respect the external, natural world? Could anything be gained from retreating into pure mathematics? Egan doesn’t quite address these issues directly, but this sort of indirect exploration of technological advancement is one of the things that the genre excels at.

Strangely, one of the things that seems to take on a more dangerous tone in the world of Diaspora is the concept of a meme (for more on this, check out this post by sd). The way ideas are transmitted and replicated among humans isn’t especially well understood, but it can certainly be dangerous. Egan is pretty clearly coming down against the humans who don’t want to escape to the Polis (to avoid disaster), and he seems to blame their attitude on “a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators”. This sort of thing seems even more dangerous to an artificial consciousness though, and Egan even gives an example. These AI consciousnesses can run a non-sentient program called an “outlook” which will monitor the consciousness and adjust it to maintain a certain set of values (in essence, it’s Clockwork Orange software). In the story, one character shows Yatima what’s happened to their outlook:

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving … including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core belief’s failings.

Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it, you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it.

I find this sort of thing terrifying. It’s almost the AI equivalent to being a zombie. If you take on this outlook, why even bother existing in the first place? I guess ignorance is bliss…

In case you can’t tell, I’m very much enjoying Diaspora. I’m still not finished, but I only have a little more than a hundred pages left. It’s not much of a page turner, but that’s more because I have to stop every now and again to consider various questions that have arisen than lack of quality (though I will note that Egan is probably not a gateway SF author – he certainly doesn’t shy away from the technical, even in extremes). I’ll probably be posting more when I finish the book…

The Mongoliad

Arts & Letters, Neal Stephenson / /

About a week ago at the SF App Show, an alpha version of something called The Mongoliad was presented. The description shows promise:

The Mongoliad is a sort of serialized story, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

Besides Kaedrin favorite Neal Stephenson, the project also seems to be attracting some other high profile talent like Greg Bear. The use of New Media apps to deliver the stories gives pause, and I have to wonder if this is being optimized for the form factor of the medium, or if it’s just because that’s the hot new thing to do… Details of the project are a bit scarce, buy you can find some info at the Subtai Corporation page as well as their Facebook page. The overview on the Facebook site gives a little more info on the setting and the plan for populating the world with stories…

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other authors; we’re also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.

Still not sure if the New Media route is the best way to distribute this sort of information, but it at least seems like a better medium than the standard dead tree novel. The other piece of info that’s come out about the project is that it will apparently be seeking fan submissions:

Very shortly, once The Mongoliad has developed some mass and momentum, we will be asking fans to join us in creating the rest of the world and telling new stories in it. That’s where the real experiment part comes in. We are building some pretty cool tech to make that easy and fun, and we hope lots of you will use it.

It’s an interesting concept, and not something I can think of seeing before. There have been various experiments in serialized novels being released on the web, but I can’t think of anything massively successful and nothing quite this ambitious has been tried. Stephenson’s involvement pretty much guarantees that I’ll be trying this app out, but I have to admit to being a bit skeptical about the fan-fiction aspect and the post-book ambitions. I think it’s a worthy effort though, and I’m glad to see people of this caliber willing to experiment with new forms like this.

Another funny note about Stephenson, from Subutai’s team page:

He is also the Company’s armorer, in charge of developing and producing helmets, gauntlets, and other such protective items as may be required.

Heh. Other members of the team seem to have their own funny quirks as well. If nothing else, it’s an interesting idea, and I’m looking forward to it…

The Book Queue

Arts & Letters / /

I recently mentioned that I’m working my way through a backlog of book purchases. This is actually somewhat unusual for me. I’ve always had a long list of books I wanted to read, but I usually only had a few unread books waiting on my shelf. But lately, I’ve been building up a large library of books I haven’t read. Sitting on my shelf right now:

Don’t you just love how non-fiction almost always has a long, descriptive subhead? The only one that doesn’t in this list is How We Decide, and that’s perhaps because Lehrer chose a self-explanatory title. The others have fluffy titles that need some sort of explanation. Except Boyd. That’s a biography of a guy named John Boyd. But I suppose he’s more exciting when you know that he’s a “Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”. Then again, GEB has a subhead that’s more mysterious than the title. So I’m just babbling now and should probably stop (and then read these books). Interestingly, I thought I had more books to put on this list, but I’ve made relatively good progress the last few months…