Nigel's Not Well: A Blog

Joker-Brand Kid's Toys

Mon, 1 Dec 2008 14:16:15 -0600

The funniest, and most horrifying, commercial I've seen in a while:

More fun with Google

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:38:12 -0600

In the warm afterglow of this crazy, historic election, I found myself remembering one of the few criticisms John McCain's campaign leveled against Barack Obama that seemed to have any resonance: the "celebrity" ad that compared him to Paris Hilton and called him "the most famous person in the world." I thought about that. You know what? Barack Obama probably is the most famous person in the world, and he probably was even before he won the election. I certainly can't think of any real contender. So, dutiful geek that I am, I went to Google to compare the hit counts of searches for famous names.

"Paul McCartney" - 12 million

"Tom Cruise" - 17 million

"Hillary Clinton" - 23 million

"Michael Jackson" - 32 million

"George W. Bush" - 43 million

"Sarah Palin" - 56 million

"Jesus Christ" - 26 million

Drum roll, please...

"Barack Obama" - 119 million

Wow. Let's try just "jesus" - 187 million

OK, now just "obama" - 244 million

Crazy.

Not the End, Not the Beginning of the End - The End of the Beginning

Wed, 5 Nov 2008 11:09:02 -0600

Nearly two years after I posted some cautiously optimistic thoughts on the beginning of Obama's run for president, I'm floored that he - and the country - made it this far. I've rarely approached American politics with anything but cynicism. If anyone had left a comment on that post predicting an Obama landslide, I would have clucked my tongue at their unchecked enthusiasm. If they'd said that Obama would emerge from a long and grueling primary not battered but strengthened, with a calm and measured and spectacularly well-organized campaign that could shrug off wave after wave of fear-baiting attacks that were vicious even by Republican standards, I'd roll my eyes. And if they'd put forward that his opponent would finally prove H.L. Mencken wrong by underestimating the intelligence of the American public and going broke, I'd probably stop listening altogether. You don't win elections in America by talking to your supporters like adults, and presenting intelligent ideas with an unfailingly positive tone.

Or at least, you didn't used to.

It's hard, much harder than I would ever have guessed, to put a cynical spin on this incredible election. It's hard not to feel real hope, and pride, one the eve of an Obama presidency. Some will do their best to paint this moment in history with negativity. But I won't be among them.

Results 1-10 for "Happy Birthday, Google!"

Fri, 3 Oct 2008 11:23:59 -0500

It's Google's 10th birthday, but they're giving us a present ("us" being Internet-addicted geeks) by opening up their earliest archive, from 2001. Go here and you can scour the historic Internet wilderness of the early 21st century. Some examples of the highly nerdy amusement to be had...

"Subprime mortgage"
2008 hits: 2,800,000
2001 hits: 2000

"Sarah Palin"
2008 hits: 20,900,000
2001 hits: 0

"September 11"
First hit 2008: Wikipedia's entry for "September 11th attacks"
First hit 2001: The Annotated Galactic Calendar's Picture of the Day for Sept. 11, 1999

"2 girls 1 cup"
First hit 2008: Not gonna try it.
First hit 2001: "1998 FYSA President Cup Scores and Standings Girls"

"Who let the dogs out"
2001 hits: 94,900
2008 hits: 15

The last one is a complete lie, but it doesn't seem there's anything with fewer hits today than in 2001, at least not that I've found.

Google Optimo Maximo

Thu, 4 Sep 2008 12:10:58 -0500

It's been nearly two days since I started playing with Google's new, inevitable web browser, Chrome. And I feel a lot like I did once I'd nestled into consistent Gmail use: quite comfortable and content, except for that nagging sense in the back of my mind that Google will soon own or control all my computers, the Internet, and my apartment. But maybe I just haven't gotten used to my new GoogleHive brain implant yet (it's still in Beta, of course).Chrome flew in completely under my radar (I'd never heard of it until a few hours before its launch on Tuesday), although as I hinted above, I had long assumed Google would come out with their own browser before too long. And like pretty much all of Google's small galaxy of beta products, it features a streamlined, intuitive interface that's as smooth as its shiny little logo would imply. From what I could glean from the Scott McCloud explanatory comic, a lot of the real innovation is happening on the back end, and involves complicated processes that I won't pretend to understand; but so far my experience as a simple user has been almost completely positive. In fact, most of the time I forget I'm using a new browser at all, which as I understand it was one of Google's goals.

Probably the best thing about Chrome is the "omnibar," which is what the address bar at the top of the screen has become. Mozilla recently revamped Firefox's address bar so that typed text will bring up similar text not just in URLs, but also page titles and bookmarks; Chrome, however, does them one better by having the address bar also double as a search bar. Just type in a word or phrase, hit enter and you'll be taken directly to a (surprise!) Google search for whatever you entered. It's a simple change but a surprisingly effective one.

There's also a simple "incognito" mode you can enter in order to keep Chrome from retaining any history or cookies from whatever you're, uh, doing online - you know, like buying gifts for someone who uses the same computer, ha ha ha. The popup blocking works fantastically, and if Google is to be believed, there's no way for obnoxious web advertisers to get around it. Tabbed browsing is central to the Chrome experience, and although I haven't experienced it yet, supposedly a site that crashes will only crash a single tab, allowing you to close it without restarting the whole program.

If you're really geeky, you can even open up a Windows-like Task Manager that monitors the memory usage of individual pages and plugins. This already came in handy for me: I periodically experience a Flash video bug that causes audio in any Flash page I open to stop working, no matter what site I go to. When this happened it Chrome, I simply shut down Flash manually, and when I went back to a Flash page, it restarted the plugin and everything worked fine. Well done, Google.

The only thing that threw me about Chrome was that it doesn't support live bookmarks - RSS feeds and the like. At first, this seemed like a really bizarre oversight. But then I realized this was just because Google wants me to use their damn Google Reader for all my feeds. This is how you get me to throw a geek tantrum. Christ, Google, haven't I given you enough? I use you for all my searches. I use you for my personal email. I have your ads on my site, and I check my site's traffic using your damn Analytics program. And now I'm using your Internet broswer! Hell, if I didn't have my own site I'd probably be writing this blog on your very own Blogspot! What more do you want from me?

Once I calmed down with some herbal tea and quaaludes, I actually gave Google Reader a try. And dammit if it isn't (sigh) a really well-implemented tool with a really smooth interface. Now I have live bookmarks anywhere I go - and Reader actually tells me which ones have updated without my having to sift through all of them, thus freeing up time I can use to cure cancer and read more blogs.

So as much as I resent how much of my Internet experience now revolves around a single company, I can't do anything but recommend Chrome, at least until Google changes its name to "Skynet." The real question, of course, is will Chrome play nice the next time I build a website? Kind of a moot point as long as Internet Explorer retains its stranglehold over the Interwebs, but what really enamored me to Firefox was how well it conformed to HTML standards, and it'll be the true test of Chrome for me. The ball's in your court, now, Mozilla - can you win me back to Firefox?

EDIT: Holy crap - Chrome lets me resize input boxes on the fly! You can try it right now (if you have Chrome, that is) with the comments field at the bottom of the post. Not sure what the point is, but it sure looks cool.

In a World...

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:29:18 -0500

Don LaFontaine has died at the age of 68. You probably don't know the name, but you definitely know the voice; he was That Trailer Guy. It feels like the end of an era. R.I.P.

Dracula: Saved and Loving It

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:07:14 -0500

After nearly four decades of penning and sometimes drawing those little cartoon pamphlets explaining exactly why you are going to Hell - yes, even you, saintly missionaries who didn't say the magic words - you might think that Jack Chick would be running out of ideas. After all, how many times can you reiterate the fact that you really out to get converted before those sweaty, hairy, homosexual evolutionary biologists team up with the Vatican to form a One World Government and the Tribulation begins?

Well, never let it be said that Jack Chick is just retreading old ground, because his latest track is about a clean and proper young Christian lady who leads a vampire to Christ. No, literally, this guy is a vampire. Normally I would approach this as some kind of an analogy, but Jack Chick is an ardent biblical literalist*, and I really think he believes in vampires. What's more, he believes that a tract like this might just save some of their souls. I think the world through Jack Chick's eyes is a lot more interesting than the one I see through mine.

* Chick is a biblical literalist in the same sense as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind books; which is to say, he doesn't seem to know what "literal" means. As evangelical-smart-guy blogger Fred Clark puts it, "There is nothing literal about [LaHaye's and Jenkins'] reading of the Book of Revelation. They interpret that book through a convoluted and contradictory allegorical scheme that treats it as a secret, coded mystery understandable only to the initiated. For decades, Tim LaHaye has insisted both A) the Book of Revelation must be read "literally," and B) the Book of Revelation is impossible to understand correctly without the help of experts like himself. Getting away with that is a neat trick." I recommend checking out Clark's further writings on Left Behind for a more detailed explanation: slacktivist.typepad.com.

Tale of Tale of Tales

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:21:46 -0500

I just found out that The Endless Forest existed, and I'm greatly intrigued. I've been saying for a while now that an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) somewhere between World of Warcraft and Second Life could find the happy medium that would get me to play and enjoy it regularly, and I think that developers Tale of Tales are on the right track. A simple game geared around exploration and very basic communication, with just a touch of magic thrown in, is something online gaming is tailor-made for. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so.

On Not Chasing that Big Ending Chord

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:44:41 -0500

After a few recent discussions about life, personal fulfillment, and the fear of missing out on that fulfillment, I was glad to come across this little piece of Alan Watts wisdom, nicely illustrated by the South Park guys:

Grand Theft Arguments, Part II

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:26:42 -0500

In my previous post about Grand Theft Auto IV and the boy-this-looks-familiar controversy that accompanied its release, I spoke a bit about how difficult it can be for someone to understand the real themes and tone of a videogame when they've never played it. This gap in understanding, not just of individual games but of the medium as a whole, has led to a whole lot of controversies that might otherwise have been avoided.

But some controversies aren't simply a matter of misinformation or jumping to conclusions. There are plenty of legitimate concerns to be had about videogames that allow players to engage in disturbing acts. My question is, when someone performs an action in a video game, how do we delegate responsibility for that action? How does the player's complicity compare to that of the game designers, or even of the math-driven artificial intelligence controlling the in-game characters?(I'm speaking here pretty much exclusively of games that involve some kind of narrative and are set in something at least resembling reality; a purely skill-based game like Tetris obviously doesn't apply to this argument.)

The reason videogames receive so much scrutiny for their content, aside from the fact that they belong to a relatively young medium that many people still haven't gotten used to, is that their interactivity places them in a different realm from traditional entertainment. It's one thing to watch Tony Montana shoot people and another thing entirely to control him as he does so. While static media like literature and film have sometimes waded into difficult questions about audience complicity (what does it say about someone who watches I Spit on Your Grave or those Faces of Death videos and actually enjoys them?), videogames don't have the same level of ambiguity. Even when a game is completely linear and developers have forced the player to perform a certain action in order to proceed, the player is still performing the action, not just watching it, and they have no choice but to take some responsibility for it.

Then again, if the game is really linear, to the point of barely being interactive, it's hard to argue that the player is truly complicit in whatever potentially disturbing actions their in-game avatar commits. Suppose a game were to pause, and a message to appear instructing the player to press a certain button in order to, say, hit a sweet old lady with a baseball bat. There's no option to let the woman go on her way, other than to turn the game off. If the player dutifully pushes that button, only the bare minimum of interaction has taken place - scarcely more than would have occurred if the same person had been watching the scene play out in a movie, and made the choice not to press "Stop" on the remote control. The funny thing is, there are some games that never get much more interactive than that.

In other words, there is a very broad range in the level of interactions that videogames allow us. At one extreme, we have games like Dragon's Lair, in which the player's only task is to correctly time button presses in order to advance a completely linear story that never changes. Since this is little more than an extremely hard-to-watch movie, the designers of the game are responsible for everything that happens onscreen. On the other extreme we have games that don't really exist yet: true "sandbox" games that merely present an environment and allow the player to do whatever they feel like with as few constraints as possible. Some games have tried to reach this potential, and many of them are in Will Wright's portfolio: the SimCity and Sims series are great examples, and the upcoming Spore, if it ends up offering what it promises. The ultimate goal behind these games is to create a space in which players are fully responsible for everything that occurs within the world of the game; the game provides the sand and the box, and the player provides the castles, or hills, or anything else they can think of.

Most games, Grand Theft Auto included, lie somewhere in between these two poles. The GTA series tries to position itself as close to the Will Wright total-freedom pole as it can, but every game in the series thus far has featured a more-or-less linear plot that the player can either follow or ignore, but not alter to any significant degree. The content in GTA IV essentially falls into three categories: the "sandbox" gameplay, in which the player drives around in the city and does whatever they feel like with the fewest constraints; the scripted missions, in which the player is given objectives to carry out but a certain amount of leverage in choosing how to do so; and the cutscenes, which are non-interactive and completely out of the player's control. Many games, from the 3D Mario games to Legend of Zelda series to The Elder Scrolls, can be organized thusly, with varying percentages of content ending up in each category.

Reaching back to Samhita's Feministing post, we find that a lot of her outrage over GTA IV came from her mistaken impression that the IGN video she watched (which has since been removed) was a trailer for the game. It wasn't; the game came not from Rockstar's marketing department but from the IGN staff themselves, who recorded and edited their own gameplay experiences. I didn't see the video but I'm going to guess that its content was entirely pulled from the first category, the sandbox gameplay, and thus had as little of the Rockstar designers' handprints on it as anything in the game. This makes it tempting to blame IGN entirely for the video's existence, as Leigh Alexander and a number of other writers did.

Of course, it's never that simple, is it? Rockstar may not have created any missions or cutscenes that require the player avatar to solicit and then kill prostitutes (at least not that I've found), and they may not offer any incentives to do so beyond retrieving money (which does add to the realism, since people kill other people for money in the real world all the time), but they still built a framework that allows players to do any number of terrible things. There's a small amount of balance in that the game allows you to perform legitimate jobs for a taxi service, and some of the killings in the game are optional, but it's not like the game lets you volunteer at an animal hospital or donate your in-game money to a homeless shelter.

But why should it? Nobody complains that Goodfellas doesn't contain scenes of people working constructively toward good causes, because that's not what the story is about. It's a movie about crime, just as GTA IV is a game about crime. The crux of the whole series is that it allows the player to assume the role of a criminal - it never claims to be a fully realistic depiction of American urban life (although it does satirize it). It works with the player to create a story and an experience in which people do horrible, immoral things, and leaves the player to sort out what it all means.

All this brings us to a larger question: is a virtual act - one that only affects imaginary or simulated people, places and things - ever truly immoral? Does the concept of morality even exist in the space of videogames?

If I take an action in the real world, it affects me and the environment around me (including people) in a tangible way. However, in a videogame, the only effect I have on the "environment" is the manipulation of data. This manipulation is generally completely reversible by either restoring a game, or restarting. So ultimately, my actions in a videogame only affect me, and they only do so psychologically (at least until videogame technology starts getting truly physical). And thus the morality of any action I take in a game can only be measured by how it affects my state of mind, or the state of mind of anyone in the room with me.

This is, naturally, impossible to measure in any concrete way, and that's where the arguments start. I'm not going to get into the question of whether or not in-game violence leads to real violence (other than to point out that there has never been any evidence to support this theory), but I think we need to understand video game space as one that, no matter how realistic the graphics that present it, exists in the mind of the player. The designers may give cues and build frameworks, but ultimately the player is the one who gives the game life; the player decides whether to think of the shapes onscreen as friends, enemies, pets - in other words, characters - or as simply the product of programming code, and chooses their emotional link to the game in this way.

I use the term "choose" loosely here, because I think the choice is made on a deep level, perhaps subconsciously. I have a hard time committing truly brutal acts in video games; given the choice between playing a good or an evil character I almost always go for good (saving every Little Sister in Bioshock, for example). When I play GTA IV, I might drive recklessly but I generally don't aim for pedestrians on purpose, or shoot anyone without provocation; twice in the game I was given the option to spare someone or kill them, and I chose the former. My friend Chris, on the other hand, will kill huge numbers of virtual people without batting an eye in the same game. This isn't because Chris is a darker or more violent person than me - well, maybe a little, but he's generally civil in the real world - it's because Chris doesn't see the game characters and the game world as anything more than an artifice. It's no coincidence that he's never had real emotional experiences in games or connections to characters within, but I have, in games like Shadow of the Colossus and Half-Life 2, among others. I couldn't tell you why I connect to games more easily than he does, but we certainly seem to be wired this way, and it's not something that can be easily changed.

So by this token we can say that games, like any artistic medium, are going to affect those who experience them based largely on how willing they are to emotionally connect with the material, and that's the real agency of a gamer; all gamers push buttons or wave Wiimotes, but it's the way the player feels the game, its story and its characters, that give the experience meaning. In this respect, the interactivity of games is ultimately not that important. Emotional engagement happens with any art form, and I don't believe it's substantially different in games.

Where, then, is the agency of the game designers? I would say that game designers are responsible for how a game affects its players largely based on how they handle player expectations. A game designer for a title like GTA not only presents a storyline but also chooses how the player can affect the game world, and to what degree. Rockstar understands that its audience is not going to feel very emotionally attached to the various pedestrians in the game's imaginary Liberty City, so I don't think it's irresponsible for them to give the players freedom to steal their cars, shoot them, and run them over with very few negative consequences. But if Rockstar set up a situation in which players would already have some emotional stake - setting the game in today's Iraq, for example - things would be very different. They could allow the player the same degree of freedom, but because they'd be working from a very serious real-life situation, they would need to show much more thought in creating in-game consequences for the player, or it they would come across as trivializing a real conflict in which real people are involved. That's an extreme example, but it would be one situation in which the game designers would know for a fact that its audience would take the game's depictions seriously. Most of the time things are far more vague, and the designers, like any artists, need to make their best estimation as to how their work will be received, and take their chances from there.

After all this rambling, that's the closest I can come to a conclusion: that agency and responsibility in videogames are based around emotional interaction much more than literal interaction, and in this respect they follow many of the same rules as older, static media. Creators of games present their work based on certain assumptions about its emotional resonance (or lack thereof) with their audience, and if they're successful the audience responds by approaching the work as it is presented (or perhaps even on a deeper level than the creators intended). Emotional resonance is something that hasn't been easy to obtain in the videogame medium, but forward-thinking designers like Fumito Ueda, Hideo Kojima, Peter Molyneux and Gabe Newell, among numerous others, are all working toward this goal with every game they produce. And as designers really question what it means to be a player in a game, exciting new approaches to game design gleam tantalizingly ahead. So even with all the hemming and hawing over the possible negative impact of a game like Grand Theft Auto IV, I like to see that at least people are taking games seriously as a part of our culture; hopefully, even the more petty and uninformed arguments have buried beneath them a much more intriguing debate about the meaning of games as an art form, one that will inform the future of the medium.