It's like clockwork, I tell you
As anyone who knows me can attest (and I believe everyone reading this falls into that category, though who knows?) during the semester it's, um, rather difficult for me to get me to wake up on time for class. Yet, as soon as the break begins, my body has no problem waking itself up at 9:30 despite the fact that I have nothing to do. Not that I mind having a healthy sleep schedule, mind you, but it's just a little frustrating.

On the bright side, I've had a chance to continue my productivity. Over the past couple months, all of those little things have been piling up, things which are individually easy to deal with but when accumulated into a huge mass become quite daunting. Now that I don't have anything else to worry about, I can tackle them one by one and slowly whittle the pile back down to reasonable size. Plus I get the wonderful feeling I get from having my life be at least somewhat more organized.

Me vs. Technology: The Road To Victory
So I finally triumphed over the irritating problem which was plaguing IE (apparently, the application installed DLLs which were too new for my old, antiquated version of Win98SE, so I had to install new ones), which prompts me to go on this tangential rant.

These days, computers often think that they're smarter than me. This is often true; for instance, when installing software, I trust that they've done their job right (although apparently, someone hadn't in this case), and let things proceed and hope that nothing goes wrong. A lot of the time, though, it's not. When it comes to, say, Word's spelling and grammar checker, I'm way smarter than Word, and so I'm perpetually annoyed by its claiming that it knows the English language better than I. Of course, I turned off such features on my own computer long ago, but they're still an irritation whenever I have to use a computer where I can't freely change the settings. And, increasingly, there are such helpful features which can't be turned off -- one of the things which drives me craziest about IE is the fact that whenever you select a word, it helpfully selects the space after the word, so that if you paste it somewhere it'll be fine. All very good -- except this feature causes me 100 times more aggravation when I don't want it than in the occasional case when I do.

What we really need, rather than trying to make computers smarter, is to make them realize when they're not smart enough. Or, in the words of Chuang Tzu: "He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion." If more people were working on Artificial Humility, I wouldn't have to deal with my computer constantly trying to correct me when it, not I, is the one that's wrong.

The pervasiveness of popular culture
So someone brought a radio to the 7b grading festivities yesterday, and so I spent the 6 or so hours I was in the 7b office listening to Alice. Now, I pretty much never listen to the radio these days -- at home, I don't even have a radio; although I could listen to what the Internet offers me, I usually just stick to the contents of my various playlists, and on the road, I prefer to listen to the various CDs I have than take my chances with the airwaves. So I was more than a little bit surprised to realize that I had heard pretty much every song on the radio that they played. (Oh, sure, I don't claim to have been paying 100% attention, so I'm certain I noticed the songs I had heard before precisely because I had heard them before.) I've heard Avril Lavigne, and Vanessa Carlton, and Alicia Keys; I've heard Jack Johnson and John Mayer; I've heard Nickelback and Coldplay and Five for Fighting, in most cases more times than I wanted to -- despite having made no effort to seek any of them out. I guess this illustrates that I can't escape from the music surrounding us even if I want to.

A Grader's Complaint
So, my last work, done yesterday, was grading for the 7b final, and given the fact that I was already running on empty, my grading there probably did not represent my best work. However, if you do it right, grading can be pretty mechanical; the trick is properly setting the mileposts for people to be awarded points (my own grading scheme being somewhat of a hybrid between the holistic grading scheme that we're supposed to use in 7b, where points are assigned on the level of understanding that the student exhibits, and the more traditional "assign a point value to every important step" method; while the former is a really nice idea, it's a lot harder to implement in practice than the latter, so I often use accomplishing a particular step as a proxy for reaching a certain level of understanding, thus nicely tying the two together).

Unfortunately, I (in strict accordance with some law or another) got awarded the most unpleasant problem to grade. On the first midterm, the professor had posed a problem involving a submerged lead ball; as a result of the buoyant force, it had an apparent weight less than its real weight. Then, everything was heated up, so that the lead ball expanded (the water, too), changing the apparent weight. So far, so good. Now, the professor wrote the problem such that there was a certain percentage change in the temperature, figuring that this would cause all of the other variables to cancel out and leaving you with a percentage change of the apparent weight, obviating the need to, say, provide the other variables. A fine idea, except that it didn't work -- you still needed to know some of the initial variables in order to get the percentage. So, you would think he had learned his lesson. But no. On the final, he did the exact same thing -- posted a problem in which the initial percentage change was given, and no other variables, figuring that the variables would cancel -- but again, they didn't. This resulted in his having to issue a clarification midway through the exam, and subsequent student confusion, which was reflected in the exams I had to grade.

That wasn't really the worst of it, though. The most annoying thing was that, fundamentally speaking, there were two ways to do the problem: a right way and a wrong way. (For those interested in the technical details: The problem asked for the change in resonant frequency in an LC circuit when the position of a dielectric in the capacitor was changed by a little amount. The right way was to use the Chain Rule to obtain dw/dx. The wrong way was to compute the old capacitance and the new capacitance, subtract the two, and attempt to find the change in the resonant frequency.) Now, for people who went the right way, if they erred, it was pretty easy to identify where they had strayed from the path and award partial credit appropriately. Unfortunately, those people were significantly in the minority behind people who went the wrong way. Now, it is possible to get the right answer using the wrong way (it does work, just not very well, if you carry everything through very carefully), and so of course I had to give full credit to people who did manage to make it all the way through to the final answer this way. But if you went astray along that path, things got unpleasant really quickly, making it impossible to determine really how much credit they deserved; their understanding was completely obscured. So I had to just assign a uniform partial credit to the large number of people who suffered that fate.

Back from the dead
So I'm finally done with all of my work! Yay! Now I can finally kick back and enjoy some hard-earned relaxation, which will hopefully mean a regular stream of posts here.

It's amazing how productive I've already been this morning; my room, which has been slowly decaying over the past three weeks, looks better already (although there's still a long way to go). I guess you can get a lot of work done when you don't actually have anything to do. On the downside, IE is still behaving badly. It seems like a rogue application I installed overwrote a few of the DLLs it uses with inferior versions, resulting in predictable chaos. I might as well take this moment to rant for a bit: back in the days when I was an avid Mac user, people like Kenshin who were trying to convince me of the innate superiority of the PC would always complain that in a Mac, you couldn't take a close look at the inner workings (the implication being that you couldn't fix them if they went wrong), while with the PC you had ready access to everything. Well, this was a blatant lie then, and it's a blatant lie now. My tools for fixing a problem like this are pretty much the same on both sides of the divide: see if any settings are wrong; if not, reinstall and hope that fixes the problem. Seriously, what else am I supposed to do? Track down the offending DLL and replace it? Yeah, right.

Why I am such an excellent typist
Hey, I'm no Nietzsche, but I figured some self-investigation is in order.

While procrastinating today, I went to PopCap to fool around with their games, and on a whim (though I had really come to play Insaniquarium), decided to try their typing game. Not surprisingly, I effortlessly blew through the game until I reached the "off-the-map" area and it just reached inhuman levels. Whenever people ask me, "How did you become such a good typist?" I'm always slightly at a loss. I mean, part of it is that I've been on computers for a long time, and typing on them (since, heck, back in those days all you could do was type) equally long. And when I was a kid, I certainly went through my fair share of typing programs. (I actually liked a lot of the typing games, in the same way that I liked the really old-school Oregon Trail, before it had any graphics, when to shoot things for food you had to type words like "BLAM" or "POW" as fast as possible.) It wasn't that the typing programs gave me good technique, though; my habits had already been solidified long before my first encounter with Ms. Beacon (actually, I don't remember what my first real typing program was, but that's as good a guess as any), and they're certainly not really all that close to what's recommended. (Whenever I type on a split keyboard, for example, I get frustrated quite rapidly, because I often find my index fingers falling into the crevasse in the middle. If this doesn't prove that my habits are less than perfect, I don't know what does.) It's possible that it was merely the practice that these programs gave me, rather than any technique I learned from them, that gave me the skill that I have today. But, well, the same is true for a lot of kids (especially today), and it's not hard to see that the majority of them aren't particularly good typists despite having done it so much. So I can't really use that as a complete explanation.

Maybe it's a natural skill? In that case, why couldn't I have ended up with a natural skill that would impress the ladies a little more? Or at least one that would be more useful in my chosen line of work?

Obligatory haiku rant (or, proving my point below)
Literarily speaking, very few things get me more riled up than some idiot slapping seventeen syllables together in a 5-7-5 pattern and calling it a "haiku". (I will confess to engaging in this pastime in my weaker moments, but I'm attributing it to "youthful indiscretion." And unlike certain members of Congress, I actually was young when this happened.) There are two reasons why this annoys me:

a) It's not a haiku. A haiku, properly speaking, is not just 5-7-5; it also needs to contain a seasonal element (loosely speaking; I know this definition isn't precise). I think the part that grates on me about this is the blatant cultural insensitivity; it's as if people are saying "oh, here's this cool Japanese thing; I'll use it without bothering to actually learn anything about it," in a way that embodies the worst ugly-American stereotypes. Obviously, I'm overprojecting in this, since I'm sure that that doesn't represent a whole bunch of people who do this, but the fact that it is (almost certainly) happening some of the time does annoy me. It's not the whole story, though; I still eat "burritos" (actually, burritos are a singularly bad example for this point, come to think of it, since they're allegedly not even authentic to begin with -- perhaps I should say "tacos" -- but anyway, you get the point) without feeling that they're an example of horrible American cultural imperialism (although it certainly could be argued that they are; I defend myself against such thoughts by comforting myself with the fact that at least I'm aware of the fact that these are hardly an authentic rendition of Mexican cuisine).

Now, it is true that you can argue that the seasonal motif is something which isn't necessary in modern haiku, or haiku in English. This is, to some extent, true. But given that every instance of the type of haiku I'm complaining about slavishly adheres to the 5-7-5 pattern -- which is indisputably something more worth changing if you're actually trying to "translate" the haiku form into English rather than just carrying it over directly -- it's pretty clear that their authors haven't actually thought about those issues, so I'm hardly going to give them a free pass on that score.

b) It's bad art. The haiku form, because of its constricted nature, requires a fair amount of effort to produce a good work of art. Unfortunately, to the average person focused on cramming whatever they want to say into this arbitrary seventeen-syllable form (and I say "arbitrary" quite deliberately, because while it is by no means actually arbitrary, from the perspective of the person I'm criticizing here, it might as well be), producing something pleasant artistically is the last thing on their minds. The result is something which is not any more worthwhile than if the author hadn't gone to all that bother to put it in 17 syllables, and which is often quite a bit worse, given the circumlocutions, peculiar word choices, awkward word breaks, and other devices people use to fit their thoughts into the 5-7-5 Procrustean bed. I suppose, as long as I'm wildly generalizing, I'll speculate that people like this are exactly the kind of people who go to a Jackson Pollock exhibit and say "What's the big deal? My 4-year-old could do that!" Haiku is their way to be the metaphorical 4-year-old in the art world; the rules are so simple (or so they think) that they can produce art just by following them. Of course, what they produce isn't really art, just as if they toddled into the garage with fingerpaint, they wouldn't get Blue Poles Number 11, either. That is to say, there is more to art than just following the rules, no matter how simple they may seem to be, and disregarding this fact is ultimately just going to produce something annoying.

Anyway, you might think that this rant might be inspired by TMQ's haiku feature. It's not, actually; while this particular feature has been annoying me since pretty much its inception, my irritation at improper haiku extends well before then. This does seem to be a particularly egregious example, but rest assured that this is always something I'll notice, regardless of its origins.

My Faustian bargain (not literally, fortunately)
So, my past three years in grad school seem to have followed a very consistent pattern: I delay doing my work during the semester as long as possible, and then at the end I frantically attempt to make it up (or at least as much of it as possible). This provides me with the benefit of being slightly happier during the semester, at the cost of a couple of weeks of pure misery at the end. As you might have guessed from the two facts that (a) it's the end of the semester and (b) I haven't posted here in a week (thus undoubtedly disappointing my legions of loyal readers), I'm currently enjoying the less-appealing end of the bargain.

This has provided with an opportunity to meta-procrastinate by looking at my procrastination habits, at least. When I first feel like I have work to do, I'll try to decrease the number of activities which explicitly feel like not-work, like, say, leaving the apartment, or playing games which will obviously take up a large amount of time, or writing blog posts. This doesn't stop me from engaging in activities which are kind of like work, although they're not the work that needs doing; when I'm in heavy work periods, suddenly I feel the need to do the dishes, or clean up my room, or organize the contents of my hard drive. Then, as time goes on and there's not any fake work left, I'll lower the threshold for what constitutes "doing something productive", so that writing blog posts or emails or reading news now counts as "work" for the purposes of avoiding real work. Thus, the post you see before me. Eventually, I'll reach the point where not even my procrastination abilities can save me from actually getting work done, but as you can see, I haven't actually reached that point yet.

Fodder for both sides of the cell phone debate
A Harvard study shows that cell phone usage in cars does cause an increased number of accidents, but that the economic benefits of cell phone usage is comparable to this cost. (This article is frustratingly vague about whether the benefits refers to the benefits of all cell phone usage, or just the benefits of using your cell phone in the car, which is a rather important difference.)

While my attitude towards cell phones has mellowed considerably over the past few years, I still have no patience for people who act like idiots on the road, for whatever reason (save your snide remarks, you), and so I do reflexively feel annoyed when I see people talking on their cell phones, probably out of the fact that this may cause them to do something stupid.

The thing I fear the most are the cell-phone defenders pointing to this and saying that it's still worth it on a utilitarian basis. I have one word to answer that: externalities. If you plow into me because you're blathering on your phone, I certainly don't reap any of the benefits of your usage.

Stupid NFL quote of the day
No, don't worry, this isn't going to be a regular feature...if it were, I wouldn't have room for anything else in the blog. But I have to comment on this:

Vikings linebacker Henri Crockett (formerly a Falcon), on Falcons quarterback Michael Vick: "He's changed the game. There are going to be no more pocket passers anymore.'' Leaving aside the fact that comments like this have been made every time a "scrambling" quarterback has made a splash in the league (most recently, Donovan McNabb, but going all the way back to Kordell Stewart), the simple truth is that Vick's success may cause other quarterbacks to try to imitate Vick's style, but you know what? They're not going to succeed, because they don't have the talent that Vick does. Unless they come out with human cloning a lot more quickly than I suspected...

Semper cras
If I ever have a Latin motto -- for a family crest or something (you know, just in case I get knighted) -- that'll be it. Here's my recipe for making sure not to get any work done on a 4-day weekend:
1) On Thursday, think "well, it's Thanksgiving, so there's no need to worry about work today. I still have plenty of time."
2) On Friday, think "well, I've earned a day off, and I still have plenty of time, so I'll worry about it on the weekend proper."
3) On Saturday, get a chance to see three old high school friends, one of who is just visiting for the weekend from Annapolis, one of whom you haven't seen since his recent return from Japan, and one who you have no good excuse for not seeing, but who you haven't seen in a while. Stay up until 6:30 am having fun and reminiscing about old times.
4) On Sunday, wake up feeling absolutely terrible (partly from lack of sleep, and partly from an incipient cold), and have to decline all offers to do something interesting because "I have to work". Sigh.

Paul's thoughts on game design
This kind of post, like a post on racism, is a post that everyone will write sooner or later, but I've just been thinking about this lately while playing Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 is a fine game; it's stunningly beautiful, but there's nothing revolutionary about the gameplay itself. It's basicaly the same formula used as in the previous Warcrafts and Starcraft, with the occasional tweak or enhancement here and there. The enhancements are useful, but they don't make a major change in how the game works. I'm somewhat disappointed, but given the success of the franchise, and the fact that this is by no means a bad game, who cam blame them for not wanting to tinker with success?

Anyway, so here are my thoughts. Note that these are not necessarily my opinions on how to build a good game, but rather how to build a game that I like. I could be egotistical and claim the two are one and the same, but I'll save that for later.

1) No waiting! By far the quickest way to make me dislike a game is to force me to wait for a long time while nothing is happening. Most games avoid the obvious forms of this trap; the much-loathed (and rightfully so!) Star Control 3 is the only game I can think of offhand in which you do just have to spend a fair amount of time waiting. This is one of the downsides of the SimCity-type games, also, in that often you have to wait a while for your money to build up (though in some games, like SimGolf, you can do other things, like play golf, while waiting for the money to flow in). But there are more subtle forms of this, too; excessive use of video, for example, is sure to annoy me -- the occasional usage is fine, but if it becomes too prevalent, what's the point? Final Fantasy games are especially egregious in this regard; not just because of the FMV, which on its own wouldn't be really horrible, but because of the constant repetition of videos that you've already seen -- things like battle transitions, spell animations, and so forth. When you see them once, fine, but once you've seen them for the 250th time, you just want to smash your machine. I think this is the strongest reason for my disenchantment with the FF series over the years. But don't worry, I'll be picking on FF much more throughout this post.

An even more subtle problem is much more perniciously widespread -- games in which you don't have to explicitly wait, but in which the optimal strategy would involve a lot more waiting (or repetitive tasks) than the normal strategy. There are a lot of games, for example, in which you'd be better off if after every encounter, you went back to the source of health, or waited for your spell points to recharge, or whatever. No one (except for perhaps the really obsessive-compulsive type of person) actually does this, but the fact that you could be better off (and in some really close battles, it becomes necessary) if you did do this is more than a bit annoying.

The next two are closely related, so I'll put them together.
2a) Doing something you know you can do is not interesting. Doing something you didn't know if you could do is interesting.
2b) Repetition forced on you by the game is bad. Repetition forced on you by yourself is good.

That is to say, any task which you have to do not because it's challenging (and by "challenging", in this context, I mean "something you could potentially fail at"), but simply because you have to do it in order to proceed with the game, is ultimately boring. This is why (to pick on RPGs again) the task of mindless leveling up is so reviled: it's not at all difficult; pretty much anyone could do it with their eyes closed, but you have to do it in order to get through the game. Square cleverly addressed that problem by largely eliminating the need for leveling up, at the cost of making the entire game non-challenging. Whoops. This applies to tasks within the game, of course, but also to tasks outside of the game: I don't particularly enjoy games which force you to make a map or write down copious quantities of information, since, hey, I know I can make a map; the act of doing it is pure busywork. I'll make exceptions if the mapmaking is relatively interesting in and of itself, but if it's just something I need to do, why bother?

Moving into the second half of my bipartite statement, it's equally frustrating to try a task which was interesting the first time round, but which you were able to accomplish, and then have the game tell you, "That's nice. Now do it again." This probably sounds like a broader statement than I intend it to be; if, say, you have to fight three of the same monsters in succession, but the first one weakens you enough so that the second is more difficult, and thus you have to plan ahead to defeat all three, that's fine. For example, the penultimate stage of Mega Man 2 (or any other Mega Man, for that matter), where you have to fight all 8 bosses again, but in one stage, is perfectly acceptable, since now you have to not just beat them, but do a good enough job beating each one that you have enough energy left to beat the rest, too. But (hey, look, I'm picking on FF again) part of the thing that annoys me about Final Fantasy is that all the fights are pretty much the same, and (with a very few exceptions, like FF1, which is part of the reason I still enjoyed it more than any other game in the series) each fight largely doesn't affect the outcome of the next, so it's all just the same with no larger strategy required.

What do I mean by the second sentence there, "repetition forced on you by yourself is good"? Well, to me, the epitome of a good challenge is something at which you don't succeed the first time, and have to try it again a few times, slowly gaining proficiency until, finally, you're good enough to make it through. The number of repetitions...well, that depends on how long each repetition is. If it takes a couple of hours each time you fail, I'm not a big fan of this model (Panzer General, I'm looking in your direction; see also (3) below), but for a minute or two, I'm willing to put up with trying quite a few times. But the point is, if you are good enough to pass the thing the first time, you should only have to do it once, not more just because the game designers are too lazy to come up with a better way to occupy your time.

This description somewhat reminds me of my spelling and grammar courses in the 5th and 6th grades; each week began with a pretest on the stuff we were covering that week, and if you did well enough on the pretest, you could skip the rest of the work for that week. I was a big fan of this system, because I was able to pass nearly all of the pretests (I think the pronoun one was the only one I didn't make it through), and so I didn't have to do completely unnecessary work. I think the same principle applies here -- if you're good enough, you shouldn't have to do unnecessary things. Of course, if this is true for a significant proportion of players out there, it's probably a sign that something is wrong with your difficulty. Which brings me to my next point...

3) The difficulty should be right. Correctly articulating my philosophy here is going to be difficult, especially since it's often self-contradictory, but the statement in bold is pretty self-explanatory, don't you think?

Seriously, though, ideally a game should be challenging at the beginning, when you're just learning, and still challenging at the end, when you're much better. The latter is complicated by the fact that as the game goes on, not only do you get better, but in many cases, so does your character, or your car, or your empire, or whatever. This isn't always a problem (as in, say, Super Mario Bros.), but it does seem that a lot of the time, game makers don't take this factor into account, and so as the game goes onward, it gets easier, often to pathetic levels. Obviously, this problem is more severe in games which don't have adjustable difficulty, but I don't intend to say that just being able to change the difficulty solves all problems, either; one of my (few) complaints with Warcraft 3 is that the "Normal" level is too easy, and the "Hard" level too hard. This is probably just a reflection of my own skill -- I'm decent, but by no means good, at RTS games in general, so the Normal level isn't much of a challenge, but I'm not good enough to tackle Hard. But since a single mission on Hard can take quite a bit of time, I'm less inclined (as (2) above might indicate) to put in the effort to improve enough to do it, so I have to content myself with something that's too easy. A perfect example of a game that does difficulty right is F-Zero X, which, when we first got it, was quite difficult at the Beginner level. Then, we got better, got through Beginner, and it was quite difficult in the Normal level. But eventually, despite it seeming impossible, we made it through...and this process proceeded through four levels of difficulty. It was perfect, in that there was always a challenge available even though our skills improved a great deal over the course of playing the game. And, of course, it didn't take all that long to play any individual course, so we could try a lot of times, even if we only improved a bit each time, and eventually end up a lot better.

There are right ways and wrong ways to make a game more difficult, of course, and unfortunately more of the latter than the former. Time limits often fall into the latter category; there's nothing more frustrating than doing really well and knowing you would have had no problem winning, except that you run into an arbitrary time limit. I don't mean to say that all time limits are bad; indeed, often they provide just the right degree of challenge to a game. But sometimes it seems that time limits are just used as a crutch by designers to artificially add difficulty, and this can be more than a little aggravating. Computer cheating is another obvious example; to pick the most heinous example I can think of, in the old Nintendo version of Super Off-Road (my favorite game in the arcade, back in those days), there were just certain races that you could never win, because the computer would just go much faster than you could ever hope to go. A slightly less-obvious instance of bad ways to make a game difficult are "instant loss" scenarios, where you can be doing excellently overall, but if you carelessly let a certain unit get destroyed, or accidentally go into the wrong place, or whatever, you instantly are defeated. Saves can help to avoid most of the damage from these, but if you design the game so that when you instantly lose you can restore from a save, what the heck is the point of having the instant losses in the first place?!

All right, now for the self-contradictory part. I suppose this part of my philosophy can be summarized as "lose quickly, but win slowly". To me, there are few things more frustrating than spending a large amount of time going through a game, only to discover at the end that I lost, and not only that I had lost, but that there was really no point I could go back to to reverse my decline, but rather that I had pretty much been doomed from near the beginning, so that I had to go allll the way back to the beginning and start over again. Again, this ties in with the whole "don't want to repeat myself a lot if it's a lot of time" thing from above; if at the beginning, I quickly lose, that's no big deal, since then I can go back and correct what I did wrong. But if the feedback cycle is that much longer, then it's much less effective. On the other hand, a very serious problem in many Civ-type games (at least at the levels which I can handle!) is that the game is essentially decided in your favor very early on, and the large portion of the rest of the game is just spent mopping up the remnants or doing whatever tasks you have to do to ensure your victory. (Admittedly, this problem is exacerbated by my perfectionist nature, where I'm not content just conquering the world/galaxy/universe, but have to make sure I colonize each planet, or whatever. But even still, even if that weren't the case, there's often a lot of dead time after you can tell who the winner is.)

Unfortunately, these two goals are somewhat at odds; after all, if there's a certain point after which I don't want to lose, then it means that everything after that part is meaningless, since I'll win, right? Well, the trick to resolving this paradox (and you might see it, too, if I tell you that I initially phrased this part of my philosophy as "lose early, but win late", before realizing the problem in this statement) is that it's okay to lose in the late stages of the game, but it should be possible, even when you lose late, to go back not too far and still have a fighting chance at winning the thing, rather than having to start all the way over from the beginning. Not lose instantly, of course; as you might have seen above, I have a great deal of dislike for that concept, but just something that won't require that much to undo.

4) You should always know what you did wrong when you fail. This is one of the things that frustrates me about the Sim series of games -- sometimes it seems like you've built a perfect city, or planet, or golf course, or whatever, and yet people still aren't coming, and you don't know how to fix it. (Between this comment and my comment in (1), it might seem like I dislike the Sim games a lot more than I do. This is not entirely true -- I played the original SimCity into the ground -- but I'll admit that I couldn't get into SimCity 2000, pretty much exactly for this reason.) This is hardly limited to this particular instance; for example, in racing games, sometimes I'll feel like I've run the perfect race and yet I'll still lose, and it's not at all clear what I need to do in order to not lose. (This is why computer cheating, aside from the obvious reasons, is particularly wicked -- if the computer is just flat-out better than you, then sometimes it's hard to see what you can do to beat it, especially if that requires something devious or underhanded.)

To tie this back into the big picture (and mix metaphors while I'm at it), like I said, one of my favorite things is improving my skills to defeat a challenge I couldn't initially overcome. If I can't actually see how to improve my skills, then I'm at a loss, and more often than not will wander off to something else.

5) Good graphics or sound or plot will not make up for bad gameplay. But the converse is true: good gameplay can make up for a variety of sins. I know I've expounded on this at length to most people who care, so I won't bother belaboring the point, especially since it is pretty obvious, after all. But this is why I still enjoy some classic Nintendo games: sure, the graphics and sound might be terrible, but some of them are still fundamentally fun games to play. I certainly don't oppose good graphics and sound; other things being equal, I'll certainly be glad to have them, and they can elevate a game from really good to the pantheon of great games, but they alone cannot save a bad game.

I know that David will disagree with the "plot" part; he plays Final Fantasy games essentially for the story, with the game really the secondary part of the experience. I, however, can't do that (especially since who's able to follow the typical Square story anyway?).

6) Make the burden on the player light when you're beginning (but it's certainly okay -- in fact, really necessary, if you want your game to have any degree of complexity -- to increase it as time goes on). I suppose this is just another way of saying "easy to learn, hard to master", though I had something more specific in mind. Heroes 2 is one of my favorite games -- and in my opinions, one of the best games ever -- but it does have a significant disadvantage: while it's easy enough to pick up the basics of the game, it's very important, even very early on, to be able to assess the relative strengths of armies, and this requires a great amount of detailed knowledge about the individual units. The game does considerately provide a quick reference card containing this exact information, but it's still suboptimal to have to consult this card time and again until you've reached the point where you've learned enough about the units not to have to constantly look at it.

The same applies to a lot of interface decisions, too. For example, in a typical RTS, you don't have to learn the hotkeys for each unit and building at the beginning; at the outset, you can just click on them, until you can learn the hotkeys and use them instead. This process is also generally facilitated by the fact that once you've learned the names of the buildings, the hotkeys are usually pretty intuitively obvious. (Actually, this is a gripe I have about Warcraft 3 -- it seems like they've gone to maximal effort to make everything start with the same letter. I keep wanting to build a Burrow and nearly building a Barracks instead, until I notice that it's the wrong size, and I have several times built a Barracks when I meant to build a Bestiary. But I digress.)

Fortunately, games have gotten a lot better at this over the years, in that most complicated games will gradually break you in by starting out with limited units or buildings or whatever available and gradually expanding them over time; it's been a long time since there's been a game for which I've had to read a substantial amount of the manual before beginning, and I hope I won't have to deal with such a game in the future either.

And now, if you've made it this far...
7) Use saves wisely. This is a pretty wishy-washy statement, so let me expand on it further. I've often expressed my view that the modern ability to save your game pretty much anywhere, any time, as opposed to never (in most Nintendo games) or at least only at infrequent times and places, has done a lot to make games a lot less interesting than before. On the other hand, saves are to some extent a necessary evil; after all, they're pretty much a sine qua non for any kind of extended sports game, and (as I remarked above in my "lose quickly, win slowly" comments) for an extended strategy game they're essential to be able to provide a challenge without making said challenge excessively frustrating.

The point at which I find saves problematic is when you end up saving before every single thing that you do, so that if it turns out wrong, you can just restore from the save. This is fundamentally silly, since it takes the game and completely reduces it into a series of disjointed separate challenges. How can you combat this problem? Well, you have 3 choices, as I see it: (a) Make each challenge easy, so that the player has no incentive to save. Well, this works, in a sufficiently trivial sense, but it also makes the whole game not all that challenging. This is definitely not the greatest solution, though it's one I've unfortunately seen more than once. (b) Prevent the player from saving all the time. As my words above might have implied, I think that this is generally a good thing, and definitely necessary in some cases (how would that aforementioned penultimate stage of Mega Man 2 be if you could save after each boss, for example? Extraordinarily pointless. Its challenge derives not from the difficulty of the individual tasks, but from the collective difficulty of doing them all decently well in one try.) In a game which is relatively easily divided up into individual tasks, this seems like the optimal solution -- don't allow people to save in the middle of a single task, but rather force them to master the entire task before proceeding. However, not all games easily lend themselves to this kind of division (how can you do this in Starcraft, for example?) So this brings us to: (c) Decrease the price of losing. This is actually a broader point worth making -- but I'm exhausted by this juncture, and so, probably, are you -- so I'll just say that the best way to prevent people from running back to the nearest save when they suffer a minor setback is to make sure that that minor setback isn't all that terrible. For instance, in Starcraft, if my attack force gets annihilated, I don't feel the need to immediately go back, because it's not that big a deal -- I can always build another attack force. This is one of the major things that distinguishes Civilization 1 from its successors, for example -- in Civ 1, if I'm way ahead, if I'm careless and the enemy sacks one of my cities, suddenly they can start building tanks and use them against me, so in defense I'm forced to save all the time to ensure that this doesn't happen. In Alpha Centauri, by contrast, if I lose a city, no big deal -- they can't get anything too far above their current technology level, so I can just work on getting it back without having to worry too much about the consequences.

All right. There's probably more to be said here (especially linearity and nonlinearity), but I think I'm best off saving it for another time.

Taking the scenic route
For a person like me, getting lost (assuming there's no one else there to be annoyed, and assuming you don't particularly have to be anywhere) can actually be a fun activity. It's essentially a puzzle, and solving it requires intuition (which is often wrong), knowledge (which is obviously imperfect), and sometimes the ability to follow signs (which are nowhere near commonplace enough to be useful).

Today, after dropping Joon off at Stanford, I realized I needed to get gas, but figured I would be much better off doing so in Fremont instead of in Palo Alto. So after crossing the Dumbarton, I continued past 880 in search of a gas station, and wandered a bit before reaching one (which was in fact much cheaper than it would have been in Palo Alto). After leaving, I decided to head in the direction which I thought I had come from, figuring that although it wasn't the same road, I would get to the freeway soon enough. Well, as it turned out (as I later learned by playing with Yahoo! Maps), in my wanderings, one of the streets I was on had curved 90 degrees, so that the direction I thought was west and back to the freeway was actually south (actually, closer to southwest and southeast, really). So, after driving for a while, and thinking "Hey, this seems like longer than it took to get here, maybe I'm going the wrong way", I was elated to find a freeway, except for the slight detail that it was 680. So, this time the puzzle beat me, although not critically so (although I did lament my lost time limping back to 880, which I also did the long way, via 238), but it was still an interesting challenge.

Hey, an actual baseball post
I haven't posted about baseball in a while, partly still from post-World Series letdown, partly because I don't want to bore my audience, and partly because there hasn't been that much to say, but I have to say this: the more I learn about the Mike Hampton trade, the more outraged I am.

Here's a recap of the facts, for those of you not familiar with them (i.e. 67% of my known audience; Matt, you can skip these next 5 paragraphs): In 1999, Mike Hampton established himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League; after several above-average seasons, in 1999 he posted a 22-4 record with a 2.90 ERA, and was probably the second-best pitcher in the league to Randy Johnson (at least according to the Cy Young voting, and to BP's SNWL figures). 2000 was his contract year, and the Astros didn't think they could keep him, and so he was traded to the Mets in the offseason, where he struggled a bit, going only 15-10, but still had an ERA of 3.14 and was easily still in the top 10 pitchers in the league. Naturally, then, he was one of the most-prized free agents in the market, and in a surprise to a lot of observers (myself included), he ended up signing an 8-year, $121-million contract with the Rockies.

If it had been any other team, I would have thought the investment worthwhile, if risky (after all, any 8-year contract is going to be risky); but Coors Field, because of its elevation, is murder on pitchers; no pitcher has pitched there effectively for an extensive amount of time. Their last big free agent pitcher, Darryl Kile, had posted excellent numbers before his trip to Coors, and when the Rockies traded him away, he went back to being an excellent pitcher, but his mile-high stay produced some decidedly unpretty entries in his pitching ledger. Apparently the Rockies hoped that he could be an exception to the trend (and some people thought he would have a chance, since he is an extreme groundball pitcher), but he was not; in 2001 he was 14-13 with a 5.41 ERA -- not as bad as it looks in Coors, but still hardly great, and in 2002 he regressed further, going 7-15, 6.15. It was clear at this point that the $120-million contract was going to be a rather large albatross, and so the Rockies certainly wanted to trade him, but who's going to take on such a huge contract for a pitcher whose reputation has been damaged?

Well, this offseason, the Rockies were able to answer that question, swapping Hampton to the Marlins for Charles Johnson and Preston Wilson, a pair of similarly bad contracts (5 years/$35M and 5 years/$32M, respectively, both ending in 2005), and some other minor entities (on both sides of the trade). The Rockies benefited from the deal in that they got a couple of players whose performance will be aided, rather than hurt, by playing at elevation, and they got out of their financial commitments three years earlier than they would otherwise. Even though the Rockies apparently agreed to pay about $11 million of Hampton's salary (plus $19 million more from a deferred signing bonus), it's not unreasonable to call it a win on their side of the ledger.

The Marlins, on the other hand, while they got someone who's likely to be a fine pitcher again with his return to sea level, didn't have the payroll room to take on Hampton, either. So, they moved him along to the Braves for Tim Spooneybarger. Spooneybarger is a perfectly decent reliever, and the Marlins may try to move him into the closer spot if they get tired of the other attractive-looking trade acquisitions they've tried in the spot (e.g. Braden Looper, Vladimir Nunez), but assuming that Hampton reverts to anywhere near his old form (an assumption I'll be making throughout; if you disbelieve this assumption, then my outrage is a little less justified, but I see no good reason to), his value will be far, far greater than Spooneybarger's.

Still, the Marlins get out from the contracts they were looking to get out of, and they at least get something, so it couldn't have been a total loss for them, could it? Well, I was willing to accept that, until I saw that the Braves were able to get the Marlins to pay $38 million of Hampton's contract, so that the Braves were responsible for only $35.5 million themselves. (Numbers courtesy of this ESPN article; for full details on Hampton's contract, see here.) That's right, the Marlins are paying $38 million for a pitcher who will never play for them. In fact, the $12.7 million a year that that works out to is greater than the Marlins have ever paid to a person who actually did play for them. Or, to put it a different way, the Marlins were more willing to pay more than half of their commitment to Hampton and have him not pitch for him than they were willing to pay the whole share and have him pitch for them.

So, why the outrage? Dave Pease, over in BP, makes a pretty good argument that we shouldn't necessarily consider the Marlins Big Losers in this trade, because it's not like in the absence of the trade, the Marlins wouldn't have been stuck with any bad contracts. They were stuck with Johnson's and Wilson's contracts to begin with, and given that as a starting point, they're still better off than if they had just done nothing (though, obviously, not better off than if they hadn't signed the bad contracts at the outset). But I think this misses the reason so many people look at this trade really suspiciously. My complaint is that the Braves get a pitcher who is likely to be a very excellent pitcher for a very, very low price (in fact, you'll notice that they're paying less for Hampton's services than the Marlins are paying to avoid Hampton's services), simply because they're in a position to take advantage of the fact that the Marlins are that desperate to avoid paying Hampton's full value.

In football and basketball, we see a lot of odd trades forced by the salary cap, where a team will often give away good players for essentially nothing just to clear up salary cap room. That's not all that different from what we have here, when the Marlins are giving up good players just to clear financial space. But what irks me is who benefits from these trades. In football and basketball, it's the teams who have the most salary-cap space to begin with. That might be arbitrary, in some sense of the word, but it is ultimately fair, in that all teams start with the same amount of salary-cap space, and so if you have less than other teams, it's your own fault, so to speak. But here, the Braves are the beneficiary not because they're wisely managed or because they've cleverly accumulated salary-cap space for such a contingency, but simply because they have more money at hand. And that's bound to make a lot of people, myself included, unhappy.

(I'll withhold my annoyed comments about the Yankees pursing Colon for now.)

My least favorite kind of weather
...is today's. Dark and cold, but not really the coldness...it's the wind, so loud you can hear it even inside, sending the leaves skittering across the streets. It's the last which gives me such a profound feeling of emptiness; everything is so dead outside, just being tossed by the merciless wind.

Make your own metaphor.

The sick man of American politics
I'm not entirely convinced that the Democratic party will exist, at least not in the form that we know it, 20 years from now.

People always talk about how American politics are inherently two-party, and I certainly can't argue with the historical record there, but it's also true that those two parties have not been constant over the years. Admittedly, the Dems and Reps have been with us since the end of the Civil War, but even then, they've shifted to occupy different positions on the political spectrum than they did in 1865. Thus, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that another such change would be possible.

Why do I have this opinion? Simple. The Republican Party has essentially dominated political discourse for the past 34 years or so. It's seemed like, as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been fighting a rear-guard action to try to hold back the tide of Republican policy, rather than being able to discuss the issues on their side of the table. Even in the brief interlude in 1992-94 when the Democrats were able to talk about things like national health care and gays in the military, they accomplished depressingly little, being torn apart by their own fractiousness. And those issues are no longer part of the national discourse: health care is a taboo subject these days, and "don't ask, don't tell" is firmly entrenched in policy. I certainly don't see this changing any time soon, except for that rear-guard action becoming more and more ineffectual as the money and media, the ultimate determiners of the victor, continue to tilt to the right. And I haven't even begun to discuss the deleterious effects of the Greens on the party.

Sometimes it seems like the party is only still alive because, like the Ottoman Empire (did you catch the reference at the top?), there's nothing immediately available to replace it. Ralph Nader's dreams aside, there's no way the Greens will ever be a viable party at the national level. Look, the very name of the party is immediately going to alienate the half of the electorate who thinks environmental issues should be subordinate to other concerns, and that's hardly a great foundation to build a national party on. The Green party certainly will continue to show strength in isolated pockets, but that strength is deceptive, since there are still great swaths of the country where the Greens know that there's no point in bothering to run. Barring an unprecedented sea change in American politics, it'll never happen.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the politics of the first half of the 20th century to discuss whether a role reversal between the parties can occur again. (If only I could get Mark Staloff to read this...) My intuitive answer is to say no, but then again, I'll bet if you traveled back to 1876 and asked a random political observer if he expected that the parties would end up like they are now, he'd probably think you were crazy. Again, I can't see it happening without a major external trigger; though I have no particular desire to live through a Great Depression of my own, I don't think it's completely implausible, either.

As Perot and Ventura have demonstrated, the wellspring of self-identified centrists dissatisfied with both major parties is quite a deep one, so I suppose the most plausible scenario is the appearance of a similar candidate who manages to secure a surprising victory. I don't find the victory part hard to believe at all; after all, Ventura did manage to do it (yeah, yeah, there's a difference between the gubernatorial and presidential level, I know). It's the question of what comes afterwards. To put it delicately, Ventura and Perot are difficult people to build a party around (after all, the efforts to construct a national Reform party have not really gotten all that far); to put it less delicately, they're both pretty much wackos. But of course, you have to be a little bit crazy to try running a third-party campaign in today's climate to begin with, so we have a true Catch-22.

Thus, I find it implausible that a third-party candidate would win and then be able to construct a new party apparatus from the ground up after winning. Nor do I think the grassroots, bottom-up approach is likely to meet with much success either, since I can't see how such a party could ever find the resources to mount a national campaign. But the scenario I can see happening is a third-party candidate (possibly a Democrat who bolted the party after a bitter primary struggle...) gaining a large number of Democratic defections after election and thus inheriting a large chunk of the party already constructed, and building a viable platform from that. And remember, you heard it here first.

(Okay, you probably didn't. But could you claim that you did, anyway? Please?)

So much bleeding to do...
But nowhere to do it, really. Certainly not here.

Nitpick of the moment
In movies (excepting foreign films, of course), there's always a convention that the characters will speak in English, no matter what language they "actually" speak; it's just implicit that somewhere along the line this has been magically translated into English for our benefit, even though (say) Russian submarine officers obviously would speak to each other in Russian. The one exception to this is, of course, when they want to say something that the hero won't understand, and then they suddenly do speak in Russian, perhaps with subtitles.

Now, Kenneth has bequeathed to me some science fiction anthologies, which I've been sporadically reading. Since they're nominally "best of"-type anthologies, they do somewhat better than Sturgeon's Law, but the quality still has a pretty wide variation.

Wait, I'm getting somewhere with this. So one of the stories makes a big deal about using a base-8 number system, explaining it and all of the associated units in one of the more clunky expositions you'll see. And yet, on the same page as this clunky exposition, the numbers "999" and "ninety" are both used. But in base 8, there is no such number as "9". In fact, I could even argue that there's no such number as "8", either, which (as you might expect) is strewn all over the story. It's like the autotranslator kicks in, but only when the author remembers to stick it in. And because of this carelessness, whenever I see "10", I have to wonder: does he mean 10 base 10, or 10 base 8 (that is, 8)? In fact, you could argue that if it were really in a base-8 system, they would refer to it as base 10, since any numerical system in its own base will be "base 10". (That is, if we had grown up hexadecimal, would base 10 be base 10? No. It'd be base A.)

Oh, and the actual story benefit of having this wonderful, exciting different number system? Nothing at all, of course. All it is is a chance for the author to show off his knowledge of sixth-grade math, at the expense of making the reader think a little harder to figure out just what the heck is going on. Grumble, grumble.

Sign #1
...that you've been playing DDR too much:

In Mike's car, I was listening to the tape deck, and closed my eyes for a moment. Immediately, step patterns came into my mind.

On the bright side, I am significantly improving, but I still have a long way to go.

Pow.
So I watched Punch-Drunk Love today with Juliana. I have to say, it's been a long time since a movie has made me feel so profoundly uncomfortable. It's not that it was bad, at least by objective standards; it just engendered a strong sense of discomfort. Let me try to explain why.

Everyone is screwed up in their own ways, me included; it's part of the human condition, after all. But seeing someone who has serious issues, like Sandler's character does, triggers in me a primordial fear, a worry that I'm really more screwed-up than average and just don't realize it. And, in a sense, it reverses the normal defense mechanism -- instead of me saying "well, it's okay, because everyone is like this to some extent", the movie essentially presents "well, here's a guy who has some of these same traits, and he's obviously not okay".

But, of course, the kicker is that his screwed-up-ness just happens to be exactly the right tool for the job, so to speak. While mine isn't. Or if it is, it's sure not doing a good job revealing that fact.