Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the games category.
Bring ‘em back!
As it’s Saturday I decided to have a library-free day, which in practice simply meant that I read outside rather than indoors. I have reached the Middle Ages with my research reading which is somewhat closer to the present day than what I read at Emory but still pretty far out in terms of everyday relevance – so it was refreshing to read some essays and articles from (and about) this century for a change.
One of the first things that caught my attention was this piece from National Geographic, which tells how scientists are getting close to cloning extinct species – trying to construct a mammoth out of an elephant DNA and such. This all evokes a lot of Jurassic Park themes, but the idea what struck me was that once something like this is possible why would anyone feel limited to simply recreating extinct species? Why not start from scratch? This way we could end up in places a lot more interesting and, in many ways scarier, than Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In addition to a short-lived Tamagochi craze, there have been computer games around for years that allow players to breed their own pets, at the level of rather simple crossing of virtual cats in Petz to tinkering with the DNA of “norns” in the cult game Creatures and seeing what comes out of it. Think of a lego set for grown men in white coats with the medieval bestiary was an inspirational manual. Or indeed, as the NG article also concludes – where do you draw the line, given that the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA is less than 1%? If you approach the DNA piecemeal, what can you use and what exactly remains off limits, as something surely has to unless we will want to end up with people bringing back their extinct grandmothers.
New Bookforum is out and there’s an article on Africa’s new literary boom – a topic that has interested me for a while. There seems to be a great deal of worthwile reading coming out of the continent in the wake of what would count as already “established authors” such as Achebe, Soyinka, Okri and Gordimer. This reminds me that today I also finished reading a book called Bazaar of the Idiots by Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal which was great fun along the lines of his famous fellow Columbian writer – and goes to further prove the point that it actually pays to dig a bit deeper than the front line of acclaimed writers of any given country or period. I will probably did write about it some lines in Varrak’s book blog.
Then, in terms of at least somewhat local news, it turns out that May is a National Masturbation Month in the United States – a tradition (a month, not masturbation) that apparently began in 1995 in San Fransisco. America doesn’t seem to cease amazing me.
GTA goes marxist
There is an interesting review of GTA (that’s Grand Theft Auto for those of you who use computers for working) IV on Open Letters Monthly website. GTA has long been one of the most successful video game franchises and has made headlines with both its innovative way of mixing different game genres as well as its violence and adult themes – which has made it hugely popular among adults as well as adolescents and children. It is probably also as close as you can get to a true crossover phenomenon – in addition to what seems to be pretty solid scripting, GTA features names such as Michael Madsen, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Penn, Kyle MacLachlan, Ray Liotta and many others in its cast of voice actors.
The article above, however, is first and foremost concerned the social commentary that the fourth installment of the game provides. It seems to play on similar kind of alienation and paranoia that was evident in latest Batman movie or Watchmen and features several interesting choices – such as casting its protagonist as an immigrant and therefore providing an outsider’s view of the game’s playground: USA. And in doing this, it doesn’t offer any easy and clear-cut choices between good and evil.
This all makes me actually want to try it out (I have a very limited experience with GTA from several years ago). The only thing I’m really worried about is that since many characters seem to be of Russian origin this would probably mean having to endure hours and hours of less-than-subtle dialogues in fake russian accents.
Just pick any
Randomness, a very basic and simple concept to grasp on abstract terms, has long proven very elusive and difficult to nail down in practice. Although the practical difficulties rose to prominence with problems related to first attempts to produce random numbers on computers, the issue itself has been known already for millennia. Aristotle referred to this as the situation when a choice is to be made which has no logical component by which to determine or make the choice – which later developed into a parable of a donkey and two haystacks. At first glance it is all very simple – if asked to pick a random number it wouldn’t strike any of us as such a difficult task at all. However, as soon as you ask a question “how”, the whole issue suddenly becomes a very thorny one. And – as all the computer scientists know too well – “just pick any” is a lot easier said than actually done.
Randomness by definition lacks structure and meaning and therefore also cannot be created by application of any kind of algorithm or procedure. Anyone even considering this would, in famous words of John von Neumann, be in a state of sin. We humans seem to be extremely good in spotting all kinds of patterns and structures – indeed, this seems to be the way how we make sense of the world - to the point that we appear to be quite incapable of being random even if we truly wanted to.
If you still think that “just picking any” is an easy thing then read on. Most of us, if not all, have played rock-paper-scissors (also known as roshambo) in our childhoods. Although the game itself is deceptively easy, it is not hard at all to get soundly beaten in it by an experienced opponent. You can take a look at a page of simple pointers to winning in roshambo at the World RPS society website. So, given all this, how does one avoid being beaten?
It doesn’t take much mathematical sophistication to figure out an optimal way to play the game – as there are only three choices available, and both opponents making the same choice results in a draw, the answer is that it doesn’t matter what you do as long it is random. Just pick any: rock, paper or scissors. However, therein lies the catch: if you DON’T pick “any”, if you don’t play randomly, you’re no more playing optimally, and are therefore open to being exploited in ways that were described in the link above.
And as it turns out, humans are remarkably poor in making deliberately random picks – even if we earnestly try, our choices are influenced by the choices we made in the past, in addition to symbolic biases (such as marked preference to pick “rock” as an opening choice and significant underweight of “scissors” in all choices). In a recent study 241 participants played 100 games each against the computer following their biases and adjusting its strategy accordingly (you can find the details in the article “Winning at Rock-Paper-Scissors” by Derek Eyler, Zach Shalla, Andrew Doumaux, and Tim McDevitt, The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, March 2009, pp. 125-128). In the end, computer ended up winning 42.1%, losing 27.7% and tying 30.2% of individual games, which is significantly better result than playing random. If you think you’ve got what it takes (after all, you only need to “pick any”), give it a shot.
And, if getting beaten by a silly program starts getting on your nerves, challenge a friend or a colleague and teach them a lesson! Or you can try this to play a round of roshambo with me.
What the hell?!
Apparently Electronic Arts, one of the world’s leading video game producers, is gearing up for the release of a new action adventure game that is based on the first cantiche of Dante’s Commedia – Inferno. The aficionados of medieval poetry are bound to get upset by the news – and indeed, at first thought it is difficult to imagine how could Dante’s allegorical masterpiece possibly be converted into a video game format without a major butchery. The trailer has a distinctive Lord-of-the-Ringish feel which will probably further deepen the suspicion that the end result will not be up to the notch. The Divine Comedy has became one of the central and sacred texts of the Western literary culture – something to be awed by, studied and treasured, looked but not touched. Commedia is kind of a perfect example, something that can’t be improved and every attempt to translate it to another medium, such as prose for example, will inevitably leave out something fundamentally important. And even if it wasn’t Dante – there is a fair amount of general scepticism in whether video games are intrinsically suitable for conveying anything but the most primitive of narratives. Also, there is certainly not much in terms of successful examples of great works of literature having been successfully converted into video games – or vice versa, for that matter.
This led me to approach the same issue from the other end – the so-called adventure games actually do have a genre of sorts. Of course, it depends on what exactly does one consider as “adventure games” – I think most would agree that Indiana Jones’ series rightfully belong there, while I would personally be hesitant qualifying Tomb Raider as such. Also, many MMORPG-s draw heavily from the original adventure game genre while doing away with the scripted storyline for the most part (in-game quests or missions being an important exception here). And then there are the likes of Myst or Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.
However, if I were to try and bring one analogy from the literature in order to summarise what adventure games are like, I would probably pick bildungsroman. Adventure games are usually in third person (although many also allow first person perspective, if not for anything else then for combat parts) and usually consist of more than just a string of puzzles – they are about character development. At their best, adventure games have actually came pretty close to literature in creating both the narrative and the ambience - Benoît Sokal’s Syberia is probably the best example of this, but there are several others. Best adventure games employ clear stylistic elements – Syberia draws from steampunk, Max Payne from film noir and hard-boiled detective genre, Silent Hill from horror, etc. And while I must agree that so far I haven’t came across a computer game with a story-line remotely as gripping as a good novel can be, there is a lot more to good literature than gripping plots – or even plots in general, as Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma demonstrates. So maybe it is not the problem of video games after all. At the time when Lumière brothers screened their first short movies about workers leaving the factory or train arriving at the station it was no doubt difficult to imagine how could that medium ever tell a gripping emotional story or be a form of high art.
All that being said – The Divine Comedy is certainly a challenge on many different levels. In that regard I’d say that Don Quixote would have been much safer a bet. It remains to be seen whether the project will prove successful, and, even more interestingly, SHOULD it prove successful shall it have a sequel – Dante’s Commedia certainly has a potential for that. A video game based on Paradiso – now that would be really interesting, although I’d be ready to lay my money on the fact that it will be a complete flop in commercial terms.
