Creating Electronic Marrow

Research-wise, my focus of late is still on videogame instruction manuals. And the most recent one has been the manual for the 2000 videogame classic, The Sims. Certain traits become apparent after you've examined a dozen or so of these manuals. For example, the longer than manual, the fewer images it uses, especially for PC games. And despite having the budget of the mighty EA behind them, The Sims is less an exception to this rule than its exemplar--aside from the cover image, the only images you get are cropped shots illustrating some piece of text. And there is a lot of text: the manual is over 90 pages long (90 very detailed pages, which in itself says something about the real nature of casual gaming--this "casual game" is really, really complicated.) But it does its best to keep the reader's interest, mainly through a constant stream of reasonably well-written, often eye-rolling, and sometimes head-scratching jokes. So, without further ado, here are the top ten quotations from the Sims Instruction Manual.

1. “The tutorial is just an appetiser: To get to the real meat (or cheese sandwich, for you vegetarians) of the game, you have to investigate the Soul of a Sim/Daily Life section of this manual. Hey, you don't think we wrote them just because we love the alphabet, do you? Check out that information and make some Sims your parents would be proud of. And if you make some that they'd be horrified by, tell 'em your sister did it.” I thought I'd start off with a baffling one. What does that alphabet thing even mean?

2. “Remember, if you choose to quit, you have to return to your regular life, where your family members won't do your bidding like Sims do. Are you sure?”
That is the chief difference between my Sims life and my real Life. That, and my real life career as an international jewel thief hasn't taken off. Yet.

3.“However, just as in human life, these are the kinds of challenges that make life interesting. And miserable as well. Here's to interesting misery!”
Interesting misery would make a good band name. For a gothy/hispterish sort of band.

4. “if you attempt the really high household counts (between six and eight), you're probably no longer eating right or bathing in your real home. (You can still tell the difference between your real home and your Sims' home, right?)”
They're very worried about distinguishing the real world from the game world. It's a real problem these days, what with all the plumber on turtle assaults you read about in the paper.

5. "This section... attempts to answer the question Freud would have posed if he were alive today: 'What do Sims really want?'"
Well, someone on the writing staff knows his stuff. Feel free to draw the conclusions you'd like in comparing women to Sims--especially considering that Sims are portrayed as less-than-human, easily controllable versions of the real thing. Yikes.

6. “Click on the High or Ultra speed settings if you want to accelerate game actions to achieve a certain goal, like getting the gal off to work so the guy can play video games in peace.”
And while we're on the subject of gender, here's another crowd-pleaser.


7. “If you want to place a few of the same items without having to return to the panel, just hold down the Shift key after you select your trinket—you can put 20 grandpa clocks in a row, if you've got time on your hands.”
That is an amazing pun, in both its groan-inducing awfulness, and the effort the writer had to go to in order to make it fit.

8. “If you're just beginning a game in an unfurnished home, you need to cover the basics first. Think eat, sleep, poop, and polish.”
This one works in real life, too.

9. “WINNING THE GAME. Don't be absurd. This is a Maxis game! What's to win? You and your Sims can play unto perpetuity, getting them into all kinds of entanglements and trying to get them out. Before you know it, it'll be 3A.M. your time, and you don't even have your teeth brushed...”
You heard them. This game is an insidious plot to turn us all into Sims.

10. “A balustrade always offers a refined touch on a staircase or balcony, and if you use 'balustrade' in conversation, all your friends will think you're ever, so, so---so pretentious, so don't even try it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

What was your favorite Simism? Do you have fond memories of guiding whole families to their doom? Do let us know in the comments.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Clockwork Pirhannas

It's time, once again, for another round of judging books by their covers. Or rather, titles.

Iron Jaws: The Killing Power of Civil War Artillery.
I like that title-- "Iron Jaws." The Civil War stuff I could take or leave, but the idea of a giant shark made out of metal appeals to me. Steam-punk fish FTW.

One Breath: A Personal Journey with Asthma.
As someone who can barely breathe in the morning until he has his daily puff (If you haven't experienced this, it's essentially the same feeling that motivates "I NEED Coffee," with a slight but persistent fear that you might accidentally die before you get it.

Truth in numbers?: everything, according to Wikipedia.
A documentary on all things Wikipedian. Apparently, it delves into the ethics of the wiki-founder, Jimmy Wales--though it was facing accusations of being out of date almost since its inception.

Do the gods wear capes? : spirituality, fantasy, and superheroes. by Ben Saunders.
A philosophy book on super heroes? Sign me up.

Surfing life: surface, substructure and the commodification of the sublime. By Mark Stranger.
A consumer-based study of surfing? Finally, something that can shed new light on Point Break.

Selling sex short : the pornographic and sexological construction of women’s sexuality in the West. by Meagan Tyler.
I like books that look into how we make these categories for sex. That, or I'm a dirty old grad student. Take your pick.

Joss Whedon : conversations. A compilation of interviews from Joss Whedon. The perfect gift for someone who really, really liked Firefly.

Approximate Continuum Comics. By Lewis Trondheim.
I've been following Trondheim ever since I came across the Dungeon comics. He's a French comic book writer who combines cartoonish creatures (usually anthropomorphized ducks) with slice-of-life reflections. I think this book is an autobiography.

Beard fetish in early modern England : sex, gender, and registers of value. by Mark Albert Johnston.
There should be more books on beards.

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers. by Robert C. Martin.
It might be interesting, in terms of what it will say on the social side of a rather tech-based profession.

Epigenetics : a reference manual. by Jeffrey Craig.
I originally read this title as "Eugenics," and was momentarily startled. But no; it appears that "Epigenetics" refers to the study of changes to genes that can be passed on, but don't alter the actual composition of DNA.

Winged obsession : the pursuit of the world’s most notorious butterfly smuggler. By Jessica Speart.
How often do you see "notorious" and "butterfly smuggler" in the same sentence?

Okay, this turned out to be a much longer exercise than I thought. A lot of good books this time around--and a lot of holds on good books. I think all the librarians may know me by sight at this point.

Later Days.

Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

"Most online games of the day generated revenue by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access. GSS only charged a onetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, for which you received a lifetime OASIS account. The ads all used the same tagline: The OASIS--it's the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter.
"At a time of drastic social and cultural upheaval, when most of the world's population longed for an escape from reality, the OASIS provided it, in a form that was cheap, legal, safe, and not (medically proven to be) addictive. The ongoing energy crisis contributed greatly to the OASIS's runaway popularity. The skyrocketing cost of oil made airline and automobile travel too expensive for the average citizen, and the OASIS became the only getaway most people could afford. As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus. Every day, more and more people had reason to seek solace inside Halliday and Morrow's virtual utopia." -- Ready Player One.

Join me, if you will, as I try to pursue that most elusive of blog posts, the short book review. I think this quotation demonstrates the basic plot: as global conditions worsen in the near future, we'll all retreat to virtual worlds. It's Second Life gone global, with a dose of Matrix-level VR. The catch is that OASIS' founder James Halliday was obsessed with 80s pop culture--Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, video games. And when he passed, he left behind a challenge--anyone who could solve his 80s-themed riddles and puzzles would get his controlling share in OASIS. Thus, we have the plot: teenaged geek boy Wade Watt sets out (with some help from his friends/rivals) to unravel the mystery. And against him are the employees of Innovative Online Industries, the heartless conglomerate that will throw any amount of money or kill anyone necessary to get control themselves. (Note to any benevolent billionaires who wish to put odd inheritance clauses in their wills--in general, you should probably add provisions to keep people whose business practices are your exact moral opposite out of the competition.)

Thus, the book is an unusual combination of future thinking scifi and nostalgia-based 80s pop culture. And there is a LOT of stuff on videogames--the opening chapter has one of the most in-depth explanations of Robinett's easter egg in the Atari 2600 Adventure that I've ever read. So this should be right up my alley, right? Eh.... not so much, actually. As someone who was 7 when the 80s ended, most of my pop culture nostalgia is for the 90s--X-Men cartoons and Reboot and Sega Genesis, and so forth. Thanks to various research, I'm familiar with most of the stuff Kline's talking about. I know Joust, and the D&D Tomb of Horrors module, and the phone phreaks. But it's all academic knowledge for me; there's no personal attachment. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

What's more interesting to me is how the book is being marketed. The list of author recommendations on the back include Charlaine Harris, Terry Brooks, John Scalzi, and Patrick Rothfuss. So we're talking about a pretty hard push to get it to the audience that's reading the adult fantasy/sci-fi genre. Ready Player One is not really in that genre at all. I understand why it's promoting itself as that, given adult fans are the ones likely to favor the nostalgia factor. But it is, very much, a book from the\young adult fantasy/sci-fi genre. And despite the uniqueness of the trappings, it's a very typical YA format: teenager gathers friends, fights evil, grows up. It's Harry Potter, if Harry was into obscure 80s geek stuff rather than magic battles against the forces of evil.

Actually, that's not quite right; it doesn't remind me of Harry Potter so much as a YA Heinlein-penned book, such as the previously reviewed . They're both tales about a young male figures overcoming adversity (in fairly black and white conditions) and growing into independent adulthood. It's the difference that's interesting, because the difference between the two is the difference between Heinlein's 1950s, 60s version of what makes a boy into a man, and the modern equivalent today. Heinlein's figures need to become functionally independent, for example, and Wade's problem is largely the opposite. Starting off as a rather stereotypical shut-in, he slowly becomes more used to having friends in his life--he doesn't have to worry about setting himself apart from his parents, because they never had much impact on him to begin with. Similarly, Heinlein's boys to men come to occupy very traditional gender roles, with a slowly blossoming, era-appropriate relationship with a young woman, in a manner that solidifies the proper behavior for both. (This makes a sharp contrast with his adult material, such as Job: A Divine Comedy, which features the Church of the Divine Orgasm.) Wade is a boy interested in girls, but gender roles don't really concern him; he accepts homosexual relationships as readily as any other sorts, and falls quite thoroughly for a girl gamer who's largely his gaming equal--no shrinking violets here. The society of the future may be economically starved and generally impoverished, but at least we're not intolerant jerks. (The best example of the difference between now and then, though, is that there's a passage in Ready Player One where Halliday extols the virtues of masturbation. Not finding that in a 50s YA novel.)

Thematically, the book is about escapism, and doubly so. By centering on a sci-fi based creator that's obsessed with the 80s, the book has simultaneously a retreat to the past and future--anything to escape the now. Cline set himself a difficult task. How do you sell a YA story about moving into adulthood when so much of the plot is about glorifying the past? There are two choices--you either promote the past as better, which is rather defeatist, or you try to forge ahead, in which case you risk disrupting exactly what attracted readers in the first place. I think he strikes a nice balance between nostalgia and bildungromans, all in all. And Cline's pulled off a double audience: I'd recommend the book for both the Harry Potter adventure crowd, and those looking for an 80s nostalgia kick. It's a light, fast-moving story, and if that's what you're in the market for, it'll do fine.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Bigger than Orc Jesus?

"Only a handful of religious denominations have more members than World of Warcraft does. Given its supernatural symbolism, its engagement of the user's emotions, and the many hours each week members may participate, one could argue it has greater significance than all but a half dozen mainstream American denominations." (46)
William Sims Bainbridge and Wilma Alice Bainbridge, "Electronic Game Research Methodologies: Studying Religious Implications."

Later Days.

First you get the laptop, then you get the power, then you get the women

I've had a lot of trouble with technology over the years. I came across a prime example of this misfortune when I was dredging up posts for the 500th compilation--there was a period of about three weeks when the keyboard on my computer was so broken that I couldn't use the spacebar button. I'd copy a space from regular texts, then insert it in by first typing "*" and using a find and replace function to change them all. How well did that work? It*didn't*work*well.

And my dear computer, beloved as it was, really wasn't any better. Just prior to moving down here, the graphics card burnt out. With a bit of jury-rigging, I got the computer working again, but it wasn't the same. Without a graphic card, even the scrolling changes, as the screen can't process as fast as you're moving. And when you're focused on game studies, not being able to use a reasonable graphics card means that you can't play anything beyond 1997 or so.

Thus, I bit the bullet, and bought a laptop. The very same laptop I'm using now! Since I needed something capable of a bit of gaming, it's an overpowered behemoth Alienware thing that cost more money than I've ever paid for anything except tuition. And I have to say, despite my miserly, luddite streak, I love it. It's transformed where and when I can work. (and play for that matter, but it hasn't, in the two days I had it anyway, cut into work time) And thus, I go one step further into technological sophistication.

So it begins.
Later Days.

Does Not Compute

I rode home on the bus today. The bastion of public transport, the chariot of the people, the service for the masses. And so forth. And while traveling on the bus, juggling my reading with my new laptop (more on that later), I overhead a conversation between two undergraduates. One was adamant, even proud, that he had never, ever picked up a math midterm after it was marked. Why bother, he asked? His mark is posted online. The answers are posted online. The actual effort to go down to someone's office and pick it up was superfluous. (I'm paraphrasing. This particular undergraduate's vocabulary did not, I'm betting, contain "superfluous" in its regular listings.) The friend offered several counter-arguments:
-don't you want to know what you did wrong? Not really.
-But what about finding your mistakes, so you don't do them again? Fixing them at that point servers no purpose; he'd forget what he learned, since the class was moving on to something else. Made more sense to learn with the answer key when studying for the final.
-What if the mark was wrong? Well, arguing with the TAs never does any good.
-But what if they actually added it wrong? You could prove that much. Sure, but what are the odds of that happening? Why waste the effort?

It was at this point the bus reached my stop. And I'm glad it did, because I really, really didn't want to hear any more. You see, in my life before being an English grad student, I was a Math marker. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I was the best. Or one of the best. In my department. At that university. That I knew of. Marking math isn't like marking English, but the difference is really one of degree rather than kind. I imagine the popular conception is that English is subjective marking, and math isn't--there's one right answer. That can be the case. But just as often, your math marker is looking for either a written proof or shown work, and in either case, it becomes somewhat subjective. Is skipping the expansion a half-mark penalty? If the student just made one error in adding, and got the wrong answer, is that worth less than the student who showed no work but came to the right one? Did they skip a step in their logic argument? How does skipping that step translate to a deduction for a problem with 3 marks allocated to it? Can you really deduct 1/4 of a mark?

Yes, it's often one check mark after the other, but there can be a lot of work involved. I usually had a large number of students, much larger than any English class section--in some first year courses, I was marking around 100 papers a quiz. But I had a fast turnover, I wrote analyses to the profs explaining which problems most students got wrong and how (I bet they loved that), and I always, always made a point of finding out where the student had gone wrong, and at least hinted at how to go about getting the final solution. Yes, it was more work than my pay or instructions merited. But I thought that if I was in their shoes, I'd like to know.

And then to hear, even years later, in a university I'd never even marked a math paper for, that some undergrad couldn't be bothered to walk down to an office to pick up his own paper--that bugged me. In some small way, it felt like it dimished all those hundreds of papers I worked hard to mark. Yes, he's paying the same amount of tuition as a student who did pick up their paper (or so we'll assume for the sake of argument), and he is entitled to not pick it up if he chooses, but... well, there seems to be a basic respect for the process and the actual people involved to shrug it all off with such a cavalier, self-indulgent attitude.

Or to put it another way, sometimes I wish "Rate Your Professor" had an equivalent "Rate Your Student."

Later Days.

I've become a very small portion of the things I hate

One of the truisms of being a prolonged student is that you extend certain "student-esque" traits beyond their commonly accepted lifespan. That is, many grad students are poor, keep poor hours, eat poorly, and live in poorly cleaned areas, often with similarly minded roommates. Generally speaking, the traits tend to fade somewhat when cohabitation with significant others and children enter the list. But frankly, most of that fits me like a glove. Poor cleaning and poor eating habits segue nicely into the life of the eccentric professor, a position I have been training for quite extensively. And the prospect of some day giving up being poor in a monetary sense is a pleasing, if entirely abstract and distant, possibility. But of all the poorness listed above, I never thought that my first to go would be "keeping poor hours."

That's right. I've been sleeping regular hours for the first time since... high school, probably. I go to bed around 10:30 or so, I'm asleep by 11:30, and I'm up at 7. Let me repeat that, as those who know my sleeping habits may have assumed they misheard: "I'm asleep by 11:30." That's right, the man who once prided himself on never closing an eyelid before the witching hour now rarely sees it at all. How did I get to such a state? It started, as most addictive behavior does, in small increments. Since I'm teaching a morning class this term, I figured it behooved me wake up early on class days. And that was fine. A bit of a pain to remember the night before, but fine. But then I started waking up earlier on my Tuesday/Thursdays. And then I did the same on weekends. WEEKENDS. Oh, I've held the line at the 10 am slumber sessions on my weekend days, but it seems that for Tuesday/Thursdays, 7 am is the new noon.
Now, being up at that time has its benefits. I'm getting more work done. I'm seeing more people. But at what cost? Is it worth giving up a romanticized version of my ideal slacker persona just to be more efficient at my chosen profession?

Well, yes, probably. When you put it that way.

Sigh. The real test will come next week, when my new laptop arrives. If my new schedule can survive a time sink like that, it will probably last the rest of my life. Or at least until the first newborn enters the equation.

Later Days.