Student of Trinity

I hadn't kissed anyone except relatives at twenty, either. I got married at 28; we just had our twentieth anniversary.

Until I met my wife, my social life was sparse at best and heartbreaking at worst. That was partly because finding an intimate relationship is just difficult, and partly because I made poor choices about how to spend my time. I didn't take seriously enough the fact that finding an intimate relationship is difficult. I assumed too much that it would just magically happen, so I hardly gave it a chance to happen. I should have been a lot more pro-active a lot sooner.

I never had an imaginary girlfriend, but I can imagine myself doing that. It would have been weird, but weird happens. In fact hardly anyone is really normal. But that means that 'normal' is actually a much broader category than people think, and so most people really are normal, even if they are weird, because weird is normal. At least up to a point. So, unfortunately, are loneliness and desperation. So are relationships that seem miraculously wonderful and yet don't pan out. Movies and books hold up an ideal of romantic ecstasy that is very rarely attained in real life. The thing is, that's okay. It turns out that love is kind of like basketball. You don't have to make the NBA for it to be a great game.

You will have one or more real girlfriends in future. (In the 'more' case, hopefully in series rather than parallel.) Your imaginary girlfriend will be a kind of ex. Most people have history like that. The worst problem I see is that this ex may be unnaturally free of defects, though also lacking in positive traits, such as reality. Real people all have some annoying features, and real relationships have to deal with this. The pros outweigh the cons.

I add whatever weight I can to Alorael's expert advice. Counseling psychologists are a really great resource. You absolutely do not have to be crazy to benefit from seeing one. I've been helped a lot by a few sessions, at times of stress in my life. In fact, to have gone through an episode of constructing an imaginary relationship, and discussed it with a counselor, could be a substantial asset in future real relationships. To be conscious of what you really want, and of what relationships can bring people, could make you quite a prize.

Edit to say that I mean what I say. Counseling is good. Getting counseling is not failure. I'm a physics professor, I'm a husband and father, I even used to be an infantry officer. If the only form of macho credential you recognize is being a biliionaire, okay, I'm not a billiionaire, or even a millionaire. But for other forms of macho success I can say, I've been there and it's [censored]. Three weeks ago my favorite paper got rejected by a good journal and I freaked out and came down with shingles. I went to the doctor and got some anti-viral pills and it's getting better pretty quickly. If I show the shiny side of the apple then my life looks just awesome, and if I turn the apple around then it still has the same kind of troubles that I had at 18, just in slightly different forms. Life is like that.

We got a cat recently. Cats are animals and their lives are simple. Human lives are harder; it's the price that we pay. The human edge is technology. Humans use it. Counseling psychology is technology. Using it is just smart.

Edit 2: First time I've hit the auto-censor, in all these years. I'm glad it was good.

With 22 answers, the poll results are consistent with having 9 respondents rank the three powers Shapers-Empire-Pact; 7 rank them Empire-Shapers-Pact; 3 rank them Empire-Pact-Shapers; 2 rank them Shapers-Pact-Empire; 1 ranks them Pact-Shapers-Empire; and no-one picks Pact-Empire-Shapers.

The poll results for these four questions provide enough information to work out exactly how many people believe in each of the six possible rankings — if one assumes that everyone has answered in terms of a single-valued power ranking of all three powers, and has kept all their answers consistent. If someone answers inconsistently, it is not necessarily apparent in the results of a poll like this. Some possible poll results could be manifestly inconsistent, though. If everyone voted SEP in the first three questions, but then picked Pact for question 4, it would be obvious that something fishy was going on.

I, on the other hand, can't answer the poll at all, because I can't answer the fourth question.

I believe the Shapers would defeat the Empire because the Empire is vulnerable to monster plagues and the Shapers are all about that.

I believe the Empire would defeat the Pact because the Empire is very much like the Pact, except bigger and better, and the Empire's vulnerability to adventurers (like Hands of Avadon) is limited. They might lose an emperor, but not the war.

I believe the Pact would defeat the Shapers, because you just know that Redbeard would get his hands on a Geneforge.

So for me the fourth question is like Rock vs. Paper vs. Scissors. I'm stumped.

I've been busy for a while; too busy to play Spiderweb games, and hence, ultimately, too busy to really keep up with the Zeitgeist here. But sometimes busy-ness defeats itself. Like when you're procrastinating on an overdue grant proposal.

A while ago here I described my experiments in running radically stripped-down pen-and-paper role-playing games for nieces and nephews. (Take-home message: pets must not die.) This was apparently one of the pebbles that eventually led to the mighty avalanche of AIMHack. Here's an update that might add a useful twist. This summer's game was:

Zombie Apocalypse: Hundred Acre Wood

Let me admit right away that there wasn't really anything more to it than the premise. On the other hand, that was its beauty. The game almost played itself. It could have been much more elaborate. But there was a zombie heffalump, and my 73-year-old Mom came through for the win.

The rules consisted solely of the character cards. Each character had two attributes: Health and Brain. These were really just flavor text. Oh well. Each character had one special power, and these were the game.

Winnie-The-Pooh

Health: Stout

Brain: Very little

Special power: "Many a bear ..."

Once during the game, you may declare, "Many a bear would not have thought to bring along a X", for pretty much any value of X. Add it to your inventory.

Piglet

Health: Very small animal

Brain: Acutely aware of danger

Special power: Trespassers Will

Once during the game, you may recite pretty much any procedure for accomplishing pretty much anything, and declare that it is what your Grandfather Trespassers William used to do. It will prove to be effective for its purpose.

Owl

Health: Fussy

Brain: Can spell Tuesday

Special power: Necessary dorsal muscles

Once during the game, you can fly while carrying pretty much anything, at least for a short distance.

Rabbit

Health: Runs fast

Brain: Clever

Special power: Captainish day

Once during the game, you may explain a plan. As long as it involves every single player character, and you explain it in detail, it will work.

Kanga

Health: Motherly

Brain: Can count pieces of soap

Special power: "Roo, dear!"

Once during the game, if Roo is in danger, you can do pretty much anything.

Roo

Health: Very small animal

Brain: Squeaky

Special power: "Look at meee!"

When you shriek, "Look at meee!" the attention of everything in the vicinity will be drawn to you, at least briefly. You may use this special power as often as you like.

Eeyore

Health: Sturdy

Brain: Under the circumstances, your persistent pessimism must be reassessed as an acute grasp of reality

Special power: "How like them."

Once during the game, you may observe, "How like them." Whatever just happened, your acute pessimism accurately anticipated it. Time rolls back to before the last bad event. The group may plan an alternative course of action, taking your anticipation into account.

Tigger

Health: Bouncy

Brain: Easily distracted

Special power: What Tiggers do best

Once during the game, you may declare of pretty much any activity that it is What Tiggers Do Best. You will be good at it.

And the ringer PC, played by my mom, who was grandma to most of the players. She had a vision for the character.

Very Small Beetle ('Small' for short)

Health: So small, most people don't notice him

Brain: No-one ever speaks to him, except occasionally to say, "Really, Small!"

Special power: More Than He Seems

The scenario map was the Ernest Shepard illustration of the Hundred Acre Wood, downloaded from the internet. The quest was just a multi-part fetch, to get the ingredients for a de-zombification potion that would de-zombifie Christopher Robin. (Extract of Malt, Haycorns, Honey, Condensed Milk, and Thistles. The book with the recipe was at Owl's house.)

The main weakness in the game was that only a couple of the players actually knew much Winnie-the-Pooh lore — even the Disney version, for crying out loud. Kids these days. It turned out to be decisive that my brother played Rabbit. Much of the actual session was devoted to refining his Captainish plan. But my youngest daughter quite enjoyed being Roo. She appreciated the fact that she could use her power at will, instead of only once, like all the others. The surprise twist was how Small turned out to be More Than He Seemed. At a climactic moment he suddenly grew into a monstrous demonic scorpion and stung the zombie heffalump back into the howling void from which it had spawned. Yay Mom!

I can recommend the Hundred Acre Wood scenario itself, but the concept is bigger. You can whip up a sort of fan-fiction RPG scenario quickly by picking characters that everyone knows, and just plunking them into any scenario you want. As long as enough people have some ideas about the setting and characters, this background knowledge will substitute adequately for rules. We don't need no stinking rules.

The surprise ending with Small was entirely my Mom's idea. It was why she wanted to play. I'm reassessing my childhood. Man.

I emerge from a hiatus dominated by separatrices and branch cuts (please do not garble that) to make a shameless commercial plug. It's not for any product in Spiderweb's line. It's for a book.

I have not actually read the book yet: I pre-ordered it months ago, but it has yet to arrive.

A friend of mine has written a book about the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy. The book is entitled Prevail, and it's available on Amazon and wherever else. It's not self-published; Jeff Pearce is a successful commercial author and an actual publishing house has given him money.

Thing is, this is a history book, and Jeff is not an academic historian. In fact he never graduated from college. I know the guy, though, and he's intelligent, very seriously interested in this topic, and very articulate. He has done a lot of homework on this book. He has gotten a foreword from the leading academic historian on the topic. He has also published many other books (many of them under pseudonyms); "but" they're all relatively low-brow. This one is serious. I make this plug for two reasons.

1) I'm persuaded of Jeff's main thesis, that this 1935 conflict really was a chapter in human history. On the one hand it was the pathetic failure of the League of Nations, the crushing end to all the hope that World War I had been a war to end wars. On the other hand, it was the end of colonialism. Ultimately, the Africans prevailed.

2) My job is to train PhDs, and/but the reason I think this job is worth doing is that what it really means is nothing but serious and intelligent study. There is no magic; there is no priesthood. If higher education means anything, then it means nothing that someone could not do without any degrees, if they just worked hard and thought carefully. So it may sound perverse, but for me it's a sort of acid test for the whole concept of higher education, that we can recognize insight when it comes without the formal credentials. I haven't read the book itself yet, but I know the author. From knowing him I feel that this is a test case. If you also happen to care about this issue, this is a book I think you'll want to check out. By all means wait until you see some actual reviews of the book before buying it, but make a note now to look out for reviews of this book.

With recent controversy here in mind, about sciences versus humanities, let me emphasize that I would be every bit as hopeful about an un-degreed physicist, if they really were serious and intelligent and articulate. I can definitely imagine amateur books on physics that would impress lay people but actually be worthless; I can also imagine that a professionally trained historian might declare this book to be like that, even if it impresses me. If that happens, I will of course defer to the professional authority, who may be as expert in their field as I am in mine; though, if it comes to that, I'll also insist that there can be intelligent lay views on science that will attract scorn from many professional scientists, but admiration from others, and these others might be the best. 'Professional' and 'degreed' are broad categories. Even from the most hieratic of experts, it can be reasonable to consider a second opinion.

The larger principle remains, and it's really important, that academic credentials exist to represent realities that can exist without the degrees. If I shoot an amateur physicist down, it'll be for errors, not for being an amateur. I can say nothing about whether Prevail will be free of errors that a professional would recognize, but I can say that it won't just be garbage. It'll be a test case at the very least, and worthwhile in some meta kind of sense just for that.

...cthulhu-on-a-cracker, REALLY?

 

Are we really going to do this again?

 

SoT, we KNOW that you think the sciences are somehow better than the humanities.

No, you don't. I don't. You have leapt to conclusions about what I believe. No doubt for understandable reasons; no doubt because I've been unclear. Unclarity, however, is the inevitable norm. In my view, you should have been more charitable in your interpretations. You should have followed more carefully my actual reasoning, persisted a bit more in trying to see what I was getting at, based on our long acquaintance, and perceived my genuinely valuable points, rather than noticing the first superficial resonances between my points and various tedious bagatelles, and assuming that I was offering no more than the same, warmed over.

Slarty: of course I'm doing a bad job explaining myself. If you haven't noticed, notice now: explaining is hard. Cut some slack. Try harder. It's worth more effort than you're giving it, it seems to me. The role you are choosing, of carping at people who are trying to solve actual problems, is easy to play, but pointless. Get back in the game. Stop blowing the whistle. Start kicking the ball.

Most of the pure sciences fall on the same side of the usefulness divide as the humanities. There is a largish demand for education in star appreciation, just as there is for education in Shakespeare appreciation. Kelandon nailed this one. But understand what he nailed, and what he didn't. Nobody ever recovered from a heart attack because of star appreciation, any more than anyone ever did from Shakespeare appreciation.

There is a smallish market for people highly trained in satisfying these largish markets for appreciating wondrous things. So a few people should be trained to teach star appreciation, and to teach fiction appreciation. This is in fact how physics departments have worked for some decades now in North America. Something like 1% of North American undergraduates study physics, and these few do so mainly to become physics teachers or professors. And that's probably the reasonable and sustainable proportion. Physics departments in North America mainly subsist on research grants and on large-enrollment courses for engineers. And that's probably the reasonable and sustainable situation.

Humanities departments should probably work in a similar way, I think. This is the full extent of my prejudice against the humanities. As a matter of fact I've studied them a bit. I took four lousy undergraduate English courses. On the other hand, I won the freshman English prize in my circa 10,000-enrollment university for what turned out to be the lowest grade I earned in English, and my three following courses were a narrowly period-specific progression of seminars to an Honors thesis on Paradise Lost. Somewhere along the way I've read a lot of books. I've met and talked with lots of people in fields outside my own, including some who are famous within their own fields. I've sat on search committees to hire professors in fields outside my own — search committees always have some faculty-external members.

I know full well I'm not an expert outside my field. I am not an ignoramus outside my field, however. It's not true that every field is entirely autonomous. In the end there is only one pie to carve up, and everyone judges everyone else. Rightly or wrongly, every academic expert has to justify their existence to people like me, just as I have to justify my existence to them. I ask questions. I don't accept buzzwords and snow as answers. So far, I have always been satisfied, though sometimes I've had to ask twice. In my judgement, my colleagues in the humanities are peers. Not on politically correct principal, but because having grilled them, they've passed muster. If you think I'm being arrogant in saying that: what do you think 'peer' means? They judge me, too. So far, I have always left humanities professors nodding, reassured that physicists are not idiots after all. I can speak their language. I can understand their answers. I can explain myself to them.

Why should anyone study anything? Getting a job isn't the only reason, but look. I'm a professor. This is my job. I need an actual answer, not just a politically correct affirmation of what things are not the only answer. After quite a few years of experience, it seems to me to be like this. There are the reasons that, if you need to ask about them, you ain't never gonna know. Fine; they're real reasons. But then, there are the reasons about acquiring skills that are of use to other people. Those reasons aren't crap. Those are good reasons.

Somehow you have to balance the different kinds of reasons, when you decide to go to one lecture, or another. In my sophomore year I pulled a miserable B in thermodynamics, because I skipped every third lecture to attend the Renaissance poetry and prose seminar. Now my research is on quantum thermodynamics, and although I think about stuff I learned in those two thirds of physics lectures, sometimes I also think about Milton's picture of creation from Chaos.

I wasn't thinking about a job either way. In retrospect, I was lucky, but that was stupid. Universities have not yet quite caught up with this. They need to.

There is a lot of money in telling bright people in their twenties not to think about this.

It's blood money.

I'm confused about what education is really for. I feel bad about that, being a professor, though being a professor in Germany, I don't feel as bad as I would if my students were paying tuition. But they are still paying a big opportunity cost by taking several years of their youths to study. Why should they do this?

I can think of two kinds of reasons, but they're very different, to the point where it's not at all clear to me that it makes sense to try to serve both reasons at the same kind of institution.

On the one hand you can learn things that are directly valuable only to you, and whose value to others is more intangible. People like learning cool stuff about stars and numbers and poems and plays and old battles and stuff. Yay; learning stuff is fun. People will pay for it, in time and in money, and so they should. Yay learning.

On the other hand you can learn useful skills that enable to do things you otherwise couldn't, valuable things that other people for which other people will want to pay. So people will pay to learn how to perform brain surgery or audit company books. Then they need to get a credential to certify that they can really do those things. So this makes sense.

In practice there's not actually so much overlap between these two kinds of education. They tend to concentrate pretty strongly (though by no means perfectly) in different faculties or schools. Maybe the fact that these diverse schools are nominally part of a larger structure called a university is just a historical coincidence, as are the facts that the instructors bear the same 'professor' title, and credentials called 'Bachelor's degrees' and so on are issued by all. It's arguably unfortunate, though, that these superficial similarities tend to conceal such an important distinction. Maybe fewer people would make choices they later regretted if there were a choice between getting a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature at a College, after being lectured by Professors, and getting a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from a School, after being trained by Instructors.

Depending upon the professor and the student the job can range from janitorial work of cleaning equipment to I have an idea for an experiment and need someone to do it that can lead to a paper and be doing work like a graduate student.

Fixed a typo. Pretty much any professor would love to have the second extreme case. If you can do it, you're probably not going to be shot down for it.

What do you want to do?

If there's nothing you really want to do, but you just want to get some kind of job, then that's actually a handicap in getting any kind of job, because almost any employer will choose someone who wants their job in particular over someone who just wants a job of some kind. Wanting to do something in particular is an edge.

What do you want to do?

Unbelievable. But the iOS version of Galactic Core appears to have nothing in common with the old turn-based strategy game except the name. It seems like a randomly generated choose-your-own adventure story, with pictures, where you try to get home in your spaceship, through a series of random encounters and explorations.

I've mostly finished reading Germany: 1866-1945 by Gordon A. Craig. I've pretty much hacked my way through it, not because it's hard going, but because I have it in the German translation from the original English, because it was a lot cheaper on Amazon and I thought I'd give it a try. Turns out there are a lot of fancy words in this level of written German. Plus some unfamiliar ones that aren't fancy. It turns out that 'arg' is a German word. It means something like bad or sore, which seems appropriate enough, but I've never heard it spoken.

Coolest thing I've learned: the nickname for Hitler among German soldiers and generals was 'Gröfaz' (pronounced 'groe-fatz', where 'oe' is like the 'oo' in 'book'). It was a German-style abbreviation for 'grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten', 'greatest commander of all time', a phrase applied to Hitler in Nazi propaganda. After Stalingrad, the goblin-like name became a bitter meme.

Otherwise the main novelty in the book, for me, has been the perspective that Hitler was not simply continuing the authoritarian strain of German society from the 19th century, but that in fact he destroyed pretty much all the previous right-wing elements, along with the left-wing and democratic traditions. According to Craig, Hitler was an opportunistic genius who wrenched Germany into his own horrible new direction. Craig does not paint an especially rosy picture of imperial Germany before WWI, but he argues against seeing Bismarck in Hitler's shadow. Up to a point, at least, I think he's right. The Junkers were hardly democrats, and if you know a bit about WW2 and nothing about the 19th century it's easy to think of them as proto-Nazis, but in fact that's absurd. They and the Nazis despised each other.

I wonder, though. Craig's book has been popular in Germany. Craig himself was awarded the Pour le Mérite, though presumably not just for one book (he had a long career). Up to a point it's right to emphasize Hitler's discontinuity in German history, but I think I should maybe read another book and compare.

I don't know much about US-Mexico things. I lived four years in New Mexico, but NM was NM before it was American, and I lived for seven years in Boston, which is northeastern and rich and liberal about everything; about everything, it's all three of those things.

Writing about any kind of underprivileged group is academic low-hanging fruit. Somebody has to write about cultural differences, and everybody who can ought to write about injustice; but wherever there's fresh meat, vultures gather. You can get tenure and promotion, book contracts and celebrity (of a sort at least) by writing a trendy book with the right kind of political slant. I'm not talking about the corrosive corruption you get from Big Oil money, or Big Tobacco, or Big Agro, or the military-industrical complex ... but academia is the financial bush leagues. Even quite modest book sales are sweets on the other side of the foggy window pane from most academic noses. And cash is not the only currency.

Suspect privilege. Writing books about privilege, and its lack, is also a privilege.

There is another hand. If someone is right about something that really makes a difference, then that doesn't change just because they are also wrong about a lot of other things. At some point it counts as privilege simply to have enough to eat, but humans need food, and you can't close your ears to everyone who isn't starving. Starving people can't think well. So the whole issue of privileged viewpoint is only important up to a point. You have to look at angels through narrow eyes, but you have to give even devils their due.

If it's really the most advanced civilization in existence, then it might be advanced enough to be like the green realm in Jack Vance's story "Green Magic". I find this story haunting, and having read it: I think I'd rather stay on earth; yet I probably wouldn't.

That's very fair, but I just can't do it — so go on without me. My proposed role was going to be basically spectating anyway, so I can just spectate.

I might be interested, but I can't guarantee any level of consistent involvement. This probably means I shouldn't play at all, but I can think of a scenario in which it might work. I could be the weak and lazy tribal god of an isolated and primitive people stuck on the smallest little island. They would naturally think of themselves as mighty and great, and suppose that the entire world were much like their own tiny patch (and not much bigger than it). Their occasional oblivious comments might be amusing.

If anyone has a more constructive use for the smallest island, I will happily cede the territory.

It's trivially true: you have to be able to do things, in a game, and what happens has to seem decent for many different choices of what to do. There may not be more than one ending, but there have to be many ways of reaching the ending, or else no-one will consider it a game. There might be only one 'right' sequence of things to do, but the game has to work, in some sense, for multiple sequences. If you try the wrong things, the game has to respond in some reasonable way that guides you toward the right choice, next play-through. In general, a game has to work well, for some value of 'well', under many different conditions of player choice.

Stories don't do that at all. There is only one sequence. That's all the audience ever sees. Moreover, a story has to leave people happy in spite of there only being one choice.

This is a major difference, it seems to me — trivial to state, but enormous in its implications for what you actually have to do, to make a game or story.

If you still disagree, have you made both a game and a story? If so, do you at least see that it might reasonably seem to make a big difference? If again so, can you say why it turns out to make less difference than one would think? If either of these last two 'ifs' returns 'false', then, um, hmmm. Try to say something I'll understand. Help me out, here.

As I said in my first post, I didn't invent this story/game distinction. The discussion in which I heard it took place in 1996, about. By 'story' and 'game' we had in mind books and boardgames as canonical examples, though we were willing to let the terms get worn wherever they would fit without too much stretching. You young whippersnappers are confusing me, with your newfangled computer games, consarn it.

Do you think about what does in fact happen, or about all the things that could in principle happen? To some extent you think about what might happen even in re-reading a novel, of course, but you normally don't think about alternatives nearly as seriously when it's not up to you to choose among them. Games should be optimized for having multiple alternative plot sequences. Stories should be optimized for having just one. There's no need to be naive about what constitutes 'optimal' in either case, but the difference between one and many is going to be major no matter what kind of quality it is at which you aim.

This is a pretty radical difference, in my view, and I think it's simpler and more basic than everything else. If you have the job of turning a good game into a good story, or the other way around, then you will have a ton of work of all kinds to do, but I think the first thing you should do is sit down and decide how you're going to switch between one and many. Get that right, and you'll be off to a fair start. Screw that up, and I think your project is crippled.

It's written from the point of view of a high schooler, and reads like it. The main character isn't that great of a writer. That doesn't irritate me.

I think it might irritate me, even if I admired how well it was done. In an abstract way I can acknowledge the skill of someone who does a great job smacking me in the face, but that doesn't mean I want to pay them for it.

I never turn the TV on to watch something for myself, but I sometimes see something that someone else in the family is watching. So I've seen some things lately, but I wouldn't say I've "been watching" anything at all for years.

It's not that I think nothing on TV is worthwhile, but I always found that watching TV for an hour was like eating one peanut. If I sat down to watch something, it somehow put me into a passive frame of mind in which I just kept watching for an hour or two more than I really wanted. Even when that first hour was something great, hours two and three usually weren't good enough, for the time they consumed.

I can't say that I've taken all that time that I would have wasted on mediocre TV and done great things with it. I've found other ways to waste time. I don't think those other ways of wasting time have been quite as effective at time-wasting as TV would have been, however. I think I've made a substantial profit in good use of time, by skipping TV.

For somebody who can just find a couple of great shows and watch them every week, and that's it, I can't see anything wrong with TV. If a lot of TV is mediocre at best, well, a lot of everything is mediocre at best. If anyone else is like me, though, and finds that any TV becomes too much TV too easily, I can report that it's really not hard to live without TV. I've really never missed it.

Doing what you love is probably good advice, but not everyone knows what they love, and sometimes the thing you think you love to do turns out to be less lovable when you get to know it better. A lot of people have to try a few things before they find something they really want to do.

That's fine, as long as you're prepared for it. False starts aren't necessarily mistakes. A little bit of training in a field you end up leaving may still turn out to be useful, somehow, someday.

Just don't plunge yourself deep in student loan debt, or waste many years of your life, on the assumption that whatever seems like your best shot right now will definitely be your whole life's work. Some people are lucky like that, but not everyone is.

I'm not sure we're necessarily taking 'games' to mean only CRPGs; I'll take those old D&D modules as a good game example. But if you can turn Tic-Tac-Toe into a novel, well, I'll give you a cookie. So games that involve a story in some sense do seem to be the topic, and so I suppose if you want you could say we're contrasting two kinds of story: game stories (like RPGs) and pure stories (like books or films). Just saying 'game' and 'story' can be an abbreviation for that.

The very fact that games and stories are similar in some basic ways means that there must be something that is entirely different between games and stories, because otherwise we wouldn't even recognize them as being basically different things, which we do. Not every individual game or story may emphasize the difference to the same degree, but I take it for granted that hardly anything is exactly described by a single "choose A or B" bit of information. There really are distinctions, however, that deserve to be mentioned first before others, because they tell you more of what you want to know. If you try to tell someone how you just wasted three hours, but refuse to even mention the game/story distinction while describing your pastime, your listener will soon get annoyed and try to stop all your beating around the bush, by asking you whether this thing is a story or a game.

Anyway, that's my current view of ontology as data compression. I'm trying to understand aesthetics as data compression, too. I think we like narratives because our brains like data compression. Short is sweet. An especially good story is one that can be compressed especially much, with especially little loss. That doesn't mean the story is just simple — that wouldn't leave much to compress. We like to feel that there's a lot of story to tell, but, 'And yet it all makes sense because ...' can be followed by something short and sweet, that makes you nod your head.

In a pure story, I think we want the short-and-sweet to come from some kind of reveal, that makes you see a new way of organizing the complex picture. In a game, I think maybe we want short-and-sweet to come from some clever strategy that eliminates a lot of otherwise necessary activity. We don't want the simplifying strategy to be too obvious, because that means there's no real compression involved, but we want to be able to find such strategies. A game where the only option is just to grind ahead seems like a worse game for that, whatever redeeming qualities it may otherwise have.

If that's at all right, then maybe the best way to convert good games and stories into one another would be to try to turn killer tactics into major plot turns, or vice versa. If the killer strategy is to combine archer and tank, then the story is how Jack and Jill learn to fight orcs together. If the critical plot twist is Jack leaving Jill, then you make a game where having the tank abandon the archer is a killer strategy.

Yeah. Or maybe it has already happened. I always suspected that my implants outranked me. Maybe they've been promoted so high above me now that I myself am no longer in their loop. They kind of nod vaguely at the rest of my brain, when we pass in the neural corridor. They're not even really embarrassed, just a bit annoyed to have to act polite, for old times' sake.

Probably Geneforge is the best candidate, from among Jeff's games. You could maybe turn the five games into a trilogy. It might all work best as Young Adult fiction, with volumes around 80K words. I think it would take a lot of treatment, but the story might gain enough impetus from the games' premises that it would be worth using the games as a basis, rather than simply starting from scratch. There are settings and confrontations in the games that I think could work well.

I think that one of the basic differences between stories and games is in what it takes to make something seem real. In a story, I think you tend to accept something when it has clear material and efficient causes: you can see how it works and how it comes about. Something that just suddenly appears out of nowhere, and does what it does only because the author says it does, does not seem real, in a story.

I think that those things matter less in a game, because you don't have time to absorb all that detail anyway. Instead I think you're more convinced by formal and final causes. Does this thing seem to fit with the rest of the game? And can I use it to achieve some purpose? In a game, a light saber can fall from the sky, and I'll still take it seriously, if a glowing sword fits the game's graphical style, and if I get to pick it up and chop monsters with it.

I wonder whether that has anything to do with the opposite ways that possibilities either expand or contract over time, in games and stories. In both games and stories, the number of possible things that you might in principle expect to see usually starts off large, and gets smaller, as you learn what's really going on. But in games, it's not mainly about what you get to see; it's more about what you get to do. The number of things available to do usually starts off small, and gets larger.

So stories seem to me to be about shrinking the range of possibilities, whereas games are about expanding it. A story is unsatisfying if the actual ending seems to be no more likely than many alternatives, while a game with many equally viable endings seems to be the better for that.

This suggests that turning a good game into a good story, or vice versa, is likely to be hard. It means taking one of many game endings and making it inevitable, or opening up serious alternatives at a story's major plot cruxes. This is bound to be hard, because you're working against your starting material.

If you pulled it off, though, you might really have something: explanations that ruled out a lot of alternatives convincingly, or choices that really made a big difference. It seems as though it ought to be possible for someone who really knew what they were doing to make a really great game out of a good story, or vice versa. Why do I feel, however, that in fact this has never been done?

Richard White was never a god, exactly. To quote from the scripture:

2. What's all this about a secret society or cult?

In recent months several posters have professed to be members of a secret order associated in some way with Richard White. The order has a complex hierarchy, with lower ranking members knowing little of its true purposes. It has been alleged that the order controls its members with brain implants (and/or eyebrow-like outplants), has secretly taken over the US Navy, deploys hit teams of trained needle/ferrets, and generally dabbles in things better left unindabbled.

It's all kind of fuzzy, now. My implants haven't been updated in years. I never really knew what was going on, anyway, because my rank in the order was never higher than Imponderable Archon. That rank sounded really good when I signed up, but it turned out to be mere middle management. The darkest dark secret I ever learned was where we kept the pencil sharpener.

_{The horror, the horror.}

Benjamin Schumacher, the theoretical physicist who is best known for coining the term 'qubit' for a quantum bit, once suggested to me that some people are story thinkers, and others are game thinkers. Ben is hardly anyone to take a simplistic dichotomy too seriously; his work is about blurring the line between zero and one, after all. But I think he had a point, that "What does happen?" and "What could happen?" are different enough as ways of thinking that it's hard to follow one seriously without losing all sight of the other, at least at the time.

How much would it take to turn one of Jeff's games into a decent novel? I think that practically anything could serve as a mere idea for a good novel to be based upon, but I'm wondering whether one could really translate quite a lot of a game into a book, directly. Could it go as far as taking fight scenes straight from game battles, for instance, and work without having to add masses more dialog that isn't present in the game?

What are the chances of producing a really good story from a game? Do any of Jeff's games somehow contain the essential ingredients for making a fine story, or are they all doomed to mediocrity as stories, because of basic features they have, from being games?

Are there any good stories that could be made into a good Spiderweb game (in precisely the way that won't ever happen because Jeff can't afford to pay royalties)?

I have a vague feeling that I may have started a thread like this once before, but if so I think it must have been a while ago, so maybe it can have a second round, if indeed this is that.

I've been losing touch with things here like that a bit over the past year or two. Not because anything has particularly gone downhill here, as far as I can tell, but rather for the good reason that some big things I've always wanted to do have begun to seem possible, with enough more work. I'm going for it, so I have less time to spare than I used to have. I doubt I'll disappear completely. For one thing, there is a lot of collective wisdom here about how games and stories work, and my interest in such topics seems to be an obsession that isn't going away.

SoT, I think it's interesting that you focused in immediately on climate change and energy issues. Those are certainly parts of the environmental crisis, large parts even, but I was thinking about smaller and more easily identifiable crises. The extinction and endangerment of specific species is just as much an environmental crisis as the larger global ecological trends, the devastation of water sources through pollution, increasing desertification in places like the Sahara, all are pressing issues.

"The environment" makes me think of the planet as a whole. Things can certainly also go wrong locally, and smaller scale problems naturally have shorter time scales, both for going bad and for being fixed, and for the window within which they can be fixed. For local things, though, I only know my own immediate environment. In the places I personally know, nothing seems to be going especially wrong, above the background of general problems.

The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much.

Serious efforts are something else. They do exist; for instance, the enormously expensive Energiewende underway for a decade in Germany. These interest me a lot. This season's episode of earnest public handwringing, not so much.