Monthly Archives: July 2009

The cautious return of LucasArts

In the early 90′s, LucasArts owned the PC adventure game market. Each new title they released broke new ground. First they perfected the straight-forward point-and-click combine-the-what-with-the-what-now??! adventure game with Monkey Island 1 and 2, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Then they really began to innovate, with games like Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road.

As the 90′s ended, LucasArts gave up on adventure games to focus on their Yet Another Bloody Star Wars Game strategy. Other major gaming companies did likewise, leading some people to think that the adventure game today is dead. Not so: the mantle has been picked up by smaller companies such as Telltale Games, who are doing well with LucasArts’s old Sam & Max franchise.

Someone at LucasArts must have recently asked themselves: Hey, people used to love us back in ’92, whatever happened with that?! So this summer they’re re-releasing Monkey Island 1 with modern graphics, they’re allowing Telltale Games to make new episodic Monkey Island games, (the first was released this week), and they’re releasing their own classics on Steam, the iTunes of PC gaming.

That’s fantastic. I’m going to look at some games I didn’t play in the 90′s, such as LOOM and The Dig. Am I still able to play such old games? At least I’ll finally be able to .. uhm, pay for Fate of Atlantis. And the first new game from Telltale looks good, (it’s actually funny.) Will be back with more.

Arkivskuffene begynte med andre ord å leve sine egne liv

Humanist-redaktør og blogger Arnfinn Pettersen har samlet en del av sine tekster fra Humanist, Fri Tanke og Den Tvilsomme Humanist i boken Tvilsbekjennelser. Den er utgitt på hans ferske mikroforlag Dodoforlaget, visstnok halvveis for å teste on-demand-trykkeriet Lulu, men jeg biter jeg.

Jeg har aldri hatt noe forhold til human-etikerne. Hva gjør de egentlig, annet enn å tilby gudsløse alternativer til religiøse seremonier? Hva står de for? Problemet ligger hos meg, jeg har aldri forsøkt å finne ut av dette. Men i den grad de står for humanismen til Arnfinn Pettersen er jeg helt med.

Pettersen skriver mye om skepsis. Ikke skepsis som et bestemt verdensbilde, med dogmer og tilbedelse av Vitenskapen, men skepsis som en metode, en måte å forholde seg til påstander på. Skepsis som et annet ord for tvil. Hvordan vet du dette? La oss teste!

Andre tekster handler om humanismen som livssyn. Hva hører hjemme under humanistenes partinøytrale paraply, og hva gjør ikke? Pettersen tar avstand fra den aggressive ateismen til Richard Dawkins, som mener at ikke noe galt har kommet fra ateisme, og ikke noe godt fra religion. Kommunistene og antislaveribevegelsen er gode moteksempler. Samtidig må ikke selvtvil og moderasjon gå på bekostning av de grunnleggende verdiene, som ytringsfrihet.

Det er ekstreme standpunkter som i dag får oppmerksomhet, ikke tvilsbekjennelser som dette. Når normen er skråsikre spissformuleringer er det derfor tvilerne og skeptikerne som er de virkelige radikalerne.

A new competence standard for pundits

Pundits are generally lazy people, and amateur online pundits are no better. They’ll settle for the least amount of thinking and learning necessary to make a point.

A common way to be lazy is to say: This is so obvious I’m not even going to argue with people who think otherwise, I’ll just make jokes about them. This works because your readers, viewers or listeners don’t want to hear that argument no more than you want to make it. But they love jokes.

I want to propose a new rule for pundits: It’s okay to say “this is too stupid, I’m not taking this argument seriously”, but only if you have, at least once, entered into an actual discussion with someone who holds this stupid opinion. Exchanges of sarcasm don’t count. It must be a real debate.

This is not a waste of time. It’s proof of basic competence. If something is obvious, you should be able to explain why. And unless you’ve tried, how do you know you’re able to? How do you know you’re not just parroting common sense?

Yes you should be able to explain why we know the earth isn’t flat. You should be able to counter the arguments of Holocaust deniers. Not every day, the nuts will believe what they want no matter what you say. But – at least once, if you get the opportunity.

That done, seek out more difficult opponents, for instance a smart representative of an ideology you disagree with. Repeat forever.

Charles Stross on his software career

Author Charles Stross has been writing a series of posts about his former life in the software industry. Read it to destroy your belief that important software and internet services are generally written by people who know what the hell they’re doing.

Often, what you have is what Stross describes here: one stressed out programmer maintaining a Gordian knot of code that was only ever meant for demo use, but then somehow it ended up in production and now they can’t ever get rid of it. From which point possible futures include burnout, bankruptcy, or gigantic profits.

Stross left the industry at about the time that I entered it, around 2000. His publishing career has since included novels that combine H. P. Lovecraft with IT, and I now understand why. My own experiences have been less harmful to sanity, (except that first part time job where I wrote a webmail solution in C, which to you non-programmers out there is like inventing and building your own car because you’re too lazy to learn how to drive a real one.) On good days I even feel like I know what I’m doing. Then the bug reports start coming in.

Slaughtering, looting and raping in disciplined fashion

In his 12 novels about the British officer Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser has sent this tormented coward to many of the greatest battles of the mid-19th century. His only real accomplishment has been to flee from all of them. Flashman is Blackadder without jokes, a cynic and egotist who would like nothing more than to enjoy life at home with his wife, (and the occasional lover and prostitute), but because of his undeserved reputation as a war hero the British government won’t let him. It’s the glory days of Empire, and there’s always a dangerous situation somewhere to sort out.

In Flashman and the Mountain of Light, Flashman is sent as a spy to Lahore in Punjab, to prepare for the Sikh war of 1845-46. Lahore at this time is a cauldron of dynastic intrigue, where leaders betray each other at first chance, and everybody has conflicting agendas. A swashbuckling hero would feel right at home. Naturally, Flashman hates every second of it.

Flashman’s curse is to be surrounded by madmen: heroes and great generals who glorify war and self-sacrifice in the name of some bloody stupid cause. He doesn’t want to die on a battlefield in India. Who would? Flashman is a hypocrite, but he’s honest with himself and the reader, and he despises the lower type of hypocrite who pretends that building an empire is a clean affair.

These are not pacifist novels, and they’re not targetted at the British empire as such. It’s just honest history: Bloody and absurd.

And Mars and Mother India floating overhead in suitable draperies

I suspected that Hardinge’s aversion to me was rooted in a feeling that I spoiled the picture he had in mind of the whole Sikh War. My face didn’t fit; it was a blot on the landscape, all the more disfiguring because he knew it belonged there. I believe he dreamed of some noble canvas for exhibition in the great historic gallery of public approval – a true enough picture, mind you, of British heroism and faith unto death in the face of impossible odds; aye, and of gallantry by that stubborn enemy who died on the Sutlej. Well, you know what I think of heroism and gallantry, but I recognise ‘em as only a born coward can. But they would be there, rightly, on the noble canvas, with Hardinge stern and forbearing, planting a magisterial boot on a dead Sikh and raising a penitent, awe-struck Dalip by the hand, while Gough (off to one side) addressed heaven with upraised sword before a background of cannon-smoke and resolute Britons gnashing niggers and Mars and Mother India floating overhead in suitable draperies. Dam’ fine.

Well, you can’t mar a spectacle like that with a Punch cartoon border of Flashy rogering dusky damsels and spying and conniving dirty deals with Lal and Tej, can you now?

- George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light

If you want to feel good, become an extremist

En høyst relevant politisk reklamevideo fra 1987, med John Cleese:

Via Unge Venstre-blogger Sveinung Rotevatn, som mener videoen også fungerer som argument for politisk TV-reklame. Ja, bortsett fra at du neppe får kjøpt 10 minutter til å legge frem et nyansert argument i reklamepausen på TV2. Derimot er den et godt argument for aktiv bruk av YouTube, og å være saklig fremfor snedig i presentasjonen.

Og den virkelige kamp forsvinner

Jeg var ikke helt begeistret for Nina Witoszek’s pamflett Verdens beste land, men dette Minerva-intervjuet liker jeg:

– Du mener det er et ideal at folk går til angrep på hverandre?

– Ja. Det er en agonistisk tenkning. Det er farlig å drømme om en utopi hvor man hele tiden snakker om dialog og den virkelige kamp forsvinner. Å usynliggjøre de virkelige kildene til uenighet er første skritt på veien til totalitarisme.

[..]

Det er vel i tråd med dette, da, at Witoszek formulerer sin egen politiske holdning på en svært motsetningsfull måte. Samtidig som hun dyrker konflikter og rakker ned på autoriteter, forsvarer hun de klassiske, vestlige verdier – ikke minst de liberale – og angriper de venstrepopulære ideene om multikultur. Hun oppfattes av mange som konservativ.

– På en måte er jeg konservativ. Jeg setter pris på det konservative i kulturen, og tror det er veldig viktig å ikke miste det. Men jeg setter også pris på det liberale og det sosialistiske. Jeg er virkelig liberalkonservativ sosialist. Det kan virke som koketteri. Men når jeg går inn i karakterer som Tocqueville og Burke på den ene siden, Marx og Gramsci på den andre og Popper og Berlin på den tredje siden, så kan jeg egentlig identifisere meg med dem alle. Kanskje er jeg egentlig en utrolig uperfekt og veldig håpløs liberal.

Heir of the byte that dogged us

In David R. Palmer’s Emergence, the world has ended in a bionuclear apocalypse, and only the smart people survived. The survivors are not just smart, they’re literally a superior species of humanity, a homo post hominem of rational geniuses who have quietly evolved among us. Immune to all disease, and aware of the apocalypse in advance, they survive both the nuclear war and the ensuing plague. The world is now clean of normal people. It’s the Day of the Übermensch.

The protagonist is an 11-year old girl, a speed-reading genius who can use her karate skills to perform superhuman feats of strength, and we follow her on her search for other survivors in the American wasteland.

The premise and the style of Emergence is so Heinleinian that you can read it as either a homage or a parody. It works as both. Every major and minor character we meet could be the hero of a Heinlein novel, which is both ridiculous and adorable.

It’s like someone has made a wish fulfillment fantasy out of Heinleinian elitism. “I liked that story where those people were smarter than everybody else, now let’s make a story where everybody is super-smart, except this little girl who is even smarter than that.”

Right. But still: Adorable. And fun. Misguided, but in a unique way. I can’t take it seriously, but I can’t hate it either, and apathy is not an option here.