james holloway

Wizards and wires

I’ve read another book! It was The Midwich Cuckoos, written in by John Wyndham in 1957. Two extracts stood out, what with, you know, the internet, drone warfare and all that.

Here, the narrator, Richard Gayford, visits Gordon Zellaby, who is listening to an “excellently reproduced” Bach recording on some new-fangled audio gear (an all-transistor phonogaph, perhaps? They first appeared in 1955, apparently). Without speaking, Zellaby invites Gayford to sit, which they do in silence until the recording is finished, whereupon Zellaby explains.

“‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he apologized. ‘One feels that once Bach has started his pattern he should be allowed to finish it. Besides,’ he added, glancing at the playing cabinet, ‘we still lack a code for dealing with these innovations. Is the art of the musician less worthy of respect simply because he is not present in person? What is the gracious thing? – For me to defer to you, for you to defer to me, or for both of us to defer to genius – even genius at second-hand? Nobody can tell us. We shall never know. We don’t seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don’t you think?’”

The other extract crops up in a speculative conversation about the cause of the so-called Dayout, an event in which the people of Midwich were rendered unconscious for a time, leading to the strange events which follow (problem children, to put mildly). A Colonel Latcher observers:

“Soldiering’ll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.”

Perhaps that wasn’t a particularly foresightful or controversial statement in 1957, but still, if you look past the superficial meaning of the word wires (metal string, if you like) to the underlying thrust of what wires do, i.e. allow change to be effected remotely, it’s a rather good line.

There.

RSS hauntings

This old photo popped into my feed reader a few months ago. The article it was attached to was mundane filler that Russell Group universities tend to use to pad out their news feeds, but something about it stuck, and so I starred it to come back to. But somewhere there’s a glitch between my RSS client and Google Reader, which it syncs with (they haven’t terminated it yet, have they?) and though I can unstar it, it doesn’t stay unstarred for long. Every day, after I check my feed subscriptions and star anything which seems potentially interesting, I go over the starred items to see what I’m actually likely to write about. Every day, at the very end, there’s this black and white photo of the Victoria Building at Liverpool University. It opened 120 years ago, I am reminded. I can’t help feeling it wants something, but I’m yet to find out what. Consider this memo an escalation of the issue; a mental moving up the agenda. Nice photo, though.

Failure, within and without games

I recently finished reading Jesper Juul’s The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Here are some extracts that stood out:

…sports writers often celebrate the top player who claims to consider winning a minor detail compared to his or her love for the game. For example, a recent New Yorker profile of chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen notes with some admiration: “Carlsen wasn’t thinking about being the best, he recalled: ‘I was just enjoying the game, really. I don’t think I’ve ever really been much into setting myself these goals. It hasn’t been necessary. I mean, just playing the game has been enough for me.’” Of course, this is an ideal—this is not how most people behave most of the time, and it may be that top athletes deliberately play up to the ideal in interviews.

I’m not sure why I made a note of this, except I’ve read a few articles recently on the benefits of living a life with no goals. Those articles appeal, but I suspect only because I want them to be true, and not because I believe them to be true.

A study of video games in the classroom observed similar differences between students who saw failure as an opportunity for learning, and those who were discouraged by it. 17 I was stuck, discouraged by failure, unable to let go, but not learning as much as I should. My behavior would surely have appalled any sports psychiatrist.

Without going all autobiographical, I can relate to this. For whatever reason, I spent a long time thinking that a puzzle or a problem was something you either could do or you couldn’t, and that you could tell which within a couple of minutes (at the outside.) This was fine at the earlier stages of my education, but certainly problematic by A level time, when, for whatever reason (again) I chose completely the wrong subjects. Luckily, the internet was starting to hit big around that time so I could continue my education through other less formal channels, which looking back I think suited me down to the ground. My advice to all teenagers is now do what you like, and try harder than the other guy. Fortunately, my failure then was relative rather than absolute.

Designer Soren Johnson of the Civilization series describes it as a general problem that players seek out the optimal path to play a game but stick to it even when they find it fundamentally uninteresting. The strategy of lumberjacking in Civilization III is one such example […] Chopping down a forest gives 10 hammers to the nearest city. However, forests can also be replanted once the appropriate tech is discovered. This set of rules encourages players to have a worker planting a forest and chopping it down on every tile within their empire in order to create an endless supply of hammers. However, the process itself is tedious and mind-numbing, killing the fun for players who wanted to play optimally.

My recent experience with container opening sim Bioshock Infinite means this resonates with me even more than it otherwise would, though the Civ series itself is another fantastic example. To play a video game strategically is too often to sap the joy out of it. That’s always a design flaw, never a player flaw. On the subject of lumberjacking in Civ III, it would have been excellent if the game detected a player reforesting a tile for the third time, and popped up with a message saying “It looks like you’ve discovered forest management. Press the M key on a tile to automate this procedure”. Hindsight and all that.

In contrast, Jonas Heide Smith has documented how players of multiplayer games frequently handicap themselves when ahead in order to maintain excitement in a game, effectively exposing themselves to failure. Perhaps multiplayer games and open sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto IV encourage us to undertake more challenge-seeking behavior, to seek out the depth of a game on our volition.

Every game I have ever spoken to does this, but though imposing self-set limits does make things harder, I think we really do it to make things more interesting, and force video games to feel more different from each other than they otherwise might be. I like that imaginative games designers have embraced achievement systems to set rewards for these sorts of things. Playing through Half Life 2: Episode One using only the gravity gun is an example. But it’s more fun still imposing the limits yourself. I’m creeping through the original Bioshock with no guns at all at the moment. I don’t know why this quote limits it to online and sandbox games, though. You can just as easily try to clear a Pac-Man screen saving the power pills till last, or clear only four lines at a time in Tetris. Or perhaps those are sandbox games.

New Hack City

New Habitat’s invitation to hack a house this weekend sounds as though it should be open to programmers and computer security types given a free pass to crack a smart house’s building management system, and make the lights spell out rude messages in morse code flashes.

As fun as that would be, the hackcity event in Brooklyn sounds as though architects and (non-software) engineers will be just as welcome. The idea is that the architecture is the API, so perhaps there’s potential for more fundamental ideas to come out of it.

I have no idea what this all means, really, except to say that, if I was anywhere near New York, I’d go.

Plumbing the depths of ad-supported journalism

An interesting debate about ad-supported writing unfolded yesterday. It took place in the sphere of video games websites, but the underlying arguments apply across subjects. This is fundamental.

It started when Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera argued that you need disposable quick-to-write link-baity content, giving the somewhat unfortunate example of “sexy cosplay galleries”, in order to support proper reporting. The quick-and-dirty stuff earns you the unique visitors which bring in the ad revenues which pay your staff to have the time to write the good stuff. That’s the idea. It’s not a new argument, but Kuchera’s take on it is detailed. I even partly agree with him when he sidetracks into ad-blocking software.

On his personal blog, Rock, Paper Shotgun’s John Walker (who wrote the excellent The Life and Death of Skyrim’s Lydia which I linked to the other day), Walker makes the case for doing things properly: writing quality content. If you’re at all interested in this stuff, do please read what he had to say. I agree with all of it. Here’s an extract:

Were that true, RPS would absolutely be tailored to suit the stereotypically perceived gaming audience, posting endless list features and galleries of half-naked women, because the reality is, that WOULD bring in a ton of hits. It’s gross, we hate it, so we don’t do it. There are better ways.

It’s difficult, but it can be done, and RPS is an excellent example. Kuchera, on Twitter, highlights RPS’s partnership with Eurogamer, but success begets business interest, be it acquisition or partnership. Does that scale? Perhaps not to all aspiring news sites. But how many do we want? RPS differentiated itself by being the best video games website (of those I know of, at least). If Kuchera turns out to be right… I suppose that’s the day I’ll find something else to do.

Perhaps more could have been made of the gender equality questions Kuchera’s post raises, but RPS (and Walker, in fact, looking again at the bylines) has nothing to prove in this area as far as I’m concerned.

Photo of sexy cosplay man: Michael Mol

Uncertainty as a feature (and the blogger ethic)

Do people have features? Non-physical ones, I mean? I suppose not, but traits are too immutable for my meaning. I want to make the case for uncertainty being a good thing, behaviourally speaking. I don’t know, but I get the sense that a lot of science and technology writers are encumbered by the need to be certain.

Facts are wonderful things, but they’re dwarfed by the set of possible things, and the set of conceivable things. Seeking out fact is probably quite a good description of journalism—especially if those facts are somehow hidden. Conclusions have to be supported by the evidence, though. If you read something, and you can’t connect the dots between the evidence and the writer’s summing up, then really they’re asking you to take their word for it.

What’s wrong with picking up a subject, poking it, smelling it, sniffing it, and hopefully shedding a bit of light on it, and then putting it down again for the next person? When I feel I’ve genuinely found things out, I end up with more questions than when I started. Yet conclusions to articles tend to have more answers than questions. Perhaps I’m reading the wrong ones.

The more certain you pretend to be, beyond what the facts support that is, the more risk you’re taking that your article is wrong. A few times I’ve felt under a little bit of pressure to be certain, and I think I prefer low risk journalism. Not low risk in the sense that you’re in safe territory, or not asking questions; but safe in the sense that you’re putting the subject down again for the next guy when you’ve taken it as far as you can without risk of dropping and breaking it—misleading the reader in other words.

Maybe my view is informed by my background as a blogger. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Darkness visible

Dan and I visited Light Show at the Hayward Gallery on Friday. It’s an exhibition about light, with two dozen or so works which all shine, glow or otherwise emit light one way or another. I didn’t really know what to expect, but thought several of the pieces were really rather good.

As usual, photography was forbidden, and the only shot I managed to snaffle out of there was this grainy iPhone snap of Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal. It’s a wonderfully simple thing. A projector shows a film of curved white lines moving slowly over a black background in a darkened room filmed with artificial mist. The projection isn’t so much the thing; it’s the planes of light the film describes in the mist. If you’ve seen the sequence in Alien when John Hurt’s character first comes across the xenormporh eggs, you’ll have some idea of the sort of effect. People are quite free to wander round the room and play with the light as they see fit. The effect is much more disconcerting than you might imagine, and at first people are clearly hesitant to “touch” the light. In a near pitch black box, it seems the most corporeal thing there.

Slow Arc inside a Cube IV was a great example of how an apparently simple idea using a few simple bits can create an almost overwhelming reaction in the observer. It’s just a single light source on a robot arm inside a cubed cage. The sides of the cage have an isometric cube pattern and the top and bottom have simple squares. The light casts these shapes in vivid shadows on the walls of the room (also a cube, or cuboid at the least). As the light moves these shadows race, and grow and shrink in size, creating the impression that the walls of the room are somehow warping and shifting. Fix you eye at a given point on the wall, and the effect is almost nauseating. While I was there someone bumped into the cage, knocking it out of alignment with the walls of the room. This lessened the effect.

Jenny Holizer’s MONUMENT was by far the most arresting piece on display. A tower of illuminated LED tickers, the sort you’d expect to show the latest news headlines, exchange rates or weather forecasts, instead displays extracts from declassified US government documents pertaining to the war on terror. As I watched, an account of an interview with a weeping 9/11 suspect, name redacted with blocks of asterisks, scrolled and flashed its way across the screen. The testimony is shown on two lines, repeated over and over up and down the cylindrical tower, but blinking and scrolling out of sync in phased patterns, making it rather difficult to read. You can’t help but stare. And think. Staring and thinking: not a bad brief for a piece of visual art, really.

And lastly, James Turrell’s Wedgework V was maybe the most intriguing work there. Unfortunately, I think the Hayward’s approach to this piece puts visitors in entirely the wrong frame of mind to enjoy it. Somehow, natural light is allowed to divide a room diagonally, creating the impression of a physical form that isn’t really there. You approach the work via a pitch black corridor, and because they say it takes 15 minutes to really appreciate it, there’s a queue. Unfortunately, people are herded in and out like cattle, told where to sit with a pointed flash of a torch, and wait, distracted, while the room is filled with other visitors. It feels like you’re waiting for a performance to begin. When it doesn’t, people inevitably feel deflated. The queue is fine, but if they let people come and go in a one-in, one-out system, people might actually stop and look and think. Are slightly power-crazed staff at museum and art galleries a thing? They were the one minor blemish on an otherwise excellent trip to New York, recently, too.

Anyway, overall: yeah – good.

List: Kravitzes (in order of fame)

1. Lenny
2. Ted

A brief accumulation of links to articles that I have read and enjoyed in recent weeks:

• What PTSD is
• Man saves tens of thousands of dollars just by thinking (I subscribed to this blog after reading Jacob Lund Fisker’s book Early Retirement Extreme—a book with much better innards than the title might suggest. I’m reading a lot in the area of longterm thrift at the moment.)
• John Lanchester rides the London Underground
• Growing By Shrinking
• Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce. The News of the World’s part in their downfall (Not so much for the precise subject matter, but more for the insights into the workings of Fleet Street, or whatever today’s equivalent is.)
• The Left Bank Ape (On bonobos. ‘Nuff said.)
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People
• She Who Dies With the Most ‘Likes’ Wins?
• The Life And Death Of Skyrim’s Lydia (This isn’t so new, but it’s quite simply the best piece of video games writing I’ve read in eons.)
• Have iPhone, will travel—without a data plan (Useful.)

On writing the wrong sorts of things

On the subject of writing the wrong sorts of things, which is something I’m preoccupied with lately, I found this lurking in the appendices of the Kindle edition of Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Idle. It’s from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay An Apology for Idlers. This extract made me laugh. I showed it to my wife. It made her laugh too, I think for the same reason it did me: recognition. I should probably keep this in mind, then:

And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid: and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.

Scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them… Yeah. That. (You can read the whole essay here.)

Warning: the Kindle edition of How to Be Idle is riddled with typos. Is it too much to ask that publishers actually sit down and read what are presumably automated ebook translations? One terrific example: “Agriculture is in fart the first example of servile labour in the history of man.” They didn’t quite spoil a good book, but they’ve had a mighty fine whack at it.

the danger of the parked idea

I’ve had the idea of a children’s novel filed in a mental safe deposit box, ever since I wrote a short story about the character when I was seven. He needs a name change, which I’ve worked out, and the narrative arc needs filling out, but I have it. Doing nothing.

I have a text file with ideas for short stories, as yet unwritten, and another with ideas for articles, largely unpitched. I have another with the titles of unwritten electronic music tracks and projects.

My most exciting creative idea is one for an oil painting. I know nothing about painting, but this is idea is highly geometric and straight-lined and so, rightly or not, feels doable. I’ve sat on this for about five years.

I worry that my tendency to bottle up old ideas might keep me from having new ones. Mental effort goes on the mulling of the undone, and because I haven’t acted, I’ve probably repeated the same mullings for years.

My philosophy should be do or (let) die (or even kill). Parked ideas must go on a meter, and when the meter expires I need to get in and drive or have the thing towed away for good.

In the last two years I’ve done a lot of writing, and an upside of that is that I am undaunted by long projects. Accumulation is incredibly powerful: it’s how I got my OU degree—the accumulation of small efforts. Likewise, I’ve written a large number of words in the last two years, and I know that by writing doable amounts daily, numbers quickly become impressive.

In the last two years I’ve also done a lot of writing the wrong things. Things I’m not all that interested in, or things that I felt I should write. I’ve probably written too many words. I intend for this not to be the case from now on, because all writing, even the wrong writing, saps the daily pool of enthusiasm and creativity. I think I need not to waste that—in my case, it’s a small enough pool as it is.

dumbphones

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen an outburst in which I declared that I was “going Android”. Obviously, this was not to say I was pulling an Annie Ross/Vera Webster, but that I was intending to switch brands of mobile phone.

I won’t bore you with my list of grievances with my current wand (iPhone) or my purveyor of signal (Vodafone). But the proverbial last straw was the inability if these two companies to prevent me from blocking nuisance calls from some sleaze-bag call-back-baiting number with its origin in the Manchester area. I find this incredible and, more to the point, given the vast sums of money we readily hand over for these little flat miracles, an incredibly bad deal.

In fact I’d already resolved, as part of my DIY ethic, to switch to a phone brand, or rather OS, that gave me more power of my own destiny. It (not being sentient) should be slave to me (vaguely sentient) rather than the other way round: a relationship I try to consciously have at the forefront of my mind when evaluating any gadgetry in use or as a potential purchase. However, my plan was to switch when I needed a new phone (by which I don’t merely mean at contract’s end).

Effectively, Apple and Vodafone had collectively conspired to annoy me into buying another device. I wondered how true this has been of big purchases in the past: that I’ve been annoyed into them by shortcomings (or my perception of shortcomings) of what I had been using instead up till that point.

Of course, buying my way out of the problem doesn’t sit too well with this whole thing about considered purchases, genuinely useful technology, and doing things for myself. Here I should give Vodafone some credit. The nice lady on the phone, very apologetic that there was nothing they could do, did recommend me a call-blocking app.

Of course, being an app that futters with the “core functionality” (and fuck that as a phrase) of the phone, which, for some unknown reason Apple deems a bad thing. So, Vodafone was essentially recommending I jail-break my phone (i.e. download a hack for the OS to bypass limitations) in order to install an unauthorised app. I didn’t know whether to be appalled, impressed, or grateful.

Suffice to say, without going into any details, despite my declared intention to “go Android”, which I still intend to, I haven’t yet.

Next up: why the choice of smartphone makes next to no difference anyway, it’s just having one that’s great.

america through the window

neo-ludditism

I have no strong feelings about Krishnan Guru-Murthy, but something he said on television in the last fortnight resonated with me. When asked if he was a technology enthusiast he replied that he was, but that so was everybody else these days. I forget the actual words used in the exchange, but you can be sure from the light entertainment context (panel show, largely with idiots) that “technology” was shorthand for gadgets.

I’ve been a little shy of blogging about some minor resolutions I’ve come to, in case I sound like a minimalist/low-tech bandwagon-hopper, but if I’ve decided to buy as little new technology as possible, it’s mostly because I suspect that this might be a more interesting way to do things. I think there may be more interesting technological discussions to be had about preserving the longevity of old stuff rather than about iterative spec improvements and latest apps of the new. Plus, there’s an army of tech writers out there itching to talk about the latter. Mostly, I don’t want to do that. When new technology affords new possibilities—that’s interesting.