I’ve been playing some of the games from the 2009 IF Comp. These are text-adventure games, arty to various degrees, meant to be be judged in under two hours of play. The games can be found here. My reviews will be categorized under “IFComp.”
This is a review of “Snowquest,” which can be downloaded here or played online here, if you’ve got the right plug-ins. If you want to download these games and play them, you’ll need an interpreter. Some things about interpreters can be found here. I use Zoom for the Mac when I’m not playing online. (more…)
Four GOP Representatives charged that Muslim spies are infiltrating Congress as interns, brandishing a book co-written by Dave Gaubatz (and based in part on documents stolen from the Council on American Islamic Relations by his son, who infiltrated CAIR as an intern, but never mind that). Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) wrote the foreword to Gaubatz’s book.
Dave Gaubatz is a nut. A real nut. He thought he found Saddam’s WMD, but I don’t suppose that’d be enough to discredit him among rank-and-file GOPers.
White Christians were at the founding of this nation a distinct people and privileged as such. Men of means among this people were given the opportunity for representative government. This is, for those of you flinching, not a thesis or”viewpoint”; this is historical fact.
I’d hope Myrick and her friends would be somewhat ashamed of that last batch of quotes. Perhaps someone should ask her about it.
[BTW, the saneworks.us site is now for members only and has been blocked from the Internet Archive, so I can't directly verify those quotes. But Jim Henley is a straight shooter, and Gaubatz himself showed up in comments without protesting them, so I'm guessing they're legit.]
While commenting on the Nobel Prize in Economics,* Ezra Klein writes:
As for the recipients, the exciting news is that Ostrom won, making her the first woman to ever receive the award. Ostrom also happens to be a political scientist, which seems like a useful admission that economics has spread far beyond its original boundaries, and is increasingly intertwined with political science, psychology, sociology and many other disciplines.
Isn’t the big news that the economists still haven’t found a woman in an economics department to give their Nobel Prize to? And I thought my field had it bad.
(Note: Economics’s crappy gender record is not actually an excuse for philosophy’s crappy gender bias.)
*To his main point, I think the first commenter has it right: As Daniel Davies says, “blah blah blah Sveriges Riksbank. Nobody cares, you know.”
Emily Short has a column up about Fable 2 and its attempt to allow interactive character development in a computer role-playing game with a linear part, emerging out of the choices you make when you play the game. The “emerging” part is important because of the ongoing debate in game design about how a game can move you through its play rather than its narrative. It’s uncontroversial that games can tell stories that move the player, but that storytelling usually takes place in non-interactive cutscenes, coming in between the gameplay parts of the game. (Not to say that the gameplay parts aren’t essential to the emotional impact, or to disparage this style of storytelling.) The question is whether a game can develop character and move you through what happens while you’re playing. This is difficult, in part because it’s hard to develop a way for a moving narrative to develop procedurally in response to whatever the player does.
Fable 2 tries to do this, in part through keeping track of the relationships it thinks you’ve formed and the moral choices it thinks you’ve made. Short doesn’t think it succeeded entirely, partly because it didn’t really recognize what she’d done. For instance, she accidentally charmed a besotted man into following her around, whereupon he may have been killed by bandits when she didn’t take care of him during a battle. But the game didn’t realize that she’d done something wrong, or that this was why she wasn’t going to let anyone else fall in love with her again.
Anyway, this reminded me of one of the most complex emotions I’ve experienced coming from emergent play, and why I don’t think it shows any artfulness on the game designer. Nerdy story below the fold. [Note to mom: Yes, I should be working on my tenure file.] (more…)
I don’t want to be a tobacco apologist, and I think people should stop smoking, but I find this recently trumpeted study a bit weird:
According to the study [by Jonathan Winickoff], a large number of people, particularly smokers, have no idea that third-hand smoke—the cocktail of toxins that linger in carpets, sofas, clothes and other materials hours or even days after a cigarette is put out—is a health hazard for infants and children. Of the 1,500 smokers and nonsmokers Winickoff surveyed, the vast majority agreed that second-hand smoke is dangerous. But when asked whether they agreed with the statement, “Breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children,” only 65 percent of nonsmokers and 43 percent of smokers answered “yes.”
…”The third-hand smoke idea—concern over that—has been around for a long time. It’s only recently been given a name and studied,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. “The level of toxicity in cigarette smoke is just astronomical when compared to other environmental toxins [such as particles found in automobile exhaust],” he adds, but notes that he is not aware of any studies directly linking third-hand smoke to disease [as opposed to second-hand smoke, which has been associated with disease].
Before you do a study making fun of people who don’t think third-hand smoke can harm children, shouldn’t you do a study showing that third-hand smoke can harm children?
Here’s an image from the new Virgin Atlantic campaign:
Here’s an extremely famous Robert Capa photo of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War at the moment of his death (below the fold, because it’s somewhat graphic): (more…)
Here is Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is widely discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee, speaking at a Duke University panel:
Here (via Brian Beutler) is a brief David Letterman segment on Sonia Sotomayor:
[Well, looks like stupid wordpress refuses to embed this clip. Go here.]
Now, on a close viewing, you may have noticed something about the Letterman clip, namely that it’s totally fucking racist. The only thing Sotomayor has in common with the shouty people in his clip are that they’re both Latino. It’s no different than saying “Here is Barack Obama” and showing a gangsta rap video; it reduces Sotomayor to nothing but her race.
And that’s why we still need affirmative action, despite the ridiculous maunderings of certain frightened white people who think that electing a black President has completely absolved the country of the taint of racism, and that it would be an atrocity if any white man ever had to give up a scintilla of his privilege. (That’s a piece complaining about a case in which Sotomayor refused to grant a reverse-discrimination claim, so it’s an attack on her as well as on the concept of affirmative action.)
Sotomayor has had to deal with a sleazyanonymouswhispercampaign, in which a “legal analyst” who hasn’t bothered to read her opinions retails claims that she’s too dumb and obnoxious for the Supreme Court. The subtext is that Sotomayor is only being considered because she’s a Latina woman. But she’s already being mocked on national TV for being a Latina woman. Any boost she might get from her ethnicity and gender just compensates for the prejudice she has to deal with. I don’t know when we’ll be able to stop consciously striving for racial and gender diversity on the Supreme Court and elsewhere, but I do know that it’ll be sometime after it stops being cool to make fun of people for their ethnicity and gender.
