An interesting discussion at Emily Short’s about moral choices in games, first between Emily and Victor Gijsbers and someone posting as “fabulous,” and then between me and Ron Newcomb. Here’s a good bit from Ron:

Maybe it’s a squid-on-the-mantlepiece problem? Just as the author can’t dramatize dad’s overdrawn bank account while a giant kraken is attacking the city, the I-F author can’t create player-NPC emotional bonds while there are keys to find in other people’s houses. The traditional gameplay stuff is “too loud”, and overwhelms an NPC’s mild disappointment in the PC’s conduct.

While looking up things for this discussion, I noticed that there are a <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ptitleole57f6wlot of tropes that are relevant to this. And I haven’t played hardly any of those games.

Some points for food co-ops, organicish supermarkets, Vegetarian Timeses, and post-hippie eaters everywhere:

Wheat gluten is not a form of meat.

Wheat gluten is not in fact an animal product of any sort.

As far as I know, there are no specific ethical issues concerning the production of wheat. Wheat stalks are not raised under especially cruel conditions.

Some people, I guess, have medical problems that make them sensitive to gluten. Most people do not. The allergy-of-the-month club doesn’t count.

Wheat has been a staple of the human diet since, like, forever. You know why the Fertile Crescent is called the Fertile Crescent? Because wheat grew there. [UPDATE: Which is not to disparage the many cultures whose main grain is rice. Do you know what is not a prominent feature of the cuisine of those cultures? Muffins.]

There are many nice baked goods that you can make without gluten, such as corn muffins, corn bread, and corn dodgers. Flourless chocolate cake can also be tasty. Cookies made of ground tapioca and potato flour are nasty. Maybe if you’re avoiding gluten, you shouldn’t try to make cookies? Those aren’t real cookies. In my experience, people who are allergic to peanut butter don’t smash up chickpeas and rubber cement in an effort to get something with a similar color and texture and then put it on their sandwiches with jelly. Or if they do, I haven’t noticed, because the peanut butter shelves at the supermarket still contain actual peanut butter, not peanut-free chickpea-cement butter.

OK, I don’t actually buy peanut butter off the shelf; there’s a machine at the store that grinds up the peanuts right there, extruding the peanut butter in a form that looks like the poop of a not very healthy person, and that’s what I get. Same principle.

What I’m trying to say is, there is no reason for any store to have a shelf full of scone and muffin mixes EVERY SINGLE ONE OF WHICH IS GLUTEN-FREE. Scones and muffins are made with wheat! That’s what they are! There should be at least one available mix for someone who wants to make an actual scone, not some gravel-chalk dust concoction that’s supposed to help you grind up the rest of your food in your gizzard.

I’m a tolerant man, even if I may actually have gone on a similar rant right there in the store the other day. I understand the plight of the small minority of the population that has Celiac Sprue and may want to have some sort of facsimile of a baked good available to console themselves for the tasty dishes they can’t have, and I’m quite all right with a store selling a couple of things for that market. But why oh why can’t you sell the real thing next to it? It’s not like anyone’s going to get sick from being near a bag of gluten-containing product. Is it possible that the only people who actually want to bake anything are the very people who can’t actually eat gluten, and so there is no demand for actual muffin mix? It doesn’t seem likely. For instance, I wanted to make scones, and, as you may have gathered, I prefer my scones with gluten in them.

I would like to announce the formation of the GRO, the Gluten Rights Organization. We will work for gluten awareness, picketing stores to ensure that for every gluten-free baking-related product on the shelf there is a corresponding product that’s, you know, normal. Also, our website, gro.org, will have a palindromic URL, and that’s pretty cool.

[NOTE: The last paragraph is full of lies; I have no intention of doing anything about this other than ranting about it on my blog, and gro.org looks like it's already squatted.]

So I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Wendy and Marvin:

Wendy Harris and Marvin White are two sidekicks who were created in an era in which many cartoons featured main characters with sidekicks who were supposed to serve two purposes: comic relief and viewer identification…. Neither Marvin nor Wendy had any special abilities. However, once on the cartoon, Marvin was shown “practicing” flying, though not very well. In fact, on the cartoon, although very nice and very bright, Marvin was shown to be somewhat bumbling, often needing to learn the day’s moral, such as looking up “photosynthesis” for himself rather than having Robin tell him. In the comics, however, Marvin and Wendy’s cleverness and resourcefulness made them invaluable to the other Super Friends. The one notable resource Marvin provided to the Super Friends was his pet dog, Wonder Dog (or just “Wonder” for short) who was preternaturally intelligent, though bumbling as well, much like Scooby-Doo….
In 2006, in Teen Titans #34, a new version of the Wendy and Marvin characters appeared…. In Teen Titans #62 Wendy and Marvin meet a stray dog that Miss Martian names Wonderdog. In reality, Wonderdog is some sort of demonic monster in the service of a new villain called King Lycus, who appeared at the end of the issue after the beast killed Marvin and severely mauled Wendy. As seen in Teen Titans #63, she survived the attack, but is apparently in a coma.

And this made me think; you know what would be great for the tired old legacy comics? A gritty reboot! Let’s see Hagar the Horrible really address the realities in the life of the pillaging Nordics. Blondie could turn into some mix of Dirty Sexy Money and Arrested Development, where we hear about the fraudulent machinations that cost Dagwood his billions, if that doesn’t hit too close to home. Beetle Bailey could get an infusion of Catch-22 (or just a deeper exploration of Beetle and Sarge’s forbidden love), while Hi and Lois, well.

On the other hand, we’ve already seen Garfield turned into an exploration of madness and alienation (though have you seen this [sound]?), The Lockhorns doesn’t need to get any bleaker, and if someone tried to do a gritty reboot of Dick Tracy it’d cause some sort of singularity of violence and gore that would probably turn the whole world into a place of unicorns and kittens through antipathetic reaction. Which would be a good thing, I guess.

…because nothing cries out for illustration more than “An exercise in Freudian scare tactics fails to unnerve Salley Vickers.”

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.

He also writes:

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.

and in case you’re wondering what moral he draws from that “fact,” he doesn’t much like Jews, black people, Jews, black people, Jews, black people, black people, black people, women, or black people.

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.]

Some necessary background:
1. I like cats more than most people. Nothing against most people. I am very fond of cats.
2. In the game nethack and its variant SLASH’EM, you have a pet, usually a cat or dog to begin with, though you can tame more exotic monsters.
3. Your pets fight beside you much the way you fight.
4. nethack and SLASH’EM aren’t big on narrative — there’s a bit of deliberately cheesy cut dialogue, but just about everything happens by moving around, attacking monsters, and doing things with items. Your pets aren’t very characterized; they move around, fight, retreat when they think they can’t win, yip/bark/purr/meow when you talk to them and follow you around some of the time (there is some characterization here; the more you they eat, especially if you feed them at the right time, the more likely they’ll be to fetch you useful stuff). Oh, and this is what a nethack cat looks like: f
5. Nethack creatures can be hostile (will attack you), tame (your pet), or peaceful (none of the above). Your pets will attack peaceful creatures as well as hostiles, but not (except in exceptional circumstances) other pets.
6. Cats and dogs may attack you, but it’s very easy to get them to stop. To quote kawaiifan4, “Little kitties ^.^ do have sharp claws … but they’re not angry, just hungry. They want your food (or, failing that, they want you as food), so try throwing some food at them instead.” If you throw a vegetable at a cat or dog, it’ll become peaceful; if you throw it something it wants to eat, it’ll become tame.
7. Your pet starts out fighting at least as well as you do. After a while, you’ll be a much better fighter. Your starting pet can last a very long time, because it won’t pick fights against monsters that are too much more powerful than it, but it’s pretty hard to keep your pet to the end of the game unless you polymorph it into a more powerful monster.
8. If you leave a pet behind in the dungeon for a long time, when you see it again it may have gone peaceful or even hostile if it’s hungry enough. (Though you can retame it by throwing it food.)
As I’ve said, I’m fond of cats. I don’t like even reading about bad things possibly happening to cats. So I won’t attack a cat in nethack if I can possibly avoid it. Since the best way to avoid fighting a cat is to throw it food, I often wind up with a fair number of cats following me around. Sometimes I morph the cats into better-fighting creatures (sometimes this happens accidentally), but that seems kind of mean. I feel sad when a cat of mine is killed in cat form, and if I’m doing well in the game I usually wind up leaving at least one cat behind in the dungeon.

I’ve just started playing SLASH’EM, which is nethack with extra stuff, and have a pretty good game going. I’m playing a gnomish ranger, which means I started with a dog (and that cats and dogs and koalas often start peaceful). My starting dog died after attacking a (peaceful) dwarf who was too heavily armed for it, all the way on the other side of a level when I couldn’t effectively control it. I also got another dog killed very quickly softening up a monster that was beating me up badly; I felt bad about that but better about surviving.

Eventually I tamed a cat in Mine Town, who I named Townser. (I always name my pets, because it helps to keep track of them. The names I choose are generally silly.) By this time I was able to survive on my town, and Townser started out as a pretty tough cat. Both of us were able to level up, and I accumulated enough stuff that I had to leave piles of it stashed in various parts of the dungeon. I also made a magic whistle, which instantly summons your pets to your side. When I went into one of the tougher side-branches of the dungeon, I would leave Townser behind for a little while, but we made it pretty far down.

Once I whistled for Townser and he didn’t come. This was annoying, because I had something I wanted him to do (check whether something I was about to buy was cursed). It was also disturbing, much as in real life. I found him using my telepathy: “a peaceful large cat named Townser.” Somehow he had quit my team. I thought perhaps I had used my whistle too much, so I went back out and threw him some food. But he still wouldn’t come when I whistled. So I went back out, tamed him again, and saw him attack a (peaceful) koala. Then, “Townser looks calmer.” Once again he was peaceful. Apparently koalas make anything that attacks them peaceful, which means pets stop being your pets. I ruthlessly dispatched the koala; I prefer not to attack peacefuls, but the one thing I won’t tolerate is messing with my cat. A bit more food and Townser was my pet again.

On one level I had wiped out all the monsters except for a peaceful dwarf and a unicorn (which wouldn’t have been a threat to me) when I got a message: “You have a sad feeling for a moment, but it passes.” This means that your pet has died out of your sight. I was very upset. Townser could have taken either monster individually, but they’d ganged up on him, and I hadn’t known to whistle him away. I rushed back over to find “a large cat corpse named Townser.” Previously, I’d found a wand of undead turning, which can resurrect monsters including pets, but it was back in one of my stashes. I had to rush poor Townser’s corpse back to my stash before it rotted away completely.

When I said “I had to,” I mean: I felt so bad about losing my cat this way that I felt like I should bring him back. I didn’t actually need the pet to help me in the game at that point.

I was able to bring Townser back, and soldiered on. (I kept the wand with me, and had to use it once more when Townser went after a nasty monster when I was in the midst of a big battle. I didn’t feel as bad about this, partly because I knew I could bring him back, partly because I was right near the monster and couldn’t whistle him out of danger.) Eventually I had finished the main sidequest and the next step to either descend deeper into the dungeon or go on one of the most dangerous sidequests available. Neither of them seemed like a good place for Townser.

Except that in nethack and especially SLASH’EM, you can always do more preparation before you go on to do anything. There was a side branch with an altar to my god Venus, and I had a wand that would create hordes of monsters that I could sacrifice to her. I popped in through the magic portal, leaving Townser behind in the main dungeon, and started in with the wand and the altar. Among the sacrifice fodder there were many peaceful monsters; dogs, horses, and even a koala. I left them alone as I tried to deal with the hostiles. Some of them wandered back through the portal to the main dungeon.

Back in the main dungeon I whistled for Townser again, and he didn’t come. A quick check revealed “a peaceful large cat named Townser.” Once again, he’d attacked the koala and gone peaceful. Grumbling, I prepared to tame him. And then I thought: Shouldn’t I leave him alone? I didn’t need him to fight by my side anymore, and the safest place for him probably was wandering around peaceful on that dungeon level, where he wouldn’t fight me or any other monsters. That’s when I had the most complex feeling I’ve had in emergent play of a computer game — not sadness, not frustration, but a sort of renunciation.

What does this tell us about emotion in games? Well, I’m pretty sure the designers of the game didn’t mean to evoke this kind of emotion. The gameplay is deep and complex, but it’s mostly about killing things in various ways, not about emotion-laden interaction with anything else. And the emotion I felt doesn’t necessarily effect any skill on the part of the designers. I brought most of it to the game; I like cats so much that all they have to do is tell me that a letter represents a cat and I’ll feel differently about it than I do about any other letter. (In the discussion of whether a game system can make you cry, the most compelling example was of a girl who cried when her Tamagotchi died. But Tamagotchis aren’t exactly great art.)

Another moral may be that life is going to be hard for designers who want to exploit the moral code they think you’re living out in a game. Would the makers of Fable be able to detect that a player’s main guiding principle was that he should be nice to cats? Should they want to?

[UPDATE: Oh dear, I'm Belkar.]

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):

They’ve got to be doing it on purpose. But why?