Tradeshow Games

Making it through the not-terrible eggs, half-decent sausage, and really-nasty hashbrown without getting ketchup on anything while at one of those standing tradeshow-floor tables feels like a real accomplishment.
Proceeding to the post-breakfast-coffee tables and getting your hands sticky from the quite-good danish, now without recourse to the paper napkins you felt so good about not needing only moments ago, feels a defeat worthy of Sophocles.

Diamantine

Although I walk in dead of night
My mind in places far away
The snowflakes glint in pale moonlight
Now absent fear, joy remains

To Thine Own Self Be True

Alone.
Alone, in the dark, far from home.
Home.

Definition. The last bastion against meaninglessness. When all seems upended, perverted, and mistaken, we define our world with defensive reflex, write a song of lament for what is, was, could have been.

And so, in throes of desperation,
When all else resists my definition,
I turn my weary words inward
And cry out to define myself

Alone, in the dark, far from home.




"Above all beware of excessive day dreaming, of seeing yourself in the centre of a drama, of self pity, and, as far as possible, of fears." The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis V1: Family Letters 1905-1931

in lieu of originality

IF you were coming in the fall,
I ’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I ’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I ’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

-Emily Dickinson

You Don't Need to See His Identification

Went to Star Wars: Identities at the Edmonton Space & Science centre today (yes, that *is* the correct name, corporate sponsors can jump in a snowbank...) with my protege, "Z." The prop and motion-control-model displays were very, very cool to see, and probably worth the price of admission, while the multimedia/interactive aspects of the presentation were only fair to middling.

The show is really set up to showcase a few ideas about identity, some of which I thought bear comment:
(For those who haven't heard of this thing before, it's a travelling exhibit of Star Wars props that incorporates ten interactive kiosks which allow you to build an "identity" profile based on the traits and factors discussed in the educational talk-along and supplemental video.)
First, the consideration of genetic factors is limited to asking participants' skin/fur colour and force ability. I find this strangely comforting (no asking about heritable dispositions toward addiction, psychiatric disorder, etc.? How quaint...) and at the same time somewhat ironic, given that it highlights the biggest cop-out in the whole Star Wars scrip process. (I.E.: if Anakin is predisposed to force-use because he was "fathered" by the force, Lucas wasn't forced to make force-use into a caste-type social scenario, and was also able to write a character with no personality strengths whatsoever and still make him the most intuitive/powerful force-user in the universe.) Thus, your genetics selections at the beginning of the show have no effect whatsoever beyond appearance, unless there's some kind of adaptive stat-checking in one of the other stations that factors force-power before presenting you with options.

Other factors include native culture, parental style, intellectual/physical aptitude, traumatic events, occupation, personality, value system, and the inevitable "dark vs. light" decision.

Personality seems to be the station with the most forethought put into it, basically it's a big-five / OCEAN model for personality traits. Again I didn't feel like the choices were really important to the "result" at the end of the tour, but it was clear the people who put this thing together were at least familiar with the commonly used personality assessment tools (even if they put no effort into the statistical instruments usually used to get some verifiability into vague test questions like "how much do you like people?")

The most interesting thing about the entire tour was seeing how much importance some people place on the decisions, or more specifically how *little* weight Z. gave any of them. Z.'s mom tagged along with us for the day and she practically begged him to let her watch as he selected his 'personality' answers. She tried to let him choose without steering his selections, but couldn't help questioning a few of his decisions. Z., being the impulsive twelve-year-old he is, retaliated in a few places by flaunting his ambivalence toward the meaning of such questions as "are you efficient and organized, or easy-going?" She clearly put a great deal of weight into the "results" of his answers (which, in a battery of questions so limited, are simply a read-back of the input you give...) while he didn't even bother to read them.

I've seen this in Z.'s attitude before, in the slightly-but-not-entirely different realm of Role-Playing Games. Z.'s history with games, up until about a year ago, centred on the simplistic (if in some cases well-designed) action-shooter genre. In the past year, he's played Fallout 3 and it's difficult for me to get a sense of what he really wants out of a role-playing experience. (I'll not that I've always expressed concern over the suitability of some of the games Z's parents have bought him, but it's a losing battle and so long as he's not playing them during our outings or telling me blatantly unhealthy things about them I try not to be overly negative about it, since it *is* something we can actually have fairly deep conversations about.) This really shouldn't surprise me, since I often have similar problems on a lesser scale (how do I collect all the best stuff in the game without resorting to outright burglary and banditry???) but it's funny hearing about his slowly-developing cognitive dissonance:
 "It was really hard buying supplies or anything, since every town I went into everyone started shooting me on sight."
"Really? What did you do to get them that mad? Usually they only do that if you shoot first..."
"Well, the first time I went into a shop I picked up a rocket launcher and started blowing things up..."

RPGs are still quite limited in terms of the moral possibilities they offer (non-player-character scripting is still pretty limited in terms of motivation and response to binary and obvious triggers like being hurt by the player, political allegiance of the character, etc.) but in contrast to the magazine-quiz format of typical personality profiling tests, I think they offer real potential. Sure, gamers who are focused on winning will always use the "min-max" approach and create unrealistically one-dimensional characters to make the game easier to play, but in a way that's *more* indicative of real personality traits than even the most honest answer to "on a scale of one to five, how honest are you?"--if my only goal in the development of a character is the ability to win more battles (at the expense of exploration or social skills) I've expressed in a very clear way my intention and priorities. The trick with RPGs, though, is that they give people the option to explore multiple possibilities on different playthroughs. You can't look at the decisions a player makes in a video game as a definitive or reductive evaluation of values or even traits, but you *can* pull qualitative correlations from multiple playthroughs together with post-play interviews about player motivation and problem-solving strategies. Not saying the RPG should be the next thing in personality trait assessment, just that it's a very interesting tool that could probably be put to work in a laboratory setting to get a much different kind of result than the typical self-reporting (and thus only marginally verifiable) multiple-choice results.

[Ed.: I am beginning to see a strong correlation between the number of hours I'm awake, the amount of time I spend standing in lines, and the number of incoherent sentences I can type in one sitting.)

International Lettermail

Several years ago, Canada Post decided that the easiest way to disguise the impact of rising energy prices and inflation on lettermail postage was to issue a generic stamp for domestic lettermail--if you buy a lot of stamps, you don't notice a difference at all, but if you buy a packet every decade or so you no longer need to supplement them with another penny's worth of stamps for every year you don't use them. The real benefit to this program is that most people are in the latter category, so the populace is far less likely to rise up and overthrow the postal system.
The interesting hitch is, what if you want to use them for oversize/weight or international postage? Turns out the generic stamps are basically commodities now, with a floating value based on current service prices. Thus, two domestic stamps are valued at $1.22, but next year they might be worth $1.24, or $1.50, or whatever Canada Post decides to value them at. This isn't a problem at present, but the simplicity of the 'one true stamp' system breaks down when you don't have any other stamps and need to figure out how to get $2.10 for US postage to cover the weight of heavy cardstock and a CD.
(Also: making "other lettermail" cost twice as much as "standard lettermail" just because it's slightly heavier is, in a word, extortion. Still better than what private couriers would probably do, and a luxury service in any case, but I reserve the right to be disgruntled.)

Luna Nova

The stars are full of memories
or so the poets say
the light that shines on us tonight
of distant past, so far away

My mind is full of wand'ring dreams
but hope... it keeps me here
what could have been, what might still be?
shall never be, because of fear

"Could I, then, have changed it?"
Is that the last torment?
Is this regret I feel tonight,
or just a pained lament?

To hope is but a curse, I think
when turned from now to then:
"so trust what is, shall be; no doubts!
Think not of how, but when."

In wand'ring thus, I feel less lost
and find more footing fair;
save nothing for the journey home
but trust it will be there.

Mem'ries are so full of stars:
they twinkle, glimmer-bright
and yet the darkness in between
is what I think on, here at night.

Perception and External Memory

Don't know how many of you are familiar with the service called "Amazon Mechanical Turk," but here's an interesting application for it. (Thanks to Edward for the link.)
Basically, Matt Richardson has designed a camera that does what we've been jokingly describing to small children for years: allows the image to be interpreted by people trapped inside of it, and spat out in a new form.

When you press the shutter release on this camera, it uploads a digital image to one of the enterprising individuals contracted through Amazon's service, who types out a description and sends it back. The camera then prints the description, and perhaps more significantly, attaches the text as "metadata" to the digital image for use in catalog/search/database applications later. (The process can complete within six minutes of pressing the shutter release, a feat that's pretty astounding when you think about someone sitting on the other side of the world, working part-time typing descriptions for the images you take.)

Richardson's camera, it seems to me, could go a step further: he could contract graphic artists through A.M.T. who could "copy" the paintings in a variety of ways. This is so close to the idea of "tiny 'Polaroid Gnomes' inside the camera painting the picture" that it makes me giddy. 



Rus and I were talking this evening about travel and the process of describing the places we visit to the people at home--he was recounting the story of someone he knows who re-traced the steps of his honeymoon and sent letters back to his terminally-ill spouse. This man didn't have a way to send images of all the places he stopped, but reflecting on that idea I'm pretty sure I'd rather *not* be able to take an album worth of photographs on a trip like that. Sure, a photo or two might be nice, and if you'd taken photos on your original honeymoon I'm sure you could make some very profound comparisons (if not of changes in scenery, the in the change of who's present in the photographs.) Describing the journey, though, gives an inherently reflective quality to the practice. Not that photos aren't reflective; I just think we're more likely to hide our perspective in photographs by slipping into the practice of taking "descriptive" or "journalistic" photos, capturing wide-angle perspectives in an attempt to remove ourselves from the scene. Sure, you can do the same thing with a written description--that's exactly what Richardson's "descriptive camera" system does, in a sense--but I think that a letter written to your wife about places you visited together in decades past would be hard to write in a passive voice.




In either form of the "descriptive camera," it does bring something interesting to photography: it removes the photograph by one "degree" or "generation" from the subject. This is, interestingly, something that many people assume cameras do already--we let the camera do the work of "seeing" the world, holding it at our own height and distance from the subject and assuming "this is what I'm seeing right now, ergo if I hold the camera here it will capture the reality of the thing itself, and preserve that reality for posterity." "It's just like being there", we say, and call our photo albums "mementos" of past events, people, and places. Something that photographers grapple with is the fallacy of this "objectification" of images; it's not "just like being there", it's "just like" someone showing you the world through their eyes at a very precise moment in time and space. Even in a description of a scene, you're going to get a very unique, personal twist on the "reality" of that precise moment, and you'll then add your own perceptual shifts in the way you interpret the description or see the image. Adding yet another layer of interpretation shifts our attention to the process, almost forcing us to ask questions "what's being left out?" and "Why this and not that?"

In a sense, photography is very much like our cognitive memories: we remember details, "close-ups", smells and sounds that are pulled out of very specific places and times; or very familiar, even mundane places and times, which we then ignore like stock photos in advertisements, attaching little significance to their details. I think it's the external nature of photography that makes us trust it: "it's outside of me, thus it's more "real" than my perception or memory." Interestingly, the same applies to oral tradition in cultures that don't have the same ideas about writing or image-making that we do: Plato argued that it was far more accurate to receive a spoken account of an idea than a written one, if only because you could ask questions and pester the speaker with questions. Oral tradition leaves things out, to be sure, and emphasizes new details in each generation, but there's a sense of accountability in the fact that the storyteller doesn't believe he is inventing the story as he goes along. If one deviates too far from the tradition, people will notice--much like the obvious darkroom/photoshop trickery that makes for a good laugh or a moment of skeptical amazement in some of the photography that's distributed in our culture. Even the "flair" that an individual storyteller can add to a tradition will stick out, in much the same way that a confident photographer, or writer, will add a touch of personal perspective that becomes a kind of signature for their work. People recognize this "flair", and it pulls attention away from the "objective" nature of the subject being described/viewed.

It's late so I'm not going to come up with any kind of profound conclusion for all this, but if you've got this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to add your two cents; pennies aren't going to be useful much longer anyway. ;)