"Jesus is the only way to God, and to be able To use xleap you will need to be a Good Graduate student."
Words of wisdom from google, courtesy of this Google Hack
There was an interesting concept that was mentioned on Aaron's weblog by quinn: power distance. Power distance varies from culture to culture.
I have been fortunate to grow up in a part of the world where the social effect of power relationships are very small. "The lowliest shopkeeper will look you straight in the eye", a national geographic reporter wrote, and I have often wondered why this is so suprising. Perhaps it's because scandinavia had a small middle class, little nobility, and a rather pietistic working class? But I have to wonder when I read Thomas Malthus' description of Norway: he talks with a wealthy local in Oslo, who complains that Norway is expensive, you have to have many more servants, because if you hire someone as a cook, then he will on no account do anything other than cooking!
That was three hundred years ago! It seems to me like our attitudes to power are deeply ingrained parts of our culture. But perhaps individuals can break the pattern, at least? Of course, it takes two to talk, but it just takes one to give a decent wage. I have nothing against domestic servants, but they better be very well paid for taking on such a low-status job.
Aaron Swartz has a story about Alfie Kohn, a psychologist - I think he must be a psychologist - with radical, but basically sensible ideas about punishments and rewards. He makes a strong stand for not doing either.
But he (and Aaron) also are adamantly anti-competition, and although I haven't read much on the position of either of them, I thought I'd share my thoughts on this topic.
I don't know how to do trackbacks (nor what they are supposed to do). If they do something nice, I apologize to Aaron for not giving him one. As it is I just post my comment in that thread here as well.
"Now, as it relates to raising a child (which I will start doing in a couple of months now), I fundamentally agree with the idea that right and wrong can never be taught with rewards and punishments (my wife is somewhat more sympathetic to rewards than I am, but I don't think the difference is all that big in practice). Of course, this applies only to "artificial", or deliberate/manipulative awards. I will still smile when my son does something that warms my heart, and if my son hits the other kids in the playground, I'll have to take him away from there and explain to him that we can't go there if he hurts his playmates.
But I don't entirely understand what this has to do with competition. There is destructive competition, yes. That's why my wife likes that picture of a child Mozart with "Wanted: CHILD PRODIGY. Has made the life unbearable for thousands of young pianists", I suppose :-) . And sometimes the competitive elements are best left out. When we play scrabble I won't keep score, because I think the beauty of the words and patterns outweights, and is sabotaged by, too much competition.
But there's positive competition, too. I am a big fan of german board games, which are usually (but not always) competitive. The key issue for me is that you don't need to win for the game to be enjoyable. That's a large part of what good game design is.
On the other hand, everything from "tag" to Mastermind(c) to playing the piano can be made into a bitter, competitive game if you play with the wrong people. Although certain games are more destructively competitive than others, it seems to me that "Competition doesn't hurt people, people hurt people" to paraphrase that old slogan."
The purely non-competitive games I know about are: just about all role-playing games, Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings game, Mastermind (noone actually keeps track of past results like the rulebook suggests, right?). Also, many children's games like "tag" and "hide and seek" have little real competition.
(On a side note, the wizards in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books follow a no-rewards-no-punishments philosophy. Nice to read if you want to see an anarchist-taoist take on that :-)
UPDATE: When I read up on Reiner Knizia, and I found an interview with this nugget:
Q: What makes a good game?
Knizia: This is my favourite answer. In a good game the losers also win (Equally in a bad game the winner also loses).
Okay, I have put off talking about this for too long, but those of you who have read my wife's weblog already know that we are expecting a baby on the 25 of september. We went for ultrasound imaging today, and I have the images in my laptop bag. Too bad I can't put them up... I'm eagerly awaiting your new blog system, paranoidkoala! Oh, and sorry to everyone who didn't know.
Also, I'd like to know who reads this weblog (actually, it's enough to know that that someone does), so everybody please congratulate me in the comments section ;-)
My wife and I played the two player version of Puerto Rico yesterday. Playing that game makes me happy for the rest of the day at the very least. And that's only when I'm losing - of course, I have won so many games in a row now that I'm amazed anyone will play with me :-)
But I have been looking on other german games, and the ones that really appeal to me are those that have some interesting economic element. In particular, Morgenland (which is called Aladdin's dragons in english) has a blind bidding mechanic that really intrigues me, and of course there's Reiner Knizia's Merchants of Amsterdam, which is based on the dutch auction.
The dutch auction suprised me when I first heard of it. An auction where the price ticks steadily down, and the winner is the first to take the bid - how utterly, well, cool! When I read about auctions on the net I can understand why being an economist might be interesting.
But there's one auction form that I'm sure exists, which I would like to know more about (where it has been used, etc).
When I read in Andrew Odlyzko's classic "Privacy, economics, and price discrimination on the Internet" (which I found via Wendy Seltzer a long time ago), I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of the article writer.
There's this guy who offers to write an article, and he has two customers, but the first is only willing to pay 600 and the other 1000. The writer won't take the time if he gets less than 1500. Unless he charges the one more than the other, the article won't get written.
That's OK, of course, it's just that to me the non-economist this seems like a great area for a sort of auction with commitments. Let all interested parties give a bid, if the sum is acceptable to the author, he publishes the article and takes all the commited money. If he doesn't, the bidders get their commitments back, of course. Now we can vary this basic concept (does the author publicise how much he needs to publish? How much is already entered? Is there a minimum bid size? How long does a commitment/bid last?), but it seems to me to be a great way to finance the kind of public or semi-public things like research articles, art displays, news, software etc.
The more uncertain people are what others will bid, the better off they are at offering what they genuinely are willing to pay. I'm not sure if this would work in practice, or if there's a game-theoretic reason why the article rarely gets written or something, but it would have been very cool to see this in action somewhere.
Via Boingboing I have just downloaded over 2000 midi piano tunes to my laptop. Why on earth would I do that, you say? Because these midi files are painstalkingly made from piano rolls. In other words, we get all the popular music from about 1890 to 1915, often played by the original artists. We have Joplin playing Joplin, Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov, and a huge library of music from a forgotten time, played by some really good pianists.
A piano roll records a great deal of the style of the performance. It captures the rhythm with perfect precision, and also pedal use. Dynamics were entered manually into the piano rolls, but apparently with great care, because the performances sound quite life-like. My wife had heard a piano-roll of Rachmaninov, she initially believed that the dynamics were also recorded. And that says something, because my wife - well, let's just say she knows a lot about piano music, particularly russian performances.
The only drawback is that soundblaster MIDI is so poor (and probably poorly implemented in Linux, since people who really care about MIDI use something better) that everything sounds like it's played on a really inferior piano - without any pedals. My midi player doesn't seem to care about the pedal encoding. That means that most of the classical music is bad, but the ragtime and popular tunes are quite acceptable, and after all they constitute 90% of the collection.
Any drawbacks? Well, they don't licence it as liberally as they should, IMO. True, they put down a lot of work into this, but they base themselves on public domain material, and I think they agree with me that although scanning is a great work, the pianists' work is greater. Since they work for preservation of these works, they should remember that nothing hurts preservation like restrictive copyright controls.
That said, I only use the music for my personal enjoyment as is permitted, so I suppose it doesn't hurt me all that much :-) Quite the opposite. I love it.
My wife apparently read the previous post, because she said I should write about more interesting stuff on my weblog :-)
Well, it's not so much for the benefit of my readers as it is for me. I need to keep some sort of log anyway, why not make it public? But for the benefit of my single, bored reader I will try to keep it short.
On monday, I cobbled together a camera system, and Hala searched out and downloaded huge amounts of models with agreeable licences. I had some spare time on the lab tuesday, so I improved the camera system to a point where I could make an acceptable demo level. It could still be easier to use, but perhaps it's time to let it be. I found that adusting the arc of the camera (same as the FOV in quake) was really useful for fixed camera shots of rooms. You get a wider look around, and since it doesn't move, the distortion is hardly noticeable.
Plan for next day (that's technically today. Haven't seen Hala, but with the crown prince visiting today and all we knew this day could be slow): This time I do the digging, for sounds and music this time, and Hala does some coding, with a fade-in from fog effect.
How will Hala do at coding? I'm perhaps a bit prejudiced, since Hala didn't have any programming experience when we started a year and a half ago, but then again, she's clever and works hard.
Hm, to make up for this boring post I should perhaps make another, more interesting one. But Pandolphia, you haven't updated your own blog very much. You really should :-)
Hala and I had our first planning meeting today, for the game project we're working on. Here are the notes:
Next week is 14, we have until about week 20 to complete the project. As it's too early to say how long time different phases of the project will take (or even what phases there will be), at the moment we plan day-to-day: The important thing, at present, is having a clear idea what we will be working on next time.
Today, we agreed that the story will be of a person in surgery who experiences dreams. If the dreams go badly, his EEG goes flat. The doctors can revive him three times (or an infinite number of times if you have life_cheat = on).
This gives us a lot of flexibility in story and puzzles, and ensures that we can make the most of every good puzzle idea we get, and every model or sound effect we find or make. The bits are most important right now: since we're moving in uncharted territory, having an inflexible story could doom our project. About the only thing I'm commited on engine-wise is the fixed cameras that change when the player moves into a new region (a la Alone in the Dark). That's easy to implement and gives a lot of artistic freedom with camera angles etc. Also, it eases the level design, since we don't have to worry about the bits the player won't see. An inventory system of some sort will also be hard to avoid.
So next time, I'll be working up a very basic camera/player system for testing, while Hala searches for good models and sounds which are acceptably licenced. At the end of the day we get together and look at the stuff Hala has found and discuss how we can use it to make good puzzles - hopefully we can fix a few. Then we commit on a program for wednesday.
We have resolved to not make the player model ourselves, that is beyond our artistic capabilities. Instead, we find a good model with bones and adapt it to our needs.
I'm considering whether to start on the camera/movement system right now, but Solveig is waiting, so I think I'll wait.