kip/bot/blog

Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

Reading and thoroughly digging Steven Johnson’s Invention of Air and seeing an overlap with discussions about planning and innovation (clunky intro, but accurate).

Early in Johnson’s book, he tells the story of how we discovered the Gulf Stream. It was a convergence of vaguely, not immediately apparently, connected things. In the 1760s there were several things being observed by people engaged in undirected, scientific observation. Joseph Priestley was using the new Fahrenheit thermometer to measure ocean water temperatures at different depths and locations. He had no idea if it would add up to something, but was simply curious and observant. Benjamin Franklin had notices that there were “gulph weeds” present along certain lines of sight in the ocean, lines which had little connection to landmass or shorelines. Sailors were informally logging certain places where sailing was smoother and faster. There was also a fascination with and fear of waterspouts.

All of these things were unconnected or loosely connected, until a question about the postal system emerged: why does it take longer for letters to travel from Europe to America than it does for letters to travel in the opposite direction?

Johnson’s characterization of this intellectual convergence, says something about innovation and discovery:

[British authorities curious about this question] were lucky in another respect: the postmaster in question happened to be Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin would ultimately turn that postal mystery into one of the great scientific breakthroughs of his career: a turning point in our visualization of the macro patterns formed by ocean currents. Franklin was well-prepared for the task. As a twenty-year old, traveling back from his first voyage to London in 1726, he had recorded notes in his journal about the strange prevalence of “gulph weed” in the waters of the North Atlantic. In a letter written twenty years later, he had remarked on the slower passage westward across the Atlantic, though at the time he supposed it was attributable to the rotation of the earth.

There’s additional layers to this very compelling story (I just love Johnson’s books), but the key things of interest to me are the components of discovery and invention:

A theme that cuts across all of these is looseness of process connected to open-ness to the new. This is an occasional theme in innovation literature which talks about generosity of spirit, lateral inspiration and thinking, and the ability to quickly move in and out of modes of discourse, multiple configurations of ideas and data points.

(Image taken from http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org/)

Very simple system: steadily controlled pouring of syrup, a moving belt, and slight adjustments to the speed of the belt. Yields different patterns and shapes, highlights the interaction of the syrup that landed and the response of the syrup feeding it.

50 hours, a couple rules, an understanding of emergent systems, and a delicate design touch:

I’ve had some (middle-aged?) inflection point in my interest in baseball. I have started to crave watching it, and now go straight to the sports page (or click my kindle straight to sports) and read every Mets and Yankees article. A friend got me jazzed about baseball, by describing the intricacies of the game, and an article today about Mets center-fielder Carlos Beltran, had a great example of the intricacy of the game:

“I would love to steal a lot more bases but the thing is, I just hate getting thrown out,” he said, adding: “It’s a bad feeling as a player. I know you cannot be afraid about stealing bases, but I go by percentages. Every time I steal a base, I want to make sure that I at least have a 90 percent chance I’m going to make it.”

Against the Braves on Tuesday night, Beltran liked his odds. He noticed that the pitcher, Mike Gonzalez, would look at him only when he held the ball with a fastball grip. When Gonzalez used a slider grip, he focused on the hitter. So when Gonzalez prepared to throw an 0-1 slider to Fernando Tatis, Beltran broke for third. He slid just beneath the tag and scored the tying run on Luis Castillo’s sacrifice fly.

All the things to think about — who’s pitching, what’s the grip, where’s the infield positioned, who’s batting, how much of a lead have I built, left handed/right handed batter. Mega-cool.

Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).

For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.

But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.

Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)

Nintendo are geniuses.

This looks like an interesting way to taint content. My understanding of the “may contain inaccuracies warning” is that it’s a way to highlight deliberately false, or rank amateur content. This warning over a highly-Digged US News and World Report article feels off of that purpose.

Silly but part of the appeal of the game.  Creating humorous, clever, even downright creative moments with your character and the environs.

“Our guild just moved up to number 20 on our server.”

I’m riding the subway home with a friend, the guy who, among many other contributions to my life, got me hooked on World of Warcraft (WoW). I haven’t played in forever, but the night before I logged onto WoW specifically to talk to him. (We’re at a point where I log on to WoW and we schedule subway rides home to get caught up.)

We talk a little bit longer when I realized what he said. “Wait. How do you know your guild’s rank?” Well . . .

Turns out (how often do I use that phrase? this is the last time) that Aspir from the guild Ludicrous Speed has created a site that taps into the WoW Armory and, using an algorithm all his own, ranks guilds. He’s doing for World of Warcraft what Bill James and the SABERMetricians have done for baseball: created an objective data-driven way of understanding and evaluating a game while at the same time giving fanatics and geeks a whole new way to spend endless hours talking about something they love.
So let’s unpack the sentence for nonWoWers (and make sure I’m getting it right).

One of the best things about Wow is that, while you can in fact play solo, the most crazy over-the-top (or, as the kids say off the hook) fun to have is doing group activities. These include quests, which every player needs to do to efficiently advance and which requires working in concert with 3 - 5 other players. Then there are raids. Raids are special places in the WoW game which are restricted to players of certain levels, contain really nasty hard to beat bad guys, and yield nifty treasures. To beat the nasties, you usually need over a dozen people with the right mix of skills and who work well together. Players create guilds for a variety of reasons, but most guilds are heavily focused on raids.

I’ve only been on raids three or four times. They are time-consuming to actually do, since most raids are complex and require multiple tries. They even take time to coordinate. Raid parties are usually organized by the in-game chat system, then people have to fly to the location, often stopping at a bank to pick up supplies, or going to a store to buy “mats” (materials) so they can make potions, bandages or other items needed for the raid. That’s a prohibitive amount of time for me, but the few times I have done it, it’s been some of the funnest gaming I’ve ever done. For a better feel of a raid, check out youTube for videos that guilds publish of their raids. (There is a whole genre of videos celebrating raid completions or mocking the d-bags who get a little caught up in it. Some of them show quite elaborate planning processes, including spreadsheets, maps, Xes and Os that look like a football playbook.)

So, that’s a raid. The WoW Armory is an API where players can check out other players and guilds. Here’s my main character:

The character name is Vishniak (named after Floyd Wayne Vishniak, from Neal Stephenson’s Interface. most of my characters are named after Stephenson characters and it’s great fun to run into other Stephenson characters — could I be any dorkier? oh yes . . .). Vishniak belongs to the guild “Victory not Vengeance” (I didn’t come up with the name, but I am proud to have been a charter member). Most important, Vish owns the “Destroyer’s Mantle”. If you look at the description, you’ll see that it “Binds when picked up.” That means that once I pick up the object, I can’t give, sell, or trade it to another player. Certain objects which bind on pick up (”BOP”), can only be acquired after the successful completion of a raid. Put another way, I can only own certain objects if I was present at the killing of a particular bad guy.

So, we have a classic web2.0 thing here. An open API that exposes data, a small, fanatical audience with no small amount of technical chops, and a larger, less technical audience that is curious about the data and will engage spiritedly in detailed conversations.

When Bill James began crunching through baseball stats by hand, he said he wanted to find baseball ‘truth’. Aspir describes his beginnings in slightly less exalted, but equally geeky terms:

I’ve been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, “Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?”.

Gruul is a baddie in a raid. Notice, that he says “for the first time” (this becomes significant in debates about his scoring system). What Aspir did to answer this question was create a formula that would measure the strength of a guild. The formula is based on the BOP items possessed by a guild’s members. If you look in Vishniak’s bag above, you can assume that I am carrying around my best gear and you can tell from the BOP items which raids I have participated in (I can only have a Gruul BOP item if I was there at the time he was dropped). You can ladder up from Vishniak to my guild and find the other BOP items owned by other guild members.

So you could create a formula that assigns points to a guild like so:

gather a list of the BOP items owned by individual players in a guild, distill that list (de-dupe) to a list of bad guys beaten, assign values to those bad guys, add up the points and that’s the score of the guild. Rinse, repeat, and rank as needed.

Number geeks, baseball fans, and AD&D players will immediately see the logic of the formula and quickly identify at least four areas for intense theological and dorkily fun debate: how do you assign point values to the raids? how do you handle guilds who have completed a raid several times? shouldn’t you divide the points by the number of members? aren’t there other things that we should factor into a guild’s strength like average level, complete sets of equipment? It’s like asking who is the better baseball player, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? There are so many factors, objective, subjective and somewhere in between, that the arguments can go on forever and be entertaining for almost that long. (The most recent definitive answer to that question can be found in Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s Babe Ruth, btw. Bonds ekes out wins on hitting and fielding, but Ruth’s pitching — which the guys at Baseball Prospectus convert into runs contributed, the only measure that counts — puts him over the top. That discussion is also a good overview of baseball statistics’ current state of evolved geekdom. The exercise of converting pitching — the quintessential run prevention activity — into runs contributed — the atomic unit of baseball stats is — nerdazzling.)

And these debates are already starting. The FAQ on the guild ranking site, called Wowjutsu, is a quick look at the major issues under discussion (the equivalent of on-base percentage explanations, at the beginning of a baseball stats book — it’s important, but there’s so much more). The issues that have bubbled up to the FAQ indicate a rich future for those so inclined: the scoring of multiple kills of a boss, how to handle guild alliances, dealing with guild defections. Dig into the notes and you’ll see updates about tweaks to the formulas.

This is yet another testament to how good a game WoW is. No matter how many hours you’ve played it, no matter how many times you’ve done every single thing there is to do in the game, there is a way to breathe new life into it. Over the last three years, I have grown bored of the game to the point where I have uninstalled it to reclaim disk space, only to hear about something that pulls me back in This time, for players, it’s the Bill Jamesian search for WoW truth.