Separated at birth?

Presented without further comment.

Joseph Ratzinger is sworn in and becomes Pope Benedict XVI


Senator Palpatine is sworn in and becomes Emperor Darth Sidious I

Reader Rabbit Preschool

I'm mostly playing two games right now: World of Warcraft and Reader Rabbit Preschool.

Reader Rabbit is very challenging. It's not that the tasks are hard, it's just that the interface is really complicated. You have to install a child in front of the keyboard, physically point at the numbers and letters and shapes on the screen, and verbally tell the program which answer is right and why. Once you build up enough experience points, some kind of learning subroutines eventually kick in, but it's a very slow process and there isn't enough precise numeric feedback. Requires more patience than most gamers have.

Al Franken live

Well, Austin, TX now officially has an Air America Radio station. To kick off, yesterday Al Franken came to downtown Austin to sit in the State Theater and do a live show. I played hooky from work so I could go with another my friend Jeff Dee and stand in line at 8 AM. We ran into another mutual friend, Linda from the Atheist Community of Austin. We hung around in line chatting with each other and the rest of the crowd for a few hours.

Actually it turns out there was no rush; they started handing out tickets at 9:00 and they weren't all gone until around 10. There were about 250 people at the theater. It was a small theater, and it looked to be about 2/3 full.

A local Fox News camera crew was there. They interviewed my two friends (Linda and Jeff), but the line started filing in the theater before they could get to me. They basically asked "Why are you here?" Linda used the opportunity to plug our atheist group -- I doubt they used it. Jeff summed up Al Franken's style, saying "It's hard to get intellectual arguments in a way that compels people to listen. Al Franken has the right idea by being intellectual and entertaining at the same time." I meant to watch the local Fox station that night to see if either of them was on, but I missed it. A couple more camera crews showed up later.

Hanging out with the crowd was a whole lot of fun. I felt really comfortable just chatting with random people standing near me. Obviously we were all big fans and shared the same political persuasion, so it was easy to find a topic to discuss. Linda brought along a couple of "Bibles" to read. They are basically copies of the New Testament, put in a glossy magazine format that looked like a teen fluff mag. There was a boy edition (trying to appeal to the "X-Treme" macho crowd) and a girl edition (for the "Vogue" crowd). They were pretty funny; you can click the links in this paragraph to see them at Amazon.

Al Franken warmed up the crowd with a few jokes, which everybody enjoyed. Katherine Lanpher was playing the crowd throughout the show. Whenever they came in from the commercial break, one of them would say "You're listening to the Al Franken Show live in Austin, Texas" and then Katherine would wave her arms to direct applause and cheers. During the "Oy Oy Oy Show" segment she started to mime clapping to get people to clap along with the Jewish music. Obviously it was all for the benefit of the radio audience, but the crowd was really into it.

I assume this doesn't happen in a studio, but when Al does skits for a live show, he actually does some minor prop comedy. During one scene, he pretended to be the head of a sleazy fictional Texas PAC, and at the end he pulled out a cell phone and started talking into it, then got up and walked away from the microphone as he talked.

Great guests. They interviewed the native Texan columnist Molly Ivins, then Anna Marie Cox who runs the blog wonkette.com, then former Texas Representative Chris Bell, who helped bring Tom Delay up on ethics charges.

It was personally interesting to me to see how a real radio show gets run, since I personally produce the amateur Non-Prophets twice a month. I was kind of pleased to see that they do almost the same things we do, just more of it. Their sound board and the microphones looked very similar to ours. The main difference is preparation and staff. They have at least four techies; we have half a techie. (I devote half my attention to keeping the show running and the other half to talking and staying in touch with the chat room.) Al Franken has a guy and a girl handling the timing and the musical cues; one guy running around with hardware (replacing bad microphones and such), and one guy staying on top of the web log during the show. Everyone has their own laptop, and there was another laptop on the table where Al, Katherine, and guests set. Presumably there were several more people in the studio in New York to receive the broadcast.

Another difference is preparation. They had scripts for many parts of their show. They discussed upcoming segments with each other during breaks, and made notes. Now, I can barely keep up with the need to collect half an hour worth of news and discussion points off the web once every two weeks. Can't imagine what it must be like to script key segments every day. But then again, I'm sure it would be different if that were a full time job. In any case, we learned a lot and came away with some pretty good new ideas about show preparation and formatting.

The Grudge (movie, ***)

Situation: Strange, scary noises are coming from a creepy old house. While investigating, you walk into a dark room. You flip on the light switch, but nothing happens.
What a normal person might do: Leave; go get a flashlight and come back.
What a horror movie character always does: Flips the light switch off and on at least three times. Finally stumbles around blindly in the dark, feeling for whatever they were looking for until they touch something horrible.

Situation: It's the middle of the night. You are all alone, and you think you are being chased by something you can't see.
What a normal person might do: Run to a crowded, brightly lit location and stay there for a while.
What a horror movie character always does: Runs to a deserted stairwell. If no stairwells are available, runs into a closet.

Situation: You visit the house of a recently missing person. You discover an injured little boy and a wall collage made by a person who clearly suffers from severe mental derangement.
What a normal person might do: Immediately leave, optionally taking the kid with you, and call 911 as soon as you can reach a phone.
What a horror movie character always does: Walks past the kid so he can get a really good look at the collage. Spends time hanging around a maniac's house to find more clues. Cleverly leaves fingerprints on every available surface (not that it matters in the case of the soon-to-be-deceased).

Situation: You have been cornered by a very slow moving monster. While fleeing, you stumble and collapse against a wall next to an open door.
What a normal person might do: Stand up again and exit.
What a horror movie character always does: Stares at the monster while scrabbling his/her hands against the smooth wall for no reason -- rather than, say, pushing up against the floor. When the monster arrives, just sit there stupidly. Don't bother to do anything like land a punch or a kick, just assume that won't work.

Situation: You expect something terrible to jump out at you. Sure enough, something jumps out at you. Luckily, it's just a cat.
What a normal person might do: Run away anyway.
What a horror movie character always does: Visibly relaxes. After all, now that you know there's a cat in the house, nothing ELSE could possibly be in there.

Half-Life 2 (PC, ****)

Half-Life 2 was an especially rare shooter for me, in that I finished the game 100% legitimately, with NO turning on cheat mode to temporarily get past a difficult section or just whiz past the endless monotony of blasting people over and over again with different machinery. This is partly thanks to the fact that the difficulty was just about right for me, with no one section getting me so frustrated that I just wanted to ignore the game and see what came next. But it was also a testament to the fact that it was incredibly varied in gameplay, for a FPS. I never really felt like skipping ahead, because what I was doing at the moment always seemed interesting to me.

A few months ago, I posted that playing Doom 3 is like riding on a Disneyland ride, in which all the events are scripted but they give the illusion of freedom.

That is still the case here; HL2 is quite linear and there is definitely one path for you to follow all the time. At one point, I was driving a car along a coast of beach, and I thought "What happens if I jump in the ocean and start swimming?" And the obvious answer was: you get eaten by an infinite number of piranhas, stupid. There's a wall there, it just doesn't look like a wall. Tricks of the Disney Imagineering team: make it look like there's a world out there when there's not.

And yet, when you come down to it, I had much more fun playing Half-Life 2 than Doom 3, or even Half-Life 1. Why?

Because HL2 does something really slick, and really rare in a shooter, which is make each segment of the game have a (mostly) different feel from the other segments.

Examples of the things you will be doing (MINOR SPOILERS):

• Standard FPS gun and run levels; a few mini-bosses.
• Levels where you must drive really really fast and dodge all over the place to avoid getting hit by gunfire, mines, etc. Also jumping ramps.
• Levels where you must drive and blast stuff with turrets.
• Fighting with a personal army at your back.
• Going for long stretches with no ammo drops at all. You need to use a specialized weapon and pre-laid traps cleverly to avoid dying.
• Sneaking across beams on a roof where the floor is swarming with headcrabs.
• Fighting in and out of a building with a squadron of independent players.
• Blasting an unlimited supply of guided rockets at a pilot who dodges a lot, before he kills you first.
• Using an uber-powerful gun that makes it feel like you are in god mode even when you're not.
• A puzzle level where you have to create your own path through dangerous terrain.

There's just an awful lot of different things to do here, and the pacing is excellent. Every time I started to think "I'm pretty bored of this sequence" a guy would come out and say "Park your car, Dr. Freeman, we have to hurry inside before the Big Bad arrives."

I think I liked Doom 3 more than most reviewers, but here's how a typical game goes:
Shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, simple puzzle, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, easy puzzle, shoot stuff, shoot stuff, JUMP SCARE, shoot stuff, boss.

Although both games are linear, you can feel the difference in what you are doing between the two games.

I think the difference can be summed up by the fact that HL2 had a lot more entertaining ways to get killed than D3 did. In Doom, if you die it's pretty much because a monster attacked you until all your hit points were gone. And sometimes, you fall down.

In HL2, you can die while trying to pick up a grenade and throw it back to the owner, become lunch for the aforementioned piranhas, total your car off a cliff, get hit by a train, not notice the land mines, make a wrong move that brings in an unbeatable swarm of enemies, step into the wrong transport and head for the incinerator. Idiot.

Also: nice soundtrack. I don't remember any music in Doom 3 at all. If there was some other than the obligatory thrash metal ballad for the closing credits, I must have missed it. Half-Life 2 has mood music all over the place. Not music all the time, but when you're doing something important, you'll definitely know. This makes the game far more cinematic.

Also, lots of HL2 takes place outside. Definitely a good thing. And even when you're inside, you don't just looking at the same boring office textures over and over again. There are a lot of different indoor environments.

Also, good NPC's who don't show up only on TV monitors or when they are about to die. There are people whose only role is "cannon fodder #53". But you also have friends, and you'll feel bad if you let them die.

Also, an interesting villain.


So to sum up my objections to this game: very long load times, and only illusory control over the story or the sequence of events. But overall, thumbs up.

One other thing: people will likely complain about the ending, which feels like a cheap way to not resolve things so that they can leave it open for a sequel. I can't say I disagree, but I read that this was coming, so I didn't care too much.

Yasir Arafat rose from the dead!

Christian:
Paul makes a reasonable appeal. Believe based on the evidence. If you don't believe that I saw Jesus alive after his crucifixion, then ask some of the 500 others who are still living. [1 Corinthians 15:6]

I understand what you're saying. As a matter of fact, last week I saw Yasir Arafat, alive and well, taking a bath in my tub. Naturally, I was surprised. "Yasir!" I exclaimed. "Didn't you just die last month?" "Yes I did," Yasir replied in heavily accented English. "Luckily for me, I came back to life two weeks later and I am now here to relate the experience to you."

Needless to say, I worried that nobody would believe me when I told them that a resurrected Yasir Arafat showed up in my bathtub and walking around. But luckily for me, after he finished his bath, he toweled off, got dressed in his robes, and walked outside. He asked me to drive him downtown, so I did. While we were in downtown Austin, some 900 people noticed us. "Hey, is that Yasir Arafat?" some of them called out. "Yes, my friends!" replied Yasir. "I have returned! Come and touch me if you cannot believe that I am real!"

So Yasir Arafat also returned from the dead. If you don't believe that I saw him, you can ask any of those 900 people who also saw him. Unfortunately I cannot tell you who they were, but I'm sure you'll have no trouble tracking them down yourself.



Question: Do you understand the difference between confidently writing about evidence, and actually producing that evidence?

It's curious that Paul claimed that 500 people witnessed the resurrected Christ, and yet none of those 500 people -- not a single person other than Paul -- saw fit to jot something down about the experience. I hear that the Romans kept excellent historical records. You would think that seeing a dead guy walking around would be an event that was surprising and unusual enough that somebody contemporary, who was not affiliated with the founding of Christianity, would want to get something about it on paper. Seeing Yasir Arafat certainly made me want to write about it.

If any of those 500 people had bothered to write down something independent, that would at least be a start. Multiple corroborated accounts from sources other than the Bible (which you have to admit seems to have an agenda) would be really impressive.

There is a certain aspect of "blind" in it, in that unless you were an eyewitness, well, you didn't see it. But you can have blind faith that a chair you've never sat in before will hold you up, based on inference. That's a reasonable action to take. If a person feels they have enough evidence, they are reasonable when they believe in a creator. It may not be enough evidence for you, or the kind of evidence you require, that is another matter altogether. [Yes, yes, of course people can put their faith in the wrong thing based on faulty evidence or inferences]

Inferring that the chair I want to sit in will hold me up, because other chairs I have sat in also hold me up, is very different from believing something just because somebody tells me so. The evidence that chairs, in general, hold people off the floor can be empirically tested as many times as you may wish.

On the other hand, if somebody told me that you can sit on clouds and they will hold you up just as well as chairs, well, I wouldn't believe them. Even if a million people fervently BELIEVED that you can sit on clouds, I wouldn't believe them. I would ask them, "Can you show me how you sit on a cloud? If not, can you provide an undoctored photo of somebody sitting on a cloud? Can you tell me whether clouds are water vapor, as scientists seem to believe, and if so, how you can sit on water vapor? Why can't I sit on steam or fog? Can you explain why most people in your group, when they try to sit on clouds, seem to fall down and die?" And so on.

This person would be under no obligation to provide me with evidence, but then he shouldn't expect me to hurl myself out of a plane for an afternoon of cloud-sitting fun.

One phrase you might hear occasionally is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." People sitting on chairs is not an extraordinary event; it happens all the time. If you say "I was sitting on a chair yesterday" then I'm likely to take your word for it without further investigation. If you say "I was sitting on a cloud yesterday" then I'm likely to ask for proof.

"It rained every day last week": not extraordinary.
"It rained every day last week in the Mojave Desert": prove it.
Clear?

But I digress, sorry for the sermon. My point is only that the case can be made that religious (at least Christian) faith is not entirely expected to be "blind", and certainly not without any evidence.

That's fine. Then in the name of presenting evidence, I would like you to propose any kind of test that could be used to verify the existence of an intelligent creator. If your test fails, you must be willing to see that failure as a point in favor of the disconfirmation of your theory.

Your faith in evolution (my assumption)

Incorrect.

is partly blind in that you can't see the major changes taking place (like new organs and new body structure), but you base your trust in it on inference (in part) from available evidence of smaller changes which most people agree are happening today.

Again: there is a DIFFERENCE between believing something that you can observe and demonstrate over and over again (people sitting on chairs) and believing something for which there is no evidence available other than hearsay (people sitting on clouds).

I do accept evidence, but I have a feeling we do not agree on what counts as evidence. If its only empirical, 5-sense evidence you mean, then I don't limit it to that.

Then please suggest another type of evidence that we may use.

We don't have to limit ourselves to the Bible. For instance, let's take another couple of books you may have heard of: The Iliad and the Odyssey.

These books are older than the New Testament. They describe events that, in large part, we are pretty sure really happened. And they have extensive descriptions of multiple gods running around interfering in wars and such. These descriptions are not isolated; the existence of those same gods (Zeus, Athena, Hermes, etc) are also confirmed by the works of Plato, Aristophanes, and many, many others.

Do you believe in Hermes? If not, why not?

The universe itself is evidence; its there (or we are in it), and it fits the definition of naturalistic standards as far as I can tell. To me and many others, the universe is evidence that *something* outside the universe exists, which brought the universe into existence.

Respectfully, the universe is evidence that the universe exists. Beyond that, I can say that the universe is evidence for anything I want to. I could say that the universe is evidence for a transdimensional polka-dotted gopher named Phil. But that doesn't make it true. If I want you to believe in Phil, I should have to produce direct evidence of Phil, instead of waving vaguely at trees and sky and saying "This! All this is evidence for Phil!"

See what I mean?

---

[This exchange lasted for several days, and finally the Christian asked the following:]

Some of the arguments against the idea of a creator go something like this: "I believe that a purple dragon lives in your garage", or that "Yasser Arafat came back from the dead and talked to me and 900 others" with the implication that you can't prove it, that just saying so doesn't make it true without evidence.

So my question, how do you disprove such claims?

That's an astute question, I'm glad you asked. The answer is: YOU CAN'T.

Really. Truly. You can't.

There is a whole category of claims like that, which just don't open themselves up to disproof. If they were true, they could easily be proved. Produce the dragon, or produce Arafat, and your claim will become true.

But there's no way to DISprove these claims, because Arafat could be really good at hiding. The dragon, though you were standing in front of him, might be invisible, incorporeal, and produce no heat. Throw enough ad hoc claims at the subject, and you simply can't say for certain that something does not exist.

So here's the question you really wanted to ask: "How then shall I choose what to believe and what not to believe?" If you wish, you can choose to believe every single thing that anybody tells you which can't be disproven. Unfortunately, that means that you'll believe a lot of contradictory information ("There is a dragon in your garage, AND there is no dragon in your garage"), which has to be false.

It also means that you'll believe a lot of things that can be very dangerous to you personally. For instance, "I am a famous Nigerian businessman trying to export 900 million dollars out of the country. If you will just send a small fee of $5000 to this address, I can pay the bank's processing fees and get the money. I will gladly send you a 10% cut."

Or: "If you drink this delicious poison, you will not die but be instantly transported onto a spaceship that is currently hiding behind that comet over there."

Or even more mundane claims, like "Buy this product and you'll be really cool and popular and successful!"

You really, honestly cannot prove that the 900 million dollars is not there. Just because there are a lot of stories about Nigerians stealing people's money, or even luring them to their home country and slitting their throats, does not PROVE that this one is not legit.

You really, honestly cannot prove that the spaceship isn't there.

That's why "skepticism" is not just a quality for crotchety, anti-social old men and nasty sinners who desperately want to not believe in God. Skepticism is a virtue, something that you should respect and cultivate.

Skepticism does not mean that you automatically believe the opposite of whatever you're told. It just means that you evaluate the evidence for something and ask yourself "Do I have a good REASON to believe this?" If you don't, then you still don't assume it's false. You just file it away under "no evidence." You recognize that it's something that might turn out to be true in the future, but for the time being, you don't feel particularly compelled to believe it.

If I tell you "Hey, there's a dragon in my garage!" you say "Interesting. Can I see it?" And if I say, "No, it's invisible" you say "Can I touch it?" and so on. If I can't give any good reason to believe in the dragon, then you don't have to believe it. It's as simple as that. You say, "Sure, you MIGHT have an invisible, untouchable, heatless dragon, but so what? It doesn't seem to make any difference whether it's there or not."

"Occam's Razor" is also a really good skeptical tool to keep in mind. Look it up. Occam's Razor says that, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Which is more likely: That a Nigerian businessman would contact a total stranger to move an enormous amount of cash, or that your email came from a garden-variety con man? Which is more likely: That Yasir Arafat is back from the dead, and there are 900 people who can't be contacted, or I am pulling your leg? If you got more evidence of Arafat's miraculous rebirth, you can always change your mind later.

For more along these lines, I highly recommend this essay:
http://rucus.ru.ac.za/~urban/docs/baloney.html

Christmas in the heartland

I went to Kansas for a week to visit my in-laws. I would like to make a few observations.

I live in a very red state, but Austin is a blue county, so we're a community of those people who don't have, you know, "moral values".

As we drove across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, I couldn't help noticing some things about the heartland. First, no piddly little run-down town is so small that they don't have a big church as the main attraction, and usually several. If the church isn't easily visible from the road, you can still see a big sign saying "Church of Christ" or some such. In many cases, towns with populations under 2000 have churches that are just as enormous and lavish as those in the big city, even if most of the other buildings in the immediate area are pathetic shells with broken windows that have clearly been abandoned for years. The Baptist churches are always the biggest and gaudiest.

What I'm trying to convey here is that you enter the more "red" areas, the amount of church space per capita increases a lot. And not only that, so do the number of bars and strip clubs per capita. We kept passing areas where there would be two or even three bars in the same shopping center block.

More churches, more bars and strip clubs. Hmmmm, interesting. Kinda gets you thinking about where the values connection to moral values really comes in.

Sports games

EA signs exclusive football license deal - Dec. 13, 2004
"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. said Monday it had signed an exclusive agreement with the National Football League and the marketing arm of its players' union, giving EA the sole rights to put NFL players, stadiums and teams in its games.

The exclusive license was a coup for EA in its ongoing battle with the joint venture of Sega Sammy Holdings Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc."

And all I can say is, I feel fortunate to be someone who hates sports games.

I've never been a pro-sports fan, which makes me not a True Guy(TM) to a lot of people, especially here in the south. I can mostly understand the appeal of it; when I was into Warcraft, I watched a lot of replays from the top players like Tillerman, who played the game exceptionally well. It was fun to watch their techniques.

Many people have reacted to this news by saying that this will most likely hurt the quality of future NFL-based games, and I agree. Other people say that it's hard to fault EA for taking this action, and I agree with them too. They are out to make money, and one way you make money is by killing the competition.

An analogy in nature: If you were to go to an ecosystem and kill off all of a certain kind of predator, in the long run you'll probably have a less robust ecosystem; but it would be hard to convince the prey that they should care about this. You could say: "But look here, Mr. Gazelle, in a few million years you will be less evolved because you won't have any cheetahs to thin the herd." And the gazelle would say, "Yeah, but I probably won't get killed by cheetahs now, will I?"

I also don't think you can really blame the NFL. They got a big bag of money that they wouldn't have had otherwise. In all likelihood, this big bag of money will be worth more than the smaller bags of money from multiple companies over the next five years. If they didn't expect this to be true, they wouldn't have signed the deal.

I think the problem was bound to come up sooner or later, because so many gamers hold the paradigm that they *have to* buy a game that features NFL players. As far as I know, this has no parallel in any other type of game. If I want to play a First Person Shooter right now, I can play Doom, or Half-Life, or Deus Ex, or whatever. If I want a massive online game, I can buy Everquest, WoW, or Camelot. The details of the story and characters will matter to me, but not so much that I will only accept a game that has one specific cast of characters. I mostly care what kind of a game it is and how well it is executed.

It is pretty much conventional wisdom that, with just a few exceptions, most games based on movie or TV licenses are junk. I don't think this is just bad luck. It's because the game is handicapped right from the start. The company is spending a bunch of money up front to acquire the license to the characters instead of spending an equivalent amount of money on development. If you feel that you absolutely HAVE TO play a game based on, say, Daffy Duck, you have a very limited set of choices because few companies would go to the trouble and expense of acquiring a Daffy Duck license. A few people must really need to play a game based on Daffy Duck, or else they wouldn't make any of those games. But for most gamers, while they might regard the presence of Daffy Duck as a slight point in the game's favor, they would almost certainly give a lot more weight to what kind of reviews the game got, or how it stacked up to a similar game with different characters.

This is not how sports games work. If you want to make a really good game that captures the feel of playing football, you could just as easily do it by making a game about college football, or urban neighborhood football. The resulting game could be just as fun. In fact, I would imagine that this is the sort of thing Take-Two will probably do, instead of giving up their football franchise altogether. But that's not really the point. The point is that for whatever reason, the majority of football gaming fans feel like they have to buy games with professional, big-name players. And there's only one game in town: the NFL has a monopoly on big-name players and they're certainly not going to give it up. (Well, not unless the XFL makes a big comeback.)

So I think maybe this situation was bound to come up sooner or later, because some people will only buy a game that features NFL players as characters, and there's only one NFL. Just imagine what it would be like if I declared: "From now on I will only buy Real-Time Strategy games that prominently feature Tillerman. Tillerman must put his stamp of approval on the game, and there must be AI characters in the game who behave in a manner that is similar to Tillerman."

Well, I'll tell you what would happen. There wouldn't be a market for me and I couldn't play any more RTS games, so the analogy to NFL sort of doesn't work anymore. But if there was a big enough market to support this kind of ultimatum, and Tillerman started selling the rights to his likeness in games, and no more games stood a chance without Tillerman's blessing, I bet RTS games would get a lot worse.

Why World of Warcraft is evil

6:30 AM
Must play Warcraft. No, sleep. Ugh, went to bed at 2. Warcraft. Sleep. Sleep. Warcraft.

Hey, listen. Last night you had THREE quests that were marked "Completed". All you have to do is take a short walk to some nearby towns, collect your rewards.

No. Sleep.

Easy experience, man.

OKAY! A little bit of Warcraft. And then, quit. Get ready for work early.

Let's see, here's your classic "travelling salesman" puzzle. What's the quickest way for me to hit these three zones, get my rewards, and quit?

Zone #1. Easy experience. Thank you.

Hey, I just remembered I got THREE new spells last night. I'd better see how well they work. Die, monster! Hey, that was fun. You die too!

Zone #2. Whoops! I left my quest items in the bank. Oh well, I have a delivery to make near the bank.

Hit bank. Make delivery.

NO, DON'T GIVE ME ANOTHER QUEST, YOU JERK!

I shouldn't take this quest. I should just decline and ignore him. Hmmm, but then I might forget that this guy offered a quest and I won't be able to do it later. Better take it.

Gee, that looks easy. I could do that quest real quick...

NO!

Oh look, I have four bolts of cloth. I wonder if I qualify to learn any new tailoring recipes. Guard, where's the tailor?

Oh yeah, new robes. Stylin'.

Okay, I need to collect on this last quest in town and that's IT. I'm logging off.

Don't give me another quest. Don't give me another quest.

Damn, he did.

It's just another delivery. All I need to do is take a short walk...

Okay, I'm walking. Walking. Straight to the delivery point.

You know, if I veered off the road just a little bit, I could fill in my map and get a quick exploration bonus.

Okay, back on the path. This guy on the roadside wants me to take another quest. Fine. Oh, not you too?!? Okay, I'll take yours. And yours. What the hell.

Okay I've arrived. Here you go. Oh goody, I'm right near the gryphon master. I can fly back to my home town.

Wheeee!

Hey, I have a quick quest here too.

Uh oh, the kid's awake. What time is it?

I have 30 minutes to get ready and I haven't showered.

Crud.




DO. NOT. BUY. THIS. GAME.


You know you want to.

Classic game review: A Mind Forever Voyaging

Written in 1985 by Steve Meretzky (author of many other Infocom classics such as Sorcerer, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Zork Zero), this was Infocom's big attempt at doing serious science fiction in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World. Like those stories, Meretzky imagines a future where the world has gone horribly wrong and spends lots of time carefully examining the details of that future society.

The game suffers from many flaws, including an interface that is difficult to understand at first and fairly skimpy interactions with most NPCs. Ultimately where it succeeds is by presenting big ideas through a very large and lavishly described game world that changes over time.

There is a gimmick to this game. You are PRISM, the world's first truly intelligent computer. The manual explains some of your origin story. The year is 2031. Years ago, PRISM's creator, Dr. Abe Perelman, decided to raise the computer under the illusion that he was really a human. PRISM inhabits a Matrix-like virtual reality for most of his life. Believing himself to be "Perry Simm", he experiences a human childhood, growing up from a baby, experiencing bad breakups and the death of loved ones and typical human existence. When PRISM is a young man, Perelman wakes him up and tells him his true identity.

PRISM was created with a purpose. Not only can he simulate a life in the past and present, but he can also extrapolate life in the future. The world is in a political crisis, and a charismatic senator has stepped up with the Orwellian-titled "Plan for Renewed National Purpose". Your job is to simulate a world ten years in the future where this plan has been implemented, and see how things turn out. Based on the recordings you make in your simulations, the Plan might be put into effect by Congress. This is where the game begins.

Part of the reason the interface is difficult is that you are expected to act as a computer in multiple roles. In communications mode, you can "turn on" your own interface outlets and instantly visit different parts of the lab where you live. You can enter interface mode and talk to other "dumb" computers that manage the facility. There is library mode where you can review your assignment, read up on current events, learn about your creator, and study the bullet points and popularity polls of "The Plan".

Once you enter simulation mode, the game becomes a fairly standard "walk around and look at stuff" adventure game. However, your goal is not to collect treasures, but to collect recordings of interesting sights in the future. In part one, when you are getting the hang of your identity and the point of the game, you are given specific events to record (i.e., talk to a church official, visit your house, eat in a restaurant).

BEGIN BIG SPOILERS (skip ahead to end spoilers if you want)






Once you win part 1, things get more interesting and fun. Your processors gradually collect enough data to simulate the future in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and finally 50 years. It is then up to you to use your judgment about what to record. As you travel to the future, you watch society gradually crumble and fall around you. The government becomes more and more totalitarian. Weird religious cults sprout up as the decades pass. The people in the world become more close minded and cruel. This is where the game really shines. You get to explore the same map in each time zone, and the changes that occur are subtle at first, but start accelerating. For instance, in 2041 and 2051, you can visit an ordinary supermarket and buy groceries. In 2061 you notice that the shelves are sparsely stocked with unappetizing canned goods. By 2071, you can only buy a crummy soy patty and you have to show your "ration card" to get food once every three days. The library pops up a list of banned books. The zoo holds "monkey taunting" events. The courthouse hosts increasingly sinister trials for more pitiful criminals each decade.

The final year, 2081, is very creepy. No matter where you go you can experience a different violent death, and if you simply wait around, you'll die of starvation.

In part 3 you engage in a fairly short and slightly anti-climactic political struggle in the real world to stop the senator from passing the Plan. The game ends on a fairly up note as you skip ahead to the far future of a world where the Plan was never implemented.

END BIG SPOILERS







From a political standpoint, the game has a definite liberal slant, even more so now than it must have looked during the Reagan years. Some have called it "preachy", so factor that in to whether you would enjoy playing it. Richard Ryder is clearly a right winger, and religion and hyper-patriotism are two of the big boogeymen that the game presents for the future. Still, the game does get a little balance from the implication that the Plan is an almost understandable reaction to a recession caused by high taxes and liberalism run amok.

The future that is presented is clearly a bit of a caricature, but then again, so was 1984. The best part of this game is not seeing the author's idea of a dystopia, but in watching the logical procession of a healthy society toward that dystopia. On the whole, the game is one of the best attempts I've ever seen to introduce serious ideas into interactive fiction, and it remains one of my favorite game stories ever.

One seriously divided nation

The mood of this election scares me. Kerry may win, Bush may win, but the problem is still going to be there. The problem is that the nation will continue to be divided up into a "faith based community" and a "reality based community", as Ron Suskind put it. (If you haven't read this article from the New Yorker, go back and read it. I insist.)

Let's pretend, just for a minute, that Kerry will win AND he'll turn out to be the dream president for the reality based community. He fights for science, bases his policies on evidence, and actively seeks advice from true experts in the relevant fields before doing anything potential stupid. And the economy rises, people start getting jobs and raises again, the stock market goes back up, etc. The Supreme Court gets a few more guys who believe in civil rights and free speech. Iraq is saved and becomes a utopia. (Just remember, this is my fantasy, not my prediction.)

Even in this rosy scenario, you still have a lot of faith based people who are angry at Kerry for deposing the guy they see as "God's man". Facts are inconvenient but meaningless trifles and will continue to be so. The economy? It's Bush's doing. Iraq? Bet you libs are GLAD we invaded now, look how grateful they are!

And still they're going to be angry about everything, because God's man is gone, church leaders will whip them into a frenzy about gay marriage, stem cells, abortion, evolution in schools, etc.

It's time to own up to the fact that the non-reality based community is not some fringe group of wackos; they are half our country. And they really want a fight. I have a strict "live and let live as long as you don't bug me with your craziness" philosophy, but they HATE me. They have signs and web sites saying they hate me. They've declared a "culture war" on me. I didn't declare that war, but apparently I'm in it now.

What do I do? Well, I have no idea.

An unfair and unbalanced media rant

I've been reading a book called "The Republican Noise Machine" by David Brock, who formerly worked for an affiliate of the Washington Times and is now a regular on the Al Franken Show. The subject of this book is the so-called "echo chamber effect" that occurs in the right wing media. To quote the book's introduction:

Because technological advances and the race for ratings and sales have made the wall between right-wing media and the rest of the media permeable, the America media as a whole has become a powerful conveyor belt for conservative-generated "news," commentary, story lines, jargon, and spin. It is now possible to watch a lie move from a disreputable right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning's Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points -- manufactured by and for conservatives, often bought and paid for by conservative political interests, and disseminated through an unabashedly biased right-wing media apparatus that follow no rules or professional norms -- into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America.

As I may have mentioned, I have a morbid fascination with the creationist movement. I'm not very far into the book, only 60 pages or so, but I see a pattern being outlined that looks very similar to the way modern creationism is trying to worm its way into our education system.

It seems that in the late 60's, some of the best and brightest in the Nixon administration decided that the press was being unreasonably hostile towards them. Those annoying reporters were always running stories claiming that Vietnam was a disaster (which it was) or that Nixon authorized illegal activities to get himself reelected (which he did). So they started to form think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation that would try to push their way into the public consciousness and demand that the conservative side of every story be heard on every possible occasion. The charge that the media is liberal didn't just come from nowhere; it was a meme that was intentionally dreamed up and pushed out there.

Fox News uses the slogans "fair and balanced" and "We report, you decide." It seems that they are trying to appeal to some mythical gold standard of journalism whereby you report both sides of every story, with no comment or bias whatever, and then let the audience decide for themselves who is right. Not only does Fox (obviously) fail to achieve this lofty goal, but in my opinion, the goal itself is crap.

You can't inform the public by just presenting everything that could possibly be presented and then saying "Well, decide for yourself." When presenting a blatant lie, journalistic integrity would imply that you should state that it's a lie. The media isn't there to post non-judgmental stories like "Adolph Hitler: was he right?" If George Bush and Karl Rove issue a press release stating that the earth is flat, it's not the media's responsibility to run a "fair and balanced" headline screaming "Shape of earth in question! Is it really a globe? Our studies reveal that many people disagree." Of course that would be dumb. People can disagree all they want, but the shape of the earth is an irregular sphere.

As Dan Rather recently demonstrated, it's really important that the media check their sources and decide whether a story is credible BEFORE they run with it, rather than just reporting "We heard that blah blah blah". But there is a major double standard at work, because CBS has a reputation for having journalistic ethics, while Fox does not. When Fox runs a picture of John Kerry at a podium with Jane Fonda, which later turns out to be an extremely clumsy Photoshop job, people say "Oh, that's just Fox." When Matt Drudge breaks the story that someone is having an affair with an intern, and we learn that he pulled the story completely out of his butt, nobody cares. When Rush Limbaugh cites "statistics" that he totally made up, he pleads "I'm not a news show! It's just entertainment!"

But the line between entertainment and news has really gotten blurred, and I think it's at least partly due to this very deliberate effort that the Republicans have made since the 70's to demand that the media show no "bias", not even a bias towards being correct. (I think it's very revealing that Fox News' slogan is NOT "Fair, balanced, and accurate.") All that matters is that it be "balanced", meaning that if you have one person on TV saying that we really landed on the moon, you must have a crackpot appear at his side claiming that it was all a government conspiracy. And furthermore, the program must not identify this guy as a crackpot, because that would be biased.

This reminds me of what I witnessed at the textbook hearings in here in Texas last year. Creationists go from state to state, demanding what? That we teach creationism? No no no, that is so eight years ago. What they want us to do is "teach the controversy." They want us to teach our students that SOME people disagree with the theory of evolution, and the jury is still out. Never mind that the "jury" are not scientists who do research; they're ideologues who are openly pushing a religious agenda. But to point that out would not be "fair" and "balanced" because it's passing a value judgment.

But that's bull, because science is all about passing value judgments. It's important and necessary for scientists to come up with crazy ideas that MIGHT be true, but then those explanations have to be tempered by reality and experiment. This is the part where you filter out the ideas that are crazy because they're innovative from the ideas that are crazy because they're ridiculous. Science will always be beset by crackpots who believe that they've invented a perpetual motion machine or "proven" the existence of ESP that mysteriously vanishes when somebody tries to measure it. But because science is a selective process, ideally the enormous number of crazy ideas are supposed to get winnowed down to the ones that are true. Same thing that evolution does in selecting for traits that have survival value.

That's how science is supposed to work, and in my opinion, that's also how journalism should work. Journalism is not, and should not be, about being a mouthpiece for every lie, every slander, every conspiracy theory that happens to be in the public consciousness. It should be about wading through the marketplace of ideas and selecting the ones which appear, to the best of our investigative understanding, to be accurate. Journalists should NOT be fair to con artists and hucksters. They should NOT be balanced by giving an interview to one liar for every truth teller.

What journalism should be doing is the science of information. It should find out the truth and report it. This is obviously an idealistic goal. Science doesn't always "work" the way it's supposed to because you have bickering and internal politics and desire for personal glory among scientists. And also because human knowledge is always going to be limited, so what we regard as "true" will only be the best guess given the available evidence. Likewise, I don't expect journalists to be infallible; only that they do more than pay lip service to reporting on real stories.

Journalists need to quit worrying about being fair and worry more about being right.

What does Kerry stand for?

A lot of people are saying that they don't plan to vote, and they justify their decision this way: "I don't like George Bush, but I don't know what John Kerry stands for. I can't identify anything that he believes in. I don't know what his guiding principles are."

This charge come straight out of the Bush camp, to be echoed word for word by not only rank and file Republicans, but also self-proclaimed "undecided" voters. It's often spoken in wise tones, as if the opiner is staying above the fray, and as if it's actually some kind of opinion.

But in my ever-so-humble opinion, this whole line of complaint just smacks of intellectual laziness. I mean, come on, this is the information age. All you have to do in order to find something out is to go and look for it. A quick trip to johnkerry.com explains the platform, but I've gotten messages dismissing the entire thing by saying, essentially, "It's long." What that means is, "Not only do I not understand the choices involved, but I can't be bothered to read about them." What else do Democrats need to do, strap you to a chair and read the platform through a bullhorn?

Refusing to vote, or voting for a write-in, does not make you politically savvy and it does not make any statement of any sort whatever. Whether you like them or not, either George Bush or John Kerry is going to be sworn in on January 20. If you choose not to decide, that's still a choice. If you think that you're going to regret a Kerry, vote for Bush. Otherwise, the outcome IS your fault, no matter who winds up in office. If you think about voting for Kerry, but don't, and then Bush wins, and it turns out badly, then you should regret that.

By abstaining from participation in the process, you forfeit your right to bitch about the result. So unless you feel that you honestly don't care who runs the country and it makes no difference at all to you what kind of policies will be passed in the next four years, maybe it would behoove you to actually take it upon YOURSELF to go read about where both candidates stand on the issues, and then figure out which one would be better -- or less bad, if you wish. Democracy only works if there is an educated electorate, and when you say "I don't know where he stands" all I hear is "I'm not educated about the candidates and I don't even care."

World of Warcraft (PC, *****)

This is an early review. I did not get in the WoW beta, but for this week only they accepted a massive number of new participants to see how their servers handle it. I get to play until the week is up and no more, until the retail version comes out, or until another round of beta keys get sent and I get lucky.

Full disclosure: I am very, very biased in favor of anything Blizzard puts out. For further disclaimers and apologies about that, you can see the beginning of my Warcraft III review.

More disclosure: I haven't played Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, or any of the other "new" crop of massively multiplayer online games. Until City of Heroes came out and I personally convinced a bunch of Fools to buy it. Lately people have started dropping out of CoH, and I understand why. While the game is very fun in the early and middle stages -- designing a hero concept and costume, exploring the first few skills, and so forth -- the mid to late game is lacking in variety. Lots of repetition in the types of enemies and indoor quests; way too much gameplay emphasis given to fighting wandering monsters, so it's not too important to experience the game's story or content. Once you hit level 14, it takes a very long time to gain additional levels and there's not much variety to look forward to.

I started the game by creating a fighter, figuring this character would have the easiest time advancing as quickly as possible in a week. I decided a dwarf would be the most appropriate race. I started off in a dwarf village, surrounded by other newbie dwarves and gnomes. At first I was struck by the game's similarity to Diablo. As you walk around, some people have exclamation marks pop up over their heads; you go to them and get a quest. Some tell you to kill monsters; some tell you to visit new places. Each quest has a lengthy and well-written block of text which you can read or not read, depending on whether you care about story or not. Power gamers can easily ignore the flavor text -- the objectives are clearly summarized at the top, and the reward you will get for finishing it is noted on the bottom. However, the content of the game is interesting, and if you enjoyed reading the history of the Warcraft universe in the manuals of other games, which I did, then you will want to pay attention to this as well.

Unlike Diablo, there are no attribute points to distribute. As in Warcraft III, your heroes automatically get boosts of strength, dexterity, mind, etc that is appropriate to their class. This is fine with me, as I hate having to figure out exactly how many hit points I'm going to need in exchange for attacking accuracy. This is also the case with City of Heroes.

Unlike City of Heroes, questing is important. I've spent periods of time both fighting wandering monsters and running errands, and I definitely feel like I gain experience much faster when I complete quests. And there are tons of quests to be had all the time. In just about every building of every city you find, you'll meet someone with an exclamation point. I have around five quests in my log most of the time, and they are conveniently sorted and color-coded to let me know if I will take a beating when I attempt to do the quest. Questing is a full-time job in World of Warcraft. You can certainly choose to fight wandering monsters, but mostly what you'll want to do is identify particular monsters that tend to give you stuff you want and fight them until you have all the stuff you need.

For example, I'm a novice cook, and I only know a couple of recipes. One of them is cooked boar meat. To practice my cooking in the early stages, I pretty much have to fight a lot of boars. I don't do it for the experience, I do it for practice.

See, in WoW, trade skills and the level treadmill are kind of like two separate games. Trade skills are the traditionally "boring" MMORPG activities such as cooking, sewing, smithing, and so on. As you gain experience and level up, you will get skill points to spend, but you can go to any trainer in town and learn whichever skill you want. The earliest levels of each skill cost relatively few points, so it doesn't hurt much to dabble in different skill trees before deciding to build one up to high levels. The online manual even gives helpful hints about which skill trees are likely to be useful to each class, but these are guidelines only.

But training a skill only gives you the ability to practice it. Once you train cooking, you will get a couple of recipes (cook boar meat, cook wolf meat, cook eggs) and a proficiency that is somewhere around zero. To improve your skill, you simply cook a lot of these meals, which you can then sell or use to boost your health later. Once your skill is high enough, you can buy more recipes from the trainer. So basically, you only need to practice the skills you actually find useful at the time; you don't have to waste a ton of time practicing skills just to get them to the level where they can do anything useful at all.

The really nice part is that you can't destroy resources by practicing with a low skill. If you have the right objects (such as meat) to practice with, you will succeed. The reward for improving your skill is not to improve your odds of not screwing up; it's to make better stuff at higher levels.

Let me recall my experience with being a blacksmith in Ultima Online many years ago. First I had to spend hours mining ore and, more often than not, not finding any. Then when I had a bunch of ore, I had to smelt it. If I failed my skill roll, I didn't make any metal bars AND I lost the metal. Then once I had a stack of metal, I had to decide what to make. If I failed to make it properly, I didn't make any armor AND I lost the metal. So frequently I put in a whole lot of work and had nothing to show for it.

In World of Warcraft, the emphasis is always on exploring, not sitting around clicking one thing over and over again. As a miner you get a skill called "find ore". This skill is always on if you want it to be, and the effect is that ore deposits which spawn randomly will be visible on the minimap. If you find an ore deposit, you just walk up to it and right click, and you hack out some copper ore. Guaranteed. Then you go back to the forge, smelt the ore, and you get copper bars. Guaranteed. Then you open your blacksmithing skill, choose a "recipe", and make it. Guaranteed. In the process, your blacksmithing and mining skills both go up.

That may sound like it's too easy, because you can't lose your materials. Blizzard decided (I think correctly) that it's not fun to watch an hour of work go down the drain because your skill is not high enough to craft anything without destroying your stuff. But, you can't get experience forever by making the basic stuff. At first you can craft copper bracers for the cost of two copper bars. But you only improve your smith skill for a little while doing that. Once it starts to drop off, you need to start buying higher level recipes, such as copper chainmail vests. That will cost you six copper bars, and some "flux", which you buy to remove impurities in the metal, and some linen cloth, which you get by fighting certain monsters. As you improve, you rely on more elaborate materials, and that requires you to go out and fight or explore. The emphasis is never on repetitive tasks; it's always on going through the world and discovering things.

There are really three kinds of points you get. Standard experience points get your character to higher levels, which improves your stats and allows you to train new fighting skills. Trade points allow you the POTENTIAL to learn any trade skill you wish, but you only get good at these trades by finding materials and practicing. (Note added later: This is no longer accurate in the retail version. Trade skill points were removed and a cap of two skills was implemented. Learning trade skills costs money, but not points.) Then when you get to level 10, you start getting talent points. These work in a manner similar to the skill tree on Diablo 2; you get three talent trees where you must acquire some abilities to acquire others.

For instance, my warrior has offense, defense, and fury. But in practice, it looks like I'll only be able to effectively choose ONE tree to develop. This is because the items in the offense tree all work in harmony with each other; to get the higher offense talents, the requirement is "Must have at least 20 talent points in offense". So if you divide up your points among the three trees, you'll be unable to get the really good skills.

This forces you to specialize your character. You can have a powerful offense fighter or defense fighter, but not both. Fury, I think, is the tree that allows you to buff your party with warcries and things like that. I don't know what talents are for the other classes because I'm not level 10 yet.

One thing I find smart about the game design is that you aren't offered choices until you know what you're doing. As I said, craft skills are cheap at low levels, so you can experiment without permanently nerfing your character. And because the talent points don't come until level 10, you should already have a feeling for what kind of abilities you can get, which means you probably won't make a big mistake picking talents for things that don't interest you.

Finally, the architecture is impressive. All the races start in their own training town, but as you get out into the world you see gradually larger towns until you finally get to your race's big city. When I played a human mage, I found Stormwind Keep for the first time. This may sound cheesy, but it was literally awe inspiring. I was like "Oh my God, that is an enormous friggin' castle!!!" Then you get inside and there's an entire city inside the walls. Guards are posted everywhere, and you can ask them for directions to anything you might be looking for (trainers, merchants, inns, etc). And believe me, you'll need them.

For the dwarves, there is Ironforge, a tremendous subterranean city with a giant anvil in the center for blacksmiths, stores and classes arranged in a ring all around the edges, and an enormous moat of lava dividing the inner and outer rings. I have played an orc character, but I haven't seen their city of Orgrimmar yet.

So far in the game, there's so many things to try that I often can't decide what to do. My quest log is always full -- you not only get quests specific to each map region, but you also get class-specific quests (warrior, mage, etc) and quests that are based on your trade skills ("We need to supply the war front with six copper axes and six copper bracers, pronto!") You can run around practicing skills, collecting resources, and levelling up without questing. You can even join large parties who are running to raid the nearby orc cities. I went with a team of about 30 characters and we beat off several high level guards before I gave up and went back to town. Tip: if you're going to attack a city, bring lots of characters with resurrect abilities.

I probably have only a few days left to play, and the game's not out until around Christmas time. It's going to be a frustrating wait. The game has a lot of minor bugs right now. Sometimes a monster will be standing around but won't attack anyone and can't be attacked. I fell through a crack in the polygon ground once while mining in a quarry. I fell for a few hundred feet, got to see the underside of the landscape, and then when I went below a certain point, I was instantly teleported to my home town. Still, apart from the regular server crashes (this *is* a stress test after all) the game was remarkably stable and smooth, and I could go about my business for long periods of time without noticing any major problems. Someone who joined my party said, "If this were Everquest, this would be the retail version."

Final score: ***** out of 5

Playing to win

In all this wall to wall coverage of Ronald Reagan's death, one clear message is coming through: he might not have known what was going on most of the time, but boy was he lovable. I saw a replay of a speech he gave, and I have to admit that it makes me downright nostalgic to have a president who can actually string an entire sentence together and deliver it without sounding like he's a second grader being put on the spot by his teacher.

I have always felt that there are two divergent elements to politics: there is the "passing good policies" aspect, and there is an aspect that is more like a game. The game is getting elected, and our political system is set up so that the winner of the game gets to run the country.

So these skills are connected to each other, but only in the sense that one is a prerequisite of the other. Other than that, there is a little overlap between the two skills, but not as much as we'd like there to be. Someone can be the greatest policy maker in the world, but they'll never get a chance to prove it if they run a boring campaign.

I have gradually become convinced that the far right wing have become incredibly skilled at playing the election game. About thirty years ago, they realized they were starting to lose the hearts and minds of the people, and they threw all their energy and money into figuring out the best way to play the game. And by and large, they've done it, while Democrats have been doing a crappy job of playing.

Whatever you think of Republican policies, you have to admit that they've done a masterful job of making a lot of people THINK that they can do a good job. This is what playing the game is all about. And it's time the other side realized that having good ideas and intelligent policies isn't enough. As distasteful as it is, they have to be prepared to play the game and win, against an opponent who plays the game as a full time profession.

I wish that everyone would read and understand this article, entitled "Playing to Win". It is about playing games competitively, which I understand may not fascinate everyone as much as me, but it is really friggin brilliant.

http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPart1.htm

For those of you who don't want to read about video games, I'll sum it up:

There is no such thing as a "cheap" victory. A win is a win, as long as you play within the rules of the game. People who play competitive games and get beaten over and over again by the same tactic often complain that their opponent is being "cheap" because his strategy never changes. What they don't realize is that the opponent isn't being cheap; he's being smart. His play never changes because THEIR play never changes, and his play works.

Players who complain about cheapness -- whom the article refers to as "scrubs" -- claim that the game is better or "more fun" if you try different tactics every time. But ruthless and/or smart players, who only care about winning the game, exploit this attitude because those who play only "for fun" play badly.

If your opponent is really a one-trick pony, you should be able to beat him easily. I mean, if you're playing rock-paper-scissors, and your opponent's strategy is to choose scissors every time, then you know what to do. You choose rock. Every time. Until your opponent wises up. You do not choose paper occasionally because it's "more fun" or "more fair." You do the thing that beats your opponent.

The Democrats lost in 2000, in large part because the Republicans know how to game the system. But the fact of the matter is, the Republicans won, and they did so without getting arrested; hence it was legal within the rules of the game. Some of the tactics they used seemed sneaky, unfair or "cheap". These tactics may have included, but are not limited to:

* Purging law-abiding voters from the rolls as felons.
* The use of media demagoguery persuade people to vote for things that aren't in their best interests.
* Stopping the recount.
* Using an arguably stacked Supreme Court.
* Getting groups of "protestors" bussed in to stop the recount in progress.

Future tactics may include all that, plus:

* Using rigged computerized voting machines.
* Redistricting key states in order to smoosh largely Democratic districts into largely Republican districts.

Assuming that these points are even true, many of them not only seem unfair, but OUGHT to be illegal. However, they're either not currently illegal, or they are technically illegal but our justice system isn't interested in going after them. But here's the hell of it: the more they win, the more they get to change or bend the rules in their favor. And that's not fair! It's cheap! But it's the way they play the game, and they're winning because we keep on playing nice.

Democrats don't have a problem with idealism; they have a problem with winning the game. The first step that needs to be taken is recognizing they have a problem. The problem is that they NEED TO WIN. Part of winning, in the changed landscape of this game, is that people respond to stuff like patriotism and war veterans and the image of being "strong on defense." These issues are mostly very low priorities for me, but they matter in winning over the electorate. The fact is that John Kerry is actually generally on the right side of issues that I do care about, such the rights of private citizens, the lack of interest in gigantic tax cuts only for the super-rich, and separation of church and state.

Does John Kerry "inspire" me? Is he my perfect candidate? No. I actually think Al Gore would have made better policies. I voted for Howard Dean in the primaries. As far as I know, I might even like president Ralph Nader more than I'd like president Kerry -- but I can't definitely say that, because I haven't paid that much attention to Nader's platform. The fact is, Nader won't be president. Nader pisses some people off because everyone knows that no matter how good his ideas may be, he's willingly altering the rules of the game to swing it in favor of Bush. It sucks that our political system is like that, but the only way to change our political system is to first WIN THE DAMN GAME.


Having said that, I do not believe that it's a waste of time to complain about the injustices of the 2000 election. The fact is, complaining is a legitimate game strategy. If you complain about something loudly enough, and convince enough people, those people will put pressure on those currently holding office; and they, in turn, may feel that they have to do something about it in order to make their jobs more secure.

But the bitching has to be constructive. It can't be just a smug little assertion that "Well, Gore really won that election, Bush is not my president." It has to be used as one weapon in an arsenal of strategies for playing the game better next time.

So am I saying that Democrats must become as ruthless and underhanded as Republicans? No. I don't believe that's necessary. I believe that the Democrats are capable of becoming just as skillful game players as the Republicans, and still retaining the core of what they stand for. I think the skill of governing and the skill of winning are totally separate from each other. The Democrats need to learn to use populism and mass media, they need to block every attempt the Republicans make to cheat or game the system... AND they need to hold on to a set of core beliefs that would lead to intelligent and successful government.

But for now, I think their crucial weakness is in the former, and they need to concentrate real hard on correcting that weakness by November.

Zelda: Windwaker (GameCube, ***)

Legend of Zelda: Windwaker is over a year old now. Recently, Ben has frequently been badgering me to play so he can watch, so I've played through it and I'm almost done. It's only the second time I've played through it, and I relied heavily on a walkthrough this time so I could find most of the secrets.

I think there are some very serious problems with the game, many of which don't show up until you've played over half of the game. No, I don't have a problem with the cartoony graphics or the childish themes. What bothers me is that there are a lot of gameplay elements that are not only not fun, but actively annoying.

Many of the elements that I loved about previous Zelda games are present through most of the game, and I will list them here:

• Starting out with a relatively weak character and gradually growing into an unstoppable badass (even if it's a badass with adorable puppy-dog eyes).
• Getting a growing arsenal of toys that you can use in various situations.
• Lots of puzzle filled dungeons, filled regularly with rewards in the shape of maps, hearts, and new toys.

The last one, I think, is extremely important. I know the dungeons were the best part of the game for me. The first time through, I would often have my older stepkids watching and giving me advice on what to do next. But whereas most previous installments (especially Ocarina of Time and the SNES game) had eight or nine major dungeons, this one only had five or six. So while there is still lots of puzzle solving to do in the game, an awful lot of the game is done in non-dungeony activities. Which brings me to the horrible, HORRIBLE overworld navigation system.

As a novelty, it was fun for a while. The world you live in is a giant ocean dotted here and there by islands. You get a boat, you sail between them. Eventually, you get warping capabilities that jump you to selected islands around the map. You use the wind waker, a conductor's baton with a small skill game attached to it, mainly to warp around the map and change the direction of the wind.

But travelling between the islands is tedious and should be kept to a minimum. It should have been more like a mini-game, not THE ENTIRE GAME. Travelling from one grid on the map to another takes around 3-5 minutes. Each time you use the windwaker, it takes another 30 seconds of fumbling around. In order to get to most locations, you must go through all of the following steps:

1. Get on the boat.
2. Figure out what square you're aiming for.
3. Select the wind waker in your inventory.
4. Play the "warp" song.
5. Identify a square near where you want to be.
6. Wait for the warping animation to finish.
7. Figure out which way the wind needs to blow for you to get to your final target.
8. Pull out the wind waker again and play the "wind" song.
9. Wait to finish sailing to the next square.
10. Get out of the boat.

How often are you willing to do all these actions? I reckon about once every thirty minutes is my limit.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the game, every square is unreadable on your map until you track down a fish somewhere in the area and get him to fill in your map. It is technically optional, but pretty much necessary that you visit the fish in every location. That's 7x7=49 times when you must repeat pretty much repeat the same action in a different place.

In the beginning, inter-island travel is kept to a minimum and all is fine. As you approach the end, you have to island hop more and more. After you do a surprisingly small number of dungeons, the game switches over completely into full-time travel mode, and the amount of time you spend doing this is roughly the same as the amount of time you've spent on the entire game before.

There are eight triforce pieces, NOT hidden in dungeons, but hidden under the water. To find each triforce piece, you:

1. Travel to a location on the map, using all the previously mentioned steps.
2. Solve a few easy puzzles to get a new treasure map.
3. Go to the island where your maps get deciphered.
4. Figure out which square the treasure map points you to.
5. Sail to that square, using all the previously mentioned steps.
6. Use the map to get you to the new location.
7. Look for the precise location of the triforce piece, and get it.

These steps are the same every single time, for all eight triforce pieces. For those of you keeping score, that's three trips for each of eight pieces, for a total of 24 island trips. Each trip has ten steps, but the deciphering island is located on a warp square, so let's cut one of those tens in half... 25 steps times 8 squares is still 200 mostly uninteresting steps you need to take -- and of course, that's after you visit the fish 50 times.

But wait, there's more.

Deciphering a map (step 2) costs 400 rupees, which is incredibly expensive. Once you've tapped out all the money you had, the only efficient way to get more is to use still more treasure maps to find still more underwater chests -- some of which contain heart pieces, and some of which contain 200 rupees, so you need to locate 400*8/200 = 16 more chests in 16 other squares, plus more maps if you want all the hearts, or if you were looking for money and got the hearts anyway.

I'm just READING what I wrote, and my God I'm bored.

I cannot emphasize enough the fact that using the wind waker itself is a dreadfully tedious experience once you've figured out how it works; I'm betting (without exaggeration) that you have to use it at least 500 times throughout the course of the game, if not more. Not only to get around the map, but to shift the wind so you can float in the right direction; to control your friends' actions inside dungeons; and to change the cycle of day and night.

And then, of course, every single island has some kind of hidden secret (the usual stuff -- hearts, extra bottles, a seemingly endless number of treasure maps, and other trinkets that have limited use in the game). So if you're going for completeness -- which I thought I would, but I've changed my mind -- you have to visit all of the 49 squares, often multiple times. And that means two uses of the wind waker and some sailing each time.

Previous Zeldas didn't do this to you. In Ocarina of Time you can use the ocarina to warp to many different areas, but you can usually find a shortcut from where you are that will jump you around the map in about a minute or two. And then there was the horse, which was an awesome way to travel. More importantly, there was a much more limited number of important locations, say 10-15, where you could find most of the things you could ever be looking for.

I finally got the triforce together this morning. On balance, given the choice between the completed triforce and the time I spent getting it, I wish I had the time back.

Doom 3 (PC, ***)

Playing games like Doom 3 makes me feel like I'm on a ride at Disneyland or Universal Studios.

Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- I happen to really like Disneyland. Last time I went there was with my wife, about seven years ago, and I'm really looking forward to my toddler being old enough to enjoy the experience of going back. When you spend a day on the rides at Disneyland, it doesn't take very long to figure out what the formula is.

The rides that have been created in the last 15 years or so -- let's say since "Star Tours" was created -- have a fun but predictable design pattern to them. They're trying to make a cinematic experience that sucks you in as much as possible. So they talk directly to you, the guest, and make you feel that you are somehow involved. When you get in the stationary car that jiggles around a lot, they tell you it's a spaceship, they cut off your view of the real world, and have a little animatronic robot pilot tells you "Hey, you guys are the first people I've flown with since they gave back my license!" Indiana Jones appears on a video screen to let you know that, while you're on your pleasure safari in the jungle, you should keep an eye out for the lost artifact of Wambooza, or whatever. When you go to a 3D movie, an attendant hands you "safety goggles" that must be worn during the presentation for your protection.

Then, as the formula dictates, Something Goes Wrong. Tie Fighters are attacking the ship! You looked at the idol of Zamafu and now you're cursed! Ladies and gentlemen, we've had a catastrophic failure in the core and aliens are loose in the theater!

A bunch of stuff happens to the audience. The ship shakes. A giant rock starts rolling after your car. Water is sprayed on the audience at just the right moment, or a little mechanical thing embedded under the seat touches you on the leg or something. Of course, the audience is never really in any danger -- imagine the liability costs. In fact, the same sequence of events happens to every single customer who gets on the ride, in the same order. You're on rails and can't control where you go; the movie playing is pre-recorded. But it FEELS LIKE something is happening to you, as long as you can willfully suspend your disbelief.

Now I can certainly do that. I like fiction. But I'm not a kid, and most of my brain is telling me that there's nothing to worry about. I focus on the way the experience is designed. Where a kid might be thinking "How does this event make me feel?" I'm thinking "How did the developers want me to feel when they created this event?" Then I just roll with it and have fun.

So that's Doom 3 for you. Technically it's very interactive. You decide how fast to move through the corridors, what weapons to use, how much time to devote to searching for hidden ammo and health. But you're STILL on rails. There is still a predetermined sequence of events that will happen in a certain order. You can get through the game most effectively if you're approaching it with a mindset of "What do the developers *want me* to do now?"

Rarely are there any kind of serious decisions to be made. You go from point A to point B, monster spawn to monster spawn. See that locked door? Let's see if there's a security panel to click nearby. If not, it's not important and there's nothing behind it. Otherwise, there's a key or a code somewhere later on, and we'll be coming back here in a minute. There are "puzzles," certainly, but only of the "Read this note to learn the security code" variety. In fact, surprisingly often, the note is placed practically right next to the door. That's ridiculous. It makes me wonder why they bothered having a locked door at all. More than anything else in the game, this jars the suspension of disbelief and reminds you that you're not really there; you're on a thrill ride and it's time for this door to open so something scary can jump out at you.

Also contributing to the feeling of being on rails is the regulated placement of items and its ratio to monster spawns. I found a big cache of plasma gun ammo, so I KNOW that some high hit point monster is about to rush me. What to do, what to do? Oh I know, I'll use the plasma gun. If I've just had the tar beaten out of me in a room where 5 imps spawned simultaneously, I just smile and keep going, knowing that there is a full cache of health and armor just around the corner. After all, I'm not a terrible gamer; surely SOME people handled that fight worse than I did, which means they're at lower health than I am, which means they need some extra help to keep having fun. I can think this way because I know that the experience is designed to happen roughly the same way to everyone.

There are times when I don't know what to do, but usually that's because I'm running through corridors to find the next door. Most of the time, that means I'm running through empty halls. When a monster appears from a dark corner while I wander around, I think "Aha! I'm going the right way!" instead of "Oh my Asmodeus, I'm gonna die!"

Now all of the above may make it seem like I don't like the game. Certainly a good online game of Warcraft 3 against a human opponent contains many more surprises. But I do like fiction. I like somebody taking the time to tell a story that they thought I would enjoy (and incidentally, pay $50 plus tax to hear). As cinema (if that's not too pompous), there are moments in the game that work. Somebody had to say "You know know what would be cool here? If you hear noises and see spooky shadows in front of you... and then something jumps you from behind." When you meet a really ugly new monster, there's often a cut scene to introduce it. For instance, you see one of those big pink chomping gorilla demons roar at you from behind a window... it charges the glass, can't break it... then it goes away for a second... then suddenly the door bursts off its hinges. That's fun.

Of course, the game certainly does startle me many times, but that's not the same as scaring me, as any Alfred Hitchcock fan will explain to you for hours if you let them. Tip: DO NOT play this game in a house with cats who like to jump on your lap. Also, there is a general feeling that things in the story are getting worse as time goes on. I took a playwriting class in college once, so I know this technique is known as "raising the stakes." Whereas in a game of Warcraft, if things are getting worse for you instead of better, 4 out of 5 times it probably means that you're going to lose, which I don't enjoy.

Still, I'd like to think that there's a way to improve on the formula, so I don't have to feel like somebody else has planned my every move. I don't have a way in mind; I'm all talk. If you were to get off your ride at Disneyland and walk around behind the trees, of course you wouldn't find yourself in uncharted jungle; you'd find a bunch of gears and stuff, and the back of the sets. What's behind that unopenable locked door in Doom 3? Well, I don't have to guess, because I can activate the "noclip" cheat. Then I know that behind the door is the outside of the model. It's a whole lot of nothin' at all.

Score: *** out of 5.

A kinder, gentler RPG

Jeff (aka Captain Liberal) mentioned -- and I agree -- that people in general are friendlier to each other in City of Heroes than I've come to expect from online games in general, and I'm starting to see what makes this game so different from a lot of others.

The fact that there's no player-killing in the game is certainly one aspect of it; the only way you can interact with other people is in a positive way. You can join their team, or you can heal them, or help them fight monsters. But there's more to it than that. The paradigm of this game is different.

In other MMORPG's, like in RPG's in general, the object of the game can best be described as "kill others and take their stuff." I mean, sure, in theory all the things you're killing are evil, but if you think about it that's just your assumption when you play the game. You walk around in the woods, you see an orc. It's just minding its own business, doesn't say a word to you. What do you think to yourself? Hey, I bet that orc has money! Kill it! Once you're outside of town, you can pretty much assume that you want to indiscriminately destroy anything that moves.

From that point, player killing is actually a logical extension of how the game works. I mean, who's going to be richer than another player? Why waste your time killing hundreds of orcs for a few dozen gold a pop, when you can kill one player and earn thousands of gold pieces plus a full set of armor and equipment to boot?

City of Heroes is different in a couple of ways. First of all, the bad guys that you kill are actually doing something wrong to warrant killing. You walk around the city and you see those little word balloons that say things like "Help! I'm being mugged!" Then you run to help the people, and what's your reward? Do they pay you? Do you loot the bodies? No... they THANK YOU, and that's what you get. An ego boost. Or alternatively, if you're playing an indoor mission, you are there because your contact said that there is some kind of illicit activity going on. Again, you're doing it for some kind of societal benefit.

Well sure, you get experience and "influence", which is basically equivalent to money. And sometimes some inspirations or enhancements magically appear in your inventory. But that's the other interesting thing: you get those things automatically. You don't have to scramble to get them before the other players do. There's no competition over limited resources; if you fight for good and cooperate with others, you get rewarded. Period.

In fact, every aspect of this game seems carefully designed to make friendliness not mandatory, but desirable. I can't help thinking that this is a very positive step in the world of RPG design. Your character is not just a wandering cutthroat or a thief. Okay, so he's a vigilante, and that's normally frowned on in polite society. But it's still a step up.

City of Heroes (PC, *****)

I'm recovering from staying up till 12:30 AM playing City of Heroes, then got up to play it again from 7:00 to 8:30. What can I say? I'm hooked.

I hooked up with my friend Jeff, who was in the beta and plays "Captain Liberal". (Basically his origin story is nearly identical to that of Captain America, except that he was created in the 50's to fight McCarthyism rather than Nazis in the 40's.) As the newly created character "Seculo", I spent a tremendous amount of time designing my cosume, then went through the tutorial, and finally hooked up with Captain Liberal to fight bad guys in the neo-Nazi district.

If you have the chance, it's definitely a good idea to start playing the game with a higher level friend who can show you the ropes. Your first few levels will probably go more smoothly.

Costume creation

Before you start playing, you get to build your character, starting with height and build (a slider from "burly" to "athletic" - meaning "skinny"). You will also be choosing what kind of origin your powers have: magic, mutation, science, technology, or natural. Seculo is recovering from being an evil lawyer, so I chose a natural origin -- meaning he wasn't born or mutated into powers, but trained himself up like Batman. I made him kind of short and wiry, with glasses and a goatee. Then I gave him a blue and gray themed costume, with a "scales of justice" symbol on the front. The only major flourish I put on his costume was a striping style on his boots that the game described as "tiger", but since they're mostly gray, they just look like slightly funky boots.

My future heroes may have a wilder style, and there's lots of variation to choose from. You can be enormous and lumbering, like the Hulk. You can be bare chested, or your clothes can have all sorts of crazy patterns on them, or fins, or whatever. Your skin can be any color; and it can have blood veins all over, or robotic circuitry, etc. Your face can have features like a cat, or goth eye makeup, or even clown makeup. (Super Gene Simmons to the rescue!) I even saw some superheroes running around who looked like nebulous glowy things. Think of, I don't know, Electro after he lights up.

You can make all kinds of changes to your costume and body, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that you can be absolutely anything you can imagine. The logos are chosen from a list, and although there are a whole lot of them, I was disappointed that you can't design and import your own from Photoshop or something. Also, there didn't seem to be very much variation between face styles, though of course you can customize your hair (mohawks! bald guys!), facial hair, helmets, and glasses or visors. You can also choose to have a permanent grin or grimace plastered on you.

Gameplay

I'll describe how the power and levelling systems work after I tell you about how my game went.

After finishing a quick tutorial and customizing my character's powers (more about that later) I left the training area and went to meet my first "contact". This guy is your Commissioner Gordon, if you will. He says "Hi Seculo, can you go beat up five 5th Column bad guys?" or "Seculo! We need you to investigate this old abandoned warehouse and get some information off the computers!"

Your contact and your preferred enemies depends on which origin you chose. As a "natural", I met with a plainclothes crimefighter who is most interested in having me fight the 5th Column, which I mentioned is a neo-Nazi group. There is one gang of villains for each origin, so magic heroes will be fighting "hellions", which are a demon gang, and science heroes will be fighting robots, etc. At least at first, the contact will usually tell you to go to an area where there are a lot of enemies to match your origin, although you are also free to go wherever you want.

But before I even talked to my guy, I messaged Captain Liberal to let him know I was ready to join him. He said "I'm on a mission, I'll be with you in a few minutes." I waited and familiarized myself with the area. Then he messaged me: "I'm out... I'll come join you." I wondered how, so I right clicked on his name and I got a menu that included the command "follow". Even though CL was halfway across the map, when I clicked follow my guy started running in the right direction and a little arrow appeared indicating that CL is 800 feet in the direction I'm going.

The homing interface is really handy. You can pick your own target on the city map and the target will always be shown on the main screen, and so will the current mission. The game has many different zones where you can go, and you'll only see a target or friend if it's on the same map as you.

Anyway, meeting up with CL was really easy, and we immediately joined up to form a team. Then he led me to meet my contact and get a mission. This then became the team's mission, and he could see my current mission as well as his own. The mission led us to another area of the city, so the Cap'n showed me the way to a subway system. All you have to do is click the subway, choose which zone you want to go to, and your character will hop on the next available train and poof, you're there.

Because there are lots of different servers and many zones within the server, you usually won't randomly meet a lot of other players unless you're specifically trying to find them. Champion City is populated with tons of NPCs, most of them just walking down the street going about their business. But as we travelled toward the mission, we would occasionally see little word balloons appear near us saying things like "Help! I'm being mugged!" or "Quick, finish da job before some heroes show up!" Helping out is optional. You can run toward the sound and fight the bad guys. When you start attacking, the victim will run away. But once you finish off all the guys in a group, the victim will return and say "Thanks!" or "Wow, you saved me!" or "Nice costume!" When that happens, you win influence points, which I'll talk about later.

When you fight somebody, the game automatically targets one of the bad guys and all your attacks are directed at him. You can switch targets by clicking on someone or hit tab to cycle through nearby baddies. Once you have targeted someone, you press number keys to throw a punch or use a superpower. Every action takes some time, and also has a cooldown time, so after you punch somebody you can't punch again for a couple of seconds, but you CAN use a different power right away.

Seculo specializes in mentally blasting people. Currently I have two types of mental attacks, so I switch back and forth between them when I fight, or occasionally punch people if both my blasts are in cooldown. Captain Liberal is a melee brawler and Seculo is mostly a long range supporter, so we complement each other pretty well in a fight.

When you target a bad guy, you can see what level they are. They also have have color coded names, so you can usually tell how you'll do in a fight. A green name means you will beat them handily; red means don't bother fighting them without a huge team.

The Mission

We get to the mission site and go inside. It's some kind of office building, and we're the only ones inside except for lots of bad guys. The game automatically creates a private area for you and your team when you go inside, so you won't be getting in the way of other players to "camp" spots where monsters are supposed to be. The building was a small maze with generous helpings of enemies, some tough and some not. As I've read, the game automatically customizes the enemies in a private zone so that they'll be an appropriate challenge for the level of your team.

I got some levels and items, and then we met the objective and I had to go back to my contact and get credit for winning the mission.

Character building continued

After you create a costume for yourself, the next thing you'll do is choose 1. origin, 2. hero type, 3. skill sets.

The origin does not affect what kind of powers you have, only what kinds of enemies and contacts you tend to meet. The hero type is everything.

There are five classes of hero:
* Scrappers are for players who like to go solo; they have a decent balance of attack, defense, and crowd control. If you made a hero based on Jackie Chan, you would be a scrapper.
* Blasters are ranged, high damage, low defense powerhouses. They can dish it out but can't take it. Guys with guns or energy blasts are blasters.
* Tankers are high defense, high power, but slow. The Hulk would be a tanker. Captain Liberal is a tanker.
* Defenders are your support team. They give buffs and healing to your party, and debuff enemies. In a more traditional game, defenders would be paladins. Seculo is a defender.
* Controllers are heroes who mess with people's minds. Professor X is a controller.

But wait, there's more. Each hero type has six, count 'em, six categories of PRIMARY powers, and six categories of SECONDARY powers. You choose one primary category and one secondary category, and you're stuck with that set of powers for the entire game. Each category has different levels of powers which you can buy after you level up. Presumably no category is useless, or so you'd hope.

A defender's primary powers are mostly about boosting their teammates, and secondary powers are for attacking and debuffing the enemy. Seculo specializes in healing (primary) and psychic powers (secondary). Within each category, there are something like ten powers. So that's five hero types, times six categories, times 10 powers, so I think that's 300 powers in the game, although it's probably a bit less because some types have overlapping skill trees.


Equipment and character advancement
The terminology used in the game is a little bit unusual, but once you get used to it you'll easily see how to make analogies to other RPGs. Here's a quick glossary.

Security level <=> level
Super powers <=> skill points
Super power enhancements <=> equipment (armor, weapons, etc)
Insights <=> potions and scrolls
Influence <=> gold

So here's how it works. By fighting enemies you get experience and influence (money). Get enough experience, and you can level up. On even numbered levels, new powers will be available to you from your primary and secondary trees. On odd numbered levels, you will get enhancement slots for those powers.

Each power has a number of little bubbles below it, like sockets where you can stick enhancements. When you fight, enhancement items will also occasionally pop into your inventory, usually after winning a tough battle. They aren't actually used until you "spend" them by popping them into a socket. Your enhancements can go into any appropriate power; an enhancement that increases flight speed only affects the flight power, and an enhancement that increases healing can only be used on a healing power. There are also all-purpose enhancements that do things like increase a power's damage, decrease cooldown, reduce the amount of energy it takes, and so on. The higher your level, the more powerful are the enhancements you can use.

You can also obtain or buy a limited number of "insights" such as rage, luck, energy recovery, and so forth. They act as potions which give you short term boosts. You can quickly consume them using the F1-F4 keys.

Production quality

As I always point out, this is the very first MMORPG I have played since I quit Ultima Online. So I don't know how this compares to Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot, but I really like the interface and visuals. The game takes place in a fully rendered 3D city, but it isn't a big network of generic identical streets and alleys. The map is very carefully designed and most of the places I've been so far stand out on their own. A short little riff of ambient music will play when you enter a new area, but otherwise there is no background music, just background noises.

There are also gigantic statues of legendary heroes throughout the city. I mean, like, statue of liberty sized. You walk up close to one and you're at eye level with the feet. And they're everywhere.

Sorry, I just have to digress and note something amusing. When you rescue a citizens from being mugged, one of their stock phrases is "Wow thanks, I've never met a real superhero before!" I want to smack them and say "What? The place is called Paragon City, the whole economy seems to revolve around heroes, there are giant freakin' statues of one on every block, there's an entire plaza full of heroes just two streets away, and you've NEVER MET ONE?"

Okay, got that off my chest.

Here's another cool thing: lots of preprogrammed animations you can go through. Bow, cheer, laugh, grovel, sit down and do yoga exercises, flex. There is also a "decision" menu which includes options like rock, paper, scissors, roll dice, flip coin.

Anyhow, I tried going solo a bit in the morning and didn't do so well. I think the game is definitely designed to make it easy on teams and tough on individuals. They give you lots of ways to hook up with people, in fact you can ask the game to automatically search for teammates and then other people who are near your level can find you. So far I'm only playing with Captain Liberal or alone. But this morning I was fighting some tough villains, and suddenly another blast of mind-rays came from behind me. Some midget girl came running up and joined the fight with me. Then I said thanks and healed her. That was neat. I know some people have complained that there isn't any PVP action, but the result of that is that everyone is really friendly and helpful to each other. I can see that it won't be much trouble to hook up with other players just to go for a short spin around the city.