We are all retards now

I just want to jot down a few things that have been running through my head lately. I have yet to play Will Wright's new game, Spore, but from what I've read my worst fears were realized. Will Wright was the genius behind Sim City 2000. In Sim City 2000 the player was given a dynamic world to interact with; a set of rules to try to learn and understand which were not presented upfront.

In that way it reminded me of Legos. Legos and Sim City 2000 were my two favorite toys growing up. Both had rules which one had to learn by doing. The tricks to building a healthy city or a stable building were not in a book, but in the experience. When I heard about Spore, like many people, I was excited. Video game press releases have a tendency to inspire people to dream. What if this is the game that does everything I ever wanted a game to do? I had just hoped that Spore would be more like Sim City 2000 than the Sims.

From the reviews, even without all the DRM drama, Spore failed this test. Like Legos, Wright's newest project is dumbed down. The choices you make do not participate in a complex set of virtual reality math. Aparrently, the difference between a creature created with two legs or ten is not registered by the computer's calculations. Like with the Harry Potter or Star Wars Legos, with half as many pieces per set as there were when I was growing up, this product presents a dumbed down shiny toy to children it assumes are dumb already.

I learned more from the smart toys I had growing up, than I ever did at school. But as important as I think education is (I never cut funding to my schools in my Sim Cities, even when the police were operating at 20%) I also recongnize that maintaining a healthy economy is equally important. The buisiness math of Sim City was fairly simple and libertarian. Lower taxes, boost business.

But now we have an economy that no one can understand. Secretary Paulson says he needs a trillion dollars to keep the confidence going and save the credit market. Credit comes from the latin word 'credere,' to believe. And right now no one can or should believe these people who have no idea how the toy they built works.

So now it's time for the computers to take over. This article was published in the New York Times today, and it sounds just right to me. It basically says that instead of using laws of thinking to determine what the markets will do we should use computer forcasts; with complex models of little indepent agents jumping up and down and doing what they do in real life. Those outside of the legitmate sciences keep proving we are as much robots as the cockroach; more complex maybe, but not less predictable. So let's start predicting. Let's start writing fate down before it happens. Not for you and me, but for us.

Will Wright should have spent less on animation and more on creating really complex algorithms that were representational, if not of real life, then of a realistic life children could learn from. I'm sick of hearing from people on the news who don't have a fucking clue as to what's going on, besides knowing that something is going on and for some reason believing someone else does get it. I don't get it and I don't think these people do. If they could show me a bunch of SimBrokers jumping around and reacting and give me a forcast as complex as the ones which say we are environmentally fucked, then I would probably believe them.

But I don't think there is anyone left to make a learning toy as smart as Sim City 2000. Like how we can't make it back to the Moon, this knowledge is lost. We are all retards now. Be honest, you just skimmed this didn't you? Not that I can really argue that it's worth your time, but a good book is, how long has it been since you have read a book?

Soviet Arcade

Last month, the four officially opened the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in a Stalin-era bomb shelter under a university dormitory. Packed into two rooms are dozens of Soviet-made video game carcasses in various states of repair. Some work perfectly; others last for a few minutes, then fade. One common feature among them all is a lack of a high-score list.

"That kind of competition wasn't encouraged," explains Alexander Stakhanov, one of the museum's founders and engineers. "If you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no 'high score' culture as in the West."
[from Wired]

Futurist Digest Weekly

I've more I want to highlight from that Bruce Sterling speech, because it has a lot of startling ideas. But I've been coming in to a lot of really great speeches lately. So I think I'll just sort of index them here.

What if the Singularity Doesn't Happen? [mp3]
Vernor Vinge @ the Long Now Foundation
February 15, 2007

[Slides] [Summary & Discussion]

In one scenario, Vinge breaks failure of a tech-rapture down in software/hardware terms. Software never advances to the level to deal with all our information. Software fails catastrophically and deters economic incentive for advancement. Etc. Vinge says that if we can make it through this century than we can be fairly certain we'll reach the Singularity.


Storytelling & Spore
Will Wright @ SXSW
March 2007
[via Wonderland]

The Spore stuff I'm somewhat skeptical of after listening to Will Wright's Long Now speech he gave with Brian Eno.
[mp3] [Summary & Discussion]
Though Wright has lots of interesting things to say about generative systems in both speeches. I think that Spore will not quite be the realization of the dream that many (he) may be claiming. It will still be trapped in the mundanity of Sim City and the Sims.

The Wonderful Power of Storytelling[txt]
Bruce Sterling @ the Computer Game Developers Conference, San Jose CA
March 1991

A few more snippets from Sterling's speech, because it covered so much ground, and being 16 years old, it now has covered even more.

Something of the sort may come from virtual reality. I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there; something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here that can really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr Developer, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software Administration don't really approve of that." That could happen. I think there are some visionary computer police around who are seriously interested in that prospect, they see it as a very promising growing market for law enforcement, it's kind of their version of a golden vaporware.

I now want to talk some about the differences between your art and my art. My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren't in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It's a terrible kind of curse really.
~

In the art of book-writing the classics are still living competition, they tend to elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence.
~
I'm into technical people who attack pop culture. I'm into techies gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street punks picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent people, people with some technical skills and some rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison that this society sets for its engineers. People who are, and I quote, "dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world situation and aware on some nightmare level that the solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians."

That last bit, reminded me of something Vinge said in his speech, about a world where the masses were better educated then the elites; here the government would have to provide true freedom, or a closer imitation of it than has ever been seen, to satisfy this new class. (olpc users unite!) And finally, Cory Doctrow makes some interesting points in his non-speech article, You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen.

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.
~
The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.