Author Archives: Steve

What has ended

What ended this week is the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge. This was the last, spectacular failure of the internet bubble, the final burnout of paper businesses that had no business and paper politicians who had no cause and paper experts whose expertise lay in their bogus credentials or in the wealth of their pals.

We’ll know the details in time. We’ll have years of investigations. We already know the answer. We filled key roles at the top with lawyers and promoters and press agents and cronies, and when we needed them to do their job, they held press conferences instead.

And we filled key roles on the line — police and fire and public safety — with too many people who weren’t up to the job, or whose leaders weren’t up to the job. Frightened by snipers and rumors, they sacrificed the lives of men and women and children in danger, lives entrusted to them, to save their own. They turned in their badges or grounded their choppers. Their duty was hard; they did not do it.

From Mark Bernstein.

In this vein I’d been contemplating a sort of Plato’s Republic post on a character who, having heard many reports about Homeland Security and the billions “supposedly” spent on prep, readiness, and planning for multiple kinds of catastrophe, leaves his house and finds that it was all just a media job, that such a place really didn’t exist beyond a name. He returns home and clicks to CNN to hear more about “reality.” It was supposed to be a joke.

More here at Scientific American on what was known. It’s not just this area, either. There’s plenty of work to be done.

This is not about being perfect or understanding Mr. Hobbes. It’s about competence and honesty.

Digital space and storyworlds

I’ve played through a few more rounds of Half-Life 2, Facade, Post Mortem, and Syberia II. The subject here isn’t genre, but story, narrative, and environment.

Where do these pieces excel? In their environments, where the user is placed into a fiction that invites the attention and motivates action. Half-Life 2’s power is in the environment, its “in-game” experience, and in its use of sound; it’s the first environment I’ve seen which gives a sense of a setting sun (but this is my own limited experience). It’s weaknessess are in everything else. Once in the world, you quickly get the sense that you can do lots of things: move objects, drive, and jump. You can barricade yourself again moaning creatures with crates. Unfortunately, as a FPS, the combat and conflict hardly make sense point A to point B. Creeping about does no good, the rebel forces are inept, and the enemy seems to know exactly where to aim when you exit a tunnel, enter a room, or set up a sniper position, which just seems dumb. The fog of battle is one thing, but an enemy that seems too competent feels like an overreach. So you run, shoot, and reload the sequence for a quicker route. The physics of the space is wonderful and frustrating as it should be and is a great achievement; the AI of the enemy, however, doesn’t promote a sense of strategy or outthinking or alternatives, as in Deus Ex. In this sense, I find the AI simply misconceived. And the story concept is loaded with questionable decisions. (At least provide a sequence where Freeman and Alyx make a life, walk the beautified canals, and make love, then Freeman can be taken away in that poigniant last scene–love stories and conflicts of reunification can work as major resolutions in shooters too; but this guy with the briefcase at the end is pure “been there done that.”)

The greatest weakness to Half-Life 2 is the point of view, though. Gordon Freeman is empty space, characterless, and silent to the point of absurdity. My greatest frustration is just not being able to connect to other characters through him. This makes no sense technically or in terms of design. Restoration as objective should come with some reminder of why the story is important to tell.

This last point, however, is where Facade and the Syberia sequences are more effective as environments and storyworlds. Facade, compared to Half-Life 2 in this regard, is much more sophisticated as an interactive, human-driven place to make decisions. You interact with Grace and Trip and their environment in important ways, ways that could have build the world of the Combines into a richer more engaging experience. You learn that you are a part of their history and this knowledge as you learn it serves as another way to contribute. In addition, the environments differ only in graphical design and presentation. Facade and HL2 are very similar in the way one moves about. Both are fluid and striking (not new). But the sense of penetrating the world is more pronounced in Facade, because you can respond to the world beyond single key strokes and through listening. You may drink the digital wine. You may make observations on objects. The ability to address the inhabitants, the principles, is part of going inside the fiction.

In Syberia, Kate Walker’s character develops along a real and substantive story arc. Her decisions (which are your decisions) make sense; as the story proceeds, cut scenes and filmic visuals can be read as Kate’s imagination and inner experience visualized as further elements of the developing fiction, a narrative element which I find incredibly interesting aesthetically, which may be unique to new media. The flashbacks Kate experiences of Hans aren’t experienced by her in the same that they are viewed by the user but they may be an approximate vision of her mind at work, a visualization of her own development. Same goes with the arcs in Facade, although the weakness of the eventual stories has already been noted.

Again, this is not a question of genre; this is a question of the limits and potentials of any sort of digital environment where a user is expected to input information with meaningful intent and for meaningful outcome.

It’s a good time for big developers to consider adding teams of people who know about story and its difficulties to their rosters and to start taking independent initiatives seriously for their ability to contribute to future projects whose results aren’t “just” this sort of thing or that sort of thing with great graphics and intricate machine intelligence, but begin to take human complexity seriously, a sort of marriage of entertainment and serious games.

Resources and Standards

In this country, we have the capability to provide everyone with a basic living standard. People shouldn’t have to fight for that. They should have the opportunity to compete for things beyond a basic standard and they will. I’d argue that such a program would result in more creativity, more curiosity, and less general misery. I see this in small places, in comments students write when they see something they hadn’t noticed before, even the tough ones, who think they know everything. A line of poetry nudges one to remark on an alternative, and from then on it’s up to them. It goes beyond quantification.

Just a thought.

Considering engineering

Mark Bernstein provides a link to this article in Civil Engineering called The Creeping Storm. A bit of it goes like this

In the 1980s Joseph Suhayda, then a coastal oceanographer in the civil engineering department at Louisiana State University (LSU), began to seek an answer to this question by simulating storms with a modified version of a hurricane model used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Suhayda first began modeling the storms to help parishes in southeastern Louisiana determine appropriate flood elevations for FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. As his modeling capabilities improved, he began to more closely investigate the level of protection provided by the levees encircling New Orleans.

Suhayda’s model contains a geographic information system overlay that divides a fairly large boundary, from Alabama to Texas, into 0.6 mi (1 km) grids containing information about ground elevations, land masses, and waterways. The FEMA hurricane model does not draw on the same processing power as AdCirc and in general produces more liberal projections of flooding from storm surges. But by solving numerical equations representing a storm’s pressure, wind forces, and forward velocity, Suhayda was able to use the model to predict the storm surge associated with an actual hurricane dozens of hours before it hit land. By subtracting the elevations on a topographical map of coastal Louisiana from those surge values, he was able to approximate the flood risk of a given storm.

In the 1990s, Suhayda began modeling category 4 and 5 storms hitting New Orleans from a variety of directions. His results were frightening enough that he shared them with emergency preparedness officials throughout Louisiana. If such a severe storm were to hit the city from the southwest, for instance, Suhayda’s data indicate that the water level of Lake Pontchartrain would rise by as much as 12 ft (3.7 m). As the storm’s counterclockwise winds battered the levees on the northern shore of the city, the water would easily top the embankments and fill the streets to a depth of 25 ft (7.6 m) or more.

Suhayda’s model is not the only one that describes such a catastrophe. A model called SLOSH (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes), which is used by the National Weather Service and local agencies concerned with emergency preparedness, portrays an equally grim outcome should a storm of category 5 hit New Orleans. The SLOSH model does not contain nearly as many computational nodes as does AdCirc, it does not use a finite-element grid to increase the resolution of the nodes on shore, and its boundary is much smaller. Even so, its results are disheartening.

“Suppose it’s wrong,” says Combe, the Corps modeler. “Suppose twenty-five feet is only fifteen feet. Fifteen feet still floods the whole city up to the height of the levees.”

Experts say a flood of this magnitude would probably shut down the city’s power plants and water and sewage treatment plants and might even take out its drainage system. The workhorse pumps would be clogged with debris, and the levees would suddenly be working to keep water in the city. Survivors of the storm—humans and animals alike—would be sharing space on the crests of levees until the Corps could dynamite holes in the structures to drain the area. In such a scenario, the American Red Cross estimates that between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die.

Some announcer on TV tonight wonders if it’s too dangerous for the help to go in. Pathetic. So much talk about security and looting. People are dying in the streets, in shelters. Water’s everywhere but there is no water. Drop tons of meals-to-eat on the islands of waiting people. Time for “overwhelming aide.” Overwhelming aide. We have the force side down.

Half-Life 2 and simple machines

It turns out that I didn’t have to kill the queen of the antlions in the prison/assylum. The great John Timmons has already completed the work in a weekend and in comparing notes, we’re noting how things went differently, given choices within the environment and our different responses to the physics.

For me, learning the environment has a lot to do with understanding simple machines, such as the fulcrum.

A view of the bridge. The sense of distance and scale.

Same bridge. Freeman suspended, hoping not to fall. Vertigo.

Online Talk Styles

It’s about day three of online lit and comp. It’s my first semester using the forum tools provided by WebCT Vista and I can already see that using them is going to be a pain in the rear. I’m used to more customizable set of conferencing tools, such as WebBoard and PhPBB, which, in my view, provide a better teaching environment complimentary to discussion of poetry and the like.

In Vista, the moderator can’t pick and choose replies to go after in a scroll pane. Often a student will make a particularly interesting entry or blunder and then can provide a focus. In threaded displays, it’s hard to tell what has been written given a thread title. It’s not about quick reading; it’s about use-discrimination and pointing people in a given direction, take it or leave it.

Perhaps it’s an interface issue. I don’t know.

Environmental themes

Before things heat up in the classroom and online, I’ve decided to get through as much of Half-Life 2 as I can and then do some comparative writing on Galatea, Facade, and this graphic intensive shooter.

I find similar and interesting environmental themes between these works. In Half-Life I’m currently zapping zombies and tossing things around with a gravity gun.

On assassination

The various certifiable reverends are out today defending the mad cleric, who claims we should murder Hugo Chavez. I’m sure there are lots of reasons why we should do this (and who else?):

Because Venenzuela is becoming a hotbed of communisim and a harborer of mad clerics
Because of Chavez’ habitual downloads of pornography and updates from Stream
Because Chavez speaks Spanish
Because he wears tube socks to church
Because he reads the newspaper
Because he enjoys the OC
Because his dues lapsed
Because he’s forsaken true biblical readings
Because he’s been seen reading poetry

I wonder what else.

Backchanneling

Susan Gibb sends along this mention of backchanneling and other ongoing computing offshoots from if:book. Two issues that come to mind with these complex adaptive projects are resources and large scale modeling in a learning context. I’m wondering if there’s enough information here on how decisions are made about what sort of sifting is to be done; what sort of interaction may “enhance” a learning environment, and how to think about the obvious clutter.

Interesting and challenging.

Vista and online speed

We should never accuse WebCT Vista of being fast or sleek. In this system built for education, you may delete files but you cannot move them. What if you have a folder with 50 files? Some of its methods, such as submit, are very slow, and why should I have to click on an extra button to open fairly important tools to organize forums?

“Where would you like to put your Topic?” You have to search for this “place.” Vista doesn’t assume that one would work with categories, thus you must find a button to open a new menu to complete this task. The extra step isn’t the problem. The problem is knowing that “more tools” at the bottom of the screen will open this option up.

In my view Vista is “okay.” But I don’t want “okay.”