Live from Austin!

You’ve probably noticed that a new Grand Theft Auto game is out, GTA IV. As usual, the release of a new GTA has resulted in a new round of articles criticizing (or outright excoriating) the game.

I’m a big fan of GTA. I’ve played every 3D GTA game from start to finish. As such, I feel I can provide an informed perspective on the game series. I see a number of annoying misconceptions and deceptions repeated time and time again, the most infamous of which is the claim that the game rewards you for killing prostitutes.
I’d like to explain why I continue to play every GTA game released. But before I can do that, I need to talk a bit about the history of video games, so that I can explain exactly why GTA was (and is still) so groundbreaking.

(In the text that follows, please excuse any lapses in chronology; my focus here is on general trends in game design, rather than the minutiae of which games were released when.)

The first wave of video games: the arcade

Video games are a comparatively new medium. While a few experimental games were created as early as the 1950s, it was in the 1960s that the first recognizable video games began to appear on university computer systems. In the early 1970s, these primitive games began to appear in amusement arcades.

Early games mostly belonged in one of two categories: sports games and shooting games. The first amusement arcade game, PONG, was an example of the former. It presented a stripped-down approximation of a familiar competitive sport, in this case tennis. Other games attempted to simulate baseball, hurdles, and other sports events.

Perhaps the earliest example of a shooting game in the arcades was Space Wars, an adaptation of a mainframe game. It allowed two players to maneuver spacecraft on a vector graphics screen, and attempt to destroy each other with missile fire.

In 1978, Taito launched Space Invaders, which introduced two vital changes to the shooting game formula. Firstly, it was a single player game, so players no longer needed to find a friend of similar ability in order to enjoy play. Obviously this was a relief to the kinds of people who played video games, but it was the second innovation that really changed gaming: Space Invaders presented the player with an enemy whose forces were apparently overwhelming.

It was a massive hit, and set the pattern for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of video games. Sometimes the enemies were Japanese aircraft, sometimes egg-laying aliens, sometimes undersea creatures; sometimes the screen scrolled horizontally or vertically, or even diagonally. However, the basic situation was always the same: large numbers of enemies were invading for no adequately explored reason, and as they moved around the screen you attempted to kill as many of them as possible. The genre became known as the shoot-em-up. While it soon became formulaic, and is no longer popular, for a while almost every other video game seemed to be a shoot-em-up.

In the 1980s, a few new primeval video game formulae were invented. The game Scramble turned the tables, making the human player the aggressor in an invasion attempt; this idea was repeated later in games like Zaxxon and R-Type. Mazes became popular, in games such as Pac-Man and Berzerk. Pac-Man also introduced many people to the game mechanic of evading enemies rather than destroying them, a formula also used in Q*Bert and Crazy Climber. Driving games made an appearance, from purist Formula One simulations to avoid-the-enemy variations with cars in mazes. Eventually true 3D graphics began to appear, with games such as Battlezone, a commercial game which was adapted into a military tank battle simulator.

One thing that was clear on entering any 1980s video arcade was that there was a tremendous focus on shooting things, and not a great deal of story-telling going on. Partly this was because of technological limitations, but mostly it was because the purpose of an arcade video game was to extract as many coins from customers as possible. Games therefore attempted to give the most intense experience possible, so that even a five minute gameplay session could feel exhausting. The easiest way to achieve this kind of intensity was with lots of violence, often enhanced with pulsating sound and visuals. Eighties games such as Robotron: 2084 and Defender still rate amongst the most intense video game experiences devised.

The second wave: console games

While arcade games battled to fit more and more killing on screen, video games began to undergo a parallel evolution in the home. In 1977, the Atari 2600 introduced the idea of a video game console which could play any number of different games, loaded onto it from cartridges. Prior to this innovation, home video game consoles came with a fixed set of games built in.

Cartridge-based console gaming lowered the investment needed to put a game into commercial production, and reduced the amount of money the customer had to risk to try a new game. At the same time, companies like Atari were making incredible amounts of money, so game designers were allowed to experiment with games that would have been unsuitable for arcades. And with no requirement to keep game sessions short in order to pull money from the player’s pockets, games could become longer.

So it was that another video game genre began to become popular: the adventure. Often modeled on pen and paper role-playing games, adventure games offered players the chance to take part in a comparatively lengthy quest, which often had some sort of narrative purpose behind it. For the first time, games began to explore why the protagonist was risking his life and why he was being attacked. Furthermore, almost all adventures had an ending in which the player could actually win the game.

It wasn’t long before some adventure games began to offer players true choice, with multiple ways to “win”–for example, by rescuing the princess, defeating the dragon, or recovering the treasure.

The third wave: home computers

During the home computer boom of the 1980s, the price of game distribution fell further, as software for home computers could be duplicated on regular audio cassettes. In addition, home computer programming languages put the means of game development in the hands of millions of people. This led to another explosion in the degree of complexity found in video games.

As well as graphical adventure games, there were adventures where the gameplay was represented purely as text. One of the earliest was called simply “Adventure”, and was developed in the 1970s on business computers which lacked any kind of graphical output. It was played at universities and colleges all over the world, before being adapted to run on home computers.

Text adventures were able to use the power of the written word to represent situations that the primitive computer graphics of the time were not suited to. In addition, because the player could type complex commands, it was possible to affect the game world in more sophisticated ways than was feasible with the four-way joystick with single fire button that was common at the time.

Hence for a number of years, text adventures led the way in showing what video games could be capable of. Most text adventures avoided violence entirely, encouraging players to find other ways to make progress within the game universe. Characters other than the player-controlled protagonist were commonplace, and they soon began to exhibit their own programmed personalities and act according to their own distinct goals. For the first time, games began to feel comparable in complexity to more established artistic genres; a text adventure game could feel like you were actually in a novel.

As the worlds modeled in the games became larger and more complex, many players began to find that exploring and mapping the world was an enjoyable and entertaining activity in and of itself. Games began to be advertised on the basis of how large they were and how many different locations they featured.

The death of the arcades and the rise of 3D

Meanwhile, the shoot-everything approach of arcade video games had run into a dead end, and the industry had collapsed. There were lean times for consoles too, as the limitations of their low priced hardware prevented their games from competing with those found on increasingly powerful home computers.

By the late 1980s, high resolution color graphics were commonplace on most home computer owners’ machines. This made it feasible to use full 3D color graphics in video games. One influential early 3D game was Wolfenstein 3D, which challenged the player to lead a heavily armed soldier into a maze-like Nazi encampment.

While there had been 3D action and adventure games on home computers as early as 1980, Wolfenstein 3D achieved notoriety for the level of violence depicted. The player was encouraged to kill hundreds of German soldiers, who were seen falling to the ground in a spray of blood. In addition, killing the “boss” at the end of a level resulted in an instant replay of his death. Although the game was controversial (and arguably tasteless), its high speed 3D graphics were groundbreaking, and it won many awards. It also kick-started the video game genre known as the first person shooter (FPS), still incredibly popular amongst Windows gamers.

The makers of Wolf 3D went on to make Doom, which ramped up the complexity of the 3D world. Rather than limiting the player to wandering in 4 fixed directions in a grid-like world, Doom provided the illusion of a true 3D world in which you could move in any direction at any angle. Doom also featured exploration-based puzzles involving locked doors and hidden switches. More controversially, it ramped up the violence level. It was another hit.

Before long, video game developers tried taking the kind of free-roaming 3D graphics popularized by Doom, and using them in story-based action-adventure games. The ultimate aim was to make a "cinematic" game; one that would feel like you were inside a movie.

By the mid 1990s, it was possible to model objects using polygons, and draw them at high speed on screen. This led to games in which both the world and the objects in it were truly three-dimensional. The launch of the Sony PlayStation boosted video game console power, enabling similar feats of programming in console games. But while game programmers could now draw and animate pretty much anything, the complexity of the resulting game worlds now became a major problem.

Next, in part 2: the complexity problem.

Someone noticed that google.jp had a picture of some kind of computer. Turns out it’s the Parametron. Not a Futurama character, but instead an early (1950s) computer from Japan that I’d never heard of.

There doesn’t seem to be much on the web about it, but from what I gather, it used a really freaky design with no valves or transistors. Instead, the fundamental unit involved two magnetic coils and a capacitor, with the binary 0 and 1 values being represented by the phase of the AC current. From this unit, the usual AND and OR gates were constructed, and then those were strung together to make a computer.

I wonder if the ideas might be applicable to optical computing?

Independent Institute article:

Newly released naval records prove that from November 17 to 25 the United States Navy intercepted eighty-three messages that Yamamoto sent to his carriers. Part of the November 25 message read: “…the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow…”

So the US knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Another conspiracy theory proven thanks to the FOIA. Am I the only person who missed this news?

I’ve decided that it’s really time I learned US history and passed the Citizenship Test. Most intelligent Americans seem to view the test as some kind of joke, but my attitude is the same as my approach to the driving test: I don’t just want to be good enough to pass, I actually think I have a duty to go beyond that and really learn properly.

The same can’t really be said of the average American. In January of this year, Synovate conducted a random telephone survey of 1,000 US adults, with a resulting margin of error of 3%. They found that fewer than 1% of respondents could identify the rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, 17% of them said it mentioned the right to drive a car, and 38% of them thought it gave you the right to “take the fifth”. Also, 21% of people thought the Constitution mentioned the right to own pets.

On the other hand, 20% of respondents could name all the members of the immediate Simpson family, which reminds me of a UK comedy sketch of years ago in which the US immigration quiz was revised to include questions that tested knowledge people actually need to know in order to fit in in the USA—like “Please sing the first verse of the Mickey Mouse Club song” and “Name three items from the McDonalds value menu”.

I have a copy of The Cartoon History of America. ‘m wondering what book to go with after that; suggestions are welcome. I’m also open to CD-ROMs, audio books, web sites, whatever. I’ve been thinking about Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C Davis as an audiobook; it seems to get slammed as “leftist” “liberal rubbish“, so it probably doesn’t just cover the politically correct history the US wants to believe.

My history teacher from school has been found guilty of molesting his pupils, and sentenced to 4 years in jail. As far as I can tell from the newspaper stories, the incidents all happened while I was at the school, and probably involved boys in my class.

The teacher’s name, believe it or not, was Dick Small. He was probably Richard to his friends, but amongst his pupils he was known as “Small, Dick”. Happily I cannot speak to the anatomical accuracy of the description. I do clearly remember that he was a large rotund man with a prominent beer gut, a hair-trigger temper, a bellowing voice, and a face prone to flushes of redness. In fact, if you look up the word “beery” in an encyclopedia, you might find a picture of him.

His sexual proclivities were often the subject of discussion after classes. Those who were unlucky enough to sit at the front desks often had their comfort zones invaded as he rested his ample gut on their desktops and leaned over them to deliver invective to a student at the back who had offered a particularly lame answer to a question. It was commonly believed that Small Dick had inappropriate feelings towards his pupils.

I remember the lessons clearly, not so much because of Small’s behavior, but because they were so terrifying on an academic level. For homework most weeks, we would be told to go and research a particular topic, and put together an essay of a few hundred words on the subject. The authors of the best essays would be invited to read out parts of them. To ensure that this did not inadvertently reward underachievers, the poorest essays would also be read out, ridiculed, and the authors loudly berated. Desks would be pounded upon by large fists, sometimes gripping rulers.

It wasn’t always that much fun, though. Mr Small’s favorite academic innovation was the “Timed Essay”. We would be given a week to study, in our own time; then in the next classroom lesson, we would be made to sit and write an essay. We would know the approximate topic of the essay in advance, but not the specific title. The essay would be written under examination conditions—complete silence, and no access to any form of reference material. Imagine having to face that every month, and perhaps you can understand why I still have issues regarding exams.

At some point, several pupils were allegedly invited by Mr Small to visit a local pub and start work on beer guts of their own. It’s said that they felt flattered by the attention, and hoped that maybe he would go easy on them in class if they went along. One lad was singled out and invited to a wine bar, even.

After a while, Mr. Small began giving lifts to at least one of the boys. Soon the journeys began to involve diversions to quiet spots in the Chiltern Hills, and indecent assault. One boy reported what had happened to a teacher, who reported it to the headmaster. Not much happened, initially; the police were not informed, and neither were the education authorities. The boy attempted suicide by jumping from a railway bridge. He survived, and told his parents it was an accident.

Finally, in my last few weeks at the school Mr Small suddenly and very quietly “resigned”. There was no announcement; we found out because the pupils who would have been in his class the following term noticed that they had been assigned to a different teacher. A friend told me the actual story; I’m not sure how he found out, and I’ll never know now because he died a year later after drinking way too much and choking on his own vomit. He also told me other things that haven’t appeared in the newspaper reports, which I’m not going to write about here for legal reasons. (I’ve had enough trouble after posting public information.)

As to Mr Small, he took the obvious career path for a child molester with anger management problems: he got a job with the Conservative Party. He worked as campaign manager for anti-gay Tory MP David Lidington. However, the boy who had attempted suicide suffered a couple of decades of serious depression, which he attributed to his being abused. In 2002, he finally decided that he had to go public about the whole thing. In 2003 after a detailed police investigation Mr Small was arrested, there was a trial, and he plead guilty to five counts of indecent assault against three boys.

The sad thing is that when he wasn’t terrorizing or molesting his pupils, Mr Small was a very good teacher. He emphasized that history wasn’t about facts; it was about connections. He expected essays to discuss cause and effect, coincidences, the why of history. It’s not useful to know that Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin in 1793 unless you know why he invented it and how his invention changed things. He expected us to be resourceful and able to do our own research, like real historians, and if that left me in terrified tears after working until midnight to prepare for a timed essay, well, that was just an unfortunate means to an end.

And ultimately I did learn, and came to find history fascinating, and passed my “O”-Level exams with flying colors. For what it’s worth, Mr Small never touched me, inappropriately or otherwise, as far as I can recall. I sat in the far corner near the fire escape door, a row forward so as to make it clear I wasn’t one of the “won’t work don’t care” kids in the back row, and I worked like crazy.

There is one thing that I can’t believe about the whole business: it’s that the person who taught us about the disaster of the Victorian “Payment By Results” education system, and about the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the working poor, was secretly a loyal Tory the whole time. Still, I suppose if you live one big lie, it becomes a habit that’s hard to break.

[If you are reading this and happen to have relevant information regarding this specific case that you wish to share with police, I understand that you can reach the child protection and sexual crime unit on 08458 505505.]

It turns out Amelia Earhart was polyamorous. (Many historians also believe she was bisexual.)

MIT Technology review has an interesting article on “How the Postman Almost Owned E-Mail“.

I find it interesting—but not for the historical reasons. Rather, it illustrates the kind of delusional state people enter when they work too long in law or politics. The author of the piece seems to believe that if the US government had allowed the US Postal Service to operate an e-mail system, we’d all have ended up with USPS e-mail accounts.

In the UK, the Post Office did get permission to run e-mail systems. They had a system called PRESTEL. It was briefly relevant during the 80s, but bulletin boards grew up around it, then began connecting together. Soon there was a UUCP network. The situation was farcical by the early 90s; UUCP was chugging along at 9600bps or faster, but PRESTEL was still 1200bps to receive your mail—or a mind-numbing 75bps to send it. Then the UUCP networks got overseas links, TCP/IP started being rolled out to businesses, and it was all over for PRESTEL. Something similar happened in France with MiniTel, and I have no doubt that the same pattern would have been followed in the US if the USPS had been allowed to set up an e-mail system.

It’s probably blindingly obvious to everyone likely to read this, but passing laws and setting policies does not make things happen. If it did, there wouldn’t need to be a war on (selected) drugs. Yet even now, politicians who apparently live in a fantasy world are contemplating new laws to prevent Internet file sharing. Record companies apparently believe that if they get themselves proclaimed as the official source of online music, they will own the system of digital music downloads. They will then be able to build in whatever retarded copy protection systems they like.

The Post Office thought the same. They owned e-mail, so why did they need to offer faster downloads, file attachments, or international connectivity? They were the official system, and if they said 1200/75 with no error correction was good enough for the public, then it was. I mean, what were the public going to do—build their own e-mail network?

Something I find interesting is how utterly different society was a mere fifty years ago. One of the great failures of most SF is that it assumes the world of the future will be technologically different, but that society’s attitudes will be more or less the same as ours. Maybe that’s because we want to believe that we are enlightened and superior beings—we don’t like the idea that in fifty years, people will look back at our worldview and say “What a bunch of bigoted little troglodytes.”

Not all the advice in the linked article is bad, mind you; #9 is worth noting. Men do seem more able to distinguish between “That’s a really dumb idea you just suggested” and “You must be really dumb to have suggested an idea like that”. I once spent a frustrating time trying to convince my ex- that those two statements really weren’t equivalent.

We went to the Neuruppin town library and browsed through the bookshelves. Many of the old DDR-produced books are still on the shelf; they can’t afford to replace them all at once. I had a look through some of them.

The Modern English textbook was interesting. It started off in the usual way: “This is John. John lives in a house in England. John has a dog called Fido.”

However, by chapter 8, John was attending Trades Union rallies and campaigning for workers’ rights. Set texts included speeches by union leaders from the British Labour movement. Questions included “Why do workers in capitalist societies need to join Trades Unions?”

There was also a short paragraph which (the book helpfully explained) was what a capitalist had said when asked about an “investment” he had made. This paragraph was followed by some questions:

The capitalist said “I had to risk everything”. What was he risking? Who does it belong to? Who would have suffered if his investment had been foolish? What are the effects on society of his behaviour?

Later, in a chapter on shopping, questions included this one:

Why did John worry that he would not have enough money to buy the goods he needed? How do we avoid such problems in a modern Socialist society?

A follow-up question said:

Write about a shopping trip of your own to your local store. You may find the following phrases useful:

• wide selection of goods
• good quality products
• cheap and affordable prices
• friendly and efficient service

Even XQ laughed at that one. She’s been to Russia.

The picture books are no less bizarre. I looked through a picture book of Berlin. The pictures of happy, smiling people in 70s clothes (this was a book printed in the mid 80s) were interspersed with little poems, like:

Many happy people live and work in Berlin
capital of the DDR
A modern socialist society
liberated with the help of the Soviet Union

The picture book of London was more subtle. The pictures of shopping streets, for example, weren’t taken in Oxford Street, but instead in a run-down district near Soho. There were plenty of pictures of the House of Commons and Buckingham Palace, and pictures of policemen staring sternly at the camera. Pictures which showed people in close-up seemed to be around ten years old; obviously they didn’t want to show 80s fashions or cars.

We wandered through the library to the literature section. Charles Dickens had been incredibly popular under the old regime, although now his novels were clearly labelled Fiction. The old DDR reprints were still on the shelves, though. The English textbook had included some passages from Dickens, of course, with the expected questions about why young children in capitalist societies were forced up chimneys and made to steal by capitalist men.

The text was laughable to my eyes, but the picture books were really quite subtle. They were propaganda exercises of course, but spotting the bias was quite tricky, even for me.

Of course, the fact that many of the pupils in the school remember being a student in the DDR only makes things more uncomfortable for the teachers. Even the non-Party members had to read out official announcements—and read them out with every ounce of enthusiasm and sincerity they could fake lest one of the pupils report them to the Stasi.

As late as 1988, all the teachers in Neuruppin had had to read out a class announcement which had basically said:

“I’m afraid your fellow pupil insert name will not be joining us again. He and his family have defected to the West. This is a time for great sorrow. It is bad enough that his parents decided to defect, but he has betrayed his country by going with them.”

Obviously even the most naïve pupils in the Sixth Form now take what teacher tells them with a large pinch of salt.