"Run, you pigeons! It's Robert Frost!"

The title of this post comes from a line uttered by Manny Calavera, the main character of Grim Fandango as you fail to solve a puzzle. Because Grim Fandango is an adventure game, failing to solve puzzles is something you'll do an awful lot, so it was nice of the developers to at least give you a good laugh as you flail your pathetic way through the misadventures of a skeleton man in a film noir world. Adventure games always attempted to complement good stories with hard puzzles, and a widespread failure to achieve the right kind of difficulty probably contributed significantly to their fall from grace. As I've been playing Grim Fandango for the Vintage Game Club, I've been reminded of what kinds of problems they had.

This post will echo some things I said in the VGC forum, and it will also spoil the first two puzzles of Grim Fandango, so keep that in mind before you read on.

Adventure games had two kinds of hard puzzles. Some of them required you to pay careful attention to the game world, remember bits and pieces of dialogue, think creatively about the items you had found, and work it all together into a solution that gave you a great "Aha!" moment. The rest were bullshit. The problems Manny must solve in the first chapter of Grim Fandango mostly involve the first kind, but you start off, unpromisingly, with the second kind, and it is these that turned people off adventure games, with good reason.

At the start of Grim Fandango, Manny is desperate to get somewhere, but in order to get there he must get his boss to sign a work order for a car modification. To this point, the problem proceeds relatively naturally. However, in order to get the work order signed, Manny must leave his office building, discover a rope that his boss has used to sneak out of his office, climb up that rope, and change his boss' automated message so that the secretary will sign his name on the work order. This solution falls into the bullshit category for several reasons, the most significant of which is that there is no reason for the player, or Manny, to suspect that the boss isn't in his office, that he is using an automated message system to pretend that he is in, or that the message can be changed to make his secretary sign the order. In fact, because Manny has received an emergency work order from his boss just moments before, both he and the player have a very strong reason to believe that the boss is in, a view which the secretary reinforces by stating outright that she is only at work because the boss is. Without knowing that the boss sneaked out of his office, or that he did so in a way that allows Manny to sneak in, the decision to leave the building (which is required in order to find the rope) is nonsensical. A key step to solving the puzzle requires an unnatural response to Manny's problem.

When people say adventure games are "hard", this is a significant reason why. It's not that the puzzles are too intellectually demanding, it's that they require you to act in ways that are utterly unnatural to the solving of the puzzle. If there's an emergency and your boss isn't taking calls, you knock on his door. You don't go outside the building to check if he might have climbed twenty stories down a rope made out of ugly neckties. And if your wallet is locked in your girlfriend's car, you ask her for the keys. You don't try to combine a nearby cat with a mango from your inventory in hopes that this will produce a tool you can somehow use to unlock the passenger door.

Note that my problem is not that the solution requires Manny to go outside per se. In fact, getting Manny to go outside during this puzzle is an important part of making sure the player has the information he needs to solve the remaining problems of the early portion of the game. The illegitimate difficulty of this puzzle arises from the fact that the game never gives the player or Manny any reason to believe that going outside constitutes a step towards solving his problem.

Contrast this with the second main puzzle of the same game, in which Manny decides to steal a co-worker's client by intercepting one of his messages. To do this, Manny must find the room of pneumatic messaging tubes, break the system using chemical foam, find a way to keep the door to the system from closing after repairs are finished, and figure out how to stop the messages so he can read them first. Stealing the client requires several more steps than getting the work order signed, but the dialogue in the game and the items Manny notices in the game world all provide definite (if subtle) clues as to how the problem can be solved. Each step towards the solution makes sense in the context of the game world. The puzzle is difficult, but legitimate.

This distinction matters because the kind of difficulty involved has an effect on how the player feels once the puzzle is solved. Solving a difficult, natural puzzle makes the player feel like he's accomplished something—even if the player is frustrated while trying to solve the puzzle, success brings positive emotions because the player feels like he was in control of finding the solution. By contrast, puzzles that require unnatural solutions which are too obscure or don't make sense in the game world steal this feeling from the player. They make the successful solution of a puzzle seem like a matter of luck, rather than skill. In my personal experience, solving a puzzle under these circumstances can increase frustration, rather than relieving it.

Another problem with unnatural puzzles is that they break immersion. The work order problem can't be solved by thinking like Manny Calavera, but it can be solved by thinking like a guy playing an adventure game, who knows that you should explore everywhere to find the solution of a puzzle. Unfortunately, once I'm thinking like myself, my mind ceases to be active in the world of the game. While the game can get me back, each exit from the world of the game prompts the question of whether I should continue. If the player's mind disengages at a point of frustration, then he is always more likely to quit, at which point your work has gone to waste.

I started this post talking about adventure games, but I think these two points speak more generally to the use of difficulty in games. A high degree of difficulty, even unfair difficulty, is acceptable in a game so long as the player's sense of accomplishment and engagement in the game world are preserved. In games with very low difficulty, the player's sense of achievement may not be a design value of the game; however, even games with low difficulty must take care not to disengage the player with unnatural puzzles or other kinds of gameplay problems.

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The coltan controversy

The gaming internets were buzzing the last few days about a widely-publicized report from Toward Freedom that civil war and ongoing militia activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have in part been fueled by the demand for coltan, a source of the tantalum powder that is necessary for capacitors in consumer electronics. Of course, this isn't a new issue, just a new press release, in which the Playstation 2 in particular is singled out as a cause of conflict. This would be an excellent reason to dislike gaming consoles were it not inflammatory nonsense.

It would be foolish to deny the destructive effects of coltan demand, of course. Although the civil wars in the DRC had political origins, the conflict was sustained in part by demand for this mineral resource. Neighboring countries used militias in the DRC as proxies to ensure access to coltan, which they then sold to a number of foreign companies, which then resold it to various manufacturers, including many American makers of capacitors. Prices for tantalum spiked significantly in the years 1999-2000, providing an even stronger incentive for the DRC's neighbors to seize its rich reserves of coltan. Conflict and deficiencies in infrastructure have at times limited industrial mining of coltan, meaning that it is often mined using less safe artisanal techniques, and often by children. While many responsible companies have taken steps to ensure that they do not use any coltan illegally seized from the DRC, monitoring any supply chain of this kind is very difficult and there are strong incentives for bad actors to lie. Moreover, the greatest damage was done by the '99-'00 price spike; adopting supply controls now can't undo what happened. The Toward Freedom article attributes the spike (and ongoing demand) to the Playstation 2. This is at best a highly selective interpretation of history.

Consider that as of 2007, the total number of cellular phone subscriptions worldwide was estimated at 3.3 billion, while the total number of PS2s sold to date is something like 150 million. According to statistics found at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association website, the number of cellular phone subscriptions in the United States in 2000 was more than 100 million. By 2003 the number of cell phone subscriptions in the United States alone exceeded the number of Playstation 2 units sold worldwide in the entire production run to date. Keep in mind that those cell phone users are changing their phones regularly: the number of used and discarded phones in the United States (which has a low cellular penetration rate) substantially exceeds its human population. As such, we should expect that the actual number of cellular phones used by human beings since their introduction is significantly higher than the number of subscriptions, perhaps by a factor of two or more. Why blame game consoles for the coltan demand, then, rather than the far more prevalent cellular technology?

Of course, the demand for coltan doesn't end with game consoles or cellular phones. Tantalum is used in virtually every modern piece of electronics equipment, including pagers, laptop computers, digital cameras, and inkjet printers, as well as artificial joints, film, and various tools. Why blame game consoles for the ongoing conflict when their sales and usage are completely dwarfed by these other applications? The turn of the century saw a massive expansion in the use of all manner of electronics, all over the world. All of these factors contributed to the tantalum price spike. Yes, the 2000 shortfall of PS2s played a role, but the 6-fold change in price that year could not have happened without an existing huge demand for phones and laptops, and serious structural problems in the tantalum market.

How, then, did this conflict come to be known as the "Playstation War"? Reporter John Lasker doesn't provide any answers. He certainly doesn't quote anyone on the subject and it's not clear to me that the words "Playstation War" were used in reference to this conflict at any point before he did so in this article. In a fit of fairness late in the piece, Lasker acknowledges that the spike in tantalum prices that provided incentive for neighboring countries to interfere in DRC affairs was the result of multiple concurrent technology booms, but any good journalist knows that readers remember the lede. I don't know why Lasker made the choice to put the console reference so high up in the story, but doing so was inflammatory, irresponsible, and counterproductive.

The world does not have vast and plentiful reserves of tantalum, and existing electronics that contain tantalum are, in general, not properly recycled. Continued strong demand for consumer electronics and the still-increasing penetration of cellular phones in the global market are combining to bring the price of tantalum back up. Thus, a rejuvenation of resource warfare in central Africa is becoming increasingly likely. The best defense against this scenario is for consumers to keep strong pressure on manufacturers and regulators to prevent "blood coltan" from making its way into consumer goods. The typical purchaser of a cell phone doesn't know anything about tantalum or its uses, and in fact the typical American probably couldn't tell you what continent the DRC is on. Awareness, then, is a precious commodity, especially for an advocate-journalist. However, awareness is diminished when you make game consoles into a scapegoat.

Even if you manage to heighten awareness of mineral wars in Africa with a piece like this, no good is done if the reader doesn't make the proper connection with his own life. Can you imagine a person reading the lede paragraph on his laptop or cell phone and cursing those darn gamers for carelessly supporting resource wars? I can imagine nothing else. Calling the conflict a "Playstation War" allows the non-gaming reader to shift the blame onto those darn gamers and ignore his own contributions to resource scarcity and conflict.

Are gamers to blame for the sustained conflict in the DRC? Sure they are — to precisely the same degree as anyone who owns a cell phone, laptop, digital camera, artificial joint, anti-lock braking system, etc. All of us should try to be conscious of the origins (and destinations, you non-cell-phone-recycling jerks) of the materials in our electronics, and pressing the companies that make them to ensure that our sale price doesn't subsidize war in Africa. Inordinately emphasizing the importance of game consoles in the financial origins of war in the DRC, however, lets non-gamers think they are off the hook, and amounts to little more than blaming the "other" for the sins of all. A putatively progressive organization like Toward Freedom should be capable of recognizing that, and ought to feel ashamed at having done so.

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Great Game Music

For those of you who have missed it, Greg Tannahill has a fun series of posts about great gaming music up at his blog, The Dust Forms Words. While I don't agree with all his selections (I prefer "Hikari" to "Sanctuary", for instance), and I think he ommitted some really good ones (more on that below), it's a great series of posts. Greg, who will soon be standing for election in Canberra, brings back happy memories of some really good games with great music, but he also dug up some very interesting renditions, such as the one below the fold.

Yes, those are musical tesla coils, and yes, that is the Mario Level 1-1 theme.

One of my favorites among the games he's mentioned is the opening theme to Katamari Damacy. You should follow that link and watch the clip, but be forewarned that hearing this music even one time will burn it permanently into that part of your brain that keeps songs in your head all day. I also think this is one of the best introductory sequences to a video game. Watching the intro doesn't prepare you in any way for the gameplay or the story, but the wacky visuals and catchy music put you in the right mood.

As I said, Greg missed a couple of great soundtracks. Rather than leave a snarky comment on his blog, I thought I'd include put some of the omissions in my own post.

The most obvious of these is Kō Ōtani's soundtrack to Shadow of the Colossus. You can find the whole soundtrack about eight times over on YouTube, but the following video will give you a good start.

One of the best parts about the sound design in Shadow of the Colossus is that it doesn't make every battle an exercise in overwhelming horns and heavy, pounding rhythms. Several combat sequences feature calmer music that builds tension with sinister or mournful undertones. Shadow of the Colossus would probably make the shortlist for best game of all time even if the soundtrack consisted entirely of kids beating sticks together, but featuring some of the best music in the history of gaming certainly doesn't hurt. "Revived Power" is one of my favorite heroic themes ever.

Second on my list of omissions is Christophe Heral's soundtrack for Beyond Good and Evil, which is simply amazing. One of the recognized high points is "Home Sweet Home", which plays over the credits and out on the water before you complete the Black Isle Mission. And my god, this piano arrangement of the main theme by Mythili Mahendran is fantastic:

The game that really cemented my love affair with computer RPGs was Betrayal at Krondor, and this was certainly helped by Jan Paul Moorhead's excellent midi soundtrack. This is harder to get these days, but I remember coming across some .ogg files from it not too long ago. Amazingly, YouTube actually had a clip of the credits (German version) to this great game, with the main theme playing over them. I actually prefer the funkier "Jimmy the Hand", which plays during this walkthrough, starting at about 0:18.

The PS2 had an amazingly vast library of RPGs to choose from, but perhaps the best, and certainly the most unique, was Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Playing fast and loose with history, it featured cameos from Roger Bacon, Anastasia, and Rasputin, blending its bizarre humor in with three convoluted and emotional love stories. And then there was the character who fights with a doll that can only gain new attacks if you give a particular tailor gay porn. The soundtrack was fairly diverse, ranging from creepy electronic themes like this one from the battle with Astaroth, to very placid piano and string pieces. Almost all of it was excellent, but I am inordinately fond of "Getsurenka", which played over the closing credits. Yes, it's almost hilariously overwrought, but after the "good" ending of Covenant a cathartic love song is precisely what you need:

There are certainly more that could go in here, but that's enough embedding for one post. If you're interested in more technical discussions of video game music, you should check out Cruise Elroy. Click his category link on the side to find the music posts.

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Microwave Pfu CelB 5 minutes for highest activity

Like many bachelors, I regularly eat meals heated up in a microwave oven. I'd like to think I eat a somewhat lower percentage of frozen dinners than others in my situation, but even when it comes to food I cooked myself I usually don't have the time or patience to cook a recipe for one every night. That means I'm often eating reheated leftovers from the trusty Radar Range. The microwave oven works using dielectric heating, a process in which the movements of dipolar bonds are coupled to an oscillating external field. Water, for instance, is a molecule with a large dipole moment, and when you cook something in a microwave a lot of the heating occurs by the accelerated movements of water molecules. In principle this kind of excitation should also occur for other kinds of polar molecules, and thus we come to an interesting study from the lab of Alex Dieters, in which microwave radiation was used to activate a cellulase from a hyperthermophile.

Protein backbones consist of series of peptide bonds which include a carbonyl group, a classic example of a polar bond. Naturally, one might expect that the motion of these groups would be excited by microwave radiation. However, it does not directly follow that additional motion of the peptide backbone will actually accelerate chemical reactions, because this motion may be chaotic or unproductive. Moreover, from the fact that microwaves cook things (like eggs), we know that microwave radiation does a good job of denaturing proteins, sometimes at lower temperatures than we expect. Both of these problems can conceivably be avoided by studying a hyperthermophilic protein.

Proteins from hyperthermophiles such as Pyrococcus furiosus tend to be stable and optimally active at very high temperatures, at or even exceeding the boiling point of water. At lower temperatures, they retain their stability, but tend to become inactive. In many cases this reduction in activity appears to result from squelching internal motions that may be necessary to bind or properly orient substrates. Young et al. decided to study the β-glucosidase CelB from P. furiosus as a way of understanding whether microwaves might enhance enzymatic catalysis. Because CelB has optimal activity at 110° C it should be possible to see a significant difference in activity if microwave activation works. The stability of this protein at high temperatures also suggests that you will not accidentally cook it.

Sharp readers will have noticed an obvious problem with this idea—because heat activates this protein, and microwaves heat aqueous solutions, we must incorporate some kind of control in order to determine the pure effect of the radiation as opposed to the temperature. Young et al. resolve this problem by monitoring the heating of the sample during microwave irradiation, and then using a normal thermal apparatus to match this temperature profile (Figure 2). When a reaction reached 40° C using either heating method, it was quenched by the addition of a basic solution and the concentration of products was measured. Simply heating the Pfu CelB reaction to 40° C produced negligible activity, but microwaving it increased the activity by 4 orders of magnitude (i.e. a factor of 10,000). Less dramatic, but still significant, effects were observed for two other hyperthermophilic enzymes, but an enzyme from a mesophilic organism (the almond) was not activated by microwave irradiation.

That the microwaves caused increased backbone motion was supported by the finding that irradiating Pfu CelB at 75° C caused it to denature; this temperature is well below the normal melting temperature of this enzyme (115° C). The authors attribute the differences in activation between CelB and the other hyperthermophiles to their lower optimal activity temperatures, but it is also possible that the particular motions enhanced by microwaves are simply not as productive in those molecules. Although all the dipoles should be affected in similar ways by microwaves, they are all oriented differently with respect to each other in the protein molecule. As a result, the induced motion may be chaotic, perhaps specifically so, and therefore the activation of a particular thermophile may depend on the nature of the motions needed for its catalytic cycle. Enzymes that require large ensemble motions of subdomains, such as adenylate kinase, might not be activated as much as a protein that simply needs to be melted a little. Examining the differences in structural dynamics of enzymes differentially activated by microwaves may be an interesting area of future study.

While microwave activation is unlikely to revolutionize some of the more common uses of hyperthermophilic proteins (i.e. PCR), it does have promise. In ligations, for instance, hyperthermophilic enzymes can not be used at present because many DNA inserts denature at the optimal active temperature. With microwave activation, it may be possible to employ extremophilic ligases in these reactions, gaining the benefits of their speed and durability without having to worry about accidentally melting your DNA. Depending on the enzymes available, this technique may also prove valuable in improving mobile medical laboratories and developing novel diagnostic tools for field work.

1. Young, D.D., Nichols, J., Kelly, R.M., Deiters, A. (2008). Microwave Activation of Enzymatic Catalysis. Journal of the American Chemical Society DOI: 10.1021/ja802404g

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It really isn't

"I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."—Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.)

I'm finding it difficult to see why this statement is considered to be at all controversial, despite the firestorm it has ignited in the conservative set. It is not an attack on John McCain's service nor is it a smear against him. I could almost find the outraged Republican blowback on this quote to be funny, if I didn't have a memory. Instead, I find it positively revolting.

It amazes me that anyone has to defend this quote at all, as our history has amply demonstrated that military service has no bearing on Presidential quality. Yes, the Army gave us Washington and Eisenhower. It also gave us such perennial entries on the shortlist for worst President in U.S. history as Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant. Even successful leadership at the rank of General does not indicate that one will perform admirably as a President. For Clark, a military man (and former Presidential candidate) himself, to point this out hardly qualifies as a smear. It's fair to say this comment is unnecessary, but absent any additional context, the histrionics of the McCain campaign are just unwarranted foolishness.

However, we are not without additional context, because in an amazing coincidence, one of the men delivering those histrionics was Bud Day. Yes, the very same Bud Day who was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and appeared in one of their commercials. This man, who through ignorance or foolishness attacked Clark's perfectly sensible statement, had the gall to follow it up with a defense of the Swift Boat smears as "the truth".

That's why I can't just dismiss the McCain response as a good laugh. The outrage, feigned or not, of conservatives is positively revolting in light of the Swift Boat campaign. To see those who winked at the SBVT's outright slander of an American serviceman treat Clark's statement as some kind of blood libel is a repellent display of hypocrisy. For McCain, who claimed to repudiate the SBVT tactics, to employ SBVT members and take their money in this campaign only heightens my disgust. The maverick, the straight-talker, the man for whom I felt a good deal of respect all seem to have perished in the pursuit of the Presidency.

McCain's experiences in the Vietnam War, heroic as they were, have no bearing on his qualifications for the Presidency. His reaction to Clark's statement of this obvious fact, however, has me more firmly convinced than ever that he lacks the judgment, the restraint, and the integrity to lead this nation.

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It's just a _____!

I didn't intend to write a separate post on this topic. I'm no authority on philosophy and can't claim that I adhere to some superior standard of rationality in daily life. I wanted to leave the "just a game" thing alone, and let my comments on the relevant post at Dan Bruno's site be my final word. But then someone left a comment at my Tin Man post, attempting to blunt the criticism with the idea that it was just entertainment. Now, despite the fact that I happen to think that some things really do fit into this category, the use of this phrase as an argument annoys me, because it is no argument at all. So here's my position. It's probably not art, but you might be entertained.

"It's just a game," or "It's just an action flick," and other statements of their ilk almost always betray a mental sloth, an unwillingness to actually engage the arguments presented. When someone responds to an argument in this way he displays a fundamental disinterest in the discussion, but also a foolish pride in that disinterest. Because he does not view the subject as worthy of discussion, he concludes that this viewpoint must be valid for everyone else, and proclaims it as a fact. However, even if it is true that some games are "just games", then that must be proven, not simply asserted. The statement incurs a burden of proof, and anyone unwilling to try meeting that burden probably shouldn't be saying anything at all.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of just how that statement can be proven, everyone ought to know that proving it doesn't put a close to the discussion. That a particular game is "just a game" doesn't preclude meaningful and interesting discussion about the way the game is made or the values that went into it. An example of this came up in the comments to Dan's article. Few people would dispute that a golf simulator is "just a game", and I am not one of them. Nonetheless, Michael Abbott says some very interesting things in comparing the presentation of the Tiger Woods games to Hot Shots Golf, and about simulations generally. Of course, we can also address the quality of the entertainment experience, i.e. its artisanship, which I tried to do in the Tin Man piece: I thought it didn't actually do a very good job of entertaining me because of its inconsistency. Even if everyone in the universe agrees that Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is so far from being art that it might not even deserve italics, we can still discuss whether the boom mike drops into the scene and what that does to the entertainment value of the film.

This brings me to another point: the failure of a piece of media to achieve anything artistically is a valid criticism of its entertainment value. We all accept that different people are entertained by different things. Gamers, whose tastes are often fragmented along genre (or even subgenre) lines should be especially aware of this. The other night I came across this fundamentally fair review of Baroque, which sent commenter Gen Eric Gui over the edge. His problem was that the author did not judge it strictly on its merits as a Roguelike, and he really likes Roguelikes, and thus loved Baroque. Everyone who has ever discussed games with any regularity has had a conversation just like that. Well, here's what I really, really like: games that do something interesting artistically. That plays a significant role in deciding whether a game (or book or movie, for that matter) entertains me. There's not some mystical wall dividing art on one side from entertainment on the other. Art does entertain, or at least it can; otherwise we probably wouldn't have it. So when considering whether a piece of media succeeds as entertainment, it's reasonable to ask whether it has some artistic merit that can help entertain people who get turned on by that sort of thing. Tin Man didn't have it, or at least not enough. Neither, in my opinion, did Baroque.

So does it matter that something is "just a game"? I think it does; achieving some kind of consensus on that point gives us a good idea of where to direct our mental energies. If it is true that a particular game (movie, etc.) is entirely without artistic merit then we ought to focus our discussions of it on the artisanal aspects of its construction. Halo probably isn't art, but it contains art, as well as artful design, from which much can be learned. Shadow of the Colossus is art, and we could do worse than discussing its artistic qualities, in addition to or instead of studying its artisanship. Directing the discussion into a particular area, however, shouldn't exclude efforts to see whether there is some merit.

Here we get to the question of how we can prove, or at least support, the statement that something is "just a game". I have to admit, I use a pragmatic rather than an analytical standard here. My experience is that it's virtually impossible to prove that a particular piece of media (let alone an entire medium) is art. My standard therefore is not analytical proof, but simply whether the premise "X is a work of art" leads us anywhere interesting. In plenty of cases, including Halo (Roger Travis' view notwithstanding) and sports simulations, I think it doesn't. We can say very interesting things about these games, but those things don't need the premise that the game is a work of art. In contrast, I think you would need to accept that No More Heroes or The Two Thrones are art in order to fully appreciate them. That doesn't mean that we have to uncritically accept every attempt at artistic discussion, but we are obligated to reply, with more than just "nuh-uh, it's just a game".

Sometimes a game is just a game, and I honestly don't have any problem with that. Plenty of games (and other media) are very entertaining without having much artistic merit at all. But the statement that a work is just entertainment is not a rebuttal of reasoned argument to the contrary, nor is it a valid way to deflect criticism. And really, because artistic content is (or at least can be) part of the entertainment value, it's not any kind of response at all. "It's just a game" isn't a response that's automatically invalid, but saying those words doesn't make them true. It's a statement that must be substantiated and shown to be relevant, just like any other argument. If you're not willing to go through with that, then perhaps you don't really have anything to say at all.

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