Falling apart at the end

Having made an extensive complaint about Fallout 3's arguments for evil, I should, in the interest of fairness and balance, discuss its case for goodness. Fallout 3 does a better job, in general, of presenting reasons to be good. The backstory supports the idea of a good character, and the dire situation of most settlements in the wasteland provides the tools to construct a compelling heroic narrative. The game falters, however, in the closing chapters. The final battles of the game don't provide a particularly compelling narrative for the good character, and the design tends to support choices that weaken the ending or make it entirely senseless.

Spoilers follow.

The narrative context of the vault supports a player's choice of a good alignment early on. The main character's father, James, is a doctor, a profession associated with helping others. Although he has his moral lapses — stealing a child's toy, for example — the impression conveyed is that he is a good person, and it's easy to tell yourself a story about how his values were impressed on his child. In addition, the game reinforces the good path here because most of the "evil" choices you can make in the vault amount to little more than just being a prick. They feel petty, cruel, and pointless. While there are a few threads that can be gathered into a narrative of evil, most of the materials are better tuned for a heroic narrative.

The world itself has the same feel. The ruins of the D.C. area serve as a grim warning about the consequences of war, and the hopelessness that suffuses many of the abandoned areas the character enters argues against the feeling of power V.A.T.S. provides. In addition, most of the people you meet seem to need your help badly. In part this is just a result of including quests, but the world design and NPCs do a good job conveying the impression of desperate people barely hanging on in a hostile land. The few pockets of "civilization" are all in such dire straits, and the character can become a powerful force so early on, that constructing a heroic narrative becomes almost a seamless activity. In addition, some quests are one-sided enough that they simply won't fit in an evil narrative at all.

The story of the good character starts to wobble late in the main quest, however. The central idea of this quest, a giant purifier that will cleanse all the water in the D.C. area of radioactivity, provides a compelling interest, but the antagonist in this section feels like a limp formality. The Enclave enters with completely inexplicable timing, and the behavior of its officers doesn't agree with any goal other than that of a writer who just wants you not to like them. If the Enclave and its brutality had been demonstrated throughout the game world, the case would be more compelling, but this just doesn't happen. The chief problem with the Enclave as antagonists is that they never appear in the open world except as a few harmless wandering robots, until the moment when you are supposed to already be at war with them. This constraint leads the writers to make them act with irrational brutality. James' behavior is also difficult to justify, because his action is so extreme, and the choice he makes to defend the project against the Enclave also renders it useless to his allies.

And why are we to believe that the Enclave is so bad that dying to stop them is worthwhile? The final acts of the game focus on dislodging the Enclave from the Jefferson Memorial so that they cannot start the purifier, but for a truly selfless character it should not matter who starts the machine, so long as it does start. Elements of the game world begin emphasizing the importance of water purification almost as soon as the main character exits the vault. The credit for such a task matters, but does it matter enough to kill dozens of people over it? Why not let the Enclave start the purifier?

The answer to this, of course, is that the Enclave's computerized leader, President Eden, wants to kill most of the people in the wasteland, leaving alive only the people of the Enclave and a few vault survivors. It goes almost without saying that in light of the very low population of the area this idea is hard to credit. A larger problem is that the Enclave officer in charge of the Memorial is one who disagrees with this plan, so much so that the computer asks the main character to carry the plan out for him. Moreover, the game pushes the character towards destroying Eden; dialogue options leading to the destruction of the computer constitute all of the top choices near the end of the conversation with Eden. And once the computer is destroyed, the Enclave seems like less of a threat than ever. The final assault feels less like heroism and more like murder.

The very end of the game presents additional problems. It turns out that the radioactive blast your father used in an attempt to stop the Enclave from taking over the Memorial has still contaminated the control room. Someone must go into the deadly radiation in order to start the purifier. The good character is clearly supposed to sacrifice himself in order to get the project started. However, the good character is also almost certain to have the follower Fawkes, a giant mutant immune to radiation, with him. The reason for this is that you cannot keep Fawkes from following you unless you act like a complete ass. The writers do an infuriatingly bad job of providing reasons why Fawkes cannot save the day. In short, the only way not to feel like a sucker at the end of the game is to feel like a jerk by dismissing Fawkes or sending Sentinel Lyons in instead. The good character's narrative ends with him killing a bunch of people so that he can do something they would have done anyway, and dying needlessly because some giant mutant thinks it's his destiny.

Fallout 3 provides plenty of materials for the player trying to create a heroic story. The family background of the main character supports an ethos geared towards helping others, and the world provides a flock of characters who desperately need help the character can provide. Where this story falls apart is in trying to create a dramatic final confrontation. The effort to rapidly build up the Enclave as an enemy leads the writers to have them behave in odd ways. Ultimately they're never convincing enough as antagonists to really justify the urgency or brutality of the final assault. Then, the final sacrifice is rendered insultingly needless by the presence of Fawkes. The overall experience of Fallout 3 supports a heroic story, but the main character is denied an epic battle for justice. Instead, he gets a series of senseless deaths, culminating with his own.

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There's nothing in it for you

In my last post I argued that the V.A.T.S. represents Fallout 3's most compelling argument for a life driven by violence and the exercise of power. It's important to have an argument in that vein, because the mass media, including video games, have a pronounced tendency to represent evil people as purely unbalanced or crazy. This is unfair to the mentally ill, to be sure, but it is also unfair to evil. The wicked life has attractions beyond sheer gibbering insanity, which is why so many perfectly rational people are heartless and cruel. The problem with Fallout 3 is that V.A.T.S. is its strongest argument for evil because it is essentially the only argument for evil.

Spoilers follow.

For a wasteland that has been scavenged by survivors for hundreds of years, the D.C. area in Fallout 3 is surprisingly rich in resources. Everywhere you look you can find guns, ammunition, medical supplies, and money just laying around as if D.C. got nuked in the middle of an NRA convention. Your supplies are likely to be tight just after your emergence from the vault, but unless you make stupendously bad choices you should be able to rapidly police up enough weapons and ammunition to get by and, eventually, dominate the wastes. This makes the game, perhaps, "too easy" but that's not the point. The real problem with this, from the standpoint of the character's place as a moral agent in the game world, is that the character is not engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. He has to shoot things that want to kill him, sure, but he is never in danger of starvation, dehydration, or running out of bullets or bottlecaps (the game's currency).

This becomes a problem in the moral calculus because the reward for maleficence in a world like that of Fallout is usually material. Killing a man means you can steal his resources, and getting them is in some way worth killing that other guy. If those resources are valuable, then this assessment of worth is cold-hearted and evil, but at least understandable. If their value is trivial, however, then you are treading dangerously into the territory of the madman. Killing a scavenger might net me a couple of bullets for my hunting rifle, but if I can find just as many laying around in the next abandoned office building or buy them for a trivial number of caps it hardly seems worth it. Besides, that wastelander can't repair my gun if he's dead.

Even mercenary ambitions seem to be thwarted by the game's relative abundance of goods. In the late game a player who has devoted even a modest effort towards exploration should have a tremendous abundance of caps, enough to buy almost anything one might want. Unfortunately, there's nothing much to buy at that point. In the face of such an enormous surplus of money, it hardly seems worthwhile to demand payment for favors. Sure, you'll get more caps, but there's nothing to do with them.

Fallout 3 gives you the option to be evil, but it doesn't do a very good job (outside of V.A.T.S.) of giving you reasons. The resources you can gain through theft or murder have so little value that killing implies that you view human life as having almost none. The caps you gain from behaving as a mercenary rather than a generous protector can't buy you anything you need or even want. Evil isn't an easier route to your goals, even though the capital wastes don't have any law and order to hunt you down.

This isn't to say that the evil character has no place in the game. What Fallout 3 lacks is a compelling narrative of evil. The main character emerges from a sheltered existence with a loving father and enters a vast, dark wasteland. The ultraviolence of V.A.T.S. may be an attraction towards the dark road, but that's not enough to build my character's story.

The game's own characters can't construct a compelling narrative of evil either. Soon after escaping the vault, the character encounters the sinister Mr. Burke, who wants you to detonate a bomb in the middle of a settlement. Burke's dialogue is laughable, the sort of thing a 12-year-old would say if he were trying to be a suave villain. If you take him up on his offer you can eventually probe his reasons further, leading you to the revelation that the town will be blown up because Mr. Burke's employer one day mentioned offhand that he thought it unsightly, even though the place can barely be seen from his balcony. Detonating the bomb doesn't gain anybody anything; it's just wanton destruction. This is worse than cartoonish, it's practically mindless.

If you choose to go ahead and detonate the bomb, you are treated to the sight of a nuclear explosion. Awestruck, Burke mutters that he thinks it is beautiful, and as you watch the lush animation, you can, just for a second, agree with him. That's as close as Fallout 3 comes to giving you a reason. Is that really compelling enough for Burke?

Is it compelling enough for you?

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Power's joy and sorrow

I do not enjoy Fallout 3's Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, because I know what it does. I understand the goal of its slow-motion, dramatic camera angles, and sound distortion. The fountains of blood and gore, arms and legs and heads flying off from precision bullet strikes, speak to the worst excesses of action movies and gladiatorial combat. Death becomes entertainment for the hooting savage; the moral weight of murder disappears in the antigravity of bizarre ragdoll physics. In short, V.A.T.S. makes killing awesome.

But killing is not awesome, not ever, because each time it happens somebody dies. I know this, and so I do not like V.A.T.S. — on occasion I could go so far as to say I find it revolting. Nonetheless, I appreciate the system. Because of its staging, V.A.T.S. is more than a method of fusing real-time and turn-based combat — it is an integral part of the moral arguments of Fallout 3.

In Fallout 3, as with many other "Western" role-playing games, the player is an agent of moral choice in a world defined by the developers. In order to succeed, such a game must provide an engrossing context, compelling choices, and legitimate (not necessarily positive) narratives for the spectrum of available moral attitudes. It is not enough simply to have options. A game of this kind must have reasons, and a world worth making decisions in. In this regard, Fallout 3 largely succeeds.

Among other things, Fallout 3 is about war. The player character emerges from a sheltered Vault into the blasted wasteland of the D.C. ruins in search of his (or her) father. The world above ground has been shattered by a nuclear war; most of the buildings are burned-out shells or crumbling hulks of rubble. In the concrete jungle of D.C. proper, the debris has grown so thick that the only reliable way to move around town is through the old metro tunnels, and even those have mostly collapsed.

The intact buildings you do find are often tombs. Tiny skeletons lie on ruined beds, clutching worn teddy bears; their parents lie dead in the next bedroom, or in a bloodstained bathtub. Security robots blindly patrol the hallways of crumbling factories and office buildings, oblivious to the fact that their creators have long ago passed on, and there is nothing left to protect. Even most of the vaults are rotting sepulchers, their inhabitants long ago fallen victim to Vault-Tec's insane experiments.

The people who inhabit this world mostly live in shacks cobbled together from the metal hulks of the old world. They live off the barely-edible meat of mutated animals and the imperishable foodstuffs of the pre-war era. Some of them live off each other, some employ slaves. Their will to live is admirable, but the means by which they enforce that will are often less so. This is the Hobbesian state of nature in its full articulation, a small-scale re-enactment of the international chaos and resource wars that gave rise to the nuclear holocaust centuries before.

These features create a compelling context, true, but they also give the "good" character something to think about. None of it is pleasant, but it is war. Fallout 3 captures the lawlessness of the resource wars already occurring in places such as the Congo. There, children are even now being enslaved to mine valuable ores. In Afghanistan and other places, they are pressed into the service of armies and forced to fight battles they hardly understand. In these places the forces of order and government always seem very distant, even if their propaganda isn't. Fallout 3 is especially effective because it puts one of the world's great power centers on display as a shattered, irradiated shell, but the destruction of homelands and the ruin of societies are the universal products of war.

If that were all of it, man would never fight.

But that isn't all. There is the desperate struggle for resources, yes, that makes men fight. But a man can fight for what he needs without being evil. Without being good, perhaps, but fighting for his daily bread, if he must, does not make a man a monster. It is power that does that.

V.A.T.S. is about power, about the character's tremendous capacity to destroy. The bloody explosions and painful contortions of his enemies speak to the part of us that cheers when the gangsters get shot, when Arnie mows through a crowd of hapless soldiers. It is not a part of us that loves justice, but rather a part that loves strength. It is a part that loves the ability to mete out punishment, warranted or not. V.A.T.S. represents the seduction of power, and thus the draw of evil. Only a sick and twisted madman could love what war has wrought in the ruins of D.C., but anyone seeing V.A.T.S. could, just for a second, think that killing is awesome.

V.A.T.S., for all that I dislike watching it, represents one of the great strengths of Fallout 3, and may be its best articulation of the argument for war. V.A.T.S. presents killing as an empowering pleasure. The system is a constant seduction towards the joyous exercise of power, just as the elements of the game world are a constant reminder of the sorrow that comes from that exercise. And if the over-the-top gore and ragdoll physics turn you off, they give you something to think about nonetheless. Because even if you don't like V.A.T.S., somebody does, and that attraction plays a significant role in turning a good world into a wasteland.

If you are curious where I got the screenshot, I'm sorry to inform you that it is an actual photograph of Beirut taken in 2006. War never changes.

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The Heidi race

Last Sunday, with more than 30 laps remaining in NASCAR's Phoenix race, ABC cut away to America's Funniest Home Videos, shifting the race to ESPN2. Many fans of the stock car racing series were up in arms, comparing the move to the infamous "Heidi game" of 1968. The comparison is inapt: despite some exciting wrecks, Jimmy Johnson continued to lead and win the race. He continued to lead the championship too, and therein lies NASCAR's real problem. It's not just that ratings are declining and the individual races don't make compelling television; the championship doesn't make compelling television either.

It's popular to villify the superfluous and artificial "Chase" playoff format, but that's not really the problem. This championship would be a snoozer under the old points system, too. Nonetheless, the goals of the Chase were to make the championship more exciting and increase interest in the sport for the end of the season. In these regards it has failed repeatedly (though not always). Ongoing efforts to make things work better have resulted in constant tinkering with the format, emphasizing its silly, artificial, ad hoc nature.

Despite its structural problems, the failure of the Chase system owes just as much to the man who is almost certainly going to win his third straight championship this weekend: Jimmie Johnson. The Chase format rewards winning, which Johnson can do, but it also rewards error-free racing. The short, ten-race span of the Chase means that there just isn't enough time for a driver to recover from two bad races, or even one bad race if it's a real disaster. Winning, and not making serious mistakes, are hallmarks of Johnson's racing style. He and pit crew chief Chad Knaus tinker around a bit early in the season, then put together flawless packages and flawless racing for the end of the year. That doesn't mean Johnson is boring — his late-race dash through the pack at Atlanta to maintain his points lead was scintillating — but drama is almost impossible to sustain in the face of Johnson's bland superiority.

What Johnson lacks is a clearly discernable weakness. He's not overly aggressive, and doesn't seem to have any problems with his temper. He's intelligent, mature, and affable — but he's the sort of person you'd spend a pleasant evening with and not particularly remember afterwards. He leaves name-calling, fighting, and spinning out competitors to the Stewarts, Harvicks, and Busches of the world. Would NASCAR be shedding as many viewers if one of those men were as far ahead as Johnson is now? Perhaps not. Their aggressiveness and occasional foolhardiness endears them to their fans and inspires hatred in their competitor's adherents. There's no such handle with Johnson — it's almost as tough to hate him as it is to love him.

NASCAR's struggle in the ratings isn't just because of the Chase, and it isn't just because of Johnson (or any other driver, for that matter). There are a variety of factors contributing to the decline, not least of them the economic climate. The races and the season are both too long. The choice to spread the season across practically every channel on the dial sometimes makes it difficult to find the race even when you know what time it will be on, and weakens the relationship with the broadcast partners. The characteristics of the new car, especially the significant advantage conferred by clean air and the commensurate increase in the importance of track position, have made pit performance disproportionately important. Although the new car can be (and has been) driven effectively through traffic, many crew chiefs are having a difficult time getting it there.

But Johnson and Knaus have figured out the car, the pits, and the Chase. Johnson's strength of focus and will is ideally suited to stringing together the chain of strong finishes, including wins, that's necessary to take the title in this format. Had it been Tony Stewart, Dale Junior, or even Jeff Gordon who solved the Chase then perhaps this level of dominance would not have been as damaging to NASCAR. But NASCAR is stuck with Johnson, and as long as it emphasizes the championship over the individual races then it will have to accept the risk that an unpopular or uninteresting champion will cause people to tune out, including their broadcast partners.

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Video games and violence: grasping at causality

The latest evidence in the debate over the effects of video game violence has arrived in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics. Japanese and American psychologists, including well-known media violence researchers Craig Anderson and Douglas Gentile, report that violent video games constitute a causal risk factor for physical aggression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gaming internets have already expressed their disagreement with these results via angry blog postings based on secondary reporting (calmer coverage can be found at Gamasutra). A more professional critique has also been offered, in the form of a post-publication peer review by Texas A&M International University Professor Christopher Ferguson. The paper tries to sell itself as a significant piece of new proof, which it is not. Anderson et al. have found an interesting, if weak, correlation that they cannot prove to be causal, due to the limitations of the methods employed.

The study has two key advantages that, in principle, make it a unique addition to our knowledge about the effects of video game violence. Firstly, it attempts to correlate physical aggression (PA) in teens and kids with habitual exposure to video game violence (HVGV) 3-6 months earlier. While the use of a timecourse alone cannot prove causation, long-term correlations are thought to suggest a causal relationship more strongly than instantaneous correlations. Secondly, the study involves several age groups from two countries, the United States and Japan. Although more children play video games in Japan than in the US, the rate of violent crime in Japanese society is much lower than in the US. This has occasionally been held out as disproof of an HVGV-PA link, but all it really establishes is that other factors play a significant role. Therefore it would be interesting to determine whether cultural differences between the US and Japan alter the effect of HVGV on PA.

Three sets of children (two in Japan, one in the US) filled out questionnaires querying their gaming habits and physical aggression levels. Some months later, these same children were surveyed again to see whether their physical aggression levels had changed. The authors found that HVGV levels at the first time point had a weak correlation (r= 0.28) with PA at the second time point. This effect varied significantly over the individual datasets and was strongest in the youngest age group. However, the r value did not exceed 0.5 for any of these datasets.

In layman's terms, one could see these results as evidence that HVGV predicts between 8% and 16% of the level of physical aggression, depending on the age group and nationality. I caution my readers that this interpretation is an oversimplification that depends on certain assumptions about the data to have any validity. Because no statistics of the underlying matrices are provided I cannot substantiate those assumptions, so this should not be taken as a definitive description of the study's findings. Statistics (even averages) imply a model, and should not be trusted if it cannot be proved that the model is appropriate.

These results are interesting and indicate that, although the magnitude of the effect may differ between societies, there is nonetheless a universal positive correlation between HVGV and subsequent physical aggression. Despite the elaborate discussion of youth violence in the paper, this does not directly indicate a linkage to criminal behavior. Moreover, this correlation is difficult to interpret due to the study's numerous flaws.

There are good reasons to wonder whether the interpretation of the questionnaires produced a valid measure of HVGV at all, the assignment of violence level by genre being particularly suspect. A more significant problem may be that HVGV and PA were assessed by different means in every single group. Each group used different delays between surveys, and each involved differently-aged children. This doesn't necessarily mean that conclusions drawn by aggregating the three are wrong, and the authors contend that agreement across the varying methodologies indicates robustness. However, the differences in method and subjects multiply the potential sources of error considerably. Since the derived correlations are so weak, this is a significant concern. In addition, because the populations differ substantially in respects other than nationality, it is impossible to accurately assess the effect of culture on the relationship between HVGV and PA. Doubtless future longitudinal studies will apply more uniform methods.

This brings me to another weakness of the study. Scientists will occasionally joke that the best possible set of correlational data is the one that contains only two points, the reason being that you are assured of being able to draw a perfect, straight line through all your data. In practice, however, we know that having limited numbers of data points makes our interpretations much more likely to be wrong. A "longitudinal" study involving two questionnaires given a couple of months apart hardly provides firm footing for a long-term correlation or a causal relationship. The authors acknowledge that the study is limited in this regard, but argue that the short wait would most likely depress correlations from their true value. Still, a longer timecourse with more measurement points would be highly desirable.

The authors make no attempt to account for any confounding factors other than gender. They do not seem to have taken data on family situation, peer influence, parental involvement, or school performance, although all of these factors are known to correlate to greater or lesser degrees with both PA and video game habits. If we only wish to establish that there is a correlation between HVGV and PA that's not a huge problem. However, Anderson et al. clearly mean to establish video games as a causal factor for aggression. In the absence of controls for confounding factors, that is impossible.

Curiously, the authors also do not seem to have measured HVGV at the later time point. One objection to existing research linking HVGV to real-world violence has been that the observed correlations exist because people predisposed to violence choose to enjoy violent media. Testing the hypothesis that PA at the initial timepoint predicts HVGV at the second timepoint seems like an obvious thing to do, if only to squelch this objection. This seems to me particularly worthwhile, because the predictive power of HVGV for later aggression appears to be less than the instantaneous correlation between HVGV and aggression, significantly so for the older group. In light of these facts, the choice not to assess HVGV at the later time seems extremely odd.

Despite these flaws, this research is a step in the right direction. We need longitudinal studies, carefully controlled for confounding factors, over a range of ages and nationalities to parse out the true effects of video games on aggressive behavior in teens and adults. I do not find the present study terribly convincing, and I particularly dislike the more sensationalistic high points of its discussion section. Nonetheless, I hope that the authors will take criticisms like those of Dr. Ferguson into account as they design studies that will more rigorously investigate the causal relationship between HVGV and PA.

Only a particularly obstinate person would deny that there is a correlation between the intake of violent media, including video games, and aggressive behavior. They may inspire aggressive behavior, or serve as an outlet for existing aggression; either way, the correlation ought not be ignored. However, video games are just one, and doubtless not the most important one, of a constellation of potential factors affecting child behavior. Without a genuine analysis of the complicated causal relationships among these it is impossible to provide good advice to parents, doctors, and psychologists. The present study does not fill that gap in our understanding; it is doomed by its single-minded focus on video games and failure to account for confounding factors. While it is of value to know that the correlation between violent video games and aggression transcends national and cultural boundaries, it would be of greater value to know whether excessive playing of violent video games is a cause of aggressive behavior, a result of pre-existing aggression, or both. That is a question this research does not adequately, much less conclusively, address.

C. A. Anderson, A. Sakamoto, D. A. Gentile, N. Ihori, A. Shibuya, S. Yukawa, M. Naito, K. Kobayashi (2008). Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States PEDIATRICS, 122 (5) DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-1425

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Massachusetts, vote NO on Question 1

Ballot Question 1: A YES vote would reduce the state personal income tax rate to 2.65% for the tax year beginning on January 1, 2009, and would eliminate the tax for all tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2010.

I know, I know. I hate paying income tax, too. I dislike government waste, too. It would be nice to have a little extra money in my pocket. It would be nice to see the state get leaner. In a world full of magical money fairies that preserved essential state programs in the absence of revenue, the Question 1 proposal might be a good idea. But there are no magical money fairies, and the only rational vote in response to question 1 is No.

I freely admit that I don't dislike taxes as much as the next guy might. The State provides me services that protect my meager wealth and support my standard of living. Accordingly, I favor the support of those services through fair taxation and fiscal responsibility. However, virtually every state in the nation, in addition to programs that support the public good, also funds programs that do little more than support public servants. Massachusetts, like any other state, is beset by waste, corruption, and appalling incompetence. Perhaps if we put the state on a starvation diet by squeezing off one of its chief revenue sources, it would force the government to trim unnecessary programs and waste.

Perhaps.

But you, and I, and anyone who has ever encountered government in any of its forms, know that's not going to happen. Oh, there may be some trimming here, some squeezing there, but the deep cut, the major restructuring, is not going to happen. What's going to happen instead is a restructuring of the tax system. Money that used to flow into state and community coffers from the income tax system will now be obtained via increased sales and property taxes.

"Higher sales taxes don't matter," you say, "I'll just drive up to New Hampshire to shop." And maybe you will, but that's not an option for everyone. Those who do their shopping in-state will end up paying more for less. Retailers will either have to cut prices to compensate, or just accept reduced sales. More people go out of state to shop, and those who stay will have reduced purchasing power.

"Property taxes don't matter," you say, "I rent, anyway." But somebody owns the property you lease, and when their taxes go up, so will your monthly rent. The heightened cost of ownership will drive some people to sell their property, increasing demand in the rental market and driving up prices that way. And even if your landlord doesn't hike your rate, the squeeze means something, be it maintenance, landscaping, or snow removal, will have to go. Moreover, the higher property taxes will be passed along to Massachusetts businesses that own or rent their stores. Higher prices or staffing cuts will follow.

The government of Massachusetts could and perhaps should be smaller. The tax burden of state citizens should perhaps also be lower. Getting there by eliminating the income tax, however, is akin to trying to lose weight by cutting off your legs. Precipitous, intemperate action of this kind will only raise the cost of living in Massachusetts, while adversely affecting the economy and standard of life. No matter how much you hate taxes, the only responsible vote on Question 1 is "No".

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Silent Hill's twists unravel

A writer takes a significant risk when he adds a plot twist to a story. In the best-case scenario, the secret that changes everything gives the audience a feeling of revelation. Everything clicks into place and suddenly makes sense. Laying the groundwork for that feeling is a tricky business, though. It's very easy to sell the setup too hard, making what's coming too obvious. In this case the twist merely bores the audience, which is not the worst thing that can happen. If the writer works too hard in the other direction, and does not give enough basis for the change-up, the audience may reject the surprise, in which case you lose them entirely. Beyond these considerations, the big reveal has to be timed well, so that it builds rather than deflates the emotions of the audience. Silent Hill: Homecoming has two twists that don't work out as well as they could. Their failures owe much to the nature of the medium itself, so it's interesting (to me at least) to examine them.

If you think I'm going to go through this without spoiling the surprise, then you'd best prepare yourself for a shocking twist.

The first surprise that Homecoming springs on the player is the fact that its protagonist, Alex Shepherd, is not a special forces soldier. He is in fact an escapee from a mental hospital, wearing his father's old dog tags. This revelation is primarily used to set up the later, more significant twist, so it doesn't end up clarifying much about the game's situation. Unfortunately, what it reveals does not mesh well with the player's experience.

In contrast to previous entries in the series, Homecoming features a dynamic combo system. This arguably improves the combat experience, and certainly accelerates it. Alex and his monstrous opponents move quickly, strike quickly, and dodge quickly. Also, firearms now come with a targeting reticule, and precision shots are key to dispatching certain enemies. All of this makes a great deal of sense and feels very natural if Alex really is a special forces soldier, much less so if he is some schlub who sneaked out of the mental ward. The player's entire experience of Alex strengthens the impression that he is a well-trained soldier, versed in the use of multiple weapons. It simply doesn't make any sense, in terms of this interaction, for Alex to be something else. In short, the game does too good a job of convincing us that Alex is who he believes himself to be. If the player had been burdened with the cumbersome combat of earlier Silent Hill games, by contrast, he probably would have already started to doubt that Alex was a highly trained veteran. In this sense, the move to the new combat system, despite the improvement to the gameplay, was probably a mistake.

Of course, the entire plot of the game could just be one of Alex's delusions. The fact that all the clocks in his hometown are stopped at 2:06, connecting with the suggestion that he was in room 206 at the hospital, would seem to support this idea. Yet this idea doesn't seem to lead us anywhere further. For one thing, Alex continues to fight like a super-soldier even after he learns that he isn't one. For another, the monsters inhabiting Alex's hometown don't really seem to reflect any psychology. Silent Hill 2 featured a man roaming through a town populated by the demons of his own mind, but the secondary characters of the game helped provide a map to his psyche. Here we have nothing to go on. Do the ferals represent the family dog? Did someone's smoking habit produce the Smog? The Nurses might symbolize Alex's unpleasant time in the hospital, and the Schisms might be saying something about Alex's conflicted feelings towards his parents. Overall, however, the monsters just feel like monsters, thrown into a game because they look frightening. If they attacked differently (if the Lurkers tried to pull him under water) or were differently armed (why not give the nurses drills or icepicks?) the lines might have been more clearly drawn. Unfortunately, while the monster designs are reasonably scary they seem to have little to do with Alex's soul.

The news that Alex isn't a soldier ends up being just too hard to swallow. The mechanics of the game do too much to convince the player that Alex really is a trained killer, and the presentation doesn't really sell the player on the idea that the whole game is in Alex's head. The devil of it all is that it's such an unnecessary choice. Would it have cost the story so much for Alex to have really been a soldier? It's a needless twist, poorly supported. The most interesting lesson here is that the gameplay is a core reason why the twist doesn't work well. The player's experience simply can't be ignored when you're trying to set up a surprise like this.

Homecoming's second, more shocking revelation is that Alex's brother Josh, whom he has been pursuing and trying to save throughout the game, died some time back in an accident for which Alex was responsible. His bad psychological reaction to this event was why Alex ended up in the mental hospital to begin with. The game's writers did a good job setting this up: when you learn this it causes many of the game's events to click into place, just as you would want. For the Silent Hill fan, however, this revelation is surprising only for the sheer audacity of the choice to recapitulate the central twist of an earlier game. Problems in the cutscene itself, and poor design choices around it, also conspire against the central twist.

The cinematic in which we learn what happened to poor Joshua simply didn't work for me. One key issue was that the Alex Shepherd of this scene didn't seem to exist anywhere else in the game. In the game itself, Alex comes across as very serious and adult, which admittedly could be the product of maturity. However, in other flashbacks Alex also seems to be mature and caring. These perceptions simply don't fit with the childish speech and behavior Alex displays in the flashback to Josh's death. The Alex we see on the boat in the cutscene acts and speaks like a 10-year-old; although physically recognizable, he is psychologically unrelated either to the Alex we see in the game or the Alex we see in other glimpses of the past. The flashbacks and found materials should have been put to use to get us acclimated to this character.

The scene also lacks a certain internal logic. Why has Alex rowed them onto the lake? Even a few fishing rods in the boat would have made this into a non-issue, but instead this question is allowed to hang over the whole scene. It becomes even more difficult to swallow if you've explored the town hall. Reading material found there suggests that Alex himself might have very good reasons to be afraid of the water. In an almost painful error, the writers have Josh actually ask Alex the question, forcing the player to confront the scene's logical failing.

Inconsistencies in character and plot make the revelatory cutscene needlessly difficult to swallow. Realizing the angle that the writers decided to take makes the surprise seem obvious and disappointing — this series already had a main character who killed a loved one and forgot that he'd done so. Although various scenes in the game and the found materials do an excellent job of supporting this development, the big reveal itself nonetheless manages to find the worst of both worlds by being at once too obvious and too absurd.

The reveal has a timing issue as well. Alex spends the whole game trying to save his younger brother. When the big twist gets revealed, that quest gets deflated. Josh is dead; nothing Alex can do will save him. Immediately after this revelation, we have the big, final boss fight. The thing is, the twist completely deflates this battle. Knowing that the main character's principal motivation has evaporated, it's difficult to see why he would struggle to survive at all. Why should I force him to fight, when victory would still mean failure?

So I didn't. I let Alex die, and turned off the XBox.

I eventually came back and tried out the various endings, of course, but I never felt right fighting Amnion. Alex's singular determination to save Josh had caused his psychotic break and propelled him through legions of hellish demons. With that determination gone, I was left searching for a reason for him to continue, and it just wasn't there. I don't contend that this is the only proper reaction or interpretation, but it is a valid one. In a movie or a book, continuing through the battle with Amnion isn't a problem, but in a game the player's emotional reaction to the flashback really ought to be considered, especially in a game where the player is making choices about Alex's emotional reaction to his journey home. If the developers were absolutely committed to the idea of putting this cutscene where it was, they should have offered the player the option to accept death from Amnion. Several of the game's existing endings could conceivably follow from such an outcome. Moreover, an ending wherein Alex trades his own life for Josh's using the powers of the town could have been profoundly affecting.

Alternately, the big reveal could be moved to after the fight with Amnion. If Amnion were to swallow Joshua in front of the player, an act that would have symbolic meaning, it would provide a strong motivation to win the final battle. Seeing Josh tumble, drowned, from Amnion's body would be a sensible stimulus for Alex's final flashback. Better yet, it would shift the disorienting emotional shock to a moment when the player can actually try to process it, rather than just diving straight into apocalyptic combat.

The decision to hit the player with the revelatory flashback just before the final battle feels at odds with the requirement that the player win that battle. Giving the player the option to progress by losing (it is survival horror after all), or shifting the flashback to the end of that fight would help sustain the emotional momentum of the story. For a game, that momentum is critical because the player is the agent who continues the story. You have to keep him on board.

For all the criticism I've leveled here, I didn't think Silent Hill: Homecoming has a bad story, or even particularly bad twists. As an effort to integrate the occult drama of Silent Hill 3 with the psychological horror of Silent Hill 2, it largely succeeds. The problem is that the play and structure of the game don't agree very well with the two main twists. They might work perfectly fine in print, or even on film, but these change-ups just don't play well. As a result, Homecoming feels like less than it could have been.

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Making a molecular switch

The practical aim of the investigation of allostery is the manipulation of this property as a means to aid human health and industry. We already have in hand the sequences of numerous enzymes that carry out unique and useful chemical reactions, and recent advances suggest that we will in the near future be able to design man-made enzymes that efficiently carry out completely novel reactions. Making the fullest use of these abilities demands that we be able to regulate the enzymatic activity of interest. Fortunately, just as nature possesses a rich array of enzymatic activities, it also holds a number of binding proteins, so we don't have to start from scratch. The trick is that there must be some way to communicate the binding event from one domain into the active site of the other domain. In last week's edition of Science researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center claim to have achieved just that.

The core idea of their approach is disarmingly simple. Identify a protein that has a long-range conformational response to a binding event, and locate the distal region on its surface where this response gets read out. Then, on an enzyme of interest, find a region of the surface that has an energetic connection to the active site. Join the proteins at these surfaces and voila! Now you have a regulatory switch for your enzyme!

The reality, of course, is likely to be trickier. In order for efficient communication between sites to occur via these pathways, the structural dynamics of allostery at the points of attachment must be compatible. For nearly all proteins, the precise nature of the conformational reactions that drive communication are essentially unknown. Thermodynamic mutant cycle analysis cannot provide detailed mechanistic information, and structural dynamics experiments from NMR and other techniques can provide only general information about what occurs on these pathways. Only molecular dynamics simulations are likely to give us the information we need to tune the allosteric control precisely. Absent that, all you can do is just stick things together and hope for the best, which is essentially what Lee et al. did.

Of course, they didn't go in totally blind. Lee et al. used the statistical coupling analysis (SCA) technique pioneered by Dr. Ranganathan to identify distal surface sites linked to the light sensitivity of a PAS domain and the enzymatic activity of a bacterial dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). I've mentioned this technique before in connection with Ranganathan's research on the PDZ domain. The SCA results indicated that a surface loop of DHFR was energetically linked to its active site. The analysis also indicated that a region encompassing the N- and C- termini of the LOV2 PAS domain was likely to be a readout for its detection of light. These results accorded with existing knowledge about these proteins. The result with the PAS domain was particularly convenient. Because the N- and C- termini are adjacent, it meant that the PAS domain could simply be inserted at a loop site. Also conveniently, the surface identified for DHFR was a loop.

Thus, Lee et al. inserted the PAS domain at two sites in DHFR. One was the loop identified by SCA, and the other was a control site equally distant from the active site but not predicted to be linked. Figure 3 of the paper shows the key result: insertion of the PAS domain at the SCA-identified site (A site), but not the control location (B site), resulted in a modest light-dependence of the hydride transfer rate for DHFR. All of the A site chimeras had substantially reduced DHFR activity, similar to the effect of a G121V mutation. Interestingly, shifting the insertion site by even a single residue completely abolished the light-dependence of the activity.

Granted, the light dependence is less than twofold at room temperature; this approach did not generate a genuine light-dependent on/off switch for DHFR. However, for the reasons I mentioned before, a perfect switch is hardly something that could have been expected. What this experiment does do is prove that this approach is workable. Conceivably, with further tuning the hybrid PAS-DHFR can be made to carry out its catalytic function exclusively in the presence (or absence) of light. Since PAS domains bind a wide array of ligands, the approach can probably be adapted for various chemical triggers.

On a more fundamental level, the authors claim that this result supports the view that specific surface locations in many domains may be evolutionarily-conserved loci for allosteric control. This does not mean that every PAS domain (or PDZ domain, or DHFR) actually possess allosteric properties, but it does imply that all of them have the potential to exert or receive allosteric influences. If this is true, then it may be possible to adapt a wide array of binding modules as allosteric regulators for natural and designed enzymes. As our understanding of intradomain signaling improves, our ability to make use of these approaches will only increase.

J. Lee, M. Natarajan, V. C. Nashine, M. Socolich, T. Vo, W. P. Russ, S. J. Benkovic, R. Ranganathan (2008). Surface Sites for Engineering Allosteric Control in Proteins Science, 322 (5900), 438-442 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159052

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The masonry of moments

Tim is on a journey to find the Princess. You have heard this story before, in games other than Braid. She was kidnapped, you see, or perhaps she left. Tim can't really remember; the past gets so blurry when it may be the future. If you're confused, that's only natural. Jonathan Blow's Braid is a metaphorical puzzle, full of worlds that contain platforming puzzles that you solve to get puzzle pieces that you assemble to reveal more of the game's core riddle. It is not layered so much as coiled, like a diamondback with a taste for its own rattle. Its dense, ambiguous narrative provides rich ground for interpretations to grow. Is it about a breakup? The atom bomb? A stalker? Or is it about something more fundamental?

Braid is Tim's quest for the Princess, a journey that in which he must surmount obstacles by manipulating time. Each "world" of the game makes use of a different time alteration. In all of them Tim can rewind time to undo most of his mistakes, but some worlds introduce objects that are immune to this trick. In one world, the direction of time depends on the physical direction Tim is walking; in another, a shadowy doppelganger repeats Tim's actions when he rewinds. There is little reward for merely crossing a world; in order to reach the Princess, Tim must gather and assemble its puzzle pieces.

But who, or what, is the Princess? She appears in the game's final level, when we learn that she was fleeing Tim, and that the identity of monsters depends on time's arrow. The character of the Princess seems to change in each piece of text. Here, she is a lover, there, a mother, elsewhere, nature itself. Tim loves only her. Tim loves someone else, but seeks the Princess anyway. Finding the Princess in the text is almost a greater challenge than finding her in the field of play. Perhaps she isn't a literal woman at all, but rather enlightenment, an understanding of the universe and of other people. I say this because, more than a quest for a person or a place, Braid is a journey of learning.


We learn by reading. We learn by observing. We learn by trying. Braid demands that the player do all these things. The world occasionally provides hints, but only the most trivial mechanics and controls are ever explained directly. Getting a puzzle piece rarely requires any particular platforming skill; rather, each requires that the player carefully look at how the world reacts to what he does, and develop a plan. The text that prefaces each world provides a metaphorical hint of the experiences to come, and the object of each world is the assembly of an image that represents that world's ideas. In one, a young man makes a mistake, in another a boy sits sullenly in an airport while his doppelganger chatters happily with strangers. The music contributes perspective as well. In one world we are presented layouts reminiscent of early platformers, layered in with Braid's native time mechanics. Lullabies play in the background: we are looking in on an artform's infancy. The player's progress and success in each levels depends on a scientific attitude towards the world; the player's understanding of what this means depends on an artistic view.

Art and science. Tim seems to understand one, but not the other. He can dissect the angles and the lighting, but the emotion of film passes by him. When the Princess lies within his reach, longing for his grasp, he cannot see her; half of the universe lies beyond his ken. He is busy putting tungsten posts into the brains of monkeys and splitting the atom. Yet each step forward takes him further away from her. The puzzles of Braid's worlds escalate in complexity, and solving them requires ever greater acuity. However, the Princess can only be found at the beginning of World 1, a world without any puzzles at all, which presents the game's purest platforming sequence. Tim is closest to the Princess when the player operates off reflex and instinct. Once he begins manipulating time, Tim can only get further away from her. The paradox is that each step away, by revealing more of the narrative and art, nonetheless brings Tim closer to the Princess. Braid is his purgatory, in which the skills of the scientist must be made to unlock the reflections that allow him to approach the Princess again, for the first time.


Braid ends with Tim's decision to build a castle from his experiences, an edifice of ideas. He has already encountered many such palaces in his travels, each inhabited by a metaphorical dinosaur from the old school of thought it embodies. Should we wonder how Tim's castle will look? Or have we already seen the interior, gazed at the key moments that form its structural walls? You know what they say about a man's home...

Is Braid too difficult, too inaccessible? Possibly so — understanding the game means the player must think deeply in divergent modes. Success requires that the physical world of Braid be taken literally, but its art and literature must be interpreted symbolically. The platforming and puzzles are physically and mentally demanding, and ultimately some players will not be able to make their way through.

But what Braid asks of us is difficult. The gap between the artistic and scientific views of the world seems so wide that many would say they have nothing (or little) to offer one another. Braid argues that either approach is insufficient, that if we look at things only one way, we cannot see the Princess. Without a piercing examination we cannot understand the physical reality. Unless we understand the physical reality we cannot make the art. Without the art we cannot find enlightenment. No one strand of reality is enough alone; they must be woven together, into a braid.

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Guanidinium alters the water landscape

Protein stability studies that rely on the use of cosolutes to effect chemical denaturation typically use either urea or the guanidinium ion (Gdm⁺). Both of these chemicals unfold proteins through a process involving multiple, low-affinity binding events, but guanidinium has the larger effect. While this could be attributed simply to the strength of the interactions, it could also be a result of other chemical properties. In an upcoming paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania suggest that a reorganization of hydrogen bonds in water may be partially responsible for its greater denaturing power.

The reason water is a liquid rather than a gas is the existence of significant networks of transient hydrogen bonds between water molecules. Typically, water forms these bonds proficiently at a wide range of angles, which means an energetic benefit without a high entropic cost. The range of bond angles in use can be tested by assessing their vibrational frequency using infrared (IR) spectroscopy. The core of this paper comes from an experiment Scott et al. perform in which they measure the dependence of these vibrational frequencies on the concentration of Gdm⁺ and the temperature of the solution.

They find that the presence of Gdm⁺ significantly alters the IR spectrum of water at high temperatures, shifting the overall peak to a lower wavenumber and causing the appearance of a shoulder around 3300 cm^-1, near the main peak of the ice spectrum (Figure 2). The effect of the Gdm⁺ ion appears to be less at lower temperatures; as a result the appearance of the water spectra changes less at high Gdm⁺ concentrations than in the absence of the solute. These spectral characteristics are not observed when another positive ion (potassium) is used instead of Gdm⁺.

The authors interpret these changes in the IR spectrum as an increase in the number of short, linear hydrogen bonds, and back this up with quantum chemical simulations. If this is correct, then it implies that Gdm⁺ rearranges the hydrogen bonding network of water, changing the structure to emphasize strong hydrogen bonds of a particular geometry. Moreover, this change in structure appears to be relatively resistant to changes in temperature. This is significant because the creation of protein tertiary structure is thought to be a mechanism by which systems avoid forming highly-structured networks of water hydrogen bonds. If Gdm⁺ induces significant water structuring, might that entropically favor the unfolding of proteins?

Because urea does not appear to induce this kind of change in water structure, it should be possible to test this experimentally. The effect of Gdm⁺ is clearly most pronounced at higher temperatures. So one could perform a comparison of the temperature dependence of Gdm⁺ and urea denaturation of a protein. Proteins tend to be more stable at lower temperatures, as a result we would expect the denaturant concentration at which half of the protein population is unfolded (D_1/2) to increase as the temperature decreases. If the structuring of water is significant, then the change in D_1/2 should be larger for Gdm⁺ than for urea, because Gdm⁺ is decreasing in effectiveness as the temperature goes down. The direct interaction may also be temperature-dependent, but it may be possible to control for this by measuring the energy released when guanidine interacts with an intrinsically unfolded protein.

Unfolding experiments typically are not interpreted in a way that that depends on the precise mechanism by which Gdm⁺ breaks down protein structure. Nonetheless, the specifics of this process are important if we want to use chemically denatured states as models of in vivo unfolded states. As we gain a better understanding of in vivo water structure, the characteristics of denaturant solvation may be an important consideration in experimental design.

J. Nathan Scott, Nathaniel V. Nucci, Jane M. Vanderkooi (2008). Changes in Water Structure Induced by the Guanidinium Cation and Implications for Protein Denaturation Journal of Physical Chemistry A DOI: 10.1021/jp8058239

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The Attention-Deficit RPG

Last weekend I finished Namco-Bandai's Tales of Vesperia for the XBox 360, a game which delivers the "Tales of" series' characteristic action-chaos combat, lovely anime-flavored visuals, and little else. That's not how things begin: Vesperia presents a deeply unjust world and a genuine moral conflict about how to change it. The game's meandering, inattentive writing, however, leaves this initial promise unfulfilled. As a consequence the story is endlessly boring and deeply disappointing.

Spoilers follow, but trust me, there's not that much to spoil.

The world of Vesperia, Terca Lumireis, is politically dominated by an Empire that maintains its power through a monopoly on the distribution and sale of magical devices called blastia. Because Terca Lumireis is inhabited by numerous and exceedingly vicious monsters, blastia are believed to be absolutely necessary to survival: nearly all humans live in towns protected by "barriers" (there's no indication of how agriculture functions in these conditions). The Empire is very stratified, with a caste of nobles having crushing dominance over the commoners. As a result, many people choose to give up their citizenship and live in cities run by the Guilds. In tribute to MMO convention, each Guild is a group of adventurers with similar interests, not an organization dedicated to monopolistic domination of crafts and the exploitation of child labor. Blastia are exclusively artifacts that must be excavated, but all the world's archaeologists belong to a Guild, making the origin of the Empire's monopoly on the devices a curious and unexplored mystery.

The main protagonist of the game, Yuri Lowell, is a citizen of the Empire who once joined its corps of knights to try and redress the grievances of the common citizen, but left because he could not embrace their rigid adherence to protocol. By contrast, his childhood friend Flynn Scifo stuck with it and is now a celebrated member of the knights. Yuri has not managed to change the lot of the common man since leaving the knights, but Flynn hasn't had any success either. Like many RPG heroes, Yuri isn't able to simply stand aside when he sees injustice. Fortunately, he doesn't possess the excessive enthusiasm or angst typical of the genre. Rather, he comes across as a grounded individual, talented with a sword, who is profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the world and unsure how to change it.

In the course of the game, Yuri comes to a kind of answer, in that he murders two of the Empire's less redeemable officials, demonstrating his teleological approach to ethics. Flynn, pinch-hitting for deontology, acknowledges that the victims are criminals who escaped justice with the help of a corrupt system, but points out that if the system isn't transformed then it will just produce more untouchable criminals. Yuri can't kill them all. The story doesn't pick sides between the two men. Flynn achieves some good despite his inability to fully correct the system. Yuri, by contrast, is depicted as being cruel (especially in killing Cumore), and his approach is taken to its logical conclusion by the principle villains Alexei, who decides to get rid of the Empire by killing everyone in it, and Duke, who decides to correct a man-made environmental disaster by killing everyone everywhere.

The Guilds seem to be the natural alternative to the Empire, but as the history of the young character Karol illustrates, they don't have a system to support people who haven't found themselves. In the Empire such a person can at least scrape by; Karol simply gets abandoned. Moreover, the Empire manages to lurch forward even without an Emperor, while the Guilds descend into chaos after the death of the strongman who held them together.

You could do things with this, especially in light of the fact that the character Estelle is one of the candidates for the imperial throne (the worst-hidden twist of the game), but the social justice angle fades in the late game without really getting resolved. Instead, the endgame focuses on the side-effects of the blastia technology. There is an explanation for this, involving enough magibabble to make a Star Trek writer blush, but the primary upshot is that if the blastia continue to be used the world will be destroyed by a gigantic monster. There seems to be an pass made at a metaphor for anthropogenic global warming here, but it never connects because all the major problem-solving takes place off-screen, and nobody really seems to resist the destruction of their entire way of life... not even the ones who must literally die in order for the plan to work. Moreover, the connection between the social injustice of the Empire and the environmental destruction caused by the goods that give it power is never seriously explored.

If the larger dynamics get short shrift, then you would think that the characters would get a fuller development. Unfortunately, most relationships between characters are only lightly drawn, with the exception of that between Yuri and Flynn. Although he doesn't ooze angst, Yuri is a very calm, restrained character in most scenes. The breakdown of this control does a good job showing the connection between the two of them. Unfortunately, the writers frequently use Flynn as a tool to move the story along or magically solve problems, meaning that he must be an NPC. As a result, we are treated to only brief encounters.

The characters in the party clearly develop a sort of squabbling family relationship, with Yuri as the ersatz father, but none of the individual connections come close to that between Yuri and Flynn. Rita and Estelle clearly develop some kind of connection, but the strongest demonstrations in that relationship tend to get obscured by the plot. Yuri and Repede have a bond, but there's just no getting around the fact that Repede is a dog. Yuri and Karol begin to connect, but this sort of peters out after Zopheir Drifts. In every case, the development of these relationships is significantly hindered by the meandering of the narrative and the flatness of the character arcs.

In an RPG of Vesperia's construction, the purpose of the story is to keep the action moving between dungeons, to motivate the player to finish each dungeon, and to imbue important battles with emotional impact. This narrative has trouble with all three. One major problem is that each time a town is entered, the story stops dead as the player must wander around trying to find and talk to each member of the party. These conversations rarely move the story forward and often repeat themselves (more on this in a moment). Momentum is also drained by the fact that the narrative meanders significantly. There are times when you firmly know where to go next and why you are going there, but there are also too many times when it's not clear where to go or why you would bother going there.

The absence of a strong direction for the general plot also sinks down into the individual character stories, which I hesitate to call "arcs" because that would imply a trajectory that is nowhere to be found. Rather, the characters remain in stasis until a critical event, and then adopt a new stasis afterwards. The effect of this is to repeatedly begin the character's development. Estelle is indecisive and impulsive; Yuri and Judith challenge her to make a firm decision. This is fine the first time, but after this has been repeated for the fifth time it wears very thin. Then, after a particular event, this characteristic simply isn't mentioned again. It almost seems like the writers forgot that they'd already shown us a scene in which Yuri demands that Estelle decide whether or not to continue her journey, so they just keep treating us to nearly identical dialogue in town after town after town ad nauseam. Similarly, the fact that Karol is a coward gets repeatedly repeated until you'd rather stab yourself in the eye than suffer through hearing it discussed again. Then a particular boss battle occurs and suddenly he's not a coward anymore.

The repetition involved here would get to be dull and annoying even if there was any doubt about how Karol and Estelle would eventually turn out; in the absence of that doubt it is almost unbearably boring. Moreover, this kind of behavior flattens character development. There's no building of tension here, no character arc at all: the characters just stay the same until they abruptly fall off a cliff into a new state and are different. On the other hand, most of the characters never find that cliff at all. Yuri, Judith, Raven, and Rita all seem to make it through the story without experiencing any significant growth beyond the occasional clichéd revelation.

The inattentiveness of the writing really shows through in the vast collection of loose ends the story picks up from very early on. The motivation for Estelle to leave Zaphias with Yuri is that she has some warning she absolutely must convey to Flynn; once she leaves the city this is never mentioned again, not even when our heroes do at last catch up to him. The Knights become very well aware of Yuri's murder habit, but after a number of speeches about how he will have to face the consequences of his actions, from Flynn himself no less, no action is ever taken. Several of the characters form their own guild, but despite how important they make this obligation seem, nobody mentions it as they discuss their plans to go their own ways after the final confrontations. Then we have the essential abandonment of the social justice theme that dominated the early action, the biggest loose end of all. It's easy to overlook this if you're not paying attention to the story, but if the story only works when the player pays no attention to it, why have one in the first place?

The other main failing of the narrative in Tales of Vesperia is that it never manages to truly embody the actual antagonist. It is not Alexei who must be opposed, nor Duke, nor even the Adephagos per se. The system is the enemy, the entire way the denizens of Terca Lumireis have been living. An abstraction like that can't be engaged in combat, but one could assemble a cast of villains who represent the evils of that system, or who stand in the way of correcting it. The desperate chaos of the combat system would mesh well with such cathartic battles. Instead, Vesperia regularly forces you to defeat your allies in battle—the few systemic representatives it presents mostly die by Yuri's hand in cutscenes. Knowing this, you often feel like you shouldn't complete the current dungeon. Moreover, the largest boss battles seem meaningless, because you never confront the real enemy. The story makes these fights seem like empty exercises rather than important confrontations.

The consistent thread in all of this is a lack of care and attention. The constant repetition of character moments makes it seem like the writers forgot what they'd already done. The loose ends make it feel like they couldn't remember what they promised. The fact that the major themes never really get tied together, although it could easily be done, makes it seem like they just couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. So why should you?

Despite it's lame, scatterbrained story, Tales of Vesperia isn't a terrible game. The high-action, Smash Bros.-style combat works as well as ever, although the frequency of enemies in dungeons and the unusual difficulty of avoiding them turned the game into a bit of a slog at some points. The anime-inspired visuals are solid, the voice actors do an excellent job, and the score is lovely (if badly handled on occasion). Those aspects seem wasted, however. There's no reason to have an art department create an overworld, towns, and NPCs, no point to hiring quality voice talent, no reason to make anything other than battle music, if this lame tale is all you're going to use them for. You'd do just as well to excise those things completely, package up the battles and character progression into a rail-movement dungeon crawl and sell the whole thing as a combat minigame collection.

The greatest disappointment is that things didn't have to turn out this way. Tales of Vesperia has atypical heroes, some strong relationships, a genuine sense of moral conflict, and a setting that links aggressive social and economic injustice to environmental abuse. You could take those elements and create a deep, compelling story, if you paid attention to what you were doing.

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Hit the road, Jack

Schadenfreude and gloating pervaded the online gaming world last week when the news broke that prominent anti-gaming crusader Jack Thompson would be permanently disbarred on or before October 25. While Thompson has challenged this decision in Federal court (accusing the justices of the Florida Supreme Court of persecuting him), it seems unlikely that he can do anything to save his right to practice law in Florida. Some optimists in the larger gaming community seem to feel that Thompson will be gone for good after this, but grandstanders of his ilk rarely depart so easily. Legally, Thompson is still entitled to file lawsuits like anyone else, and because he has become so notorious it is doubtful that he will be pushed out of the public square. This is much to the detriment of the debate on video game violence, because he did, and does, far more to harm the cause of those concerned about graphic violence than he ever did to help.

Of course, the critics of video game violence are legion, but few, if any, of them could rival Thompson for sheer volume or nastiness. Like many such critics he had a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts, famously asserting that the Virginia Tech massacre had been inspired by first-person shooter games and holding to this view in the face of definitive evidence to the contrary. His partaking in the brain-dead excesses of conservative punditry was not nearly as troublesome as Thompson's deep, almost disturbing lack of professionalism, good taste, and basic decency. His demand that Janet Reno tell him whether or not she was a lesbian is a well-known matter of public record. Less famous, but just as unsettling, was his conduct towards judges and fellow lawyers, carefully described in his bar trial (of which you can read selected transcripts at Gamepolitics). It is clear from the record that no boundary of decency or good behavior deterred Thompson from the pursuit of litigation based on the idea that video game violence caused real life violence.

That isn't a completely absurd contention like creationism. The psychological effects of violent media (including video games) constitute a serious area of scientific study. While reasonable people can disagree on the quality of particular experiments and the proper interpretation of their results, there is no serious scientific disagreement that violent media produce at least short-term changes in feelings of aggression and attitudes towards violence. The long-term effects of violent video games on normal people are still disputed, and there are a number of moral, economic, and artistic considerations that have an important bearing on the subject. Nonetheless, it should be possible to have a rational, constructive dialogue about whether and how much violence in games ought to be acceptable to the audience, the creators, and yes, even the government.

But constructive dialogue is precisely the sort of thing people like Jack Thompson prevent. The bullying attack mentality at the core of his behavior turns the issue into an emotional one, making every side too angry to engage in a calm, rational assessment of evidence. Because of this, Jack Thompson got in the way of addressing the violence issue every time he showed his face. Admittedly, if the court has a remedy for your harm these tactics can pay off in some instances. However, suppressing video game violence through legal means has not been, and will never be, a viable strategy in America. Thompson's attitude poisoned any chance that he could personally effect a change in the quantity of violence in video games. Even if he had been effective in recovering money from video game developers, the end result would have been an interminable process of swatting flies; attempting to punish the games industry for violence every time an exemplar showed its head. Profitable for a professional litigator, perhaps, but not a way to effectively change the industry's attitude towards the portrayal of violence.

Thompson also poisoned the larger debate by being a kook and a villain. He made himself easy to hate, a figurehead for gamers to revile, and also did his best to demonize both gamers and his personal critics. In this way he brought a needlessly adversarial relationship to the various sides of the issue. Because his attacks were accompanied by distasteful personal behavior and a fundamental unwillingness to deal in fact, Thompson also made himself a ready caricature. He enabled gamers and game developers to regard everyone who held his position as being just as out of touch, hateful, and ridiculous as he was. Hatred and ridicule both have the effect of dehumanizing the other side, and ending any serious effort at consideration or collaboration.

So I'm glad that Thompson has been disbarred. I'm not glad because it hurts Thompson, and it doesn't matter to me that the dignity of the Florida Bar has been upheld. I'm happy about this result because it discredits Mr. Thompson and is the first step towards removing him from the debate entirely. That's the best possible outcome for gamers, game developers, and organizations that are genuinely interested in decreasing the violent content of games and keeping violent games out of the hands of children. Jack Thompson did nothing but harm to those efforts; it is to be hoped that in his absence a friendlier environment, in which the participants in the discussion seek common ground rather than mutual destruction, will develop.

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