If you haven't read Charles Darwin's seminal work then that
is really something you need to correct. Perhaps you think that you know all
about evolution and natural selection and see little value in going back to
such an old book that must surely be outdated by now. Or perhaps you feel
intimidated by the science of evolution, see it as encroaching too much on your
worldview or simply dealing with ideas beyond the prowess of your feeble
intellect. Both such positions are indefensible. Some 158 years on from its
initial publication, Darwin's Origin
remains essential reading for those who aspire to understand the world around
them. It is accessible to any educated person regardless of one's lack of
technical knowledge in biology, geology, taxonomy, etc. But you don't have to
see reading Origin as a chore,
something to be endured so that you can maintain your small modicum of
credibility among the intelligentsia. Rather, reading Origin should be seen as a delight, akin to watching a new season
of Planet Earth as narrated by David
Attenborough.
Game Pitch: Rectifier
"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
The above quote from The Terminator is spoken by the character of Kyle Reese to Sarah
Connor. It has in a way become iconic, the perfect descriptor for the
terminator, the titular killing machine. In Rectifier,
this quote describes not your enemy, but you.
Which Quake?
Quake II was never
meant to be a Quake game. In the wake
of Quake, a groundbreaking
first-person shooter that suffered from a tumultuous development, id software
viewed the final product as haphazard and schizophrenic. Its mix of
Lovecraftian horror, the arcane and the occult, alongside the
techno-futuristic, all wrapped in the mechanical devices of a shooter was seen
not as a unique property to be celebrated, but rather a disjointed collection
of ideas that needed to be tamed in order to better conform to expectations.
Was Quake fantasy or science-fiction?
Was it heavy metal or gothic horror? Of course id had been down this route
before. Wolfenstein 3D combined the
occult with more modern firearms to create an alt-historical take on the Third Reich.
Doom more clearly juxtaposed elements
with its admixture of an Alien-inspired
used-future alongside the ancient horrors spilling out from Hell. But Quake was different. It wasn't simply
fusing two different elements: it wasn't simply a peanut-butter and chocolate
combination. It's elements were more varied and drawn with a looser brush. The
cohesion between elements became subtler, and the abstractness of the elements
themselves grew to fill the void. Quake
was not merely different, it was odd.
Lo-Fi Games Seen Right
Or: Low Resolution and Low Frame-rate as Integral Aspects of the
Art-style of Low-Fidelity Graphics
When one puts on one's NostalgiaVision (TM), one recalls how
the games of years past seemed to wow with their graphical prowess. How they
seemed so life-like at the time! Or rather how they provided a compelling and consistent
simulation that was easy to become adsorbed in. When one returns to such games,
one is amazed at how bad they look, it seems we are incapable of correctly
remembering their low-fidelity. However, rarely are we actually properly returning to these games. Games
intended for low-resolution CRT screens are instead played on high-resolution
LCDs, where possible the rendering resolutions and frame-rates are increased,
behind these changes is the implicit assumption that improving the clarity of the
image can only be beneficial, that it is separate from and not intrinsic to the
art. Here I would like to argue that this is misguided, and that the aesthetic
of old games is only properly appreciated when they are experienced in their
rightful context.
Thoughts On: Syndicate
In 2012, Electronic Arts published the first-person shooter Syndicate intended as a sort of
franchise reboot of the 1993 title of the same name. Developed by Starbreeze
Studios, the game shares many mechanical similarities with their prior efforts,
chiefly The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape
From Butcher Bay.
The story was written by Richard Morgan, perhaps best known
as the author of Altered Carbon, a
futuristic cyberpunk-ian tale where human consciousness is stored on a stack
and the surrounding body is often regarded as only so much "meat". So
devalued is human life (at least the aspects of life not contained on a chip)
in the novel that murder not damaging the stacks of the victims is referred to
as "organic damage".
The world of Syndicate
is a cyberpunk dystopia where multinational mega-corporations (the so-called
Syndicates), unfettered by such pesky considerations as anti-trust laws come to
dominate and carve up the globe, becoming in effect new breeds of empires,
complete with their own military might and consumer bases. Into this world
Morgan seems a natural fit, but ultimately the story of Syndicate doesn't quite work, and I will attempt to articulate why.
Power and Politics
The primary occupation of the political class is just that -
political. They are concerned with the business of achieving and maintaining
their power, for politics is the art and science of power dynamics. This is
tacitly admitted by the political class, who often speak of communication to
their constituencies as their primary concern. That their constituents believe
they serve their best interests is of primary importance, whether this is true
is secondary or not important at all if the means of communication are
effective enough. That they must appeal to constituents - to the public - is
not at all a characteristic of democratic systems. It is inherent in all
political systems, for there is always power in numeracy. The degree to which
they must appeal however is regulated by the means of control they have at
their disposal and varies by the type of system.
Effective politicians are those who succeed in intensifying
and consolidating their power. They do this by perceiving the most advantageous
power bases with which to align themselves and so seizing the opportunity. In a
capitalist society with unchecked corporate growth, corporate interests will
grow to become a formidable power base. In such a system no politician can find
success without strategic alignment and balance between corporate and public
interests. Like seeks like, and so consolidated political power seeks out
institutions of consolidated power with which to forge alliances and determine
points of mutual interest. Large corporations, religions, and sprawling
organizations become natural allies to consolidated hierarchical political
power, which becomes increasingly incapable of interfacing with the individual.
The Tuning Problem in Physics
The tuning problem in physics is the question of why the
constants of the laws of nature have assumed their values relative to one
another that they have. In order to have a chance of answering the question we
must rephrase it in a way that it could possibly be answered scientifically.
That is, not why the values are what they are, but rather how it is that they
are what they are. The distinction may seem subtle and unnecessary, but it
shifts us from trying to assign a reason (an unscientific task) to one of
understanding a process (an eminently scientific endeavour).
I say tuning problem because these constants appear as
tunable parameters in the natural laws. Assuming they could assume any value
relative to one another, for we have no knowledge of how they might be
constrained, we find that there is an extremely narrow range in which a
universe such as our own is made possible. But the term also suggests a
process, one of adjustment - that of the parameters being tuned with respect to
one another.
The Optimistic Dystopia of Brave New World
Reading Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World I was struck by how utopian his dystopia is. Huxley
does not present a world that is obviously wrong from the inside, since the
inhabitants suffer from the same corruption that plagues their society. It is
only from the perspective of an outsider, or someone imperfectly adjusted to
the system, that one can see just how out-of-sync the society is with human
nature. This makes for an interesting angle and a welcome contrast from other
dystopian fiction where the systemic problems are apparent to all yet the
characters feel powerless to do anything about it. However, from the
perspective of a prediction of the future, Brave
New World comes across as overly optimistic. It should be noted however
that Brave New World takes place so
far in the future (around the seventh century A.F. - After Ford, Henry Ford
that is) that any assignments of optimistic or pessimistic are in truth
entirely useless. All is speculation, beyond that there is little we can say.
From Relativity to Rambling Thoughts
What follows are my own train of thoughts spurred on from
reading Einstein's Relativity: The
Special and the General Theory. I use these ideas as jumping off points
into the highly speculative which is not covered in the book.
In his book, Einstein explains how the special theory of
relativity comes about after taking seriously two positions about the nature of
reality and following both of them through to their logical conclusions. These
are the constancy of the speed of light in
vacuo and that of relativity: the idea that there is no preferred reference
body of uniform motion in the universe, such that the physical laws are
independent of such motion.
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