No Russian
I feel like posting about this, despite having read articles that express what I'm about to say far more eloquently. Rock paper shotgun had the
best so far, I think.
So, a brief recap of what I'm talking about for those who are unaware of it. Call of Duty modern warfare 2 has a level in which you play a secret agent who has penetrated a terrorist organisation. To gain their trust you must participate in an attack on civillians at an airport. You can watch it
here.
You know what I felt, watching this level? Very little. I've seen this before. In Grand theft auto you can maim, cause havoc and destruction, and frequently do. Usually you will mow down innocents simply so you can inspire the police to chase you. Of course, the point is, you, as the player, know these aren't human beings. You realise they are sprites, little moving targets with no connection to reality whatsoever. Its a game. Call of Duty is trying something more.
It sort of always has. There is a mission in the first game in which you play out the assault on stalingrad (or was it leningrad. Name fail). You are issued ammo, and no gun. The beginning is blisteringly hard, and it helps underline to you the true costs of that war, as you fight and others fight beside you. You are playing out a real event, and as such, during the many death scences you will encounter, you realise that not everyone gets to respawn.
This, however, is trying to evoke... what exactly? That the murder of innocents is bad? We already knew that, and you could just show us the murder of innocents, not make us a participant in it. So us being a participant must matter, but I can't really see how. It could be talking about agency and choice, but the choices you make in this scence really make very little difference. The other terrorists ignore you no matter what you choose to do, leaving the choice to join in to mow down civillians one based on how real you feel the scene is (it isn't, by the way... almost all airports have guards with submachine guns. Walking very slowly shooting through an airport will get you killed in short order).
There is no chance to empathise with the terrorists here. They are murderers, with no real agenda on display, nothing to humanise them there. With that possibility drained, this is just a pointless exercise. You don't even know who exactly you are meant to be getting close to- what atrocity you are trying to prevent that is worse than the one you are partaking in. As the rps article says, this could possibly be a statement about the foolishness of blindly following orders, but its simply not smart enough for that.
I guess its just a failed experiment then. Expecting more out of such a popcorn game may have been asking a bit too much...
Labels: gaming
The Birds
Film critics love Alfred Hitchcock. Which is understandable- the fellow was a master of film after all. Yet this sometimes allows them to ignore its flaws. Every time I head The Birds mentioned in the same level of reverence as Psycho, I sigh. Yes, there is some lovely direction in terms of the camera, but when you have
-a hokey plot
-incredibly dated special effects
-awful acting
what you get is a BAD film, no matter who is behind the camera....
Labels: film, review
Star Wars updates
Funny stuffLabels: random
A bit of radicalism
I'm not sure what the government thinks it has to lose. Throughout its time in power, new Labour has been timid about social redistribution. It has done it, certainly, but has hidden its moves, and been afraid, always afraid, of raising taxes. Labour has made friends with those in power, has become complicit in their structures. This has worked well for them.
Until now. They are heading towards a loss in the next election, and their former allies are disconnected them. Whats more, public anger at bankers and the rich has never been larger. So now would be a brilliant time, to, you know, be radical. Lets put the tax burden on the top 10%. Lets raise taxes, lets redistribute wealth. Lets destroy those harmful havens. Lets recognise that these people aren't creating wealth, they're leeching it. Lets make society a little bit more fair. What would be brilliant about this is that it would completely throw the conservative party. The conservative party, for all their big words, are about as ready to shake the status quo as, well, a conservative. The conservatives are truly as reactionary as they ever have been, but they don't really need to provide alternatives, because the answers that this government give are insipid and anemic.
Lets put fire in the bellies of those who want to vote for Labour, and actually make a change. Please?
Labels: politics, rant
Railroading in rpgs
So my players recently acquired the macguffin they needed, only to have it snatched from their hands. Stepping outside they were confronted with a force they could not defeat, and were tied up and their object stolen. Now the question is, was this railroading?
I suspect some of my players might argue that it was, but I disagree. First of all, there were very good reasons for the people to be there (that my players are currently unaware of)- they didn't magically appear, although it did seem like they did. Second of all, the players weren't actually forced to do something. There were several ways they could react. I admit, I wanted them to react by giving up the macguffin, as it leads to a fun little arc that'll tie us up for christmas, but if they hadn't, they might have escaped. They didn't try in the end, and it would have taken some ingenuity, but I probably would have allowed it. (if they had done so I probably would end the session to plot out how that might go instead, as we were near the end anywhere). They also had the option of charging into a fight. I had made it very clear that the odds were unbeatable, but one of the advantages of WFRP is that if the players do do something quite so stupid, you can just deduct a fate point each and keep on playing, while in other systems the mechanic isn't quite there.
Labels: roleplaying, wfrp
A short note
This one goes out to certain D&D optmisers out there.
-No its not roleplaying
-No theres not a great deal of difference betwen you and munchkins
-So help me, if you call it "kung fu" again, I will end you.
... I may have spent too much time on the order of the stick forums of late.
Labels: rant, roleplaying
The Brothers Bloom
I did have a rather good selection of films on my journey back and to America. This is another film reviewed on a plane that I would have prefered to have seen on the ground. Directed by Ryan Johnson, the director of Brick, this is a con movie that is less about the con than the people (although isn't that always the way?). There was a lot of talk about similarities to Wes Anderson, and while some reviewers have distanced themselves from this notion, I can sort of see it. However, where Johnson succeeds and Anderson does not is in making his characters relatable.
This film can be very funny, with the strong female cast of Rachel Weisz as Penelope, who I don't think I've ever failed to enjoy watching on screen, and Rinko Kikuchi as the consistently hilarious Bang Bang. The tale follows our characters living out a fantasy. While the film is set in the modern world, its easy to forget it at some points, as the characters find themselves in trains that have escaped from the 30s.
There are flaws though. The cons that happen are a little too twisty for me: the ending is meant to have an emotional twist, and yet thanks to all thats come before you end up wondering if the assumptions the characters make are correct. The main flaw for me, though, is that I found Adrien Brody's character rather unrelatable. Brody plays a con man who has become disaffected, but I get the feeling he always was. I never got the feeling that he was a great con man, who was crying on the inside, because he spent most of the film listless and complaining. He always seemed utterly reluctant, which made it unclear as to why he kept going along with his brother's schemes.
Still, an enjoyable fantasy, with some great performances. I would happily see this one again. I suspect that without a weight of expectation I might find the experience more agreeable (and I probably won't be on a plane at the time!)
Labels: film, review
Experimental design
I enjoy making long blog posts about subjects which no-one will understand. So for your(lack of) entertainment, heres a mini-post on experimental design, the field of my research:
Most scientists, at some point, will need to perform experiments. Typically the process they are looking at will not be devoid of error. That is, when you measure someones height, you are unlikely to a-get the same answer each time and b-get the correct answer (most people would round up to 1cm at least, which imposes inaccuracies in your measurements). Such errors mean that even if you are certain as to what causes the process, your predictions would be out by some amount.
Such errors can usually be given a probability distribution, and we want to do our best to minimise these, so our predictions can be as accurate as possible. If we have a model to describe a process, we might know the form, but not the parameters of said model. Lets suppose we have a model for the temperature of a meal. We say that
temperature=a+b*time cooked for. We know age, and we can measure height, but for us to make predictions we need the values of a and b. Well we can run experiments, cooking our items for certain amounts of time, and then measuring the temperature. If there was no error, there would be no need to run more than two experiments, as we could perfectly estimate these parameters. However, we exist in the real world, and experimental error is a fact of existence. So lets suppose our food can be baked for between 10 and 200 minutes. If we had 10 cakes to test this with, a naeive approach might be to take these evenly spaced across time. In fact if you use statistical theory you can do much better, and take 5 observations at 10 minutes, and 5 at 200. Why? Well we only have two things to estimate, a and b, so we only need to take a minimum of two observations as we know. The thing we need to estimate here is the amount of error in our estimations, so repeating our observations at these point helps to minimise it.
This result is counter-intuitive, and important, because it extends. If we had two things we could vary (time cooked and weight of cake), an instinct for many experimenters would be to vary only one thing at a time- so look at changing time, while holding weight fixed, then holding time and varying weight. The best thing to do is to vary both at once, because this allows you to see if weight and time are interacting in any way.
Now this is an extremely simplistic look at the subject, with lots of the subtlties glazed over, but some important things to note are:
Experimental design has been demonstrated to be effective in multiple situations. Given a set of goals the experimenter wants to acheieve, statisticans can almost always find a design that will do better than the experimenter currently use.
Huge amounts of scientists are completely ignorant of this field.
Its an interesting field, with many problems left to solve, and one that most people, including many mathematicians, are entirely ignorant of.
Labels: phd, statistics
A puzzle wrapped in an enigma
Ah, my usual dilemma, statistical programming. It seems a large portion of what I do is not to actually consider the theory, but to actually utilise it. The problems I look at tend to be rather complex and spikey, and to apply the theory to them can be a difficult thing to do. As the day continues my attempts become more and more desperate. Inevitably, as always happens, the solution will come when I look away from the problem, let it stew, and come up with a new direction with which to attack it. Sadly it seems this epiphany must be underlined by frustration in the mean time.
Labels: my life
