You Want Some of This Sauce?

My Idea #3: Tower Defense against a single big, blobby enemy.

My Idea #1: Space shooter, a la Star Control, where you construct your ship out of pieces which then can be blown off in combat

My Idea #2: Tycoon game about running an MMORPG

Curse you, agile indie developers!

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury is certainly a brilliant man. (Sometimes, I might argue, too brilliant, in that he can wear an intellectual's blinders.) Check out this excellent speech he has given on "Human Well-Being and Economic Decision-Making." It really cuts to the heart of the cultural crisis that is begetting and will continue to beget economic crises:

'Economy' is simply the Greek word for 'housekeeping'. Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don't lose sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in. We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, 'economic realities', economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, 'sustainable' in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation.

Economics understood in abstraction from all this is not just an academic error: it actually dismantles the walls of the home. Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about 'housekeeping', has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making – until the bluffs were all called at the same time.

If we are not to be caught indefinitely in a trap we have designed for ourselves, we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home – a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings – people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity.

I have to admit, I do kinda wish that Pope Benedict's last encyclical had or included words that were this clear and this accessible. If this stuff is interesting to you, read the whole speech. It is most encouraging to see important people attempting seriously to reform our notion of economics, even if our politicians are completely fucking worthless on this point.

[I got the link from Rod Dreher.]

Last night, Andrew was puzzling to himself (in bed, with his 4-year-old brother in the room) about how there could be a Tooth Fairy when fairies aren't real. I asked him how else his teeth could disappear and money appear in its place. "Maybe you do it!" he replied. I acted incredulous, but when he said, "And there's something about Santa Claus that doesn't make any sense," I knew that the day had come. I insisted that he should not talk about it that moment (in front of Ben) and that we would talk about it later.

So this evening I explained the bald truth to him. He didn't seem bothered by it--either that Santa Claus wasn't real or that we had been telling him stories about it his whole life. He didn't ask, but I took it upon myself to explain why Santa Claus is important (or, at least, why a childhood with Santa Claus might be better than one without):

It has to do with the nature of gifts. Gift-giving between people can be a fragile thing, sometimes fraught with confusion and awkwardness. When gifts are given, there is often some trepidation on one side or the other -- Is it a good gift? How will they take it? Is the giver expecting something in return? Does this intensify our relationship or dampen it? Do I want it to be intensified? There's always a danger, certainly in Christmas gift exchanges, that the gift will turn into a kind of commerce (which, by this definition, is no gift at all). Are our gifts equal in value? Last year, so-and-so got me something really expensive! What will he think if I don't do the same?

Santa Claus is kind of solution to this conundrum. (He's certainly not the only one, either. We often like to have an intermediary when we give gifts. I would speculate that even gift wrapping is a kind of buffer between ourselves, our gifts, and each other.) Santa's are true gifts--pure gifts. We do not and cannot give him a gift in return, so there is no commercial transaction to be made or implied, no haggling over value and recompense. That this kind of gifting exists is an important thing for kids to learn or, more precisely, to experience.

And it's all tied up in why we have gifts at Christmas in the first place. The gifts of Santa Claus are like the gifts of God, specifically his gift of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God With Us. Fully grasping the nature of God's gifts is difficult directly, even for an adult. Explaining it in technical terms does little good. We need an experience to compare it to. hence Santa Claus. And even if we learn later that it was a fabrication of a sort, that experience sticks with us and is still something we can relate to. Our childhood experience of Santa is an anchor for faith.

...Okay, so I didn't explain ALL of that to Andrew, but I made an attempt to get across this idea: Receiving gifts from Santa helps you understand God's love and all true love that is modeled on His love.

(Footnote: Some of the thinking here was influenced by a very interesting book I read (or, read half of anyway) a couple months ago called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Some profound stuff.)

Brit-Com dissection of video game genres and history. Takes awhile to get funny, but it's pretty good. Not for kiddies. Find the rest on YouTube.

I know we're supposed to be cheering on that great American institution of book banning this week--cheer on its pervasiveness, its popularity, its growing influence on our culture--but frankly I just can't muster that much enthusiasm for such a tepid, soft-minded activity as banning books. I much prefer the idea of burning them.

Now someone please print this sin against artistry in a book so I can burn that one:

Fun side effect of a burgeoning indie game market: Nifty, audacious, silly game titles. Below, a sample of four. What's even cooler is that all of these are reputed to be pretty darn good games, too.

( YouToobin' behind the cut... )

Hmmm.... Looks like there are some serious limits in terms of components, but it's at least neat to know it's out there.

Am I the only one who thinks that the overheated, often plain irrational antipathy being shown toward health care reform proposals has less to do with health care policy and more to do with the financial crisis of the last year? It's like a stopped up bottle that's finally been opened. The kind of federal money that was thrown around very quickly, and the temporary (yes) socializing of banks and industries occurred in an atmosphere of dread, and quite justifiably. Many folks probably would have felt uneasy or angry about it all, if they weren't simultaneously frightened by the prospect of the whole system collapsing or seizing up. In that environment, a lot of people held their breath and, thus, their voices.

Now we're breathing again (long, gulping breaths), and here comes health care. There's no socialization of medicine going on here. The costs are huge, but they are dwarfed by the debt we already have. There's plenty to debate, but the rhetoric that's coming out, especially in opposition, is out of proportion. One explanation is that conservatives are just wackos, or that right-wing extremists are very loud on the public stage. If the people who are grouchy here are a rabid minority, then why is it having such an effect on the congressional debate? Why, even if Republicans are being opportunistic obstructionists (and perhaps they are), are the Blue Dog Democrats and their constituents being such an obstacle?

I think the furor is coming from fairly ordinary, often moderate people who bottled up their severe discomfort with the financial bailouts and only now are getting out there and protesting using all that energy. The grassroots anger is fundamentally misdirected, with unfortunate results, but in a sense much of it is nonetheless legitimate.

While I'm at it, let me also diagnose the left: Their passion for the "public option" is really a passion for a single-payer system. The public option may, I think, be a perfectly fine policy in itself, but I bet few of its cheerleaders are interested in merely a little more competition in the insurance markets. Fair?

I've done it. I've created an account on the so-called Book of Face. It's yet another one of the soul-endangering things I've been forced to do because of my career in video games. I hereby promise to keep from spamming you with invites from social games I'm playing for research, and I also promise to only post the most trivial of trivialities there, leaving the important trivialities to LiveJournal.

All in all, it's just another post on my wall.

(Oh, and if any of y'all actually WANT to play social games with me, let me know here (LJ) or there (FB). I'm trying out a gaggle of them right now until I settle on the most relevant or, dare I say it, fun ones. Current winner is Restaurant City. Suggestions? Let me know.)

That's the original Japanese box art for ICO (aka, the pinnacle of console gameage). Nifty.

(Hat tip to Kotaku.)

Noah Millman compares Ground Zero to Brussels' Grand Place, which was leveled by French cannons in 1695 and then rebuilt over the next four years.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Commonplace Book"--a collection of fragments, ideas, and notes on stories and other things that interested him.

If this isn't the Best Song of the Last Year (and for my money it is), we should at least be able to agree that these are The Least Rock-Star-Looking Rockers You've Ever Seen:



(Other Awards: Most Crystal Clear Lead Vocals. And Shit-Freakiest Official Video! OMG! Nightmares!)

Roger Scruton says we shouldn't give neurons more explanatory power--over concepts like beauty, God, mathematics, or justice--than they deserve, no matter how fashionable the impulse is:

It [brain imaging and analysis] associates ideas with parts of the brain; but it does not tell us what the ideas mean, or what they refer to. It tells a story about neurons, which cause my arm to rise; but it says nothing about what I do when I raise my arm. And the talk of “adaptations” turns out, on inspection, to be trivial. It tells us that the love of God, of neighbour, of beauty and virtue are not dysfunctional from the point of view of reproduction. Otherwise they would have all died out. Big deal.

Perhaps he overstates his case, since the study of how we experience things (not that neuron activity is the entirety of that, either) must be examined to truly understand those things. But surely it's the "neuroethicists," "neuroarthistorians," and whatnot who most egregiously overstate their case, and any tonic that counters their neurofetish is welcome.

Stuff I didn't know about syllable-counting in other languages and why an English Haiku may be impossible.

Amen.

If, improbably, you happen to be, like me, a sucker for any discussion of the nature of art and aesthetics, you will enjoy David Hart's essay on butterflies, beauty, and Vladamir Nabokov.

My friend Paul has penned another fine essay on the financial situation, continuing to make the case that "usury" is not a bad label for what happened. Why does the label matter? Well, because if we can't generate some solid understanding of what precisely happened, then we will traipse right back into the same situation. Our Men in Washington, including the President of UnChange, are doing a pretty good job of traipsing as we speak.

Paul points out one of the enlightening conundrums of the whole financial crisis, which is why we can't seem to figure out what to do about the guys who were at the center of the collapse--the Financial Products division of AIG, for instance, or the ratings agencies that slapped AAA ratings on risky junk. Are they criminals? Do we string them up? To must of us, this doesn't seem right. These guys aren't Bernard Madoff, whose status as a fraud and a crook is pretty clear. Do we just decide they were doing their job, but were poorly regulated? They played the game by the rules they had, too bad they were bad rules? This doesn't seem right, either. These guys are supposed to be the experts; they're supposed to understand their field. There are some rules that don't need regulation--they enforce themselves--like, say, "risk is risky." So we ought not treat these guys like undisciplined toddlers.

Usury is not a crime, but a sin. It is a failure of will. We might even say it is a rejection of reality, a suspension of reason. Paul calls them (and, by reasonable extension, us) both "usurers" and "utopians," because their sin came not from cynicism or ill will, but from optimism and fantasy. What they believed they could do was ignore the laws of property, they could make money not from resources, goods, and labor, but from mere money itself and financial manipulation. This sounded pretty good to just about everyone involved. They were, to put a different spin on it, seduced into usury. To implicate a deceiver in this we would need to take the leap and posit a Great Deceiver, for their hearts--and ours--deceived themselves.

Just finished watching it and, overall, I'd say it was a pretty impressive story. They dealt quite well with the time-travelly plotting, created a pretty darn effective villain, and quite a few great characters.

Some specifics (potential spoilers):
( Spoiler Cut )