This chapter is a sort of case study or example of something we might start deictic discourse (the subject of the last chapter) about in a fruitful way. Borgmann thinks that, in North America, nature (specifically as “wilderness”) is possibly the most obvious place to start looking for focal concerns to discourse deictically about. We’ll first start with a brief history of attitudes towards North American wilderness, then discuss previous attempts by conservationists to involve the wilderness in public discourse, and finally explore a new understanding of wilderness from within the context of our technological society.

The initial view of wilderness was that, being wild, it was a terrifying place. It was something that was not good until it could be tamed into a garden. And early European settlers (or invaders, however you see them), after a brief flirtation with the idea of the New World as a beautiful Eden, eventually saw it as an empty land, waiting to be wrought into shape. Of course, the land wasn’t “empty” by any stretch, nor was it unsettled or uncultivated; civilizations and centuries-long relationships with land already existed, in the form of the Native Americans.

Anyway, while this view of wilderness as a chaotic void waiting to be tamed was pre-technological, it was certainly amenable to the technological approach once that came on the scene. The technological paradigm sees nature as something to be shaped, something to be used as a mere means, as a raw material. And this indeed became the mission, not so much of the pioneers, but of early American industry: to subdue the wilderness and turn it into something that could become part of the production of goods that benefit humankind. Whereas in the Old World there were much more long-lasting ties between humans and the lands they dwelled in, this more instrumental view of nature in the New World did not encourage such ties.

On the other hand, in the Old World, nature was much more often cultivated than not; relatively speaking, there was much less true “wilderness” left in Europe. Thus the American wilderness can be seen as providing a unique challenge to the technological paradigm, in two senses: first, it can be a challenge within the framework. In this sense, wilderness is something to be overcome by technology. It might prove at first unyielding to technology; for a long time we lacked the ability to blast holes through mountains, for example. Technology overcomes this challenge through the outworking of the paradigm, applying scientific insight with the aim of deconstructing natural resources for us. Second, wilderness can be a challenge to the framework of technology itself, for example by highlighting necessary conversations about domination vs respect and conservation. If the technological paradigm in and of itself must take a dominating stance to nature, then the existence of the wilderness could be seen as a counterexample to that paradigm.

Technology does have within itself some resources to meet this kind of challenge, however. Recreation and human enjoyment is one of the avowed ends of technology, and it could be argued (from within that framework) that we should therefore preserve some wilderness so that humans have access to that particular kind of pleasure. Borgmann points out that this kind of argumentation is not what he means by deictic discourse, and thus ultimately not the kind of talk that brings the real issues to the fore. When conservationists use these kinds of arguments (arguments according to practical rationality), they give up the possibility of speaking movingly and eloquently about this thing (the wilderness) that has so deeply affected them.

In other words, feeling the need to give a justification for conservation gives the game away before it starts, because it is then always an open move to rank the wilderness against some other supposed human benefit (like safety, or convenience). It fails to disclose nature to us as something other, something that has value in its own right outside of human instrumentality. As Borgmann says, “Discourse of nature can hope finally to be successful only if it abandons the conceptual outposts and bulwarks and allows nature to speak directly and fully in one’s words” (187).

Early analyses of technology vis a vis nature talked a lot about the intrusiveness of technology. The loud and brash steam locomotive, for example. There was a sense that technology was constructing a “machine in the garden”, so to speak. More recently, as Borgmann’s book is trying to show, technology has been shaping our lives more concretely precisely when it is less intrusive, precisely when it is the hidden backdrop of all our actions. A city suburb, for example, is a technological device through and through: a conglomeration of commodities procured by hidden machinery. Thus, “the advanced technology setting is characterized not by the violence of machinery but by the disengagement and distraction of commodities” (189). The balance has shifted. Now nature is the island, the garden in the machine, not the other way around.

On one hand, this feels defeating. Has nature been fully conquered? Borgmann wants us to take a more positive view: these islands can be sources of challenge for the technological paradigm, sacred spaces where technological distractions can be (in virtue of their conspicuous absence) be seen for what they are, viscerally. Borgmann’s not saying that we should turn nature into religion or that it’s the only way of accessing the divine, but it is a clear starting point for this kind of thing.

How does this work, exactly? How does nature have the possibility of bringing these issues up for us in this “sacred” way? We could look at some oppositions between life in technology and life in the wilderness.

• Technology annihilates time and space (in bringing everything and everyone closer in both dimensions, until space has no more meaning). Wilderness restores it to us. The sun is our compass, the land delineates clear boundaries with its physical features. A day in the wilderness is marked by the rhythm of the various activities necessary for survival.
• Technology bespeaks human creation; nature speaks to us as an another, outside the human world. It speaks as something in its own right, which devices never do.
• Technology takes a shallow view of objects, and turns them into commodities. Nature is eminently deep. An animal in the eyes of technology is a machine that produces such-and-such amount of meat and other materials that are worthless and must be discarded. In the wilderness, the animal is a focus of nature, a distillation of the land itself and the bounty that it can support. In the wilderness, we are not consumers or conquerors, but engaged guests. We can, in a different way even than the animal, gather and focus (like a prism) the beauty and meaning around us.

Of course, these days the wilderness is always bounded by or mediated by technology. We drive to the mountains. We see jet contrails while backpacking. These slight intrusions remind us of the troubled relationship between nature and technology. They call us to be less egotistical, less anthropocentric in our treatment of the world. We also recognize that in our wilderness expeditions nowadays, it is the blessings of technology that keep us warm, well-fed, and safe. Our technical clothing, footgear, lightweight tents, dried food, and so on. But wait a minute! Is it not contradictory with the spirit of Borgmann’s analysis to want to enter the wild in safety and ease? Maybe it is to some extent, but Borgmann acquiesces that it would be foolish to court death in the wilderness. We have to have a mature recognition that the need to risk our lives in nature has been done away with. Still, this doesn’t mean that we can simply let the wilderness vanish; in fact the opposite is even more true. Our position of technological safety in the wilderness highlights nature’s fragility and need for protection. In a way, we as the children of nature have grown up, and are now “old” enough (technologically advanced enough) to see the frailty and complexity of our parents. This situation should move us to compassion and care, not extortion or abandonment.

In other words, the wilderness can help us acknowledge our need for technology, the fact that we fundamentally rely on it now, and there’s no going back. At the same time, nature helps us acknowledge our need to limit technology. On its own, technology neither needs nor wants limits, but engagement with focal things (or practices) like nature can help us outline that more mature and humble engagement with technology. Focal things are not just forlorn, pre-technological bygones; they can have a new and deep splendor, even in the technological world, so long as we heed their call to a mature and appropriately limited technology.

In the next chapter, we’ll dig even more deeply into the concept of “focal things and practices”, and move from nature to a number of other examples and how they might be patterns for us to move forward and find yet more in our own lives, about which we can speak deictically and effectively.

[Header photo by the author; Joshua Tree in 2009]

Just click on the picture to access the photo set.

Backpacking in the Sierras

It should be said also that we did have an excellent time, were in great physical condition (we rocked the climb and the altitude) and health for the duration, and got back a day early, safe and sound. These are all good things, and the whole experience was overwhelmingly positive. I’m sure Dan and I will be writing a full trip report to post at Summit Whitney, so I’ll post here when that happens. At that time we should have a number of awesome pictures, too.

About a day after I got back from Whitney, I left for Florida to be at work and with family for a week and a half or so. Since my brother David has gotten in to Duke law school and will be moving to Durham pretty shortly, we decided that Splendour Hyaline (which consists of the two of us) needed to make a new record, and fast. So apart from work, we’re pretty much in the studio (Spareroom Studios, that is). So far things are going great–we’re planning on releasing a 5 or 6 song EP. The recording quality we’re getting, both mechanically and in terms of performance, is light years beyond our previous attempts, so definitely stay tuned; we might post some unofficial mixes here or at our myspace page.

On another music-related note, you’ll notice a new sidebar on my blog, which consists of recently-played tracks from iTunes. All e4 blogs now have the ability to get data from last.fm if you have a last.fm username and some implementation of AudioScrobbler (downloads here for all platforms). If you’ve never heard of last.fm, you should check it out–it’s a cool web application that tracks your music listening and gives you cool statistics about it, suggests new artists, and connects you with people with similar taste. All that is to say, if I’ve been listening to iTunes recently (and had an internet connection), you should now be able to see that info on my blog! (If you also have an e4 blog, just go to the weblog config page and put in your last.fm username to take advantage of this feature too).

4-4, 6:05 PM, Fira, Santorini

The last few days have been incredible. The long ferry ride to Santorini was peaceful, and productive. I thought, wandered the boat, stared at the myriad passing islands, read Greek, and watched Howl’s Moving Castle. Like all Hayao Miyazaki’s films, it was excellent. Like the others, there was a story, but it refused to let you see any character as totally good or bad, or totally on one side or another.

When we got to Santorini, Victor, Deana, and Lisa (new friends from the Athens hostel and tour, respectively) joined us in the ride from the new port up the windy hill road to our hotel at Φίρα (Fira). The accomodations are good–2 beds, couch, bathroom, kitchenette, patio for 20 euros a night per person (Loizos apartments). That first night 4 of us booked an island-hopping boat tour for the next day, then wandered around Fira to find a place to eat. We were persuaded to sit down at a cafe/bar overlooking the sunset-ready sea, where the management ordered some cheap and good gyros from another place, and furnished us with a steady supply of ouzo and beer. We had a downright beautiful show of a sunset, and stayed for hours talking, drinking, laughing, and hanging out with our Albanian waiter, Roland. We got back home after 11, buzzed and ready to fall asleep.

The next morning (Monday, the 3rd), Rachel and I were awake early to buy food supplies at the supermarket with which to avoid paying lots for lunch and breakfast. We readied for the day, which promised to be warm, donning swimsuits and making sandwiches. We took the 600 long steps down to the old port, where we arrived in plenty of time for our 10:30 tour boat departure. The boat took us and the roughly 40 other tourists first to the volcanic island in the middle of what used to be the Santorini atoll [or caldera]. We disembarked and hiked around for an hour and a half, following our tour guide as she pointed out random craters and shared local myths. There was a continuous stream of mumbling from everyone about how difficult the hike was, about which I had many an internal smug smile, since I wasn’t breaking a sweat. Rachel was doing equally awesome, too.

Next came one of the more memorable parts of the trip so far. Our boat took us around the volcano (which, incidentally, was the site of the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history–weighing in at 20 times the power of Hiroshima, the shock wave was heard 3 times by all the earth’s inhabitants, as the force of the eruption rippled through the air, around the earth again and again) to a smaller island, where there were reportedly some hot springs. The boat had to stay a ways out from the island because of the rocks, so all those interested in visiting the hot springs were asked to dive into the ocean and swim to shore, where the spring was supposedly just offshore, amidst a patch of brown, sediment-filled water. Everyone who went was required to be a strong swimmer, because it was probably 125-150 meters from where we dropped anchor to the spring. It being by that time a very hot day, I was glad to be the first to dive off the side of the boat and let my muscles pull my smoothly to the springs. I have no real swimming training, though, and so by the time I reached the brown patch, my form was much less than smooth, and I was exhausted. Moreover, there was not a noticeable difference between the ocean’s temperature and these “hot” springs, with the result that after I stopped moving, I was cold. [Incidentally, between the springs at last year’s dude’s camping trip at Big Sur, and now these Greek ones, I have officially sworn off any “hot” springs boasting a temperature of less than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s just not worth it.] I was shivering uncontrollably and having a very unpleasant time, so I made my way back to the boat, which was harder due to the current at that location. Nevertheless, moving was much better than sitting still, and when I climbed the boat ladder, my muscles full of lactic acid, I felt refreshed and alive. But even in the hot sun, with my black jacket on, my teeth were chattering for almost the next hour.

The third stop on our tour was the island of Θιράσσια (Thirassia), a gorgeous, rocky-coastlined island with only 300 inhabitants. There we had lunch and I took some time by myself to run up the cliff path and explore the town up there. when I reached the top and wandered alone through the empty streets and through flower-strewn fields, I felt an astounding sense of peace. It seemed that in that place, life and time moved together at the correct speed. I wanted to stay for hours, but our boat was scheduled to leave, so I ran back down the stone path to the dock and we were off.

The fourth and last stop of the day was at the port of Ωια (Ia), and there the 4 of us (me, Rachel, Deana, Lisa) decided to leave the tour and walk up the cliff path to the town, which is one of the most picturesque in all the Greek isles. It was then only mid-afternoon, and we wanted to see the sunset, so we killed time for a while by wandering, sitting in the shade, reading, and napping. Everywhere I looked, beauty attended my glance, and I wore out my camera with photos of houses, churches, the sea, other islands, etc… As sunset neared, we got gyros at a stand and walked to an old tower on a point, from which was supposed to be the best view. Unfortunately, a swift-moving cold front decided to bring many clouds, which blocked the sun and spoiled (we thought) our hope for a beautiful scene. Sadly, we made our way to the bust stop, where we arrived just in time to see the sun dip in between two cloud layers, and light the entire sky with absolutely unreal shades of pink and purple. Had there not been power lines and ugly houses in the way from that spot, it might have been the most beautiful (albeit short) sunset I’ve seen. Oh well–that’s the result of lack of faith!

[Then it was time to leave for dinner…to be continued…]

Now, I want to preface this whole entry with a bit of history, since to many of you it may come as a shock that for most of my life I have considered myself and been considered by others a “gamer”. If you want to skip the history and get to the point, scroll down to “The Reason for this Entry” below.

A Personal Gaming History

My dad was into computers and hardware since I was a baby, so we always had a computer in the family. I think the first one was an Apple, but when we moved back to the States in 1988 from Papua New Guinea, our home computer became a PC with MS-DOS. Being a technically-minded youngster, my dad and I would spend hours together playing with hardware, installing hard drives and so forth–and he taught me how to use DOS commands like “cd”, “dir”, “md”, and so on; he even taught me how to create .bat scripts! Later on I furthered my own education and learned how to write .com programs in assembly using “copy con”. Anyway, seeing that I took well to these sorts of things, my parents allowed me to play games on the computer, even though we had a no-Nintendo policy. Thus began a long love affair with PC gaming (and not, of course, console gaming).

Games were like books to me–little consumable pieces of fun that would transport me to different worlds, or allow me to be creative and imaginative, or give me a chance to learn more about computers (back in those days, things usually didn’t just “work”–before running many games, you had to edit system startup files to allocate the correct amounts of memory to different parts of the system, or set IRQ settings for multimedia equipment because different games used different ports). I would get games usually via one of four ways. Occasionally my dad would bring home a game he’d borrowed from a friend (like Gunship 2000), or found overseas for cheap (like Prince of Persia). More often I would be messing around on one of the many Dallas-based BBSes, looking through the downloads section for shareware games to get and try out (incidentally, BBS culture and reminiscences are worth their own entry, but I probably won’t ever have the time to write such things out). Otherwise, I’d borrow and install games from my friends Nathan or Sean or Ben. This was before the days of cd-roms and copy protection, of course. Very occasionally, I’d spend what little money I had on a game.

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to make some lists for posterity’s sake, and also to underscore how much of a gamer I was in earlier years–a world which is probably strange to most of you who spent your time at soccer practice or doing homework or whatever. If anyone wants to analyze the psychological implications of all of this, please do so in the comments. So here are lists of my favorite games:

The Elementary School era (1988 - 1991) During elementary school, we had a computer class every day which was supposed to teach us math or something, and if we finished our lessons early, we could go up to Mrs Mehta and ask for the 7.5" floppy of the game of our choice, which we could put into the Apple IIs and boot. I’d always play one of four games: Conan: Hall of Volta, Moon Patrol, Number Munchers, or of course, the mighty Oregon Trail.

The MS-DOS era (1988 - about 1996) The MS-DOS era overlaps quite a bit with both the Windows 3.1 and the Windows 95 era, since both of these operating systems were more or less pieces of software running on top of DOS, and so games created then were typically written for DOS. That’s why the era extends until 1996, even though I’d been using a graphical OS for quite some time. There are a lot of important games to list here, so I’ll do so by genre, and roughly chronologically within that.

Educational games - the first games I played were educational games my parents had bought for the edification of myself and my siblings. For the most part, they didn’t teach me anything, but they were fun nonetheless and so I spent lots of time with them. For example: Reader Rabbit, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, Math Rescue, and my favorite, Word Rescue.

Board games / Strategy games - I wasn’t as big a fan of this genre, but a few games did suck up my childhood time: Hexxagon, Battle Chess, The Incredible Machine, and the tank strategy Scorched Earth.

Side-scrollers (top-down scrollers, too) - This was possibly the most popular style of game for this era, since it allowed for exciting action while avoiding the challenges of 3D. All were more or less awesome: Pharaoh’s Tomb, Secret Agent, Dark Ages, Jazz Jackrabbit, Commander Keen 4, Duke Nukem (the infamous), and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. By far the best of the lot was Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, my dad bought the game in Singapore and it came back without a manual. Many of this era’s games used words in the manual as keys to enter the game, to ensure that you had purchased it legally. Thus we could only play the game after successfully guessing the requested keyword (which happened about 1 in 50 times–until we began writing them down).

Sims (space sims, plane sims, jet fighter sims, racing sims, worldbuilding sims) - We had flight sims like F-15 Strike Eagle, MS Flight Simulator 5, Jetfighter II (probably my favorite–I distinctly remember flying at over Mach 1 underneath the Bay and Golden Gate bridges…and then turning south to fly for over an hour down to the LA coast–where there were only 1-color land/sea bitmaps), ATF, Gunship 2000 (the best helicopter sim ever), [Falcon 3.0](http://www.mobygames.com/game/lhx-attack-chopper>LHX: Attack Chopper, and <a href=). We also had space sims like Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Descent (and Descent 2), Star Wars: X-Wing (the first time I ventured into the Star Wars gaming universe, which has provided endless entertainment since then), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (the best sim experience I’ve ever had), and Terminal Velocity. Notable racing sims included one of my all-time favorites, Stunts, which let you design your own racetrack with jumps, loops, corkscrews. Definitely a plus–and you could even record yourself driving on the tracks and replay them later. Also: SkyRoads. The lone sub sim I played was Silent Hunter. There were two cool mech sims I liked: Ultrabots and Mechwarrior 2. Finally, I already mentioned Sim City and Sim City 2000.

Role-playing games - unlike the MMORPGs of today, the MS-DOS era’s role-playing games were single-person adventures where you typically had to use your brain to figure out puzzles and guide a character through an adventure. My favorite experience in this genre was undoubtedly King’s Quest V, which my friend Nathan and I agonized over together for quite a long time. The most technically wowing game was Return to Zork, which was a first-person adventure utilizing the newly-released cd-rom drives to deliver actual video content as part of the game. Other memorable games included: The Secret of Monkey Island (Guybrush Threepwood is my hero!), King’s Quest VI, Space Quest IV, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, the extremely original, genre-bending It Came from the Desert!, and Solar Winds.

First-person shooters - A fledgling genre, but later to become my favorite, more or less. I played Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom (but only at my friend Michael’s house, since my parents would have banned it).

Other - I used to play one fighting game with my brother: One Must Fall: 2097. Also there was the excellent Nibbles, run as “qbasic nibbles.bas” – I had tons of fun looking at the source code for that one when I was beginning to write my own BASIC programs. Also, this doesn’t count as a DOS game, because it was for the early Macs, but I was absolutely addicted to Bolo in junior high, primarily because it was multiplayer! Also, another fun sim-like game was Coaster, which let you have very fine-control design over coasters, and then ride them, monitoring g-forces, rider experience, etc…

The high school era (1997-2000) Sometime before high school, I discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces - the Star Wars FPS that would spawn the series I’ve completed the most games from. I probably spent more time playing Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight during freshman year of high school than any other game. In multiplayer (by then the internet had become useful for playing games), I was literally unstoppable if I had the rocket launcher. The subsequent games, Jedi Knight II: Outcast, and Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy were equally fun, with somewhat more of an arcade feel.

But back to high school: Quake and Quake II initiated the era, but soon I discovered a new genre that would prove to be the one that I thought would be my favorite (but in fact wasn’t): the real-time strategy. First there was Command and Conquer, and its flow of unit creation / control / combat was intriguing. I didn’t get very far in the game, though, before I became bored. Later that year, I traded C&C with my friend for Warcraft II, which turned out to be a much more important game in my gaming history. It was the first time I’d heard of Blizzard, but I loved the way they’d set up the game much more than C&C, because it was fantasy-based as opposed to modern. What really got me, however, was the story–Warcraft II came with a manual which had a short book included, telling the story of the game world. The depth of that story, and the clever way it was integrated into the game itself, hooked me a lot more than the actual mechanics of the game, which were good, but which wouldn’t have hooked me otherwise. I had such a fun experience with WC2 that I went back and bought the original Warcraft as well, which was laughably worse, but still fun. Anyway, Warcraft II was impactful in that it caused me to spend hours and hours on the forums for Blizzard’s upcoming RTS Starcraft, discussing all aspects of the game for almost a year before it was released. As it happened, I was way more into the game before it came out, and I didn’t finish any of the campaigns.

While I was waiting for Starcraft, I enjoyed several other strategy games: Riven, Myth: The Fallen Lords (which had the most awesome 3D RTS engine to date–it actually let you move the camera around!), Age of Empires, and a family favorite, Lords of the Realm II.

During and after the move to Florida in 1999, I played Battlezone, The Wheel of Time (an excellent, very much under-appreciated game based on the Robert Jordan book series), Total Annihilation, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (an unfairly-lampooned RTS with a very original story line), Age of Empires II (a vast improvement over the original), Thief: The Dark Project (an extremely original first-person sneaker), and most importantly, I finally got around to playing through Half-Life, which was without doubt the best game of its time. The summer before Stanford I also attempted to tackle the new breed of adventure/role-playing games by taking on Ultima IX: Ascension, but it proved to be too much of a time sink (a lesson I apparently didn’t learn, given that I later played both Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and World of Warcraft (which readers will remember).

College to Current (2000 - 2006) College was mostly a sad time for my gaming habits, as other parts of my life were fleshed out and took precedence, including but not limited to the newfound athleticism I was cultivating partly to fit in to the more-active Stanford crowd, and partly because it just felt right and healthy. Of course, freshman year would give the lie to that statement, as I would game with my roommate Eric or my whole floor to all hours of the night, playing Counter-Strike. But games were definitely on the downswing as a whole…while I continued to buy games I thought I would like with my bits of disposable income, I rarely had time to finish them. One notable exception (other than the Jedi Knight games), was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was the most scary first-person shooter I’d played to date. I would play it with the lights off for a while, but occasionally I’d have to jump out of my chair and run down the hall to get rid of the goosebumps. Needless to say, it was excellent. One summer, I was accepted as a beta tester for the now sadly defunct Savage, a boldly-conceptualized hybrid of FPS and RTS. It was fun to see a game change while I was playing it.

Since I was a Blizzard fan, I also picked up Warcraft III on the day it was released, and finished it over the next couple of years (though I’m still not done with The Frozen Throne. Since college, I’ve really only played two games: the extremely awesome Half-Life 2, which is probably the best FPS game ever, and the ubiquitous World of Warcraft. Oh wait, I did finish Halo for mac, as well.

Anyway, so much for my personal gaming history. I’m not sure what principles we can draw from this, but I will say that most of my best gaming experiences have been ones that have involved other people in some way–I can remember hours of pure, awesome fun playing games with my brother over the LAN, or with my friends. I also formed some friendships online through gaming that, while not particularly long-lasting, were not meaningless. (This would be harder to now, given that most people who play games on the internet are about 10 years of age, or have that mentality).

Essentially, being in communities formed around gaming has made that gaming more meaningful than it otherwise would have been. Which is not to say that these are good or helpful communities, but more the general observation that doing things with people makes you like the things themselves more. That’s why some people have positive connotations of consuming alcohol or tobacco, where others don’t.

The Reason for this Entry Now that it is clear exactly what kind of nerd I am, I wanted to share news of an exciting game that is in the works. It’s called Spore, and it’s being designed by Will Wright, the same guy who designed the SimCity and Sims games. As the Wikipedia article says, he generally designs “software toys” rather than goal-oriented games–essentially, things that you can play with and do what you will with for an indefinite period of time–there is no set beginning or end. Think about SimCity–you could spend your whole life building and running it if you wanted; there is no endpoint, only your own creativity and tolerance. You can watch a video of a talk by Wright at last year’s Game Developers Conference, where he says a lot of interesting things about game design. In the middle of the talk he gives a demo of this upcoming game Spore which is possibly the most amazing piece of interactive software I have seen. If you don’t want to wade through the talk, you can go straight to the gameplay video.

Basically, the game is a world sim of the most epic proportions. You start out controlling a microorganism, and through eating and modifying the organism through various generations of existence using the game’s editor, you propel your creature-line through various stages of evolution: bacteria, small macroorganism, fish-type thing, amphibious walking creature, etc…

The micro stage

At a certain point your creature becomes sentient and the game changes–you’re now controlling a society, which you grow in ways familiar to Civ players. Other asynchronously-user-designed societies exist on your world with which you interact in friendly or hostile manners depending on how you have been training your creatures. At this stage you use the same world editor to “buy” and/or create from scratch various buildings and technologies, which enable creation of vehicles, colonizations, and other possibilities.

The city (“civ”) stage

Eventually, assuming all the previous stages have been successful, you gain off-world transportation power and are able to travel to other planets in the solar system, using terraforming techniques to make them habitable.

View of your planet

With the resources gathered by all your civilizations, interstellar travel becomes possible, and using SETI-like mini-games, discovery of other sentient beings throughout the galaxy becomes only a matter of time. These sentient beings have been designed by other players–though they are copied from a central database and your actions with them do not affect that player’s world. Anyway, peaceful or warlike negotiations are possible here just in the same way as on your home planet, and thusly you can explore the galaxy. And finally, it is even possible to zoom out from the galaxy and fly around at the most macro-scale imaginable, swooshing past countless similar galaxies, each with their own star systems and habitable worlds, populated with procedurally-generated or other-user-generated content.

While the game itself looks like it will probably be the most fun game ever released, the way it has been conceptualized/designed is fascinating and inspiring to me. First, the game is basically an analogue to the Powers of 10 phenomenon which is so breathtaking–only you’re zooming out instead of in. Second, the game behavior actually changes at each step backwards. In other words, you don’t have one game with one set of game mechanics that you play until completion–no, the rules, methods, and goals of the game change depending on what level of detail you are at in your universal evolution. This promises to provide a completely different gameplay experience than most games, which are somewhat statically designed. Third, everything in the game is procedural or algorithmic, which completely fascinates me. Wright explains at the beginning of his talk how in the early 90s the exponential increase in data storage capacities (via the cd-rom) made game designers think almost exclusively in terms of massive content creation, because they now could, instead of thinking in terms of dynamically generating content based on smart and compact algorithms. This part of the game blows my mind–every creature, every building is customizable in thousands of ways, but the software knows how to treat everything so that it works exactly how it’s supposed to in the world.

In the gameplay video, Wright shows off some of the variety you can have in the creature editor, and he made a creature with three legs. We don’t really have any of these on Earth, so in my mind I didn’t even have a good idea of what a three-legged creature should walk and move like. But the game’s engine analyzed the skeleton of the tripod animal and decided that it would have to walk in a certain way, and it looks completely real. The amount of physics research that must have been done to produce such an engine is incredible.

Another inspiring design point Wright made was that, in their research into gameplay patterns, people are almost always happier when they are given tools with which to be creative regarding content. That content might not be as good as content designed by professionals, but given that it belongs to me, I am more invested in it and therefore feel that I am having a more meaningful entertainment experience. I resonate deeply with this mode of thinking, and feel that it might be the thing that saves electronic entertainment from being completely useless. Fundamentally, entertainment needs to be recreation (see weblog title!), by which I mean re-creation, or creating-after. Games that facilitate this creativity will be much more beneficial for people than hack-and-slashers or for most of the crap that Hollywood spews out (the same principle holds true for other forms of media, even if it’s less fundamentally interactive–good films are the ones that require you to creatively generate something in order to correctly experience or understand it–whether that creativity is in the intellectual or emotional sphere). So this is the tie-in to the personal gaming history, because I’m wondering if Spore might have some ability to re-deem and re-integrate gaming into a well-rounded and well-recreated life.

Moving on to another theme: as someone who essentially designs interfaces for a living (but who is beginning to realize this is neither always nor typically enjoyable), the way the interfaces are designed in Spore is dazzling. Everything is simple, clean, and organic. What is necessary is at hand, and what is not is hidden away. I’m not sure if this good design was easy given the organic nature of the game itself, but regardless, someone is doing something right, and I am excited to get my hands on a copy just to see how they solve all the UI problems that must exist in a game with as large a scope as this one. (Incidentally, I couldn’t find a release date anywhere…hopefully 2006 sometime!)

Lastly, given recent thoughts about evolution, in biological, sociological, cosmological, and theological terms, the bare premise of the game is philosophically interesting. I want to see how the story of evolution is told, what explanations are given, and so forth. I mean, what we have here is basically a model of “theistic” (rather, “guided”) evolution, where the player is actually making cognitive decisions for how to affect the physical or cultural aspects of a creature or society. Given that this is an interesting model in general, I really want to play around with it and see how deep the “procedurality” of the game goes, and how much of it is hard-coded AI.

If anyone has made it this far: what do you think? Did you watch either of the videos? Why am I so excited about this? Is it just my Five-wing expressing itself?

We left reasonably close to the 5am goal and made record time to the central valley, but after making our way up into the hills, things got interesting: a regular blizzard was in session, and the roads were soon quite treacherous after the snow was compacted by tires in the sub-freezing temperatures. At one point we were stopped on a slight incline behind traffic, and when it was time to go, the Civic refused to move forward–traction had disappeared. Luckily, the car behind us happened to be a police officer and so he held traffic while I mustered all my clutch ability and eased into first gear and then to the side of the road where we put chains on the tires for the rest of the climb.

It soon became apparent, as the snow kept piling up, that we were going to have serious problems, and it was indeed so: the pass to Kirkwood was closed for avalanche control, and so we were out of luck. Determined to get on some mountain, we went all the way back down and took another road, intending to find Bear Valley, a lesser resort. The pass was not quite as high on that road, so there was a good chance it wouldn’t be closed, and it wasn’t!

Of course, though open, the road was still dangerous and the going was slow. Even with chains, the car would slide and fishtail with anything but minor changes in velocity or minor turns of the wheel, making it exhausting to drive many miles at such a slow pace. Eventually, though, we made it through the whiteout (parts of which were so white that it was impossible to make out where the road was and where the snowbanks to the sides of it were) and to Bear Valley, where we were able to get 2 hours of snowboarding in before the slopes closed.

I was exhausted from 7+ hours of driving, and I hadn’t been on a board since 2004, so I had quite a few amazing spills–none of which were very dangerous, given the multiple feet of fresh powder there to break my fall! So we had a crazy fun time careening down the mountain and trying to make the most of our short time. Here you can see the snow that accumulated on my car after just that short time (and this was just the residual, post-storm effect):

Another 5 hours of driving (not including the horrendous chain installation/removal events which definitely tried our collective patience), and we were back–a very long, very intense, not-too-snowboarding-filled day! But you have to love these little adventures.

Shapes in clear water when moving
are blurred and the fuzz provides fear
For unknown says death's always seeking
and will in the end become near

So sun and life soon are forgotten
if only for a space of seconds
Heart and mind illusion-smitten
propel the soul back to the sands

From the shore heartbeats are slower
Embarrassment looks like the heat of the day
The water is clear, it seems fear need not tower
O'er a reckless rejoining the fray

But horizon reveals, dark symbols appear
Omens or fins? both blacker than sky
Recklessness checked, the imagined is here
It seems a more rational soul would have died

• summitwhitney.com

This year, T-Bone accompanied me to Cocoa, where we were greeted by an absolutely amazing sunrise, replete with a flock of gulls that would zoom and flutter about, putting on an amazing show:

But then, a few minutes later, we saw this:

Look at the middle-left of the image: that’s right! A shark was cruising through the water, not 30 feet off the beach (notice the pigeon for scale). Actually, there were two sharks, though I only got a shot of one. The fins were only above water as the waves would break over them, so it was hard to get a good view. Was this shark a sign of some kind? Was God warning us about something?

Later on, not realizing that if two sharks were a sign of anything, they would surely import “DON’T GO IN THE WATER!”, T-Bone and I took a swim in the ocean. What could be more relishing than being able to go in the water on January 2nd? It was a bit cold, but quite bearable and refreshing. And, as we have now proven, shark infested. Unless, of course, one of you is a marine biologist and believes the picture is actually of a dolphin.

(Picture taken from our backyard, looking towards Lake Hart–one of the few Orlando water bodies that’s actually somewhat a lake and not a retention pond)

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