I recently created a Twitter bot that tweets one randomly generated metaphor every two minutes.

I’ve decided to make the source code available. Get the source on Github here. Read the README.md, as it requires installing some software and getting your own API keys.

The whole thing is pretty simple and hacky. The program is pure JavaScript, running in node.js, which lets you run server-side JavaScript totally distinct from a web browser. I host the bot over at Nodejitsu — you can actually see the app “running” here: http://metaphor.jit.su/ (Nodejitsu requires all its apps to respond to HTTP requests, so I have Express, a very simple web server, running just so the hosting service doesn’t mess things up.)

The program uses the Wordnik API, which is a fantastic service that lets you specify things like “give me 4 random nouns, and now give me words commonly used in phrases with those nouns.” I don’t really use any of the fancy stuff; I just ask for random nouns and adjectives within a certain tolerance of common use (I’ve calibrated it so that the words can get pretty weird, but not so weird that the sentence is incomprehensible). What the bot does is call the Wordnik REST API using Chris Williams’ super-simple restclient, which returns a JSON object with my words that I add to a very simple string. The algorithm is:

(a/an) noun (is/considers/of) (a/an) noun: adjective (and / , not / , yet / but / , / , but not) adjective

That’s it. I play around with frequencies a bit, where “is” is much more likely to show up than “considers” or “of”.

When it chooses articles it can be buggy. I don’t check for phonemes (though you can do it with Wordnik), so sometimes you’ll get “an university” or “a hour,” things like that.

Weirdly, the Wordnik API needs to be coaxed to just give me regular nouns or adjectives. For example, to get singular nouns I had to ask for it to include nouns, but explicitly exclude proper nouns, plural nouns, proper plural nouns, possessive proper nouns, suffixes, family names, idioms, and affixes. Adjectives I didn’t filter so much as it seemed to mostly work, but I still get weird words that don’t seem to fit, like “generall” (archaic adjective), cist (a noun), youngling (archaic noun). But I also get wonderful conversational words like “lovey-dovey,” “sky-high,” and “Smithsonian.” So… I’m pretty happy with the results.

Finally, I have the program tweeting on a setInterval using the twit npm package, which is the simplest JavaScript Twitter API interface I was able to find. It works exactly as advertised.

The only other interesting thing the bot does from a programming perspective is that every five hours, it grabs the last 20 retweets of its own tweets and favorites them. The result is that you can see a best-of list right here.

I wanted to write up an essay in response to the third chapter of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, “Metaphorism.” Instead, I decided to do philosophical carpentry. I made this:

Metaphor-a-Minute!

It uses the Wordnik API to grab nouns and adjectives and does some very naive processing to form a basic metaphor. (It’s not polished; for some reason when I ask Wordnik for an adjective it only gives me one 90% of the time.)

Essentially, I’m skeptical that we can ever have good metaphors for anything; or rather, anything can be a good or a bad metaphor. I think metaphorism requires someone to take the stance of a poet, to have confidence in metaphor. And a poet I am not…

I would say more, but I think the work speaks for itself. Take heed, Ian–this object has spoken!

a speculation is a wicket: long-chain and soft-hearted

— Metaphor-a-Minute! (@metaphorminute) May 10, 2012

Here’s the latest in a series of articles chronicling my unhealthy obsession with videogames and ontology. Just in case you thought I was back to blogging about normal stuff.

Most videogames have dynamic objects that you can interact with and static objects that you cannot interactive with. After a few minutes of experimentation, experienced players intuitively understand what is static in a game and what is not. If we imagine a typical first-person shooter, “the environment” is static: trees and ground and sky, but also buildings, rubble, street signs, and so on. This environment provides ambiance and strategic cover, and perhaps motivation for progress, but little of concrete utility to the player. Interactive, ‘real’ objects are usually things with obvious utility or drawbacks: guns, ammunition, vehicles, and people usually top the list. But abstract games have a similar ontological divide: in Tetris, the tetrominoes are real, interactive objects. But the score board and playing field lie inert and mostly uninteresting.

It’s easy to see that the ontology of most games relies on a division between types of objects: static and dynamic, borrowing the lingo that many game engines use. Things the player can directly affect, and things she cannot. No matter how many rockets you fire at that stop sign, it’s not going anywhere, sorry. (Furthermore there are objects that are not modeled in the game world itself. For example, a spawning system or a menu system could be represented as an object. I’m bracketing that discussion for this essay and will get back to it at some point.)

What would a game with a flat ontology look like? Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky comes close, as I posited the other day in a roundabout way. The game with the flattest ontology I can think of is none other than 2004’s sleeper hit for PlayStation 2, Katamari Damacy.

The Prince of Objects

If you’re unfamiliar with Katamari Damacy, and since I’m too lazy to write one myself, I’ll quote Wikipedia’s current description of the game:

The game’s plot concerns a diminutive prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations, and Moon, which were accidentally destroyed by his father, the King of All Cosmos. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to people to mountains, until the ball has grown great enough to become a star. Katamari Damacy’s story, characters, and settings are bizarre and heavily stylized, rarely attempting any resemblance of realism, though the brands and items used are based on those current in Japan during the game’s production.

Katamari Damacy eschews the static/dynamic divide seen in most videogames–at least, to a point. Everything is an object to be picked up. Domino, snail, seat cushion, pencil sharpener, lipstick; police car, picnic table, graffito, telephone pole, shoe store sign; hot air balloon, butcher shop, iceberg, storm cloud, and Jumboman alike. All are objects to wadded up into your magic ball.

For myself, Katamari’s primary delight came from the slow realization that things which appeared to be static when the Prince’s ball is small turn out to be dynamic when the scale changes. You might spend the first five minutes of a level rolling around a house. The house is immovable and noninteractive, comprising of a maze for you to traverse and collect the smaller items that it make their home within its walls. But five minutes later you’re 50 meters in diameter and can pick up the entire house as easily as if it were a ballpoint pen!

And yet the way this scaling works is extremely interesting. I’ll look at another example: a park. At the small scale, you find yourself inside the park, working your way up from popsicles to picnic baskets to punk rockers. But at a certain scale, those objects become abstracted into the notion of a “park” as an object on its own. You can no longer pick up a single popsicle–you’re too big. This is related to a concept in game engines called “level of detail” or “LOD” (basic explanation here) In a game like Skyrim, when you’re far away from a mountain range the game does not render every single goat and tree on that mountain. It shows you the mountain in the abstract in order to save on resources. What’s interesting is that LOD normally applies to things that are far away from the player or from the camera. In the case of Katamari, LOD applies to a case where an object is no longer on a scale you care about anymore. What we’re seeing here is a case of a Latourian black box appearing in a game. Yes, we can and do appreciate the individual elements of a park, but at some level we close that box and begin to refer to the park as an object in and of itself. What was inside the park no longer exists, and is subsumed by the “park” object.

Contrast this to a game like Minecraft, where huge objects are constructed from raw materials, either by human hands or the hands of the world generation algorithm. While Minecraft features objects at many scales, it never abstracts those objects. Every object in Minecraft is either a building block or an aggregate composed of building blocks. It’s a strictly atomist ontology: there’s the stuff the world is made of (wood, stone, coal, iron, etc), and everything else can be reduced to those atoms, literally with the blow of a hammer. (Perhaps it’s more Empedoclean, since there’s not a single substance at the root of things but rather a set of primal elements.)

While large objects in Katamari are indeed composed of smaller objects, they are not mere aggregates. They are qualitatively different from the sum of their parts. Here’s Graham Harman on Latourian black boxes:

“Finally, we have seen that Latour’s relationism allows him to replace the usual twofold rift of philosophy with a plurality of levels. [...]There is no final stratum of brute material from which flimsier, more ostentatious entities would then be molded. [...] There is no substance, only black boxes, and like Pandora’s box they can be opened at will to examine the delicate internal negotiations that made them possible. Traditional realism’s hobgoblin of the ‘mere aggregate’ or ‘mere thing of reason’ is no longer a worry, since in the end everything is an aggregate, assembled carefully or carelessly from numerous components. Gaps multiply to infinity and are constantly crossed by the work of translation, not by the impossible perilous leap so deservedly ridiculed by James. In short, there is no final layer of reality from which all relations will have been cleansed. The stunning metaphysical implication here, which Latour never discusses openly, is an infinite regress of actors. If there are only black boxes and never a final substance, then we will never come to a final stage in any analysis.” (Harman,  Prince of Networks, 106) [emphasis mine]

This “plurality of levels” is immediately clear in Katamari Damacy. While at one level the house is a container for smaller objects you can pick up, at another level it becomes an object you can pick up in its own right. When I read that gaps “multiply to infinity and are constantly crossed by the work of translation,” I think of the moment in Katamari when you hear a chorus of harps and get a sort of magic transition to a new size category. Moving from small to large is not a smooth, continuous process. This is for technical reasons related to LOD and memory management: the PlayStation 2 simply can’t model every object in the world as dynamic, so when we jump the gap between scales, the engine places small objects in various black boxes and closes them up for good.  This is the work of translation between the multiple levels of reality, represented in Katamari Damacy by your magical katamari ball, or perhaps the King, who appears with a pithy comment whenever translation between scales occurs.

On another level, at the end of a stage the King of All Cosmos shoots your balls of stuff into the sky and they are transformed into stars. It’s an occasionalist world, but instead of Allah, the King is waiting there to provide the magic needed for objects to truly touch one another and become aggregates, for the black boxes to close. The prince brings objects together, but the king allows them to translate.

The ontology of Katamari Damacy implies the “infinite regress of actors” that Harman identifies in his take on Latour’s metaphysics (which Harman finds unacceptable and dedicates a significant portion of Prince of Networks to offering an alternative). Unlike Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky, where the player opens up black boxes and can travel ever downwards or upwards into a literal infinite regress of objects, Katamari stops at a certain point. In the credits you roll up the nations of the Earth itself. In its sequel, We <3 Katamari, you can roll up the solar system, including the Sun:

It’s worth asking what you can’t roll up. What objects exist outside the realm of things-that-can-be-rolled-up? Well: the Prince himself, and his father the King of All Cosmos, and the katamari ball all seem to have some kind of special status. In some of the sequels, you can roll up the King. But it’s clearly not the true King — rather it’s some kind of projection of the King. The real King is the one who lives in the source code, doing the hard work of translation from objects to closed black box of park or of star.

Of course, there are also the limitations of the game engine itself. The game runs on hardware. The Prince can’t break out into our own world and roll us up. Perhaps a Katamari game with a true flat ontology would allow the player at some point to roll up addresses of memory in the game console’s hardware that would corrupt the game, bringing the world to a screeching, freezing halt in a cacophony of confusing colors, repeating sounds, or perhaps just blackness.

The World is Full of Things

“My, Earth really is full of things!” –The King of All Cosmos

One last point I want to make is that the encyclopedia of items in Katamari is an example of ontography as defined in Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. Every object the player picks up gets added to an encyclopedia that you can then review. There’s a possibly-complete list of every item in the original game available at Fanboy.net.

Oddly, I remember the quote as “My, the world really is full of things!” I’m not alone in this, apparently. I think this has to do with the universal scale of Katamari Damacy. The Earth just seems too small to contain it. As Anna Anthropy says in a great short essay about the game:

“we are replacing the stars with stuff; with human stuff, all the little minutia that litters human environments in abundance. the game suggests that the whole of the vast, dark cosmos contains as many interesting things as the surface of the one small planet earth.”

I wrote the following piece on a transatlantic flight yesterday after reading a big chunk of Bruno Latour’s (absolutely brilliant) Aramis, or the Love of Technology. I was inspired by a passage in the book where a personal rapid transit system is talking to its priest about ontology and free will. (Yeah, I know.)

This a dialogue that takes place between two philosophers who live inside Jason Rohrer’s game Inside a Star-Filled Sky. (Yeah, I know.)

If you haven’t played the game, you really should do so (Win/Mac/Linux), but this video will give you an idea of what it’s like to play a recursive shoot ‘em up. (Yeah, I know.)

METAPHYSICIANS INSIDE A STAR-FILLED SKY

–What is an object?

–Why, an object is a thing that sustains qualities.

–Very well then: what is not an object?

–Simple! It’s something without qualities, such as a wall.

–Ah yes, of course, silly me. It appears I’ve temporarily forgotten my education at L’Ecole [Star Filled]! But how do we know whether a wall contains intrinsic qualities?

–I say, is something wrong? Have you been drinking? You’re asking the most peculiar questions. Knowing whether a wall contains intrinsic qualities is a simple empirical matter: when we try to dive into the depths of the wall to see what is inside of it, we find that we are unable to do so!

–Ah, so the fact that the wall does not allow us to plumb its depths is what makes it not an object. But how can a wall exist without qualities?

–The nature of the wall, as a not-object, is contained within objects themselves. You might call it a virtual object, or an intentional object? The wall is a kind of negative space. It appears to have qualities but in fact does not have any: you and I have the quality of Do-Not-Pass-Through-Wall. This in turn makes it appear to have the quality of Denizens-Do-Not-Pass-Through-Me. But do not be fooled. The wall has no qualities. Similarly, bullets know to disappear when they encounter this wall-space.

–Then let me ask: is “Wall-ness” a quality?

–It is not a true quality, not in the same sense as Do-Not-Pass-Through-Wall is a quality. It’s… let’s call it a surface quality. This is why we cannot plumb the depths of the wall: it is nothing but surface, no depth whatsoever.

–What of bullets, then? A bullet moves, but we are not able to plumb its depths. Yet it sustains velocity, attraction, deflection, replication, and other behaviors! Surely those are primary qualities in the same sense as Do-Not-Pass-Through-Wall?

–Hmmm. You make an interesting point. Very well, I revise my metaphysics: the primary divide in the world is not between objects and not-objects, but rather it’s between objects whose depths can be plumbed and those whose depths cannot be plumbed: the plumbable and the unplumbable!

–That sounds all well and good, but I believe you’re short-sighted. For let me ask: what do we see when we plumb an object?

–By the stars, I know you know the answer to this question but I’ll play along anyway. When we plumb an object, we see mazes of walls, exits, powerups, a sometimes dense spray of bullets, and of course other denizens.

–Yes, and further, what relation does the interior of an object have to its exterior?

–Well, the maze makes up the general geometry of the object’s exterior. The powerups contained within represent the object’s potential for change: collecting these powerups provides the transformative moment when the exterior object changes its properties and behaviors. And the density of bullets and denizens is somehow related to the overall power level of the object itself.

–Yes, very good! So allow me to ask: what do we see when we plumb the depths of ourselves?

–Why… why we see the very same things!

–Is it not possible, then, that only objects that are similar to one another—that is, that sustain the same qualities—are able to plumb one another?

–But that is absurd! Powerups sustain the same qualities as we do—we can see as much when we enter them—but a powerup never plumbs the depths of another object!

–Yet perhaps it could, were it able or willing to do so? It is perfectly normal to enter a powerup, then enter a series of denizens, then exit those denizens, then find yourself back inside the powerup. It’s normal because, by convention, we know that we must have entered the powerup at some point. And while you think you know that you are yourself, that you are a Primary-Path denizen, how do we know we are not 100 levels deep inside some powerup, deluded this whole time into thinking we are not a recursive branch—secondary, tertiary, or worse?

–You mean to say that on my exit from the current maze, I might not find myself in a new body, but rather a body inhabiting the interior of some powerup? Or that I am currently inhabiting a powerup, and on my next exit I will find myself face to face with that powerup for the consumption?

–Yes, I mean to say that. What I mean to say is: like denizens, powerups contain both powerups, mazes, and denizens. Perhaps a powerup is just a denizen who chooses not to shoot or move for whatever reason.

–That’s absurd. Next you’re going to tell me denizens can be consumed.

–I wouldn’t go that far. What I’m saying is that ontologically speaking, denizens are a hair’s width from being powerups, and vice versa.

–How does this talk have anything to do with my theory of the plumbable/unplumbable divide as the two primary ontological states of being?

–Has it occurred to you that perhaps self-similarity is the hallmark of plumbability?

–It has occurred to me, yes.

–Well then: walls, even in their complete alienness as a kind of negative space without recognizable qualities, are presumably similar to one another. Perhaps a wall could plumb another wall, should it choose to do so.

–You’re entering moonbat territory here, my friend…

About an hour ago, I finished Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost’s new book. What follows are my unfiltered (AKA barely fleshed out) responses. The second section is not going to make sense to you if you haven’t read the book.

Style

When it comes to the style of written philosophy, I am in complete agreement with Graham Harman:

Against the program for philosophy written in ‘good plain English’, I hold that it should be written in good vivid English. Plain speech contains clear statements that are forgotten as soon as their spokesman closes his mouth, since they have already said all that they are capable of saying. But vivid speech forges new concepts that take on a life their own, like good fictional characters.
(Harman, Prince of Networks, p. 140)

Alien Phenomenology is a joy to read. The language never veers into that intentionally obscure academic style, yet retains intellectual value (shocking, I know). But beyond mere accessibility, the prose is beautiful. Opening the book at random and skimming a page, I’m treated to a passage about philosophical speculation as a concrete, pragmatic activity, concluding: “The result is something particular whose branches bristle into the canopy of the conceptual.” (30)

Carpentry

Of the concepts covered in the book, the most personally interesting to me what Bogost terms “carpentry.” Carpentry is the act of building objects that do philosophical work. It’s a brilliant concept. The gist of the argument is that while writing is certainly a good way to express some philosophical ideas, it’s limiting and potentially far too anthropocentric to allow us to plumb the depths of the truly alien.

Bogost’s argument for carpentry spends a lot of time setting it up in relation to academic publishing, where writing often happens for the sake of publishing rather than being read and understood by one’s peers. This portion of his argument is a powerful one, but is (happily) pretty much irrelevant to me: I’m not an academic, but I do practice philosophy, and carpentry just makes good sense to me. I don’t have centuries-old institutions dictating how I should practice philosophy, because I don’t rely on those institutions to put food on the table.

I remember trying to describe carpentry to my friend Darren Torpey a few months ago. His response was, “It sounds like art.” It’s a pretty good response: certainly a lot of art manages to do what carpentry attempts, speculating on the way the world hangs together, and providing metaphors that allow humans to understand that speculation. So how is carpentry different from art? Bogost touches briefly on the question: “unlike tools and art, philosophical carpentry is built with philosophy in mind. [...] Carpentry is philosophical lab equipment.” (100)

That’s an unsatisfying distinction. I find intent-based arguments wearisome, and it’s somewhat ironic to hear an intent-based argument come from an object-oriented philosopher. If I create an object with intent in mind, even if I could somehow imbue that intent into the core of the object, there is no way for others to plumb the depths of that object and somehow retrieve its intent. Further, there is no way for the object to plumb its own depths!

Bogost’s metaphor of “philosophical lab equipment” doesn’t help, either. I’ve worked in labs, and we used plenty of tools that were not built with lab work in mind. Ready-to-hand objects like Scotch tape, paperclips, and scissors are lab equipment, each contributing to the overall work as much as oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, centrifuges, and Kimtech Kimwipes.

In fact, at least one example of carpentry in the book was not built with philosophy in mind. While Ben Fry’s brilliant Deconstructulator certainly does philosophical work, it declares its intent outright: to help people develop “insight for how software and hardware work”. I suppose you could unpack “insight” to mean “deep, platform-studies-level analysis of the software and hardware,” but I’m reasonably sure Fry was interested in teaching basic computer science concepts in this case.

My confusion may come down to the fact that the word “carpentry” can mean both “the act of building” and “objects built by a carpenter” (for example: “look at all the carpentry on display in this furniture warehouse”). Philosophical carpentry is the act of building objects that do philosophical work. Yet philosophical carpentry also refers to a body of objects that do philosophy. Carpentry both is lab equipment and the act of building that lab equipment. Does this minor grammatical nitpick matter? I think it does — having a single word refer to both the act of creation and the object created makes it difficult to resolve questions like “is art carpentry?” in a satisfying way.

Practicing ontology

If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought be someone who practices ontology. Just as one would likely not trust a doctor who had only read and written journal articles about medicine to explain the particular curiosities of one’s body, so one ought not trust a metaphysician who had only read and written books about the nature of the universe. (Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 91)

The idea of practicing ontology ties into something I’ve been thinking about at length recently. If ontology is the study of the nature of being, how do you practice ontology? How do we perform applied ontology without being a god? One answer is to settle for being a demiurge. The practice of building a videogame engine is one way to perform applied ontology.

When we architect a game engine, we ask questions like: what is an object? Are objects described by essential classes, or are they simply how they present themselves at this moment? What is an event? Do objects interact in the context of events? When objects interact with one another, what do they have access to? What is time, and how do events and objects resolve themselves within the span of an instant? What is an instant? Etc., etc. Granted, we usually pose these questions in far more technical language, talking about things like class-based inheritance, public and private methods, deltas and whether we have access to the state of variables from previous instants. But they’re the same questions being asked by game engine architect and object-oriented ontologist alike!

While architecting a game engine is obviously not the same as architecting the universe (not only is the former is bound by certain limits, but we know what these limits are), I believe they are similar practices. I claim that architecting a game engine can be good training for doing metaphysics. As I’ve put to several of my game developer friends: just as we talk about building a physics engine for our game, we could just as easily speak of fundamental game engine architecture as building a metaphysics engine for our game.

There was a post on some news site last week with an article by Louis Bedigian quoting an analyst (Arvind Bhatia) claiming that “Zynga loses $150 on every new paying customer.” I read it, thought to myself, “That’s absurd linkbait,” and then assumed that nobody would take the bait. I was wrong: it got picked up everywhere. Sigh.

This morning, Andrew VandenBossche alerted me to an article by Dylan Collins, quoting industry CEO Torsten Reil, that responds, no, you idiots! Your methodology is wrong! “Zynga is probably MAKING $30 on every paying user!” So… here’s what I think: nobody knows what the fuck is going on. (For those of you wondering why I’m writing about this, before I did HTML5 stuff full time, I spent 6 years as a data analyst for game studios, both MMO and Facebook games.)

Surface analysis

Collins/Reil are absolutely right to call the original analysis oversimplified. It was based on a model that completely failed to account for attrition — they’re correct when they state that Zynga certainly gained far more than 400k paying users for their marketing money.

Unfortunately, Collins/Reil pick a number out of thin air (20% attrition rate) which results in a rough estimate where Zynga spends $120 per paying user, and makes $150 per paying user, resulting in a net profit of $30 per paying user. I say unfortunately because if the number is 10%, then by Reil’s metric they’re losing $21 on every paying user. If it’s 30% they’re earning $57 per acquired paying user. It all hinges on their attrition rate, which we don’t know! Some games see 10%. Some games see 90%. 20% seems like a roughly correct ballpark for a mix of successful and unsuccessful games, but honestly we have no idea what it is because we’re on the outside looking in. But the truly weird thing to consider is: Zynga doesn’t know what their attrition number is either.

Models and black boxes

All numbers like this are built on models that analysts put together, and models are built on assumptions. Simple example: when we talk about attrition, what phenomenon do we refer to? Typically we mean “the moment when someone is no longer a player of the game.” Yet in the context of a social game, how do you define that? Facebook users don’t typically uninstall an app — they usually just stop using it. So you have to pick an arbitrary cutoff point. Does someone fall into an “attrition” bucket after 1 week of inactivity? 2 weeks? A month? Remember, this number is arbitrary, so you can adjust that number all you like (within reason, you’re not going to pick 100 years) until you come up with an attrition percentage that meets your criteria. Whether those criteria are “seems more realistic” or “would appease our shareholders” is another question!

But regardless, this attrition percentage then affects all of your other calculations. Now, ideally you want to remain internally consistent once you pick this number, but a dirty secret is that even if you maintain perfect internal consistency in always using “2 weeks of inactivity” as your cutoff for attrition, there will always be dozens of other fiddly and less directly consequential definitions that you can tweak. And the thing is, on some level you have to tweak these numbers! Otherwise you might find yourself stuck with a model that doesn’t reflect what looks like the reality of your game.

To put it another way: the internal game studio analyst’s job is to assemble a black box known as the concept of “attrition” — to the CEOs and CFOs and shareholders and external analysts and pundits at home, this concept seems pretty straightforward: it’s the people who leave your game. End of story. The black box behaves and does its job, reporting a number between 0% and 100%, and presumably you panic if the number is closer to 100%.

But the internal studio analyst needs to assemble this concept from a variety of sources. They might ask the game designers what they see as a “normal” or “natural” amount of time away from the game — if a game is designed to be played during the work week, then you shouldn’t sweat it when someone isn’t playing over the weekends or on Christmas. They might look at historical data for the game and notice that 80% of players who are inactive for 12 days never come back. And 90% of players inactive for 15 days never come back. So maybe we pick 90% and say 15 days is our cutoff. But of course we’re looking at historical data for the current game, which is different today than it was back then, so it’s not a perfect analogy! So maybe we want to rely on data from the last 30 days, when the game was most similar — but now our definition of “never come back” really means “people who were inactive for 15 of the last 30 days and haven’t been back.” But of course, those people “haven’t been back” for a maximum of 15 days since we’re looking at a 30 day window. So now that our historical data is more representative of the current state of the game, our very definition of “never” comes into question!

An infinite regress of assumptions

“ An internal game studio data analyst does in fact work in a vacuum, and will get fired for sharing with outside analysts. This means that the chances that our assumptions are off-base are pretty good.

In summary: games are very complex systems, and the numbers that get thrown around in the media are built on black-box-style assumptions. These black boxes can always be broken down into components, and those components into subcomponents, forever and ever into an infinite regress. If this seems mind-bogglingly weird, well: it is. On some level you need to stop digging into the infinite and come up with assumptions about the way the game works that become the foundation for your models. There’s nothing wrong about that in principle: science does this all the time, and manages to come up with some great models to describe the world. But there’s a huge difference between science and analyzing the metrics for social games. Scientists do not work in a vacuum within their universities or corporations. Scientists do not work with “proprietary data” and they do not run the risk of getting fired for sharing their results and even their methodologies with other scientists. An internal game studio data analyst does in fact work in a vacuum, and will get fired for sharing with outside analysts. This means that the chances that our assumptions are off-base are pretty good. And it means that the numbers that different companies throw around can’t even be compared. “Average revenue per user,” which sounds straightforward, can be based on entirely different foundational assumptions at different companies and on different games.

This whole mess is one of the main reasons I stopped being a data analyst for games. I did not feel comfortable coming up with assumptions that weren’t, on some level, complete bullshit. Now, the level on which these assumptions operated was often very low-level, fiddly stuff. But it was an art, not a science. Which, again, nothing wrong with that — except that the black boxes that I generated were being treated as science rather than as art.

In the end, for the purposes of arguments about how much money a company is making, the only numbers that matter are: how much money is coming into the company each month? How much money is leaving the company each month? Everything else should be viewed with utmost suspicion.

Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks is the most exciting book of philosophy I’ve read in a long, long time. Partly I find it exciting due to its prose style. I’m fascinated by the Whitmanesque enumeration of objects/actors/actants in the book, so I wrote a script to parse the original text for things that are probably lists of objects, and then I did a little manual data cleanup on the resulting output.

Once I had the data, it was easy to create a page that gives you a random object.

I’m not really sure why I made it, but hey, it only took a couple hours.

I gave a lecture yesterday at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, my alma mater. The class I spoke to was IMGD 2001, Philosophy and Ethics of Computer Games. A little bit of background on that: during my senior year in college, WPI was still putting together its undergraduate video game development major. I took on a thesis project for Prof. John Sanbonmatsu where I essentially wrote a grab-bag paper on video games and critical theory. As John educated me in critical theory, I educated John in video games. The end result was not just my paper, but a framework which John applied to creating the IMGD 2001 class.

I bring up that background to highlight what a joy it is to speak to this particular class. I try to be a guest speaker every time it’s run.

Someone mentioned to me that I should probably try and post what I lectured about on my blog. So this is my attempt to cover some of my points. It was a pretty fragmented lecture, and I was responding in part to some of their reading (Marcuse on aggression in technological societies).

My Lecture

I framed my lecture by showing two videos: real footage of AC-130 combat from Afghanistan, and the AC-130 footage from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I didn’t really comment on the footage except to remind them that in the real footage they are watching human beings die on camera. It is difficult to interpret the real footage as anything but a video game. Again, this was really just to set a mood and perhaps shock them into paying attention.

I wanted to show them that professional game developers do think about the philosophical issues that they cover in John’s class. My first stop was Clint Hocking’s blog. I told them to read his lecture transcripts, particularly the ones about intentional play, improvisational play, and the exploration of the self through systems.

I then went into a discussion of Far Cry 2 versus Halo (or most other FPS games). The basic argument I covered was that FC2 promotes improvisational play, whereas Halo promotes the play of dominance. Because of its game systems, in Halo you can find a dominant strategy and become a godlike slayer of baddies.  Halo is a game where you dominate the system. FC2 is a game where the system dominates you. Plans often do not work out as you expect. The game is often brutally difficult, but gives you a wide array of tools with which to mitigate that difficulty.  But the important thing is that the system dominates the player, and the best you can do is survive long enough to meet the end conditions of the game and “win.” Some gamers take FC2′s stance towards improvisation without domination as literally offensive: people claim that the game’s endlessly respawning enemy encampments never let you feel like you’ve “cleaned out” an area. You’re never safe. Ever.

I think this is fundamentally a good thing for a game system to present a player. By giving us a system that is stacked against us, where we need to be clever given our limited resources to survive, I feel like FC2 is doing a service by training our brains to perhaps be more receptive to those kinds of situations in the real world.

A feeling of progression is perhaps a way of forgetting about death for a while.

This led into a discussion of Ben Abraham’s FC2 permanent death experiment, and then the concept of permadeath in general, and discussing reasons why gamers might be as opposed to permadeath in games as they are. It was particularly interesting in light of the Marcuse essay they’d been assigned. Playing games and getting a feeling of progression is perhaps a way of forgetting about death for a while — the institution of permadeath flies in the face of forgetting the inevitable.

Progression-as-soma led to examining Facebook games. Farmville and Mafia Wars were brought up as prime examples of “spreadsheet games” that are about a feeling of progress towards who-knows-what… and not much more than that. Which then prompted me to bring up Jonathan Blow’s 2007 MIGS keynote, which is centered around this assertion/question:

When millions of people buy our game, we are pumping a (mental) substance into the (mental) environment.

This is a public mental health issue.

We have the power to shape humanity. How will we use it?

Other things were discussed in the 90 minutes I had to speak. The last half hour was Q&A. I spoke a little bit about what it’s like to work for a big game company, and the amount of creative freedom you have (or more accurately, do not have). I talked a little bit about Auntie Pixelante’s dissatisfaction with the Guildhall at SMU. I also discussed the indie game scene.

“Good games are made by interesting people.”

Probably the best question came from a student in the back, who said:

No offense to the professor, but in my other classes it seems like they’re encouraging us to make video games, and they talk about how video games are good things. This class is the opposite. It’s depressing, it’s almost like you don’t want us to make games at all. What’s the point of taking a class like this if what I want to do is make games?

My response came surprisingly easily:

If you look at the people who are at the vanguard of the game industry, the people who are pushing the form and helping video games become better than they ever have been, most of those people are reflective about the process of making games. The best game developers are the ones  who think about this stuff. So the answer is simple: if you want to make the best games in the world, you need to actively think about exactly the sorts of issues that are brought up in this class.

After class, I met with some of the IMGD faculty, one of whom is (I say with no small amount of pride) Brian Moriarty. I mentioned this last question/answer exchange to him and his response was: “Well, yes. Good games are made by interesting people.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

So Gamasutra just posted a summary of a talk Chaim gave at the Dutch Festival of Games, called “Magic Crayons: Spore and Beyond.” This is actually a reprise and probably an update of a talk he gave at GDC 2007. Most of what is in there is great, but I always get bothered by sentiments like this one:

In the end, Gingold says that he believes computers can ease “this anxiety and alienation that we have from doing one thing.” Even though people become experts at their trade, “we can design houses, human beings, pinball sets,” he said.

See, I don’t want to make games that ease alienation from labor. That just makes it easier for people to accept alienation. I want to make games that end alienation from labor. Games that inspire people to learn new things, to make positive changes in their lives, to learn about themselves in the process of interacting with systems.

Of course, I have no idea how to do any of this. But hey, the first step is admitting there’s a problem.

I gave a guest lecture a few weeks ago at WPI (where I got my degree). My friend and former professor John Sanbonmatsu teaches a course on critical theory and video games, and he invited me to be a guest lecturer–I suspect mostly to mollify student’s suspicions that no real world game developer could actually give a crap about all this Adorno and Horkheimer stuff. Well, I certainly do.

Anyway, here are the notes that made up the first part of the lecture I gave. It’s all over the place, but I think it’s worth putting up here.

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One of the unique qualities of capitalism is that it’s about the domination of use value for exchange value. That is, instead of valuing the intrinsic qualities of a thing in itself, we instead care about its market value. This simple statement actually encapsulates two of the biggest complaints that your hear from within the game industry.

One complaint is basically that art games won’t get funded. That is, if you want to make a really interesting game that stands on its own as a work of art, you either have to do it yourself and nobody will know about it, or you get a publisher and venture capital and you spend millions of dollars and end up with a derivative piece of crap that’s nothing like your original vision. This is because the publishers, the capitalists who control the means of production, care about profit more than the overall increase of human happiness that could be caused by making a thoughtful, moving game. It’s actually pretty soul-crushing when you claim that something you’re working on is art, but what you’re really producing is a cheap commodity. At least the folks toiling away in the stapler assembly factory don’t have any delusions that they’re making people’s lives better.

Another big complaint is that game journalism sucks. Some people want interesting analyses of video games. Let’s look at games in a critical way, tease out their influences. Yet when you read a review of a game like Team Fortress 2 (which I love, by the way), everybody’s talking about graphics and art and does it get an 8.5 of out 10 or a 9 out of 10 and whether the medic/heavy combo is a dominant strategy. Almost nobody notices, to cite a pithy example, that TF2 and all games like it are actually a modern recreation of Valhalla, the Norse warrior heaven where dead soldiers fight endless battles and are resurrected upon death to continue their ceaseless fighting. (Which is an observation I stole entirely from Ernest Adams, in his semi-famous lecture “The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design”.)

Most game journalists defend their writing by saying that all they’re doing is helping consumers make an informed decision about whether they should be spending their money on X, Y, or Z game. But who’s to say that’s any more important than the Valhalla assessment? I mean, when I am playing Team Fortress 2 I get lost in the strategy and the adrenal viscerality of the game, I forget that I’m just logging on to a server and fighting a bunch of guys for no particular reason whatsoever. And then I have to think: is this truly making me a happier, better person? And after some reflection, I come to the conclusion that the only reason that I play this game is that my best friend Darren also plays, and I enjoy playing with him. I rarely get to see him in person, but we can spend one or two nights a week playing together and talking over voice chat, and it really does strengthen my friendship with him. And that’s why I play Team Fortress 2: the friendship. (Cue rainbows and puppies.) And I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t actually taken a step back and thought about the game for a few minutes.

So I’ll go back to my earlier question: who’s to say what’s more important, consumer reporting or qualitative analysis? And the answer’s simple, again: the capitalists who control means of production. They’re the ones who have the final say, they’re the ones who run the magazines and the TV networks and so forth, and so people are only going to be exposed to the shitty consumer reports. Yes, there’s been some democratization with the internet, and you can go to certain websites and get good game criticism, but it’s still an uphill battle because 99% of the population has been indoctrinated to believe that being informed on HOW to spend your money is more important than being informed on how to THINK about what you’re spending it ON. Your average gamer is literally insulted when you ask him (or possibly her) to think instead of to consume.

And there’s another problem. As gamers, we think of ourselves as consumers first and foremost. We fetishize commodities, we stand in line 20 hours for a Nintendo Wii, and our self-worth is reflected in our Xbox Live Achievement scores. And that’s dangerous. I was just watching a 2004 lecture called “The Tragedy of Suburbia” by an architectural critic named James Howard Kunstler, and he said something that really resonated with me: people need to stop thinking of themselves as consumers, and start thinking of themselves as citizens. And not “citizens” in the sense of the word where you’re an obedient servant of the government. Citizens have responsibility to their fellow humans. You need to look at everything you do and ask yourself how you’re increasing the general welfare. And as long as gamer culture is focused on consumerism, that won’t happen.

There’s a great quote from Adorno’s essay on “free time,” where he’s lamenting the idea of having hobbies. To paraphrase, he says that every time someone asks him if he has any hobbies, he has to say no. This isn’t because he’s a workaholic who can’t enjoy himself, but rather that a hobby is merely something to pass the time, and he doesn’t lower himself to passing time. He reads and makes music and listens to music with his full attention, and to call these things “hobbies” would be to degrade them. And the gamers that I really admire approach video games the same way: they are extremely mindful of their play. They really truly think about it.

And that’s all I can ask of you. Be mindful of your play.