The website of Associate Professor of Philosophy M R. X. Dentith
So, Obama won and the papers are filled with the prepared summaries, overviews and reactions. I want to know what happens to the other prepared material, the articles written just in case McCain made it. What happens to these important counterfactual documents? Is there a library or resource centre I can go to to find out how the papers would have reacted had McCain won, or Kerry won, or Gore won?
Answers on a postcard.
(I seem to be losing my touch when it comes to post titles…)
So, work. I’ve been at it like a… well, someone working away at a thesis. The last few weeks have seen me editing my sixty-five page chapter 1 (provisionally I call it chapter one; it might be chapter 2, actually) where I go through the terminology in use by philosophers in respect to `Conspiracy Theories’ and draw out the common threads and intuitions they use to define the term. This is going to lead to my definition (which is next week’s work), of which I have a fairly good vague idea of (but actually making it concrete; well, there’s the rub). Which should hopefully justify the following sentence (which occurs on page sixty of this section):
Once my definition is stated (and defended) I will then move on to the question of what kind of explanations are Conspiracy Theories, how they are transmitted (and their relation to other kinds of social transmitted knowledge claims, like Gossip and Rumour) and how we can explain what appears to be a rather peculiar tension on our beliefs about Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories, to whit the fact that we know Conspiracies do occur and yet it seems we have \textit{prima facie} ((TeX Markup)) warrant to our suspicion of (contemporary) Conspiracy Theories.
This isn’t even vaguely related to Conspiracy Theories, commentary on Conspiracy Theories or, well, anything I usually talk about. It’s a rant about computer game design and it was written quite some time ago. I never used it anywhere and `discovered’ it whilst trawling through my files. I’m slinging it up here because I want to uncluttered my Documents folder and this seems as good a place as any to put it.
Also, I think the point I was making in… 2005? is still largely true.
And I liked Deus Ex 2. Just not as much as the first one.
Like many, I suspect that the first thought that entered my mind after hearing that Deus Ex 2 would not feature a skill system was a mighty ‘Arrgh!’ With no experience system to speak of, Deus Ex 2 was destined to simply be a novelty shooter.
Then I played Arx Fatalis.
I liked Arx Fatalis, mostly because it felt like an Ultima Underworld. The game world, although small, provided me with some nice vistas to explore, had an interesting spell system and the crypts felt like Thief’s ‘The Boneyard’.
But Arx Fatalis has many flaws; it lacks substantial side-quests, somewhat robbing the game of replayability (especially since it also promotes the jack-of-trades character class), some levels are simply there for you to traverse and its crashes to Windows far too often. By far its biggest weakness, however, is that it is a traditional CRPG.
To accomplish tasks in Arx Fatalis you need skills; to kill a goblin you need close combat, ranged combat or magical skill, plus the actual equipment. To gain or improve skills you need to complete tasks; kill enemies, complete side-quests, attain critical points on the main quest; all to get experience points to go up levels. These ‘tasks’ are set by the designers; the game rewards you for playing it in a certain way. The problem is, people don’t play games the way designers want them to. People (mostly ‘Thief’ fans) wanted to ‘ghost’ through the levels, but there was no extra-reward (which would match hacking-and-slashing) for trying not to kill everything that moved. It wasn’t part of the designers’ mindset.
It’s all remarkably constraining for us gamers.
Experience point based CRPGs tend to force you, the gamer, into acting more like a designer rather than a player. To level up you need to do things the way that they, the authors, planned you to. This wasn’t always a problem; in the days of yore the player, you, didn’t have much of a choice in the way they played a computer role-playing game. Games were necessarily simple; the game world didn’t support items having multiple properties that could be affected by the player, they did not give you multiple ways to traverse levels or obtain items. Games like Ultima IV made the world feel as real as they could, within the limitations of their world simulation.
Modern games try to go further and fail.
Arx Fatalis allows you to hide in shadows, allows you to sneak past hostile NPCs and try and complete the game without killing everything. It doesn’t, however, reward you for it. Arx Fatalis gives you a tool that ends up being a novelty. Ghosting wasn’t factored into the game design.
The simulation of the game world is getting better and better, but the options that this gives you simply seem tacked on. At its heart, Arx Fatalis is a classic old-skool CRPG; kill everything and reap the benefits. It’s an emerging flaw of the skill/XP based role-playing game. As the game world becomes more complex the less, it seems, you can actually do to make use of it. Sure, you can ghost through, play the diplomat or never speak to anyone and steal all the items you need, but don’t think that the game design wants you to actually use those options. It doesn’t.
Harvey Smith, of Deus Ex fame, seems to understand this point entirely. Deus Ex 2 does not feature it’s predecessor’s skill system; you’re not going to need to obey the inner most thoughts of the level designers to get your rewards in ‘Invisible War.’ No more worrying about ‘Is this the optimal solution to the problem thought up by level designer X?;’ instead you can tackle the problem in any way you see fit. It is still a role-playing game; choices will determine outcomes and your character can attain ever greater powers. Instead of being rewarded by experience points you can spend on skills the ‘attributes’ are now bio-augmentations that exist as physical objects within the levels. Your reward is no longer a hex-decimal string assigned to your avatar upon ‘doing X;’ it is something you find in the course of your play-style.
The difference between Deus Ex 2 and, well, all the rest (for the time being) seems to be that you won’t be punished for thinking like you rather than the designer. Let’s just hope it works.
On Friday I received a response to my article submission (the piece I gave back at the beginning of last year to the Postgraduate Conference in Kaikoura). This was a little surprising; I had been told it would take three to four months to get a reply and I sent it in (well, used a strange and arcane web-interface to submit it) a little over three weeks. In academic terms this was a little like breaking the light barrier.
My first thought was that this must be a rejection letter but it turned out to be a `Revise and Resubmit.’ Admittedly, they want a major revision, but it’s still a tiny bit of academic progress. This will be my first truly academic article should it get accepted (the Skeptic piece does not count, seeing as it is not a peer-reviewed publication) ((Although this is not a paper I’m all that wed to, truth be told. My other paper awaiting a response, the AAP piece, is much more interesting and much more relevant to my thesis)).
I have, since Friday morning, spent an awful lot of time rewriting. One thing the two reviews of the paper showed me was that the first third was too much like a discussion paper rather than something trying to advance a thesis. I’m hoping to fix that with this new revision. I’ve cut out about five hundred words and replaced them with almost brand new ones, some of which make snappier points than their forebears.
It’s also been a bit of trial, in re software. I write my thesis in TeX. Most journals used to accept TeX documents but a lot of them are moving towards Word .doc submissions, mostly, I believe, because of the Track Changes feature (which TeX can provide some functionality of, but not `out of the box’). I hardly ever use Word and don’t like having too; it takes too long to load and it paginates weirdly. For a little while I had a footnote that was located smack in the middle of a page and nothing fixed it until I loaded the file up on another machine.
More news as it comes to hand.
Trevor Loudon hit the ground running (upon his return to active service in the Right-wing Conspiracy Theory section of the Internet) with an Investigate ‘investigation’ of the Urewera 17. It’s a hatchet job; we should be scared of these so-called terrorists because, well, they aren’t nice, middle-class Act voters ((Loudon recently took a Green Activist to task for playing a role in the dissolution of the Auckland Star, an evening daily, because it robbed the people of their evening news fix. That the paper folded because the editor was outed as a homophobe seemed irrelevant to Loudon.)).
Loudon’s `journalism’ is interesting (and I use the term academically); because he rarely advances anything approaching an argument. Instead, he prefers to present his potted version of the `facts’ and it can be very easy to read the material in the `wrong’ way.
Take, for example, the article on the `Urewera 17′ (who are now up one member and being called the `Ruatoki 18′). Up until the final page and an half it would be easy to read the piece as a fairly understanding and almost sympathetic representation of the issues these people are supposed to represent.
For example, Loudon explains how some in the Tino Rangatiratanga movement have been inspired by or involved in the Zapatistas. The connection between those seeking the sovereignty denied to them by their colonial governments in Mexico and Aotearoa is laid out clearly. Because of the lack of some argumentative strand to Loudon’s writing the sense of there being a global community, of peoples interacting and co-operating, seeking to redress these not-so-ancient crimes, felt positive and empowering rather than indicative of a great, socialist evil lurking in the background (at least to this reader).
Of course, this isn’t what Loudon intends. I’m not his target audience; I don’t share his prejudices and fears and thus I’m not reading the piece with horror etched into my face. Loudon’s demographic (which, fortunately for us all, is small but, unfortunately, is also very vocal) share his prejudices and need nothing more than a list of `facts’ (because some of his details are contentious) to activate the Fear Module (TM) in their psychology. Loudon doesn’t need to advance an argument; his readers will jump to the same conclusion given a set of `salient’ points.
Loudon doesn’t condemn, then, the Urewera 17 openly, but he does try to do it by association. In the last section of the article, the only real meat in the pie ((I could here make some joke about Australia. Loudon wrote `that’ paper with Bernard Moran, an Australian, and given that Australian pies have so little meat compared to the New Zealand variety (it’s a regulation thing) it would be easy to make some pithy comment in that direction, comparing things to inferior pies. Instead I’ve written a non-pithy comment which has been relegated to the footnotes. Ho hum.)) he engages in some of his traditional investigative journalism; blog-reading ((I suppose I shouldn’t ping him on this, given what I do, but what the hell?)).
The man reads widely and during his `surveillance’ of the people involved with and around the Urewera 17 he came across a blog written by someone connected to one of the arrestees ((I’m deliberately being vague due to issues with a) privacy and b) the courts; if you need to know more I’m sure a library will have a copy of the relevant `Investigate.’ (Issue 91, August 2008))). The posts Loudon quotes are angry and inflammatory and because of their content Loudon tries to run an analogy between his expression of a extremist militant politic and the motivations and intentions of the `Urewera 17.’
Now, given the paucity of information (Loudon provides several quotes but we do not know just how indicative these posts are of the blogger’s general mindset) we could say that he had been having a series of bad days or that he might even be a militant (because, on both sides of the spectrum, left and right, there are people we can disapprove of. I’m certainly not in solidarity with all of my left-wing `associates’ (some would say I’m hardly in solidarity with them at all)) but Loudon moves from a claim of this person’s blog being “very revealing of the extremist mind-set of some Maori activists” ((p. 61)) (a claim that simply means ‘Some people do think this way’) to associating these sentiments with all anarchists ((p. 62)) (a claim that says `All such people think this way) ((Loudon would probably be horrified to find out that I know, very well, a Libertarian who is also an anarchist; according to Loudon’s logic this Libertarian would also be a suicide bomber and thus all Libertarians would be suicide bombers. And that’s what happens if you use slippery slope arguments.)). He uses this (perhaps unwitting) sleight of hand to then justify asking the leading question “Are [the blogger’s] view’s unique to himself, or are they more widespread amongst the maori [sic] radical community?” ((p. 62))
(The answer to which, for Loudon’s audience, is going to be a resounding ‘Yes.’)
We should not simply laugh off people who think like Loudon. Plenty of presumably sensible left-wingers (like Russell Brown for example) expressed their shock and horror at the alleged crimes of the `Urewera 17,’ buying right into the notion that the intentions and motivations of some of these people can be generalised to the group (Brown, at least, doesn’t tar all Socialalists as being Suicide Bombers; he simply tars all the arrestees with the same brush (see here). It is a worrying trend; people are buying into the notion that as the 17 were arrested by the police that they must represent some cabal of plotters prior to their being grouped together by the arrests (we must remember, the `Urewera 17′ is a media term not the name of a secret society). Now, of course, these people knew of each other if not knew each other, but it is not clear that they present an actual cabal of conspirators.
There will be more to say on this in the coming months.
Next time: Loudon and the Greens.
No, seriously, he does. I’ve known Ben for a while now; I remember clearly him dragging me into his office at Cracuum, where he played me his first received death threat on the old answer-ophone.
Yes, those were the days.
Anyway, in lieu of actual posting (I have drafts a-plenty) I thought I would point people towards local Conspiracy Theories. The one that seems to have had a lot of blogosphere attention has been Cameron ‘Whaleoil’ Slater and Clint Heine’s credulity over an obvious (and malacious) prank. The details need not be repeated here (if you want the goss, so to speak, then you need not go past this post on Public Address and this one on Poneke’s Blog). Ben, who now politically edits the news for the National Business Review, had this to say in response to Clint Heine’s assertion that the prank was all a part of Labour’s attempt to stay in power.
Okay, I’ll be the idiot who asks the obvious question: WHY do you think that? On what grounds? How does it follow from the fact you are lazy and easily fooled by a malicious prank that there is some organised conspiracy by the Labour Party?
It’s a good question; Cameron Slater and Clint Heine were duped and are now trying to make out that they weren’t. It’s conceivable that they even believe this; embarrassment can make a `man’ revise his previously deeply held beliefs and do it in such a way that they think they never thought otherwise (George Orwell’s `1984′ and the eternal war come to mind). It’s also conceivable that they are hoping we’ll believe them so that the burning shame that must be filling the space between their ears won’t be revisited upon them again and again and again. Whatever the case, Heine does seem to be alleging Conspiracy; he’s engaging in a Conspiracy Theory where nasty old Helen Clark and Mike Williams are setting up poor innocent bloggers like himself and Slater to take falls.
Still, when it comes to true vapidity (which turns out to be a word) me old mucker (and I use the term lightly) Trevor Loudon turns the credulity all the way to 11. Believe me when I say, to paraphrase the Fundypost, I read this so you don’t have to.
Trevor, in his latest `expose’ of the Greens has published the contents of an e-mail he received. The anonymous tipoff claims that the Kotare Trust building has raw sewerage running through it and people have become ill. Loudon, by way of supporting evidence, supplies what he takes to be the salient part of a newsletter:
This meeting was particularly good for those of us who integrate our understanding with our action – we took a walk around the grounds and checked out the various concerns and celebrations – including wonderfully growing plants, new chickens, the wetlands, sewerage filter station, and where we will plant our trees to off set carbon emissions generated by travel…
You can almost hear his reasoning; the people who run the Kotare Trust are Enviromentalists. That makes them Luddites. They have a sewerage filter station. Ipso facto, the sewerage must be washing around their feet. ((Plus, of course, because they are Lefties they are hard of heart and eat babies for breakfast.))
Or something like that. He claims to have reported the so-called incidence to the Police and report back on whatever actions are taken, insinuating that a lack of action will indicate something malign. So we get a `Nasty Lefties’ stories (they are so uncaring), a dose of anti-environmentalism and the old `the police are just a tool of the Establishment’ rolled into one proto-Conspiracy Theory. I eagerly await the results of his work.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.