A Couple of My CNS Stories

As I've mentioned, I'm now contributing to a new game review/news department for Catholic News Service (CNS), a wire service with several hundred outlets. Mt first two pieces are on the wires now.

The first one is merely a general survey of video and computer games, and is meant to introduce readers to the new service.

The second is a recap of the important Supreme Court decision which struck down a ban on sales of violent games to minors. So far it's only up on a few sites. Both should start appearing in newspapers and magazines over the next few weeks.

Life Imitates Bioshock

I'm still working on the big issue, but I had to share this eerie story about an Objectivist billionaire attempting to build floating libertarian utopias.

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal "has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place."

What could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday's outrageous plot for Bioshock is tomorrow's reality. I wonder if they'll call it "Rapture."

H/T Sean Dailey (check out his awesome magazine, Gilbert)

1979: A Game About the Iranian Revolution

Before leaving to found his own company, Navid Khonsari was one of the people who gave Rockstar's games, such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Revolver, their cinematic feel. After producing critically acclaimed titles like Alan Wake and Homefront, the Iranian-born director and producer is turning his attention to the Islamic revolution that drove his family from their homeland.

In 1979, Khonsari is tackling the events surrounding he deposing of the Shah, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the hostage crisis. He's well aware of the controversial nature of the project:

Iranians are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'promotes American imperialists going in and shooting Iranians'. Americans are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'glorifies Islamic fundamentalism,' or something. I'm not going to please everyone, and the point of the game isn't to do that. 

I think that being able to base a game in contemporary historical truths is significant, besides being educational. It opens people's eyes to look beyond what they're reading in the paper and realize that there's a definite relationship between history and the headlines.

Read the whole thing.

Deepak Chopra Makes Boring Game

Actually, I've only seen the trailer, but I believe it is metaphysically certain that a forthcoming game from contemptible New Age quack Deepak Chopra will be blindingly boring and spiritually nugatory. THQ spent a bundle last year to nail down the rights to the Chopra ouvre, and the first fruit of that deal is named Leela. (I thought she was still working for Planet Express.)

The game includes things like "Chakra-based meditations." These "task players with moving their bodies to control graphics onscreen set to a soothing soundtrack ... the root chakra exercise, for example, directs players to tilt their hips to seed a virtual planet." It seems to be a motion control thing aimed at the Wii and Xbox Kinect markets. I shall be waiting by my mailbox every day until it arrives.



Here's my favorite D-Pak moment:


Exit quote from Deepak: "Hope is a sign of despair." And people have made this fool a multi-millionaire for peddling this tripe.

More Religion Games

We can't let the Jews and the Catholics have all the fun this week, so I did a bit of digging around to see if other religions were doing the gaming thing.

Of course, I realize just saying "other" kind of makes it sound like I'm channeling Rev. Lovejoy from The Simpsons:

Rev. Lovejoy: No Homer, God didn't burn your house down, but he was working in the hearts of your friends be they Christian, Jew, or miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu! There are seven hundred million of us!
Rev. Lovejoy: Aww, that's super.

Be that as it may, it's pretty easy to find games that are used as religious teaching tools, primarily for kids. These are your basic "scripture quote" and "heroes of the Bible" trivia games that Christian kids play at Summer Bible Camp. (Oddly enough, I went to a Jewish summer camp as the Token Catholic. It's a long story.) As games, they're fairly uninteresting, based on the bog-standard trivia two-step of 1) answer questions in order to 2) win the race to the finish. I got bored just typing that sentence.

For instance, there are a number of Islamic board games made by Goodword Books to teach Muslim children about various subjects. The Hadith Challenge Game and the Quran Challenge Game are designed to help with memorization of the religious texts. Pilgrimage is taught with the Hajj Fun Game, prayer with the Madinah Salat Fun Game, and mosque architecture with the Great Mosque Game. They all appear to be trivia games designed for use in religious education.

Mecca to Medina is another Muslim board game, and this one looks like it might have a little more substance. It doesn't require any specialized knowledge of Islam, and appears to be a trading and resource collection game with an Islamic theme, rather than a trivia game.

Buddhist board games follow a similar pattern. Buddhist Knowledge Quest, for example, is a straight-up Trivial Pursuit-style learning game.

I'd like to be able to tell you just what Karma Chakra is like, but I've read the instructions a couple of times and still not figured it out. The description makes it sound like a trivia game with perhaps a more complex racing mechanic. The goal is to "attain a rebirth as a Bodhisattva of the First Level (Great Joy) or at least a better rebirth than one’s current existence. There are no 'winners' or 'losers' in this game and whomever finishes first may not acquire the best rebirth. At the end of the game, players' Sonam points (merit) are totalled to see what kind of rebirth he/she managed to get."

By the way, Gautama Buddha didn't think much of games and toys, and left behind a list of games he would not play. This included "hitting a short stick with a long stick," "guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back," and "imitating deformities"(?). Oh, and all board games.

Hindus seem to have a much wider range of game choices thanks to the efforts of Kreeda Games. Indian culture in general is remarkably rich and diverse, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, they gave us chess, pachisi, and snakes and ladders.

"Kreeda" means "play" in Sanskrit, and the company evolved from a series of articles on traditional Indian games. People became interested in playing the games, but there were no pieces or boards available. So, the people who wrote the articles founded Kreeda to produce these classic games, as well as make some new ones based on traditional Hindu themes.

The results are fascinating historical recreations. Kalanay Belanay (Black Elephant White Elephant), for instance, appears to be a regional wari variant taught to the Kreeda staff by "a lady anxious to see the games she played as a child passed onto the next generation." That's the kind of cultural field work that we see all too rarely in gaming. (As I never get tired of saying, gaming is part of folklore and regional culture, just like music, storytelling, food, dress, and dance.)

Some of Kreeda's original games are more explicitly religious. They've created a trilogy of games based on the Hindu epic the Ramayana, and including Vanavaas (Adventures in the Forest), Search for Sita, and Battle of Lanka (The War Game). Kreeda describes Vanavaas this way:

In the Ramayana, Dasharatha, Rama.s father is forced by an old promise to send Rama, his eldest son away to the forest for fourteen years. Rama is accompanied by his wife Sita and brother, Lakshmana. In the forest they have many adventures and face many hardships. Vanavaas - The Adventures in the Forest lets you understand their experiences and brings you face to face with the demons they meet in the forest.

In the game, the footsteps are pictured as sandals - the old and traditional footwear worn by forest dwellers and rishis. The game is played with long dice which are the traditional dice in India.

This game begins with Rama and Lakshmana leaving Ayodhya and follows their adventures in the forest. The game takes you through the stay at Chitrakoot, Bharata.s encounter with Rama, the meeting with Shoorpanaka and the incident of the golden deer.

This blend of storytelling, traditional game techniques, history, and pedagogy sounds far more interesting than the usual "Who begat Abijah?"* trivia-race, and might serve as a good example to religious game designer who want to make more engaging games.  The full list of Kreeda games can be found here.

And thus ends the Unofficial Accidental Religion in Games Week here at State of Play. If you have any favorites that I missed, please feel free to add them in the comboxes. And I'll leave you off where I began: with The Simpsons:

Interviewer: Apu, there are rumors that you are a Hindu. Is this true?
Apu: By the many arms of Vishnu, I swear it is a lie!

*Rehoboam. 

Clue + Passover = Chametz: The Search is On!

Designer: Jay Falk
Publisher: Hazahak Inc.
Players: 2-6
Ages: 7+
Time: 30 min.
Price: $30
Publication Date: available now

Colonel Moti is ready for Passover and has invited Rabbi Greenberg over for snacks (kosher, of course) and a Torah lesson. One of the guests, however, is wandering around the Colonel's house with some chametz: food that's not properly kosher for Passover. By searching the house (inspired by a Clue board) and answering trivia questions, the players narrow down the field of suspects and find the culprit

Chametz: The Search is On! is a rarity: a Jewish-themed boardgame. Featuring a blend of trivia and Clue-style mystery, it seems well-designed for players of various ages, with three levels of difficulty for each question. For instance, one of the sample cards reads:

• True or False: The last step in the seder is prayer.
• The last step in the seder is: A) Afikoman (dessert) B) Hallel (Psalms of praise) C) Nirtzah (pray G-d accepts the mitzvah)
• [What is] the last step in the seder?

According to the story in JewishJournal.com, the game is "Shabbat-friendly — rather than keeping track of the culprits on a notepad, as in Clue, players slip markers into slots on cards. The Jewish characters and content are slightly unexpected — Rabbi Greenberg (“Clue” has Rev. Green) is clean-shaven, while Professor Slivovitz sports a long, gray beard and, according to the Web site, teaches endocrinology."

H/T: Purple Pawn

Who Is The Patron Saint of Gaming? UPDATED

St. Cajetan

Short answer: there is none.

However, searches for variations of that question bring a lot of people to this site, probably because of the sidebar picture of St. Balthasar, the Patron Saint of Playing Card Manufacturers.  Since I lecture on Church history and have a sizable collection of hagiographic reference material, I thought I'd sort it out so people don't go wandering all over the internet getting half-formed ideas about saints, patronage, gaming, and related subjects.

Since this is a long post about theological and historical subject matter, I'm going to place the text after the jump.

Watson's Amazing Victory

Ken Jennings has written a wonderful piece for Slate about his experience playing against (and losing to) IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson.

But there's no shame in losing to silicon, I thought to myself as I greeted the (suddenly friendlier) team of IBM engineers after the match. After all, I don't have 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of reference works at my disposal—nor can I buzz in with perfect timing whenever I know an answer. My puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.

I remember writing about Deep Blue and what its victory against Chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov meant for AI, and Watson is exponentially more impressive than Deep Blue. Kasparov wouldn't last five minutes against Ken Jennings. The skill set and programming necessary to master Jeopardy is far more subtle and complex and that required to master Chess, at least from a pure computer AI perspective.

The Singularity is Not Near
Impressive as it is, I still balk at the notion that this is the first step towards The Singularity, for the simple reason that I believe The Singularity is the greatest farrago of nonsense since the Population Bomb. Time Magazine recently ran a long, hilarious piece on The Singularity. I laughed all the way until the end, and then I realized that it wasn't satire, thus reminding me yet again that Time isn't so much a news magazine as it is a source of absurd trend-chasing and juvenile credulity wrapped in a squishy coating of bias.

Let me state this as clearly as possible: The Singularity--the moment at which computers essentially become sentient--is the greatest load of BS to come down the pike in many generations. That intelligent people believe it's All Really True! doesn't make it so. Aristotle, the most intelligent man of his age or almost any other, was certain that the blood cooled the brain and the liver was the true seat of human life. At one point, all the brightest minds in the world were utterly convinced in the truth of geocentricism. In our own day, powerful interests continue to flog the big lie of anthropogenic global warming. 

So, I don't care one bit that some of "the best and brightest" have signed on to Ray Kurzweil's loony idea that one day (in the next 40 years!) we will reverse engineer the human brain, dump our entire consciousness into a computer, and live forever. It is more likely that I could swallow my own torso than it is for a machine to replicate the human brain. I am not saying "maybe," or "perhaps eventually," or "given the right scientific developments": I am saying never, ever, ever: not in 40 years, not in a 1000.

This is all just part of the progressive's favorite delusion: that of the continued upward development of humanity, hand in hand with glorious technical achievement. This is utilitarian nonsense. First off, it's a failure to understand the practical reality of Moore's Law. The number of transistors on an integrated circuit may in fact keep doubling every two years until infinity (although I highly doubt it, and there is already some evidence that this will eventually peak and then decline), but that does not correlate to a matched increase in processing speeds. 

Second, it ignores the immense complexity of the human brain, and just how much of its function remains poorly understood if not downright inexplicable. Even the common process of medicating for mental illness remains a matter of trial and error because we simply don't know how the brain does much of what it does. The notion that the myriad complexities of the human psyche can be wholly reproduced if we just have enough processing power is madness.

Finally, there is the part many scientists leave out due to their own personal bias. I hate to break it to the atheists out there, but the human soul exists. We are not merely clever meat. We are simultaneously physical and metaphysical beings. The notion that we are the product of random chance, originating from nothing and returning to nothing, isn't even good nonsense. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The rational soul is transcendent, and will forever remain a mystery beyond the ability of science to grasp.

The Simulated Brain

Without question, we will see continued progress in artificial intelligence. Watson impresses not because of its 15 terabyte store of knowledge, but because of its ability to parse the English language, including puns, word play, allusions, and other very human subtleties of speech. Its knowledge set did not impress me: that's simply raw processing muscle. It's language ability, however, is frankly amazing. 

Yet with all that, IBM couldn't create a truly human voice. Watson won Jeopardy, but he still would have failed the Turing test. No one listening to its answers would be in doubt that they were hearing a computer. Watson is the Deep Blue of this generation, and as such is a fascinating and important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. Where it will lead, I have no idea. Deep Blue was dismembered and mothballed, with a chunk of it ultimately winding up in the Smithsonian. 

And it's important--vitally important--to remember one thing. Watson did not create itself. It was created by a team of brilliant and dedicated people, pouring human knowledge into its brain and teaching it to think and learn in human ways. A machine can only be a simulation of the human brain, and no machine will ever be anything more than that. It will forever remain a mere shadow of the real thing.

REVIEW: Epic Mickey for Wii

Epic Mickey
Wii: $50, Rated: E (Everybody)

Note: This is an expanded version of a piece called "Through a Glass, Darkly, With Mickey Mouse," which I wrote for the National Catholic Register, and as such not only tackles narrative and gameplay, but also offers a religious interpretation of certain themes.

Mickey Mouse didn’t start out as a pleasant, smiling corporate icon, but as a bit of a mischievous trouble-maker, and not above the occasional bit of anti-social behavior. He wasn’t the first child of Walt Disney’s craft. He was only created when Disney lost the rights to Oswald and had to start over. This time, he created a cartoon mouse, started his own studio, and the rest is history.

At least, that’s real history. But there’s also cartoon history, which is a little more interesting. In cartoon history, Mickey and Oswald are half-brothers, and Oswald felt forgotten and betrayed by Mickey’s sudden rise to fame. 

And Oswald’s not alone. Over their long history, Disney’s studios have created many characters who either never made it to the screen, or were forgotten when they faded from popularity. In his magical workshop, Yen Sid (the titular magician of the “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment in Fantasia) is working on a special place for these lost characters to call home.

This is the premise of Disney’s bold new Wii game, Epic Mickey. The story begins with a scene directly inspired by the 1936 short Thru the Mirror, as Mickey steps through a mirror into a magical dimension. He finds himself in Yen Sid’s workshop, just as the sorcerer is leaving. Mickey begins to play with the paintbrush used to create the new world, and in the process unleashes the Shadow Blot, who is obviously inspired by the Disney Comics character the Phantom Blot. Although Mickey narrowly escapes the Blot, the world for the forgotten is consumed by darkness. 

Mickey returns to his own reality, and becomes a famous movie star, oblivious to the destruction he has wrought until he Blot reaches through the mirror and drags Mickey back. The world that was supposed to be a haven is now called The Wasteland. Unloved and forgotten, no one in this land has a heart anymore, and even Oswald now hates his half-brother. The Blot wants to escape, and only the heart of Mickey Mouse can set him free.

Armed with Yen Sid’s magic paintbrush, Mickey embarks on a quest through this dark and ruined land in order to set things right and atone for his sins. With the brush, he can both create and destroy. When he uses it to spread paint, the world is restored, enemies are turned into friends, and things are set right. When he uses it to spread thinner, everything it touches is destroyed. The paintbrush is controlled via the Wii-mote, allowing the player to paint the world back into being, or tear it down with a flick of the wrist.

Guided by Gremlins (lifted from an unmade wartime movie collaboration between Disney and Roald Dahl), Mickey sets about rescuing allies and either destroying or converting foes. It’s certainly possible to play through with the thinner button pressed, washing the cartoon characters away to oblivion. But it’s more practical (and satisfying) to turn them into friends who might be able to help. 

Good Mickey, Bad Mickey?
It’s easy enough to ignore the pleas of characters who need Mickey’s help and take the easy (even cruel) path. But the game is designed to nudge you towards the higher road. It may be more difficult, but it’s almost always more rewarding. Help a gremlin now, and he may get through a sticky spot later on.

The ethical choices do affect the world: good choices restore it and make it bright and colorful, while bad choices degrade the world and sap it of color. Unfortunately, these changes aren’t permanent, and resuming a previous level resets the world to its prior state. This seems like an odd element for a game that stresses the importance of ethical choice.

The levels themselves are based on and inspired by various cartoon and theme park imagery, and overall they’re very appealing, with plenty of hidden details and attractive visuals. The goals for each level, however, are often rather perfunctory, and rarely lift the game above the level of a standard platformer/action game.

Part of this is almost certainly the result of the difficult balance designer Warren Spector is trying to maintain. The game was billed as a kind of dark, revisionist Mickey, and the initial concept art showed an amazing, complex world that would have looked wonderful rendered with, say, Unreal or Source.

But that really wouldn’t have been a Mickey Mouse game for the masses. Spector needed to create a complex take on Disney lore in general and Mickey in particular, while still providing an E-rated game that could be played by a 7-year-old. Amazingly, he succeeds, sounding depths you don’t usually find in this material, while also keeping things light and easy to play. In other words, the deeper levels are there for adults who tend to note some things, but kids can still fly through the game just spraying paint all over the place.

Technically, the experience is somewhat hampered by poor camera controls and finicky aiming. The camera never quite defaults to the best location, requiring fairly constant manipulation to get just the right angle on the action. There are places where it certainly seems like you have a clear line of sight at an enemy, but when you fire a stream of paint or thinner, it’s blocked by the scenery.

There are also some 2D platforming sequences that are used to link levels. These feel like filler, and are generally getting a thumbs-down from reviewers and games. I liked them, however. They draw heavily on old Disney shorts, which I adore, and provide a brief change of pace from the main 3D game. They’re not brilliant examples or 2D gaming—no one will mistake them for Super Mario Bros.—but they’re a nice way to link levels.

The Religious Angle
As the narrative proceeds and the relationship between Oswald and Mickey develops, it’s hard not to see Biblical themes emerging. Oswald feels forgotten and betrayed by his “father” (Walt Disney) and jealous of his half-brother (Mickey), whom he obviously feels is loved better. Oswald tries to kill Mickey several times, with fairly obvious echoes of the story of Cain and Abel.

The religious themes become more pronounced as the game’s central dilemma plays out. The characters in The Wasteland are not naturally cruel. They are literally “heartless” because they feel forgotten and unloved. Mickey shines a little brighter because of his big heart, which is why the forces of darkness are pursuing him. In the end (big spoiler alert) Mickey simply gives himself up to the Blot in order to save his brother and his friend, the gremlin Gus. The Blot takes Mickey’s heart, and destroys The Wasteland.

But as the Blot attempts to escape, Oswald, Mickey and Gus team up to destroy him and recover Mickey’s heart. With the Blot gone, the world can return to what it should have been before Mickey’s thoughtless act, and the Wasteland can flower into a kind of Eden for the cartoon characters. Since these characters are “dead” to the outside world, it’s almost as though Mickey has harrowed hell and brought them to paradise.

The story plays out like a classic tale of good versus evil, redemption, sacrifice, and the triumph of love. Mickey Mouse may well be one of the few fictional characters never to have been seen as a Christ-figure, but in Epic Mickey that changes. The world is saved by his redemptive sacrifice and his love: literally, by the blood of his heart. Determined to undo the effects of his sin, he “dies” and is reborn, and in the process makes all things new.

Were these conscious thematic elements on the part of the designers? That’s unlikely. The game industry, like the movie industry, is simply using the culture capital built up by 2000 years of Christianity. It is, to use Flannery O’Connor’s famous phrase, not so much Christian as “Christ-haunted.”

Yet in spite of itself, amidst all the cartoon silliness and Wii-mote waving fun, Epic Mickey reaches some real depths. A being of joy and light enters a world twisted by sin, and using all the colors of the rainbow he paints it back into existence, and in the process redeems the world and himself.

Rabbi Simcha's Dreidel Spinning Tips

Rabbi Simcha spins a mean dreidel, so go and learn from the master.

When I was a kid, I attended a Jewish day camp during the summers, which probably wasn't a common occurrence for Catholic kids growing up Union County New Jersey during the 1970s.

To make matters even more entertaining, it was run by enthusiastic Zionists, so we began each day lined up in front of American and Israeli flags, first saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then saying something in Hebrew which I always assumed was some kind of Israeli equivalent, but could have been a wicked recipe for kasha for all I knew. (The Jewish kids always complained because they had to attend Hebrew School. I just thought it was cool that they were learning a Secret Language none of us could ever penetrate. That's probably why I teach my kids Latin: it's the Secret Language of Catholics.)

I always wondered how the Jewish kids were consistently able to skool the silly goyim at dreidel spinning. Thirty years on, Rabbi Simacha finally provides the answer.

h/t: Kathy Shaidle.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Rabbi Simcha wrote a book with one of the greatest titles of all time: Up, Up, and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero.

'Tis the Season

Tomorrow, I get back to blogging on my regular schedule. It was nice to have a week off, but it also made me realize that I’ve made this blog thing a part of my routine, and I kinda missed it.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the App O’ The Mornin’, as well as a new series on European-suited playing cards and the usual odds and sods. My Xbox is still in the shop, so I’m horribly behind on new titles. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood continues to sit there, mocking me.

On the positive side, I’ve been able to get Betrayal at House on the Hill to the table, and we’re liking it a lot. Plus, I’ve learned the Italian card games Briscola and Scopa, which are a blast.

With December comes Hanukkah and Christmas, both of which I’ll post about from time to time. I realize some people get bothered when even the mention of religion flickers across their consciousness. Some may well believe that faith should be shut inside a tiny little box and kept away from the eyes of impressionable types less they get the vapors, but it’s not a belief I share.

Judaism has played an important part in my life and forms the foundation of the Christian faith. My Jewish brothers and sisters begin Hanukkah at sundown on Wednesday, December 1st. My fellow Papists and I begin Advent tonight. Thus, for part of both this week and next, Catholics and Jews alike will be lighting candles in remembrance of miracles.

In addition, Hanukkah recalls the rededication of the Temple and the miracle of the oil, as mentioned in First and Second Maccabees. Although most Protestants consigned these books to "apocryphal" status during the Reformation, they remain part of Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, and thus these festivals have significance for us as well.

Holidays bring play, as well. I hope to get some directions for group games posted throughout the month, to help fill the longueurs in between the flurry of package opening and the moment when your eggnog buzz finally kicks in.

Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) lights a menorah