As long as we’re playing games…

How about Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination? It’s called a “satirical board game of religious warfare”, and sounds like good silly fun. Some people, though, don’t like to see their dogma mocked.

[The game] has no basis in historical reality and doesn’t actually represent any religion. It just appeals to people who hate religion to begin with — the hip subculture of militant popular atheists. These people are fanatics, for the most part, themselves. Their thinking is rigid and hostile and not much different from jihadists who don’t use their minds or study what they are dealing with. They start from their own dogmatic perspective.

Oh. So if you simply think the idea that there is a Great Cosmic Voyeur who wants to control your genitals is absurd, that makes you a fanatic? I can’t be too concerned about the opinions of a deluded true believer who can’t tell a fierce bearded guy with an AK-47 from a tweedy academic with a word processor.

Chumbawamba drinks a toast to Charlie

All of nature in its place
By hand of the designer
Comes our Charlie spins the world
From here to Asia Minor
In between the Platypus
And perfect Aphrodite
Charlie come with opposing thumb
To question the Almighty

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

See the dancing President
The congressman and teacher
Jumpin’ to the music of
The wealthy Midwest preacher
Charlie come with a brand new dance
Get on the floor and follow
Find yourself a partner and
We’ll swing into tomorrow

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

Armed with truth we’re stepping out
Come join the worldwide party
Charge your glass and face the world
We’ll drink a toast to Charlie

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder.

PZ Myers finally watches a certain DVD!

You may all recall that a certain bad movie was released in mid-April…a movie which I have not yet seen, but which is now available on DVD. I was just at the local gas station/grocery store/video store, and there it was, available right there on the shelf. I considered it for a few minutes, and then, since I was paying for gas anyway, I tossed it on the counter and brought it home. Yeah, I know, I wasted $2.12, but it’s about time I got it over with.

I’m about to sit down and watch it. I figure one way I can recoup my investment is by live-blogging it.

[Read more…]

The dumbification of Spore

As anyone who has followed computer games at all lately knows, Spore is the recently released computer game from Maxis that was initially touted as a kind of partial simulation of evolution. Unfortunately, It wasn’t a very good simulation of much of anything, and as a game it has only been a partial success, with some parts being quite entertaining and others deserving a resounding “meh”. (Disclaimer: I have the game, but haven’t bothered to install it yet; I’ve let Skatje play it for me, and I’ve read the reviews, and suffered a noticeable loss of enthusiasm from that exposure.)

Now there is a revealing inside view of the Spore development process, with some tantalizing hints of some really great stuff that was implemented in early versions of the game, that never made it to release. Here’s the problem: the developers divided into two competing/complementary teams with radically different goals, a “cute team” and a “science team”. Guess who won?

This was Spore’s central problem: Could the game be both scientifically accurate and fun? The prototyping teams were becoming lost in their scientific interests. Chaim Gingold, a team member who started as an intern and went on to help design the game’s content creation tools, recalls a summer spent playing with pattern language and cellular automata: “It was just about being engaged with the universe as a set of systems, and being able to build toys that manifested our fascination with these systems and our love for them.” But from within this explosion of experimental enthusiasm came an unexpected warning voice. Spore’s resident uber-geek and artificial intelligence expert Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. “I was the founding member of the ‘cute’ team,” he says with pride. “Ocean [Quigley, Spore’s art director] and Will were really the founding members of the ‘science’ team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!’ and some of us were thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that.'”

(That, by the way, is from the Seed magazine article on the game. You’ve probably already seen it since you all subscribe, right?)

This is the annoying mantra of far too many people, from Barbie to Chris Hecker: “science is hard”. Yes, it is…and that’s what makes it fun! Games are also hard, if they’re any good — you often have to master difficult moves, arcane strategy, work fast or plan far ahead, or solve tricky puzzles, and that’s why we choose to play them, that’s the appeal. What I was looking for in Spore was for someone to take a look with a gamer’s eyes at the process of science and extract from it the puzzle-solving essence and make it approachable and entertaining; instead, they seem to have given up on the science and instead created animated plush dolls for amusement’s sake.

It’s a real shame. There is a little hope in an unlikely suggestion:

I hope that Maxis announces that it intends to rectify this odd deviation from their plan through expansion packs, including a complete overhaul of the Cell Stage and Creature Stage, at minimum. The forced linear progression of the game and forced evolution should also be removed from the Cell and Creature Stages, as it is not faithful to the freedom of the advertised product. (Evolution to a better brain should be optional, at least in the Creature Stage, as it was in the earlier videos.) I do not believe that we have a right to demand it be free, as the development costs of this game are already astronomical. This may have not been as much of a problem if they hadn’t been spending the past few years removing content.

Somebody at Maxis should have encouraged everyone to embrace the science. It could have been great. I don’t know why they didn’t, but I suspect that a bean counter somewhere noted that it never hurts to underestimate the intelligence of the buying public…and decided to embrace the lowest common denominator instead of aspiring to greatness.

Happy Halloween!

It’s Halloween, and I’m on my way to Toronto, where I’ll be spending a most unhallowed evening giving a talk. The one thing I regret about this is that I won’t be indulging in my favorite guilty pleasure for this time of year: watching an old horror movie or two. I’ll just reminisce here for a few minutes over my favorites. Don’t expect profundity, I admit up front that my taste is indiscriminate.

  • All of the Hammer films — I happened to hit adolescence just as there was this renaissance of British horror, so these caught me at an impressionable age.

  • The Abominable Dr Phibes. Vincent Price at his cheesiest. Vincent was splendid in lots of movies: The House of Wax, House of Usher, Witchfinder General, The Raven. And The Raven starred Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff as well!

  • Cat People, both the Val Lewton original and the remake with Nastassja Kinski. It’s one of those movies that tangled sex and horror together wonderfully.

  • Speaking of sex and horror…The Lair of the White Worm. Amanda Donohoe is my kind of woman.

  • The Wicker Man. Not the awful recent remake, but the creepy one with Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee.

  • Quatermass and the Pit aka Five Million Years to Earth. Who cares that it had cheap special effects — intelligent writing always wins out.

  • Cheesy Japanese rubber suit flicks. These are ridiculous and weird, which is the appeal. I can snarf ’em down like popcorn.

  • Mad scientist movies, for some unfathomable reason, appeal deeply to me. From Colin Clive tho Jeffrey Combs, if it’s got a deranged maniac with a gift for violating the laws of god and man, I will identify.

  • There are a few movies that can only be described as surreal which are wonderfully disquieting: Eraserhead and Tetsuo come to mind.

  • I haven’t been too impressed with more modern horror — grisly gore just bores me — but one recent movie that I thought was well done was El Orfanato. If I were staying home tonight, that’s the one I’d be watching while handing out candy to the kiddies at the door.

Your turn.

A little comparison

This new movie, Religulous, is doing reasonably well on its opening weekend, bringing in about $3.5 million. This is comparable to what Expelled brought in (about $3.7 million). There are a few differences, though.

  • Religulous hasn’t had much of an advertising campaign. Remember all the Expelled commercials everywhere, including The Daily Show? Maher’s movie has only relatively recently been getting plugged. It’s ads are more intelligently targeted, though.

  • Religulous only opened on 500 screens, compared to Expelled‘s 1000.

  • Religulous is coming off its opening weekend with great word of mouth and good critical reviews. Expelled attendance plummeted steadily from the first day onward.

  • One to think about, and maybe this isn’t a difference: Expelled had a built-in base of evangelical Christians to draw on (although many were disgusted by it, too). Does Religulous also draw upon a base of freethinkers? Is there a neglected audience for more godless entertainment? Will advertisers and investors figure this out?

They also have something in common. I’ve seen neither. I don’t think Bill Maher would throw me out of the theater if he spotted me in line, though. Or maybe he would — it was such great PR for Mark Mathis and company, wasn’t it?