Category: Writings

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Game Design Gaming PC Reviews Writings

The Long Dark, Appreciated

Little has transpired lately that cheers me, so here, I have decided to praise something that I like.

I’ve been using Steam to buy PC games for over a decade. The best one in my alarmingly large collection is, by any measure, The Long Dark. It has been in Early Access since at least 2015, but it doesn’t matter. It is pretty much everything I might want in a PC game, but at the same time, it is maddeningly incomplete, illogical, and nonsensical. But this is a case where the flaws create the sublime.

The narrative version of the game, “Story Mode,” is fine, if still incomplete after seven years of development. Irrelevant, though. The core fan base of the game is in “Sandbox,” where you, as a recent plane crash survivor on a remote Canadian island after a ill-defined apocalypse, are tasked to survive as long as possible.

That’s it.

It’s very cold. There are no living humans save yourself. Much of the wildlife is hostile. The weather is fickle and deadly. Supplies are rare and randomly placed in every new game, and “safe” areas are widely spaced from each other, forcing dangerous treks. It’s a game of careful planning and preparation, and in the end, you’re going to make a mistake and die, as TLD is permadeath. You can stop playing to save your progress, but dying is permanent, and you must start over.

It is a gorgeous game. The weather is dynamic, moody, and a character unto itself. A typical game consists of long stretches of pleasant monotony, carefully building up a reasonable shelter, broken by abrupt moments of sheer terror during meticulously planned expeditions to distant corners of the island for rare supplies.

But the game is also highly unrealistic, and by design.

Crafting items is essential to survival, but many of the most painfully obvious items that a reasonable individual in such a circumstance might think to construct are not featured.

For example, I can build a fire, repair clothing, sharpen a tool, forge an arrowhead (if I’ve got a forge), even fashion a rabbit trap and build a self bow, among other useful survival tasks.

But I can’t make a spear, the most basic and easy to make Paleolithic weapon, even if items like knives, arrowheads, cured gut, and hardwood saplings are in the game.

I can’t fashion a sled to carry more gear or an animal I’ve just killed so I can harvest it in a safer location. They did eventually implement quartering, but it’s not that useful.

Even with a hatchet, I can’t manually cut down a tree – I’m limited to hacking branches that have already fallen to the ground.

I can’t fashion a stronger or larger backpack other than the one I have at the beginning. It’s possible to make a satchel out of a moose to supplement my carrying capacity, but I can only carry one.

I can’t build anything larger than a small snow shelter, despite, again, having multiple hatchets, knives, and various appropriate tools, or modify an existing structure in any way.

Several firearms exist in the game – a .303 carbine and a .357 revolver – but the stock character, despite apparent 20/20 vision, can barely hit a deer at 20 yards when he/she is standing still and the ungulate in question is standing still.

Finally, perhaps, raw meat spoils far too quickly, even if left outdoors to freeze , and there is no way to preserve/pickle anything long-term.

Oh, and don’t even get me on the lack of booze and candles.

Now, you’d think a reasonable individual like myself would laugh all the way to never playing the game again, after taking all of this nonsense into consideration.

But all of these examples are examples of good game design. Games are never supposed to be realistic. They’re supposed to be fun and challenging. Walking right up to reality and becoming indistinguishable from it is not the goal.

Spears would unbalance the game. Solo wolves and bears and even the odd moose would be too easy to fend off, and conserving and handloading ammunition for the guns would be less important.

A sled would make the “expedition for supplies” play cycle too easy, which encourages careful inventory management.

Forcing the player to harvest an animal where it falls introduces considerable strategy when hunting.

Allowing the player to deforest an area or improve shelters in an area also unbalances the carefully crafted maps that balance shelter, resources, and danger.

A realistically accurate rifle would make hunting trivial.

Yes, constructing a bear-proof log cabin, with an endless supply of firewood and months of cured meat, plus some pit traps that would allow me to hunt without wasting bullets… that would be ideal. But it would remove the sense of improvising every moment, of immediate danger and death around every corner.

These limitations can also be explained. The character is a unlucky bush pilot, not a mountain man/carpenter/hunter/craftsman. So the technology and abilities is closer to what an average Joe might be able to do while in a perpetual state of total panic.

In other words, nothing heroic.

The first time I encountered a bear in the game, I slowly backed away, despite being heavily armed and theoretically prepared. I only had one life. Having one life and holding on to that one life requires a different kind of thinking, decision-making, and risk calculation. The strange restrictions that I listed before, then, actually increase my sense of realism. Letting the player get too powerful and capable would turn it into every other poorly-balanced RPG in existence. The limits are what make it great.

Categories
Argumentation Politics Short Essays Writings

The Authoritarian Mirage

Oh no! The Atlantic has revealed there are undiscovered authoritarians on the left! Hide the children!

I read bad studies all the time, but this one is particularly bad. Witness:

Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”

Let’s go slowly here. Packing this much nonsense into a single paragraph requires the argumentative equivalent of swamp waders.

So. If I “agree strongly” with “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom,” am I “authoritarian”? Well, that would depend on a few assumptions:

  1. Is the opposite response on this scale, the “disagree strongly,” considered to be an expression of declining to remake society at all, or is it an expression of keeping people with the “most privilege” exactly where they are? Yes, those are two very different decisions, even though in certain interpretations they might lead to a similar result.   
  2. But on a related note, is the middle of the 7-point scale here an expression of moving some people with “moderate privilege” to the bottom? Or to the top? Or is that a neutral “take no action” position, and the “disagree strongly” is to make the least privileged even less so? Hard to say, and again, too open to interpretation to garner a useful response. Are the respondents actually reading the question this closely?
  3. Likewise, would the respondents have picked “agree strongly” to the question “I would destroy the freedom of speech if I could get rid of inequality”? Put that way…
  4. If I “agree strongly,” does that mean I am serious enough to enact the said policy for “reals” in the zero chance that I would ever have the power to “remake society”?

Note that after point 4, if this was Law & Order, this is where I would add, “Withdrawn, nothing further.”

So it seems any response to this question could be considered “authoritarian.” Strip privilege away from the powerful and you’re “authoritarian.” Decline to change society, and you’ve reinforced the current hierarchy – but what could be more “authoritarian” than supporting a preexisting hierarchy? Split the difference and you’re both supporting a hierarchy and undercutting it by doing nothing…. it’s almost as if we’ve got a socioeconomic Catch-22 here that reflects a sharp critique of capitalism… good job, AEI! I think y’all might be actually “leftist” and not know it. Perhaps I should set up a study to show that there are secret Marxists in the right. The standards for method are pretty loose these days…

You are also “authoritarian” and a supporter of “top-down censorship” if you “agree strongly” with “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech.” But this question only asks the respondent rank two values, not toss out the other. A belief that getting rid of inequality is not inherently “authoritarian” – in fact, I don’t think a single human being alive that is really concerned about inequality would also throw out free speech with the bathwater, as it’s kinda necessary to address inequality. Anyone can believe in both. But even with a Likert scale, the 4 is not a clear expression of a balanced position. Each point of the scale would need to be carefully teased out in a nuanced description, as in a pinch, I might have clicked “agree strongly” myself when my actual position is in the middle. This question, like many on these kinds of silly tests, pretends to address ethical dilemmas where values must be balanced against each other by pushing the respondents (who probably do not have a doctoral degree in political science) to take an extreme position that they may not actually have or ever act upon if they even did. Questions that pit free speech and equality against each other cannot be reduced to a linear scale. This isn’t a new problem with Likert, of course.

Finally, it’s “anti-conventionalism” to “agree strongly” with “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.” So unless you can imagine yourself friends with a political conservative, you’re an authoritarian? I wonder how that would make for an icebreaker. “Be friends with me, or you’re an authoritarian!”

But there are two more serious problems with these results than the loaded questions. Those are just symptoms.

One, the responses are self-reported and completely untrustworthy. Someone who chooses “agree strongly” on all three questions is quite likely to violate their positions within the day, because there are no consequences for doing so, and no reward for being consistent.

The second is the most obvious problem – the author is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate, and the study, by virtue of its loaded questions and goofy analysis, is just attempting to smear some of the accumulated fascist mud off of conservative thought onto the nebulous left, as any “left” position can now be automagically rendered “authoritarian.” Cue the Onion: “Rotten Apples In Every Bunch, Claims Horde of Shambling Apples, All Rotten.”

If anything goes, by questioning the method of the study, I am clearly “authoritarian.” I find this unlikely, though, as I already spend too much effort making the trains run on time in Italy to be railroaded into a specific political station in life.

Categories
Argumentation Politics Short Essays Uncategorized

Revisiting The Rhetoric of Moderation

Back in 2014, I co-wrote an article, “The Rhetoric of Moderation in Deliberative Discourse: Barack Obama’s December 1, 2009 speech at West Point,” that proved difficult to place in a journal. My co-author thought it was because we were mildly critical of Obama and all our peer reviewers were leftists; I thought, rather, it was because our fine distinctions of what constituted claims and evidence in argumentation were deemed unimportant. I leave to the reader who was correct. Perhaps both.

Regardless, I think that article has held up rather well. I say this having now read the corresponding sections of Obama’s half-autobiography, A Promised Land, where he gives a fuller account of the deliberations that led up to that speech in two relevant passages: 431-439 and 442-445, as well as a later account of the Rolling Stone episode that prompted him to fire Stanley McChrystal on 577-580. These offer more evidence for our argument.

To summarize the original article, we held that Obama’s speech was a prime example of a “rhetoric of moderation,” where achieving a “middle” position and demonstrating extensive deliberation and weighing of options becomes a circular justification for that “middle” position, eliminating any need for evidence to support the position. The West Point speech appears on face value to be explaining why Obama has decided to send more troops to Afghanistan, but he never states a concrete reason for the specific number of troops. We compared Obama’s speech to LBJ’s 1968 Vietnam speech, noting that LBJ did provide a reason in his, namely that Westmoreland had indicated 100,000 troops were necessary, and we suggested that Obama did not refer to military authority as his relationship with the Pentagon was strained, and the actual troop number was far more arbitrary that Obama was willing to admit.

Before I get into the book, however, I should note something about post-presidential Obama. That he is verbose is obvious, I think, as well as the shoring up of old decisions, but what strikes me most about his style is how guarded he remains, even in 2020. Yes, his humor is showing more now – his disdain for McConnell in particular – and he does at times speak frankly about what he was feeling at moments.

But he is also still holding back a considerable amount of emotion, and not in a convincing way, any more than he was in 2008. Obama is simply unwilling, I think, to admit that some of his decisions have not been perfectly rational. Over and over in the book, all his decisions that he discusses are described as based on rigorous deliberation and careful impartiality and a seemingly 147-point ethical rubric, as if someone is going to accuse him of being human and he wants to get that notion out of the way quickly. I am not alone in such a critique, of course. Obama’s tendency toward restraint is established. He is reportedly a tight poker player, giving away as little information as possible and betting rarely, and an autobiography and his legacy is yet another game, I suppose.

In any case, Obama’s insider account confirms that the number of troops was both an operational and political compromise, where he favored a variant of a smaller plan backed by Robert Gates over a larger request by McChrystal, with Biden serving as a foil against a mission-oriented Pentagon at odds with Obama’s forest-over-trees worldview. These plans are tellingly not discussed separately from the men that championed them, and yet the rhetoric of moderation is everywhere. In the end, Obama mentions only the ceremonial occasion of the speech, not its moderating content that leaves little trace of the deliberation or power struggle, only a fait accompli. The external accounting is only a performance of nonexistent proof.

In a dictatorship, it is of course anathema for the dictator to admit other courses of action might also be justified, that there were doubts, that there are still doubts, that the people involved in constructing the decision have conflicting emotions and are not sure they made the right call. All those admissions undercut the notion of a fearless leader who decides. The ranks must be closed, even if the artificial nature of the entire enterprise can be pried apart from its protective rhetorical shell to find the softer, gushier innards of the decision-making process within. Like anyone thought it was anything else, dictatorship or democratic republic. In an autocratic state, I understand the purpose of the facade. Putin is great at it. But in America, what purpose does all this rigid posturing serve if it is regularly picked to shreds before the news cycle starts anew?

Obama still seems convinced he made the right call. But events have proved otherwise. Afghanistan remained a quagmire twelve years later, and now the man who played foil to the Pentagon then is now President and has taken the opposite view, announcing a full withdrawal. Time will tell if it sticks. But Obama’s unwillingness to show how the sausage was made at the time and his attempt to obscure the process undercut any notion of transparent deliberation. It is one thing to announce a troop increase and not provide any justification, it is another thing to announce a troop increase and provide considerable justification, but he did neither – he announced a troop increase, said he would justify it, and filled the gap with a rhetorical maneuver because he could not say then what he says implicitly now – that the decision was both logistically and politically expedient.

I suppose such a rhetoric keeps journalists and critics like myself employed, but why not skip to the end? Why wait 11 years to note that the sausage was, indeed, sausage? Is it only because we prefer to chomp down on our McNuggets without thinking about the mechanical chicken separator?

But before you, gentle reader, think I came to bury Obama, the later-yet-related firing of Stanley McChrystal, described on pages 577-580, was more justified. Obama notes McChrystal was an effective leader that he liked, but the stakes for undercutting the civilian control of the military were too high to let the insubordination he’d allowed his staff to commit pass. McChrystal made the decision easier by offering his resignation, of course.

This is not the only such incident in the book. Obama seems to have faced an unusual amount of pushback to his C-in-C role. His relative youth, lack of military experience, and his race are the obvious culprits. The question remains, then, how much of the Afghanistan troop decision was Obama pushing back against the passive undercutting of his constitutional authority, making sure that his moderate deliberation was his, not the Pentagon’s. Another open question for a future biographer and historian.

My cautionary note would be that it is the interaction between Obama, his staff, the Pentagon and the various generals, the actual “facts on the ground,” and the political situation that produced the rhetoric. It is never just about the lone rhetor who cuts through the malarkey to lead. Presidents are tempting targets for rhetorical criticism as they both have a lot of practical power and they are believed to have more power than they technically and legally have (the bully pulpit concept), but they have also considerable restraints that aren’t always appreciated. The West Point speech is prima facie evidence of this duality.