“If you don’t like ko, don’t play go” is one of the first proverbs a beginning go player is likely to hear. Like a lot of go proverbs, its meaning isn’t necessarily clear when you first hear it. “Play forcing moves before living,” for example, makes no sense when you’re a beginner with no idea what either term means. Ko is a little different. In its most basic form it’s one of the fundamental rules, but its strategic implications remain obscure for a long while.
Recently I had a discussion with one of my online friends about Go. I told him that despite my tendency to “abandon” the game for months at a time, I always seem to come back to it. I had difficulty articulating why that’s the case, but it led me to thinking about what makes a good game. In general, I think a good game should create an environment in which the player possesses the ability to affect that environment as a player, not as a character. This can include metagame elements such as completion times and scores, as in classic arcade games, or it can be based on an individual’s command of the playing environment, as in the perfect information abstract games. This concept can be called “consequentiality,” the idea that the player’s actions have a real effect on the outcome of the game. I think Go epitomizes the concept. Beyond the turn-based structure of the game, it makes few assumptions about the players or the flow of the game. For a counter-example, let’s look at online RPGs…
Since I signed up for Netflix, I’ve been watching movies constantly. Previously, my movie-viewing habits were relatively simple: I went to the movie theater with my friends when there was a palatable movie to watch and sometimes watched a rented movie with someone. I seldom rented movies on my own, with a few exceptions, so the choices had to be somewhat moderated to the taste of the group rather than the individual. Well, with the addition of Netflix’s thousands of discs, that’s changed a bit.
One of my friends posted a comment on my post about Stalker, and I feel it necessary to respond. Since I’ve been making it a point to watch a few movies the last couple of weeks—I’ve just subscribed to Netflix—I decided to make it a post of its own. It may help to explain my “odd” taste in movies.
It may be cliché that I prefer a movie closely resembling the two that you mention (I, Robot and I Am Legend), but I don’t care. I like a movie that keeps me on the edge of my seat, a suspense. Save the world movies, Good verses evil, casting of spells, the use of heavy artillery, you catch my drift.
I do catch your drift. I don’t particularly like your drift, but I catch it. The thing is, that’s pretty much the normal mode of watching film. It’s based on the standard Hollywood “focus group commercialism” model of film-making: make it exciting, suspenseful, and easy to digest. Don’t make it too interesting—if it’s too interesting, people will complain when you shoehorn in an unnecessary, cookie cutter sequel. I enjoy films like that as much as anyone, I guess, but I don’t consider them good or significant.
The thing is, film and other art forms can be much more than just a three-hour entertainment in the middle of July. Summer blockbusters are popular, yes, which is why they make money, but they’re not necessarily the only or the best type of film. Stalker, for example, is an extremely slow and meditative film. It’s also vastly superior to any film I’ve seen in the theater since at least No Country for Old Men, and of the two I’m not sure which is the better. The film exhibits a feeling of strong authorial control on the part of the director. Tarkovsky has a voice, whereas a director like Francis Lawrence (I am Legend) seems more like a cypher, a manager presiding over a product already drafted and detailed in limitless committee meetings. Stalker lingers in the mind. I Am Legend and I, Robot do not. It’s like comparing candy and steak: both are enjoyable to eat, but one is more satisfying, despite the investment required.
Anyone who’s allowed me to pick out a movie to watch (or who has talked about movies in general, really) will be aware that my tastes tend toward the “odd.”’ David Lynch? He’s a genius. The Coen brothers? Amazing. Terry Gilliam? Pretty dang good. None of the films from these directors are weird in quite the way that Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is weird, though, and I think I may be adding a director to my list.
Like most other artists, writers are self-obsessed. The art becomes the art, so to speak. Rock musicians sing a lot of songs about rock, blues musicians often sing about the blues, Captain Beefheart exists, and “serious writers” write about writing and writers. Seriously. To varying degrees.
I’ve done a lot of movie-watching recently, including the movie that seemingly everyone else has seen: The Dark Knight. It’s a good film with something extra: an unforgettable performance. Ledger’s Joker is going to remain in the cultural lexicon for a long time, longer certainly than his predecessors in the role. He managed to bring something uncanny to the screen, a sort of Loki-esque chaos which appeals to the id and is deeply unsettling because of that.
Well, that was a disappointment. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bujold, but her recent books have been well off her peak. Beguilement is essentially a romance novel disguised as a fantasy, and nothing happens for three-quarters of the book. It’s front-loaded: at the beginning, we get a lot of fantasy-adventure, and the rest of it (all three hundred pages) consists of the protagonists falling in love and having sexual escapades. I wonder why this wasn’t a standalone novel; it’s plain that Bujold wrote most of this book as filler, and given its modest length (360 pages) it seems unlikely that the book would have been “too long” if it were printed as one volume. It’s a shame. The characters are likeable and the world is interesting, but I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the the second volume.
At one point in my life, I felt it a sort of Solemn Duty to finish every book I began, no matter how dismal I found it. Oddly enough, I think going to college and majoring in English cured me of that; good luck getting through that degree if you insist on reading everything you’re assigned. That said, there’s always a little bit of a guilty feeling when I decide to put a book to the side.
Okay, I’m not a fan of romance novels. In fact, I’m going to take the risk of offending a few people who will read this by saying that romance novels are basically pornography for women. Considering that my grandmother owned hundreds of the damnable things, this is a little bit horrifying. She liked the cheap ones, where all the coverart is of a pirate, cowboy, or gangster with a woman whose breasts are barely concealed by her blouse. The implications for the psychology of this are probably damning. (Why do books by and for women feature breasts as a prominent point on the cover, anyway?) There is a style of novel, however, whose treatment of love is more interesting. I can’t call it a “genre,” because it doesn’t seem particularly internally consistent, so let’s call them “stories of attachment.” Most people have read or encountered these in some form. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a particularly good example of the type.
My Summer will involve a lot of reading. This can partially be blamed on the Southern heat. Although I fully expect to take several medals in the “complaining about the heat” and “sprinting from the air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building” events this summer, the most satisfying method of coping may be reading a book in front of an air conditioner vent while drinking ice-water. In light of this ambitious vacation planning, I’ve begun to line up my reading schedule, and thought it might be a fun way to inaugurate the “real” posts on the new blog.
After years of looking at the same WordPress theme, I finally got off my tail and edited it. Well, demolished it, actually. I’ve left the land of WordPress behind, folks, and struck out on the strange road towards blosxom. If you were subscribed to me via RSS, well, you’re out of luck now. (And I guess I’ve probably lost a reader. Oops.)