Man, I just love games. Video games. Board games. Card games. Negotiation games. Deduction games. Sports games. Role-playing games. Dexterity games. Multiplayer games. Solo games. Competitive games. Cooperative games. You name it.
Games are so rad.
This past year has really opened my eyes and ears to that which I couldn't, or perhaps more correctly, wouldn't see. We are a bigoted nation. Not just in the advantages people like me enjoy through the actions of history. Advantages that are hard to acknowledge when you're the one reaping the benefits. But also in very real, very concious, very deliberate ways.
In the past, I've seen friends and colleagues complain about shit that I thought was pure nonsense at the time. I thought it was pure nonsense because I didn't understand how life was structured differently for me than it was for them. I'm a white, affluent, American, male. Unbeknownst to me (shamefully), my life has worked differently than it has for others.
I was a fucking dipshit. I didn't listen, just like hundreds of millions of other dipshits like me didn't. These events over the past year regarding vaccines, facemasks, the remorseless murder of black people, sexism in the workplace, sexism fucking everywhere, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and violence, women being told they're not women because of their chromosomes, a fucking attack on the U.S. Capitol...
I am so ashamed and disgusted. With myself. With everyone else. Even though I loathe these bigots and terrorists -- these monsters -- I have done nothing to stop them. Hell, I've done nothing but promote them through my ignorance. Through me shutting my ears to victims. Through me arguing the most ridiculous fucking horseshit arguments. I've been so foolish.
The victims of shit like this, shit that happens every single day, saw all of this coming. This is daily life for them. But here I sat, bewildered by these events, wondering how they could possibly occur and fester in the shadows. The reality is that they didn't fester in the shadows. They were in plain sight for anyone with eyes to see. I simply refused to.
I remember arguing, well over a decade ago, about a female developer and how outraged I was over a team picture she was in. I felt she was unduly stealing the spotlight from the rest of the team. Why did I think that? I wasn't on the team. I didn't know any of these people. There wasn't even a problem. IT WAS A FUCKING PICTURE. But yet I felt I had a right, a fucking duty, to stand up against this person, a person who is considered a brilliant and kind individual by everyone who has worked directly with her, and berate them to others on the Internet. What a disgusting, sexist, piece-of-shit thing for me to do. It never struck me as such at the time. I would have even had the gall to be offended at the suggestion. What a piece of shit I was.
I don't know why I remember that event in particular. I'm not anyone important so it wasn't a notable event in history. It wasn't even particularly notable to the people I was shouting at nor was it notable for the little corner of the Web we were on. But to me, it's a concrete example to hold on to of how I have been a part of the problem. It's a thing to look back on in the hope that I will open my eyes to this shit and stop feeding in to it.
I have no right to be surprised at the next insane news story reporting bigotry or violence. I sit in an ivory tower of white, male privilege. It's time I left and smashed it to the ground.
People will tell you that it doesn't matter if you're good at something or not, you should do it anyway. The reality is that it does matter. Not only does it matter, it's often the only thing that matters. People want you to be good at your job, good at the game, a good friend, a good lover, a good father or mother, good at finances, good at housekeeping, a good driver, good at trivia, good at fixing lawnmowers. Society requires you to be good at things in order to matter.
They'll also often cite how it's impossible to get good at something without practice. While that is typically true, practice does not guarantee proficiency. Often, you just won't make it to the ranks of the good no matter how hard you try.
In fact, this is so baked in to society that we tell ourselves lies just to get on with our lives. We say everyone is good at something. We want to believe it so much that business professionals groom subordinates in to "managing their optics". When someone is proud of something they've failed to do, we politely pretend to be awestruck so as not to break their illusion.
The truth is that failure is indeed part and parcel to success. More importantly, in my opinion, is that failure without future achievement should be perfectly acceptable. How else does one explore different paths in life? Different lines of research? Different interests? Different solutions? Even more sinister is how our focus on achievement often masks reality, such as how high marks on achievement tests often mask a lack of proficiency. However, our insistence on success makes failure socially unacceptable. You have to fail in private. You have to fail alone.
This is a source of sadness for me.
In my experience, when people debate what is and is not a good game, the vast majority of the time, they aren't disagreeing on whether a game is good or not. They're disagreeing on what a game is.
I think people need to really sit and have a think as to what they believe a game to be. It's not as easy a question to answer as it sounds. Go ahead and devise a defintion. Now, I'll give you a few hints as to where some hangups may lie:
You can approach any one of those questions from a faithless angle, of course. For example, you could claim you're not intentionally excluding games just because you don't like them even though you actually are excluding them. But if you answer the questions in good-faith, you may find that it can be rather difficult to pin down a reasonable definition for the term, "game".
Here is my definition: a game is a set of limitations (rules) in which agents (players) perform actions (strategies) in order to maximize their own benefits (payoffs). Notice that nowhere in my definition did I mention fun or entertainment. Games do not have to be fun or entertaining.
This conceit causes many people to reject this definition. They think the core tenant of a game is to be fun or entertaining. I'll explain my definition and then explain why I think this is not so.
A game requires limitations. That is, there are a set of rules that players must be bound to. Note that this doesn't mean a game need be limiting. The universe itself imposes rules; limitations.
A game requires agents. These are the "players" of the game. Note that these players are not required to be humans. They can be cats, dogs, algorithms, or anything else that can make decisions within the rules of the game.
Agents must be able to perform actions that move them either toward or away from their own benefit. Note that this does not require a final win state. This simply requires agents to make decisions that impact payoffs for themselves and other agents.
A game requires payoffs. That is, after agents have made decisions, they must move up or down some scale of payoffs. Note that this scale can actually be a collection payoffs. In other words, decisions could have trade-offs. But the key point is that after making decisions, agents either improve or reduce the standing of some subset of agents (often including themselves)
So, what exactly does this mean? Simply put, games are "strategic interactions among rational decision makers".
What applies to this definition? Well, Monopoly is a game. Twilight Imperium is a game. Uno is a game. Poker is a game. Animal Crossing is a game. Street Fighter is a game. Football is a game. MMA is a game. Horseshoes is a game. The military often employs "serious games" for simulation and tactical analysis. Finances are a game. War is a game. Applying to a university is a game. Sure, these are games that can have dire consequences but they are games.
This may seem like an overly broad definition, especially when being used squarely within the realm of games that are meant to entertain. However, I argue that is not the case. This definition allows game concepts and game mechanics to be introduced that common wisdom of the day would argue do not belong in a game. For example, games can introduce real-world components to them (eg., alternate reality games) Games can introduce consequences that impact the agent outside of the game (eg., gambling) Games can introduce lying, deception, and social manipulation (eg., The Resistence, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Diplomacy) Games can remove the requirement for a prescribed set of goals (eg., Dear Esther) Games do not have to be competitive between human agents (e.g., Pandemic, The Initiative) Games don't have to have turns, dice, cards, rounds, or charts (e.g., escape rooms and the myriad "escape room" tabletop games) Games don't have to have agents who are all human (e.g., Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition, Gloomhaven)
Moreover, games can allow us to do things we might not otherwise be able to do. We can be business moguls. We can be crime bosses. We can be dragon slayers. We can be friends to those who we may not otherwise be friends with.
Not only that but games can abstract away the sorts of games that have dire consequences. We can have war games where no one dies. Financial games where no one goes bankrupt. Social manipulation games where relationships aren't destroyed. Crucially: it allows games to grow, change, and mature as time goes on. It doesn't limit the definition to just those games which I like to play. That is to say, my definition of a game isn't bound to my definition of good.
Case in point: I tend to prefer games that are competitive, have well defined structures (rounds, turns, phases, etc.), and have clear and final objectives. That means I absolutely loathe games like Cards Against Humanity. Cards Against Humanity is a game where agents are tasked with making funny jokes. Sure, it has a slapdash points system and consequently a goal but if those were removed, the game remains virtually unchanged. My definition includes a game like Cards Against Humanity rather than excluding it.
So, what would I consider to be a good game? Well, a good game to me is one with a set of rules that require agents to make interesting decisions. That's it. No requirement for competitiveness. No requirement for an end condition. No requirement for balance. Sure, these things could all play a part in making the game more or less interesting. What's more, what I find interesting today, I could find boring tomorrow. However, at the end of the day, if I'm being asked to make interesting choices then it's a good game. It's a consistent definition and, really, that's what definitions need to be.
...I'd also probably be having fun.
Homomorphic encryption allows parties to perform operations on encrypted data without knowing what that data is. For example, you could perhaps multiply two times ten and give back the correct answer without ever knowing what any of those values, including the answer, are. How is this possible?
The term, group, has a very specific meaning in math. Basically, a group is a set over which we can perform some operation and also has some extra rules to make that operation sensible. When we want to map between two groups, we can use a function to do so. When we do that, we call the input group the domain and the output group the codomain.
Side note: You may have heard the terms, domain and range. A range is not a codomain although the two terms are often used interchangeably. The codomain is the set of possible function outputs whereas the range is the set of all actual outputs. The codomain is part of the function definition. So, if you're familiar with programming, you may have seen a function signature like this:
function long doSomething(int input1)
The set of possible input1s is our domain. In this case, it's the set of ints. doSomething() returns a long so its codomain is the set of longs. However, if doSomething is defined as:
function long doSomething(int input1) {
return (long) (input1 * 2);
}
...then, the range is a subset of the set of longs. It's the set of even longs. End side note.
A homomorphism is a function that maps one group to another while retaining the group's structure. Supposed we have two groups: A and B. For A, we have the operation, ♣. For B, we have the operation, ♠.
Next, for two elements in A, x and y, we know x ♣ y = z. Finally, we have a function, f(), that maps A to B.
Remember that homomorphisms preserve group structure. So, for f() to be a homomorphism, the following must hold true:
We can substitute the z input in our function:
If this equality holds true then f() is a homomorphism. This allows us to perform operations in B that will map correctly to corresponding operations in A. We never actually need to know the values in A. This is how homomorphic encryption works.
Notice how we have to define our function carefully in order to be homomorphic. That's because there may be some functions that are not homomorphisms. However, if we are able to perform arbitrary functions between our two groups and they remain homomorphic, this is referred to as Fully Homomorphic Encryption. This means you could perform arbitrary calculations on encrypted data. This in turn means you can shuttle off arbitrary computations to untrusted parties and not have to worry about them having access to the plaintext data.
Philosophy is, broadly, the study of truth. There's a philosophical movement called Postmodernism that has gained traction over the years, particularly in the humanities. This movement rejects the notion of objective truth and instead, opts to believe that truth is whatever you perceive it to be; that truth it whatever you think it is. This is pure twaddle.
The fundamental idea underpinning the concept of knowledge is that there is something objective to know. There is something to discover and to learn. All of our experiences point to this. Clearly, you cannot just believe you are a champion bobsledder and have it be true. Yet, here we are entertaining people who outright reject the idea of objective truth. They decide that the truth is whatever they've determined it to be. They reject the tools of truth: argumentation and logic, in favor of "conversations".
I genuinely believe this ideology has caused some of the most social harm in the past decade or so. It makes it trivial to lend credibility to conspiracy theories. It lends credence to ideals that would otherwise be indefensible.
I find Postmodernism contemptible. Richard Dawkins said it well:
"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."
When people talk about what's important in life, I think entertainment often gets overlooked as superfluous. At the end of the chain of education, health, chores, and career is entertainment. The vast majority of us perform all of these other life tasks in order to provide time, money, and opportunity to enjoy ourselves.
So, if you create video games, manufacture board games, sell toys, or draw comics then don't feel that your job is unimportant or non-essential, particularly in these times of pandemic. Your job is, in my opinion, one of the most important. You provide to us the reason we do any of this other stuff in the first place.
I resent cell phones a bit. I resent how hardware keyboards went away in favor of demonstrably less usable software keyboards. I resent the expectation that you will always have one on you. I resent how batteries don't even last a day with anything more than moderate usage. I resent that I am disallowed root privileges. I resent "mobile-first" software designs that make it a chore at best and impossible at worst to use said software on devices other than cell phones. I resent how they are squarely, with very narrow exceptions, consumption devices rather than creation devices. I resent how I can't have half a dozen of them spread throughout my house all with the same number.
I resent how they have made my life more difficult than they need to have.
The power of encryption is not that it's a complicated series of steps to try to figure out. It's that the ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise and that reversing that process requires being able to solve a problem efficiently that cannot actually be solved efficiently.
We love to talk about how poor losers should exhibit better sportsmanship but we never talk about how poor winners should do the same.
What do you think is driving the behavior of poor sports?
