Goodness, doesn't time fly? Yet another Christmas Message! The previous two are stored around here somewhere but, rather than regift them, I've cut you some fresh slices from the mouldy old cheese that is my logorrheic narrative of a mind.
We held a Christmas party this year, a precursor to the events where people run from family to family in these increasingly post-nuclear family days, and it was a wonderful success. We saw lots of friends and some older friends that we came near to falling out of contact with: catching up was a blast. Apparently, the baton has now been passed to us for the foreseeable future and this has now become the pre-Christmas party - although your interpretation of the authority of the Oracle might vary. (See what happens when you give a great party? It's a curse, I tells ya!)
Something I've noticed is that we almost never have to mention "absent friends" any more because we all have so many friends who are absent, in one way or another, and it's that nasty exposed and un-sanded sharp edge on the shiny wooden box of Christmas, which cuts you when you pick it up without thinking. Christmas is a time of being together so being apart becomes harder, especially when the apart is forever. We don't need to say "absent friends" because we see them sitting on the couch, slouching by the tree or laughing over at the dinner table. We don't need to say it because we always see it, and that's one of the things about getting older that they should put a government health warning on - but, at this time, we're probably all feeling it so it's a great time to hug people, to say hello, to drop a coin in the hula-hoop violin busker's hat, to offer someone a space in traffic or to just be nice, because this secular festival of whatever collides with our lives, our beliefs and our loves in so many different ways that it's a strange time for everyone.
But it's a good time for change. We have a free pass at this time that we often don't have. It's sad that we can't just walk up to someone who we've been arguing with, say "I'm sorry we've been arguing but in the spirit of ... Monday ... let's put it behind us" but around this time most religious groups have something that they can use as a reason. Those of us in the secular space can use Christmas for it.
To everyone who has helped to support me, who have shared such wonderful things with me and who continue to be a part of my life, my genuine thanks and appreciation. To anyone who has got the "tetchy me", look, sometimes it's because I feel bad and sometimes it's because I feel strongly. I need to work at expressing myself better because some of those 'feel strongly' things are important but they won't get any traction unless I get better at not being grumpy - I am still very sorry that I didn't handle some things better. So my genuine apologies to everyone I've been short or angry with this year, including the innocent paper recycling bin I thumped really hard on Friday because the photocopier had run out of paper and I was in a hurry. I'm trying to be a better man.
As Scrooge discovered, his journey didn't stop with him being a better man, he kept going until he became the best man and, even if that wasn't every day, just trying for that can be wonderful.
Despite some minor issues that beset me, my generosity to everyone else cannot be limited by the small obstacles I face and, if I may, I commend to you the same sentiment. Forgive what you can, be generous what you can, but don't be a door mat or a fool. And if you work out how to do this, please tell me! :)
I think that, this year, I've done more than ever before in sharing a vision of a better world with people and, slowly but shortly, we're sharing privilege, increasing access and lowering some unnecessary boundaries. This is not a 'me' thing, it's the tiny work of 'me' with a large body of 'us' and a whole lots of good people saying "Yes, this should change - now let's change it."
This kind of magic doesn't happen because it's Christmas. The magic happens because we let it happen at this time of the year. The trick to getting some serious things going is to make every day a day when new things can start, genuine apologies can be accepted and old and irrelevant deeds forgiven, when you open your eyes and jump out of bed because "Hooray! It's Thursday!" and Thursday is a day when anything can happen!
You'll see this happening when you read this message because, if you're a Christmas person, reading this message will bring you into Christmas, whether you read it today (24th), on Christmas or thereafter. See? That whole opportunity to start again, to try something fresh, to change the world, it can start with getting into the right mindset - and those of us who have the capability to do that probably ought to use that to make sure that everyone, no matter whether they were born or who to, have the power to do that as well. Not everyone has our agency or privilege - the fact that we can read sets us apart from some, the fact that you are using a computer from others, the fact that you will wake up safe next to a loved one with the certainty of three meals is a dream to some people. Maybe we can fix that but I think it would be easier if every day was capable of the kind of amazing possibility that we seem able to contemplate around this time.
I wrestle with a lot of personal demons, as many of you know, and I'm not saying that happy thoughts will cure your ills, but when you are not weighed down by dark clouds, making every day a day when you have the permission and the authority to do amazing things can be a rewarding and beautiful way to live. I may never reach the horizons that I run towards, but I am very much enjoying the journey!
I'm off to wrap presents, probably wearing a silly hat, while drinking Christmas drinks and making up songs about snow in a city that has almost never seen snow, while in the middle of summer. Share the magic and have a wonderful and safe festive season.
Ho ho ho!
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
RUOK?
It is RUOK (Are you OK) day today and it's a good time to reflect on two important concepts: asking someone if they are ok and answering that question. It's not really in our modern culture to ask people how they are doing (in the expectation of a genuine answer) and those among us who are sensitive enough to think it often fall into the category of those who should be asked as well!
Here's the link to the resources and, if you know anyone that you're worried about (including yourself!), then go and check this out.
How do we ask someone if they're ok? Well, we have to think about how people react to this question. I've been a dreadful liar over the years when someone asks me if I'm ok - regardless of what's going on, I've stiffened my upper lip and projected a confidence that I haven't felt. Recently, after a lot of help, I've felt more comfortable with telling people how I am, but it has taken years to arrive at that level of maturity. (And there's still a long way to go.)
Will asking someone if they're ok make them think that they're not looking ok? The portrayal of confident and unquestioning certainty is one of the most rewarded appearances in our culture. You only have to look at politicians to see how far certainty in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary can take you. As someone who struggles with self-image anyway, if you asked me if I was ok in the wrong circumstances, I would panic - convinced that I had been appearing weak or, worse, overly emotional in a professional sense.
What a stupid way to think! But what an important thing to consider when you want to help. How can you help? By thinking about the impact of your actions. Because this is me, a long digressive narrative follows. Please, take my arm.
One of my favourite movies at the moment is The Avengers (spoilers follow) because, apart from being a good action movie, it covers so many aspects of what it means to be a hero. A hero, of course, always has to consider the impact of their actions because (to steal from another hero) "with great power comes great responsibility". (And sticky hands.)
While it is not really all that canonical, I trace the arc of Iron Man (no pun intended) through the three movies with some interest. Iron Man 1 is a story of betrayal, vengeance and redemption. Iron Man 2 is a discussion of power and the fact that strength is not virtuous by dint of being strength but through the application of a virtuous mind (recall Socrates' discussion with the generals!) . The Avengers, however, asks us what it is that makes a man in a high-powered suit a hero or a villain. When asked what he is without the suit, Stark flippantly replies:
And Cap is, for all of his cheesiness, completely correct. Stark does what he can mostly because he can. He doesn't play well with others and, while he performs good deeds and is on the right path, it is the suit that gives him the power to be a good man without necessarily taking all of the risks that this should incur. Stark takes actions lightly, for his own amusement and completely aware that he will usually only be lightly touched by the outcome.
To steal from another movie (Khaaaaaannnn!), he seems to be acting under the illusion that he will never face death and, because of that, his actions can have far greater impact on those who are weaker.
However, and Joss Whedon was involved so this was completely deliberate, Stark's transformation comes when the suit can help him to carry out an action that will come at the highest price possible. As he takes the missile, a nuke bound for the city, and propels it through the gateway, his suit politely inquires as to whether it should call Pepper. Stark agrees but, where in a weaker movie we would have had an overly sentimental exchange or (worse) he would have called off his actions because he couldn't say goodbye, he is unable to get through. Pepper is too busy watching what she realises, with mounting horror, is Stark about to sacrifice himself.
An earlier Iron Man might have thought about blowing it up, or sending it away, but these are all actions that move the damage elsewhere: the impact is too high unless we remove it completely.
"Are you OK" is an easy question to ask but it has a great deal of impact. Asked in the wrong way it makes the situation worse. Asked too lightly, or with no thought of what you will have to deal with if someone genuinely asks it, it makes your enquiry trivial and is a betrayal of the very trust that you are asking someone to share with you.
Answering the question can be even harder. Is the person asking strong enough to take the answer? I can tell you now that people don't like hearing about suicidal thoughts: if they are close to you, it makes them wonder how they have failed in keeping you from harm. This is a cycle of burden that makes no sense to many people but will have some of you nodding along. It is not easy to ask, it is not easy to answer. But reading the link I posted above will, I hope, give some of you information that will assist you in trying either or both.
I am almost always overwhelmed watching the scene as Stark soars skyward, the phone ringing out, because he has considered all of the options and has taken the one path that will minimise the damage and impact of some very bad decisions. The actor's face makes it clear that this is not an easy decision but it is one that is being taken in full knowledge of the most likely outcome, which is a hard burden to shoulder.
On this important day, where we think about other people and how we can help them, please give some thought to how your help can be at its most helpful. How you can increase the chances of helping. Yes, you may have to think about burden (receiving or sharing) but it is only by fully appreciating what it is that is involved that you can provide the most honest assistance, or response, to the question of the day.
Here's the link to the resources and, if you know anyone that you're worried about (including yourself!), then go and check this out.
How do we ask someone if they're ok? Well, we have to think about how people react to this question. I've been a dreadful liar over the years when someone asks me if I'm ok - regardless of what's going on, I've stiffened my upper lip and projected a confidence that I haven't felt. Recently, after a lot of help, I've felt more comfortable with telling people how I am, but it has taken years to arrive at that level of maturity. (And there's still a long way to go.)
Will asking someone if they're ok make them think that they're not looking ok? The portrayal of confident and unquestioning certainty is one of the most rewarded appearances in our culture. You only have to look at politicians to see how far certainty in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary can take you. As someone who struggles with self-image anyway, if you asked me if I was ok in the wrong circumstances, I would panic - convinced that I had been appearing weak or, worse, overly emotional in a professional sense.
What a stupid way to think! But what an important thing to consider when you want to help. How can you help? By thinking about the impact of your actions. Because this is me, a long digressive narrative follows. Please, take my arm.
One of my favourite movies at the moment is The Avengers (spoilers follow) because, apart from being a good action movie, it covers so many aspects of what it means to be a hero. A hero, of course, always has to consider the impact of their actions because (to steal from another hero) "with great power comes great responsibility". (And sticky hands.)
While it is not really all that canonical, I trace the arc of Iron Man (no pun intended) through the three movies with some interest. Iron Man 1 is a story of betrayal, vengeance and redemption. Iron Man 2 is a discussion of power and the fact that strength is not virtuous by dint of being strength but through the application of a virtuous mind (recall Socrates' discussion with the generals!) . The Avengers, however, asks us what it is that makes a man in a high-powered suit a hero or a villain. When asked what he is without the suit, Stark flippantly replies:
Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.Captain America then responds:
I know guys with none of that worth ten of you.
And Cap is, for all of his cheesiness, completely correct. Stark does what he can mostly because he can. He doesn't play well with others and, while he performs good deeds and is on the right path, it is the suit that gives him the power to be a good man without necessarily taking all of the risks that this should incur. Stark takes actions lightly, for his own amusement and completely aware that he will usually only be lightly touched by the outcome.
To steal from another movie (Khaaaaaannnn!), he seems to be acting under the illusion that he will never face death and, because of that, his actions can have far greater impact on those who are weaker.
However, and Joss Whedon was involved so this was completely deliberate, Stark's transformation comes when the suit can help him to carry out an action that will come at the highest price possible. As he takes the missile, a nuke bound for the city, and propels it through the gateway, his suit politely inquires as to whether it should call Pepper. Stark agrees but, where in a weaker movie we would have had an overly sentimental exchange or (worse) he would have called off his actions because he couldn't say goodbye, he is unable to get through. Pepper is too busy watching what she realises, with mounting horror, is Stark about to sacrifice himself.
An earlier Iron Man might have thought about blowing it up, or sending it away, but these are all actions that move the damage elsewhere: the impact is too high unless we remove it completely.
"Are you OK" is an easy question to ask but it has a great deal of impact. Asked in the wrong way it makes the situation worse. Asked too lightly, or with no thought of what you will have to deal with if someone genuinely asks it, it makes your enquiry trivial and is a betrayal of the very trust that you are asking someone to share with you.
Answering the question can be even harder. Is the person asking strong enough to take the answer? I can tell you now that people don't like hearing about suicidal thoughts: if they are close to you, it makes them wonder how they have failed in keeping you from harm. This is a cycle of burden that makes no sense to many people but will have some of you nodding along. It is not easy to ask, it is not easy to answer. But reading the link I posted above will, I hope, give some of you information that will assist you in trying either or both.
I am almost always overwhelmed watching the scene as Stark soars skyward, the phone ringing out, because he has considered all of the options and has taken the one path that will minimise the damage and impact of some very bad decisions. The actor's face makes it clear that this is not an easy decision but it is one that is being taken in full knowledge of the most likely outcome, which is a hard burden to shoulder.
On this important day, where we think about other people and how we can help them, please give some thought to how your help can be at its most helpful. How you can increase the chances of helping. Yes, you may have to think about burden (receiving or sharing) but it is only by fully appreciating what it is that is involved that you can provide the most honest assistance, or response, to the question of the day.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
The Joy of the Ephemeral and the Sorrow at its Loss
I've been doing some pre-reading and planning for my proposal to undertake some more study next year in the field of English and Creative Writing, which promises to be an entirely different approach to scholarship from my strongly scientific and quantitative background. Postgraduate work in this area consists of the production of a book or literary collection and an associated exegesis, where I critically evaluate and explain my text. A lot of my writing recently has been on solitude, specifically the solitude that one can experience when still surrounded by people and yet still alone: isolation.
I write, usually, from the basis of "another me", a Nick with slightly different life experiences, from a different time, even a different gender, but to get the voice right for writing about solitude I have to dig deep down, well below my usually stable exterior and through the protections of my relationship. I have to find the places in myself where I am only myself and, once in that mindset, I can apply a filter to it and, with any luck, write something that resonates with a reader.
I have a natural advantage in writing about solitude because of my struggle with depression. I have tried, over the years, to explain to people, including my wife, how I can be so alone when I am demonstrably not and, regrettably, language usually fails me. In searching for the scholarly foundations, the language and taxonomy of my new field of research, I have discovered some useful terms that go beyond the coy and overused terms such as ennui or world-weariness/tired of living, burdened as they are with the weight of Fauxbaud, teenage poetry and the angry freshman clutching a copy of Howl. (This does not affect their legitimacy but much as begging the question has effectively lost its original use, it does dilute their meaning - a split of understanding between receiving groups.)
I have bored many people recently with my discovery of the term mono no aware, a beautiful Japanese term that, while translating to "awareness/transience/pathos of things"is used to convey the concept of the heightened appreciation of the beautiful and ephemeral, while accepting the inevitable wistfulness at its loss. Combine that with the German Weltschmerz (world pain: that the world we live in can never live up to your imagination) and I start to have the vocabulary I need to convey how I can feel so lonely, and so sad, while acknowledging that the world is full of beautiful things and that I am not alone.
Consider, if you will, the domestic pet rat. It has a life span of three years, maximum, and you often require surgical intervention to get them to that stage (tumour removal). There is no doubt in my mind that our two rats (black tail and white tip) led good lives, happy lives, where they ate well, explored, slept safely and lived without fear. But their lives were so short. They were barely adult before they were old, barely old before they were ill, barely ill before they were dead.
Raising rats made me realise what Tolkien was writing about with the Elves and their deep sadness in dealing with humans - any joy came at the price of the knowledge that such joy was fleeting.
Mono no aware.
I couldn't bear to have rats again. I can't put myself through that again because of the way that I think. We have cats now, Ella and Quincy, and I write this with Ella, now 8, curled up next to me. I can already see their age, the slowing and, because of the way that I think, my impression of their lives is seen through the lens of their loss. Every time I have an opportunity to pick one up or stroke their heads or cuddle them, I do, but while this is an act of joy, every encounter is framed, in my mind, as the opportunity taken while they are still with me.
Mono no aware.
It is hard for people who don't suffer from this all the time to understand that it can be a permanent view of the world - that every plate is waiting to break, that every plant will wither, that everything you love is dying. It is a world that is still full of joy, of course, because life can be wonderful and often is, especially when you are lucky as I am, but it's also an isolating viewpoint. We are all susceptible to this mode of thinking but it is contagiously depressing - even if people tell you to 'cheer up', a sufficiently elegant explanation of the problem or your description may make other people focus on the transient nature of existence and, much like showing "Brazil" at a Year 10 sleep-over, it's really unnecessarily depressing.
It is possible to feel happiness, live a good life, and even use it as a spur when you feel this way. Yes, the world is painful sometimes and bad days are like walking around in salt rain with no skin but it is not always so and sometimes a sunrise is just a sunrise - the sunset is out of mind. I do some of the things that I do because tomorrow is not guaranteed - if I don't do it, maybe I won't get the chance again, maybe nobody else will? There are some people out there whose mental anguish and genuine pain are so great that it immobilises them. I am very lucky that it is rarely as bad as that for me.
And, yet, everything I see around me is transient: as permanent as the seeds on a dandelion. While I welcome change, if I had to imagine a heaven, it would be a place where nothing was lost, where no family friends were gone, where my cats and my rats were always there, where the bread always landed butter side up and this idyllic state of affairs would go on forever. Regrettably, and sadly, I can't believe in that because it doesn't make any sense to me - any comfort I'd derive from it is immediately undermined by my lack of faith and any evidence that such a thing could exist. I am the most pathetic of atheists: I long for a heaven that I cannot believe in.
I feel out of balance with the world - knowing that my sorrow at a loss that might not come for years is always more present and immediate to me than the joy I should be feeling while something is there. This isolates me more than sheer solitude ever could, because it throws up barriers in my mind and they follow me everywhere. We all feel like that, which is why I think the work that I'm planning will be readable, especially as I'm trying to write something that is not always pessimistic (I am, at heart, a romantic and it is, unashamedly, love that keeps me alive. I am capable of optimism and try to use it in my writing as often as I can.)
Perhaps, through discussing and sharing our fear of loss, our (hopefully only occasional) pain at being alive, and accepting that this makes us so very similar, perhaps there is something good in there, to be shared from the mind of a middle-aged man who is seeking to understand himself. I don't pretend to have any answers but, much like my other blog, by throwing open my thought processes, maybe there's something to learn from - even if it's "Oh, for goodness's sake, cheer up, you miserable bastard."
I write, usually, from the basis of "another me", a Nick with slightly different life experiences, from a different time, even a different gender, but to get the voice right for writing about solitude I have to dig deep down, well below my usually stable exterior and through the protections of my relationship. I have to find the places in myself where I am only myself and, once in that mindset, I can apply a filter to it and, with any luck, write something that resonates with a reader.
I have a natural advantage in writing about solitude because of my struggle with depression. I have tried, over the years, to explain to people, including my wife, how I can be so alone when I am demonstrably not and, regrettably, language usually fails me. In searching for the scholarly foundations, the language and taxonomy of my new field of research, I have discovered some useful terms that go beyond the coy and overused terms such as ennui or world-weariness/tired of living, burdened as they are with the weight of Fauxbaud, teenage poetry and the angry freshman clutching a copy of Howl. (This does not affect their legitimacy but much as begging the question has effectively lost its original use, it does dilute their meaning - a split of understanding between receiving groups.)
I have bored many people recently with my discovery of the term mono no aware, a beautiful Japanese term that, while translating to "awareness/transience/pathos of things"is used to convey the concept of the heightened appreciation of the beautiful and ephemeral, while accepting the inevitable wistfulness at its loss. Combine that with the German Weltschmerz (world pain: that the world we live in can never live up to your imagination) and I start to have the vocabulary I need to convey how I can feel so lonely, and so sad, while acknowledging that the world is full of beautiful things and that I am not alone.
Consider, if you will, the domestic pet rat. It has a life span of three years, maximum, and you often require surgical intervention to get them to that stage (tumour removal). There is no doubt in my mind that our two rats (black tail and white tip) led good lives, happy lives, where they ate well, explored, slept safely and lived without fear. But their lives were so short. They were barely adult before they were old, barely old before they were ill, barely ill before they were dead.
Raising rats made me realise what Tolkien was writing about with the Elves and their deep sadness in dealing with humans - any joy came at the price of the knowledge that such joy was fleeting.
Mono no aware.
I couldn't bear to have rats again. I can't put myself through that again because of the way that I think. We have cats now, Ella and Quincy, and I write this with Ella, now 8, curled up next to me. I can already see their age, the slowing and, because of the way that I think, my impression of their lives is seen through the lens of their loss. Every time I have an opportunity to pick one up or stroke their heads or cuddle them, I do, but while this is an act of joy, every encounter is framed, in my mind, as the opportunity taken while they are still with me.
Mono no aware.
It is hard for people who don't suffer from this all the time to understand that it can be a permanent view of the world - that every plate is waiting to break, that every plant will wither, that everything you love is dying. It is a world that is still full of joy, of course, because life can be wonderful and often is, especially when you are lucky as I am, but it's also an isolating viewpoint. We are all susceptible to this mode of thinking but it is contagiously depressing - even if people tell you to 'cheer up', a sufficiently elegant explanation of the problem or your description may make other people focus on the transient nature of existence and, much like showing "Brazil" at a Year 10 sleep-over, it's really unnecessarily depressing.
It is possible to feel happiness, live a good life, and even use it as a spur when you feel this way. Yes, the world is painful sometimes and bad days are like walking around in salt rain with no skin but it is not always so and sometimes a sunrise is just a sunrise - the sunset is out of mind. I do some of the things that I do because tomorrow is not guaranteed - if I don't do it, maybe I won't get the chance again, maybe nobody else will? There are some people out there whose mental anguish and genuine pain are so great that it immobilises them. I am very lucky that it is rarely as bad as that for me.
And, yet, everything I see around me is transient: as permanent as the seeds on a dandelion. While I welcome change, if I had to imagine a heaven, it would be a place where nothing was lost, where no family friends were gone, where my cats and my rats were always there, where the bread always landed butter side up and this idyllic state of affairs would go on forever. Regrettably, and sadly, I can't believe in that because it doesn't make any sense to me - any comfort I'd derive from it is immediately undermined by my lack of faith and any evidence that such a thing could exist. I am the most pathetic of atheists: I long for a heaven that I cannot believe in.
I feel out of balance with the world - knowing that my sorrow at a loss that might not come for years is always more present and immediate to me than the joy I should be feeling while something is there. This isolates me more than sheer solitude ever could, because it throws up barriers in my mind and they follow me everywhere. We all feel like that, which is why I think the work that I'm planning will be readable, especially as I'm trying to write something that is not always pessimistic (I am, at heart, a romantic and it is, unashamedly, love that keeps me alive. I am capable of optimism and try to use it in my writing as often as I can.)
Perhaps, through discussing and sharing our fear of loss, our (hopefully only occasional) pain at being alive, and accepting that this makes us so very similar, perhaps there is something good in there, to be shared from the mind of a middle-aged man who is seeking to understand himself. I don't pretend to have any answers but, much like my other blog, by throwing open my thought processes, maybe there's something to learn from - even if it's "Oh, for goodness's sake, cheer up, you miserable bastard."
Friday, May 18, 2012
Musings in California
I haven't posted here much (well, at all) since I took on the other blog, the official blog, and that's not really a good thing. This was always the blog where I could talk about things, muse, didn't have to make a point, could just have some fun. I greatly enjoy blogging on the other site but it is very different and far less liberated. I also have to have a point.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a very nice hotel on De Anza in Cupertino, California, between Apple's Campus and Seagate. That's the Valley though. The cardinal points are all tech companies. (I should note that, with their expansion, I suspect you could form a Valley spanning mesh just by connecting Apple buildings.) I have about 24 hours before I jump on a plane to go home, my meetings are done, my work is (temporarily) achieved and I have some time to myself.
This feels very strange.
In the last five months I have worked something very close to three jobs and, much like what happens when you drink too much coffee for a long time, your body and mind adapt to the new frantic rhythms of constant work. You flick at your e-mail when you have nothing else to do, waiting for something to come in that you can deal with. You churn through tasks that could probably be done more slowly, or at a later time, instead of just relaxing and watching a movie, or reading a book.
About a week ago, I was so tired I realised that this couldn't go on. That I had to work out how to do what I had set out do in a way that I would survive it.
If you had asked me ten years ago where I would be, I can assure you that having a PhD, being a successful academic and having international representation meetings with large companies would not be what I would have suggested.
Ten years ago, whatever I would have said, I would have thought that I would be dead by now. I would have made up something good to cover that but it wouldn't have been the truth. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong but there was something very, very wrong.
Twenty years ago, strangely enough, I was heading in pretty much the same direction. I couldn't see a way out, I was saturated with work and very unhappy in many ways. I would have been surprised to know that I would make thirty.
Thirty years ago - well, I was a teenager so I was supposed to feel like that. Well, maybe not that bad, nor quite as angry. Actually, no, I wasn't ok then but it was very hard to work that out.
This time, I can put my feelings down to overwork and, for once, be completely honest about it. I have actually been working too hard. Behind the fatigue there is far less of the feeling that drove me 10, 20, 30 years ago. I've seen a doctor and, fortunately, while I've damaged my health a bit, it's not too bad and we can get me back on track fairly easily.
I was talking to my wife the other day and I expressed the thought that she was unstoppable, while I was indefatigable. She, sensibly enough, asked me what the key difference was. I said that I was very hard to tire out but that I could be stopped while, regardless of whether she was tired or not, she couldn't be. Why?
One of the things about managing depression of any kind is that it is always a drain on your mental capability. There are some days where choosing a shirt is too hard. It sounds really stupid but that's how it is - sometimes, all of your mental effort is focused on staying alive. When you realise this, it doesn't matter how much energy you have, if your mind is so bound up that you can't deal with other problems - you can be stopped. Blocked by the decisions that you can't make. Combine that with lots of otherwise useful energy and you generate vast amounts of frustration, which can devolve into rage very easily. My wife, however, sees solutions and can act on them. She appears to be able to devote her mental effort to the task at hand with fewer diversions.
Together, we're a very good team because we can carry each other when we need to. We always have each other's back. That's us when we need to take on dark forces, back-to-back, both facing out to the world but completely aware of each other and being there for each other.
I have a great deal of sympathy for people who suffer from energy sapping conditions, because they are so much more harshly judged by our society. As a high-energy person, who occasionally flakes, I get cut a lot more slack. No-one is ever going to call me, or think of me as, lazy. The stupid thing is that mental and physical conditions don't care about what our society thinks is important and, as a result, someone who has the audacity to feel tired for perfectly valid biochemical/medical reasons will get a lot of thoughtless treatment. I, however, could probably work myself into a complete collapse, take 2 months off and come back, and still get better treatment from society. But that would be a pretty stupid thing to do on my part - even I'm aware of that.
Of course, as part of this awareness, I have to accept that I cannot work until I run out of energy anymore. When I drop down below the red line, I start to lose the energy I need to keep my brain working properly. I start to lose all of those cool CBT techniques for refocusing and avoiding negative cycles. I head down dark paths and, sadly, my brain alters so that I feel alone when, really, I'm never alone.
That's one of the hardest things for the partners of people with mental illness - our world doesn't look right sometimes and there's nothing that rationality and love can do about it. The brain works in curious and amazing ways but sometimes, it's a real bugger.
Other people may fall asleep when they're exhausted - I could end up killing myself if I stop thinking the right way. That's pretty stupid if I know how to avoid it. Especially if it's not as if I'm going to stop working, I'm just going to stop working 7 days a week. I think everyone can live with that. :)
So I have 24 hours off. I'm going to relax. Watch some bad television. Mess around with things that I've been meaning to do for a while. Read a book. Get a good night's sleep. Go for a run. Join some friends for brunch. Fly home.
And learn how to do this whole relaxation thing, all over again, at home.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a very nice hotel on De Anza in Cupertino, California, between Apple's Campus and Seagate. That's the Valley though. The cardinal points are all tech companies. (I should note that, with their expansion, I suspect you could form a Valley spanning mesh just by connecting Apple buildings.) I have about 24 hours before I jump on a plane to go home, my meetings are done, my work is (temporarily) achieved and I have some time to myself.
This feels very strange.
In the last five months I have worked something very close to three jobs and, much like what happens when you drink too much coffee for a long time, your body and mind adapt to the new frantic rhythms of constant work. You flick at your e-mail when you have nothing else to do, waiting for something to come in that you can deal with. You churn through tasks that could probably be done more slowly, or at a later time, instead of just relaxing and watching a movie, or reading a book.
About a week ago, I was so tired I realised that this couldn't go on. That I had to work out how to do what I had set out do in a way that I would survive it.
If you had asked me ten years ago where I would be, I can assure you that having a PhD, being a successful academic and having international representation meetings with large companies would not be what I would have suggested.
Ten years ago, whatever I would have said, I would have thought that I would be dead by now. I would have made up something good to cover that but it wouldn't have been the truth. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong but there was something very, very wrong.
Twenty years ago, strangely enough, I was heading in pretty much the same direction. I couldn't see a way out, I was saturated with work and very unhappy in many ways. I would have been surprised to know that I would make thirty.
Thirty years ago - well, I was a teenager so I was supposed to feel like that. Well, maybe not that bad, nor quite as angry. Actually, no, I wasn't ok then but it was very hard to work that out.
This time, I can put my feelings down to overwork and, for once, be completely honest about it. I have actually been working too hard. Behind the fatigue there is far less of the feeling that drove me 10, 20, 30 years ago. I've seen a doctor and, fortunately, while I've damaged my health a bit, it's not too bad and we can get me back on track fairly easily.
I was talking to my wife the other day and I expressed the thought that she was unstoppable, while I was indefatigable. She, sensibly enough, asked me what the key difference was. I said that I was very hard to tire out but that I could be stopped while, regardless of whether she was tired or not, she couldn't be. Why?
One of the things about managing depression of any kind is that it is always a drain on your mental capability. There are some days where choosing a shirt is too hard. It sounds really stupid but that's how it is - sometimes, all of your mental effort is focused on staying alive. When you realise this, it doesn't matter how much energy you have, if your mind is so bound up that you can't deal with other problems - you can be stopped. Blocked by the decisions that you can't make. Combine that with lots of otherwise useful energy and you generate vast amounts of frustration, which can devolve into rage very easily. My wife, however, sees solutions and can act on them. She appears to be able to devote her mental effort to the task at hand with fewer diversions.
Together, we're a very good team because we can carry each other when we need to. We always have each other's back. That's us when we need to take on dark forces, back-to-back, both facing out to the world but completely aware of each other and being there for each other.
I have a great deal of sympathy for people who suffer from energy sapping conditions, because they are so much more harshly judged by our society. As a high-energy person, who occasionally flakes, I get cut a lot more slack. No-one is ever going to call me, or think of me as, lazy. The stupid thing is that mental and physical conditions don't care about what our society thinks is important and, as a result, someone who has the audacity to feel tired for perfectly valid biochemical/medical reasons will get a lot of thoughtless treatment. I, however, could probably work myself into a complete collapse, take 2 months off and come back, and still get better treatment from society. But that would be a pretty stupid thing to do on my part - even I'm aware of that.
Of course, as part of this awareness, I have to accept that I cannot work until I run out of energy anymore. When I drop down below the red line, I start to lose the energy I need to keep my brain working properly. I start to lose all of those cool CBT techniques for refocusing and avoiding negative cycles. I head down dark paths and, sadly, my brain alters so that I feel alone when, really, I'm never alone.
That's one of the hardest things for the partners of people with mental illness - our world doesn't look right sometimes and there's nothing that rationality and love can do about it. The brain works in curious and amazing ways but sometimes, it's a real bugger.
Other people may fall asleep when they're exhausted - I could end up killing myself if I stop thinking the right way. That's pretty stupid if I know how to avoid it. Especially if it's not as if I'm going to stop working, I'm just going to stop working 7 days a week. I think everyone can live with that. :)
So I have 24 hours off. I'm going to relax. Watch some bad television. Mess around with things that I've been meaning to do for a while. Read a book. Get a good night's sleep. Go for a run. Join some friends for brunch. Fly home.
And learn how to do this whole relaxation thing, all over again, at home.
Monday, January 02, 2012
More musings on games
I realise that I am mostly critical of games, even when I say "you should play this" or "I really like this", the obvious exception being the original Deus Ex. It's hard for me, after all this time, to look back and be able to say for sure whether it was that the game was so good or whether it was just the first game like that I really enjoyed. It's probably a little of both. If, however, I had to put my feelings about DE into one sentence, it would be this:
I felt, almost all of the time, as if what I was doing was what I wanted to do and I felt a desire to keep doing it - it mattered.
The philosophical concept of agency is useful here. Agency is your capacity to act in the world and, ultimately, your ability to impose your will upon your environment. Deus Ex is, for me, a "high agency" game because I was able to act and my actions appeared to change the world.
We are strongly conditioned to appreciate, and even desire, roles with a higher degree of agency because this is what most of our fictional and historical narratives present. There are few movies that feature a protagonist who is never in control at all and has no influence on the world. Even Seinfeld, the ultimate non-event, gives the protagonists agency. They are, rightly, finally dealt with because they have chosen to have no impact at a critical time. The choice to do nothing is, however, a choice. Had they been incapable of action and then have been locked up, there would have been no humour - instead we would have expected a righteous break-out or injustice plot, in order to provide an avenue for the reassertion of agency.
History tells many stories but the stories of those who did nothing are cautionary tales, often more folk lore than fact and rarely presented as full stories. The truly 'great' are often presented with many accounts of their constant control and influence over the world. These days, a naval commander who finished a game of bowls before heading off to fight the Spanish Armada would be court-martialled, not feted. (Yes, yes, Tower of London eventually but that was geo-political).
There are very few games with broad appeal that do not allow the players to feel as if they are controlling the world in key ways. For the most part, it's an illusion, as it almost always must be. I must briefly note a game called Pathologic, which a friend mentioned to me, that I am trying to track down to play as it appears that half the game is trying to work out how to become a free agent! There is a key difference between being able to make choices and being able to make world-changing choices. This is as true socially as it is in games. If the only choice you can make is between two cheap tins of beans, there's no real agency there.
Even with the body of ... curious ... games coming out of Japan and Russia, I look at the popular games and I see First Person Shooters and MMORPGs of many waters. FPS games almost all run on rails and your choice is too frequently limited to which gun you pick, your mission is generally heavily constrained. MMORPGs have many large-scale distributed systems problems to conquer and get around this in a number of ways, but frequently by using instances, event separation and zoning. Can you actually change the world? Some players on Acheron's Call tried to hold off a server upgrade, by standing and defending a point that was supposed to be overrun, and nearly managed it. That, however, is rare and the house always wins, because no single subscribed player on a game server should be able to change everyone's playing experience. Even the cachet of being a Scarab Lord changed nothing, except possibly your bank balance when your boss worked out how much time you'd spent playing WoW. Killing friendlies? Killing other players? Attacking other players? Special kid-friendly areas? Swearing control? Any fragments of agency can come and go at the flick of a software switch and may be limited in order to protect the agency of other players. The cost of interaction with humans, instead of machine AI, is that you have to play sufficiently nicely that you won't cost the parent company subscriptions.
(EVE Online is a counter-example here, as they appear to have allowed for almost any form of activity that can be supported in the game, as long as the communications go through the game. EVE appears to be, however, either highly rewarding or highly frustrating depending on whether you are in on the con or you are staring at an empty hangar or the destroyed dust of your capital ship. But can anyone carry out in-game research as a skill to develop a wormhole weapon that can obliterate other planets?)
I was reading about the last days of Star Wars: Galaxies and, at the end, when it no longer mattered, players could change the world. They were told who had won and lost on each server. A Star Destroyer hovered over a city and small groups took up X-Wings to battle it in the atmosphere. I read that and thought "Who wouldn't want to play a game like that? An exciting world where the small can make an impact on the big?" But it was only free because it was ending. No-one's subscription was at risk so anyone could change the world.
Even without agency, it still feels like you have a choice in many ways. Some of this, I believe, comes from the 3D visual environment. Back in the old text days, you had to guess the particular phrase, or have the particular item, or knock on the wall 10 times because it opened every 10th knock (Yes, I've seen it). There's an example in a closed area of TinyTIM (1991 and still going...) of a door lock that requires you to have not only read a relatively obscure work but to know which phrase of those found on the 104 pages of the novella will be needed to open the door. The frustration levels in old games could be very high because there was no "running at it from another angle" which is easily achieved in any game that allows graphically supported three dimensional movement.
This did require the puzzle makers to be clever, however, as they had to balance ease of solving with potential frustration level. Rather than impose a strict order of box jumping, or precise pixel positioning to achieve a goal (hello, Tomb Raider), hints had to be left, or actions rewarded, in a way that a persistent and thoughtful player would be rewarded.
However, I would be lying if I said that the levels of agency were higher for conventional players in these games, they typed commands and read the results - but, of course, the big reward back in the days of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) was that one could eventually become a wizard, someone who could write the code that would literally change the world and add new adventures or features. I am still a wizard on TinyTIM, although this now mostly amounts to taking out the virtual trash occasionally, and have been a wizard of both LP and DIKU MUDs. Changing the world is both fascinating and onerous.
These days, the coding required to build worlds and add features are heavily protected, strongly bound into concealed and proprietary bundles and merely playing through to top level doesn't guarantee you any world-changing status at all. Yes, you are free to range across giant vistas as much as you like and there's no doubt that there is a great deal of personal reward in being the best skinner in the plains, but is that the same as, one day, being able to raise up a giant castle using your knowledge and skill and seeing people who are just like you were, when you were started, being tested by your devices and earning great reward? (Guilds, of course, offer a useful agency analogue for players as you are creating and maintaining a structure that does, effectively, change the world for your group. But could your guild take over the city and become its government? Could your guild form an alliance of guilds and march on another continent? Are you seeing the walls on the cage yet?)
Let me digress for a moment to talk about a gaming system, or systems, where one would appear to have a great deal of agency but, in reality, you don't. The worst of these are generally based on successful movie or book franchises. Who didn't come out of Star Wars wanting to wield a light-saber or fly the Falcon? (You? Well, you're weird.) You've been raised on high agency narrative - you want in to this Universe!
Only, if you play the Star Wars RPG, you are not going to be anybody at all to start with. Maybe if you play it for a long time, you can end up powerful but, take a breath, you'll never be Leia, Luke, Han or Vader. In fact, most of these games specifically prevent you from becoming a leading character and you can't start at a level of power where you can do much, if any, of what you see in the movies.
Games, like most systems that use rules, try to hold a careful balance between defining how the Universe works and stating exactly what can and can't happen. However, the more freedom that you are allowed, the more you depend upon the human(s) who are interpreting the rules. (If you don't know what the term 'rules lawyer' means, go and check it out now.) Some of these rules are intrinsically limiting your ability change the world in ways that would otherwise make sense.
Simple example: you have the power of telekinesis, say, and can lift a weight of up to 5kg with your mind. Hmm, ok, then, I'll use that amount of force to close off the blood supply to my opponent's brain. Instant death. This is perhaps the simplest example to illustrate why magical powers and mind effects have to be heavily proscribed by the gaming system and, for continued game enjoyment, I can see why you would make that trade.
(It makes sense. So you have POWER COSMIC INFINITE as a character. You sit in your chair and say "I win." Fancy another game? Some rules are put in for enjoyable game play and to create a situation where conflict can be sustained for both narrative and play effect.)
Some rules are just prescriptive... because. Who cares if you actually have a million Darth Vaders? (Shout outs to Elf Only Inn here!) If your system is good, and your narrative engine (game master), can carry it off then I can see something amazing about the Vader Clone War, not the least of which is that I doubt that the Vaders would trust each other.
Now, going to back to electronic games, the only way you can be the Amazing Hero Protagonist character is if at least one of the following conditions holds (some are mutually exclusive):
I felt, almost all of the time, as if what I was doing was what I wanted to do and I felt a desire to keep doing it - it mattered.
The philosophical concept of agency is useful here. Agency is your capacity to act in the world and, ultimately, your ability to impose your will upon your environment. Deus Ex is, for me, a "high agency" game because I was able to act and my actions appeared to change the world.
We are strongly conditioned to appreciate, and even desire, roles with a higher degree of agency because this is what most of our fictional and historical narratives present. There are few movies that feature a protagonist who is never in control at all and has no influence on the world. Even Seinfeld, the ultimate non-event, gives the protagonists agency. They are, rightly, finally dealt with because they have chosen to have no impact at a critical time. The choice to do nothing is, however, a choice. Had they been incapable of action and then have been locked up, there would have been no humour - instead we would have expected a righteous break-out or injustice plot, in order to provide an avenue for the reassertion of agency.
History tells many stories but the stories of those who did nothing are cautionary tales, often more folk lore than fact and rarely presented as full stories. The truly 'great' are often presented with many accounts of their constant control and influence over the world. These days, a naval commander who finished a game of bowls before heading off to fight the Spanish Armada would be court-martialled, not feted. (Yes, yes, Tower of London eventually but that was geo-political).
There are very few games with broad appeal that do not allow the players to feel as if they are controlling the world in key ways. For the most part, it's an illusion, as it almost always must be. I must briefly note a game called Pathologic, which a friend mentioned to me, that I am trying to track down to play as it appears that half the game is trying to work out how to become a free agent! There is a key difference between being able to make choices and being able to make world-changing choices. This is as true socially as it is in games. If the only choice you can make is between two cheap tins of beans, there's no real agency there.
Even with the body of ... curious ... games coming out of Japan and Russia, I look at the popular games and I see First Person Shooters and MMORPGs of many waters. FPS games almost all run on rails and your choice is too frequently limited to which gun you pick, your mission is generally heavily constrained. MMORPGs have many large-scale distributed systems problems to conquer and get around this in a number of ways, but frequently by using instances, event separation and zoning. Can you actually change the world? Some players on Acheron's Call tried to hold off a server upgrade, by standing and defending a point that was supposed to be overrun, and nearly managed it. That, however, is rare and the house always wins, because no single subscribed player on a game server should be able to change everyone's playing experience. Even the cachet of being a Scarab Lord changed nothing, except possibly your bank balance when your boss worked out how much time you'd spent playing WoW. Killing friendlies? Killing other players? Attacking other players? Special kid-friendly areas? Swearing control? Any fragments of agency can come and go at the flick of a software switch and may be limited in order to protect the agency of other players. The cost of interaction with humans, instead of machine AI, is that you have to play sufficiently nicely that you won't cost the parent company subscriptions.
(EVE Online is a counter-example here, as they appear to have allowed for almost any form of activity that can be supported in the game, as long as the communications go through the game. EVE appears to be, however, either highly rewarding or highly frustrating depending on whether you are in on the con or you are staring at an empty hangar or the destroyed dust of your capital ship. But can anyone carry out in-game research as a skill to develop a wormhole weapon that can obliterate other planets?)
I was reading about the last days of Star Wars: Galaxies and, at the end, when it no longer mattered, players could change the world. They were told who had won and lost on each server. A Star Destroyer hovered over a city and small groups took up X-Wings to battle it in the atmosphere. I read that and thought "Who wouldn't want to play a game like that? An exciting world where the small can make an impact on the big?" But it was only free because it was ending. No-one's subscription was at risk so anyone could change the world.
Even without agency, it still feels like you have a choice in many ways. Some of this, I believe, comes from the 3D visual environment. Back in the old text days, you had to guess the particular phrase, or have the particular item, or knock on the wall 10 times because it opened every 10th knock (Yes, I've seen it). There's an example in a closed area of TinyTIM (1991 and still going...) of a door lock that requires you to have not only read a relatively obscure work but to know which phrase of those found on the 104 pages of the novella will be needed to open the door. The frustration levels in old games could be very high because there was no "running at it from another angle" which is easily achieved in any game that allows graphically supported three dimensional movement.
This did require the puzzle makers to be clever, however, as they had to balance ease of solving with potential frustration level. Rather than impose a strict order of box jumping, or precise pixel positioning to achieve a goal (hello, Tomb Raider), hints had to be left, or actions rewarded, in a way that a persistent and thoughtful player would be rewarded.
However, I would be lying if I said that the levels of agency were higher for conventional players in these games, they typed commands and read the results - but, of course, the big reward back in the days of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) was that one could eventually become a wizard, someone who could write the code that would literally change the world and add new adventures or features. I am still a wizard on TinyTIM, although this now mostly amounts to taking out the virtual trash occasionally, and have been a wizard of both LP and DIKU MUDs. Changing the world is both fascinating and onerous.
These days, the coding required to build worlds and add features are heavily protected, strongly bound into concealed and proprietary bundles and merely playing through to top level doesn't guarantee you any world-changing status at all. Yes, you are free to range across giant vistas as much as you like and there's no doubt that there is a great deal of personal reward in being the best skinner in the plains, but is that the same as, one day, being able to raise up a giant castle using your knowledge and skill and seeing people who are just like you were, when you were started, being tested by your devices and earning great reward? (Guilds, of course, offer a useful agency analogue for players as you are creating and maintaining a structure that does, effectively, change the world for your group. But could your guild take over the city and become its government? Could your guild form an alliance of guilds and march on another continent? Are you seeing the walls on the cage yet?)
Let me digress for a moment to talk about a gaming system, or systems, where one would appear to have a great deal of agency but, in reality, you don't. The worst of these are generally based on successful movie or book franchises. Who didn't come out of Star Wars wanting to wield a light-saber or fly the Falcon? (You? Well, you're weird.) You've been raised on high agency narrative - you want in to this Universe!
Only, if you play the Star Wars RPG, you are not going to be anybody at all to start with. Maybe if you play it for a long time, you can end up powerful but, take a breath, you'll never be Leia, Luke, Han or Vader. In fact, most of these games specifically prevent you from becoming a leading character and you can't start at a level of power where you can do much, if any, of what you see in the movies.
Games, like most systems that use rules, try to hold a careful balance between defining how the Universe works and stating exactly what can and can't happen. However, the more freedom that you are allowed, the more you depend upon the human(s) who are interpreting the rules. (If you don't know what the term 'rules lawyer' means, go and check it out now.) Some of these rules are intrinsically limiting your ability change the world in ways that would otherwise make sense.
Simple example: you have the power of telekinesis, say, and can lift a weight of up to 5kg with your mind. Hmm, ok, then, I'll use that amount of force to close off the blood supply to my opponent's brain. Instant death. This is perhaps the simplest example to illustrate why magical powers and mind effects have to be heavily proscribed by the gaming system and, for continued game enjoyment, I can see why you would make that trade.
(It makes sense. So you have POWER COSMIC INFINITE as a character. You sit in your chair and say "I win." Fancy another game? Some rules are put in for enjoyable game play and to create a situation where conflict can be sustained for both narrative and play effect.)
Some rules are just prescriptive... because. Who cares if you actually have a million Darth Vaders? (Shout outs to Elf Only Inn here!) If your system is good, and your narrative engine (game master), can carry it off then I can see something amazing about the Vader Clone War, not the least of which is that I doubt that the Vaders would trust each other.
Now, going to back to electronic games, the only way you can be the Amazing Hero Protagonist character is if at least one of the following conditions holds (some are mutually exclusive):
- It's a single player game. You get to be the big cheese in the original Knights of the Old Republic because it was just you, playing on your computer.
- The multi-player allows you to rotate roles, or you have cookie cutter characters that can be customised with more play or money but you are holding an archetype rather than a specific character. Examples include Team Fortress 2 where you can buy/play your way to being the biggest baddest X, where X is one of the available characters. However, you can't be the ONLY one of these.
- The multi-player is LAN-based, so the user base is formed by relatively usual social cohesion, there are no subscription fees to maintain.
- There are no subscription fees or, to put it another way, you holding that spot will not reduce someone else's enjoyment to the point that they will stop paying - and playing.
- Your tenure on the role is so brief, and guaranteed to be so, that all the patient need to do is wait, or all the scheming need to do is scheme. The play-by-e-mail game En Garde features a ferocious struggle to be the French aristocrat with the highest social status but it is a very slippery pole and many variants of the game immediately remove the 'winner' once they attain top rank. The player can come back in, but with a new character, to try again. It is strangely addictive and I have made it to the top, mostly by being beaten to a pulp in duels.
The dominant model for sustaining large user bases - the MMORPG - cannot afford to grant large amounts of agency to 'untrusted' players because the risk is too high that they will do something that will cause damage to the enjoyment of the paying player base. Can this be solved economically? Well, how much money would it cost to risk alienating the player base on an entire server by granting one guild 'Kingship' of the server and the ability to control large areas of cities? More importantly, would ti be worth it to that guild if everyone then packed up and left?
Try starting an LPMud from scratch and walking around an empty world as a god - it gets dull quickly.
Even the simple requirements, making any change to a graphical world, can be challenging because it requires the developers to provide all of the alternative graphics - a far harder job than putting up some alternative text!
Finally, however, the problem is keeping the game playable in the face of player actions. Let's say that in Bioshock you managed to damage the environment by breaking the glass and jamming the doors open - everything floods and everyone dies. Uhh - victory? One of my pet hates is the protection of 'key non-player characters', because you never really know when you'll be able to kill them and, quite often, it is quite obvious to the player that something is up but you have to run along on narrative rails until you are finally allowed to act. For all of the reasons I've already discussed, this is frustrating. But I can understand why it's done. It is still likely to be an indicator of a strongly linear storyline - I don't want to read your script, I want to write the story myself!
I was very happy in Deus Ex when I managed to blow up Anna Navarre in the Jumbo (through careful use of potted plants and grenades) and the game actually dealt with it properly. The writers had realised that it could happen and that it was a sneaky and Deus Ex-y of dealing with the dangerous opponent. Then again, I also enable some cheats later on, killed some key characters and watched the game fail miserably as it tried to make actions happen through non-existent characters. Come on, guys, I'm sneakier than a bag full of weasels - prepare for the possibility that I might want to try and do this. I don't want to stand there during long speeches and throw cactuses at people with no effect - make it obvious that the game (and its inhabitants) is watching me like a hawk!
This 'continued playability' problem magnifies in multi-player environments - you only have to look at Corrupted Blood in WoW to see what can happen when existing protective boundaries are violated, even accidentally. Imagine if someone in the game deliberately brought a plague animal back and dropped it in a city water supply. We know what extremists can do in this world and we don't have anywhere near the same level of real-world control in a virtual environment. One buggy piece of software will leave us far more vulnerable than we ever could be in reality!
I realise that what I want in a game is an almost unattainable goal because I want a game where my actions are effectively unlimited, but I still want a fun game, and one where I may even run into real people. I also want a game where the actions that I am free to take are useful and interesting actions so I'm as bound by a desire for narrative fulfilment as the next person, but at the same time I want the convenient illusion that someone is writing a story where I am the hero and events unfold in a way that keep me immersed in the game.
Sounds like I have some serious game design to do. :)
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