Author: Zubon

Douglas Hofstadter explains in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

There is an old saw which says, “Computers can only do what you tell them to do.” This is right in one sense, but it misses the point: you don’t know in advance the consequences of what you tell a computer to do; therefore its behavior can be as baffling and surprising and unpredictable to you as that of a person. You generally know in advance the space in which the output will fall, but you dont know details of where it will fall.

The context here is that as you move from machine language to assembly language to higher-level languages, you gain abstraction at the cost of perfect predictability. The more abstract your commands, the more room there is for gaps between what you meant and what you told the computer to do. At any level sufficiently abstract to think about the whole program, significant parts will be unpredictable, especially if you are trying to cross levels. See the Wi flag.

This is a reason why we have test servers. Large programs have too many moving pieces for anything to work as intended on the first try. Even if the coding is perfect, its aggregate effect on the system may not be what was intended. The developer did not think of what rule change X would do to ability Y when used with item Z, and now players can one-shot raid bosses. Oops. And that can happen with any moving part, which is why you want thousands of players to beat on the code, going through enough combinations to find the inevitable problems.

Back to the code level, documentation exists to reduce this. If we all programmed with textbook-perfect processes, you would be able to track any change throughout the system, and unpredictability would be lower. Unfortunately your crafting system is only half-documented, the comments are haiku in Gaelic, and the guy who wrote them quit to pursue his dream of becoming a pastry chef. Expect surprises every time you change anything. To cite a non-haiku issue along these lines, City of Heroes recently noticed that the taunt/aggro system was documented incorrectly, and no one knew that no one knew how taunt worked until someone traced back why the code was not doing what it was supposed to. It was doing what it was told to.

: Zubon

I saw a friend’s new MP3 player this weekend: 8GB plus the software to run it, and it is about the size of five credit cards. It could probably be smaller, but there would be no way to plug in headphones or have a screen/buttons. Looking back a half-century, a 4.4MB hard drive was 5′ by 6′ by ~2′ and reportedly leased for $3,200/month. If that is before inflation, that would be $23,934.75 per month in 2007 dollars.

Many of our people will be receiving electronics this holiday. As you are opening your gifts, enjoy the benefits of Moore’s Law and its parallels in all manners of progress. You are already living in the future.

: Zubon

H/T: Grumpy Gamer. Check out the links on his right side sometime.

Where is this next level? Can you tell me what level you are on currently, and what exact features differentiate this next one, in a way that someone else is not already doing?

I am not going to link to the latest meaningless crap about taking MMOs/gaming “to the next level,” so please just stop it. Here, have a Gooogle link: over 1/2 million people taking it to the next level. There are not that many levels.

Here is how I am taking blogging to the next level: if I ever link something that has the phrase “taking * to the next level,” tell me in the comments. I will remove the link and start hating whoever wrote the meaningless cliché.

: Zubon

Eliezer Yudkowsky offers an argument for tolerating dissent:

Wait until substantially after it seems to you justified in ejecting a member from the group, before actually ejecting. If you get rid of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will become the oddball.
…
It’s the articulate trolls that you should be wary of ejecting, on this theory – they serve the hidden function of legitimizing less extreme disagreements. But you should not have so many articulate trolls that they begin arguing with each other, or begin to dominate conversations. If you have one person around who is the famous Guy Who Disagrees With Everything, anyone with a more reasonable, more moderate disagreement won’t look like the sole nail sticking out.

His analogy starts with cults or theories whose adherents become more fanatical after having been proven wrong. All the sane and moderate people left. I am considering how this applies to blogs, forums, and games.

Continue reading Troll Tolerance

PAC-TXT:

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

From the front page:

Wth?! Why would anyone invest the time and effort to build such a useless game?
Well, I had just got back from a party where the concept of a Pac-Man + Zork hybrid came up as a joke. So, being 2am with a little alcohol in my system, I thought it’d be funny to code it up

: Zubon

There is a long-standing question of how law deals with virtual property. Is in-game theft theft? Does a raid produce wealth of a taxable value? And then there are the questions that come from RMT, since we can translate in-game values to US dollars pretty easily. (Last weekend’s math: a set of City of Heroes’ new purple enhancement recipes was worth ~$200 at the going consignment house/RMT rates.)

Have you ever wondered if having virtual gold could get you arrested? Last month, the US government raided a group that set up its own hard currency, under the claim that having any competing currency to the US dollar is a federal crime and a form of counterfeit (no word yet about attempts to enforce this on people using loonies and pesos). Unlike your raids from the weekend, this one came away with literal tons of gold, silver, and copper coins “medallions.”

At what point does in-game currency become a competing currency that the government will attempt to seize? We already have at least one example of meatspace prostitution for cyberspace gold. Second Life has been bobbing and weaving about its relationship to property, but Linden dollars are more or less fully convertible to US dollars, and Project Entropia has bragged about how its currency connects to out-of-game value. Most games even refer to their currencies as gold coins or dollars.

The Secret Service has not let “it’s just a game” get in the way before. Nor are the Lindens protected by operating outside the US. Note that the IRS considers barter and in-kind exchanges to be taxable income, so the raid could also be done on the grounds of tax evasion.

: Zubon