I had friends over for Valentine’s Day, as I frequently do, and this year I decided to make a playlist of songs about friendship, which were astonishingly hard to find. Although to be fair, I did exclude some songs ’cause I didn’t like them, but I should have been overwhelmed by options! Anyway, here is the playlist:
Many thanks to Deborah, Alice, and Kaesa for song recommendations.
Earlier this week, UK’s House of Lords dismissed a petition asking them to pardon Alan Turing for the crime of “gross indecency” (ie being gay), which he was convicted of in 1952. Turing, whose work was essential both to Britain’s victory in WWII and to the creation of the modern computer, was forced to choose between imprisonment and chemical castration. He chose chemical castration. Two years later, he committed suicide.
I find the reasoning for the dismissal interesting:
“It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offense which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”
Two things strike me about this. First, the insistence on respecting the law of the time, even while admitting it was “cruel and absurd.” If the situation were different and Turing were sitting in jail instead of sixty years gone, the fact that “the law at the time required a prosecution” would hardly justify keeping him imprisoned. So why does it justify rejecting a posthumous pardon?
Second, the last clause: “ensure instead that we never again return to those times.” Why is the pardoning of Turing considered separate and unrelated to the goal of progressing as a society? I would have more appreciation for their reluctance to try and “put right what can never be put right” if there was indication that any efforts were being made to keep something like this from happening again.
(It reminds me a bit of efforts to get Mary Whiton Calkins a posthumous Harvard degree. As far as I know the school hasn’t given a reason for their refusal, but I imagine it would be something along the same lines. ‘Obviously it was deeply sexist to deny women degrees. But rather than trying to change the past, let’s focus on creating a welcoming environment for women at Harvard’.)
The truth is that governments and other institutions – just like individuals – are making bad calls and hurting others, sometimes grievously, all the time. Colonization, slavery, disenfranchisement, human rights abuses, discrimination on the basis of race/gender/orientation/age/appearance/religion – these are not ancient phenomena. In many cases, they’re not even past phenomena. The more deeply we consider the wrongs of the past, the more clearly we can see them as linked to the wrongs we are currently doing. That’s where I think this resistance, this dismissal, is coming from. Pardon Turing, and you have to pardon thousands of others. Pardon thousands of others, and you start wondering how these convictions ever happened in the first place. Think about how thousands of people came to be prosecuted for simply being gay, and you have to start questioning how thousands of people are currently being discriminated against by current law for being gay.
It’s a slippery slope, and at the bottom is a giant pool of guilt and responsibility and hard work. So I understand, psychologically, why it’s so often avoided. But it’s also why I think these types of gestures are important. Who knows when a small step will lead to something greater – when communities will slip and fall and land butt first in real, fundamental change?
So. Correlations. They’re fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.
The most commonly used equation for determining correlations is the Pearson coefficient, usually denoted by r. The equation can be shuffled around quite a bit, but in one common form it looks like this:
In English, this means:
How does this tell us the relationship between two variables? To understand, we can use the concept of a regression line, although I won’t explore how to calculate one until a later post. Briefly, a regression line or line of best fit is a line drawn across your data such that there is the minimum possible distance of the data points, collectively, from the line. Another way to think of it, is that it’s the line drawn by the linear equation which best predicts x from y or vice versa. The correlation coefficient is a way of measuring how closely the data fit that ideal line.
A fake example to demonstrate, and then a calculation using political data are below the cut. (more…)
The other day at work, while I was hanging around the coffee machine, I saw a flyer for an IAP (read: Jan Term) course on “Serious Games”. It looked neat, so I emailed the instructor to get the syllabus, and I’ve started playing my way through. I figured I’d post my half-formed thoughts about how these projects work both as games and as tools to educate/persuade/mobilize people.
Before I started playing, I asked myself – what makes for an effective “serious game”? I came up with three criteria:
So, on to the first three games I played.
1. Gray
This is a short concept game: you are dropped down in the middle of an artfully drawn mob and tasked with convincing the rioters to change their minds. You can do this via a very simple mechanic which requires exactly two things: halfway decent timing, and a lot of patience. As you convince people, they change color and switch the direction they’re running in. Soon, everyone is black instead of white. Suddenly your character changes color, and you have to convince them to change back to their original color. Play for long enough, and you turn gray.
This game was too much of a blank slate for my taste. In the game’s forums, one of the designers explains, “sorry for being purposely obtuse, but there really is no one thing we want people to come away with, the fact that you guys came away with anything at all makes us feel like our experiment was worthwhile in some way.” The game seems to be the functional equivalent of saying, “Hey, have you noticed how people seem to have a sort of all-or-nothing approach to politics? Especially when they’re in crowds? What do you think about that?” Yes, Gray, I have noticed.
So: the gameplay didn’t engage me, the concept didn’t compel me, and the two didn’t work together — there was little about the game mechanics that resonated with the topic at hand, with the exception of how it was sort of difficult to make your character run against the crowd. Not an effective serious game, according to my criteria.
Against All Odds is a collection of twelve mini-games that attempt to “let you experience what it is like to be a refugee.” The mini-games vary widely in their effectiveness. Some have a great synergy of concept and mechanics, where the act of playing provokes empathy beyond what you’d get from merely taking in facts. Others seem less like a game and more like a classroom exercise with good artwork and animation.
There were moments I really liked. In “Interrogation”, you look down at statements you are being asked to sign. Wrong answers are followed by blood dripping down onto them. Effectively chilling. In “You Must Flee” you have two minutes to pack a bag, and the process of grabbing seemingly vital items like clothes and then hurrying to dump them out and replace them with true necessities before the authorities arrive left me feeling rushed and frustrated. (And having to leave my pet rabbit just killed me.) I liked that in “Leaving the Country”, the risky choice of helping others did not always turn out bad, nor did it always turn out well. In “New In Class”, your character learns to communicate without knowing the language, using well drawn visual and situational cues.
That said, there were so many places where this game could have been much better. “Leaving the Country” looks at first like a choose-your-own-adventure style mini game, but there is only one path through, and most of the dead ends are immediate. Why not let players flee the country by foot or boat? Why not have consequences for players jettisoning water or food instead of clothes? It doesn’t feel like a game when you’re just following a set path. “You Must Flee”, in addition to having a really frustrating interface, missed an opportunity to better capture its flavor: they could have used sightlines instead of physical proximity to guards to trigger capture, and encouraged the player to stick to the shadows, they could have used more hidden passageways and had more bystanders you had to decide whether or not to trust.
In the end, the majority of the mini-games were not really games at all. In many of them (“Shelter for the Night”, “Find the Interpreter”, “Shopping”, “Neighbors”) you just clicked on various things in your environment in order to see how a refugee might experience them. And in “Immigrant or Refugee” and “Origins” you step out of the refugee PoV entirely in order to learn lessons about what makes a refugee different than an immigrant, and how much Americans owe to other cultures.
I did like playing through Against All Odds, and I do feel as though I learned quite a bit. But I’m not sure it was terribly successful as a serious game.
3. Layoff
Another quick game with a simple mechanism. You mouse over workers standing in an 8 x 11 matrix, reading biographies so that you can match similar workers with each other. Once you have three or more contiguous workers, they all leave the board for the “Unemployment Office” at the bottom of the screen. They’re replaced by other workers, some of whom are bankers. Bankers cannot be laid off, making the game more difficult as you go along (although if you really get stuck, you can click a button reading “Bailout”.)
Again, it didn’t seem like there was much synergy between the concept/flavor/issue of the game, and the game mechanics. The objective was nominally to “match similar workers” to “eliminate redundancy” but the actual implementation (so! many! paragraphs!) made it hard to learn much from the game – I found myself guessing almost at random, and whenever I did successfully cause workers to swap whole swaths of the board would walk off before I had a chance to investigate what they had in common.
Layoff works mostly as satire, not as a game. It also, as satire, seems to be preaching to the choir – I don’t think there’s anything persuasive or educational about the game that would convince someone who was previously supportive of layoffs as an economic tool to rethink their position. No explanation of why layoffs are bad, beyond that they make people unemployed. (For contrast, what about a game where you and a bunch of AI-driven coworkers struggle to do certain tasks. As the CEOs lay off your coworkers, you must do more and more work just to get by, exhausting you and ruining your products.)
***
I was pretty disappointed with these games. That’s not a knock on the designers, because they’re all interesting in their own way – they just don’t fit my idea of a “serious game”. Because I chose to start with browser games, I might have ended up with an unusually short and simple set. Next time I’m going to try and find one that plays more like a traditional game with a serious spin, and see if there’s something more satisfying there.
The Mystery Hunt was last weekend. It was unexpectedly musicals-themed and expectedly exhaustingly awesome. I wanted to briefly highlight my favorite puzzles from this year:
My first puzzle of the hunt was Revisiting History, which was Doctor Who themed. The first set of answers were fun and easy to assemble, but it took us an embarrassingly long time to extract the final solution. (Not the writer’s fault, we were just warming up, I guess.)
Picture an Acorn is a puzzle full of puns. How could I not love it? It was voted best in the hunt.
And my personal favorite: Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts (So I made you a puzzle hunt in your puzzle hunt so that you can solve a hunt while you solve the hunt.) A really clever puzzle with several layers. It took us a while to solve but not because we were stuck staring at it for ages, rubbing our chins and wondering what to do next. It’s just very rich.
Those links bring you to the hunt website. You can get the solutions to the puzzles by clicking on the link in the righthand corner.
If you did the hunt this year, what puzzles would you recommend going back and doing?
