Play Unsafe

This is a cute little book by Graham Walmsley. In short, it is a collection of tips for bringing the improvisational acting techniques of Keith Johnstone's Impro into tabletop roleplaying. The spirit of the book is very much that by embracing interaction and improvisation, you will create a much better play experience than by rigidly sticking with a plan. The book is light, friendly, and fun, and offers a thoughtful perspective for designers of all sorts.

Wreck-it Ralph

I saw this when it first came out in the theater, but we just watched it again at home. I was struck by how different it was at home. So many of the scenes are large and full of tiny detail that was hard to make out on the small screen. It was really a movie made to immerse. I really liked all the classic videogame jokes, that was certainly fun, but what I liked most of all was the depth of the story rules. I always enjoy fantasy worlds that are based on deep rules, and this movie has so many, so interestingly intertwined. Let me see if I can enumerate them...

1. Game characters should abide by their programming.
2. Game characters are free to move about after the arcade is closed.
3. If a character dies outside their game, they die permanently. 
4. Some characters can suffer from "glitches."
5. Characters with glitches cannot ever leave their game.
6. Bugs in Hero's Duty are drawn to the beacon.
7. It is possible to access and manipulate game code.

...and on and on. I think if I worked at it, I would probably find about 25 or so of these. It makes sense that a story about game characters would be rife with rules. 

What I didn't like: so many characters were mean, angry, and rude. Ironically, the least angry character was Q*Bert. I don't think it was necessary to have absolutely every character be so angry and mean so much of the time... it was kind of off-putting. 

Anyway -- it certainly made me pine for the old arcade days, and I really was pleased to see such a solid and surprising rule-based storyline. I very much believe that if you want your story to seem real, it must be real to you. It certainly was real to the writers!

Less Than Art

My brother introduced me to Ookla the Mok... How did I not find these albums before? The songs are fun, a lot of rock tributes to 70's childhood, and other weird things. My most favorite is View-Master (amazingly not on youtube! All I could find were lyrics) followed by a song about the lack of restrooms on the Starship Enterprise, followed by a song about Aquaman. Yeah, so, like that. Given that their lyrics are so fun and clever, though, I do wish that they were more audible. Oh also... the cover! Genius!

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Useful advice about the right way to think about zazen practice. I've found books that that were very much about the practical aspects of zazen (how to sit, how to breathe, etc.) and others that were about the philosophical nature of zen, but this is the first one I've found that was about how one should think about one's practice. And it seems very important, because there seem to be many ways to think about your practice that can actually defeat the purpose of it. Side note: The audio quality of this CD set was surprisingly bad, like it was recorded on a cheap tape recorder. Maybe it was? Anyway, that doesn't matter much, because the advice was clear and useful.

Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology: The Exhibition

I had reason to be hanging around the National Geographic Museum in DC today, so I thought I would check this out. It's pretty cool! It is reminiscent of the James Bond Exhibit at the Spy Museum. Lots of artifacts from the movies, mixed in with various archaeological artifacts. Interestingly, it features a portable tablet with headphones that is somewhat essential to the exhibit. You enter numbers into it based on where you are in the exhibit, and it plays sound bites or short videos related to what you are looking at. There are several looping video clips on big screens in the exhibit, but they have no sound unless you enter their code, and then you hear synchronized sound in the headphones. The headphones are a clever construction that allow you to easily hear what people around you are saying, so you can easily have a conversation with them on. Few people did, though. Everyone's demeanor was as if they were walking through a tomb... and it looked like a tomb, so maybe that's okay? I am uncertain how I feel about the weird mix of things in this exhibit. "Making of the movie" displays are mixed in with real archaeology are mixed in with explanations of the inspiration for the fake things in the movie. Overall, it is a clever way to bring a relatively static installation to life. I did find myself wishing that the audio clips weren't so dry, or at least a little shorter. Maybe I wanted it to be more of a story? I'm not sure. Anyway, it's worth checking out just to see something a little different in museum design. Also: Crystal skull beer mugs in the gift shop.

Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective

This book has been lurking around my house for almost ten years now, I thought I better read it so I could get it out of here. By all rights, it should be terrible... an abomination. A Star Trek book about artificial life posing as a textbook? Come on. But... it's really not too bad. I thought it was going be a book about coding up a-life algorithms, but it isn't. It's more of a pop science book, using the many instances of AI in Star Trek as jumping off points to give high level explanations about things as diverse as cellular automata, vision systems, Markov chains, formal logic, fuzzy logic, basically all the stuff that a computer science undergrad trying to study AI is going to bump into. This book is ideal for a smart high school student who is into Star Trek and curious about AI. It's light, fun, and clever, has some good references, and it really knows its Star Trek. It would have done much better, I suspect, if it wasn't packaged like a textbook. Kudos to you, Penny Baillie-de Byl!

Tomorrowland

Gah! Such complicated feels about this movie! Let me see if I can try to unravel it all. (Spoilers ahead.) Tomorrowland made me feel...

Delight. Some of the scenes of "Utopia Tomorrowland" are EXACTLY out of dreams I have had. I believe in my dream diary somewhere I have sketches of the view of the anti-grav swimming pools as seen from inside a glass tube habitrail/monorail system. The main difference being that my tubes also went underwater. Maybe I should say this made me feel creeped out at how identical it was to my dreams, but really, I was too overwhelmed with delight. 

Pain. Oh, good lord, those early scenes where young Frank Walker is having his inventions derided because they (a) don't work and (b) are more fun than practical are all things that actually happened to me when I was his age, almost word for word. 

Validation. Yes, yes, yes! This is EXACTLY how I see the world! Making things better for everyone is the reason we are here! Why can't everyone understand that? This belief is the reason I do this, and this, and why I made this, and this, and this, and well, just about everything! 

Boredom. I think the biggest flaw of the film is that it spends a lot of time being mysterious and vague about what is actually happening. As a result, it was hard to emotionally care about the action. Sure, if the robots destroy the little girl, that would be bad... but, uh, what are the larger consequences? As viewers, we have no idea. I could feel this boredom from the whole audience. We all wanted to care, and we all cared in theory... but I don't think anyone was feeling edge-of-their-seat thrills due to so much vagueness. 

Sorrow. Athena's sacrifice was hard for me to take. Not only does she look a great deal like my fifth-grade first crush, but her attitude and mission were that of Peggy Van Pelt, who carried the culture of Imagineering in her own two hands for years until she, too, had to leave us unexpectedly. 

Hope. Okay, sure. There's a lot this movie does wrong in terms of entertaining an audience. But if I had seen this when I was twelve -- it could easily have made an major difference in my life. It may not be a box office blockbuster, but if it affects just a few dozen of the right young people the right way, it may have a legacy that is well worth the trouble it took to make this film. 

And there is so much more... the scene at the end with the kids looked to be taken straight from The Blue Bird, which implies a lot... the amazing Eiffel Tower scene, which I should have loved, but left me flat... George Clooney not having any real chemistry with the rest of the cast because, well, he is George Clooney.... though for the life of me, I have no suggestions for a better choice... all the connections to The Rational Optimist, the book that has given me more hope than any other for the fate of the human race, but I don't talk about it much, because I am pretty sure that our unrealistic pessimism is the engine that causes humanity to continuously improve.... God, this is all so complicated... this movie puts its finger on the center of a web of incredibly complex, unspoken, important ideas, but it does so clumsily... I really wish this film was better... but I'm not sure I see how to make it better. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but so, of course, is the road to Utopia. Thanks, Brad Bird and friends, for getting us one step closer.

Postscript: I’ve continued to think about this movie a lot. At first I wasn’t sure why. But as time went on it became clear to me. This isn’t just a movie to me, it is my religion, and when your religion is portrayed on screen, you want it to be done right. Here’s a brief stab at the tenets of said religion:

1. The universe wants us to help each other.
2. The human race is on a journey that is taking us ever closer to utopia.
3. We must work hard and use what gifts we have to make the world a wonderful place.

And what is fascinating about Tomorrowland is that it does an okay job of expressing these notions, and pointing out the fact that only a minority of us hold these beliefs – many more seem willing to (eager to?) wallow in misery that things aren’t easy, simple, or perfect. One of the most influential books I have ever read is The Rational Optimist, which, in glorious detail, outlines the fact that life for the human race has continuously improved for thousands of years, and explains why this trend is likely to continue. I agree with this, but the curious part is this: It may actually be irresponsible to proselytize this viewpoint too strongly or widely, for pessimism and worry about the future drives us to make it better. If everyone believes that everything is going to be fine, it may well be that we let things get worse and worse. The issue is probably moot, though, since in all ages and times it is part of human nature to generally believe that things are going to hell, and it seems unlikely that any about of zealous cheerleading about the power of human creativity is going to change that. The more I think about it, the more I start to think that a world comprised of 85% pessimists and 15% optimists might be the best thing, after all.

But that makes it sound like pessimism and optimism are static, when we know perfectly well they are dynamic: they change with age. Young people are naturally optimistic, old people are naturally pessimistic. And this is the story of Tomorrowland. A young boy who was once optimistic has been ground down into a cranky old pessimist by a cold, hard world. He meets a young girl who is an optimist, and he regains hope. It sounds like a reasonable story, so why is it such a mess? I have some new insights on that after thinking about it for a while.

1) The film fails to follow the Hero’s Journey. I’m not saying every movie should follow the hero’s journey, but when you are telling a story about an underdog saving the world, you should at least consider it. Several important elements of the journey are missing. “The call” is obviously there. But where is “the refusal”? Where is the “point of no return”? What part of the story is “the cave” exactly? Looking at the movie through this lens, these important scenes feel vague and mushy, not crisp and clear, and that vagueness does little to draw us into the story. Also confusing is the fact that the film is trying to relate two parallel stories, which leads to the next question…

2) Who is the protagonist? At first, it seems obvious that Casey is the protagonist. But is she? She behaves in no way like a hero, and undergoes no changes in the story. She is a frustrated optimist in the beginning, middle, and end of the story. She supposedly can “fix anything”, but she is given no opportunity to do so at any point during the story. She is used more as a “key” than anything else. So – it could be George Clooney? There is an argument for this, since he is the one who undergoes the transformation. Looking at the lens of the Hero’s Journey again, he fits the bill a little better… But not a lot better. A colleague of mine suggested that Athena  is really the protagonist – which I think might actually be true! She’s the only one who actually knows what is going on, she takes the most risks, and makes the greatest sacrifice. But we never get to see things from her point of view. Which leads us to possibly the greatest problem with the movie…

3) No one knows what is going on. Not our “heroes”, and not the audience. The film spends so much time trying to keep us in the dark, that we can’t really get attached to the plot or the characters. Villains appear – they are obstacles to our heroes… but obstacles to what exactly? What is their motivation? What are the consequences if the villains win? We don’t know, and so how can we care?

Anyway, sighs and sadness. I am writing this on a return flight from Walt Disney World. I felt sure that I would pick up an enamel Tomorrowland pin while I was there. Unfortunately, the film seems to have made so little impact that Disney didn’t even bother to make or sell them. In some ways, the whole Tomorrowland experience feels like validation of the film’s warning – that most people would prefer to let the world go to ruin. But at the same time, I can’t help but notice the meta-theming: if this movie was inspiring to everyone, it wouldn’t be a call to the select few who actually want to improve things. I can’t help but think that somehow, quietly, this film will end up being a signifier that those of my religion will use to find one another. That's why the pins aren't available to everyone at Disney World. After all – for reasons I have never understood, sloppy storytelling is a shared feature of all sacred texts.