Grues, Games, and Gainful Employment

So I now have requests in to several individuals to allow me to use them as professional references when I attempt to get a job this summer, and I'm just waiting to hear back before I start filling out online applications.

Seems like the old "sidle up to the place of employment with the classified ad clutched in hand" method of job-hunting seems to have fallen by the wayside. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed by that, but on the other I'm glad to be saved the trouble.

In any case, I've got two projects that will also be keeping my attention for the rest of the summer, along with (hopefully) my job. The first of them is a bit of interactive fiction that I started last summer, but put on hiatus when school started kicking my ass. I picked it back up again yesterday and added a few more rooms on to it, along with at least one instant game over for the player.

In my experience, IF enthusiasts seem to like those. At least, the third or fourth time I was strangled by the janitor in The Lurking Horror, that was the conclusion that I drew. Strangely enough, it had to be the time I went to try to catch the snippet of the game where you realize he didn't blink the entire bloody game that I figured out how to beat him. Go figure.

The other project is (at the suggestion of a friend) to write my own role-playing game. I've been working on the opening fluff since yesterday, and I've got a good solid four pages or so of it (single-spaced, at that). I'm liking it. It's going to have some nice layers to it, I think. Or at least as many layers as Western steampunk fantasy can have. After I'm done writing this I'm going to post a chunk of the fluff on Literary Bushido, just for the hell of it.

So between those two and the job I'll (optimistically) get, it seems I'll have a fairly productive summer. And hey, one of my reference hopefuls just emailed me and said that he would. Just one more to go before I start putting in applications.

Then I will be gainfully employed. How about that?

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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the primary reasons I actually put down the money for a PlayStation 2, so I was hoping for one helluva gaming experience when I finally popped it into the disc tray. Fortunately for me, I wasn't disappointed.

Colossus is like if Princess Zelda and the Prince of Persia, as representatives of their respective franchises, were to get utterly shitfaced at some shinding for the video game elite and wind up having incredibly hot, totally unprotected sex on the couch in the back room. Then, in the morning, they find they're both incredibly embarrassed, vow never to speak of that night again, and return promptly home.

Then six weeks later, Zelda discovers she's pregnant, and Link flips out and leaves her because he's been off questing for the past eight months. So, in grand romantic comedy style, Zelda and the Prince wind up together because of twue wuv, and when the little tyke is born they give the Cloverfield monster a call and ask him to be the godfather, which twists the kid's development in a serious way*.

The baby, if you follow the extended and painful metaphor, is Shadow of the Colossus.

In Colossus, you play as Wander, a seemingly archetypal young male heroic sort, who has come to the cursed, unpeopled land that serves as the game's setting in an effort to bring back to life a young woman named Mono. Wander's relationship to Mono is never made clear in-game. Is she his wife? Girlfriend? Sister? Mother, by dint of time-traveling weirdness? Does she owe him money? You never bloody find out. All you know is that she was sacrificed because she had a cursed destiny, and the story (for the sake of simplicity) seems to leave it at that.

Anyway, Wander arrives with Mono's body in a shrine, and there is given instructions by a voice from above calling itself Domin to slay the sixteen great colossi in this cursed land to complete the spell that will resurrect Mono.

So Wander sets out, astride his very talented stair-climbing horse Agro, to kill the terrible beasties and bring his girlfriend/sister/debtor back to life**.

As implied by the anecdote at the beginning of this review, the game plays like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and The Prince of Persia. Wander has a decidedly Link-like arsenal (a bow and a very European sword) but has some very Prince-like moves (the ability to grab hold of ledges and shimmy along them, for instance). His animations are very fluid, transitioning easily from one to the next.

Fluidity, however, does not imply grace. Wander has a tendency to stumble as he runs--a purely aesthetic addition, as it doesn't actually affect the distance he traverses, but it makes considerable sense. If you were hauling ass away from a sixty-foot titan that uses chunks of buildings for armor, you'd probably stumble a bit, too. Also, he freely flails about in grand ragdoll style as the colossi try to shrug off the deathgrip he uses to scale their furry hides.

The controls that make Wander do all these things--jump, shimmy, climb, and stab--are fairly intuitive. I'd hardly any experience at all with the PS2 controller when I began to play, but had little trouble in picking it up. There's even a button specifically used for targeting the colossi, which is really bloody sensible if you think about it, seeing how there are no other enemies in the entire game. I will warn you, however, that your right index finger will feel like it's about to break off from holding down R1, which is used for climbing. Also, it would've been nice if the jump button had not been the same as the mount button. There were a number of spare controls left, so I don't see why that wasn't possible, but having the same button do both leads to tedious moments when you're trying to mount Agro but instead wind up hopping beside him like an imbecile.

Riding Agro is something else to be considered. Agro is very much a character on his own terms, and acts considerably realistically as regards general horsiness. What this means is that any and all commands you issue Agro are more or less suggestions, which Agro may or may not take. He tends to be fairly agreeable, but he certainly isn't Epona. It takes him some time to respond to kicks that prompt speed and to tugs on the reins, which is frustrating initially but actually turns out to be incredibly useful as that same horsey intelligence means that you don't have to control Agro directly to keep him from running smack into walls--a definite bonus in one colossus battle where you have to ride him backwards in order to shoot the massive sandworm chasing after you.

This game pretty much redefined "epic" for the entire industry, I'd have to say.

Unlike Zelda and Prince of Persia, Wander gets no equipment upgrades and learns no special moves during the course of the game. He has everything he's ever going to have at the start of the game, and it's up to the player to make the best use of the lot of it. This basically means that each colossus battle is a puzzle resolved by divining how to make use of the tools and tactics at Wander's disposal to bring down the beast. You'd think that would get old fairly quickly, but let me assure you that it doesn't. Each colossus brings something new and entertaining to the table, keeping the game's central conceit from getting stale.

The game is short, clocking in at around nine hours, but that seems to be a good length for it. It manages to finish out the story (albeit in an anime-ambiguous sort of way) and make its exit before it wears out its welcome. Those nine hours, unfortunately, don't have a great deal of replay value. Once you've figured out the schtick that'll take down each of the sixteen colossi, there's not much left to do. There's not really anything left to do. The game is composed wholly of pretty landscapes, epic boss fights, and dark, bittersweet storytelling.

To sum up, I enjoyed this game immensely, even if its resolution left me as emotionally confused as a budding bisexual schoolgirl. The attention to detail is extraordinary, and everything from the colossi's models to the voice acting is excellently executed. Certainly worth the purchase if you're a freak like me who is only just now getting around to playing games released in 2005.

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* Sadly, it would not surprise me if there was a fanfic somewhere whose plot unfolds in precisely this fashion. The internet is a scary, sad place.
** If you're more the thoughtful sort (i.e. not Wander) you'd be asking serious questions at this point. Questions like "Why am I doing what a voice in a skylight tells me to?", "Why are there no people around here?", and "You want me to kill fucking what?"

Zen and the Art of Magic

I decided today (or yesterday, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) to go apply for a job at a nearby newspaper that I'd seen advertised. It seemed to be the ideal sort of thing for me: sitting at a desk taking calls from people wanting to buy classified ads. Nice, clean work environment, a steady paycheck, and I'd be working for a publication--being a writer, that's always a bonus.

Unfortunately, when I checked their classifieds today/yesterday (it's almost three in the morning, I'm not being too strange) I found that they were no longer advertising for that position. It makes me worry that it was already taken. I'm going to go there and make sure, of course, but I'm not holding out much hope. Hope has a nasty way of coming back and biting you in situations like this.

I've looked at a few other jobs. None of them appeal to me as much as the newspaper gig, but some of them might be serviceable. I'll just have to see how things turn out.

To deal with the disappointment, and also that I might have an activity while I waited to grow tired enough to go to bed, I took all the new Magic cards I've gotten over the past week or so and constructed a deck. It's blue/white, and its base is the deck that I threw together for last Friday's sealed deck tournament. I took out some of the things that just didn't function well within it and tried to limit it to being decent at only a few tasks. What I wound up with was a goodly number of denial tactics, spells that do unpleasant things to my opponent's creatures, and a small horde of my own creatures (almost all of whom have some manner of evasion ability, like flying).

The weird thing about the whole process is that I got very calm, very focused, and very content while I was sorting through what cards were going to go in and what ones were coming out. There was some serious Zen shit going on, and I have no idea why. I just sort of blocked out everything else, and an hour and a half or so later I had a deck that I think is actually pretty good, considering. It needs deck protectors, of course, because I think there's summat like three or four rare cards and two foil cards in there. While I may not be hardcore like some folk (I don't, for instance, drop $360 to buy four copies of a complete set) but I still like to protect the cards from accidental drink spillage and suchforth.

I don't know when I'm actually going to get to use my new deck. I suppose, like with the job opening, I'll just have to see.

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I don't know if anyone's ever slit their wrists by determined papercutting, but if I have to spend several hours a day stuffing inserts into newspapers I might just be the first.

Misanthropy and Wal-Mart

I was at Wal-Mart a couple days ago buying a copy of Final Fantasy XII and a sack of hamburger buns when it suddenly occurred to me that I positively adore the self-checkout option. Perhaps it was because I had to wade past the crowd of small children raising funds at the front doors, or it could be that I simply wasn't in a terrifically congenial mood, but I felt the need to come up with something to explain this sudden and inexplicable affection for automated purchasing. What I conjured I believe I shall dub the Strong Misanthropic Principle, and it reads thusly:

"The fewer people I have to interact with in order to get my necessary shit done, the better."

It's fairly simple, straightforward, and to the point. None of this weird vagueness of meaning associated with the regular old anthropic principle and all its myriad variants. Of course, the various anthropic principles (strong and weak) could all use some consideration at some point, because I have some very pointed, and probably very unique, views on precisely how wrong the lot of them are.

I have pointed views on lots of things, however. Honestly, it's a surprise that I don't just stab people when I turn around in a crowded room.

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Balthier? What's that philanderer doing here? I'm supposed to kill him, not these imperial scum!

Friday Night Magic

Well, tonight I played Magic: The Gathering for the first time in about four years. I actually did better than I thought I would, oddly enough. It was a sealed-deck tournament, wherein each participant got a tournament pack (45 spells and 30 basic lands) and two booster packs (15 cards each) and composed a deck on the spot. I wound up playing blue/white, primarily because I had some nasty blue spells and one big white Angel, Twilight Shepherd, that was a 5/5 with flying, didn't need to tap to attack, would come back from the dead one time after she was killed, and had really pretty artwork. She was epic, and I managed to (somehow) bring her out in almost every game I played in. A definite gamewinner, for certain.

The competitors were not a fairly diverse lot, gender-wise. There were nine men, including myself, and one incredibly intrepid (and cute) woman who I think was a few months pregnant and not shy about her decolletage. I expect she got a distraction bonus during gameplay.

See what I did there? That was French. I could've just said "boobs", but I went the classy route.

Anyway, in the first round I was up against Mr. All Business, who had a habit of using as few words as humanly possible to express his thoughts. Take this exchange, for example, which took place after our first game (each round was best of three games):

Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "...I'm sorry?"
Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "I'm not sure if I know what you're asking."
Mr. AB: "Do you want to draw a card first, or play first?"

At that point I managed to divine that he was asking (since I'd lost the previous game) whether I wanted to go first or second, as the first player to go doesn't get to draw a card. It only took three tries. This habit didn't irk me so much as make me feel uncomfortable. It was terribly impersonal. Also, when I won the second game we played, he started picking his cards up before I actually went through the motions of taking my turn and issuing the winning attack and whatnot. It was a little thing, but it was kind of rude.

So anyway, after that I went on to my next opponent, The Rules Lawyer, who was built like a bloody football player. I got my ass handed to me two games in a row by this bloke, who was significantly friendlier than Mr. All Business but also happened to be brutally in command of all the minutiae of the rulebook. An example:

The RL: "So I attack with my 2/2 creature, here."
Me: "Okay. I block with my 2/2. They both die."
The RL: "Nope, see I activate this other creature's ability, which removes my creature from play until the end of the turn, but damage was already dealt, so your creature dies from lethal damage but the damage doesn't affect my creature because it's out of play."
Me: "O...kay. Shit."

He pulled that kind of shit both games. Apparently he'd been on the serious tournament circuit and that's where you pick this stuff up. It was beyond me, though, and my knowledge of the mechanics was so rusty I was in no position to argue. After we were through playing, he asked if he could leaf through my deck just to see what I'd put in it, then he took a look at the other cards I wasn't using. He promptly informed me that here are several cards that I should put in my deck, and also I should have been playing black and something because I had some wicked awesome black spells.

I told him I always went black back whenever I used to play, and that I figured I should try something new. He shrugged and seemed to think I should've gone black/some other color anyway.

My third opponent was The Aging Newbie. He was in his late fifties, looked like, or maybe he was in his early fifties and did a lot of drugs early on. Distinct possibility. Anyway, he only started playing a month or so ago (as had the token woman) and was still a bit sketchy on the rules. I helped him along as best I could in spots, though there was one bit of advice I was going to give him afterward that I forgot to. He was always very nervous about attacking, even when he had six or so creatures and I only had three or four. Sure, he would've lost some of them, but they would've taken a few of my defenders down with them. In any case, he was the nicest of the lot. The rest of them were apparently just in it to win, but The Aging Newbie seemed to want to sit down and play a game, which was refreshing. I won both games I played against him, but I think he took it in stride.

Most of the people there seemed to have lost track of the fact that Magic is, in point of fact, a game. Maybe half of us actually seemed to be having fun, and the rest were crouched vulturelike over their cards with determined grimaces. They were the ones who filled out the top four at the end of the third round and got to continue. The other six of us hung around long enough for the random drawing to determine which two got special foil cards, then sidled on out into the night.

For some perspective, by way of listening I found out that one of the guys what didn't make it to the final four makes a habit of buying complete sets of Magic cards. But he doesn't just buy a single complete copy of a set, oh no: he buys four. So he can be sure to have four copies of each card in the set for deckbuilding purposes. That's insane.

It was an interesting experience, all told. I'm just sort of sorry that it was so gorram competitive. I mean, I went in there knowing it was a tournament, and that practically by definition there would be some manner of prize at the end, but I didn't know anyone would be so bloody dead-set on winning. I guess it was too much to expect a pleasant and sociable game with people I hardly even knew.

In any case, I think I've got Magic out of my system now, at least for the time being. It's one thing playing a game friendly-like, and quite another playing for fame, fortune, and foil cards. I'll take friendly-like anyday, and I even began to feel partway through the tourney that perhaps I should have spent my evening with friends instead of with complete strangers. I think I would have felt somewhat more fulfilled by that.

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Well, ah'll be Gosh Durned. Ain't this a fine how-do-ya-do.

Review: Dwarf Fortress

So a few days ago I downloaded a freeware game called Dwarf Fortress. I had heard interesting things about it, so I decided to give it a shot, not expecting altogether much. What I discovered was an incredibly and strangely addictive game that is an ingenious exercise in real-time strategy and low-level artificial intelligence.

The game starts out by naming and fractally rendering a world. This isn't just the little swatch you're going to build your soon-to-be village, on, however. This is the entire. Bloody. World. It simulates corrosion by running water, raises a few mountains, busts out some greenery, and suddenly there's landscaping. Then it goes through and names each individual location (I believe in the world belonging to the screenshot above there is a Swamp of Despair or some such) and determines where the civilizations of this new world make their homes. It then (evidently) generates legends and folklore for the world. The whole process takes around ten minutes.

Now would be a good point to mention the graphics involved, or the lack thereof. As you can tell in the screenshot above, everything is rendered in colored ASCII characters. The whole business was baffling as hell to start out with--I could barely tell plants and trees from grass--but after a while you get used to it, and the interface begins to make more sense. And the time that would've been spent on graphics has apparently been rerouted into the gameplay itself.

After the world is generated, you choose a place to plop down your group of intrepid pioneers, and then you're off. You have a handful of dwarves (represented by smiley faces of various colors, depending on their profession) and some limited supplies, and the name of the game is civilization...that is, the forging thereof.

I set my first fortress by and in a sandstone mountain. This may not have been the brightest thing, but it certainly made digging by my miner (who has officially reached "legendary" as his mining skill) easier. Unfortunately, it also meant that there was almost no proper stone to build things with, so I had to make do with wood for a good long while as supplied by my woodcutter and shaped by my carpenter.

Here's the thing, though: each dwarf isn't defined merely by their profession and randomly-generated name. Each one has an array of skills (which may or may not be related to their profession) and a collection of likes, dislikes, and thoughts that can be accessed by selecting them. Their thoughts in particular can serve as a guide for improvements to the settlement. And it's always amusing to take someone as useless as a jeweler and turn them into the campus cook.

Speaking of such, each dwarf must be fed, clothed, and otherwise taken care of lest they become grumpy, fall ill, or even die. This is easier than it sounds, however. My hamlet (that's its official title) has a little over thirty dwarves, and there have been no complaints about hunger. Early on there were problems with food rotting in the stores, but that was taken care of by setting aside an area for trash outside the mountain.

After the first year of game-time, traders begin stopping by the village from other civilizations. Most of the traders that have come by Diamondcastles (that's the name of my hamlet translated from dwarfish--kind of poncy, I know, but what can you do?) have been elves, who are literally tree-hugging hippies. They refuse to take any goods manufactured from wood. Since I only recently struck upon a vein of workable stone, there hasn't been much actual trade, so I can't really speak to that aspect of the game.

Similarly, I can't speak to the combat/military aspect, as I only today set up a group of individuals whose collective profession was literally "peasant" as recruits, and they're a ridiculous little lot. There's four of them, and their job is (or would be, if the dwarves actually spoke) to stroll around outside the mountain and shout, "Four o'clock and all's well!" Also, the late game in which the village becomes a true bastion of short, bearded culture protected by siege engines, and the--well, intergame, for lack of a better word--in which a lone dwarf strikes out from the fallen ruins of said bastion of culture to set up another somewhere else in the world are equally mysterious to me.

To say the absolute least, there is a shit-tonne of content in this game, and the dwarves behave in surprising and sometimes very human ways. One threw a party yesterday around the statue in the main hall (represented by the white omega symbol above).

I have only two problems with this little gem: its interface, which is not the most intuitive thing in the world, and the complete micromanagement clusterfuck gameplay must become once the fortress becomes large enough. The interface is a series of menus accessed by keypresses (as seen above), which wouldn't be so bad if all the menus behaved more or less the same. Most of them seem to want to be off in the corner playing by themselves instead of joining the rest of the class, however, so it's a bit of a crapshoot as to whether any given menu will operate with ease. Unless there's some mechanic to take the "micro" out of "micromanagement", which happens to be a major part of the early game, the late game has to get indescribably complex. I have yet to get there, however, so it's hard to tell.

In any case, I would heartily recommend this game, as it is by and far worth the download. But only play it if you happen to have several hours to spare. You wouldn't think that watching smiley faces scooting around would be that engaging, but the second time I sat down to it I lost two and a half hours. After all, those smiley faces have gotta eat.

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I'll build a well when I get to it, dammit!

Concerning Colossi

It has been a fortuitous day, today. Remember that PlayStation 2 I've been chatting about for so long? Well, I was finally able to buy the bloody thing. I got it set up and spent a little under two hours playing Shadow of the Colossus, and the whole business rocks on toast in a serious kind of way. Once I've played a good chunk of Colossus (and potentially beaten it) I'll post a review.

Game reviews are actually something I hope to make a regular part of this blog. I would be utterly content to review games for a living, if it was at all possible. Unfortunately, I suspect that those jobs happen to be extremely competitive. Lots of folk want to write about video games for a living.

In any case, my next post will most likely be a review, though not of Colossus. It will cover another (freeware) game, Dwarf Fortress, that has seized my attention in a very violent way and doesn't seem to want to let it go. I'll never know what precisely makes ASCII games so addictive. I suppose because the graphics are so bloody simple that a lot more time gets spent on the actual game. That makes a kind of sense, really. The game industry ought to be informed.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a minor domestic crisis to attend to.

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There can only be one...kind of.

...It's Over?

So I took my last final exam as an undergraduate today. ...Last final exam? I think this may be the only case in which that phrase is not actually redundant. Anyway, I was terribly worried about it, mostly because I hadn't really gotten a chance to properly study for it, but it all seems to've turned out all right.

I won't be getting to walk for graduation this evening. I have a show to do, and it would kind of put them in a bad way if I wasn't there. Main character and all that. I'm not especially fussed about it, though. The only thing I'd miss would be the sense of closure I'd get from it. I've been at this malarkey for four years, the absolute least I should get to do is prance around in a dress^H^H^H^H^Hrobe and mortarboard for a bit and have people clap for me. But what can you do?

I'm not sure what I expected, with graduation. What I would've liked was for some sort of Highlander-styled academic Quickening to take place, with lightning jagging down from the sky and infusing my jerking body with the sublime power of a Bachelor of the Arts, but I don't think that Real Life has a budget for special effects. Which is a shame, if you think about it. But I'm not sure what I expected.

I expected to feel rather more accomplished, I guess. Don't misunderstand me, I feel accomplished, just not in any profound sort of way. Mostly I feel tired. The sort of exhaustion you get after finishing a massive project and seeing that hey, maybe you did an all right job with it after all. Which I suppose sums up my feelings about how my undergraduate education went.

I'm not looking forward to being on the low end of the graduate totem pole next fall, though, wherever I wind up at. And I'm going to miss the friends that I've made in this program, of course. There's no guarantee that I'll never see them again, and if I hang around here for my graduate schooling I more than likely will see them, but somehow I'm not sure it'll be the same. There were a lot of people who I really liked, and a few people who I was only just getting to know but whose company I enjoyed, and leaving all that behind (in a sense) is kind of distressing.

On the other hand, escape from undergraduate school means being able to move out, which is a definite plus however you cut it. I'm not sure where I'm moving to or when, but I know that it will most certainly be out. And as part of a sort of package graduation present, my parents have gone ahead and paid for my ordered copy of CthulhuTech, which is most definitely groovy.

Also, with my Saturday paycheck, I'll finally be able to pick up that PlayStation 2. So all in all, life is pretty good, I think. Things'll be a bit confused for a while, but it'll all turn out.

Things usually do.

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Sing from your VAGINA!

Jerry Holkins Is A God

And today's Penny Arcade proves it. The funniest thing? I know exactly what they're talking about. In my younger days, I myself experienced a great deal of puzzlement over what precisely a vagina looked like. Sure, there were those line drawings in Sex Ed, but they basically rendered the female body with the featureless crotch of a Barbie doll. Like Tycho, I'm not going to go into details as to what shape my abstract pubescent theories gave vaginas, just know that it did indeed differ significantly from the real article (which I have since seen both by way of the internet and up close and personal-like).

Even as far back as kindergarten, boys give consideration to this mystery of the universe, as well as hypothesizing as to the uses of various other feminine anatomical features. I recall sitting in a circle with several other little boys one day as we all attempted to divine what strange and unique purpose breasts served.

The running theory was that they were how girls peed.

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In the fifth grade, I knew someone who claimed to have seen a vagina. He told us wild tales about them, like some mad woodsman.

Finals Week Cometh

And I suppose I could make a joke about having to clean up after it, but that would require effort on my part.

In any case, here I am, a mere three days away from being a fully-fledged graduate from a state university--and I'm oddly calm about the whole business. I mean, sure I have two finals that will involve summat like two hours of solid writing each, and I still have to finish my final project for Stage Costume (only three more renderings to go!), but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good about the world.

I spent a chunk of the morning yesterday relearning how to play Magic: The Gathering by watching the videos concerning the topic that Wizards of the Coast has posted on YouTube. The acting is subpar and the humor is eye-rollingly painful, but they weren't a bad primer. If you want to have a chuckle at a guy who loves gesturing more than life itself, you should take a look.

Now, you're probably wondering, "PS, you handsome devil you, didn't you shrug off the old addiction to cardboard crack some years ago? What's got you peering into the depths of the black abyss of collectible card games again?" And that's a perfectly valid question, particularly when phrased in that precise manner. The answer is simple.

I got to reading a book called Gaming as Culture, a more or less scholarly look at tabletop RPGs, computer RPGs, collectible games, and the subculture associated with it all. It was an interesting read, one which I agreed with on some occasions (like when it asserted that there can be as real a sense of community in something like World of Warcraft as there can in meatspace) and disagreed with on other occasions (like when one essayist basically suggested that all roleplaying games are hypermasculinized powertrips engaged in by males who have been desexualized or feminized by society and in which women are at best marginalized and at worst openly degraded), but the articles on collectible games reminded me of something that I had never really gotten around to: Magic tournaments.

I'd never engaged in tournaments because my deck basically took cards from just about every set ever released, except maybe the first two, and tournaments are very picky about what they allow in terms of cards. But I discovered with this book that there are sealed-deck tournaments, in which you show up, pay your entry fee, get a tournament pack and a couple of boosters, and proceed to build your deck on site. So its playability (insofar as being legal) is basically guaranteed. It also means that nobody gets an undue advantage by slinging money around and picking up the best cards to stick in their decks. You get what you get, and that's it. There's a certain bourgeois appeal to the whole business.

So Friday after next, I'm going to attend my first ever Magic: The Gathering tournament. I'm hoping it'll be as fun playing as I remember it being.

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I'm gonna rip yer face off.

Reality as a Matryoshka Doll

Imagine for a second that there is a game programmer. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we're going to assume that this programmer is of uncanny talent, prodigious intellect, and unusual bloody-mindedness.

This programmer is sitting at a computer. Again, for the purposes of this experiment, we're going to posit that this computer is one of unusual potence as regards processing power.

Now this programmer is, at this particular moment, endeavoring to create a game engine that can animate something--say, a robotic arm--with as much accuracy as possible. He starts out by going at it the usual way, having the application instruct a texture-mapped polygonal model that has been bound to an invisible skeleton that defines its range of movement to follow specific predefined animations laid out by the model's designer.

Around about three in the morning, after his fifth cup of coffee (two sugars, no cream) and a quick pick-me-up sandwich (BLT, naturally) it begins to occur to his sleep-deprived brain that there must be a more efficient way of going about all this. That the whole laborious process of designing the three-dimensional object, texture-mapping it, designing the skeleton, binding it to the skeleton, recording its necessary animations, and uploading it to the game engine could be made completely obsolete if only the game engine would presuppose the existence of such a mechanical arm and its functions in the first place.

So he gets a sixth cup of coffee (gin, no cream) downs it, and gets to work.

Two days later he has created an engine that animates objects from the subatomic level on up, and manages to compile it and set it in motion before passing out in a puddle of his own drool.

And as he does this, a virtual void is suddenly and violently populated with a set amount of raw matter, which promptly begins the task of coalescing into virtual planets, virtual stars, virtual galaxies, on and on until on a smallish volcanic planet virtual life springs up, which then proceeds to quickly and violently evolve, altering the world on which it lives, and eventually producing (of its own accord), a virtual robotic arm in a virtual lab of perhaps not the precise design required, but close enough to do the job.

Then somewhere on that smallish (now blue) world, it turns out that not only has this experiment produced a virtual robot arm, but that there is, as it turns out, a whole host of virtual programmers. And one of them happens to be of uncanny talent, prodigious intellect, and unusual bloody-mindedness...

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We may need you to play twing-twang.