Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Secret Quests? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, May 31 2007 08:12
Profile
It's been a while, but what I remember is that your finally encounter with Komoa is on the Isle of Spears. Komoa has been driven mad by canister abuse or something, blames you for this, and attacks. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Secret Quests? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 30 2007 10:40
Profile
No, you can see the end to Komoa's story near the end of G3, if you play along with him. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 30 2007 10:36
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quote:Certainly: Paris. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Amateur historians in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 30 2007 02:42
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Well, whenever the various Bible stories got written down in its current form, their sources are clearly a lot older than Pliny and Plato. The Noah tale, for instance, is a prehistoric myth represented in at least two other cultures that I know of. There may very well have been some actual ur-Noah somewhere, sometime, who salvaged a bunch of people and animals from some big flood. Or maybe not: a lot of ancient cultures dealt regularly with floods, and the story of an ark could plausibly have been invented as fiction in such a society. It's a profound story even today, though, because it is so often true that an essential kernel can be preserved through calamity, if precautions are taken early enough to seem absurd at the time. Somehow hearing and heeding divine warnings to take those absurd precautions is an example of how spirituality can sometimes be better than reason. That, after all, is the real crux of the flood story: that Noah built an ark far inland because he heard God say so. The Noah story is of course full of too many extraneous details to be an ideal allegory for this principle of timely irrational precaution through inspiration; but those details make it stick in your mind better, and make it more real. In other words, it's not an allegory but a parable. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A2 shareware barrier in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 30 2007 02:07
Profile
Thanks. It seems, alas, that the shareware barrier is intact. I saw some pop-up about a shareware demon as I crossed a bridge into the Vahnatai lands, but it disappeared too quickly to read. I thought maybe it was the barrier itself, but evidently it was just a warning that the barrier was near. It's remarkable how much there is in the A2 demo; even the cool Dark Waters chapter. I don't say 'alas' because I begrudge Jeff his money, but because I can't really afford any more nights where I stop playing A2 at 4 AM. It would probably have happened again last night, even though I'm just about out of things to try in the demo, except for a providential kernel panic around 1 AM, after which I looked at the time. The barrier is too convenient a stopping point to ignore, so good sense gets to triumph for once. Maybe I'll take A2 up again in the summer. After Nethergate: Resurrection I've gotten over my distaste for the Avernum graphics, and the games seem to be pretty good. [ Wednesday, May 30, 2007 02:13: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Amateur historians in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 29 2007 11:41
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No, the Bible is not really big on being coherent. It is, after all, a pastiche, with most if not all of the traditionally identified books being multiply edited compilations of earlier books. (In Genesis, in particular, you can identify the stitching points quite distinctly, because the different sources consistently use different names for God.) But very little of the discernible editing seems to have been in the cause of presenting a single coherent story. One of the very funny things about the Bible, in fact, is its consistent preference for offering alternative versions in parallel, instead of harmonizing them into single, unified accounts. Even in the most overt sense of parallelism, there are two creation stories, two versions of the ten commandments, two versions of the David saga, and no less than four gospels. And in subtler ways, a lot of divergent passages on similar themes are included, without having been hammered into a single clear party line. The Bible is a pervasively polyoptic scripture. I'm not really sure what to make of this, though. And I'm not terribly up on many other ancient documents. What ones are they that seem more coherent than the Bible? Are they perhaps simply much shorter? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| I just thought some of you might want to be informed of this potential heretic. in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 29 2007 05:30
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quote:When you're secretly taking over the world, the fear and loathing of those who suspect but dare not believe is one of the best parts. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Strategy in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 29 2007 04:00
Profile
Suppose we distinguish between strategy and tactics. I don't really know any distinction except for scale: tactics is about individual battles, strategy is bigger and longer term. People also distinguish grand strategy from plain strategy, as being larger scale still. Tactics in Spiderweb games are not extremely complex, but they do make a difference. Everybody has tried a tough fight a few times, trying to find the best way to do it. If there is a best way, it's probably obvious in hindsight, so then afterwards we don't think there was any serious tactics involved. But the fact that we regularly take several stabs at Spiderweb battles seems to say that in fact the games have non-trivial tactics. Strategy is always limited in CRPGs, since at best they have only tactical AIs. At the strategic level they are all purely passive. In a sense they even have negative strategy, since the games are rigged to be beaten, instead of being designed to thwart the player. On the other hand passivity also eliminates most of the value of strategy on the part of the player. You can't cut an enemy's communications and supply lines, or take out its command center, because none of these really exists. Usually the only way your actions in any one area affect anything in another area is that your characters take stuff (like new equipment or spells) from the first area and bring it to the second. So there's a bit of strategy in less linear games, deciding what order to do things in, in order to build up your party most efficiently. Spiderweb games do have that element, or there wouldn't be so much demand for the FAQs. It would be very interesting, though, to see just how responsive a world could be made, with tons of Stuff-Done-Flags. In principle I think a lot could be done in this direction. The question is whether you really make the game more fun by doing so, given the opportunity costs involved. Time spent working out how the game will react differently to different player decisions is time that can't be spent making a single game track longer or more interesting. Back when I was a DM, I tried to encourage my D&D players to think up creative strategies, and tell me about them before I started work designing stuff. Once I started writing dungeon, though, I used every trick I could to surreptitiously eliminate player strategic options; because every time they had a major meaningful choice, it meant that I had to do twice as much work for the same amount of actual gameplay. Perhaps in the end RPGs are only games at the tactical level. Strategically, they are stories. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A2 shareware barrier in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 29 2007 01:52
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Where is the shareware barrier supposed to be in A2? I have an idea that I may have tunneled through it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Secret Quests? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 26 2007 08:55
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Yes, you can see Komoa again. It's not a hugely important story arc, so don't expect too much, but it is interesting. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Complexity sidebar in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 26 2007 00:43
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For me this has gone on long enough. Lots more could be said about fossil evidence and all the questions Stillness wants to talk about, but there is no point in discussing it with Stillness. Meaningful discussion of anything requires being able, at some point, to fill in logical steps. We have pressed Stillness point-blank to do so for his own pet argument, for pages and pages. Ash flashed him a clear example of the kind of thing he was being asked for. Stillness just ducks and stalls, ducks and stalls, ducks and stalls. Either he's being dishonest, and is deliberately and cynically avoiding a point that gives him trouble; or he is laboring under the very unfortunate mental handicap of really not getting what reason is all about. Lack of education can be overcome. The fact that he really doesn't seem to understand what reason is, that's too big an obstacle for me. His key argument about complexity is like a sentence that's missing the verb, and he doesn't seem to know what he's missing, after having it pointed out again and again and again. He seems to think we're all just using some annoying debating tactic against him, or are all very dim. His arguments on any of the other interesting points of this thread are likely to be similar. And his appreciation of any of our arguments will be just as atrocious. I give up. Thanks to everyone who has played along in my experiment on focus. I've found it interesting. It was successful in one thing at least, in that it exposed Stillness's basic logic deficit. While it is always tempting to suspect one's opponent of such a thing, a discussion that ranges over many points makes it hard to be sure. I don't mean to declare the debate over, just that I am leaving it. I feel I owe Thuryl a beer. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, May Update in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 26 2007 00:17
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I think I understood your point, and that it had nothing to do with plagiarism; we all took for granted that Jeff doesn't look at scenarios. I just don't know Exodus, either, so I don't know how similar A5 is likely to be. But really none of us does. I hope you don't feel bad when it comes out, and until then I hope you won't worry about feeling bad. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Amateur historians in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 26 2007 00:06
Profile
quote:The whole literal inerrancy thing, which is really a small minority view, is a terrible lens through which to view the Bible. It's an ancient book, and while it's remarkable in that there aren't many books of its age, nothing in its composition seems supernatural. It's a product of its times. Considered as such, rather than as a miraculously inerrant text, it's an amazing document. To me it seems profound and subtle enough that I can buy it as divine revelation. Even if you don't want to go that far, though, you miss a lot of deep ideas by miscasting it as an inerrant history text, whether false or true. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Amateur historians in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 25 2007 23:53
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quote:No! A secondary source is something some other writer like you wrote, on your topic. A primary source is a direct piece of evidence. So a letter written by a Civil War private to his mother is a primary source. The History Channel website is a secondary source. Primary sources are essential in history. Without them, all you have is people making stuff up about the past. But most primary sources are obscure and hard to find, which is a big reason why we need secondary sources. The other reason is that primary sources rarely make any effort to reach any kind of big-picture understanding of what was going on. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Firing every gun in Blades of Avernum | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 25 2007 23:36
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Pearlblossom seemed to work fine for me; she made the points Jeff said she made. The puzzle box would be much more frustrating, I think, because you want to see what's in it; but by the time I found it I already knew there wasn't any way to open it, so I was happy to keep it as an indication that dragons are mysterious. So I don't buy the interpretation of Chekov's principle that forbids all possible loose ends. But I picture Chekov talking about rather small sets without too many props, and a prominent gun that draws the audience's attention. A gun is obviously something that could do a lot. Moreover, the official Chekov principle is not that the gun must be fired, but that somebody must be thinking of firing it. The story doesn't necessarily have to take the obvious path, but it has to recognize and address it. And this seems to me to be more generally valid. On this view, Chekov's gun in Nethergate isn't against Pearlblossom. It would be against never having a big battle between Celts and Roman soldiers. From the beginning of the game onward the player is reminded of Roman legions demolishing Celtic resistance, and there are plenty of Roman troops wandering around the fort area. The Legion is the gun placed prominently onstage. Will it ever attack any of these weird Celts and Faeries? And in the end it does, Bang! For me, it would have also been acceptable to have no such battle, but instead a dialog pane that offers some excellent reason why the big Roman attack can't happen. For example, Nero recalls everyone, playing the theme of Roman military might against the theme of Roman political corruption. Not as fun in a CRPG as a big fight, but dramatically okay. The gun doesn't have to be fired, as long as its firing is considered. What I really don't like are big, obvious possibilities that are simply ignored. Chekov's gun as the elephant in the middle of the room. I can't think of any cases where Jeff has done that, but I bet it's a problem for beginners. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Firing every gun in Blades of Avernum | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 25 2007 06:47
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To me BoA is just something I might try in some happy distant day when I have lots more time, but I'm generally interest in the theory of game design, so this might be a good question for this board. Chekov laid down the rule for drama, that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." This has been elaborated by various people. I first heard it as a rule for short stories, that a gun mentioned in the first paragraph must be fired by the end of the story. Does this principle apply to CRPGs? Jeff has said, in connection with his plans for A5, that in future he wants to have tighter plots, with chokepoints and channels so that players can't wander randomly over wide areas, doing or not doing all sorts of things in arbitrary order. This seems to me to be going in a Chekov's gun direction. On the one hand it sounds like a nice, disciplined principle. But on the other hand, the problem with Chekov's gun is that it telegraphs the drama's punches. (Metaphor Kama Sutra for the win.) See the gun, wait for the shot. So Chekov's gun only really works for you if you're the first person doing it; once everyone does it, it sucks. And CRPGs are so full of conventions anyway, designing one according to Chekov's gun will just make it obvious and predictable. Or? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, May Update in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 25 2007 06:18
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I've only ever played the BoA VoDT demo, so I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but I'd be surprised if Kelandon really had anything to worry about. 'Long trip with lots of cool stuff along the way' is a great game theme, but it's not great for its originality. It's great because there are endlessly many great ways of implementing it, which means there's lots of room for A5 and Exodus to be cool in quite different ways, despite both being odysseys through (and/or beyond) Avernum. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Complexity sidebar in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, May 24 2007 10:20
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quote:FYT. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Complexity sidebar in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 20:53
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I don't think he's a troll, though his arguments do seem to regenerate. Stillness is at any rate also not Behe, and I don't think there is any further need to define his concept of irreducible complexity. It isn't Behe's; it's this much simpler property of not working when any major component is abruptly removed. He observes that some irreducible complexity is produced by design. How any conclusion follows from this has still not been explained. If a guy's $100 bill has suspiciously smudgy printing, it is not reassuring that he can wave nine other bills around. Bad arguments are as cheap and easy as fake banknotes, and just as worthless, however many there are. And believing something for ten reasons that under close scrutiny all turn out to be incoherent or circular does amount to believing something because it just feels right. So let's stick to the complexity thing, at least in this thread. No dinosaur collagen, no other issues, fascinating though they are. It is fair enough to talk about specified as well as irreducible complexity here. But this isn't like Quake, where fragging one guy offsets the fact that you got killed by someone else. Maybe Kelandon can't actually find an example of natural specified complexity, or maybe he can: I don't care. My current position on specified complexity, which I think is also Khoth's, is not that it is naturally occurring, but that it is meaningless, in such a way that arguments from specified complexity boil down merely to 'designed things are designed'. My interest right now, though, is in the irreducibility argument, and I won't accept any amount of success on specificied complexity as an excuse for not dealing with irreducibility. [ Thursday, May 24, 2007 00:02: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Amateur historians in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 12:01
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Here's something weird. I've read several books on Napoleon I and his wars, but I only own one book on Waterloo. It's by one David Hamilton-Williams, Bt., B.Sc., ARHist.S. It's engagingly written, has voluminous footnotes citing all sorts of impressively primary looking sources (Hanoverian archives and the like), and offers viewpoints on the battle that are both novel and persuasive. The style is a little more breathless than you could find in an academic historian, but the author comes across as an enthusiastic but very diligent amateur, with a lot of things worth saying. If you google this guy, you find tons of pages about his books. But you also find a lot of allegations that Hamilton-Williams is actually a pseudonym for a guy who is no baronet, but a convicted fraudster. And that most of the primary sources he cites in support of his novel claims do not actually exist. This is the kind of thing that you just can't fight if you're only an amateur history buff, because you have no way of telling that this seemingly cool book is actually a load of crap. If it is; the people who make these accusations are also somewhat vague, and have no evident credentials. As the Old Guard said (or maybe didn't) when asked to surrender, Merde. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Moderators in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 11:47
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Huh — I guess that really is the main practical purpose of the defence, to catch people who didn't do the work themselves. In most cases a student works closely enough with an advisor that they couldn't get away with hiring a ghost-writer. But there are rare cases of more independent work. And there is the subtler problem that can happen if an advisor is too busy, of a student managing to squeak through by relying too much on collaborators. This I can really see happening, because it can take a lot of patience to let a student take weeks to do something themselves, which you could do yourself in a day. If you only had a day. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Not starting as rats in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 11:40
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Or a chitrach [grumble]. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulations in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 11:36
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In the weird old comic strip Bloom County, the degenerate cat Bill went through a phase as a televangelist, Morally Oral Bill. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Complexity sidebar in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 11:02
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I'm still waiting to hear why seeing design produce Stillness's kind of irreducible complexity today implies that it can only ever have occurred through design. Otherwise he has an argument that cats must be black because he has seen some black cats. My problem with ten points is that they distract us from this one point. And if we never get the chance to get any one point really clear, then it's all too easy for ten bad arguments to pass for ten solid reasons, for another twenty pages of pointless wrangling. So let's stick with this one. If Stillness has a good answer, then let him out with it, and we can move on to something else. If he doesn't, then there's at least one point that needs to be crossed off the list. And begging the question, or proposing that bad logic is okay, don't count as good answers. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Moderators in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 05:30
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The requirement for formal defense is universal. After all, it's the only way to guarantee that anyone ever reads your thesis. And it's pretty important that doctoral degrees from all over the world are recognized as equivalent, so the procedures are actually very similar in all countries. [ Wednesday, May 23, 2007 05:32: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |