Archive for October, 2007

Pick Your Place

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

There are places in the world, coffee shops in general and some coffee shops in Tampere in particular where an unescorted adult male (UAM) is not welcome. He will be queried:”Are you here all by yourself!?” Nobody will sit with him if there’s shortage of available seats. Women will sit with other women, or in some cases, with couples, but not with an UAM. Couples will sit with other couples or with single women. UAM are shady.

Women are usually present in packs, but if there are single women present, they will be engaged in some meaningful activity such as writing. They are not to be disturbed. If you are an UAM and you attend the lavatory, reserve your place carefully. Leave at least a jacket and a backpack on your seat, otherwise it will be taken.

I guess you are looking for trouble if you’re an UAM and not a bar-dwelling creature…

Posted in Social | No Comments »

On Luck

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Luck is one of those interesting concepts that have meaning whether anything like it actually exists or not. I think it’s farely safe to propose that luck doesn’t exist in at least in the form that you could acquire it somehow. Of course this doesn’t stop anyone from trying. Yet an utterance like:”He sure is lucky” when someone wins the lottery is perfectly meaningful sentence. It is highly unlikely to win at a lottery, so you can say that winning it takes luck.

But someone always wins at lottery. If you could keep on playing it for long enough, you would win. Being lucky in this way probably wouldn’t propagate elsewhere in life nor would it be expected to. People believing in luck might even feel that something bad should happen to them to balance out the luck they’ve received.

Luck seems to be associated with isolated incidents then. A person isn’t born with intrinsic luck, it happens to him at certain times. Contrast this with Computer Games such as NetHack where you can actually be lucky and luck can be acquired. What does this mean? If you jump in the moat and you are about to drown, if you are lucky enough you get a chance to crawl out before you die. If someone uses the Finger of Death on you, they will mostly fail, and so on. A concept that doesn’t have a real-life counterpart, yet still has a meaning, has a perfectly valid existence within a Computer Game.

Can you say the same about any other form of Art?

Posted in Computer Games, Concepts | No Comments »

Why Computer Games Are an Art Form

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

There is an infinite amount of daftness to go around, enough so that there are still people clinging to the idea that Computer Games wouldn’t be art. Of course, as with often with humans, this matter is rarely settled with convincing argumentations or empirical log-to-the-forehead -evidence. That’s not going to stop me from trying though. I present for your reading pleasure an argument for that Computer Games are an art form.

NetHack is a game where you have to go deep in the Dungeons of Doom, down to Gehennom itself, to find 3 artifacts, one of them from the clutches of the dreaded piece of age, Wizard of Yendor (affectionately called ‘Rodney’ by NetHackers). These artifacts will give you access to the temple of Moloch that has stolen The Amulet of Yendor, which you must retrieve and return to your god. At the end game you fight your way through 5 elemental planes, last of which is the Astral plane, where you will encounter the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine, Death and Pestilence.

Hang on. Are we a Horseman short? The game doesn’t seem to think so. When you #chat with Death he replies:”Who do you think you are, War?”

After killing thousands of monsters either directly or indirectly, perhaps genociding a number or races, getting close to finishing the game, the player is presented with this idea. He is War himself. Of course, the full blow of this situation is not delivered through reading about it. This shall forever remain as the lonely straw of hope for those opposing the superiority of Computer Games as an art form, not playing them!

Posted in Computer Games | No Comments »

Strange Aural Phenomena

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

I was watching the third episode of the last season of The Sopranos. Somebody gets shot on the street in that episode. As they show a close-up of the body a female scream is heard in the background. Fair enough. I only got the distinct feeling that I’ve heard it before, and I have. It was on a music piece by a local indie artist and I’ve certain I’ve heard it elsewhere as well. Now I’ve concrete evidence instead a vague feeling.

This is not an isolated incident. I seem to notice that the sound of door opening in television in many occasions sound familiar. The particular sound that I recognize I’ve heard in some computer game, probably Half-Life.

Even with this meagre empiric evidence I’ve convinced that this is a real phenomena, reusing sound samples beyond ridiculousness. Why does it happen? Is it so hard to come up with a sound sample library big enough to make running into familiar sounds improbable enough? Or is this just an unlikely coincidence? Does it happen for copyright reasons?

Why should we care anyway? Well, for one, it quickly disposes the suspension of disbelief. It is also highly annoying, partly because I don’t know why it happens?! WHY?!

Posted in Inquiry | 2 Comments »