Monthly Archives: April 2009

The awakening society

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di090418

I think it’s really cool when people try their best to help others. (Instead of, say, watching anime all evening…)

Awakening, Enlightenment, Higher Consciousness – we tend to associate this with hermits, Zen monks and New Agers going “ooommm”. Awakening to higher states of consciousness is indeed a very private, personal thing. But consistently living at a higher level of consciousness has consequences for those around us, as has living at a low level. What would happen if the average citizen put a little more “ooommm” in their life?

I am not proposing that you do this instead of caring for your kids or earning your own living. Rather, that one takes some time from watching TV (which is usually actively harming the mind. ) The television keep you in a constant state of moderate stress with its frequently shifting images, while you are helpless to influence what you see. This wears down your body and brain. Meditation is a scientifically proven anti-stress. Or you could choose any other “sitting practice”, such as prayer or lectio divina (holy reading) if you are religious (which is not as bad as it looks – the guys on TV are not representative of real religion). For those fearful of both religion and mysticism, at least set aside some time each day for contemplation of beauty, whether it is a piece of visual art or a timeless musical composition. The scientifically inclined may want to experiment with brainwave entrainment.

Meditation and other “sitting practices” make you more aware. Biologically, they reduce stress and restore natural rhythms to the body. Mentally, they calm the frenzied churning of the mind so you can think and feel more clearly. Subjectively, the constant “now” that we live in seems to expand, infused by eternity. But what about the social dimension?

First off, the growth in awareness is not something new and magical. All of us have grown in awareness through our life. We started as a purely biological parasite with no awareness whatsoever. We gradually became aware of ourselves and the distinction between self and (m)other. Then we grew in awareness through many years of play and learning, a time of great confusion that hopefully lessened as more of the pieces came together. When we grew up, we learned to think beyond the purely selfish and beyond the moment. You can say our circle of awareness expanded in space as well as time. This process continues in some adults, and they become mature. Others don’t.

The acute problems in any society comes from those who are severely lacking maturity. The rank and file criminal falls squarely in this category. Unable to think beyond his selfish wants to empathize with others, unable to see the consequences of his actions in future time, he acts without forethought or afterthought, tossed by the waves of his excitement and the manipulations of others. Their severe lack of maturity is seen in their toddler-like sense of entitlement.

But crime is not the only fruit of low awareness. Unreflected sexual behavior brings broken hearts and unloved children, not to mention the spread of diseases ranging from nuisance to slow, painful death. Impulsive shopping causes shortages further ahead and sells us into varying degrees of slavery. It is also one of the biggest sources of family tension. And it destroys the environment by squandering resources and overflowing the landfills with yesterday’s shiny things.

In our social life, lack of awareness and maturity quickly gets on other people’s nerves. Those who are more mature think we are idiots for being whiny and self-centered for no reason. Those who are not more mature still think we are idiots, but because we hog the spotlight and don’t realize that they are the center of the universe. While having common enemies may still keep us together, deep and lasting friendships are hard to maintain unless we have grown to care about others and give them room to be themselves. Instead we get dysfunctional pairings between the needy and the intrusive, or between the martyr and the persecutor.

These pairing frequently form the basis of family life as well. But while an immature person may be great fun in the bedroom, they are that much more vexing elsewhere. And the worst of the horrors is an immature parent, which brings the madness on to the next generation, distorting their tiny minds and making it hard for them to grow and mature naturally themselves. Luckily some in each generation manage to find other role models, or we would have been doomed to an endless cycle of madness.

Now, it would be cool if we all reached Satori, Nirvana or whatever your name is for the ultimate Enlightenment. But my claim is that just a little more awareness would do a world of good. For the criminals, this would unfortunately have to be enforced from outside. But the rest of us have the choice to set aside a little time on a regular basis to work on our consciousness. And it is the regular practice that does it, even if it is only a little.

What would life be if people were a little more mature? They would be calmer, not showering you with their stress like a wet dog shaking itself before you. They would be happier, more content and grateful; instead of whining so much, they would smile more and be excited about opportunities for themselves and others. They would be less selfish, more willing to share, more trustworthy and more willing to trust others. They would have more friends and fewer rivals. They would be wiser, managing their time and money better. They would show up in time and not having to run off in a hurry; they would live simpler lives and have a little time and money to spare for those who actually need a helping hand. They would not be quick to judge others, but on the other hand they would be able to admit their own mistakes and even apologize and try to make things better.

Life in a more aware society would not be paradise or utopia. While meditation and wisdom may protect against many accident and illnesses, eventually we all sicken and die. Finite resources would still be finite, even if we used them more wisely. There would presumably still be earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. But everyday life would be a lot better than it is now. And it is pretty good now compared to how it used to be. There is nothing that keeps us from making a better world for ourselves and your children. Nothing but our own excuses.

Friday

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I was writing a long gray entry again, but stopped.  It was a long day at the office, files kept coming in during the day and I had to do files for two of my coworkers who were absent. I was home a couple hours later than usual. And there has been the whole work week, with a little less sleep than I should have each night.  Yes, my day is starting to slide again. I have been able to hold it constant for a while, using the Holosync Dive for half an hour or sometimes more in the morning, but lately it is sliding again.  Well, enough about that.  I don’t feel like writing an essay tonight, let that be enough.

In other news, Linux (the freeee operating system) is progressing slowly but surely.  Last year, getting flash content (such as YouTube) to run in Opera under Linux was still hit & miss for me.  This time, I still had to look it up online, but it only took half a minute or so to actually get it to work.  So now I can play my brute in my browser window, although Tsaiko’s brute still flattens me in a moment.

It took me considerably more time to get the ICE (NMT) wireless broadband to work under Xubuntu Linux. I am not sure why, but I never got that to work before, which is why I bought the Vista laptop in the beginning of 2008. Now another Vista machine has been Linuxified. No more worrying about worms, virii, keyloggers and identity theft, all the usual stuff that Windows users have hanging over their neck day by day.  (Of course, I still have to not be a complete bumpkin that clicks on any mail claiming to be from my bank or Ebay politely asking me to enter my data again to avoid my account being closed.  Seriously, some people need to not use computers, or talk to strangers, alone.) Although the computer was more than strong enough to run Vista, so I won’t have that benefit (Linux runs better on older or weaker machines).

Oh, and another glass jar recycled! Wheee!  Just twenty or so left.

Still peak oil, folks

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di090416

Interstate highway of 2020?  I doubt it.

I was reading through an issue of New Scientist from 2008 so I can throw it away. It contained a full-page ad (albeit badly laid out) for a book called “Oil Apocalypse“. Yes, it looked stupid then and it looks stupid now. Hiring someone with more than high school background in web design could make it not look like My First Little Homepage Of Insane Theories. But that would not change the content.

“The rich will travel by horse and cart. The middle classes will use bicycles. The poor will walk. The oil is running out and, as a result, our civilization is reaching its end. There’s going to be a massive, unprecedented shortage of food. Five billion people will die within a very short space of time.” Pretty memorable scaremongering, but actually not the worst possible scenario. That would probably be the one where one of the world’s great nations run out of fuel for their army in the midst of a protracted war, and have to whip out their nukes or suffer a humiliating defeat and possibly occupation. Now that would be truly apocalyptic. But even Vernon Coleman’s scenario is quite unpleasant. And luckily quite unlikely.

“Quite unlikely” may sound too generous when the price of crude (unrefined) oil has fallen by over 70% since its peak last year. If you see something in the shop marked “70% off”, you will probably conclude that there is probably not a desperate shortage. More like someone is desperate to get rid of it.

So is “peak oil” just another insane quasi-theory like “aliens killed J.F. Kennedy”, “the Virgin Mary was kidnapped by an UFO and impregnated” or “the Bush government blew up World Trade Center”? Not quite. It is just that the “peak” here is not one of those needle-like alpine peaks. It is more like a huge mound. You see, what “peak oil” really means is just that we have reached the maximum production per hour. It does not mean that we are anywhere close to reaching the end of the reserves. However, oil has already for a while become more and more expensive to extract. So it is not like “Oh gee, we just accidentally used the last gallon! Whatever will we do now?” Rather, it is like “Oh man, gas is getting so expensive these days, we better change our plans.”

I have not heard of any economist – or anyone else, actually – who doubts that the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression. And yet the price of crude oil is 3-4 times what it was in 1998. In fact, many of the oil fields opened since then would sell at the loss with those prices. Saudi Arabia could still turn a profit, but Saudi Arabia can no longer supply the whole world. Even in the midst of a recession, a billion Chinese are still living a modern city life where they used to plant rice on the family farm. The growth of the developing world has been the main source of the upswing in demand; and while some of these economies are shrinking now, most are stable at worst, and China is still growing. We are used to economic growth; but even if economic growth for the whole world fell to zero, we would still be using about as much oil as last year. And that was a lot.

Well, actually we would use a little less. Perhaps 1% or so. This is because the steady march of science and technology allows us to use energy more efficiently for each passing year. In addition to this, there is a slow trickle over from gas and diesel cars to electric and (especially) hybrid cars. And even among gas-driven cars, newer models use less fuel than the old that are phased out. But it is not enough to make a serious dent in oil consumption. Before these trends have time to greatly reduce our consumption, oil will begin to get scarce again. And of course, if the recession ever ends, oil prices will jump right back up. Economic growth is almost always reflected in higher energy use.

But not all energy needs to come from oil, or even from other fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. When the price of oil and gas skyrocketed last year, everyone and their broker went into renewable energy, like sun or wind power. Now that urgency is gone, of course. And some of the companies in that sector are no doubt going to go out of business. But not all the investments are going to just evaporate. New technologies and large-scale production will allow these “alternative” energies to become more affordable, and when the price of oil necessarily starts rising again, it will meet stronger competition than before.

So instead of horse and cart, we will have electric cars. But I am not really saying we won’t see a fall in material standard of living. This is already happening. Right now we may want to blame the subprime mortgages (or even rich bankers, if you’re a leftist) for all our problems, but last year we had both a gas crisis and a food crisis. They were not all that critical here in the rich world, because we could simply borrow more money and continue to live like before. That won’t work anymore.

As I have said before, I don’t think we will exactly recover from this recession. The economy before it was artificially ballooned by imaginary money and wild hopes. So even returning to sanity would be like a moderate recession compared to that. And by the time we get back to sanity from panic, a lot of things will have changed. Because things change very fast these days. There will be less oil in the ground than ever before, yes. But it is highly unlikely that we will have exchanged our cars for horse buggies. (Well, your cars – I don’t have one and hasn’t had for decades. Man of the future, that’s me!)

One jar a day

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di090415

You’re next, Mr Paradiso!

Today I took another glass jar to town with me, it fit just snugly in my bag. I put in the glass container on my way to work.  When I came home from work, I took the spent fluorescent tubes to the supermarket.  (Yesterday it was the fluorescent bulbs, known here as saving bulbs since they use much less energy and last longer.  Well, supposedly they last longer. I don’t see much difference myself – I have changed most of them during these three years I’ve lived here, which is perhaps twice the life of ordinary incandescent bulbs.)

My point today – as if I had not made it before – is that I try to do this each workday.  Perhaps not both of them, but at least get something out of the house every day (not counting the ordinary trash).  Hopefully it will become second nature eventually.  My first nature is to drag things to the cave.  Thinking back to the home where I grew up, there is no doubt that I am descended from packrats.  Actually, now that I live in a house that is vaguely similar to the type of house I grew up in (albeit newer), the similarity is striking.  A living room that is halfway presentable, and several other rooms absolutely stacked with all kinds of objects, but mostly those related to learning somehow.  Yes, I have grown up to become my parents, only fewer in number.

More immediately, however, the inspiration for the (work-)daily activity probably comes from the book Integral Life Practice.  It is quite insistent that one practice each of the four core modules every day – even if only for one minute! It actually has various 5-minute and 1-minute exercises scattered throughout.  If you are busy – or, more likely, if you make yourself busy because you really don’t like one of the modules (such as body, in my case) – you can still not with any shred of dignity or integrity claim that you don’t have 1 minute free over the course of 24 hours.

Michael Mackenzie at Project Meditation says much the same thing.  If you can’t meditate more than 5 minutes, then meditate 5 minutes.  It is far better to do so every day than to start skipping days.  And Bill Harris at Centerpointe Research Institute compares using their product (Holosync) to brushing one’s teeth.  (Although I certainly would not brush my teeth continually for half an hour, much less the whole hour recommended for Holosync.  I can see what he means though.)

So that is what I do now to deal with something that is contrary to my nature.  One jar at a time, or a few light bulbs, or an old CD.  It may be only five minutes, pitiful or ridiculous depending on your view.  But if I don’t forget it and don’t fall out of the practice,  sooner or later I should become a changed person.  And even if not, there will be hundreds fewer objects in the house than it would otherwise have been, if I live here another year.

Pigsty Project progress

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di090414

This CD (Pomme Fritz) is on its way to where it belongs – the garbage heap.  Perhaps it will make future archeologists ashamed of their ancestry.

Today I returned to work after the Holy Week, or nearly a week at least. So the big question is, did I remember the Pigsty Project that I started the last workday before Easter? Yes and no.  I did not consciously remember the project, which consists of trowing away something each day when I return from work (not counting the usual garbage). Even so, I did remember to take the burnt-out fluorescent bulbs to the shop.  This is special garbage that is not allowed to throw along with the usual landfill stuff, but I recently found that the nearest supermarket accepts it.  (They also sell them, so I think that is fair.)  I had told myself to not stop at the supermarket on my way home from work, since I would go there anyway with the bulbs.

For good measure, I carried an empty glass jar with me to the city this morning and put it in a special container for glass garbage.  Yes, we do an insane amount of manual sorting here. I think I read that in America they use machines to sort the garbage. Perhaps it was just in one particular place? This would probably be smarter here too, since I bet normal humans throw a lot of dubious stuff in the main garbage. After all, since nobody sees them, it is OK.   If humans did not operate on that principle, STDs would have been extinct millennia ago.  So they do.

The first day of the Pigsty Project, I ripped and threw away an old techno CD which I cannot imagine ever regretting. Over the next days, even though I did not go to work, I ripped a few more of them. In the process, I also discovered that there was a reason I had bought many of my hundreds of  CDs:  They usually contain one good song.  Although not good enough for me to have played in 10-15-20 years.  I don’t miss them because I have forgotten them, not because they are bad.  (Although some are.  My tastes have changed. Also, I bought some because of their cool covers, which I mistakenly believed corresponded to the music.)

But generally it is true:  When I am about to throw something away, then I realize how good it is. I hope I did mention the stack of New Scientist on my phone table?  I have been making my way through one of them over the past days. That’s the unread ones, I threw away those I had read already.  Since I live in Norway, I don’t think the used book store wants them.  They are not glossy or anything.  (The store takes National Geographic even when in English. But you don’t get much glossier than National Geographic, and there are occasionally pictures of tribal people without clothes, if memory serves. Always a selling point, even here in Norway.)

Anyway, I seem to be on track. Albeit a very slow track.

(I also dragged another 1TB hard disk to the house, but that’s another story… sort of.)

Golden rule rules

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Since it is official Jesus Day today, in memory of him teleporting out of the tomb and saving the world (how’s that for comeback), I thought I would say a few words about the Golden Rule. After all, Jesus made it famous. There are similar sayings from other people, or so I have heard, although I have never heard who. The Silver Rule (don’t do it to others if you don’t want them to do it to you) was around in the same area before Jesus though, and is generally something small children learn the hard way.

Anyway! It has come to my attention that some people think the Golden Rule is not perfect and we need a “Platinum Rule”. While I’d say Kant may have been on to something with his proposal that we should live so that our actions could be used as a universal law, that is a bit too wide to be practical. Most of us don’t know much about the universe and its morality, but we know what we’d like others to do to us. So we can do that to them.

Now the latest criticism I have heard is that we should do to others what THEY want rather than what we want. Uhm. Yes, dear reader, this is what happens when people think Jesus was some kind of barbarian hick who couldn’t think as clearly as they can – even though they obviously don’t even have the wisdom of Solomon. If they had, they would not have made fools out of themselves. (And I don’t mean that in a good way, this time.)

Let me illustrate this by example. Let us say that you really like grilled cheese sandwiches. Really, really like them. According to the Golden Rule, whenever you have guests, you would serve grilled cheese sandwiches and nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches, right? Because that is what you would want them to do when you visit them.

But wait a minute! One of your neighbors has this thing about hot dogs. He really, really likes them. Or so it seems, because every time you’ve been there, he has served hot dogs and nothing but hot dogs. Even though you have tried to speak to him at length and in great detail about the glory of grilled cheese, he just doesn’t take a hint and keeps serving hot dogs. He simply ignores your opinion completely, and you don’t like that at all. Did you hear that? So don’t do that to him!

We definitely want other people to consider our needs, and within reason also our wants. Therefore, the Golden Rule commands that we do the same unto them. How hard can that be to understand?

The Golden Rule grows with you. Just because you interpreted it in a childish way does not mean this was its only meaning. No matter how much your awareness expands, the same principle still applies. You want others to live a life that can serve as a moral guideline for the world? In that case, it behooves you to do the same.

That’s all, folks. Or at least it is Moses and the prophets.

God’s wife

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And other stories from when Jehovah was young.

Wouldn’t that be an awesome name for a book? Unfortunately for its mass market acceptance, John Day’s book has the slightly more scholarly title “Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan”. It is also written in an extremely scholarly style, with footnotes taking up about as much space as the actual text, and numerous discussions of what other scholars have to say on the matter. Still, it is a fairly easy read if you don’t get scared by the format.  (Google Books is your friend. Google Books loves you.)

It should go without saying that the book is strongly discommended for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but unfortunately many other good Christians would probably get terribly upset too if they read it. So don’t, at least until you have read the Bible enough to outgrow the static worldview in which people’s impression of God is supposed to always be the same, no matter when and where.

The Bible actually says out loud that it is a gradual revelation. When Yahweh talks to Moses, he explicitly mentions that the patriarchs did not know him by this name. Even though there are a few references to Yahweh in Genesis. It’s not like Genesis was a blog, you know, which was written down as it happened. And for us Christians, the whole idea of the New Covenant (and the New Testament) requires belief in a gradual revelation. While millions of Christians are adamant that it ended there, that’s not what Jesus says. On the contrary, he complains that he has a lot of things he could not talk to his disciples when he was around them, but had to leave it to the Spokesman, the Spirit of Truth. As far as we know, that One is still at work. If allowed to.

In this perspective, it becomes quite interesting to see that the early Israelites thought God was married. It made perfect sense to them. Everyone married, except losers. Obviously an amazing God would have an amazing wife. The wife in question was Asherah. Some translations (including the one I grew up with) named her Astarte, but if the texts of nearby Ugarit are any indication, Astarte was her daughter.

Actually that’s why I came across this book, while reading wild-eyed people who believe that Easter is named after Astarte. (Easter is named after Eastre / Eostre, a goddess of dawn and spring, worshiped during the Dark Ages. There is no historical record of the corresponding German goddess Ostara, not that this stopped German poets from letting their imagination run wild. Ostara again should supposedly be the same as Astarte, despite the languages being utterly incomprehensible to each other, having separated while the Neanderthals were still alive and well.)

Be that as it may, the Canaanite culture that preceded Israel had worshiped a pantheon of gods, the chief god being called simply El, which corresponds to our word God. For clarification he was frequently called El Elyon (God Most High) or El Shaddai (God of the Mountains, or God Almighty). The old, wise and merciful El presided on the holy mountain of the gods in the north, and his 70 sons were gods of the various countries. All of these details are found in the Hebrew Scriptures as well, so there was at least some continuity despite Yahweh’s burning hate of the Canaanites (kill them all and their camels too). In fact, cultural artifacts indicate that most of Israel actually descended from the Canaanites. In any case, the Bible attests that they were never even remotely eradicated but lived among Israel for centuries after the conquest.

So it should surprise no one that the Israelites, at least before the monarchy, believed in many of the old tales about El, Baal, Asherah and Astarte etc. In fact, there are inscriptions referring to Yahweh and His Asherah, a reasonable assumption since they were told Yahweh was God, and God was married to Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. The prophets kept trying to explain that God wasn’t like that, but it took many long centuries before it started to sink in.

Once you know the cultural context, it is plain to see how the Old Testament portrays a gradual revelation from polytheism through a phase of hierogamy before God is finally seen as spirit, not some old guy up there. (I guess this is still a work in progress some places.)

And at each point, the peasants were no doubt just as certain as we are that they had the final revelation. Nobody though “Why, I am actually blaspheming and worshiping a caricature of God, despite my best intentions.” And neither do I.

Long Friday again

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I am writing this on Good Friday, arguably the holiest day in the year here in Norway. For while most people here doubt that Jesus returned from the dead, at least in any literal or physical sense, they certainly believe he died. Not all are equally excited about this, of course, but out of respect for our 1000 years of Christianity and the values those years imparted, the country grinds to a halt already on Thursday and is utterly closed down on Friday. Only life-saving work is still done, like in hospitals and on animal farms. Not without reason is this day called Langfredag (Long Friday) here in Norway. It certainly gives time to think, although most of us go out of our way to avoid that. With computers everywhere these days, that’s pretty easy. But even before the Information Age, most city people traveled to the mountains to spend the holy days skiing. That way they did not need to go to church, as there were no churches there, and hear the creepy story about suffering and redemption.

(Long essay deleted here for theological reasons.  And also because 10 PM became 3 AM.)

Fat chance

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Today I had a chance to test a hypothesis. Based on one data point, I’d say the hypothesis failed. Hypothesis: Brainwave entrainment may counteract fat poisoning.

Regular readers will know that I get fat poisoning if I eat more than a few grams of fat in a single meal (about six hours). I start feeling cold regardless of the temperature in the room, a cold that comes from inside. (A thermometer, when I can be still long enough, confirms that my body temperature usually is lower than normal, not higher, so it is not fever shaking.) I start shivering and then shaking. My body goes stiffer than usual, so intense exercise to heat me up is out of the question – it would tear my muscles as it is basically the opposite of warming up. Finally come the worst symptoms, fear and diarrhea as the muscles in my digestive tract join in the dance to keep me warm. Queasiness, gut pain, violent bowel movements and in extreme cases the beginning of a rectal prolapse. Not a pretty sight, but you can see it many places on the Internet if you are curious. The final symptom is irresistible drowsiness and deep sleep, regardless of the time of day.

Since some of the symptoms are neurological, I have wondered if brainwave entrainment could have an effect. So when I got the first symptoms, this came to mind. I also put up the heat in the bathroom to max, it has a radiating space heater. Walking in place in front of the heater, I played an alpha wave entrainment track with my eyes closed for about 20 minutes. Luckily it was only a small attack. I had not expected one at all, since I haven’t eaten all that much fat. I have eaten more rice chocolate than usual lately – usually I only eat one 1-2 wafers of thin mint dark chocolate a day, exactly because even a small bite of chocolate takes a big bite out of my fat ration. A lot of the tastes we enjoy through the day are fat soluble, so I tend to be very protective of my fat rations.

On the bright side, I did not feel serious fear. But this is explained by the fact that I did not have colon spasms. This again probably comes from the heat and activity that I set in early, and the fact that it was a very small attack. So the total attempt at treating the attack was a success. But the brainwave entrainment part was not: There was no noticeable different in my body’s reactions either as I began entrainment or after 8 minute, the time at which entrainment should normally be complete.

So at best entrainment may be attempted to minimize the risk of panic, but not the things that would cause the panic in the first place.

Perhaps a better idea would be to get the brain to look for less fat in the first place?  Although I have become pretty good at this, I could still do fine with half the fat I now eat.  We need only very small amounts of fat in our diet, less than 10% of our daily energy expenditure. Even I eat more than double that, and most people in the western world double that again.  (Fat is twice as rich in energy as either sugar, starches or proteins. It is also very compact, so we tend to grossly under-estimate it in our diet.)

Mission Architect & unwilling villains

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2009-04-08 23:19:56

“The Bridge to Your Imagination” says the in-game sign on the Mission Architect building. More important, it is a bridge to a thousand other imaginations as well.

As the City of Heroes servers come to life this evening after hours of downtime, something new emerges into online gaming that has never existed before. Something that catapults the five year old superhero game far ahead of its competition, at least in one particular aspect of the game. Over the next hours and days, thousands of missions (quests) will be brought over from the test servers, and user-generated content will dwarf the original contents of the game several times over.

With “Mission Architect”, NCSoft has given the users nearly the same tools their own designers have, and some that were never before used, to create new story arcs, new opponents and allies, whole new organizations and even species!
Yes, this is the game I was beta-testing a few weeks ago. Unfortunately my creativity is not up to such a standard in this area, so I merely tested other players’ creations. But even so, there were already thousands of missions by the time the beta ended. It is a safe bet that new are being made even as I write this.

This is the unstoppable rise of user-created content, as I have written about quite a few times before. I noted it with Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS, everyone noted it with Spore. In offline games, Donald Tipton’s quest tools for Daggerfall in the previous century were the beginning, to be followed by official tools for the next two Elder Scrolls games, leading to an ongoing bloom of user-made locations, quests and even a project to recreate the whole fantasy world of Tamriel in lifelike detail, Tamriel Rebuilt. Giving the players the same tools as the developers has greatly expanded the popularity and extended the lifetime of these games, and I expect the same to happen with City of Heroes and its unfortunate evil twin, City of Villains.

Actually, City of Villains (which now comes free with every City of Heroes and the other way around) is my main reason for looking forward to this expansion. (In so far as I do at all – my recent invasion into the territories of brainwave entrainment has left me with both less time and less interest for gaming, so that mainly The Sims 2 has remained and little else. (Civilization III went back in hibernation after four days or so, due to the wrist pain it causes me. I knew it was something.))

I am not much of a villain, for which I am grateful. Of course, this stems in no small part from the American way of thinking, in which setting bullies on fire is a Good Thing. In the real world, and most assuredly in Scandinavia, setting fire to even the most intransigent evildoers will get you branded as the villain. What’s up with all that sympathy for the evil? They already get the chicks, which is the most important thing in a man’s life. Being set on fire seems a reasonable counterbalance. A long list of acclaimed medieval theologians also share this view. Anyway! Back to City of Morally Ambiguous Characters.

City of Villains was released as an attempt to add Player vs. Player combat to the game. An earlier attempt, the Arena, had failed thoroughly. Heroes just did not much like fighting heroes, despite this being a mainstay of Marvel Comics at the time. But PvP was considered the sine qua non of MMORPGs, after the explosive success of World of Warcraft, which came just as City of Heroes was at its peak. WoW, as any half-awake gamer knows, quickly dwarfed not only City of Heroes but every other massive online game in the western world. (Things are a bit different in Asia.) And the fight between the “good” Alliance and the “evil” Horde was the core of this new success game. So, we got City of Villains. It did indeed attract a decent number of players. The PvP was however never to become an important part of the games. The players preferred to stay on their own side, and the few PvP zones were thinly populated at best, sometimes empty, and often used only for each side to perform their own quests as furtively as possible.

In modern superhero comics, it is more the rule than the exception that villains have a heroic streak and the other way around. Seemingly random events and outright misunderstandings may decide which side of the law a character ends up on, and some of the most interesting characters change sides either permanently or for a while. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this in City of Villains. However, there did eventually emerge cooperative zones in which Heroes and Villains may band together against a greater threat. There are only two major zones of this sort, but they are quite popular.

With Mission Architect, ALL player-made content is equally available to heroes and villains.

I trust you see my interest in it now. In particular, the Mastermind class has a unique play style different from any of the hero classes. While some controllers and defenders get “pets” a ways into their career, these are barely sentient energy forms with limited control and mostly fixed abilities. In contrast, the Mastermind commands robots, zombies or various human underlings from the first few minutes of the game, and many of his powers are strictly related to improving the abilities of these assistants. Over time, they become more and more competent and also increase in number, doing most of the fighting while the Mastermind directs the tactics and supports them in various ways.

Being able to play a uniquely villain-side class while doing exclusively heroic missions would expand the game greatly for me and others like me who have no desire to identify with evil.

That said, for most players the appeal will lie in playing an endless stream of new, unique missions, each one different from all the others, and some of them quite unlike anything the player has seen before. It is possible to play all the way from level 1 to 50 solely on Mission Architect content, according to the developers. I can certainly see the appeal in doing just that: Not only would new missions become available faster than you could play through them, but it would also save a lot on travel time. In the game itself, there are different zones with different difficulty level. In Mission Architect, you can access all the missions through the same portal, no matter what the level. It is all right there at your fingertips. Online gaming has never been better than this.

Now if I had time to actually play it…