Monthly Archives: August 2010

RPGs and spirituality

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We live in a world bound by rules. And even though we try to push the limits, they are there. But while we are here, we are simultaneously in another, greater world, in which this world is just like a shared dream: Small, limited, not quite real. And the rules that apply to our world are different from those that apply to the greater world, the Real World to which we all return when we log off.

It was around 1964 that I got the basic inspiration for what we today call “role-playing games”, or RPGs. In its basic form, it consisted of a hero, a sword, potions, trolls to be defeated, and leveling up. The levels were counted by the number of heads on the trolls. Admittedly a rather rudimentary design, but then again I was about six years old. The world’s first official RPG was released in Sweden approximately ten years later unbeknown to me. At that time I was already a teenager, but I did not play RPGs. I only learned about these later, and was surprised.

The people who were young when the first wave or RPGs spread around the western world? They are now ruling that world. They are the politicians, the businessmen, the preachers, and the women who bring all of these low when the time comes. Today we live in the first society where RPGs are widespread, a natural part of culture.

Regular playing of RPGs are likely to accustom people to the thought that there are different levels of reality at which a world can exist. Clearly the worlds of City of Heroes or The Sims are much less real than our world, and yet they are quite fleshed out with so many different possibilities that all humans now alive, if they spent as much of their lives as biologically possible just playing these games, would not in a lifetime exhaust all possible combinations, even if there was no new content added (which there is several times a year).

As these virtual worlds become ever more lifelike, there is bound to sneak in a suspicion that our world may not be the most real one. Thus, The Matrix. But Buddhists have claimed for 2500 years or so that this world is illusionary, except perhaps for the mind itself. Other religions also chime in that the Real World is “up there”, not here on Earth.

Clearly spirituality came first, by thousands of years, before roleplaying games. But do these games influence our openness to spiritual beliefs? Or is it the other way around, that people with an earlier, more concrete mindset would not have wanted to play RPGs even if they existed? Have children throughout history discovered the basics of RPGs, only to lay them aside when they grew into the more earthbound spirit of their times?

Heroes gone wild… er, rogue

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There is nothing rogue about my Azure Wingman. He’s a bit darker than intended, but only in coloring.

The massive online multiplayer game City of Heroes, known as one of the most family-friendly in the pack, was after some years followed by its shadow, City of Villains. While some play one of them exclusively, others have characters on both sides of the divide. There was, as is good and proper, a great gap fastened between them, so that those on one side could not go over to the other, nor could those on the other side come over. There were a few combat zones where heroes and villains could fight each other, but this proved not to be popular. Most players far preferred to fight against computer-generated opponents rather than real humans.

Soon a couple cooperative zones were established where heroes and villains could fight against a common threat or just chill under a truce, but this was also rather limited. And the two worlds were still separate in essential ways, so that for instance enhancements crafted by heroes could not be sold on the black market in the Rogue Isles of the villains.

Lately, and I feel compelled to say unfortunately, a third expansion has been made. This week it went live, officially on Tuesday (though some could play it on Monday). This second paid expansion (there are 18 free ones) is called “Going Rogue”, but has nothing to do with Mama Grizzly as you Americans may think. Rather it contains an alternate Earth in which history took a different course, where the world’s greatest hero became a tyrant, and superheroes rule over the common people with an iron fist… for their own good, of course.

In this place, called Praetoria, you can create a new character based on either a hero or villain archetype. But their origin does not define them. It is up to the player, through his (or surprisingly often her) choices to define the alignment of the character. You may wholeheartedly join the ruling group, or work for the Resistance seeking to overthrow them, or work for both of them at a proportion of your own choosing.

By the security level of 20 (out of 50 possible) your goose is cooked in Praetoria, and you have to make it to either City of Heroes or City of Villains. But someone who started from a villain archetype may be “redeemed” to become a hero, and someone starting from a hero archetype may “fall from grace” (yes, the publisher uses this religious terminology).

Even after you arrive in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, however, your future is not set in stone. The same applies to those who have been around before, and never visited Praetoria at all. They will find temptations in the form of “tips” from enemies they fight. These tips lead to missions where you may gradually change your alignment – or affirm it. There are rewards for staying with your original decision, and you may become slightly more powerful as a hero or villain. On the other hand, the opposite lets you cross over to the other side. In effect, villains can now become heroes, and heroes can become villains.

As a regular of the game, I was invited into the early Closed Beta testing. This is not my first time doing beta for them, but this time it did not last long. I found the moral ambiguity not interesting.

The expansion is not ALL about moral grayzoning, but almost. The upgrade to the graphics engine was included in the previous free expansion (and presumably the one before that again, when power coloring was introduced). There are a few new zones and enemy groups in the level 1-20 range, and the first hint at the new endgame content comes in the form of the first of ten “incarnate levels”. I will have to come back to those, if ever. I understand them not to be simply more levels (as in level 51) but rather a somewhat different way of improving your level 50 character, but I haven’t tried.

More to my liking, there are a few new powers. Actually the most popular of them, dual pistols, has been available since the previous free expansion, but available only to those who pre-ordered Going Rogue. Which I think most did. I did not, though I have bought it after release. With a month’s subscription fee included, two new character slots, and the new powers and auras, it is not a bad deal if you have money you don’t need yourself or want to give to the poor.

I naturally skipped Demon Summoning. There is enough of that in real life, but let that lie for now. There is also a new power of electricity manipulation, which I have not tried (there were already several electricity powers in the game before). I have however tested Kinetic Melee. The hero in the picture above has this. Basically he uses the aura around his hands to fight. It is somewhat similar to the concept of using Ki in martial arts. You can throw enemies around without actually touching them, but still at a short distance, about the length of a blade mostly.

The azure auras on Wingman’s hands and the gleam in his eyes are not parts of his power, as one might think, but are also new. Before, you could only get auras after doing a series of missions (quests) at level 30 or above. So that is a welcome addition. The hand auras fit quite well with his powers, and I colored them in the same color so they would blend seamlessly. I am quite happy with the result.

But the main attraction of the expansion, I am not impressed with. Sure, it is nice that masterminds and brutes can become heroes. But the whole “shades of gray” thing was not really ever on my wishlist. And it still isn’t my reason for buying the expansion. It is not a “run and buy” recommendation in the least. More like a curiosity.

People are stupid and crazy

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Parental explosions is just one of the things most humans have to contend with. Parents should be filled with inexhaustible love and wisdom, but sometimes the difference between father and toddler is mainly one of physical strength. People are stupid and crazy.

Today I want to write calmly and objectively about the fact that most people are stupid and crazy.

In the past, we were in contact with only a few people. In the village, the same people were our neighbors, friends (or enemies) and more or less distant relatives. Today, I hear from people living in different towns or cities and even different countries. And yet many of them have the same experience: They are surrounded by idiots. Neighbors, customers, coworkers, fellow travelers, even relatives. Usually stupid, sometimes crazy, or both.

The reaction varies, depending on temperament and the actions to which they are exposed: From amusement to disdain to anger. But there is another emotion underlying these, and that is what I want to confront: Surprise. Somehow there is the expectation that ordinary people should not be stupid or crazy, that this should be reserved for a special few. And with that comes the logical question of why these few have decided to cluster around me. Why me? Why must I, of all people, be surrounded by idiots?

The truth is that almost all people are surrounded by idiots, because almost all people are idiots. This is not new. Throughout recorded history, there has never been a time when most people were smart and sane. Historians have simply decided to ignore this for the most part, mercifully. Actually, I believe things were worse in the past. Much worse.

I present to you the fact that around the year 1900, when my maternal grandfather was already born, it was considered perfectly reasonable for men of good breed and classical education to duel to the death over the heart of a lady. The survivor, if any, would then presumably take ownership of the Cattle With Breasts, who generally had no reservations or at least no ability to enforce them. Today, in the upper layers of society, I dare say that people would simply ask her to choose instead. But people were dumber then, impossible as this may seem at times.

Seriously, throughout most of history, most people were illiterate, uneducated, malnourished and forced to work hard from early childhood. Being stupid and crazy came with the territory. The few glaring exceptions are the ones who are remembered today, for the simple reason that they created today’s culture. We are their cultural heirs. Without the exceptions we would not been here.

So what is your neighbor’s excuse today? We are no longer illiterate, malnourished and forced into child labor. Why don’t we all grow up to paragons of wisdom and sanity?

Well, one thing is the purely biological mental capacity. In an age where it was normal to be stupid and crazy, there was no strong selection pressure to weed out the stupid and crazy. Quite possibly the opposite, at times. As long as you could till the soil, milk the cows, and not try to reform religion, you were good to go. You stood an excellent chance to survive long enough to reproduce, especially since you probably started early. Of course, many of your children would die, but being smart or sane would not have changed that, since there was no option to have your children vaccinated or even to learn that drinking uncooked water might kill them.

Then there is the matter of family tradition. If your great-grandparents were stupid and crazy, how do you think they raised your grandparents? And how did your grandparents raise your parents? Somewhere along the road you and I lucked out. Someone intervened, quite likely a teacher, breaking the chain of insanity and tempting someone into thinking more clearly, or more at all. Perhaps someone even just stumbled across a book, and having learned to read in school, found within the book the seeds of sanity. It was no sure thing. I can bring witnesses that not all teachers even today make a big difference in favor of wisdom.

In the last instance, there is also the personal responsibility. Even if you have the opportunity to become a bright light, you may decide not to, or simply not decide at all. Many promising young people decide that there is more fun to be had by taking various drugs or simply getting dangerously drunk repeatedly, even if it impacts their future brain function. Or they just have other hobbies than thinking. The day only has so many hours, after all.

So when we meet a stranger, we should not do so with the expectation that they will be just like us. The very fact that you have been able to wade through this vast text (with long words here and there) is proof that you are not an average person. I am not recommending paranoia, of course. Most people are not actually malicious, just stupid and to some extent mentally unhinged. They don’t particularly want to hurt you. In fact, you are probably not quite real to them, as most people have plenty enough with thinking of themselves and, in the happier cases, their closest family. You are just a bystander that may provide them with money, sex or someone to yell at when angry.

You may think me a misanthrope at this point. And it is true that I have studied misanthropology for a long time, but I have done so largely in my own life. I have studied why I, of all people, fail to live up to my expectations. And so I have concluded that being human is not all that easy, even with a good starting point, which most people don’t have.

We should love and help people, because they need it, and because it is the right thing to do. If the reasonably smart, reasonably sane people don’t try to help keep the wagon on the road, who will? The blind, leading the blind?

To borrow an allegory from Ryuho Okawa’s latest book (Change Your Life, Change the World), a loveless society is like a hospital filled with patients screaming and moaning in pain. If there are no healers of the soul, how will they get better? Should we just quietly hope that they will die so the screaming stops? It is not likely, there will be new patients replacing the old.

Now, I am not well suited to go out among people and spread love and joy. After all, I am a weirdo. But someone who has an established family life, non-ugly looks or an admirable economy may be in a position to impress those around them with the benefits of sanity. Please, consider it, or at least don’t go around with a shaker of salt for their wounds…

Online games – a road to Hell?

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Dogpile! From the online game City of Heroes.

I am not talking about online chess or Online Go, which are like their offline versions. I am sure better men than I have evaluated their ethical standing. If not, I would just say that if you are a sore loser or a triumphant winner, you should consider not playing even these unless you are a child. It is OK for children to experience a wide range of emotions so they can learn, since they hopefully have parents or guardians to contain them and help them back to balance. For adults, to be brought out of balance by a game is shameful and should give grounds for self-reflection.

What I want to write about, however, is the current popular breed of multiplayer roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, or City of Heroes/City of Villains. In these games, you take on the role of a character, almost always a fighter of some kind (there are also healers, but these go along with the fighters into battle and are targeted by enemies as well).

In some cases, the very name of the online game hints at the atmosphere: Nobody would want to spend their real life in a dark age, or a world at war, or a city of villains.

Fighting is the main appeal of these games. And not an abstract battle of anonymous pieces, like in chess. It is man against man, or at least team against team. While some games allow you to craft weapons or even grow crops, it is safe to say that the heart of these games is the fight to the (temporary) death.

The game would obviously not last very long if death was permanent, so a main difference from the real world is that you return to life with only a small penalty, which varies from game to game. It could be loss of experience points, gold or equipment, but in any case it is only a minor setback. As such, you are not actually killing the opponent’s character, only inconveniencing them. Still, it is generally referred to as killing, which it symbolizes.

In some games, your character can kill anyone and be killed by anyone. In others, the world is organized into two or three competing kingdoms, and you can only kill foreigners. This is more similar to war than murder, but it is still mostly undertaken in small groups of 6-8 players, although sometimes several groups band together for a raid.

In many games there are also servers or at least zones without “player killing”. Instead you have only “PvE”, “Player vs Environment”, in which you fight against computer-controlled opponents. These may look human or otherwise, but you cause no insult to actual real-world humans by defeating them. You may fight these imaginary enemies alone or in groups with other human players. In some games you can also have computer-controlled pets or servants that fight together with you.

By now we should have a pretty good idea of the ethics involved. Let us first measure our actions against the golden rule. Would you want others to do this unto you? In other words, can you put yourself in your opponent’s shoes? My observation is that people get very upset when defeated by a human opponent, and yet they persevere in doing it to others. So yeah, that is a definite danger zone.

You may argue that you would never kill anyone in real life, but you ARE causing emotional upheaval to real people over the Internet. And you are doing so by going through the motions of killing a humanoid character, which has a quite different flavor from beating someone in a game of checkers or a sports competition. I can see this from the intense reaction of the victims: Curses and profanity abound in PvP zones, and threats that are not always restricted to the game. Clearly the opponent really feels hated.

In short, you are adding to the total of suffering in the world, and as such I am bound to advice against it. This is not what we were born for. Or born again for, as the case may be.

There is another element to it, and that is what you do to your own soul. Let us consider the fate of the soul upon death. It is common in western religion to see the further reward or punishment of the soul as imposed by a foreign will. Basically this guy, God, sits on a throne and decrees your fate. As such, he can be reasoned with, at least by paid experts, so that you can go to Heaven even if you don’t fit in there at all. Indeed, you may not even enjoy Heaven unless you get a brain transplant first, which kind of defeats the point of going there in the first place. If someone else arrives there with your name, it is not much to pop the champagne for.

Buddhism and some parts of Christianity have a somewhat different view. The afterlife is not decided by God’s personal opinion, but on the objective measure of what your soul is like at the time of your passing.

In a manner of speaking, the afterlife is indeed like a virtual reality, in that you are unberthed from your body and all things familiar and thrown into a world of the soul. (Unless, as Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, you simply wake up later in a newly resurrected body. Would be nice, but you still don’t get back to the life you lived. It will anyway be a new and different world.) Now, if you have trained yourself to see life as an ongoing fight for your very existence, to see any stranger as a potential enemy, and you golden rule has become “do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first”… Now, if God does not put you on a fast train but simply let you gravitate toward the afterlife where your soul naturally belongs… Not a good scenario, is it?

Approximately ten years ago, I used to play the computer roleplaying game Daggerfall daily. It was not an online game, so we always knew that the innumerable opponents were computer-generated. Even so, on an online group dedicated to the game, one of the players mused that perhaps we would go to Daggerfall when we died. He did not seem to think this was a bad thing, and it is indeed a world of amazing possibilities, filled with magic and wonders. Even so, I can think of better fates, due exactly to the constant threat of violence and murder.

At the time, I did not think it possible that we could actually go to Daggerfall after our death, of course. Now I am less sure. In Christianity, as it is commonly understood, there is only Heaven and Hell. But Jesus says that “in my Father’s house there are many rooms” [or even “mansion” in some translations], and also that there are different degrees of punishment for those worthy of that. Given the psychic energy that thousands of people pour into computer games, it is not entirely beyond the pale that a psychic realm – a world of the soul – may be created to accommodate those souls who feel more at home there than in the ordinary world.

In the Judeo-Christian creation myth, God placed the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, even though it could at the time only bring ruin to mankind. This was not an act of cruelty, but a symbol that to God, freedom is more important than life. If they were willing to trade eternal life for knowledge of evil, then so be it. If God still has the same mindset of valuing the freedom of the soul, it is not entirely unthinkable that those who freely choose an imaginary realm of strife will also go to an imaginary realm of strife after their tenure in the flesh has ended.

In any case, there will not be Player vs Player in Heaven, I am quite confident of that. In Valhalla, though…

Happy Sim Hermeticism

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Acclaimed author, artist and athlete Hermes Trismegistus in the library, where he teaches the townspeople valuable skills to improve their work and their neighborhood. What?

We are talking about The Sims 3, the “people simulator” from Electronic Arts. With far more detail than the previous simulator, and with improved artificial intelligence, the small people inside the computer go about their lives no longer just as a family, but as a community. And in the small town of Riverview, numerous computer-generated people (“townies”) live their simulated lives in their simulated homes, go to their simulated jobs and come home with simulated money to pay their simulated bills.

Enter Hermes Trismegistus (loosely based on the Hellenic deity of books and wisdom, which again may be based on one or more historical figures of extraordinary accomplishment.) In the game, he is a playable character, controlled by me rather than by the computer. He is also artistic, athletic, good and a genius bookworm. In other words, he is as near to the perfect man as the world he lives in allows. And with my daily guidance, he gets even better.

His first focus is on gardening, allowing him to grow the coveted Lifefruit while he is still young.  Later he becomes able to make Ambrosia, which has the ability to reset the age of a sim to the beginning of its current life phase. Now effectively immortal, Hermes has studied a wide range of subjects as well as improved his body to amazing strength and health. So far, so good. It may sound like a male Mary Sue (for those of you unfamiliar with literary concepts, this is a too-good-to-be-true character that usually represents the author in poorly written fiction, especially fan fiction.)  But there is a twist to this character.

On workdays, Hermes goes to the library, where he writes non-fiction books. After work hours, he talks to townspeople who come to the library, brightening their days. He asks them about their career, then if they need a skill for that career, he will tutor them for free.  For instance he will teach writing to a journalist, gardening to an agricultural scientist, or logic to a police detective. On weekends, he will go to the gym and train with those of a more physical ambition.

As a result of the teachings of Hermes, more and more of the townsfolk are successful in their work. They advance in their career repeatedly and find job security, higher income and less stressful work. As their economy improves, they become able to move to more expensive homes that have been empty before.  Families that have been forced to live with friends or relatives get their own homes, and families that lived in overcrowded houses have room to have children.  Slowly, year by year, the whole town flowers and becomes more prosperous, thanks to the tireless work of one man.

By all means try this at home. ^_^

tl;dr

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Pick one or another! People only read blogs that cater to their particular narrow interest, so should I stop writing about a thousand different things?

The dreaded acronym tl;dr means “too long; didn’t read”. I hope the use of an acronym was originally ironic: If not, it shows the sad state of impatience that is widespread in the world.  As I mentioned last time, this is not entirely due to the Internet: The TV remote and the crazy jumpy nature of TV programming has prepared us for the world of soundbites.

But this time is not about how we got here. This time is about what I should do about it.

I have written literally thousands of journal entries. By coincidence, or inspiration, or copying Debra, I have included a picture at the start of my entries from the very beginning. This was smarter than I knew, because I know today that people turn and run at the sight of a huge screen of text. A pretty or funny picture puts them in the mood to stay long enough to overcome the backspace reflex, and possibly read some of the text.

That said, even I reached the tl;dr point of my own journal after about ten years.  That’s why I went on hiatus, and that’s why I eventually shifted my journal to WordPress.  The old HTML setup was great, arguably better in some ways.  But the link to the years-ago entries (1 year ago, 2 years ago, …, 9 years ago…) caused me to go back and read those.  And when I had done that, the day was pretty much gone. I did not have time to write a new entry too. So I stopped.

If even I cannot read this mountain of text I have produced, who else will?

One problem is that the quality varies randomly.  Not just the content, but the quality.  The content is one thing, you cannot expect someone who came for the Sims to stay and read about spiritual practices.  (Although the Sims do yoga and meditation…) But even when writing on the same topic, sometimes I write better than other times.

And of course I change over time, and facts change over time. So I may contradict myself, when I don’t repeat myself.

Perhaps I should just keep adding seemingly random stuff at this end of the journal, and leave to historians of the future to try to organize it. I mean, who else would, when even I myself can’t imagine going through it all?

Or perhaps I should split off different categories into different blogs. Actually I already have that.  I have a pretty much purely spiritual blog in English, a personal and a political / philosophical blog in Norwegian (that I rarely write in), I have my Sims blog on LiveJournal, I have Twitter and FaceBook. But I could go further.

I have considered  making a more systematic overview of my philosophy of the mind. A kind of one-man Wiki perhaps, with links between the different parts that relate to each other.  Or perhaps something more similar to a book, which imposes a kind of narrative and presents my thoughts in order.

Then again, should I really do that for the couple readers who don’t come just for the pictures?  If it is that important, historians of the future will do it.  If it is too long, people won’t read it anyway, right?

tl;dr: I don’t know how much work I should put into writing for a generation that does not read.

Webthink vs bookthink

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Search the net with the click of a mouse! It is almost too easy…

So there has been some worry about how the web influences our thinking. Not just the content of our thoughts – actually, with Google at hand, we probably think a little more factually where we used to be guesstimating – but the WAY we think.  Studies show that people don’t read more than a few paragraphs. For instance, statistically you probably don’t read this entry to the end, at least if I provide a link somewhere before that.

In the past, people read books, so the theory goes. Books are deeeep. They let you immerse yourself in the narrative, build a grand cathedral of interrelated facts (or fiction, as the case may be), with many relationships knit together, thorough analysis and a span of time.  What is not to love? But now, people click the first link they see, and if they see a block of text filling the whole screen, they press backspace.

The idea is that people are starting to do this in the rest of their life too.  Certainly newspaper and magazines are starting to include highlights and fact boxes for those who can’t take the time to read the whole article. Who is to say that we are not adopting the same attitude in human relationships.

Don’t worry about that last part, say I.  Most people were always going on tangents anyway. Besides, the few who could follow a long narrative during a conversation, were the ones who followed their own, regardless of what everyone else was talking about.

And seriously, which came first, the hyperlink or the the remote TV control?  Even though many TV channels already look like someone is clicking frenetically on the remote, with random changes of angles, colors, faces and scenes, people STILL click the remote anyway. Because they can.

The books, I give you the point.  But take a trip to the nearest book kiosk and look at what kind of books they sell, and which of these again people actually buy.  Murder mysteries and Harlequin romance. And even then, people read them on the plane, subway, doctor’s waiting room or wherever they don’t have anything else to do and people would look strangely at them if they touched themselves.

There may be some who used to read War and Peace and now are unable to read more than a couple paragraphs.  That is worrying. (They should also see a doctor and get tested if they are 40 or above, Alzheimer’s is a terrible and creeping illness.) As for my humble self, people I have met on the net – like Carl McColman, Robert W Godwin, Ryuho Okawa – have made me not only return to books, but start to build a library of timeless wisdom instead of the hundreds of fantasy and sci-fi books I used to have.

You have to take responsibility for your actions.  But at least now you have more chances to learn things from cultures far from your own, geographically or in thoughtspace. If that is what you want. Or you could read numerous explanations of why George Bush is the Antichrist and will return to imperil us all once again.  It is up to you, really. You could even log off and read a good book.

But if you just did that, you would miss out on your reward! A link! Click it click it click it! The Last Psychiatrist – whose irony, wit and clarity of thought surpass even my own! (You know how hard that can be… but then again, you are not reading the rest of the entry after the link, so I can write whatever I want here.)

Unimaginably much information

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You may well stare: The rise and fall of entire civilizations could be contained within that computer!

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”

Few people in the world are better placed to feel the pulse of information flow than Schmidt, so I’ll take him on face value regarding the facts.  When he uses the expression “dawn of civilization”, it means he is not just talking about the Internet.  From clay tablets to newspapers and advertising fliers, everything is in there. Presumably also music cassettes, CD’s, movie reels and DVDs as well. Exabytes are unbelievably large: One quintillion bytes, or about 50 000 years of DVD-quality video.

Most of the new information is probably irrelevant or erroneous. For instance, over 90% of e-mail traffic is spam. (Microsoft says 97%, most other sources are lower though.) But Google is pretty good at filtering those:  Looking over the spam folder, which contains 30 days of spam, I found only one legitimate message, and it was a rather unimportant one, from a mailing list I’m on.  Likewise, I have had one spam-mail delivered in my inbox over the last month. Not perfect, but nearly so.

Twitter is a good example of the next level of “random” data: Even after you have subtracted the spammers, the relevance of what is left varies, to say the least. On my Twitter feed I get words of wisdom that will be valid and valuable as long as humans are humans. I also get product launches, and friends griping about their computer games and telling me what they have for dinner. Twitter is badly in need of tagging, but does not have it.

Modern blogs, on the other hand, have tagging.  However, it is often only available for those who write the blog, and their concepts may be different from yours.  Most notably, one person’s religion is another person’s superstition. In America in particular, one person’s political view is another person’s clinical insanity.

Even without using tags, though, Eric Schmidt boasts: “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are.” That is an average, obviously. But more and more of the online content is photographs or even movies. Schmidt’s comment also puts Google Street View is a slightly different light…

Much of the new content is neither text nor pictures nor sound, but abstract data like information from cash registers, car counting devices etc. These seem utterly impersonal at the moment, but it may not always remain so. As the net of data grows ever finer, it becomes possible to track the individual whether he wants it or not. In fact, I would say that trying to retain anonymity in this age is like walking into a bank wearing a mask and gloves.  You will stand out as a shadow on the data:  This customer always pays with cash, does not wear a connected mobile phone, avoids buildings with video surveillance… there may already be government agencies looking out for such a pattern.

Now – what will YOU do with the world’s information when Google puts it in your hand and says “Here, take this!”?

***

(I picked up the quote from an article on ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Schmidt: “People aren’t ready for the technology revolution”. They have some interesting information on that site, by the way. You may want to bookmark it for a rainy day.)

100 times stronger

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No, it won’t break, unless you also have grown 100 times stronger over the last decade. But a decade from now, it may break your mind…

No, this is not a spiritual entry, although I hope that one day I may be able to write such an entry with that title… Rather it is about a more down to earth science. 100 times is how much more powerful a computer is today than 10 years ago.

Moore’s Law implies that the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. That might sound impressive, but perhaps not astounding. To astonishment comes when we realize that the doubling is doubling again after another year and a half, and so on. This amounts to approximately an order on magnitude — a factor of 10 — every five years. And five years is a period of time most of us can remember pretty well, if we set our minds to it.

In other words, the average computer five years ago was 10 times weaker than today. So, what difference has this made in our lives?

At first, you probably think like I did: “Nothing at all.” I mean, five years ago I was writing my journal, surfing the web, and playing City of Heroes and The Sims 2. That is what I still do, so what happened to the revolution?

Well, for one thing, five years ago I did not have YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. And especially not on my mobile phone.  My mobile phone had something like twenty grainy characters in its display, and was used for talking. Actually it was barely used at all, because even then I did not talk if I could avoid it, more or less. But you get the point.

So mobile phones have basically become computers. How about the computers? Well, I am still playing The Sims 2 and City of Heroes, but with much more content, faster and with more detail on a larger screen, with a cheaper computer.

Five years ago, streaming video over the Internet was still experimental, and not reliable for most of us. There were services offering such an experience, but the movies tended to be small and grainy and you might still not be able to complete them without pauses or without the whole process breaking down. Today, streaming video is trivial for many of us.. though not all, as this depends on the communications infrastructure (copper cables, fiber or wireless network) in the area.

Five years ago, speech recognition was still not something I could recommend unless you were seriously disabled. I used it occasionally because of the wrist pain, but not for long, because of the high error rate.  Today, it is only marginally worse than dictating to a well educated human. But it still requires a fairly strong computer. It is not like you can dictate reliably to your netbook or mobile phone (although Google’s Nexus One made a decent attempt).

Your computing experience will vary:  A friend of mine is using the same computer and mobile phone as five years ago.  On the other hand of the spectrum, if I had bought a high-end video card, I would be able to run even modern games like Age of Conan at full tilt.  (This online game is not recommended due to its evil atmosphere, but as a demonstration of what computers can do in terms of lifelike video, it is possibly second only to Crysis.)

If I go another five years back in my journal archive, I come to the age of The Sims 1 and the tail end of the life of Daggerfall.  Both of these games look decidedly long in the tooth.  For Daggerfall this is to be expected, as it was released in August 1996.  But The Sims was the hit game of the year 2000, and I made comments about how it caused my computer to grow hot. The amazingly lifelike pictures and behavior of the small people in the game was a marvel.  Yet today they strike us as simplistic in body and mind, merely a prelude to the more realistic later iterations.

Back in 2000, I was still waiting for the broadband, and had to pay “through the nose” or “an arm and a leg” (not literally) for slow dial-up access to the Internet.  Going online was not something to undertake trivially: One time I got into one of the earliest online games, I ended up with a bill I just barely was able to work off without hurting my credit.

The grainy Japanese cartoons I downloaded occasionally back then took overnight to download, if I succeeded at all. Still, I was impressed at the time that it was even possible. From across the globe, at that! This newfangled “Internet” thing sure was amazing!

***

I don’t really think we are getting 100 times more effect out of our computers than in the year 2000.  Some of the raw power is lost in sloppy programming. It is a fact that programming is still more of an art than just plain production, and a good programmer can still run rings around a large team of mediocre programmers. In fact, if the team gets large enough, it may start performing worse and worse.  But thanks to ever faster computer, it is no longer necessary to optimize your code. As long as it does what you want, even if it uses an ineffective way to get there, you are good to go. After all, in a year and a half it will run twice as fast again.

But a lot really has happened, and some of it is like science fiction come true:  A computer taking dictation like a secretary, or a cell phone performing the functions that had required a computer only a few years ago. Actually, the ability to stream music from the sky with a choice between millions of tracks, is literally taken from one of my science fiction novel attempts approximately 20 years ago. Today I can do this on my cell phone, at high quality and barely noticeable cost.

So what will the computers of 2015 or 2020 bring, if we manage to not blow up the planet before that?

My best guess today would be that computing will go further mobile over the next five years. The cell phone of 2015 will probably take dictation much like my home computer does today. The screen resolution will also be much higher than today, although I don’t think it is practical to have a screen resolution comparable to today’s home computers. It will likely have handwriting recognition for those situations where you don’t want to speak out loud, although on-screen keyboards will be more popular since they will be pretty much typo proof.

I honestly cannot predict the computer of 2020. I believe computers will be embedded in most everyday things, so if will be perfectly normal to talk to your stereo or your TV and expect them to react accordingly. Not to mention your car, which may or may not drive on its own for the most part. Mobile phones will likely be able to translate between most of the world’s national languages, written or spoken.

But when it comes to computer games, online or off-line (if such a distinction is even meaningful anymore)… I have no idea what the future will bring, when computers are 100 times stronger than today.

Weird mornings

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For perhaps a week now, I have started to wake up an hour before the alarm. This is unusual for me. And it is not because I am fully rested either, I am very tired. I don’t hurt anywhere either.  Interesting. I can’t say it worries me.  I can lie in my bed too awake to sleep and too sleepy to wake up, and just be there, quietly observing my own existence. That’s a pretty pleasant thing to do actually. Eventually I am able to move enough to put on my headphones and play the delta brainwave entrainment track.