Category Archives: games

Sims 3: Me, family man

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Screenshot Sims 3: a simple home wedding

Wedding day! For the first simulated time in my sims3ulated life!

I have played The Sims 3 off and on since shortly after it came out, although I continued to play The Sims 2 at least as much for the first year or so. Yet earlier this month when I decided that my self-sim would marry, I realized that this was something I had never done in the game before. Not just for my self-sim’s various lives in the various neighborhoods of The Sims 3, but at all for any of my computer-controlled character.

My self-sim has sometimes been a “townie”, a computer-controlled character. It amuses me to see how the computer would play someone with my personality, or the best approximation of it that I could make in the game. There have been some amusing moments where I would think “That is so me!” but also some facepalm moments, as the young people would say. One bizarre thing is that my self-sim always seem to end up married to unlikely prospects, probably simply because they were both single at the time. Needless to say that does not happen when I play him.

This time however I made an exception to the celibacy of my avatar. He is now happily married to Jenni, formerly Mrs Goode, born Jones-Brown of Twinbrook, and they have two children together. And one ragdoll. We’ll get to that. ^_^

Jenni is a family sim whose lifetime want was to raise five children. She was pregnant bearing Goodwin’s child when the game started, although I did not know that at the time. Their marriage also passed me by. I only noticed her when she asked my self-sim on a series of dates. At the time I was unaware that she was married – I mean, why would married people date someone else? That is a recipe for disaster, of various kinds. So when I found out, the dating came to an end. Self-sim dedicated himself to gardening, fishing and cooking, as well as writing a little now and then.

Jenni and Goodwin raised three children, grew old and died. Sim-Magnus, on the other hand, did not grow old. He had maximized his gardening skill first, and gathered special seeds. One of them was a Lifefruit seed, and by his late adult years he had enough of them to eat one lifefruit every day. Each fruit makes the sim one year younger (except for elderly sim, who grow rapidly older if they eat lifefruit. I assume it is vaguely based on the Tree-of-life eaten by the Pak protectors in Larry Niven’s “Known Universe” series, except for being a fruit and not a root. Well, they are probably both based on the book of Genesis, but the thing about the herb being poisonous to the elderly is a Niven thing.)

By the time Mr and Mrs Goode had passed away, Sim-Magnus had maximized his fishing skills as well and caught Deathfish, a dubious creature usually found in ponds in or near cemeteries. Combine lifefruit and deathfish, maximized cooking skill and a recipe as expensive as a small house, and you can make Ambrosia. Normally this celestial meal will reset a sim to the start of his current age (mature adult in the case of my self-sim), but if given to a ghost, the ghost will embody again. You can see where this is leading.

So the re-embodied but still elderly Jenni moved in with Sim-Magnus and they married. Next up was chemistry. Experimenting with the chemistry set will improve the logic skill but also from time to time lead to the discovery of new elixirs, some nasty and some nice. One of the last, which I believe requires maximum skill as well, is the Elixir of Youth. It is rather costly at §5000, but it will rejuvenate a sim from old age to young adult. (You can also buy it for lifetime happiness points, it costs 70 000 of those. Come to think of it, I probably had that many by then. Oh well.)

So there you have it. The ragdoll belonged to Marit, their firstborn daughter. She played with it constantly, and when she grew up from toddler to school child, the ragdoll grew up to a fantasy friend. The parents could see her playing and arguing with it, but she could see it as a child her own age. Another chemical elixir eventually allowed the imaginary friend to become real, and Trulte is now part of the family, although not a relative. This is a feature of the Generations expansion pack, and lets you double the child population of a house if you go that route. It seems a few children do not receive ragdolls in the mail, I am not sure whether this is random, but both of mine have. They don’t count toward the raising babies lifetime wish, though. Adopted babies do, but not adopted toddlers and children.

Oh, and both Sim-Magnus and Jenni went through a midlife crisis and replaced one of their incompatible traits with a trait from the other. Jenni changed from flirty to bookworm, and Sim-Magnus changed from unflirty to family-oriented. Thus the rash of children. They are now both stay-at-home authors, letting them keep an eye on the kids while earning a decent living.

The real Magnus is not immortal, alas, so don’t expect this to play out anywhere outside the game. Still, it amused me.

 

Games, timers and recollection

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Screenshot Sims 2

A certain discontent, or at least lack of joy, when playing games for a while.

With my renewed attempt to tell the story of the simulated neighborhood of Micropolis, I have once again encountered a peculiar experience I have written about before: When I spend too much time in a game, I experience a general feeling of discontent, restlessness, even irritation. This does not seem to be related to what actually happens in the game. It may seem reasonable to get a little upset if I play a superhero game and suddenly a bunch of villains ambush me. But I get the same feeling, if not more so and sooner, from watching my small computer people go to work, come home from work, cook dinner, play the piano all night and feel lonely because they have prioritized the piano over their friends, with no help from me by the way.

So I have been thinking that perhaps I should start a timer when I begin playing, and stop after one hour or half an hour – this will take some experimenting to find a reasonable value. The idea is to get out of there before the discontent sets in. I have mentioned my suspicions that the problem may be of a spiritual or metaphysical nature: That spending too much time in a lower-dimensional world, one less real than me, causes some kind of “essence leak” or something that diminishes me. But that is just a vague hypothesis. It is based on the polar opposition from spiritual practice, which is not fun but ultimately satisfying, whereas for gaming the opposite is true. That is not to say that gaming is evil – and especially when there is a noble purpose to it. But in terms of effect on my soul, I think there may be some negative effects. Interestingly there seems to elapse a certain amount of time before this feeling of discontent sets in.

One of the saints I read during the past year repeatedly used the word “recollection”, which is an interesting noun. It seems to refer to a kind of spiritual concentration that is basically remembering to be present. Perhaps I have misunderstood this, but the voice in my heart seems to like this idea, that staying too long in lower worlds – games, movies, daydreams – unravels my recollection, my experience of united presence in the face of higher reality.

There are times when I suspect that the so-called “real life” is itself a lower reality, not in the Matrix sense of virtual reality but in a spiritual sense, that the home of the soul is actually higher up, and that a certain amount of discontent is unavoidable if one accepts this life on earth as one’s home. The Buddha’s primary revelation – often translated as “life is suffering” – could refer to just this opening toward discontent that comes from living below one’s home reality. But is this the same for all of us? I do not know.

Anyway, it is time to experiment with a timer, I think, and report back to you. If I never do, I probably found it too cumbersome and forgot the whole thing.

Return to Micropolis

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Snapshot from Sims 2: Micropolis, where happiness is the prosperity of the soul.

One strange effect of the song Into the West playing and replaying in my head: I felt the urge to return to Micropolis, my Sims 2 Prosperity Challenge. (I named it before I knew about the game with the same name.) I chronicled the history of the Micropolis neighborhood for years, until I was lured away by Sims 3. I regret now that I did not continue writing it. It may be too late to resume now: My readers have probably drifted away. But who knows. Perhaps someone will find it again, or someone new will find it.

I quoted the song twice during my writing of that saga, both at rather poignant scenes, so that would be why I suddenly thought of Micropolis when I heard that song. And I realized something, belatedly: My illustrated story of this imaginary neighborhood may have been one of the most important things I have done in my life. I have thought of this before but it kind of slipped my mind, among the many things going on. But the way I act as a “guardian angel” for the sims in Micropolis, my dialog with them and their life with each other, was a unique opportunity to bring across my view of life: What I really think is important, and how to get there.

The story of Micropolis is one of six very different families, all of which had lost loved ones and all that they owned in a hurricane. Together they settled in an abandoned village in the foothills. When I began writing the story in 2007, my “near future” setting seemed unreasonably austere: Everything was more expensive, jobs were hard to come by and almost impossible without college education, which was in itself quite expensive. My founding families were mired in debt from the day they set foot in their tiny houses far from the city. I wrote this toward the very end of the long boom, during its last frothing frenzy, long before the bleakness had sunk in among common people.

Over the course of decades, we follow the families as they go about their lives, but with a very unusual addition: An invisible higher-dimensional being, generally called “the Angel”, who observes them, converses with them, comments on their actions and thoughts, advises them and encourages them. Rather than using brute magic to give them prosperity, the Angel teaches them to use the opportunities in their everyday life to learn useful skills and improve their lot in the long run. Often a very long run, as they continue to rack up debt for a while until they have the skill and the free time to start paying off.

But the long-term project to turn the economy around is not even the most notable part of the project, despite the subtitle “a Prosperity Challenge”. The Angel is first and foremost concerned about the long-term happiness of his people, and help them make friends, find love, and steer each toward their life goals. The purpose is for each of them to achieve during their lifetime what in the Sims 2 is called “platinum mood”, or what we in this world would call “an unshakable mind”, a mental state where an individual is virtually immune to despair and able to always remain happy and do their best even in the face of adversity and disappointment. The wish of the Angel is that each and every one of his people will achieve this during their lifetime, a permanent feeling like the constant fulfillment of all desire.

So no, this state of mind is not permanent in me yet in the real world. But with the help of my higher-dimensional overseer, I still hope to spend more and more time in it until it becomes permanent. In a way, I am preaching to myself with this story, but the funny thing is, in The Sims 2 this really works. Living this kind of life really does bring happiness, peace of mind and peace among people. I don’t need to cheat or hack the game. Doing unto my sims what my own invisible friend does unto me works. Since most of those who will read the story are avid Sims players themselves, they will recognize this. That’s why I can tell a funny and heartwarming story about a small cluster of bereaved families growing into a happy and prosperous town, rather than trying to convince people of some ideology or religion. “Show, don’t tell”. ^_^

The already super long story of Micropolis begins here: http://itlandm-sims-mp.livejournal.com

Memrise!

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Tiny angels of curiosity

Are you insatiably curious? Then this website may be for you.

I have found another fun thing to do: Memrise, a website that teaches things, mostly vocabulary of foreign languages. Of course, there are many such websites, but this one uses state of the art psychology which lets you learn better using less time.

By “less time” I mean less time in total, when you sum up the hours of your life you have spent on learning the thing. It does not mean that you can sit down the night before an exam and learn at superspeed. One of the three “legs” on which this method stands is spaced repetition, which I have written about before (SuperMemo and Mnemosyne.) But this time it is combined with two other “legs”:  Mnemonics and motivation.

Mnemonics is the use of images or other associations which we connect to a random piece of information. Except for small children, most people have a hard time remembering something that is unrelated to everything else. The more vivid, amusing or emotional the association, the easier it will be to remember. If it also is associated with something we think about regularly, the energy that flows through the neural pathways will spill over on something associated. The best mnemonics therefore are those which we associate with ourselves, because we tend to think of ourselves a lot. This site cannot really help with that, but every piece of random data comes with a number of “mems”, images or thoughts that can make it easier to remember. Not as good as making your own, but easy and reasonably effective.

Memory refreshment, or spaced repetition, is the art of reviewing something just before you have forgotten it. This is the ideal time. If you review it while you still remember it easily, the effect is less. If you review it after you have forgotten it, you have to put more energy into re-learning it. The website remembers when you learned each word or fact, and even sends you a mail to remind you. At first, you repeat every few seconds or minutes during the main drill, but then it can take half an hour, four hours, 12 hours… it depends on how many times you have already reviewed it and how well you did. If you keep acing your reviews, it could soon be days or weeks. If you fail miserably, you will have to return to it soon.

Unfortunately, the calculation completely ignores work and sleep, so it is unlikely to work too well in the intermediate range, when you are supposed to review in a few hours. By then you are probably asleep or at work, hopefully not both at the same time!

Motivation is the third and often ignored factor. Most electronic teaching systems assume that you are already motivated by an external factor, and that may well be true. But this one has taken a leaf from the popular Facebook games (or “social games” now that we have Google+ and other venues for them). In these social games, people come back every day or even several times a day to water and harvest their plants or do other boring task to get some small imaginary reward, especially when they can share these with their friends. Memrise uses the same model. The initial learning of a word or fact is called planting a seed. Later you return to water it by testing your knowledge of the word after some hours. Finally you can harvest it into your long-term memory. You get points for each successful action, and your “wealth” of points is visible to your Memrise friends. (My name is itlandm4b by the way.)

As already mentioned, the website will mail you when you need to return to water or harvest your memories. You can also see if you go into each course how long it is until your next interaction with each plot of verbal crops. I have a lot that fall due in 12 hours, when I will hopefully be at work. This thing may be better suited for students. But no worries, if I fail miserably, I will simply have to return to them faster than I otherwise would. The game… er, teaching site keeps track of each individual fact, helping us work more on the difficult ones and less on the easy ones … for us personally, not some imaginary average person.

To keep track of everything and mail you when needed, the site needs you to register. You can create a new account or log in with Facebook. Unfortunately it does not take any of the other popular identity managers, like Google or Twitter or OpenID. Then again, it is free. If you don’t like having to create a new account, you don’t need to. But you may lose out on some of the most entertaining learning, or most instructive fun, on the web.

Wait! If it is free, how does it pay its bills? Well, so far it survives on generous investors, it seems. The plan is to take a cut of for-profit courses, but so far these are notable only by their absence. This may not bode well for the future of the website. But on the other hand, expenses are probably moderate as well: The users are making pretty much all the courses. After developing the software, the founders basically just need to run the server, and people contribute everything from single mnemonics to complete courses. So hopefully it will be around for a while. By then I should have learned thousands of new things. Perhaps. Or I might flutter off like a butterfly to the next flower. You know how I am with such things. Time flows differently for me. A month is an ocean of time, at least until it is over…

http://www.memrise.com/

Imaginary heroism: Resumed!

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“The price is that it changes your personality in the real world.” The anime Sword Art Online, which is about the virtual reality online games of the near future, supports the school of thought which we may call “habituation”, that our behavior in online games gradually affects our behavior in the real world. The opposite, the “catharsis” theory, says that people in games get an outlet for tendencies that might otherwise build up and be expressed in real life. It would be nice to know which was true right now.

OK, I have now actually tried Champions Online, and it is very similar to City of Heroes. It is more cartoonish in style, both the graphics and the atmosphere are closer to a comic book than the more realistic terrains of CoH. The control system is a little more confusing too. But overall, it is probably the closest thing, which is not so strange since it was made by the same developing house (although many of the artists and developers stayed with CoH when NCSoft bought it up.) And it does have the clear-cut morality, you know right away who are the good guys, and you get to rescue civilians from the clutches of evil. (For some reason, only evil has clutches? And cars, I guess, but I never hear of the clutches of good.)

Anyway, I should probably solemnly consider whether I should continue to fight imaginary evil on my free time or choose a more peaceful way to employ my mind for whatever time I may have left. I guess each has its benefits. Having my favorite crime-fighting game disappear beneath me may have been a helping hand from Heaven, or at least an opportunity from fate. Then again, it may be said that this self-satisfaction of the justice instinct may also contribute to strengthening it, and to maintain a lawful good self-image that will hopefully spill over into everyday life.

I mean, it is widely assumed by the populace that if someone satisfies their sexual drive by computer animation of child molestation, even though no actual children are involved, this person is probably capable of doing the same in real life, and may even become gradually more intent on doing so. (Scientists are not so sure of this, but then there is a lack of test subjects, for obvious reasons.) Logic dictates that by the same measure, people who derive pleasure from doing good in a virtual world, may be inclined to do good in the real worlds as well. I can’t say I have seen a lot of that in my life, but hey. At least I am not much of a force for evil, which is pretty good considering my youth.

That said, I wonder whether I should follow through with my original plan of limiting my game time to The Sims, a very peaceful and constructive single-player game. Or even cut out gaming to spend my time reading and writing good books. But the latter would be rather a big shift. I think I would have to feel very sick to stop gaming altogether…

The end of a world

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“Even if this world ends today, I will still protect you.”

November 30 marks the end of the online multiplayer game City of Heroes, which has been running since April 2004. I was actually playing it already when it was in closed beta, and was impressed. In my first review of it here, I described the game world as “a believable world, but larger than life: Beautiful and dangerous like the first weeks of love.” This may explain why I kept playing it till the end. But it is more than that: It was the goodest game I have ever played.

I don’t mean just that it was technically good, which it also was. The controls in particular was superior to any multiplayer game I have played before or since. But more importantly, there was an inherent goodness in roleplaying a hero constantly protecting people from danger, and defeating evil. (In the game, the concept “defeat” was always used. It was implied that nobody was ever killed in the epic superpowered battles. If a hero was defeated, they would immediately recover at the hospital, and it was assumed that a prison hospital would receive the villains.)

It should surprise no one that a game like this attracted a special type of players, a bit different from the ones playing elves and rangers, jedis and space traders. Comic book fans, of course, but it appealed to a particular temperament. Its players tended to be friendly, helpful, tolerant and mature in a way I never really saw in other games. (Although there was some of it, of course. Dark Age of Camelot gave me some happy memories back in the day too.) Over the years, these people have stayed with the game, to the very last. Sometimes couples were playing together, or parents and their grown children, or friends who had moved to different places but met up in this virtual world. Many new friendships were also made in the game, and it is likely that these people would have continued to play for another decade if they had a chance. But that chance disappeared.

NCSoft, a Korean company that bought the rights to the game some years ago, suddenly decided this fall to close it down. This came as a shock: The game had shaken off two newer competitors and was growing. It was running a profit, and new content was arriving at a brisk pace. Suddenly one day it was announced that the game would soon be closed, and the whole developer team was fired immediately. The reason given was that the company wanted to concentrate on its core (that is, Korean games, translated to English for the international market). I am not overly surprised. CoH is a very American game, and America has gone from being cool to embarrassing over these same years. Americans are probably not aware of this.

Be that as it may. This is not a day I want to spend talking about politics. Today I want to remember the “goodest” game I have ever played, the wonderful people I met and shared a beautiful, colorful dream with. The heart that made you thrive in such a place, will still be beating elsewhere.

People are bewildered that life must end
And time strikes them harshly.
But even if this world ends today,
I will still protect you.

(The end of the world, by Angela. YouTube. Translated by Suri-chan. )

Sims 2 and small hells

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The Sims 2 was arguably the first game where artificial intelligence was sometimes indistinguishable from natural stupidity.

I installed The Sims 2 on my laptop, and was surprised to see that it ran noticeably faster than on my old desktop.

You may wonder why I was surprised: After all, the laptop is four and a half year newer than the desktop, and that’s 3 “generations” of Moore’s Law.  Today, that Law is usually quoted as “the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months”. This is slightly different from what Moore actually said, but easy to remember and pretty close to what we observe in the real world. That would mean an 8-fold increase in computing power, more than enough to overwhelm even the difference between a desktop and a laptop.

(Yes, this means computers become 10 times more powerful in 5 years, 100 times more powerful in 10 years, and 1000 times more powerful in 15 years. Do you really want to turn your new computer on in 15 years? What if it takes control of you instead of the other way around? Luckily, what has happened is largely that instead of making large, insanely powerful computers, factories are churning out smaller and cheaper computers. These days they are called “smartphones”. ^_^)

***

Sims 2 is a lot of fun when it starts quickly and runs smoothly like that. But even so, I notice that after a while (about half an hour or so, for me and Sims 2) I begin to grow more irritable and grumpy. A feeling of dissatisfaction begins to emerge from within. These are hellish feelings, as you know if you have been on the receiving end of them. They are certainly not heavenly. And this happens even though the game is a lot of fun and I want to play it more. But even as I do so, I can feel my patience wear thin and my temper begin to fray. Why?

One day I felt compelled to write something like this: “On the way to Heaven, the sinner stops in Hell, thinking he has arrived.” I am not sure if this is literally true for the afterlife, or even whether there are ways and time in the afterlife (at least in our sense). What I mean is that this happens to us in everyday life. We seek after the Good, the True and the Beautiful. But on our way we come to surrogates which please us, but on a more shallow level than what our hearts really seek. So we stop and cling to these things, but this is the cause of a growing sense of wrongness. As long as we project this wrongness outward, thinking that we have been wronged by others and not by ourselves, it cannot be abated. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada:
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who harbor such thoughts
do not still their hatred.
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who do not harbor such thoughts
still their hatred.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal.

***

With The Sims 2, there is also the detail that the sims have needs and wants. And as with us, the two are not always in harmony. Their needs are such as hunger, bladder, fun and sleep. Their wants may vary, for instance to increase a skill or to become friends with a particular other sim. If their needs fall too low, bad things happen, all the way to starving to death. If they never fulfill any wants, they start worrying and eventually go insane. If you have any plans for them beyond this, that just complicates it even more. And if you tend to empathize (not to say identify) with the little computer people, some of that conflict will be felt in yourself. That is how I see it. In The Sims 3 this factor is less intense, because they take better care of themselves, and they don’t go crazy if they don’t fulfill their wants. They just pass over some benefits. So that might explain the difference between the two games.

But there is still some of this fraying of tempers in all games I play, although some hold out better than others. (City of Heroes, which will be discontinued on November 30 after 8 years, was quite possibly the best of them. I think part of this was its innate goodness. Even though roleplaying a hero is a kind of self-satisfaction, it is still aligned with good. I tried playing the included villain scenario, but this irritated me again.)

I believe that this restlessness and irritation and lack of satisfaction is a natural result of spending too much time in a lower world, a world less real than ours, even if it is fun. Conversely, spending time in a higher world can be distinctly unfun , but leaves us with a sense of deep satisfaction. (By higher worlds I mean not only those of religion, accessed for instance through prayer and meditation, but also secular studies of mathematics or physics, the laws on which our universe depends. It is not that these activities cannot result in great joy, even bliss, when we reach some new insight. But they are not entertaining or fun in the same way as playing a video game.)

So does this mean I am going to stop playing Sims games? Well, probably not yet. But perhaps I can learn to stop once my Fun bar has been filled…?

Go: Adventures in kifu

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Felt tip coloring pencils are not ideal for writing game records, but they will do in a pinch, at least for short games.

Today’s newbie Go player report is from the mysterious land of “kifu”. The word means a record or map of the game. It is usually drawn on a simple picture of a Go board. On each intersection you write the number of the move. The first move is number 1, the second move is number 2 etc, and you write them on the map where they were played on the board. That way you can easily reconstruct the game later. Seasoned players can even read the game directly from a kifu as if they had watched it, more or less. I am not one of those. Definitely not.

Do you need a kifu? Not if you are just playing for fun. You can play the game and forget about it. Well, you may want to reflect on particularly stupid moves so as to not do those in the future, or on particularly clever moves of the opponent if you can figure them out. But apart from that, it is all water under the bridge.

But if you are studying Go, and want to get better, there are two obvious uses for kifu. You can record your own games so you can reflect on them at your leisure later. Or you can use kifu from better players to replay their games. This is one of the time-proven methods of getting stronger at Go. Even young professionals do it, so I hear. I am definitely not one of them, though.  Still, I wanted to try it.

I did a Google search for “kifu paper”. There are a number of web sites which are eager to tell you to not use the phrase “kifu paper”. It is called “game record form” in English. But that is not a good search term as you will get lots of irrelevant hits. If you search for “kifu paper”, you come straight to the places where these sites tell you not to call it “kifu paper”, which happens to be right where you can download the form as well. ^_^

I picked the one from AllAboutGo.com, it was simple and to the point. Some have circles to write in, but I find it more natural to just write on the intersection. As recommended, I write the black moves in black (blue is fine also) and the white in red. It makes a big difference to how easy it is both to write and read. With this, you will not lose track easily or accidentally write 69 two times in a row. The black numbers are always odd, the red always even. Pure genius.

My first was an attempt to kifu an amateur match between a 9-dan and an 8-dan on the Internet Go Server. When you play yourself on the IGS, you can save a kifu that is made automatically, and download it at your leisure. It is possible you can do this with games you watch too, but the voices in my h… er, I thought it might be a good idea to write it by hand, involving other parts of the body and brain in the process.

I found out that fiber-tip coloring pens are not ideal for writing kifu. Who would have thought it? It worked, for the most part, up to 99. After that things became iffy.

Next out was coloring pencils. These worked well enough, although you may want to have a pencil sharpener around after a while. And who has pencil sharpeners in this age?

Eventually today I caved in and bought a red and a black Pilot V5 Hi-tecpoint 0.5. Because the quality of your Go obviously depends on the quality of your stuff. Well, to humans that may actually be true, since science has proven that people borrowing cheap imitations of brand sunglasses tend to cheat and not act with the dignity of those who borrow the real thing. So it is entirely possible that having an expensive Go board in real kaya wood, and writing your kifu with a quality fountain pen on original printed kifu forms will make you take your Go more seriously. But I like to think I am not like that. I am not saying I am not human (although sometimes I have wondered), but hopefully I am human in a different way than that. Still, a good pen is nice to have around. I haven’t had one in the Chaos Node for years.

So that’s my story. I am kifuing, as I call it, mainly to involve other parts of the body and brain, to improve subconscious learning. But is learning Go a good use of the sunset of your life? The Japanese certainly seem to think so, it is very popular among the elderly there. Millions of Japanese can’t be wrong! OK, they can – millions of Japanese were wrong during World War 2. But not about Go. In fact, if they had come to Pearl Harbor with Go boards, they would probably have won…

#go #igo #baduk #weiqi #kifu

My subconscious and I

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In the anime Hikaru no Go, the boy Hikaru can actually see the great Go player that resides in his subconscious. No one else can see him though. I can’t even see mine. It’s OK, he is probably not as good as Sai – just better than me, and that doesn’t say much.

I sometimes say to my subconscious: “There is a reason why you are the sub.” But this is not one of those occasions. Sometimes it just shows off. This was one of those times. Make that TWO of those times.

On my bus commute, I took the opportunity to watch a Go match on my Android tablet. It was a 7-dan player against a 6-dan. For me, that is comparable to a first-grader watching two English majors debating Shakespeare. While I find it vaguely interesting, I don’t really aspire to understanding a game on that high a level. My subconscious may disagree: At a certain point, it basically said “Black is going to play there”, pointing to a spot on the (virtual) board. Plop! Black put down a stone right on the spot.

I looked closer at that particular move, and actually it was pretty clear that bad things would have happened had black not secured that spot right away. But the thing is, I had not seen that by thinking logically and reading ahead. Rather, some corner of my pattern matching brain must have picked up enough Go to expect the next move based on what it had already seen of successful (and, in my own case, utterly failed) games. Now, as high-level games go, this particular move was one of the more obvious. But the fact remains that I did not see it with my rational conscious mind, but instead a “voice in my head” (not literally, but more like an independent thought) spotted it straight away.

Later in the day, I took a look at the opposite: A lowbie game, still on the Pandanet-IGS (Internet Go Server). A 17-kyu – the lowest rank on IGS, but still way above me – was playing someone in the Beginner Class. As it happens, the beginner was in the process of winning when I arrived. Looking over the board, I quickly spotted a large group of white stones that were dead as a doornail. (We say that a group is dead when it can be caught by the opponent and there is nothing to do about it.) In this case, black could kill it in three moves, and there was nowhere else on the board where such a big opportunity existed. (Or if it was, neither I nor they found it!) I watched intently, but neither of them seemed to pay the slightest attention to the huge group, 15-20 stones by my counting. In the end, they both passed, which ends the game. They counted the territory, and still no one of them made a move to remove the dead group.

It was glaringly obvious to me as an observer, so I thought by myself: “If a 17-kyu player does not see something as obvious as that, and I see it, I must have made quite a bit of progress.” So I fired up the Go-playing robot program in my tablet. It crushed me again, just as badly as it usually does. I had made no progress at all.

And this, dear congregation, is the story of my life. I can see things that are above my play grade, with the help of the imaginary voices in my head. But when it comes to myself, I seem to make no progress at all.

The beauty of our weapons

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This dagger is radiant with beauty – at least when seen by the one wielding it!

I was playing Daggerfall as a Linguist, probably the most underpowered character class possible to make without hacking the game files. A life on the brink of extinction, running away a lot, progressing slowly.  And then I got my hand on one of the most overpowered items in the whole game, the Dagger of Life Stealing. (Mages Guild, Grayidge, Tulune.)

The surge of elation and confidence was on behalf of my imaginary character, but I still felt it in my physical body. I also noticed just how pretty the thing looked, which was why I took the screenshot. But as the “voice in my heart” pointed out: It probably doesn’t look that good from the other side, that is, for the person it is pointed at. Isn’t that the truth for all weapons?

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There are also abstract weapons. For instance, here in Norway we talk about the “strike weapon”, when workers go on strike against employers or against some perceived injustice in society. I am sure my friends on the political left see the beauty in this weapon, but it is clear that most people who get stuck at an airport or find their supermarket without milk or their doctor appointment canceled, don’t see the beauty of the weapon so clearly.

Conversely, the members of “Occupy Wall Street” and similar organizations probably fail to see the beauty of a well-ordered troop of policemen coming their way with shields, batons and pepper spray – a beauty that is plain to see for my conservative friends.

So that is the lesson I was told by the Voice in my heart. It would probably have been better if I spent more time with that teacher than with my old flame Daggerfall, but what can I say. This is what happened. Sometimes we forget the obvious: That the beauty of a weapon depends on whether you are behind it or in front of it. Even words can have the power to wound, and I remember the satisfaction of giving a particularly sharp-edged reply. There is a lesson in this for almost everyone, I think.