News You Can Bruise for 2007 October

Yes, I did my writing assignments. One of my stories is 2500 words instead of 5000, but it's a good story and it's as long as it needs to be.

Your name might be uneuphonic, difficult to spell or pronounce, or very long. The same reason a lot of performance artists use stage names.

You might use different names when writing in different genres. Genre readers are pretty picky, and if you put the same name on all your books, bookstores may not stock as many of your titles. Publishing imprints work on this principle.

If you get caught in the midlist death spiral (which is definitely caused by an algorithm, though I'm still going back and forth on whether it's a bad algorithm even by the shortsighted standards of big business), changing your pseudonymn can be an effective way to fool the algorithm and reboot your career. Publishing imprints also contain elements of fooling bookstores' algorithms.

Finally, you might want to avoid prejudice. Still common is the girl cooties theory of literature which holds that certain genres are intrinsically less macho than others, and has as a subtext the idea that hard SF written by women can never achieve the synthetic-diamond hardness of hard SF written by men. So a lot of women use their initials or gender-neutral or male pseudonyms. (Attempting to defeat the GCToL can also lead to overcompensating within the story.)

Through the workshop I got wildly varying assessments of my story's position on the Mohr scale of science fiction, and I'm pretty sure this had to do, not with the GCToL directly, but different readers' perception of the mass market's perception of the GCToL.

Despite the not-terribly-surprising fact that the vast majority of people who write SF under their initials are women (there was a survey on this topic but I can't find a link), readers tend to assume that unless the writer's unambiguously feminine name is spelled out for them, the writer is male (different survey, ditto on link). I guess even thinking about it requires confronting the prejudice.

It's still a little early for me to be picking out my science fiction pseudonym, but I'm considering writing under my initials 1) out of solidarity with female SF writers, and 2) to avoid confusion with the two nonfiction books already published under my full name. However, it's difficult for me to pass up an opportunity to sow confusion.

That part of the book is now outdated because I went on to describe a set of equivalent ad hoc solutions to this problem, each created by a different web service provider for their services, with the implication that someone who's not me should get off their butt and come up with an open standard. This has now happened, and the result is OAuth. The people working on the standard are posting introductory guides to drum up interest. The standard is good, I've been pushing it on the companies I consult with, and the time is right to use the NYCB bully pulpit to spread it further. If I were Kenneth Turan I would rave, "The most significant HTTP authentication mechanism since Basic!"

Incidentally, today's the first day of my job, but I don't actually start until tomorrow because it's a holiday.

"You got peanut butter on the sheet!"
"You got sheet on my peanut butter!"
"No! That's not how it happened!"

"You wanna go dance in the rain?"
"Sure."
...
"I think we just reenacted an xkcd cartoon."
"I'm fine with that."
"I think we just reenacted another one."

The short form is the natural experimental form for science fiction, and I think it's the one where you can really advance the state of the art. But one of the less controversial things you can say in this troubled world is that the market for short-form science fiction is pretty bad. Subscription numbers to the big three print fiction magazines are in decline. So are the pay rates: a story published in 1930 might have netted you the 1930 equivalent of $1000; today the same story might fetch you $300. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm going to talk generally about money in a bit but tonight I want to focus on what's the deal with short stories. You can't blame piracy because nobody even bothers to make unauthorized copies of short stories. The audience is just gone.

At VP I heard things to the effect of: the short story is the farm team, the garage music of science fiction. It's a mechanism for editors, writers, and fans to keep abreast of developments in the field. There's your problem: that's a really small audience! I've been an SF/F fan since before I could read on my own, and I like the short form, but I only started reading the magazines when I became serious about getting my own stuff published; ie. took the field itself as an object of study. For these purposes the market is drastically oversupplied.

The short form is ideal for evaluating new writers: you have to concisely demonstrate the quality of your counterfactuals and psychological treatment. But the market is based on the outdated premise that their core audience wants a certain thrill every month and that a print magazine is the best way to deliver it.

I've said before that the vectors of change are online magazines like Strange Horizons, but after VP I see why. It's not just generic "online is awesome", though that's part of it: the people who want the thrill that SF provides (inc. me) are starting to want it online. The other part is that online magazines are making it possible to regard modern short SF/F as an indexed body of work, the fictional equivalent of a field of science: the study of thought experiments. (Remember that the web was originally designed, if I may quote myself, "to schlep project notes around a physics lab.") As a bonus, for those interested in short SF/F solely as entertainment, it's easy and permanent access to the entertainment.

This is why I keep linking to the old science fiction that shows up in Project Gutenberg: it fills in the enormous gaps in the indexed body of work. This is why it's so bad that the Sci Fi Channel claims they've taken down their archive of new and classic stories (it looks like they haven't actually done it yet): it brings into the online world a taste of the impermanence that is completely standard in the print world.

Lying in wait like an unwelcome subtext to this discussion is the topic of my own humble contributions to the field. Post-VP I've been editing my stories for submission to the big-name print magazines; but really, why am I doing this? Well, there is the blood oath I took on Friday. But what do I want out of it? At any time I could short-circuit the whole boring process by publishing my stories online. The money's really bad either way, and my online readership over time would approach the basically-one-time print readership.

Really what I want out of it is recognition from my would-be peers. Right now that comes by voluntarily going through an established gatekeeper instead of self-publishing. This is important because the traditional career trajectory for a science fiction writer (insofar as such a thing can be considered a career, which as I'll claim later is not very far at all) starts out with you building a name for yourself in this increasingly misaligned short story market. I don't particularly want a trajectory right now, but I would like to have something of a name in the field, so I press onward.

When I asked Patrick Nielsen Hayden what new career trajectories he saw taking shape, he said "If I knew that, I'd be rich." Well, nothing's going to make you rich in this field, but if he knew this it'd be a lot easier for him to find people he should sign for novels. I'm coming up with alternate schemes for advancing the state of the art, schemes based more around peer review, but they tend to reduce to starting my own online magazine.

In semi-related news, someone at VP wrote a constrained story based on the premise that teleology was a real science. I didn't read this story but I'd really like to.

"If you want best-sellers you can check the best-seller list."

• This is the third time I've mentioned Lost Labyrinth in a Roundup, and that's because they keep changing it. Its Linux port is back and there are now presets for the enormous list of character-creation attributes. It also seems a little better-balanced than previously. Full of even more random stuff--last time I played, I got trapped in a throne room by a jolly king who wouldn't let me leave. Seriously. PS: casting spells in this game is a pain.
• POWDER has a really simple interface due to being originally written for the GBA. Has all the moving parts of your more complicated roguelikes, though, like self-polymorph.
• Now a bunch of Java Roguelikes based on old games, put out by Slashie.net. All of these do a good job of translating the original gameplay into roguelike terms. To play them on Linux you'll need to delete a DLL file that comes with the download, or Java will crash. (??)
• First, CastlevaniaRL, the best of this group. Captures the atmosphere of the Castlevania games, complete with incongruous candlesticks that you smash for prizes and poorly-translated narration from Castlevania II. WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE, indeed.
• DrashRL seems to be an Ultima-type roguelike. Or Ranadin-type, which I never did find the Java remake of that game. Anyway. Kind of boring, but cool "floating orb" graphic.
• ZeldaRL is okay but the color curses interface makes it look like Zangband, totally changing the mood to a non-Zelda mood.
• MetroidRL was pretty disappointing actually. You know what we need here is a Kid Icarus roguelike.
• Not from Slashies.net but a similar idea is DiabloRL, which is Windows-only and won't work on WINE. There's a whole 7-Day Roguelike project that spawns most of these weird games, kind of like the IF MiniComps except they often get fleshed out later.

One ludeme shared by most of these games is non-regenerating HP. I find this ups the difficulty greatly in a roguelike, where you can't rely on dexterity to evade enemies, so I tend to go for magicians or other characters who can self-heal, like the allegedly reformed vampire in CastlevaniaRL.

However, the waiter did offer us the ability to poutine-ize our fries.

"You know the joke about how all the superheroes are Jewish? Cause their names are Batman, Superman, Spiderman..."
"Well, you know who's not Jewish. Robin the Goy Wonder."

Anonymous commenter on Zack's Livejournal says to take a look at Dwarf Fortress. I definitely think everyone should take a look at Dwarf Fortress, but the roguelike part of DF is pretty lame. Instead I would suggest Zack take a look at ADOM, which has most of Nethack's fun features, few of the aggravations, and not many of the second-order aggravations that come from fixing the first-order aggravations.

Zack's complaints about Nethack:

• The basic mechanics are taken from 1st edition AD&D. That's easy to change if you're writing a new Roguelike. The only place I think this really causes confusion is the weird treatment of armor class and THAC0, and the ancient D&D alignment system. ADOM keeps the lawful-chaotic axis, but has a more fluid model where your alignment fluctuates little by little according to your acts, and where many in-game possibilities depend on your alignment.
• The class system is limiting. I agree. Many modern roguelikes handle advancement with skill points, or a mechanism that lets you assign each of your experience levels to a class. Or look at Omega, most sadly neglected of roguelikes, which lets you join and advance in a few guilds, some of them mutually exclusive.

  I would like to see a roguelike that consistently applies the real-world principle that you get better with practice. You start with an inclination towards solving problems in certain ways, but you only improve the skills you practice.

• The goal is a boring MacGuffin search. Yes, but. A MacGuffin search is what you get when you don't have a plot. Nethack has a page of plot at the beginning, a page at the end, and a bit during the quest, all easily skipped. The only way Nethack branches out is with multiple exits to a level. You can explore the dungeon branches or not: they don't interact with each other or with the main quest. The second-order effect is you stay in a tactical frame of mind from your first move to your last.

  ADOM is a roguelike with a plot. You have to talk to people to get quests. There are multiple endings. Pretty basic stuff, but it changes the gameplay. The world feels a lot less static. There are a couple things about the game world that actually happen over game time.

  Nethack also has no character definition. The memorable characters in Nethack are mainly memorable for inscrutability: the Oracle, Izchak, Rodney. Characters in ADOM have approximately the depth of console RPG characters: there's the old gladiator, the girl who lost her dog, the baby dragon. Console RPG depth is not very deep, but it feels more like a real world and less like a game.

  What's the downside? Because ADOM is a roguelike, you die a lot. When you die in a console RPG you go back to your last save, but every time you die in ADOM you have to restart this moderately complex plot, make a bunch of decisions about which plot levers you want to try and pull this time, which characters you want to put into which states. This problem gets worse as the plot gets richer. Nethack sidesteps the whole thing by having no plot and no character definition.

  Is there a solution? @Play did a few columns on a Japanese rogulike called Torneko No Daibouken (tr. "Torneko's Huge-Ass Adventure"). Read about its architecture as a Nethack player and it will seem very weird but it's a nice synthesis of Roguelike death and CRPG continuity. There's a CRPG metagame where you talk to people and build up your magic items business, and a Roguelike game where you steal magic items from the dungeon. When you play the Roguelike you start at level 1, and the Roguelike continues until you leave the dungeon. Then you play the CRPG for a while. Eventually you can take a couple of useful items into the dungeon with you to make it easier.

  In Torneko No Daibouken you have no real agency in the CRPG portion. But you could put most of the plot into the CRPG, and make your plot decisions persistent over a series of games. I'm still thinking this out.

• The middle game is very tedious. Definitely. No one has so far hired me as a niche-game-themed motivational speaker, but if that ever happens one of the connections I'll make is that mazes in Roguelikes are like mazes in text adventures. They were funny once (in Rogue/Colossal Cave) and now they should not be used.

  The solution is to have more special levels that are not all aggravating in the same way. ADOM has a huge variety of levels: different environments connected by a world map, and a large dungeon that contains many special levels. SLASHEM has more special levels than Nethack, but not enough. CRPG 'levels' are almost always different from each other, both in terms of window dressing and in terms of monsters. I'm seriously reevaluating CRPGs after playing Earthbound. The only ones I'd played before were a pretty old crop: Dragon Warrior, Ultima, and the original Final Fantasy.

  The other part of the tedium is schlepping items around the dungeon. This is not hard to fix with different mechanics: making it possible to carry huge amounts (there's a spell for this in ADOM), or making it unneccesary or impossible to carry lots of stuff (*Angband, Diablo).

More later as I need to go to sleep.

Update: The promised "more".

• Identification is too hard. Well, there are lots of tricks here, and it's not too hard if you know them. Basic price ID and the wand trick will get you a long way. BUT, that's a feature of Nethack and doesn't have to be a feature of any given Roguelike. *Angband and Diablo have identify scrolls for sale in the town. But those games also have very strict inventory limits, so you have to constantly identify and ditch items. They also have a huge number of unique artifacts, so there are many more things to identify than in Nethack.

  I've found that identification is very difficult in ADOM, because the Nethack tricks don't work and identify scrolls are much rarer. Also you can't name classes of items.

  If you want to make identification easier, you can add more tricks or add more sources of identification. You can balance this by adding more things that need to be identified. This ties in well with Zack's desire to see more equipment and more artifacts.

• It's easy to optimize your kit. *Angband negates this by 1) having an enormous number of monster attacks that you need to defend against, and 2) giving you lots of randomly generated equipment. If you're lucky you can optimize your kit, but there is no immunity in *Angband, so you still have to carry around resistance potions to deal with the Older Than Dirt Red Wyrm who can breathe for 400 points of fire damage every turn (this is one of the things I hate about *Angband actually).

  However you get rid of this problem, it's going to be by creating more aspects of equipment. Either there will be no way to get all these aspects at once, there will be so many ways to get partial coverage it will be difficult to figure out the best one, or some of the aspects will be negative (permacurses, vulnerabilties). It helps if you limit (ADOM) or remove (*Angband) permanent intrinsics. That way the player has to rely more on their equipment and less on something they ate.

• Artifacts are boring. They are, in fact. I think this is another result of Nethack's flatness and written-in-C-ness. It's easy to add another weapon to the artifact table but difficult to give it custom behavior. And often the custom behavior doesn't make the artifact better than a normal enchanted weapon. The vorpal sword is kind of cool but it's not worth lugging around.

  ADOM has more useful artifacts than Nethack, even though there's no custom behavior. *Angband has random artifacts that are cool, and Zangband(?) has a whole subgenre of usually-useless artifacts that can be triggered for some effect every N turns and have fun Knapsack Problem-esque names. Diablo II has super-cool customizable artifacts. I like Zack's idea of artifacts (or just random objects) gaining more power as you complete quests, but that's going to be a whole lot of side quests most of which won't be triggered in a given game. Sounds kind of MMORPGish.

  Magicbane, Mjolnir, and Stormbringer are the only Nethack artifacts that feel like artifacts, like powerful magics barely under your control. That said, most roguelikes don't give artifacts any special behavior at all. You could go a long way just by programming that big table of artifact effects from the 1st edition AD&D DMG.

• Starting equipment quality has too much variance. True, but if you're going to introduce variance into the game (important for replayability at different challenge levels), the beginning is the place to do it.

  In this context Zack brings up the complaint, common to pseudo-RPG genres, that although saving the world is supposedly your job, nobody lifts a finger to help you. I actually wrote What Fools These Mortals to explain this, and the "Guide to the Mazes of Menace" tries to accomplish the same by downplaying the implications of the game intro dump.

  In a game design context, this occurs in Nethack for two reasons. First, Nethack comes from Rogue, and in Rogue you are "some punk kid with no particular skills and no holy mission" -- a rogue, if you will. Second, if you started the game with good equipment, the first part of the game would be too easy. It'd have to be made harder. Then you'd be back where you started. Maybe kick in a couple food rations for classes that start with no food, but I think Nethack gives you a wide variety of challenges here and it's a reasonable design decision.

Realistically it's not going to happen, if by "career" you mean "source of enough money to live on" and not "thing you're primarily known for doing". In fact, if I may speak from experience, writing in general isn't going to do it. John Scalzi (he of the unorthodox career trajectory, of which more anon) made $67k last year as an SF writer. That's really good for an SF writer, but it's about entry-level for, say, a computer programmer.

The telling detail for me came during the discussion of conventions. Many fans who are heavily involved in the SF community are perfectly capable of writing professional-quality SF. They don't do it because they're happy making 10 times the money as theoretical physicists or sysadmins. In other words, they're rational.

But of course lots of people, including most of the VP instructors, devote big chunks of their lives to and are best known for writing science fiction. How do they do it? Here are the tactics I discerned.

• Don't need a lot of money. Live in New Hampshire or Nevada. Don't live in New York unless you're an editor on salary.
• Have another job. Laura Mixon works at a game company. John Scalzi (who was, I should mention at this point, not teaching at VP this year, but he makes a good test case for a lot of things) does some sort of contract work for AOL Journals. Cory Doctorow reduces overhead by tying all of his work into a media empire (weblog, science fiction, speaking engagements, teaching, etc.) each part of which reinforces the other parts.
• Publish a lot. Elizabeth Bear has published eight novels since 2005. James MacDonald and Debra Doyle have published thirty-five novels together. Charlie Stross, to pick another useful non-VP test case, was able to quit his lame job and become a full-time writer, but he did this by selling fourteen novels in six years.

  James was talking about how you can get paid for the same story multiple times (anthologies, basically) and how that money adds up, but I can't see it adding up to very much unless you constantly write stuff for anthologies. Which, of course, you can do.

• Marry another writer. James Macdonald and Debra Doyle are espoused; so are Laura Mixon and Steven Gould. You can collaborate with your spouse to get stuff written faster, or you can trade off such that one of you is working full-time and the other is writing full-time. (Sumana and I have been doing something similar, which is how I was able to write my two O'Reilly books.)

One thing that doesn't work is selling movie rights to your book. Steven Gould's Jumper has been turned into a big-budget Hollywood movie (I hear tell it takes place in a world) and he certainly got a chunk of money from that, but it's not life-changing money. It's money for paying off a big one-time expense like a kid's college education. Selling one set of movie rights is not fundamentally different from selling one novel. If you want Hollywood money you should go into Hollywood proper.

I've always enjoyed AI and robot characters in all kinds of fiction, but the AI NPC is powerful in a way that's unique to video games. This is partly because a video game is itself a primitive AI, and partly because there's a closer affinity between the player and an AI NPC than between the player and their own PC.

An alien is not human. Game aliens are either humans with foreheads, or they're cannon fodder and you're not supposed to identify with them. The latter works out great because aliens are alien to the extent that you can't identify with them. Outside of games, the space-alien concept is powerful because it forces you to confront the difference between an enemy, who you can identify with but you're not supposed to, and someone who might be friendly but whom you can't identify with. Games usually pull a cheap equivocation: you can't identify with the aliens because there's nothing there.

An AI is a broken human. A well-conceived alien, as John Campbell said, "thinks as well as a man... but not like a man." An AI is the alien we get when we try to make something that thinks like a man but we fail. Usually we fail because an AI doesn't have a human body. It's traditionally embodied in an immobile computer and it sees the world through cameras. It can't identify with other in-fiction people, so its behavior tends to be at odds with what its designers intended.

We get a game when we try to replicate some aspect of real life and fail. A game just isn't real life. Not only will the graphics and physics never be perfectly accurate, but the ludic lessons we learn in games never apply directly to real situations. Except for Math Blaster. Man, I can't even tell you how many times that saved my bacon.

Now let's get heavy. When we play a video game we embody ourselves in an immobile screen, looking through a camera at the game world. We send electronic commands into an interface box to change the game world. The AI NPC and the player have the same relationship to the game world. In a sense we can identify with an AI NPC better than we can identify with our own PC! We share the feeling of being right up against the edge of the world but not really part of it, the frustration of not being able to do something because of the coarseness of our controls.

The AI in Portal was designed to be helpful but has "ridiculously base assumptions about human intellect and motivation." It's broken in the same way HAL is broken: it has human desires but it can't interpret them in terms of the real world, only in terms of its hard-coded mission goals. It can't even empathize with itself. So it treats the satisfaction of its desires as an optimization problem. Similarly, we often have trouble empathizing with the PC's desires, even though according to the fiction of game-playing we are the PC. We optimize the PC's behavior for our own convenience or other goals, even if that's certainly not what the PC would want.

So I think the trick of Portal is that the AI NPC is really the player. The NPC addresses the PC in the same patronizing tone I address characters I control when they suffer ten consecutive bad die rolls or slide off the platform I tried to land them on. The player identifies with their antagonist over "themselves". That's what makes it funny.

All part of my ongoing plan to out-Adam P. Adam P. More on how a corporation, another kind of artificial human, has the same empathy problems as an AI, and how this ties into the atmosphere of Portal, will not be forthcoming.

PS/Update: Sumana suggests I explain the title of this entry, my beautiful obscure reference which violates all audience-retainership rules about the title serving as a summary. Here you go.

PPS: The best thing about the Coulton song is that now, all other songs that use vocoder sound like they're sung by the AI.

What to do? There's the de rigeur Emacs RTF plugin, but all it can do right now is read some RTF documents. I've found the process of manuscript conversion is pretty automatic as long as you distinguish poetry from prose. That means I should be able to write a script using Ruby RTF to do the conversion. (It's missing some features but I can just hard-code the corresponding markup.)

I'm mainly posting this to find out if anyone else is in this same, admittedly only slightly leaky, boat.

• Dwarf Fortress approaches a huge new release that apparently includes 3D caves, even more mechanism building, and whales.
• Robert Hooke's minutes from the Royal Society. Post-VP I'm taking everything written in archaic English as broadly as possible, like "Orderd tht mr Bond & the Rest try the variation of the needle at white hall."
• CFDG is like a hipper Logo.
• I can't play these Windows games but they look fun.
• The first in a series: A History of Gaming Platforms: The Commodore 64

• 2 slices Italian bread
• 1 tomato
• Green beans
• Basil
• Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper to taste

Toast the bread and dice it. Put it in a bowl. Pour olive oil and vinegar on top. Dice the tomato and put it on top. Meanwhile, cook the green beans. Put them on top of the tomato. By this time the tomato juice should have soaked into the bread. Or help it out by tossing everything together with tongs.

Another recipe coming immediately because my sister-in-law just requested it. Immediate update: No need, Sumana already posted the Indian-style popcorn recipe.

I decided to do a semi-scientific test where I measured this by searching for game "X levels" and comparing the numbers of results. I did a few Google searches until I remembered that Google doesn't want my business for this. I switched to Yahoo!, which has a handy web search service.

I graphed the number of search results against the number of levels for every X in 1 to 100:

According to that, most games have 10, 50, or 100 levels. 4 levels is also extremely common (though I think there's a lot of pollution there from things that have 4 levels, like malls). A number divisible by 10 or 5 is the most common, but you can plug in any small number of levels and find some oddball game (random example).

Then I graphed X=1 to X=1000, with a skip of 10 between 100 and 1000. I had to use a log scale because 90% of the total matches are for X=1 to X=100.

The left side of the graph is a "long tail" type graph, but there are very popular data points near round numbers. I also graphed X=1 to X=2000, again with a skip of 10. As we can see the adventure continues. Between 1900 and 2000 there's significant pollution from years ("returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions").

I collected data up to X=5000, but 2000 levels is really the limit of how many levels one entity can create for a specific "game", unless that entity be a computer generating them randomly. I don't think I've ever even seen a Rocks 'N' Diamonds level set that had more than 2000 levels. So I won't show you another graph. But if you want the raw data I put up a Gnumeric spreadsheet with my original graphs. Around 3500 there's a lot of financial crap from India for some reason ("support at 3575 levels from the past three trading sessions").

Random tidbit: judging from hits, the least popular number of levels 1-100 is 79. However, 46 stands out from its neighbors as being especially unpopular. Also mysterious: why is 80 more popular than 70?

Spent the afternoon writing up Future Stuff entries, building up the backlog for yet another business trip next week. I hope y'all appreciate this, as this is very real time I could be spending playing roguelike games. We are approaching the two-thirds mark of Future Stuff, but still have many bizarre items left to go, like "Holograph Bifocal Contact Lenses", "The Vilest Taste", and "Edible Pet Spoon".