CalvinDude.com

300 is more than just an awesome movie with no historical realism.

It’s also how many miles I’ve biked since August 1.

304.26 to be exact.

Last night, I was able to play some of NHL 12, EA Sports’ latest hockey video game. There were a couple of things about it that bugged me. For example, they have a sign-in code that you have to put in the game in order to unlock certain features in multiplayer. That by itself isn’t too bad (aside from the obvious feeling like Big Brother is monitoring you—which is most certainly the case when you get any EA game); however, it would have been nice if the code that was included with the game actually…what’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh yes: WORKED.

The second issue is that it really has not changed all that much from the previous version that I’ve got. Indeed, as I started up the Be A Pro mode playing as a goalie, the presentation might as well have been my old version of the game. Even most, if not all, of the color-commentary used was straight out of the old version I’ve got.

Did I mention my old version of the game is NHL 09? Yeah, that’s right. They’ve “upgraded” the game three times and it’s almost identical to what it was back then.

There is one aspect to it that makes 12 better than 9, however, and that’s how the goalie plays in Be A Pro mode. One of the frustrating things about 9, at least for me, was just how difficult it was to get realistic percentages in a game when you were playing Be A Pro mode as a goalie. I experimented with a lot of slider setting trying to get a realistic game. The best I could do was adjust the settings so that my team would take tons of shots, and the other team’s goalie would stop almost all of them, while their team would take less than 10 shots at me while scoring a lot. Thus, one game my team won 5 – 3 and the other team’s goalie—you know, the guy who lost—ended up as the third star of the game because he had over 120 saves. Me, on the other hand—I had 14 saves on 17 shots. The other goalie’s save percentage was above 95%. Mine was 82%.

With 12, on the other hand, it’s more realistic. Notice I say “more realistic” and not just “realistic”. It’s better, but not perfect. Playing last night, my team scored 2 goals on 27 shots, which is a realistic number of shots on goal for a game and a realistic number of goals scored for that, with a realistic save percentage for the other goalie (93%). The only problem? The opposing team scored 10 goals on 77 shots. Yeah, that’s way too many shots for a game…but they did get this part right: if your team lets the other team shoot 50 more shots than you do, you’re going to lose big (not like my team taking more than 120 shots and only getting 5 goals). Saving 67 out of 77 gives an 87% save percentage for my goalie too. When you factor in the fact that one goal was the result of me playing out of position and another was when I discovered I could shove people out of the crease by hitting that button instead of blocking a shot, it didn’t feel to me like the game was “cheating” my goalie like 09 does. In fact, I felt that as a goalie I did almost everything I could have done, and if my team would have actually cleared the zone on defense instead of just turning over the puck, we would have had a shot at winning the game.

In other words, I felt like a real Avs goalie.

Over all, 12 is a fun game, but if you’ve got 09 or later I’m not sure you can justify buying it for as little as you get, unless you want to play a lot of goalie in Be A Pro mode.

It’s officially cold here. Yup, that’s right, the furnace kicked on this morning. That means that inside my house got below 65 degrees. Which would actually still be quite toasty if it were Celsius…

It’s not.

You’re not old until you ask that. So I guess I’m old now…. :-P

In the comments of my original post on Heaven’s Gate, Charles Sebold asked which documentary I had seen. I intended to respond earlier, but since I didn’t get around to it, I figured a new post might be better since others are probably interested too. You can actually watch the video on YouTube right now. The first segment is located here.

I just read an article called Hollywood’s 5 Saddest Attempts a Feminism.

I typically like Cracked.com, although they can be somewhat risque at times. However, since there are a bunch of different people who post columns there, there’s also a bit of inconsistency in the standards. This is an example of one of their lower-quality works.

The author of this piece (Jennifer Liang) complains that Hollywood tries to make female heroes in movies but still falls back to typical gender roles. She gives “examples” of this throughout the post. But in the end, the post is just a screed about how women aren’t treated like they are “empowered” or whatever PC term you want to include there.

All of this leads me to point out the simple fact that it seems to me that Jennifer Liang wants her feminism to be when a woman acts like a man…. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and actually use this thing called logic. Isn’t the view that a woman isn’t worthwhile unless she can be a man–isn’t THAT anti-feminism? All the examples of failure to promote “feminism” that are listed in this article are examples of women failing to act like men.

It seems to me that feminism is the most sexist anti-women position one can take.

As an aside, Liang also writes this sentence: “Her and her one true love, Will (Orlando Bloom), endure many obstacles in their relationship and are rewarded when they are finally united in a thirty second Easter egg after the closing credits of the final movie.” I think if she had paid more attention to grammar than to social engineering, the world would have been improved.

I’ve played a couple of video games lately with the specific goal of just seeing what kind of achievements I could unlock on my Xbox 360. I’ve noticed a trend in a couple of newer games, which I know others have noted before me, and still others will note after me. And it goes hand in hand with the idea of achievements in the first place.

See, before you include downloadable content to add on features, almost every single game on the Xbox has 1,000 gamer points. You get rewarded points for various tasks that you do, in the game, and if you accomplish them all, you’ve added 1,000 points to your total score. Your gamer score is your lump sum of all the games you’ve played.

Some games actually do a pretty good job with the achievement systems. For instance, if they know that many people might miss out on a particular feature, they can make it into an achievement so that the gamers who care about the score (which is everyone—those who say otherwise included) will at least give it a shot. Others reward you for doing things that are more life-like—for example, an NHL video game might give you an achievement if your player scores a hat-trick, since that’s something that real hockey players actually strive to do.

But then there are achievements that are given to you by sadists in the gaming industry. These can make even a good game become tedious and boring, if you try to do the achievement. A prime example of this is in the game Red Dead Redemption, where you can unlock things for your character by completing certain tasks. For instance, the game takes place in the old West, so hunting is a part of the game. You get rewarded for how well you hunt based on the animals you can shoot, and when you shoot enough of them, you gain more rewards—to the point where when you unlock everything, you get your achievement too.

The hunting progression, however, isn’t as straightforward as you might think, though. See, in order to start the challenge, you have to first shoot the correct animal. The game doesn’t tell you which animal it is—or even that it will have these types of challenges—so if you decide not to do much hunting and you don’t read on-line how to do it, you’ll never know how to get that achievement. But it gets worse. Part of the challenge requires you to kill 5 coyotes and then 5 rabbits. But what the game doesn’t tell you until you’re doing it is that it doesn’t count anything you do until after you start the challenge itself. So you might have shot 900 rabbits, but because you haven’t shot any coyotes yet, none of those count. Then, when you get the five coyotes, you suddenly discover that you can’t locate a single rabbit anywhere (but you’ll find hundreds of coyotes now).

This sort of grinding and collecting is becoming more and more common in games. It used to be reserved for the RPG enthusiast. And yes, in those games, some people like a bit of level grinding. My brother, for instance, once played Final Fantasy VII and got up to level 40 before he left the first Mako reactor in Midgar (those who’ve played the game realize that means he spent roughly 30 hours to play the first 10 minutes of the game).

But what’s happened with modern games is that game producers have gotten the idea that people want longer games to play. This is actually true, in and of itself. After all, buying a new game sets you back $60, and you don’t want to have a game you can beat in 3 hours (you could have, after all, watched Avatar at the IMAX for a third of the cost during that same time. So game makers have correspondingly decided to make their games longer.

The problem is, they make them longer by ruining the fun of the game. The game becomes repetitive, predictable, and the game makers resort to cheap gimmicks to eek out a longer running time. For example, I just finished playing Viking: Battle for Asgard. The first half hour was actually a lot of fun, if you can ignore the horrible camera controls. The problem is, they took that half hour and made you do it once in the first island, twice on the second island, and twice on the third island. I mean, literally everything you did on the first island you had to do again, four more times. The only difference was that the names of the baddies you were killing or the goodies you were rescuing changed. That game even let you get a more powerful weapon, which they immediately compensated by increasing the difficulty of all the bad guys you were fighting. In other words, not only was it not an accomplishment to upgrade your weapon, but the game actually got harder after your “upgrade.”

So, yeah, the first half hour was a lot of fun, but the rest of the game sucked. Did I mention that I played my first half hour of that game over a year ago? And I only just now finished the game since it was so boring to play I have no desire at all to ever play it again. In fact, at one point, during the final boss battle, when I was fighting the third sub-boss before even getting to the regular boss (and to get to the sub-bosses, you have to wade through dozens of the lesser creatures you’ve literally killed thousands of already), I realized that my only desire was for the game to just be over. I killed off the last wave of baddies and dispatched the sub-boss and finally got to the main boss…only to have her hide behind a wall of fire and summon waves of the lesser monsters for me to battle with yet again. I actually yelled at my TV at that point: “Games are supposed to be FUN!!!”

And that’s what many modern game makers have forgotten. It’s even—or maybe especially—in the little things. I hate running up to a door in a game and pressing the controller button to open it only to have the game tell me: “Repeatedly tap the B button to open.” Who in their right mind would program that in the user interface? It serves no purpose other than giving you carpel tunnel syndrome…and adding an extra 30 seconds to the game play. Which isn’t so bad if you only had to open one door. And if they didn’t also add that to any chest or gate or portal you had to open. Oh, and if they hadn’t also made it how the combat worked too.

Thankfully, Viking did have any collection achievements to pile on. But even in otherwise very good games, such as Fallout: New Vegas, the achievements section is designed to make you hate the game if you get all the points. It’s bad enough that there are four different faction endings that you have to do, but then they add in things like “Play 10 games of black jack.” Or the even more “fun” one: the “Get kicked out of every casino on the New Vegas Strip” achievement by winning too much money at each of the casinos. Which wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, but they decided to put in an anti-cheating mechanism that makes the game wait for 60 seconds before you can play again if you load your game at the gambling table–but literally the only way you’re going to get that achievement is if you cheat (the max bet is too low for you to get lucky and win it in one shot, and the house edge will make you lose if you have to make so many consecutive bets, so the only way to win is to save the game after you win rounds and load the save file, wait the 60 seconds, and then continue if you lost).

The only thing they could do to make it even less enjoyable is to put in an achievement where you have to collect 50 special bottle caps strewn over the wilderness, or actually make you win thirty rounds of their invented card game Caravan (no one actually knows the rules—the game doesn’t even play according to the rules they give you in the instructions). But no game programmer would be mean enough to do that….right? Right?

Oh….

“If you program a computer to spit out the phrase, ‘I love you’ whenever you execute the program, you know that that is not genuine love. In the same way, if God ‘programs’ someone to love Him, that’s not genuine love either.”

The above statement is a paraphrase of an analogy I’ve heard multiple times from various Arminians over the years. The assumption the illustration makes is that the reason we say that a computer program outputting “I love you” is not genuine love is because love must come from somewhere other than a program. That is, the assumption being made by the Arminian is that the reason

print "I love you";

is not love is because the program is not free, but is rather determined.

But that’s NOT the reason that we think programming

print "I love you";

is not a demonstration of love. We think it’s not a demonstration of love because the statement “I love you” being output to the screen is not an indication of emotion at all. The program that outputs “I love you” to the screen has no emotional content whatsoever, but rather it is simply echoing back what is put into it.

In other words, it would be like saying, “A reflection in the mirror does not have genuine love because it is not free, but can only reflect what’s in front of it.” No, the reason the reflection does not have genuine love is because all it is, is the reflection of light off another object. It has no will, no brain, no emotions, no soul, nothing.

So what happens if we change the original illustration a bit? “If you could program a computer to have genuine emotions–assuming, of course, that emotions can be created from a materialistic view–then the computer, having that emotion programmed into it, writes, ‘I love you’, is that genuine love?” Phrased in that manner, we see that the question is meaningless. There are only a few limited options available. The Arminian can claim that under the theory that we can actually program emotions in an inanimate object, then programming the emotion is not a genuine emotion because it’s not free–but such is to beg the question about whether genuineness is related to freedom in the first place (i.e., the question is therefore based on a fallacy). The Arminian can also accept that under the theory that we can actually program emotions, the computer experiences genuine emotions and therefore his argument is self-refuting. Or, the Arminian can claim that we can never program a computer to experience emotions in the first place, in which case he admits that his original question is comparing apples to oranges.

No, not THE flood. As I biked home today, I had to make an abrupt stop and then back track about a half mile because the creek had flooded over the bridge on the bike path. This actually isn’t all that unusual, since the bridge is only about three feet above the creek during normal weather. Apparently, it rained during the afternoon while I was at work (one of the only drawbacks to my new position–and it’s one I can definitely live with–is that where my cubicle is located has no windows to the outside so I never know what the weather’s like until I get ready to go home).

After having watched the documentary on the Heaven’s Gate cult yesterday, this morning I was reading a bit of Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter is, I believe, what I’ll call a non-reductionistic materialist. That is, he believes that immaterial thought arises from the actions of material objects. Which is a fancy way of saying that he doesn’t believe in the existence of souls, but instead believes that all which we would quantify as a “soul”—such as the presence of our mind—is just the outworking of several complex levels of physical objects obeying concrete rules. His argument is that the level where the rules take place is far beneath the level where thoughts occur, such that it is impossible for the person who is experiencing the thought to be able to focus on the foundational level where the physics reactions take place. One of his concepts presented in G.E.B. is that an ant colony has a rudimentary level of consciousness—that is, the colony as a whole, and not any individual ants. He likens this to the brain as a whole having consciousness, while individual neurons are mechanical objects obeying set rules.

So, this is about as far away as you can get from the likes of the Heaven’s Gate folks, who believed (very similarly to the ancient Gnostic cults) that the physical world was bad and the spiritual realm was good, and therefore we ought to be freed from our bodies—our “vehicles” in their lingo—to become who we truly are, in the spiritual realm. I myself fall somewhere in the middle, but probably much closer to Douglas Hofstadter’s view in the end.

Why? Because God made our bodies for a reason. And while I do not believe that mechanical explanations are sufficient to explain everything about immaterial thought, nor would I conclude that an ant colony has even a rudimentary intelligence, I also believe that God built human beings to be both body and spirit together. We are supposed to be a linked unit, and that’s part of why the resurrection is such an important concept in Christian theology.

See, if we were whole as spirits, then there would be no need for our bodies to be resurrected, for us to live on the new Earth (or “renewed” Earth). The very fact that there is a resurrection at all seems to imply that God believes our bodies are also important. And in the end, I believe that we are not truly “us” unless we are in our physical bodies.

Now, the actual make up of that body is not very important. By which I mean, our bodies are composed of individual atoms that can be replaced and re-arranged, etc. This is why we eat food that replaces certain chemicals in our bodies, and we also have waste products, and it even extends to our breathing (oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, etc.). Every single one of our atoms could be taken out and substituted in with another atom of the same type. That is, if every single atom of carbon in your body was suddenly removed and replaced with atoms of carbon from, say, some distant star, and they were put back in the same configuration, you would not know any different. It is the organization of the atoms that are important, not the individual atoms. And I believe that that corresponds more to the view of an ant colony having replaceable ants and still function as an ant colony.

But that is not to say that we are reducible to organization of atoms, or neurons, or any other materialistic aspect. The Bible clearly tells us that there is a spiritual existence beyond just the physical aspects that make up our bodies. Yet, this is not to minimize the importance of our bodies, and sadly I think most religious people go far closer to the route of the Heaven’s Gate or gnostic concepts. This is why you will commonly hear such phrases, even in Christian circles, as: “We have a body, but we are a spirit.” I maintain that the truth is: “We are a fusion of both body and soul, and if we are missing either one, we are not completely us.”

All of this is actually background to the point I wanted to make (which was to examine the question of whether or not a human will can be said to be “free” if every component of the will has been created and put together by someone else—i.e., God), but that will now have to wait for a future blog post.

EDITED: My post first said that I believed Hofstadter was what I called “a reductionistic materialist” but this was a typo on my part. It should have read “a non-reductionistic materialist” so I corrected the post above.