malvasia bianca

For the last couple of weeks, my twitter feed has had a lot of chatter about Persona 4 Golden, enough so that I was thinking that I should maybe get a copy at some point. I don’t have a Vita yet, but I’m actually hearing enough buzz about that system that I’m not against getting one, it seems plausible that there will be enough games I’d be interested in playing on the system that it won’t just collect dust. So, if it’s a game I should play and that’s the best version, I guess that’s what I should do?

The thing is, though: I was really looking forward to playing Walking Dead on the iPad. And it’s a great game, no question, and once I got past the first episode, the iPad interface has been fine.

But something’s been missing in my experience with that game: Liesl isn’t involved in it. I’m used to playing narrative games on a TV with her watching; it’s not so much that we spend huge amounts of time talking about games, but her watching me play them creates a shared context, and sometimes she’ll comment on choices while I’m making them in the game. And it turns out that I can feel the lack of that shared context.

This is part of the reason why I avoid PC games. Not the only reason: I don’t have a Windows machine around, I managed to cleverly structure my gaming history in such a way as to avoid becoming really fluent with keyboard and mouse controls, and mice give me RSI (trackpads and typing are fine, fortunately). But even setting all of that aside: if I’m playing a game on a PC that’s at all demanding, then I can’t play it on our living room TV, and I probably can’t play it on our laptop: I’d have to shut myself away upstairs in our library to use the computer there. And I’m quite reluctant to commit to doing something that will require me to isolate myself from the family for tens of hours at a time like that.

Jordan wrote an article earlier this week entitled Most tech writers are single but most phone buyers aren’t, and I think this is another manifestation of that. Fellow game bloggers, I love all of you, I assure you; but most of you are noticeably younger than I am, and many (most?) of you are also noticeably singler than I am. Maybe I’m just projecting my own change in habits from playing games on a computer in my dorm room (or my basement growing up) to playing games in a shared space onto other people’s life experiences, but I don’t have space in the house that’s strictly my own, and playing games in a separate room would feel faintly hostile to me now. And that’s just for single-player games: spending regular time playing online games alone on a computer upstairs raises even more complications. (As would playing in the living room but roaming the wilds of Xbox Live, for that matter.)

Actually, now that I write this, I’m wondering what the boundaries are between game modes that feel isolating and ones that don’t? I’m happy to read a book by myself; and I’m also happy to be playing Super Hexagon or Letterpress on my iPad. And Liesl certainly plays quite a bit on her iPad as well—10000000 is a current fave—and that doesn’t feel isolating.

Looking at those examples, the time scale seems relevant: games where a play session takes a few minutes don’t have the potential to isolate in the same way that games that will take months to finish. (With books in the middle; and I wouldn’t feel so loathe to isolate myself on a computer to play a game if I could finish it over the course of two or three evenings spread across a week, instead of requiring a month or two to finish.) Also, books and iPads are devices that we can play on (practomimic on?) next to each other in bed, looking over at what the other is doing as we feel like we want contact.

Which raises the question: why do I feel that Walking Dead on the iPad is more isolating than I’d like? It’s relatively short, and it’s on a device I can play sitting/lying next to Liesl, so on those grounds it’s no more isolating than a book. But a big difference between that game and a book is the sound. Whenever I watch a video on a laptop or iPad in the living room, I’m always torn between having the sound on the external speakers (and bothering everybody) or plugging in earphones (and isolating myself). And that’s just with typical Youtube-length videos; with a game I’m playing for hours at a stretch, the problem gets a lot worse. And with a game like Walking Dead, I’m not willing to turn off the sound in the same way that I am with Super Hexagon.

I dunno. As I was typing this, I was thinking that I should have considered playing Walking Dead on the TV with Airplay; but games have to support that, and Walking Dead doesn’t. (And, returning to the Persona 4 question, I guess the Vita doesn’t have an HDMI out?) Hopefully Telltale will fix that if they come out with a sequel for the game; if not, maybe I’ll play it on the 360 instead. And maybe the right platform for Persona 4 for me (in a mythical world where I had 80 hours to play a JRPG!) would be the PS2 instead of the Vita.

I never played Words with Friends, or Scrabulous before it, so Letterpress was my introduction to the genre of “asynchronous video games based on coming up with longer and/or more obscure words than your friends”. Which turns out to be a pleasant enough genre! Especially since my stock of long and obscure words is not small.

Of course, that’s a double-edged sword: I won most of my early games of Letterpress, which was boring, but Dan Schmidt clearly had the edge on me, which was also boring. So: is it just a game of “who has the bigger dictionary”? Which I was especially worried about when I encountered boards with Q but no U: I don’t want to have to memorize lists of special-case Scrabble words.

That game against Dan actually suggested that the answer might be that no, vocabulary alone isn’t decisive. Because it went on for a long time, with us fighting over the same set of letters, and with him winning by locking down one more letter every round or two. So territory control seemed important.

That also got me noticing some of the other gamier aspects of Letterpress. My initial take was that the start of the game was badly done, because the first move seemed like a dominating advantage. But the swings in points from turn to turn are quite large in general: if you, say, steal six of your opponent’s squares and grab one new square, then that’s a 13-point swing, and there are only 25 points available! So sure, you’ll have a big lead after the first move; but in the second move, the second player will take a big lead back, and the pendulum will keep on swinging back and forth.

In fact, those big swings continue until the end of the game. The final move generally isn’t quite as large as the previous moves, because it will grab at least one and frequently three or four unclaimed squares (which give one point but don’t take away one point, so are only half the point swing of a play on your opponent’s boundary), and because the last unclaimed squares are generally for letters that are hard to use, hence (perhaps) lending themselves less well to long words. But still: you absolutely can’t get cocky about doing better than your opponent, having larger leads after your turn than they do after their turn, because all they need is to come up with a word that can end the game while giving them a one-point lead.

So: to play well, you need to do a little bit of reading ahead. Not elaborate reading ahead, but once you get past the opening, you have to ask yourself about every word you’re considering: will my opponent be able to make a word that uses up all of the white squares that I’m leaving on the board? And, if so, will that be a winning move? If so, you’d better do something else.

That’s one way in which you have to think beyond playing the word that will give you the largest point swing. But there’s also the territory control aspect of the game: your letters that are surrounded by your own color can’t be (immediately) taken away by the other player. So if you can play in a way that takes advantage of that fact, you’ll do well.

Honestly, I haven’t thoroughly analyzed the strategy there. Presumably it’s good to expose a small attack surface area: so start from a corner, expand in a clump, so your boundary is as small a proportion of your total area as possible? And the general wisdom seems to be that it’s a good idea to lock up key rare letters, e.g. vowels; of course, if you own those, then you’ll have to play them yourself, so you’ll end up not gaining territory by playing them, but it’s still better to own them than not, and given that, you can’t affect how the score will change when you play them but you can affect how the score will change when your opponent plays them. So yeah: locking up key rare letters is good.

So, once I’d gotten past my first round of days, my gameplay switched from grabbing as many letters as possible wherever they were to locking down a core region and slowly expanding out from it. Games took longer; we’d end up dancing around the last three or four letters, until enough one-point gains accumulated that one or the other of us had enough of a lead to let the other player finish off the white squares.

If I wanted to further improve my skills, the next thing to do would be to combine these notions of reading ahead and territory control and start trying to visualize exactly what options each move of mine would leave for my opponent. But, for better or worse, I stopped playing after about a week. If I want to play a game involving reading and territory control, I should start visiting the local go club again. And Letterpress is fun as a social experience, but it’s too one-sided: it’s no fun to have the same person always win.

I’m still not convinced that there isn’t more to Letterpress than I’m giving it—if I had more free time (or less aversion to asynchronous interrupts), I’d have pushed it farther. And I’m glad I spent the time with it that I did: it has a lovely aesthetic and some interesting ideas. (I’m not against playing it even now; I’m davidcarlton on Game Center.) But my time constraints are what they are, and there are so many good games to play this year.

When I became a manager at Sun, they sent me to new manager training; they asked us to read a book called First, Break All the Rules which seemed to do a pretty good job of presenting a research-based approach towards management. One of the findings that the book presents is that, if you want “to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees”, then you want employees to strongly agree with as many of the following questions as possible:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Which looks like a pretty good list.

Different questions are relevant for different reasons: for example, they say that only the following five questions are relevant for employee retention:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

That surprises me: not that those five questions don’t seem relevant to retention, but I would have expected some of the others (e.g. “Do I have a best friend at work?”) to be relevant as well.

Overall, the authors say that the first six questions are the most powerful, in that they have “the strongest links to the most business outcomes” (I believe the outcomes that they’re looking at are productivity, profitability, retention, and customer satisfaction):

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

Unsurprisingly, these lists are consistent with the advice given by another one of my favorite research-based management books, The Progress Principle. For example, the latter book lists the following as “The Seven Major Catalysts”:

1. Setting clear goals
2. Allowing autonomy
3. Providing resources
4. Giving enough time—but not too much
5. Help with the work
6. Learning from problems and successes
7. Allowing ideas to flow

(Though there are certainly items on each book’s list that aren’t on the other’s.) The Progress Principle also lists the following as “The Four Major Nourishers”: Respect, Encouragement; Emotional Support; and Affiliation; these all fit squarely into the list from First, Break All the Rules, and they give the following recommendations for leaders when it comes to nourishing:

• Do: Show that you respect people and the work they do.
• Do: Recognize and reward the accomplishments of your people.
• Do: When needed, provide emotional support to those who work under you.
• Do: Create opportunities for the development of friendship and camaraderie in the team.
• Don’t: Act dismissive, discourteous, or patronizing.
• Don’t: Display apathy toward your team members or their projects.
• Don’t: Obfuscate roles, responsibilities, and formal relationships, or change them haphazardly.

Again, all of those do’s show up on First, Break All the Rules‘s list, and they’re all consistent with my personal subjective perceptions.

Returning to First, Break All the Rules, that book follows up the aforementioned lists with a section entitled “Managers Trump Companies”:

Once a year a study is published entitled “The Hundred Best Companies to Work For.” The criteria for selection are such factors as Does the company have an on-site day care facility? How much vacation does the company provide? Does the company offer any kind of profit sharing?

…

Our research suggests that these criteria miss the mark. It’s not that these employee-focused initiatives are unimportant. It’s just that your immediate manager is more important. She defines and pervades your work environment. If she sets clear expectations, knows you, trusts you, and invests in you, then you can forgive the company its lack of a profit-sharing program. But if your relationship with your manager is fractured, then no amount of in-chair massaging or company-sponsored dog walking will persuade you to stay and perform. It is better to work for a great manager in an old-fashioned company than for a terrible manager in a company offering an enlightened, employee-focused culture.

Indeed.

I have not been playing a lot of games recently. Part of this is that my weekend video game time is almost entirely taken up with Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith; part of it is that we’re watching more movies than we used to and we’re going through Deep Space 9 as well; part is that I have bunch of blog posts that I want to write, and I don’t want to get back to playing until I’ve burned through most of that backlog; and part of it, frankly, is that other events in my life have been keeping me too distracted to focus as well as I’d like.

But part of it is that I’m spending some of my time doing fairly unusual for me, namely watching current television programs. The other factors mentioned above would keep me busy, but I’d still have one or two evenings free a week; as is, though, I’m spending one-and-a-half evenings a week watching TV, and there goes my game playing time.

I don’t want to claim that I’m so much of an anti-TV person that this is completely unprecedented. For example, when we first moved out here, we watched a bunch of baseball, and fairly soon on discovered the original Iron Chef; a few years later, we watched the U.S. version of Iron Chef, and Liesl not infrequently has other Food Network programs on that I’ll pay partial attention to. (The Next Iron Chef, Chopped, etc.) She also watches some fashion design contest programs that I’ll pay a smaller amount of attention to (e.g. Project Runway); and I did watch The Glee Project with here. (Which I liked a lot more than the few episodes of Glee itself that I’ve seen, though I didn’t think the second season of The Glee Project was as good as the first.)

That list almost entirely consists of reality TV. (Liesl also watches some shows that aren’t reality TV; I pay less attention to those, though I did watch Downton Abbey with her.) Which is a favorite genre to bash from a cultural snobbishness point of view; it would seem that I like it, though, and I don’t think that’s solely my reflexive low culture boosterism coming out. And, actually, the major TV watching that I’ve done since moving out here that isn’t reality TV consists of watching baseball: and, as far as I’m concerned, the fact that sports doesn’t fall under the “reality TV” label is a pure accident of history. (Well, an accident of history combined with cultural snobbishness.) Because sports is unscripted TV filming actual events; when I look at the Wikipedia article on reality TV, it says that, in addition to those factors, the genre “usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors”, but shows like Iron Chef blur that line pretty seriously as well themselves. I’m not saying that there aren’t potentially interesting/productive distinctions to be made between the genres of reality TV and sports, but from where I sit, they look like they fit on the same continuum, and judging from my viewing habits it’s reasonable to say that they both satisfy the same parts of my brain.

Which isn’t to say that I like all reality TV, either. I’ve never watched shows like, say, The Real World, because in general I’m not attracted to the more voyeuristic side of reality TV. What I like is TV shows that show people performing activities skillfully, activities that are frequently of an artistic or culinary nature, and I’m happy to have a game framework wrapped around that performance. In fact, written that way, it’s completely unsurprising that I like reality TV: if I spend a noticeable chunk of each weekend playing video games that focus on music, then why shouldn’t I be drawn to watching games on television that focus on music?

One example of such as show is the one that is taking up my viewing time these days, The Voice. And that show really does focus on music: its titular shtick is that contestants are chosen sight unseen, so right from the beginning the quality of their singing is what matters. And this season, the singers have been really good: even the initial round had generally solid performances, and with two weeks left we’re already seeing singers being eliminated whose future solo careers I am actively curious about.

That’s not the only reason why I like The Voice this year, though. Because there are several contestants this year who are freaks, and who are my kind of freaks. The most striking example of that is Nicholas David: he’s gotten noticeably better groomed in recent weeks, but he was amazingly scruffy for the first week or two, I don’t think I’ve ever had as strong a feeling of recognition/identification when watching somebody on a popular TV show as I had with him.

Even the bits that don’t match how I actually look do match me conceptually: elbow patches on your jacket are an academic cliche. And his hippie bowing mannerism is dear to my heart as well.

But, unlike me, the guy can really sing: he’s still there in the final four, and he deserves that spot. And that’s the case for the other freaks in the show: they sing very well, and in a way that very much brings their own character to what they’re singing, much more than the more standard contestants. I’m not going to argue that MacKenzie Bourg should have lasted for many weeks than he did, but his version of Call Me Maybe was amazing in its own way, and week after week we’ve gotten to hear Melanie Martinez put her own, very strong, stamp on songs. (Though I am also a big fan of her style in hair and clothes.)

So, yeah, reality TV in general and The Voice in particular are open to talented weirdos. And, of course, open to talented non-weirdos, too: Trevin Hunte occasionally absolutely floors me with his singing, and I do not understand why Amanda Brown got knocked out this week. (The ending of her rendition of Dream On was probably my favorite performance on the show so far, and she’s had a lot of other excellent performances as well.)

Which isn’t to say that I like everything about the decisions on the show: Cassadee Pope is fine, but I don’t understand why she’s made it this far, so people are seeing something in her that I’m not; and Christina Aguilera’s excessive boosterism of styles (both vocal and presentational) that aren’t to my taste grated on me enough that I was glad to see her artists all get knocked out. (Though wow, what a charmer Dez Duron was.) And I’m not sure what I think about the show’s approach to diversity in the judges: it’s super by-the-numbers (the black judge, the female judge, the country judge, and the judge who is unmarked by virtue of being a white male pop singer), but at least the show is trying to show a bit of diversity within its basically mainstream framework, and in general I think the judges are doing a good job of bringing professional skills to the table?

So: that’s where my time has been going. And I’m happy with that. But it will also be nice to get back to games: Mark of the Ninja has been calling to me for a month! Fortunately, The Voice only has two weeks left, and I’ll have a lot of free time starting next week, enabling me to burn through the backlog of blog posts to write. So I should get back to a more normal artistic regime soon.

I frequently lament the lack of crepe stands in Downtown Mountain View, so I was pleased that a restaurant called “Crepevine” was setting up shop; when I noticed it had opened its doors today, I figured I’d go in and buy a crepe to eat on my way home.

The restaurant looked pleasant enough once I got in, with a slightly more diverse menu than its name suggested. Which, actually, led to the first warning sign: I couldn’t even find a nutella and banana crepe on the menu, and when I asked about it, they said they had it, they just called it the ‘Monaco’. Maybe there’s a reference there that I’m missing, but as is it feels like a slightly inappropriate renaming of a culinary standard? And the second warning sign was that the crepe cost seven bucks; I decided to give it a try, but that’s expensive enough that it’s certainly not going to be any sort of regular habit for me.

The third warning sign, though, was much more serious: here’s the packaging that they gave the crepe to me in:

That is not suitable for me to eat while walking home. (Or while walking to the train station, or while wandering around downtown after dinner.) And I wasn’t any more impressed when I got home: the crepe wasn’t warm (no idea how warm it was when I got it), it wasn’t particularly good (not actively bad, just mediocre), and those containers contained ice cream and whipped cream that were both superfluous and poor quality.

So: the food snob in me recoils. The restaurant isn’t focusing on the basics of making a good crepe, and they’re adding unwanted geegaws (both culinary and nomenclatural) to that indifferent start. Food snobbery aside, though, it’s an interesting lesson of “job to be done” theory: I was hoping to hire the food as a pleasant snack on the way home (and have wished in the past that I’d had that food to hire as a dessert to munch on while wandering around downtown), but the packaging, pricing, and toppings all worked to make it inappropriate for that task.

Now, there’s no reason why this particular restaurant should have as its goal to fill that niche. And, indeed, if the niche it’s trying to fill is a low-ceremony place to have a sit-down meal, then what they’re doing is more appropriate. That price, though, still seems odd to me: much better desserts at more expensive places on Castro still top out at around $7, so aren’t they overshooting a bit?

I imagine rents on Castro aren’t cheap: they have a cost structure that they have to make work. But that’s not my problem, that’s theirs. Which actually reminds me of the recent news in the iPad magazine space: The Daily announced that it was going to close, while The Magazine looks successful so far. It’s not that The Daily didn’t get subscribers—it apparently got millions of dollars in subscription revenue—but its cost model didn’t let them be successful with that amount of revenue. The Magazine, in contrast, has much smaller overhead.

So, in that light, it’s not surprising that my expectations that are formed by sidewalk crepe vendors don’t fit for sit-down restaurants. Still: I wish downtown Mountain View had a sidewalk crepe vendor. And a panini stand…

One of my main sources of blog posts is following analogies: seeing where they’ll lead me, stretching them far past their breaking point in hopes that they’ll give me a different perspective on something that I’m thinking about.

And today’s area in which to analogize is forms of social organization, or relationships more broadly. The social group that’s by far the most important to me is, of course, my family. In terms of time, though: I spend a huge amount of time with my coworkers, probably more time than I spend with my daughter. And it would be very easy to spend as much time with them as I do waking time with my wife.

So: did I spend as much time getting to know my coworkers as I did my wife? Not hardly: a few hours of interviews, and while they were interesting and informative hours, it’s nothing like the months/years of courtship that Liesl and I went through. Which is, perhaps, disproportionately short compared to the amount of time that my coworkers and I were going to spend in each other’s company?

Of course, Liesl and I ended up wanting to make a life together; and more than two decades later, we’re still going strong. I do not, in contrast, have any expectation of wanting to work in the same company for the rest of my life: I don’t consider myself a job-hopper, and a year and a half at Playdom/Disney was shorter than I’d like future job stints to last, but six years at Kealia/Sun was perhaps a bit on the long side? Not that I wouldn’t be happy for future jobs to be places where I want to spend six years, but I’m not particularly expecting that.

Which raises question number one: why not? Should I set my sights longer-term than that? Job hopping is definitely ingrained into Silicon Valley startup culture, we’re always supposed to be looking for the next big thing and to have our eyes set on getting rich from stock options instead of building something that matters to us long-term; and that’s a part of Silicon Valley that I’m not at all comfortable with. Wouldn’t it be better to try to find a company that I wanted to be part of indefinitely?

Well, maybe. Or even probably: I’d prefer for all aspects of my life to be as satisfying as possible, and I don’t see any reason offhand to think that work that’s as satisfying as possible wouldn’t be more likely to be at one company long term instead of a string of companies shorter term.

Still, while that’s a potential goal, and certainly not something for me to actively avoid looking for, it’s not something that I would worry too much about. For one thing, I already have one marriage in my life: that’s incredibly rewarding as is, and I feel no need for a metaphorical second marriage in my job. Also, one of the things I find fulfilling in jobs is an opportunity to learn something new; it’s certainly possible to repeatedly do that within a single company (I’ve done it many times before), but I always learn something new whenever I change companies.

But, on a more pragmatic level: it’s hard. On a basic level: the process of finding somebody to marry generally involves a lot of short-term exploration and a fair amount of medium-term exploration before diving into a long-term marriage. Job hunting is different, though: you’re lucky if you’ve spent as much as a day in the company of your coworkers before you basically commit to spending at least a year or two at that company unless something goes seriously wrong. Returning to the marriage analogy, that would be like agreeing to move in with somebody that you’ve only gone on a couple of dates with: not smart, and not likely to lead to something long-lasting. But also not something that you can avoid: if you’re in the dating market, it’s a lot easier to go for long stretches without dating anybody at all, let alone long-term, if you don’t find anybody that clicks, whereas going without a job long-term has much more concrete negative repercussions.

Still, based on that analogy, the traditional process of finding a job sounds like a ludicrously bad idea. And maybe it is! Maybe not, though: I find the ideas of arranged marriages extremely distasteful, but many cultures have made them work. And, for that matter, the other relationship that is as important to me as my marriage is my relationship with my daughter; both of us went into that sight unseen, but it’s worked out rather well. So these sorts of long-term commitments can work even without prior knowledge of the other person, if they matter enough to you. (Though I imagine having hundreds of millions of years of evolution of biological programming doesn’t hurt…)

The other big difference between marriages and jobs (or at least between my marriage and my job, I certainly don’t want to speak for everybody!) is that I’m only married to one person but I’m working with a bunch of people. So maybe a better relationship analogy for a job would be a group marriage, or a commune, or something. Neither of which I have experience with, but I suspect that there’s something there. The bigger the group of people you spend time with, the more likely it is that you won’t be temperamentally completely aligned with everybody there, and the more likely it is that, at any given moment, you’ll be annoyed about some aspect of your interaction with somebody that you normally get along well with.

And, most of the time, you don’t want that to be a deal-breaker. So you spend time talking stuff out; but you also accept that not all social links are high-intensity all the time, giving you breathing room when you need it and in general reducing the overall friction level so you don’t need that breathing room as often.

(Of course, sometimes in group living situations, one personal interaction really does turn out to be a deal-breaker. Which happens in jobs, too…)

So: when I think about analogies, jobs are more similar group living situations better than they are to marriages, I think. But even there, the match isn’t particularly good: jobs are much more likely to be hierarchical than group living situations.

Actually, as I type that of sentences, I realize it’s flawed for a couple of reasons. For one thing, while I would say that I find hierarchical group living situations distasteful enough to reject them out of hand, the truth is that there are a lot of them out there, and in fact I’m participating in one right now: Miranda is not a peer to Liesl and myself in this living situation. And, for another thing, I wish jobs weren’t as hierarchical! So I guess it’s an analogy that I would like to hold, and that I hope points in a direction of a useful question (living situations seem to be able to get along well without hierarchy, why do we accept the need for it unquestioningly in work situations?), but that I don’t want to stretch too far.

I wonder if religious institutions could provide another useful analogy here; unfortunately, I’m hampered by never having spent time in any. So: who knows! Broadening out to still larger groups: let’s raise the question of hierarchy explicitly, and ask what forms of political organization we would like in our workplaces?

These days, of course, democracy is the dominant form of political organization, and we generally look askance on political entities that aren’t democratic in some sense or another. So, in that light, it seems odd that democracy is so rare in workplaces.

Or at least: it is in the workplaces where I spend time. Maybe if I spent time in unionized workplaces, I’d see a lot more democracy in action, though I’m not sure what the scope of that democracy is even within those workplaces.

And, taking a broader historical view, democracy is very much not the norm in political systems these days. If I were to take a teleological point of view of the evolution of political systems, I might say: just as we’ve evolved from autocracy to democracy in the political sphere, so too will we evolve that way in workspaces. But teleology is lousy science, and adding it to naive analogization doesn’t help matters! Still, at the least it does point out that, just because autocracy is widespread in one context at one point of time, it doesn’t mean that autocracy will remain widespread in that context in later points of time. So we should be open to the possibility of changes in this form of social organization as well.

One reason why I believe in democracy as a political organization and in a lack of hierarchy in marriages is that, in both cases, important resources are shared. What’s mine is Liesl’s and what’s hers is mine (and, importantly, the same isn’t true for Miranda, her name is not on our mortgage or our checking account); and the air, many public works, and many natural resources are shared by all. In a job, though, that’s not the case: some people own the resources, other people just work there.

As I type that, I realize: in general, though, all the people who work there are basically on the same foot in that regard. Even in Silicon Valley with its stock culture, there isn’t a strong link between the amount of stock you own and the amount of political power you have. (Not that the two aren’t correlated, but the correlation is probably best explained for older companies by correlating both with total compensation.) But at the very least, it raises the question: economics is a lens with which to view some aspects of social organization, can we apply it to jobs?

And, for all the dominancy of free market ideology these days, the free market has precious little play within a company. I can’t choose where to invest my time based on the reward/benefit tradeoffs: I’m supposed to work on what I’m told to work on, and the main backstop I have against choices that I find distasteful in that regard is to leave the entire company. (Though in larger companies, internal transfers are possible at times, but even there the market is more of a centrally planned economy rather than a free market.)

This is an extremely blunt instrument with which to make choices. The situation isn’t that simple—workers make micro-choices all the time about where to put their energies, what to give more of themselves to and what to ignore and whom to help—but even that smaller level of choices is anti-free market, with its lack of transparency in decisions and with forces blunting the adoption of decisions that have bigger payoffs. Or other goodies that the free market gives you—think of how market segmentation could apply to workspaces to let people flow towards groups that are organized in ways that they find congenial or that are working on projects that they find interesting!

I dunno. A job isn’t a marriage (though leaving one can sometimes feel like a divorce), it’s not a state, it’s not an economy. But I don’t think there’s anything sacrosanct about the way workplaces are most commonly organized currently, either. Change is possible, change is probably inevitable, the only question is to what and over what timescale.

I upgraded this server to Ubuntu 12.10 last night. And, as is always the case, almost everything went smoothly, with the only exception being my memorization program. It’s a Rails app, and at least half the time I upgrade the server, something goes wrong with it.

Usually, reinstalling Passenger does the trick; last time, I had to recompile the mysql2 gem as well, because the mysql version had changed. This time, though, no combination of recompiling and reinstalling seemed to be doing the trick. And, to make things more complicated, I’ve been stuck on an old Passenger version for a while (I think two years now?), because newer versions just hadn’t worked for me with an error that I’d never been able to find any help on by googling.

In retrospect, I think that what happened was that Ubuntu 12.10 switched to Ruby 1.9 (I haven’t verified that, I could be wrong), and so any gem without a native extension is likely to fail without recompiling? So maybe if I’d reinstalled all my gems, they would have just worked. I could be wrong, though (and the backtrace in the Apache logs seemed to be complaining about the mysql2 gem, which I did recompile). But I decided to take this as a sign that I should really get off of my hand-grown configuration and switch to rvm. (And to Ruby 1.9, it’s ridiculous that I’ve been on Ruby 1.8 for so long.)

So I installed rvm, told it to install Ruby 1.9.3, told it to install the bundler and passenger gems, and then went to my project and did bundle install. And, after generating the Passenger Apache module and updating my Apache config, I restarted Apache, and things just worked!

Which was great: so nice that, when I switch to the standard community way of doing things, everything works so simply, and it turned me into a complete Bundler convert. I’m still worried about future OS upgrades, because gems could silently become incompatible with my OS libraries; still, I expect that to be a lot more manageable in the future, and now I figure that, if worst comes to worst, I’ll just reinstall everything from rvm and be up and running in 15 minutes. It is a sign of the problems that can happen if you have multiple packaging systems that are fighting with each other, but I like this a lot better than depending on Ubuntu to package all the Ruby machinery for me.

Of course, after doing this, I realized that, while my site worked, my unit tests didn’t, even run. I experimented with that this morning; upgrading to the most recent version of Rake fixed that, but there were a handful of test failures. Fortunately, all the failures turned out to be test-only, and were due to the fact that, in Ruby 1.9.3, you can no longer query membership in a range of time objects via ===, you need to use cover? instead. I don’t understand the thinking behind that—it seems like === could easily use cover? instead of include?, and it makes ranges potentially less useful in case statements—but I’m sure there’s a reason for it. And in general it’s a reminder that I should brush up on Ruby 1.9 differences, partly to learn about gotchas but mostly to learn ways in which it can make my code look nicer.

Which is a helpful reminder of the benefits of staying up to date with versions, so I only have one or two things to change at a given time instead of lots. Which gets me worried about the other way in which I’m behind the times, namely Rails. I finally upgraded to Rails 3 a little over a year ago; I’m now technically on Rails 3.1, but I’m not using all the Rails 3.1 goodness, in particular I’m still using Prototype instead of jQuery and I’m not yet on the asset pipeline. So I really need to switch those over, and then switch to Rails 3.2. (And I’d like to do this before I fall further behind in the Rails world, I hear mutterings about Rails 4!) It’s been in my Someday/Maybe list for ages; time for it to turn into Next Actions soon, I think…

Miranda’s elementary school was a parent participation program, so I spent a couple of hours there every week for several years. And one of the most peculiar aspects of that experience was watching kids learn how to read. I have been reading fluently and obsessively for most of four decades by now, so I am literally incapable of imagining seeing a piece of English text appear in front of my eyes and not taking in its meaning immediately. Which definitely wasn’t the case for these kids (and they were generally smart kids raised in book-friendly households): each letter would be a struggle, and when confronted with a long word, they would try to figure out the first few letters, come up with a plausible sound matching their reading of those letters, and then leap to a word that they knew that matched that sound. Frequently, the result would be correct, frequently it wouldn’t; in the cases where the result wasn’t correct, errors could crop in at any stage in the process. They could identify the letters incorrectly, they could make an incorrect transition from letters to sound, or they could make an incorrect extrapolation from partial sound to full word. The resulting process was one that was completely foreign to me.

Or at least one that was completely foreign to me at the time; shortly thereafter, I got a lot more sympathy (a lot more empathy, really) for what those kids were going through as I started learning Japanese: I made the exact same mistakes as they did. In fact, and I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit this: I still make the exact same mistakes as they did, even though I’ve been studying Japanese for about half a decade by now! Translating from marks on paper to words in my mind requires a lot of mental effort, requires real stamina: far too often, I just don’t have the patience to do that, so I try to short-circuit the process halfway through, with less-than-ideal results. Heck, I sometimes have to stop and think about which of さ or ち is sa or chi, which of シ or ツ is shi or tsu, which of ン or ソ is n or so; it’s the exact same problem those kids were facing every time they saw the letters b or d.

So: the next time you’re watching a Hong Kong action flick or a Japanese anime, take some time to marvel at the words written on screen in the introduction, at the signs you see on buildings, or turn on subtitles. And realize that there are hundreds of millions of people out there who read those words as effortlessly as you read English. Because your reading of English, if it’s like mine, really is effortless: my brain has been rewired to do a significant amount of processing without any conscious thought or apparent exertion of energy: text goes straight from my eyes to chunks of words and meaning.

Alternatively, you could play Super Hexagon. Which is a game that I didn’t expect to be any good at: as any of the VGHVI regulars can attest, my skills at twitch games leave something to be desired. (I don’t think my reflexes were ever particularly wonderful, and I’m sure they haven’t gotten any better as I’ve gotten older.) So a game that requires me to react quickly to oncoming events, basically choosing the single correct response to each of them, didn’t sound like a good match for my skill set.

Fortunately, the game did throw me a few lifelines amidst its frantic demands for response. It didn’t take too long before I realized that, just before you hit the 10 second mark, you’ll see a couple of 180-degree turns. So I knew I didn’t have to think about that; and, as a bonus, I got to practice the move that has you move as far as possible from your previous position. Or, soon after you hit the 20 second mark, it will give you a ring with two gaps in it, 120 degrees apart, with one of those gaps disappearing, and you’ll be confronted with pentagons for a while. Those pentagons were tough (and the 30- to 45-second high score seems to be the first widespread plateau in players’ experience with the game), but at least I knew what I was up against.

And what I was up against wasn’t an unpredictable series of gaps in walls forming a maze that I had to navigate: what I was up against was a set of patterns of shapes that were approaching me. And, as I discovered while trying those pentagons over and over again, not an unbounded set of patterns, or even a particularly large one; we’re talking 10–20 of them, with restrictions on what patterns can appear next to each other. It’s actually a slightly less complicated set of patterns than the Roman alphabet, at it turns out. (And, as a bonus, with some similarities to the challenges that alphabets pose: every time I see a gap that’s 120 degrees away from my current position and I accidentally go left instead of right, I think of those kids and their difficulty reliably telling b’s apart from d’s.)

So: that turns out to be a challenge that I can get much better at. I wasn’t trying to sharpen my reflexes to a finer and finer point, I just had to learn how to not be abysmally bad at recognizing letters in an alphabet. It took me a while, but I did eventually make it through 60 seconds of Hexagon mode, at which point I was awarded an achievement and unlocked Hyper Hexagon mode. Which was a rather rude awakening: most of the patterns were the same, but it’s fast! So now, Super Hexagon really has turned into a game of reflexes, hasn’t it?

As it turns, out: no, it hasn’t. I’d just reached a stage where I had finally made it all the way through reading a paragraph on my own: it’s a lot of work, a real accomplishment, but being asked to do that faster doesn’t require faster reflexes, it requires me to be able to read those patterns more quickly and reliably. In fact, my first real step at competency in Hyper Hexagon mode was purely an attitude shift: I made the mental decision that I was going to read quickly, and lo-and-behold, I could read quickly. At least some of the time; at any rate, the speed no longer terrified me.

What was more interesting was this: when I went back from Hyper Hexagon mode to regular Hexagon mode, the game seemed unimaginably slow. And now, hours and hours later, Hexagon mode seems positively glacial to me: I remember intellectually that I once had a hard time dealing with the speed of Hexagon mode even in the first 20 seconds, but now I have no more direct understanding of that than I do of sounding out the letters in an English-language word. It’s not just a feeling of getting better at the game: my experiences with playing it are rewiring the game in a way that directly affects my perception of time. And I can still see that occasionally even now: when I play Hyper Hexagonest for a while, then Hexagonest feels quite slow, but if I stay with Hexagonest, then after a few minutes, it goes back to feeling reasonably fast, albeit nowhere near as impossibly fast as I seem to recall it once did.

And, of course, there are other modes to experiment with. At any given time (at least until you get most of the achievements), there will be three modes that you’ll learn from pushing on; which actually turns out to be a rather good design choice for asynchronous multiplayer reasons, I think. And those different modes give you different challenges: for example, once you’ve completed Hexagon mode, then you can go on with Hyper Hexagon (the same stuff, just sped up); Hexagoner (more complex patterns but almost as slow as Hexagon); or Hexagonest (which will seem crazily difficult and fast to you).

So you can learn from each of these. Hyper Hexagon mode is really just reading practice: seeing the same patterns over and over, and being comfortable with reading them more quickly as you were before. Hexagoner mode’s additional set of patterns gives you practice in swapping out alphabets; but one of its patterns, the one requiring you to quickly zig-zag 120 degrees at a time while making you stop in the middle instead of going all the way until vertical walls, is much more difficult than any pattern you’ll have seen until then, bringing precision of execution into the mix. And Hexagonest’s crazy fast speeds (or at least they seem crazy fast at that point in your development) make it clear: while this is primarily a game about reading, it will be a long time before reflexes are out of the picture. So really: reading, execution, and reflexes are all part of doing well at the game.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time in the VGHVI podcast this year talking about flow; and I honestly don’t think I understood the concept before playing Super Hexagon. Heck, I probably still don’t understand the concept, but if flow is about responding appropriately to circumstances, then I can’t think of a game that does a better job of making that concept concrete in a remarkably short amount of time. The game is nothing but an infinite sequence of circumstances for you to respond to; and there’s enough just enough meat in your responses (in particular, pulling in just enough complexity to your perception of that situation) to make it feel real. And the game gets you to that point over the course of a few hours, with a completely abstract environment: no extraneous associations here, nothing to get in your way of the perception of that flow channel.

That’s not the only area that the game shines light upon. As I mentioned above, the concreteness with which it alters your perception of time is truly remarkable; all of a sudden, I have something that I can relate to the written experiences of martial arts masters talking about time slowing down in a fight. And, behind this all, there are dice being rolled, both by the game (in its choice of patterns) and in you (in whether you respond quickly and accurately enough). So I also commend the game to anybody who is interested in questions of streaks and hot hands in sports: I only spent a little time gathering data there, but I suspect that there’s a lot more information that can be mined from the game, and mined in a way that has many fewer external variables than, say, basketball or baseball.

On the game goes, each mode givings its new challenges, its new teachings. I already mentioned Hexagonest’s speed above; I also love the way the game screen shakes at around 13 seconds and 23 seconds into that mode, as a reminder that what you’re seeing is only an image of the underlying reality, shadows flickering on the wall of Plato’s cave. (And as a reminder that chaos will end, and that perhaps the best response to chaos is to relax and react on instinct while it’s happening!) The longer spiral sequences that let you pause and reorient yourself to snap back into action as soon as you’ve evaluated what’s coming next. The philosophical premise that the game posits that, at any point in time, the first question you need to answer is: should I go in a diametrically opposite direction from where I’m facing now? The wonderful change in color palette that Hyper Hexagoner mode gives you; I’ve gone back to that mode obsessively over the last week, I find it incredibly soothing. The music, and Jenn Frank‘s amazing voice; the sadness that comes with my realization that I do better with the music turned off (perhaps the music gives me permission to play too slowly?), and there’s no option for having the music off but the voice on.

And then there’s Hyper Hexagonest mode. Which throws away lots of the variations that the earlier levels give you: as far as I can tell, it’s completely homogeneous, with the speed and collection of patterns not changing at all. (Well, maybe not completely homogeneous—the screen occasionally zooms out and back in—but pretty damn close.) And that speed is fast enough to bring reflexes and execution back to the fore, and to make clear the aleatory nature of success in the game: a meditation on chance and free will.

Game Over.

Begin.

I’ve been trying to make a decision recently that’s been unexpectedly difficult. Or at least unpleasantly and abnormally difficult; maybe that’s completely to be expected in this case.

My uncertainty on this score is a reflection of my overall state: in some sense, I feel that I’ve been really off my game mentally for about two years now. I think I’m mostly past the mid-life crisis situation that was going through last year, but its aftershocks are still vibrating. And there have certainly been some new events this year that my brain hasn’t responded to as gracefully as I would like. So, while I’m not entirely sure that I would be less uncertain about the decision triggering this post if I were on my game, I would at the least have more of an appreciation for what’s feeding into that uncertainty.

This decision, like (I imagine) most difficult decisions, is asymmetric. And one of the ways in which it’s asymmetric is a differential of control. In one direction, I feel relatively lacking in my ability to affect the followup context. That’s probably not true—if I were more on my game then I’d have a richer view of the possibility space over there. But, as is, I’m getting overly fixated on subsets of the possibility space which make me feel relatively helpless.

In the other direction, I don’t feel as helpless. That may be a mirage, though: while I’m in control of this specific decision, it may be that, beyond that decision, I’m at the mercy just as much of the winds of chance on that side.

And part of what’s frustrating me is: I feel that, if I were the sort of person I’d like to be and think I can be, being at the mercy of chance would be totally fine. We’re always responding to chance; that’s what makes life fun, there’s an art in figuring out how to best be open to circumstances and respond to the unexpected. (That’s part of why I like playing games so much!) So I feel like I’m playing the wrong game here, that I should be looking at the context from a different level.

But it’s hard to do that when your brain is shouting at you. One of the tricks I’ve done so far is to tell my brain to just shut up for a while, until date X, when I can hallucinate that I might have more information. But I can only play that game so many times before it wears thin.

At which point I can just designate one of the decisions as a default. But I have enough emotional ties on both sides that doing that isn’t so simple. And actually, watching that emotional conflict itself is an interesting process, as is watching my brain shout at itself and my reaction to that shouting.

At any rate: I need something to get me out of this rut of picking dates and waiting. One tactic that I’ve tentatively adopted is what I’m calling the Dread Pirate Roberts approach (or the reverse Scheherazade approach?): giving myself permission to make drastic changes any given morning, in fact working under the assumption that I probably will do that, but in the mean time using that permission to by myself a bit of breathing room to observe the current situation and my reactions to it. (I am not, however, adopting most other aspects of Dread Pirate Roberts’s philosophy.) I’m hoping that that will give me an outlet for my brain to take a more holistic view of the situation.

I’m fairly sure that that alone won’t be enough. Another tactic that has served me well in the past: pull in my external brain. (Or at least actively don’t shut it out!) Hence this post: maybe I’ll learn something by writing about my reactions.

Interesting times. More frequently than I’d like, though, I’ve wished they weren’t quite so interesting…

For me, the most problematic app change in iOS 6 was the new Podcasts app. The new design made it harder to find which podcasts had episodes that I hadn’t listened to, required more tapping for me to change speeds, and, most unforgivably, didn’t give me a way to see the episode notes for JapanesePod101 and ChineseClass101. Which is really a problem: I spend maybe a fifth of my podcast listening time studying foreign languages, and not being able to read along while I listen is a noticeable handicap.

So, after putting up with it for a few weeks, I looked around for other alternatives. I suppose it’s a bit late to hope that posting this will help other people in the same boat, but: I ended up using Downcast, and I wish I had switched earlier. Nothing super fancy, but it shows me my podcasts in the organization that I wanted, it remembers which ones I like to listen to at 2x speed (basically: all the ones not done by professional radio) and which ones I want to listen to at 1x speed, it restores the episodes notes (really, what on earth was Apple thinking when they removed that?).

But none of that is the big difference compared to the pre-iOS 6 version of the Podcasts app (though remembering the speeds is nice). The big difference is something that I was reluctant to do, namely severing the linkage between podcasts and iTunes. I was reluctant because all my feeds were stored in iTunes and because its interface for managing a bunch of new episodes within a single feed is relatively useful. But really: iTunes is not a good piece of software in general, and it has a long standing bug (inappropriate quadratic algorithm is my guess) causing it to freeze for up to a minute when trying to determine which episodes of a podcast with a huge RSS feed are new. (Maybe you haven’t run into that bug, but the paid feeds for JapanesePod101 and ChineseClass101 trigger it.) So, not having to plug into iTunes every day is rather more of a relief than I expected.

Of course, not plugging in every day meant that I wasn’t backing up my iPhone every day. Which wasn’t a super big deal—I don’t store critical information on the phone itself—but I figured it was an excuse to look into iCloud backups. And there, too, I had a pleasant surprise: iCloud backups work great (and they now mean that my iPad is getting backed up regularly), and, despite the warning when you switch to iCloud backups, it is possible to backup to both iCloud and to iTunes. (The secret is to control-click on the device when it’s plugged into iTunes.) So the upshot is that (with my current regime of plugging into iTunes once a week) I have backups in two places, one of which is offsite, which is a much better practice.

So: yay for cutting cords! (Things Cloud has been a nice surprise in that regard, too.) Boo for the iOS 6 Podcasts app! Yay for Downcast! I mean, Downcast isn’t perfect—there’s a little less space to see liner notes than I’d like, the way you control per-podcast playback speeds makes one slightly weird choice, and in general it doesn’t exactly ooze elegance—but it’s never unpleasant, and is solidly and helpfully functional. And they’ve even fixed one other quirk that was on my initial list of disappointments (rotation lock and turning the phone upside down), so it’s improving. Definitely worth the switch; many thanks to Steve for recommending it.

Dragon Age 2 starts off with a frame: the Seeker interrogating Varric about Hawke’s deeds, and calling bullshit on him. So: it’s first of all a game about story. But not a story with a clear ending or a clear path; and not a story where we the player (or, for that matter, the player’s avatar in game) are in complete control: other people are going to have their say about the course of events, about the basic truth of what happened. We can threaten all we want, but ultimately they’re going to say something and we have to figure out how to approach what they say. Maybe we’ll accept it as truth, maybe not; either way, we have to figure out how to interpret its significance, what our reaction to it is.

This emphasis on story is not limited to the frame. Yes, there’s a city to wander through, dungeons to explore, battles to fight. But the second and third of those almost aggressively signal that they’re not a priority: the game reuses the same handful of dungeon layouts over and over again, it teleports waves of successive enemies into your battle. If I wanted to make an affirmative case for the repeated environments, I might say that it turns the dungeons into places with their own character that deserve repeated visits, or (taking a diametrically opposite view) that it causes the environments to fade into the background in the same way stages in a fighting game do. I don’t really believe the last of those is relevant, though; I did actually find the repeated stages comfortable, but that case shows up much more strongly in the city environments. (There, the fact that all three acts of the game take place within the same city instead of having you travel from city to city on your journey really does invest those environments with strength, emphasizing the fact that Dragon Age II is, in part, about making a home.)

The game returns to this question of story and narration over and over again. It’s not just the Seeker wondering what to make of Varric’s storytelling, or you (the player) reflecting on that: in the second and third acts, Hawke herself starts questioning Varric, asking why he tells tales in the pub the way he does. Why does he put Hawke in the foreground, why does he put himself in the background? In the first act, Carver has an internal narrative going on that foregrounds Hawke (and doubtless an internal narrative picking up in parts on external narratives), but this time it’s a source of resentment: why isn’t he the chosen one? Yes, it’s a traditional fantasy role-playing game, with you (the player) controlling the hero; but other people are going to have their say in the construction of that heroism. (As, of course, game developers always do—perhaps Varric is in part a personification of those game developers?)

In fact, in general the other characters push back against you quite a bit more than is normal in role-playing games. This shows up in the very mechanics of the games: in a traditional RPG, you can control all aspects of your party members’ outfits. Dragon Age 2 generally lets you control your party members’ weapons and accessories (though even that isn’t a universal rule), but they have their own clothing. Appearance is such a strong social signal; ironically, in Dragon Age 2, your party members have more control over that than you do, because you’ll almost inevitably decide what Hawke should wear for game mechanical reasons rather than for sartorial reasons; your companions suffer no such handicap.

You do generally get to decide which party members accompany you on your excursions. But even there, the focus is away from you: party members rarely talk to you while you’re strolling around town or exploring a dungeon. Instead, the interesting aspects of those excursions involves the party members’ conversations with each other, watching their relationships with each other grow in ways that are completely independent of Hawke’s presence. I very much enjoyed watching the tone of Aveline’s and Isabela’s conversation change over the course of their experiences together, with real mutual respect developing; and seeing that externally-directed respect develop also made the times where they showed how much they cared about and trusted Hawke just that much more powerful.

This being a BioWare game, there is of course more than one way in which the word ‘relationship’ is relevant: romance options are indeed present. And they’re present in ways that gave me more pause than other recent BioWare games (though perhaps it’s also not a coincidence that it took me a while to find a happy romance option in Mass Effect 2?). I was maybe a third of the way into Dragon Age 2 when Felicity Shoulders published her article “I am not a Puzzle Box”, and RPG romance choices have the lamentable habit of structurally reinforcing a puzzle box interpretation. Which is, perhaps, understandable given games’ desires to allow you to win on both a macro and a micro level: a game that touches on romance is likely to be designed in a way that allows you to, with the right set of choices, “unlock” romance with certain characters.

But that’s not the only possible way for games to approach that question. Stepping back a level: games’ desire to allow you to win is, in part, a manifestation of games’ desire to allow you to understand systems. And those systems can allow you to discover at times that there are certain actions that you’d like to be able to perform that don’t fit in within the game’s systems. Handled in a ham-handed way, this can be frustrating (c.f. invisible walls); done right, though, it gives you a richer appreciation for the underlying systems, with the initial frustration transforming into respect, respect that would be unavailable if the game were all about arbitrary wish-fulfillment.

And, when I thought about my romance options, my expectations were indeed frustrated. Initially, I found Merrill charming; that charm, though, is the charm of watching somebody inexperienced come into her own, which isn’t something I’ve ever looked for in a romantic partner. So, after thinking about this a bit and looking around, I realized that whom I was most attracted to was the person I saw as the grown-up in the party, namely Aveline. Which surprised me—we got off on the wrong foot when we first met—but, by then, quite a bit of mutual respect had developed.

Unfortunately, at the time I was figuring this out, Aveline was asking me to help set her up with Donnic! In a charmingly inept way; that sort of charming ineptness I might like just fine, but, well, she’s just not into me that way. So: frustration; and continuing with the theme of the grown-up in the party, my next choice (who actually temperamentally might have been the best fit of all) was Varric, who also isn’t a romance option.

This left me with Anders, Fenris, Isabela, or going without romance. And I considered the last option; but I liked Isabela quite a bit as well, and we ended up together. Which points at a more subtle way that Dragon Age 2 fights against the “puzzle box” idea: not only are some characters simply not available as “puzzles” to be solved, but the characters who are available as romance options don’t take any real puzzling to get them into bed with you: as long as you show basic social skills and decency, they’ll be happy to go along. (At least in my limited sample, but I suspect that’s true for all of them, based on my BioWare experience.) At first, I thought of this as removing agency from those characters; but after considering all of the companions together, the way I look at that now is that, in all cases, significant romantic agency is on your companions’ side. What really matters is whether or not a companion is attracted to you; you can choose to go along with that or not, but what you can’t choose is to change the basic fact of whether or not they’re attracted to you.

Dragon Age 2 is a game about story; but other people are going to have their say in how that story is told. It’s a game about relationships; but others have their say in the boundaries and nature of those relationships, and indeed many of the most important relationships in the game don’t involve you at all. And, as I briefly mentioned above, it’s a game about home; but a home that you don’t choose, a home that you’re driven to by the horrors of war. (And a home that you have to fight for, including arguing with members of your family!)

Home isn’t just a place, though: ever since I’ve left my parents’ house, home has been an affirmative choice, a conception of who and how I want to be. Not simply my own choice, to be sure—the other people who are part of my home are the single most important factor in that home, and material circumstances have an ever-present effect—but it’s something that we’re constructing.

So: what is the conception of home and self that we’re construction in Dragon Age 2? To me, role-playing games always feel like adolescent games: you’re growing up and trying to construct a story where you’re the hero. Which has its charms, but these days such games come off to me too frequently as banal wish fulfillment. (And, even setting that complaint aside: it really gets old!)

Fortunately, Dragon Age 2 steps back from that story; the steps aren’t big, but they’ve had an outsized impact on me, leaving room for the story to be personal instead of a fantasy. The dialog options are one example: instead of choosing between good/evil/neutral, you choose between being just a little too good, or being a little too impatient and focused on the ends instead of the means, or being a little too distant and snarky. (I almost always chose that last option; and what a relief it was to have it available!) Or the three-act structure: you’re doing the same leveling up from humble beginnings to unimaginable powers as in any RPG, but at least the game frames this as happening over the course of years instead of weeks, leaving enough room to interpret it as coming into your own powers instead of revealing your divinity.

And those acts. You don’t start out by fighting some sort of malevolent being, some sort of power personified: you instead fight against a much more subtle and much more real power, you fight against the indifference of society to make a home for yourself, to be able to provide for your family. (And, despite the structural indifference of society, you’re not doing this by yourself: you’re finding people who care, you’re building a second family along the family that you’re born with.)

In the second act, you’ve won acceptance from the city: you’re no longer a child depending on (trying desperately to win!) the support of others, you’re living on your own, showing you can take care of yourself. There is, I think, an undercurrent of self-doubt that remains; but there’s also a wonderful reflection of that self-doubt in others, where you realize at a fundamental level that your parents are people with their own flaws, not flaws that make them caricatures but flaws that make them people. So you’re providing for your mother; and the city as a whole is going through its own adolescent crisis, trying to figure out who it wants to be and what the Qunari say about the city, and needing you to act as the adult helping guide it through this crisis.

During this, your relationships with your party members deepen; by the end of the second act, your places and selves are all set, though implications remain. I loved the way my story with Isabela played out: she’s very much her own person, I was also my own person, and we both had to work out what that meant; but ultimately that relationship was strong enough to win out over forces that would otherwise have pulled us in different directions.

Which brings us to the third act. In a normal RPG, this would be where you fight against some sort of all-encompassing evil. But Dragon Age 2 only hints at that (and, honestly, the external nature of Meredith’s evil was probably the single weakest aspect of the game for me): instead, you’re fighting for control of the city with somebody who is powerful but far from god-like, who is ambitious but not clearly overly driven by that ambition. (Indeed, not clearly any more driven by ambition than you are!) Instead, Meredith is driven by a vision of morality, with a bright line between the good and the bad and with a willingness to consider horrible tactics in support of that line.

And I found that, in its third act, rather than becoming more grandiose, Dragon Age 2 became a lot more real. Meredith’s labeling of mages as fundamentally not to be trusted, as fundamentally evil, is something that’s playing out in the world in so many ways right now. Pushing people into boxes, labeling them as terrorists, and using their reactions to that boxing to further justify that labeling: it’s going on all around us. My only regret with Dragon Age 2‘s treatment of those matters is that it goes far too far along the path of seeing that threat as justified: in Thedas, mages really do consort with demons, really are at risk of being possessed by those demons.

That’s the political question that the third act of the game sets up (helped, of course, by the second act); what I wasn’t expecting was how unexpectedly personal it would be to me. I live in a context of privilege, so I have the great luxury of not being personally attacked for who I am; but I do have experience being around authoritarian assholes, people whose general political temperament is extremely different from mine and who systematically disrespect and attack others because of those others’ memberships in politically disempowered groups.

Or at least that’s the story I tell about some situations I’m in; as Dragon Age 2 teaches us, there’s no reason for you to trust the story that I’m telling, and I should be suspicious of my own stories as well! Our own stories are too easy, too pat, too likely to frame a situation in ways that are convenient to our own self-worth. So I should be suspicious when I start telling stories like that about my own situation; I should look for other ways to interpret what’s going on, and if I find I can’t, I should seriously consider simply removing myself from that story.

But, if I find myself going along with such a story, the question is: how do I see myself, how would I like to act? And Dragon Age 2 provides an answer to that question: I don’t want to use the situation as an excuse to grab power for myself, but I have a strong reflexive instinct for which side I’m fighting on, an instinct which is strong enough to overpower critical thought in some circumstances. And if my friends get involved, which side I’m on gets even clearer; fortunately, in real life, none of my friends act in ways similar to Anders, and, also fortunately, in both real life and in the game, those loyalties to friends play both ways. (I loved the scene where your various companions had to pick sides: I was completely happy to have Fenris go his own way, but I would have been devastated if Aveline hadn’t stuck by me. Certainly some of her nature must have pulled her in the other direction; but our bonds were strong enough that she went along with me, and could see why I was acting the way I was.)

Dragon Age 2 is a game; resolving these questions is always much easier in a game than it is in real life. But it’s a game that serves as a mirror, enough so that the third act had me shaking; and the vision that I saw in that mirror is one that I can learn from, in which I can see somebody that I’d like to grow into.

That unreliable narrator, though: always there, always reminding me not to take my own stories as telling the truth. And the acts that divide in this game, the fact that it’s the second game in what will at least be a trilogy. Taking a Latourian point of view, we see the Politics of Nature unfolding: following the Requirement of Consultation, we listen to the voices around us. The Requirement of Hierarchy says that we build up our understanding step by step, each new understanding respecting what came before. The Requirement of Institution says: at some point, an argument comes to an end; but the Separation of Powers and the Requirement of Perplexity say that we can’t ignore facts because they’re uncomfortable. And yes, Scenarization of the Totality says that we weave all of these voices, all of these layers of understanding, all of these uncomfortable facts into a grand retrospective narrative of truth.

But at the end, we have the Power to Follow up: that grand narrative always has flaws, there are always events that leave uncomfortable lumps as we sweep them under the rug, leading to another go around of the story to recontexualize what has come before. So it is in life; so it is in Dragon Age 2, which ends in as unsure a state as any game I can think of. That uncertainty isn’t a sign of weakness or a sign of a lack of belief in its own powers and message: it is, instead, a simple acknowledgement that this story was told by these people at this time in this place, and different stories will be told in the future.

I tend to think of agile as a way of thinking about programming that’s very supportive of individuals, their quirks, desires, and autonomy. As I’ve been tossing some of the ideas behind this post around in my head, though, I’m not entirely sure why I have that attitude. Certainly the lean pillar of Respect for People sounds very well aligned with autonomy, as is the Agile Manifesto’s valuing of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; and, looking through the eXtreme Programming practices, Collective Ownership (“anyone can change any code anywhere in the system at any time”) sounds like it supports autonomy, and the 40-Hour Week acknowledges that our selves are richer than what is visible at work, with work not being allowed to dominate.

But there are a lot of other XP practices, and a lot of them are about following rules: Coding Standards, Pair Programming, TDD. And, while lean’s idea of Respect for People isn’t at all a sham (it’s a deep-seated belief that everybody has valuable ideas to contribute and should have the power to, for example, stop production lines), lean also codifies that knowledge in the form of checklists that all team members follow to help them (get them?) to work as efficiently as possible.

In retrospect, I think that a lot of what is going on in my attitude is that many of the agile practices happen to be ways that I enjoy working. This meant that I was likely to interpret them as supportive of individuality, but quite possibly a better read is that many of them happened to be aligned with my individuality, and people with different tastes could just as reasonably seeing them as suppressing their individuality.

So: am I completely wrong? Should I more correctly interpret the XP practices, for example, as dicta from above that suppress individuality? I don’t think that’s true, either. For one thing, I rarely get that feeling from agile thought leaders. They may be uncompromising on what XP means, and say that, if you’re not following the practices, you’re not doing XP, and that you might learn something new if you put down your individuality and followed those practices. There’s an important difference, however, between saying that they believe XP practices are a productive starting point and saying that everybody should blindly follow those practices, and those same thought leaders will often say in the very next sentence that, once you’ve given the strict practices a real try, you should next evolve it to better fit your needs and circumstances. (Where those circumstances very much include the individuals on your team, not just your business and technical context.) In fact, many people say that retrospectives are the single most important agile practice!

Or take Scrum, the agile methodology whose name is, in my experience, invoked in the widest variety of contexts. Part of Scrum’s popularity is due, I think, to its lack of dictates about what to do, which many companies interpret as thinking that it fits well into their pre-existing practices. But, if those pre-existing practices include top-down command-and-control direction from management, then they might want to look at Scrum more carefully: the Scrum Guide doesn’t acknowledge managers at all, with the only roles being the Product Owner, the Development Team, and the Scrum Master. And yes, many people interpret the Scrum Master as being a manager; but the guide characterizes the Scrum Master as being “a servant-leader for the Scrum Team”, with removing impediments a key role and giving orders not. (And a manager isn’t hidden on the Development Team, either: “Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the person; there are no exceptions to this rule”.)

So no, agile isn’t top down, it doesn’t suppress individuality. But it doesn’t give unfettered reign to individuality, either: returning to the manifesto, we see individuals joined at the hip with interactions, the word “team” is everywhere in Scrum, and people working in a Lean organization are very far from free agents. If I were to pick one value for agile, “communication” would be a good choice: most of the XP practices are about improving communication directly or indirectly, as are practices from other agile methodologies. (I haven’t mentioned Kanban yet, but it’s all about clear signaling of your current state, needs, impediments, and priorities.) And you can’t communicate if you’re on your own!

And that communication flows everywhere. Maybe that’s where agile’s acceptance of individuality comes in: if communication is going to flow through people, then it has to accept that those people are, well, people, each with their own individual effect on (contribution to!) that information flow. In particular, a top-down, command-and-control organization hinders communication: yes, messages that look clear are broadcast, but they’re only sent in one direction, and the more top down you are, the harder it is to check whether that communication has even been heard as you intended it to be heard, let alone to learn from mismatches between how it is interpreted and how the intent was.

And this, in turn, leads to the question of team size. In a team of one, a world where everybody is a free agent, meaningful communication can’t exist: there’s nobody to speak to who really matters. But if the team gets too large, you have the opposite problem: you can say that everybody’s voice matters, but if there are too many of those voices, then you can’t hear them. So: a large enough team to allow for a range of meaningful interactions, but a small enough team where everybody knows everybody else as an individual.

This small team size works well with many of the other core agile values and practices, too. Over the last year, I’ve gotten a much more visceral appreciation of the importance of retrospectives than I ever had before; and one of the things I’m really feeling there is that, to experiment well, you need a large enough group to give meaningful reinforcement to your experiment but a small enough group that new ideas can come to the fore and can be played with. Sure, if you have a twenty-person team, then sometimes all twenty people need to do something in the same way, but you’ll learn a lot more quickly if there are five-person groups that can come up with ideas, try them out, modify or discard them, and come up with ways of working that work well for their context and, perhaps, for the larger group as well. Or take the servant leadership that scrum recommends: maybe you can command a team of twenty, but serving twenty people? Not so easy.

I refer to myself at times as an anarchist. I’m actually not familiar enough with anarchist literature and philosophy to know how accurate that label is, but it’s definitely the case that I don’t like other people giving me orders, and I don’t feel comfortable giving other people orders either. (Though I’m sure there’s some amount of self-delusion in the latter—the various people who have reported to me over the years probably have a more jaundiced view of me in that regard, and I’m certainly not shy about my opinions.) But, while I’m far from an expert on what the word “anarchist” really means, I am fairly sure that the stereotype that “no rulers means people do whatever they want” is, at best, a very partial view of the philosophy. Instead, you’ll often find anarchist paired with other words like “collective” or “syndicalism”, words that say that, at its core, anarchism is concerned with forming groups, with organization, with people coming together. (Returning to agile: agile is in large part about choosing your priorities, but that choice is ever so much richer if it’s done as part of a group!)

And, of course, in so many situations this kind of non-hierarchical organization is accepted and natural: when hanging out with friends, when forging a marriage. Some companies seem to pull it off, too—it’s no coincidence that multiple friends forwarded me links to the Valve Employee Handbook, and their website proudly proclaims that they’ve been “boss-free since 1996”. They’ve certainly been successful with that strategy, as has Semco. Though that’s a pretty small list of success stories; who knows whether that means that those companies are the vanguard of a new way of working (democracy was once a new idea even outside of the workplace, after all) or a sign that that approach will rarely work in business contexts.

Fortunately, I don’t need to answer that question. But I am learning something about myself, that I like to be in situations where I’m working closely with a handful of peers. And I’m learning something about agile, too: the focus on agile teams really means something, both in terms of team size (neither too large nor too small) and in terms of being empowered groups of empowered individuals.

I’m working on trying to get the 60-second achievement for Hyper Hexagonest mode in Super Hexagon; for a while, I’ve had the feeling that 60 seconds is achievable with my current skill level (and that my current skill level isn’t increasing particularly quickly), I just need to have a lucky run where my guesses and reflexes hold up enough times in a row. (For what it’s worth, my current high score is 48.43 seconds; I’ve broken 40 seconds maybe 10 times?)

Which raises the question: how often would I expect to have such a lucky run? Unlike the other Super Hexagon modes, that question feels relatively tractable to calculate for Hyper Hexagonest. You get the same collection of patterns throughout that mode (at last as far I’ve pushed it, I assume that changes at 60 seconds), and it doesn’t seem to speed up at all (except maybe right at the beginning). There are one or two visual distractions it adds (e.g. sometimes the screen zooms in and out); I’m not sure if those happen at regular times or are part of the patterns, but I don’t think that happens more as the time progresses. So, for all I know, there’s a fixed percentage that I’ll pass each pattern, and (assuming we don’t believe in hot hands or nerves), we should be able to map my chances of reaching a given time with an exponential curve.

And, of course, the exponent matters: if, say, I reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 5 times, then I should reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 125 times (clearly not the case!), or if I reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 20 times, then I should reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 800 times (plausible, and holds out enough hope that I should keep going). But if I only reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 40 times, then I’d only reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 64,000 times, and I should just cut my losses now.

So I recorded my times on 200 tries. Here’s the raw data, in case anybody wants to play around with it; the numbers are my time in seconds, rounded down to the nearest second. If we group it in 10-second chunks (where 10–20 includes 10 seconds but doesn’t include 20), then we have:

• 0–10 seconds: 110 runs
• 10–20 seconds: 55 runs
• 20–30 seconds: 22 runs
• 30–40 seconds: 8 runs
• 40–50 seconds: 5 runs
• >50 seconds: no runs

It looks like the numbers are getting cut by a little more than half every 10 seconds; if we take the first 10 seconds as the best indicator of the decay factor, then my chances of reaching a given time get multiplied by .45 every 10 seconds. That would lead to a prediction of

• >10 seconds: 90.0 runs predicted, 90 runs actual
• >20 seconds: 40.5 runs predicted, 35 runs actual
• >30 seconds: 18.2 runs predicted, 13 runs actual
• >40 seconds: 8.2 runs predicted, 5 runs actual
• >50 seconds: 3.7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual
• >60 seconds: 1.7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual

That’s clearly not right: all the predictions except for the first one are high. So I guess that means that the jump from 0 to 10 seconds is easier than the subsequent jumps.

If I look at the other ratios to calculate how much my chances are of reaching 10 seconds, then I get actually a surprisingly consistent answer:

• (>10 seconds) / (>0 seconds) = 90 / 200 = .45
• (>20 seconds) / (>10 seconds) = 35 / 90 = .39
• (>30 seconds) / (>20 seconds) = 13 / 35 = .37
• (>40 seconds) / (>30 seconds) = 5 / 13 = .38
• (>50 seconds) / (>40 seconds) = 0 / 5 = .0

The first of those is unexpectedly high and the last is really really low, but the middle are consistent. (Honestly, way too consistent given the sample sizes.) And maybe we can explain the last with nerves and the first with a slow ramp-up? If we assume that I’ll reach 10 seconds in 45% of my attempts and that I’ll reach the next 10 second mark in 38% of my attempts for times after 10 seconds, then that predicts that, out of 200 tries, I’ll reach:

• >10 seconds: 90.0 runs predicted, 90 runs actual
• >20 seconds: 34.2 runs predicted, 35 runs actual
• >30 seconds: 13.0 runs predicted, 13 runs actual
• >40 seconds: 4.9 runs predicted, 5 runs actual
• >50 seconds: 1.9 runs predicted, 0 runs actual
• >60 seconds: .7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual

Obviously I’m cooking the books somewhat to make those first four predictions look good. Still, this is enough to suggest to me that I should keep on plugging away: assuming that the game doesn’t suddenly get harder at 45 seconds (which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given my observed performance), then I should reach 60 seconds after a few hundred more attempts. (One out of every 280 attempts, if the above formula holds.) And that I am willing to try; if the numbers were suggesting it would take a few tens of thousands of attempts, then I’d be a lot more dubious about the wisdom of that attempt.

Update: And, of course, later on this afternoon, I did in fact break 60 seconds; I didn’t count, but maybe it took another 30 tries or so? So my belief that that goal was in reach, and that it was mostly a matter of luck as to when I’d get there, turned out to be correct.

I basically spent one long afternoon playing Rock Band Blitz. I went through all the songs, unlocked all the power-ups, earned three quarters of the achievements, challenged a few friends, completed some of the goals from the Facebook app. So: a long afternoon, and a pleasant one!

But, after that afternoon, I didn’t really feel like coming back. The friend challenge mechanic left me a little uneasy: with the game as it launched, you couldn’t use even two power-ups, let alone three, at once on most of your playthroughs for a single song. So this meant that you had to grind to put yourself in a position to win challenges; and, to make matters worse, you couldn’t even really experiment with pairs of powerups to try to hone your strategies without seeing your coin collection dwindle. (They tweaked the costs and rewards a couple of weeks later, so I suspect that now the second problem has completely disappeared and that the first problem has mostly gone away in practical terms.)

It’s not like I have that many friends who would be likely to play the game enough for the competition to be a long-term draw, though; so, for me, what really matters is the single-player gameplay, both on its own terms and as a musical experience. I’m honestly not sure what I think about the gameplay on its own terms: I imagine that there’s a reasonable amount for me to sink my teeth into if I’d like to, especially experimenting with different powerup combos, but there are enough games around that I have to spend my time playing that I don’t really see why I should spend my time here. And the musical connection really didn’t work for me: with only two lanes, melody goes out the window, so you’re left with rhythm gameplay that maybe makes a little bit of musical sense for drums but almost none for the other instruments. To make matters worse, switching between tracks got in the way of my enjoyment of the music: I was never following changes in what I was paying attention to, I was instead getting jerked out of the music.

So, as a game: not unpleasant, but not something I wanted to spend more than one long afternoon with. (I did come back and put another hour into it, but that only confirmed my suspicion.) Basically: I couldn’t think of a situation where I’d prefer to play Rock Band Blitz instead of Rock Band 3. Fortunately, the Rock Band Blitz songs are all exportable to Rock Band 3, and a 25-song pack for 15 bucks sounds pretty good.

And, indeed, it is more than pretty good. As a basic collection of songs, it’s solid but not exceptional. What is exceptional is two aspects of the songs: while I enjoyed them fine on guitar and keys, many of the songs were flat-out great on vocal harmonies, and twenty-four out of the twenty-five songs include harmonies. So, if you enjoy singing harmonies, it’s a great deal. The second aspect that’s exceptional is the one song that didn’t come with vocal harmonies, namely Give It Away. That song was included on Rock Band 2, but wasn’t exportable due to some sort of licensing restriction. Which was a shame, because the rest of Blood Sugar Sex Magik was available as DLC; so it had been impossible to play the whole album in game unless you went back to Rock Band 2. And I really appreciate Harmonix for going out of their way to make that album whole again: no surprise that the company cares about their players, given how they keep on putting out DLC week after week, but yay for them.

I was a postdoc in the Stanford math department for five years, from 1998 to 2003. I had a very pleasant time there, and had many pleasant interactions with my fellow department members; I’m glad that I ultimately left academia, but that’s purely because of me being a misfit.

Part of that being a misfit is that I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I should have actually doing math. I spent some of my time helping raise my daughter and playing video games (the latter not at work, of course; for the former, Miranda actually did hang out in my office a lot during the first two years of her life), and reading random books. I was still reading a fair amount of sociology of science books at the time; I dimly recall having fairly pleasant conversations about the topic with my fellow department members over lunch, but conversations with a modernist flavor that’s familiar to any reader of We Have Never Been Modern. This was fairly soon after the Sokal affair; that paper fit neatly into a narrative that was in the air, where mathematicians and hard scientists write papers full of gibberish that is incomprehensible to outsiders because that’s the only way to express our deep understanding of complex truths, while humanists and soft scientists write papers full of gibberish that is incomprehensible to outsiders in an attempt to cover up the vacuousness of what they’re saying. Those conversations weren’t generally mean, or as lacking in respect as I’m making them out to be here, but there was an asymmetry in the undertone.

The other thing that I spent a lot of time (far too much time, if you’re a postdoc in a research-focused school—teaching really isn’t what schools like Stanford are about) is thinking about teaching, which led to me running my courses in eccentric ways. The department was actually quite accepting of my eccentricity—I don’t know if anybody noticed the one time that I gave three quarters of my students an A in an intro course instead of weeding most of them out, but if anybody noticed, nobody brought it up to me—and while I was clearly an outlier within the department, my recollection was that I generally had pleasant conversations on teaching with other department members. (They were happy to let me stick around teaching calculus for a couple of years after my first postdoc expired, which I’m very grateful for.)

And there was a fair amount of surprisingly broad conversation about math teaching in the air. California had recently published a new set of standards (you can still see many of them on the California Content Standards page, look for the ones with the late-1990’s dates); and the math standards in particular had led to a fair amount of contention. I was curious about this (mostly because of my own interests, but also because they might be shaping the schools that my daughter would eventually enter), so I read through the various different standards; as I recall, the math standards seemed to me to be the most innocuous (standard skills-based stuff, noticeably but not offensively overstuffed), while the science ones were starting to get offensively overstuffed, the social studies were outright jingoistic, and if I wanted to design a curriculum to make somebody hate reading and writing, I’m not sure I could have done a better job than the English standards. Though maybe I’m being a bit hypocritical saying this, given my sniping above: I don’t have any expertise in childhood education, so I’m not the right person to criticize!

I think what was going on with the math standards was that they tapped into a real cultural discomfort with math teaching. The general context of the math wars was whether math teaching should focus on having kids be able to accurately carry out algorithms or whether they should focus on having kids develop a holistic understanding of concepts. Neither side thought that the other goal was bad: everybody would agree that algorithms should ideally lead to understanding of the concepts underlying them, while if you claim to have a holistic understanding of multiplication but can’t calculate seventeen times thirty-six, you’re just deluding yourself. But there was quite a lot of heat as to which side you could start on.

From my point of view, the heat was actually mostly in one direction: the algorithms folks were engaging in shameless fear-mongering about the conceptual approach. If I recall correctly, there was one local lady who went around to various local school board meetings telling people how, if their schools took a conceptual approach to teaching mathematics, then colleges wouldn’t accept their kids, which she based on some almost completely trumped-up claims about discussions with admissions departments. My take on this, on the other hand, was that the algorithms approach had been ruling the scene since basically forever, and it had a remarkable capacity for producing people who are actually traumatized by mathematics. That is not a term that I use lightly, and I recognize that, as forms of trauma go, math education trauma is relatively benign; it is, however, the case that, when I tell people that I’m a mathematician, the response is quite regularly for the person I’m speaking to to tell me unprompted how they’re a failure at mathematics. (With many variants; a quite common one is for people to say when they felt that they stopped being good at mathematics, e.g. “I was good at mathematics through calculus, but then linear algebra kicked my butt.”) I don’t believe any other field of study gets nearly the same tenor of response, and the situation is fucked up enough that, from the time I showed up in California until the time when Miranda was maybe in third grade, I actively avoided telling people I met outside of Stanford that I was a mathematician. (And of course now it doesn’t generally come up because I don’t work as a mathematician.) So, from my perspective, the results of the algorithmic approach towards teaching mathematics were Not Good, and it was high time to try something else.

The reason why I bring this up in a context of a discussion of the Stanford math department is that at least two members of the Stanford math department were involved in the production of the California state standards. My memory says three members, but when I look at the standard itself, the names that I recognize are James Milgram and Gunnar Carlsson, so I guess it was only two. The core of their involvement was before I showed up in the department (the standards have a 1997 date, and I was still in grad school then); and, in general, I think the idea of professional mathematicians being involved in the production of standards is a laudable idea, because they have specialized knowledge that will inform what is valuable for students to know, including subtle linkages between different areas.

It’s not, of course, the only specialized knowledge that is useful when writing a standard for teaching mathematics. I would like actual math teachers to be heavily involved in the production of such documents, as well as education professors who are up to date on the research for what educational approaches currently seem to give the best approach. And my impression (based admittedly on scanty evidence) is that this did not happen on the California math standards: that there was quite a lot of politicization in the composition of who participated in the committee and what voices were listened to, based on philosophical beliefs on what approach would work that weren’t supported by research.

I interacted with Gunnar Carlsson not infrequently during my time at Stanford (and worked part-time at a startup he cofounded during a few months when I wasn’t teaching), and all my memories of that interaction were pleasant: in particular, I’m sure his motives for devoting considerable amounts of time to the California math standards were public-spirited, trying to lend the help of his professional expertise without a particular didactic axe to grind. I spent much less time interacting with James Milgram; I’m sure his motives were also public-spirited, but I’m fairly sure that he did have an axe to grind, an axe that wasn’t backed up by his professional expertise.

Which brings us to the person whose name gives the title to this blog post, Jo Boaler. I assume we met during some sort of new faculty event in 1998; and we talked several times about math teaching over the years. I really enjoyed those conversations (and reading her first book), and found them very useful in thinking through some of the approaches I was trying to take in my course design. When I went further along that path, trying to turn what I was thinking about into an attempt to gather substantial data, she helped me with methodological advice and convinced a couple of her grad students to donate time to me interviewing some of the students who were taking my class. And I’m embarrassed that I didn’t do a real job of following through on that; though less embarrassed than I would be, because it was only by doing that that I started to realize just how much work it is to turn observations into real data that you can begin to draw conclusions from. (Mathematicians have it much easier in that respect in the relatively cut-and-dry nature of our proofs; though of course mathematics has its own significant difficulties because that cut-and-dried nature means that we’ve been able to dig very deep over the centuries into areas where our approach works.)

She mentioned conversations that she had had with Milgram. I dropped into his office once or twice because of that (and rarely ran into him in other contexts around the department, we traveled in different circles there); I don’t recall probing too deeply, but those conversations were consistent with Jo’s description of his behavior. I got the impression that my approach towards mathematics teaching was quite different to Milgram’s approach, that our opinions of mathematics teachers were also quite different, and that there wasn’t much point in having further conversations in that area.

I lost touch with Jo Boaler after my first three years at Stanford—she was busy, I was going in different directions. And of course, I’ve been out of academia for more than nine years by now. I was pleased to see her name show up recently in my twitter feed; I was sad to learn that the reason for that appearance was that she was starting a social media offensive campaign against Milgram (and Wayne Bishop, a math professor from elsewhere). According to Jo’s report of the situation, Milgram and Bishop have been trying to destroy her professional career; if a quarter of what Jo says there is accurate, then Milgram and Bishop’s behavior is, at the least, shameful.

Of course, I’m an outsider, so I can’t talk about the nuances of what happened first hand. But what Jo describes is consistent with what I saw: a strong ideological dislike for certain didactic approaches which translates into a lack of respect for people who aren’t aligned with scientists laying down the truth from high: a lack of respect for people who come to other conclusions, a lack of respect for professors who work in other fields, a lack of respect for people who are actually doing the day-to-day work of the teaching that is under discussion! There are strong structural undercurrents pulling in those directions in math departments all over the country (along with reinforcing undercurrents: Jo doesn’t call out gender issues in her web page, but they’re all over the place in science departments, and for that matter in Silicon Valley in general, as I’ve seen repeatedly in my post-Stanford career); a lot of the time, people work to fight those undercurrents and at least maintain a basic level of professional respect, but not always.

So: maybe Milgram and Bishop are right. But to believe that, I’ll have to believe that I should take the word of a couple of people who have never published peer-reviewed mathematics education research over somebody who has built a career on that, over the word of multiple departments that have given Jo Boaler research appointments over the years, over the word of a committee set up to investigate exactly that question. And you can make a consistent worldview out of that, if it’s the direction you choose to go in: it’s a world view that leads to statements like the one Bishop apparently made that schools of educations should be “nuked”. (That sort of lack of respect for math ed research by people who haven’t done any math ed research is depressingly common, though most people who hold such a view are more polite about it than that.)

It’s not a worldview that I hold, though. And I’m very glad Jo Boaler is showing the strength to fight against it.

At Agile Open Northern California 2012, I led a session titled “Worries as Inventory: Bug Trackers, Lean, and GTD”. I put up my notes on the conference wiki, but I’m reproducing them here for archival purposes as well. Many thanks to the people who participated in the session, they did a wonderful job of getting something concrete out of the vague idea I had going into it.

Session participants: David Carlton (session organizer); Jeff Isenberg; Brad Neiman; Super Aaron.

We started with a brief discussion of GTD. GTD’s main point: if there’s something you’re worried that you’ll forget about or won’t do, then:

1. Get it out of your head by writing it down.
2. Decide explicitly whether to do it now or to not do it now.

This is similar to the ways in which some people use bug trackers (JIRA, Bugzilla, etc.): if there’s a bug, a feature request, etc., then file it in a bug tracker.

The problem with filing all of that is that it creates inventory; and, as lean teaches us, inventory has a cost. Here, it’s a cost in terms of causing people to spend time interacting with the bug tracker, worrying about the large numbers of bugs assigned to them, etc. Can we find approaches towards minimizing those costs while keeping the benefits of GTD’s approach?

GTD suggests keeping a list of things you’re not going to do. This is good – it avoids having them get in your way most of the time. But it’s bad because those items can still show up at inopportune times, e.g. when doing searches. So it could be hard to find those items when you want them but not when you don’t? We discussed filtering as a possible approach.

One way to avoid one source of excess worry here is to never assign tasks to people in advance: just leave those entries as unassigned. Create a next task queue, tell people to pull items off of that queue, and only then to assign those items to themselves. This avoids the problem of having dozens / hundreds of items assigned to individuals.

Aaron suggested having the team pull work into the sprint, creating a bucket in Jira at the start of a sprint. In his context, there’s only one team. Jeff is working in a multi-team situation; his Jira instance has a custom field to indicate the scrum team. Jeff says that PMs have a psychological need to assign a feature to somebody when coming up with it; this is okay as long as they assign that feature to a team instead of an individual.

We also talked about bugs that are found in a sprint. In general, we liked the idea of having the tester add a comment to the story bug, talk to the developer, and reopen that story bug – don’t open a new bug unless you’re making an explicit choice to defer fixing the defect until a future sprint. One antipattern that this can run into is when testers are evaluated based on the number of bugs they file; don’t do that! The goal for everybody should be to have tasks flow smoothly through the system; ideally, you’d have early QA/dev communication that leads to defects not even being introduced in the first place.

With this, we felt like we had a pretty good handle on Jira queues downstream of product management; but it can lead to PMs having hundreds of feature requests on their queues.

For the queue immediately upstream of dev, we suggested having a WIP limit (about two sprints’ worth), with a definition of ‘Ready’ required for something to be in this queue. But what about items further out than that? If they’re on a list, that presence is distracting; if they’re not on a list, that absence is also distracting!

GTD suggests that it should be on some list; whose list should it be on, and where is that list? The list should be owned by product management; we weren’t sure the list should be in Jira, maybe Jira is tactical, not strategic.

The next question: how often should we review that list? E.g. is the GTD notion of a weekly review relevant? In general, we felt that, the more distant a feature is, the less detail we should use to specify it, and the least frequently we should review it. Value stream maps could help here: we want to remove rework loops, and that applies both right before releasing stories (rework loops involving dev / QA / customer) and right at the start of the value stream (rework loops involving customers / PMs / dev).

We had the question of to what extent the weekly review is a psychological need? The tentative answer that we had was that, if you have queue review patterns that you trust, then you can relax that – so if you work on, say, 2 week iterations, then review the queue every two weeks instead of every week. (Focusing your attention on a time period twice the sprint length, 4 weeks in this example.) Though weekends are also a good subconscious reset period, so there’s something to be said for weekly reviews; reviewing more often than that probably isn’t too helpful.

And add in reviews at a slower cadence that are more strategic: think about your overall feature roadmap at a monthly or quarterly cadence, perhaps. And about your set of products quarterly or annually.

I went to PSL last month; it was a great experience, and the only reason why I haven’t blogged about it here is that there was so much to think about that I haven’t managed to wrap my brain around it. (Well, that’s not the only reason: I’ve been distracted. But it’s the main reason!)

One bit I wanted to mention, though, was something that happened on the last full day of the workshop. That day, we were split into two groups, and each group was told to design a 60-minute delegation-based simulation for the other group to work through. And both groups got a lot from both designing their simulation and carrying out the other team’s simulation; but, from where I sat, it seemed like the other group accomplished both tasks more smoothly than our group. (In fact, our group didn’t manage to reach the desired end goal of the other team’s simulation at all!)

I’m sure there are a lot of factors that played into that, but listening to the other team report out how their design went and watching them carry out our simulation, it seemed like one important success factor for them was their use of set-based design. Our group went through a fairly traditional brainstorming and culling process; that led to us having a single choice earlier than the other group (in both halves: a choice of simulation topic and a choice of topic for our solution to their simulation), which sounds good. In contrast, their group picked three possible choices fairly early on, and dived into those; they then met again, showed all three preliminary solutions to the full team, rejected one and split that team’s members into the other two choices (with also some cross-pollination of ideas between the surviving choices), and dived into those. It wasn’t until close to the end (probably two-thirds of the allotted solution time in the situation I observed) that they’d decided what solution to go with.

But, by the time they’d decided on that solution, it had gone through a lot of refinement. They didn’t just have an agreement that it was the best idea to go with: they had a good feel for how it would work in practice, and knew where to focus their remaining time. So they could spend the remaining third of their time really focusing on refining the last issues. In contrast, the group that I was part of probably got to a consensus on the desired solution faster, but when we had that consensus, that was all we had: we didn’t have any sort of real feel for what the solution would concretely entail. So we had a lot of discovery to do; in fact, it could have been the case (though, fortunately, it wasn’t the case in our examples) that part of that discovery would have been a realization that the solution that we’d agreed to was unworkable in practice.

A very interesting experience. I’d run into set-based design in the lean literature several years ago, and I was willing to believe intellectually that it could lead to faster solutions than a single-threaded approach. But I’d never seen it put into action that way; I’ll certainly have to look for occasions to try it out in software projects.

My favorite cookie recipe (and my favorite cookie dough recipe!). Invented by Liesl’s friend Elizabeth Winchell.

Betsy Cookies

2 sticks butter
1 c. white sugar
3/4 c. brown sugar
2 eggs
2-3 Tbsp. vanilla
2 c. flour
1/4 c. cocoa
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 Tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1 package chocolate chips

Cream the butter then work in the sugars. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth.

Mix together the dry ingredients then gradually blend them into the butter mixture. Add chips. If dough is dry, add a little water.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit: 8-10 minutes for cookies, a little less than 20 minutes for pan cookies. (In a 9×13 inch pan.) Or just eat it raw…

Like I said yesterday, we’re in a surprising heyday for match 3 variants. Of the variants I’ve played recently, I like Triple Town quite a bit more than 10000000: I get the feeling that there’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, in the way that it invites me to plot out strategies that take advantage of rare items drops while not being screwed up by them when they don’t fit into my plan.

Despite that, though, I gave it up fairly quickly—I’m not sure I’ve played through ten rounds of the game. The problem is that there’s almost too much depth, or perhaps that it takes too long to unfold: I haven’t timed it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a round takes 30 minutes or more. (And that’s with me just not being that good at the game yet—my individual turns will speed up as I get better, but I expect the fact that I’ll be making more of them to balance that out.) And, while there’s no hidden state, there’s enough advance planning going on that I find it difficult to put down the game in the middle of a round and then pick it up again the next day.

The result is a game that doesn’t fit very well into the rhythms of my play sessions: it’s structured more like a pick-up-and-play game that I’d like to be able to fit into small pieces of down time in evenings/weekends (with, of course, occasional longer bouts), the way I have with Ascension, but instead I feel I have to schedule time for it the way I would a narrative game. (Or the way I used to schedule time for go; but while Triple Town is a very good game, I’m pretty sure it’s no go.) And my brain resists doing that.

So I stopped playing it. I wish things had worked out differently, but they didn’t.

10000000 is one of the many match 3 variants to have popped up over the last few years, along with Puzzle Quest (and its sequels) and Triple Town. Like those other games, it’s surprisingly good, but it’s the weakest of the trio: the gameplay doesn’t have nearly the conceptual depth of Triple Town, and the RPG trappings don’t add to either the gameplay or the game length the way they do for Puzzle Quest. 10000000‘s schtick isn’t so much its RPG trappings as its Cannabalt-esque leanings; that’s a genre I don’t enjoy as much, and like the last game I played in that genre, Jetpack Joyride, I went through several hours spread over maybe three days where I played a fair amount of 10000000, and then I had no trouble stopping when the leveling up motivation stopped.

Still, those were good hours. And I liked the length of individual bouts more than I did in other Cannabalt-esque games. Liesl is still playing 10000000; it wouldn’t surprise me if I were also to pick it up occasionally in stray moments over the next few months.