malvasia bianca

I haven’t started programming Scala in earnest yet, though I’ve been going through some books and typed a bit into the interpreter. (Whee, JVM startup times.) I had the Odersky book recommended to me, but I actually first read the PragProg book: I’ve had good luck with some of their books recently, it’s quite a bit shorter, and there is a tradition of excellent short introductions to programming languages in the field. I won’t exactly say I regret that choice, but the PragProg book isn’t anything special; I’m only 85 pages into the Odersky book, but I’m enjoying it quite a bit more.

A few things that amuse me so far, as a C++ fan:

Yet another book which has to explain that a variable being immutable doesn’t mean that the object it’s pointing to is immutable (just that you can’t reassign the variable to point to something else), and that there’s in fact no way to create immutable objects (assuming that the class allows mutation at all, of course). Is C++ really the only language that has a reasonable story about this?

Admittedly, C++’s story is far from perfect as well: all you have to do is hold a member variable via a pointer and then it’s up to the class implementor to declare const methods honestly, the compiler won’t have your back for you in that case. And that also points at C++’s main advantage in this area, that you can have variables that aren’t held via pointers: maybe without that, automatically enforcing constness is impossible, and without that there’s no benefit in letting class implementers declare which methods are const? I’ll have to think about that one; still, it’s certainly not an area that I would have thought C++ would be relatively unique in when I first ran into the language.

And after reading so many complaints about how you can’t tell what “a + b” means in C++ code, it’s great to see another language that unabashedly embraces operator overloading. And having operators that end in a colon be magically reversed to be methods of the object on their right is simply brilliant: not only does it naturally handle the cons case of

1 :: List(2,3)

but having /: be an alias for foldLeft is just brilliant: I think writing

(0 /: list) { _ + _ }

to sum the elements of list is super natural, much more so than a syntax with 0 and list reversed would be. (Think of it as smooshing down list starting with 0 at the front and with the function argument telling you how to do the smooshing.)

So yeah, Scala and I are going to get along just fine, I think.

Beginnings

As soon as Disney’s acquisition of Playdom closed, e-mails from recruiters started appearing regularly in my inbox. Most of them I essentially ignored: I’d been having a great time at Playdom, and while I didn’t expect to stay there for the six years that I’d stayed in my previous job, I certainly wasn’t planning to leave after just over a year. So I sent polite notes back to the recruiters saying that I wasn’t interested, and promptly forgot about them.

Eventually, though, one of those e-mails snuck through my defenses. It was from a startup that I had vague warm feelings about, enough so that I clicked through to their job ads; and, when I did so, I found that they used both Ruby on Rails and Scala. These are two technologies that I’m quite interested in, and that I wasn’t likely to get to play around with at Playdom; also, at that point I was in a bit of a rut at my current role at Playdom. So I responded to that e-mail in a more positive fashion.

That was the first chink in my armor; a little while after that, I got an e-mail from an industry recruiter whom I’d noticed appearing on my twitter followers list a week or two before. So, out of curiosity (or perhaps vanity), I responded to her as well.

This was the middle of December, so it was close enough to Christmas break that not much happened with those conversations for the rest of the year. But the conversations had planted a seed in my brain, enough to shift my mental story so that, when relatives asked me over Christmas how work was going, my answer was “fine, but I’ve been a little bored recently”.

Changing Stories

In retrospect, that was the key turning point. Before, the dominant stories playing in my head were all strongly in favor of my being at Playdom: the story about being in the games industry, the story about how Playdom was on the right side of an Innovator’s Dilemma market shift, the story of being part of a startup destined for great things, the story of learning new technologies. The first two stories were holding up fine; but Playdom wasn’t a startup anymore (and I was a late enough hire that I didn’t have much of a financial incentive to stick around waiting for options to vest), and there weren’t any technologies on the horizon at Playdom that I was actively excited about, so the third and fourth stories were losing their power. And we hadn’t had meetings within Playdom for a while that were reinforcing those stories or generating new stories to replace them. (Playdom had an all-hands meeting in early February that excited me an a couple of ways; if that had happened in December, maybe I never would have responded to that earlier e-mail.)

This meant that my brain had a narrative gap that it wanted to fill. And, right at that moment, the best new stories were coming from seeds planted by recruiters: maybe I wanted to be at a startup again, maybe I wanted to explore Ruby or functional programming. The very act of talking to recruiters and companies gave this a boost: such conversations inevitably turn fairly soon to the question of what you’re interested in, so unless you want to sabotage your chances immediately, you’ll come up with an answer expressing a story leading away from your current company and towards whomever you’re talking to. Yes, you’re doing that because of your audience; still, telling them those stories has a cumulative effect, and if you spin enough such stories, they’ll combine to lead you in a different direction.

Crafting a New Story

But that travel is more haphazard than I’d like. And potentially dangerous: if other people are driving the conversations and leading the stories, they’re not particularly likely to go in directions that will turn out well for me. So that suggested two courses of action:

1. I should think hard about what I wanted.
2. I should talk to as many people as I could manage, to maximize options and prevent any single external story from having undue influence.

The outcome of the first course of action was:

• I wanted to explore different technologies, Ruby and functional programming languages in particular.
• I wanted to be some place that was into the technical side of agile, that focused more on craftsmanship.
• I wanted to be at a startup again, and a smaller one: I’d tried 50-person and 100+-person startups, I’d tried large companies, and it seemed time to head down to the 25-person range.

None of which I was likely to get at Playdom. Now, I like playing and thinking about games, which meant that I liked being in the games industry; but I like thinking about programming, too, and about everything entailed in the art of creating software. And when it comes down to which of those two I’d most be able to make a rewarding career out of, I don’t think there’s much comparison: I’ll do better (both personally and financially) if I follow my nose as a programmer. So it wasn’t crazy to think that I’d gotten most of what I was going to get technically out of Playdom, and move on.

And the outcome of the second question was that I should cast my net more broadly: in particular, I talked to a couple of recruiters that had helped me land with Playdom originally. One of whom was at a different firm, so now I was talking to three recruiting firms plus a handful of companies that I’d met through other means, mostly LinkedIn e-mails that they’d sent.

Going for a Ride

Let me tell you: those recruiters did not mess around. They all did a very good job, and I’d happily work with all of them again: they’d come up with a first pass of ten or so companies that seemed to them to be plausible fits, I’d look at them and agree that all of them were plausible but pick out a few that particularly caught my eye for some reason, and they’d both set up conversations with those few and use that information to come up with further excellent suggestions.

The upshot of this was that I was spending a lot of time on the phone talking to various companies, and some amount of time (mercifully mostly on evenings or holidays) interviewing in person. (It was quite lucky that it was good weather, because I spent a lot of lunch breaks sitting in a nearby park and talking.) And it was nice to feel wanted!

But also a little disconcerting. I’d like to pretend that I’m so super-awesome that anybody would love to hire me; the truth is, though, that while I’m fairly sure I do have several good attributes, there’s also quite a bit of luck involved. I know several other people whom I have a lot of respect for who have had more protracted job searches recently; I’m not about to chalk that up to some sort of essential difference, it means instead that right now I’m in a situation where people are happy to work with me to spin stories where I sound good. So I need to understand what’s going on there, and see how to best take advantage of it and set myself up in the future.

I wasn’t consciously thinking about this during the job search, but I turned 40 last Tuesday. I’m in an industry that, to some extent, overvalues youth; so far I haven’t had any problems with that, but it’s an example of how future job searches could be a lot more prolonged and a lot less fun than this one was. Which helped confirm my feeling that now was the right time to leave Playdom: from a strictly mercenary point of view, it’s almost certainly going to be the case that I have a significantly higher expected value from playing up the story of “being part of a company that has sold for a good amount recently in a high-profile industry” than from the Disney stock options that I’d be giving up by changing jobs.

Ambition

The upshot of this was that I decided that I needed to change the story that I was telling myself and others still more, and to do so by increasing its ambition. Following the nose of technologies that I’m interested in but not yet fully fluent in remained important (both for personal fulfillment reasons and for setting myself up for further growth), but I didn’t want to go too far in that direction at the expense of underplaying everything that I’ve learned over the last decade.

Also, I ended up prioritizing functional programming languages over Ruby: Ruby’s been around enough that I’m definitely playing catchup there compared to a lot of other programmers, whereas I’m hearing a surprising amount of buzz about Scala while not yet getting the feel that there’s a huge amount of existing expertise in the language. (And I’m quite confident that my brain will do well at turning me into a very good Scala programmer: it’s good at that sort of thing.) I’m pretty optimistic that going in that direction will open up a lot of interesting doors a few years from now, positioning me well on the adoption curve.

In terms of company size, I should go still smaller: coming into a 25-person company would be interesting, but even then you’ve missed a lot of the early decisions. I didn’t quite want to be a co-founder or first hire, but being in the 10-15 person range seemed like it would be a plausible fit.

And then there’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. You can never predict what will turn out to be successful, but I figured there’s no sense not swinging for the fences. Which meant looking for companies that could tell a story involving disruption on a significant scale, and companies whose founders have the chops to pull it off.

This all adds up to a great story going forward: I’ll have worked at multiple successful startups, I’ll have had increasingly important roles within those startups, I’ll have a lot of experience in dealing with very large quantities of data, with cloud technologies, with new programming paradigms (or with half-century old programming paradigms that are making a deserved resurgence!), I’ll have the agile chops to look beyond my day-to-day programming to help the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. That is a story that I can get behind, and it will convert my getting older from a potential liability into a tale of valuable experience.

Outcome

At least that’s how I’d like things to go; then again, I certainly wouldn’t have predicted two years ago anything that has happened since then, so I don’t want to get too tied up in this particular story! I’m very glad to have spent time thinking about it, but in the mean time I need to dive in, start programming, work as hard as I can to help make my next company successful, and see where the future leads.

Which means I needed to pick the next step in my future! I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to some very interesting companies indeed; I ended up joining Sumo Logic, and I’m super-excited about them. They have a great disruption story, their founders can pull it off if anybody can, I interviewed with all nine of the current employees and am very much looking forward to having all of them as colleagues. What they’re doing and the way they’re working fits well enough with my prior experience that I should be able to hit the ground running and contribute well, but there’s enough new that I’ll come out of it knowing quite a bit more than I know going in. It looks like a great fit from my point of view, and they seem to agree; I’m looking forward to spending the next several years with them, it’ll be quite a ride.

And I will pay more attention to the stories that are going through my head in the future: they are powerful, they control me more than I realize.

Last month, it seemed like most of my twitter feed (especially the game developers in it!) was playing Game Dev Story, so I decided to give it a try last week.

And it’s certainly addictive; I spent more time playing it than I’d like to admit, and while I was getting a little bored with the game towards the end of my first run, there were also some goals I hadn’t managed to accomplish, so I ended up launching into a second playthrough immediately. Having said that, I haven’t had any desire to touch the game after the second run, so its addictive qualities seem to be fairly short-lived.

Straightforward enough gameplay, though admittedly well-matched to the iPhone. To me, the most interesting thing about the game was the strategies that it encouraged: the path to success that I found was to find the best people possible to do whatever work needed to be done, and not to worry about how much it cost as long as I could afford them at all. Hear that, game companies: find good people, and pay them lots of money! (Alas, in the real world developers don’t come with stats meters to let you figure out which ones are five or ten times more productive than others…)

Actually, the game seemed to reward spending money in general: if I could afford it, I threw double resources at games when developing them and never regretted it, and spending money on advertising seems to have paid off, too. Once you do that, you’ll have a well-oiled machine where it’s impossible to develop a game that doesn’t do fantastically well, and where you’ll be able to make sequel after sequel for games with no loss in quality. So: not so realistic, and a bit boring. But there were some nail-biting moments in my first playthrough, when I was trying to save up money for a new console license while manufacturers kept on releasing more and more expensive consoles.

I wanted to like the iPhone version of Noby Noby Boy. Not out of any particular fondness for the PS3 version, but because I think Katamari Damacy is one of the most wonderful games of all time.

Sadly, I do not find either variant of Noby Noby Boy to be one of the most wonderful games of all time. I found the PS3 version strangely soothing, but I haven’t felt any pull to return to it. And the iPhone version didn’t manage that: you have a small screen with bad controls to stretch things (though the controls did improve once I discovered tapping to stick things), and with the addition of badly-done music library listening and clock watching modes. Some of the items that you can play with were worth a minute of fiddling; some weren’t.

On to Game Dev Story.

So. Dragon Age: Origins. I’m a pretty big BioWare fan, though more on their action RPG side: Jade Empire was the game where I fell in love with them, and of their two recent games, it’s not due to chance that I played Mass Effect 2 first. But I enjoy their games in general, and I’ve seen more interesting blog posts about Dragon Age than any other game I can think of, so certainly I was going to play it when I had a bit of free time in my gaming schedule. And any game that Kateri thinks so highly of has to be rather good: her liking it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will, but it almost certainly means that I’ll respect it.

Which I do. But I also have no idea what to say about it! So I’ll fall back on my favorite technique of free-associating; and, given the scope of the game, that will be a lot of associating indeed.

RPG Conventions

Let’s start off with the “action RPG” label that I mentioned above. Dragon Age isn’t an action RPG, but a lot of the time its combat plays like one. Which is mostly good: it means that you don’t have to spend more time than necessary on the simple battles. (It’s possible for a turn-based RPG to have similarly fast battles—see Chrono Trigger—but these days the style is for turn-based RPGs to spend too much time animating you into and out of combat.) Though that does raise the question: what is the point of the simple battles, exactly?

For the hard battles, though, the battle system started to fall apart. You really want all of your party members to be working well together; for better or for worse, however, I’d reacted to the action aspect of the battles by only directly controlling my primary character, which meant that I had very little idea of how I wanted to use my other characters’ abilities, and the interface left me with no desire to actively switch between them. (Incidentally, one aspect of the “Leliana’s Song” DLC that I enjoyed was having an excuse to try out playing as a rogue.) Maybe the tactics controls would have left me with sufficient control to pull that off without pulling out my hair, maybe it would have worked better if I’d been playing on a PC instead of an Xbox; as it was, I just fell down to easy.

There were a lot of items to pick up; I bought all the backpacks I could, but on the long dungeons, they still got full, which just increased my annoyance at said long dungeons. There were, potentially, some interesting choices to be made in my choices of items to keep, of armor sets to target; I didn’t feel like thinking about that too hard or looking up the community’s recommended courses of action in that regard, though.

I was expecting to look forward to learning about the history of the world. Thinking back, though, I skimmed most of the encyclopedia material in Mass Effect 2, so perhaps that falls under the category of something that I think I’ll like more than I actually like it. (I do think that building a history for your world makes it richer, but that doesn’t mean that you benefit from making that material available to players.) I can’t say for sure one way or another, though, because Dragon Age combined a huge amount of material with an interface that made it impossible to find bits of lore that you hadn’t read: there’s no way to tell unread lore from previously read lore unless its entry happened to be on the first screen.

Interlude

Which all adds up to a feeling of meh. Is that fair? Maybe I should look at the game through my musicals analogy: embrace the set pieces? I don’t think that analogy is really relevant here: that analogy suggests that I shouldn’t worry too much about the overall narrative structure, but here my feeling is that the set pieces don’t hold together particularly well. (They certainly don’t have the crispness of a good song in a musical).

Failing that, what about the Bohemian Rhapsody analogy? Embrace the overwhelming nature of the game, its ungainly aspects, the ways in which it sails past convention, heedless of the sharp corners that result?

But, of course, Dragon Age doesn’t sail past convention: that’s exactly the problem! In a weird way, though, there’s something here nonetheless: the game was so overwhelming in its adherence to RPG tropes that I ended up ignoring them, ended up going through them and coming out on the good side. If it broke me of the habit of reading through history, of opening chests just because they’re there, of swapping out party members and going through endless conversation trees just to see all of the choices and answers that ensue, and that’s all to the good. I don’t entirely approve of the methods there, but the outcome was curiously pleasing.

Relationships and Story

Speaking of choices and conversation trees: I was a female city elf mage. The most interesting part of my origin story was Jowan: I can’t remember the last tIme I’ve felt so conflicted about a quest in a game. Normally, I jump at a chance to be helpful, but what a drip!

And then Ostagar, and Alistair. Whom I was charmed by immediately, with his self-deprecating humor. Followed by the arrival in short order of Morrigan and Leliana: I really enjoyed being around all three of them, in particular Morrigan’s bickering with the other two; by the time other party members showed up on the scene, I couldn’t imagine swapping out any of those three.

(Side note: Leliana’s entrance, covered in blood spatters, is ridiculous. I read those omnipresent blood splatters as the strongest signal that the game is intentionally going so deep into genre and game conventions as to point out the absurdity and come out on the other side. But the game doesn’t manage to do that wholeheartedly (far too little camp for that to be the case), so it comes out as yet another sign of the game not making up its mind. Which, in its own way, is perhaps the strongest argument for viewing it through a Bohemian Rhapsody lens: the game throws in everything, you make of it what you will, and don’t expect consistency. I just wish there had been more fevered dreams, or indeed any fevered dreams.)

And characters kept on surprising me, and my attitude towards them changed. Sure, Alistair’s revealed as the potential heir to the throne; oddly enough, I reacted to that by mentally withdrawing somewhat. Which ended up making a lot of sense when I reached the part of the game where that really mattered: yes, I could have put Alistair on the throne, but to me the queen fit much better there. (Incidentally, I really appreciated her behavior towards me when I botched one aspect of her rescue.)

And then there’s the approval system. I could have tried to keep everybody’s approval as high as possible; I ended up completely ignoring it when choosing my actions. But I still really liked having the approval system in place: it was an accurate feedback mechanism for how I and the various characters approached the world differently. And it helped me notice that I was much more on the same wavelength with Leliana than with Alistair; I’d been charmed by him initially and assumed that I’d go on to romance him, but I ended up with Leliana, and I think she was a much better fit.

Morrigan generally disagreed with my actions; somehow, though, that never mattered to me, and I found that I really respected her and never questioned her fitting in as a member of my party. So when, towards the end of the game, she made two rather serious requests of me, I did them without thinking twice (or with only a little bit of thought): she was a party member, I had faith enough to go along with what she wanted.

And then there were the fringe party members: I was fond of the dog, certainly, but I never got to know Oghren, Zevran, Sten, Wynne. (Though I did end up disliking Wynne from what little contact I did have with her.) I was a little surprised when Zevran turned on me, but I’d been ignoring him the whole time, so I certainly can’t blame him.

Conclusion?

I have no idea where this all ends up. I’m still ambivalent about RPGs in general, and about a lot of the details of the mechanics of the game. The game seems to some extent aware of those flaws, and I’m not sure if that makes matters better or worse.

But, ultimately, the characters make up for that. Not completely, but enough so that I’m happy to have played through the game. It’s similar to how I feel about Persona 3: too long, too much of a slog in places, but it lets me view relationships between characters that I’ve never seen before in a game. And, in both cases, I wish the game went all-in on what makes it special. But I’m also a little scared of what the results would be of doing that, because I don’t feel I really understand the virtues of RPG slogs.

Time to play some shorter games, I suppose.

If you’ve been wondering at the slow pace of updates here, part of the reason is that a low-key job search suddenly got a lot hotter over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, it’s over now: I’ll be joining Sumo Logic on February 21st.

More info to come eventually…

I’ve been trying to figure out my reactions to Minecraft recently, and to that end I thought writing down some of my experiences would be useful. Useful to me, that is; quite possibly boring to y’all! So I decided to create another blog for that purpose, and to expand the purpose slightly to include narration of whatever game-related experiences I’m going through.

I don’t expect to put longer-form material there, or even particularly analytical material: I’d like to largely confine it to experience reports. I hope that those experience reports will lead to deeper dives here, however.

It’s at scenes.malvasiabianca.org—have a look. (Or don’t!) There’s not much there yet, but my guess is that what’s there now is representative enough of what its content will look like for the next few months.

(I’ll also use this as an occasion to plug my linkblog, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

I was using one of our laptops on New Year’s Day, and it froze with an odd graphical pattern on the screen. I force-rebooted the computer, but it hung in the middle of the reboot; repeating the attempt showed that this was not a one-time coincidence. Whoops; I have bad luck with computers these days, it seems.

Though, to be honest, it wasn’t much of a shock: the computer was one of the original Macbook Pros, which meant that it was almost five years old, quite long in laptop years. So I’d been thinking about replacement plans for a while; in fact, disk space concerns might have forced my hand on that over the next few months anyways. (And kudos to Snow Leopard for reducing disk usage enough to not have forced my hand a year ago!) I talked it over with Liesl and Miranda, and we decided that my tentative plan of replacing it with a desktop machine plus a second iPad made sense, and that it also made sense to hold off on purchasing the second iPad for a few months, until the next model is released. (We have a Macbook around the house, too, so we’re not exactly lacking in options in the interim.)

So, the next day, I went to the Apple store and got a replacement (a base model 27″ iMac, specifically), along with the new Apple trackpad, an external drive for backup purposes, and a copy of iWork that was on sale. (Though, in retrospect, not on sale enough, given the appearance of those programs on Apple’s Mac app store the next week…) And, fortunately, for the second time this year, my backup strategy proved to be up to the task: when I turned on the new computer, it asked me if I wanted to restore from a Time Machine backup, I did so, and all our files and applications were back.

Though, as it turned out, not all of those restored applications worked. Almost all of the problematic ones didn’t work for the same reason, namely DRM. Some of that was straightforward but annoying (I had to re-enter license keys for a bunch of Popcap games), but I ran into real bugs with Spore and with iTunes’s ability to play Audible files that took some amount of googling to figure out. (The Spore problems were particularly special; the joys of PC gaming…) Also, on a non-DRM front, I ended up deleting and reinstalling Macports after some problems there (which, admittedly, may have been partially my fault); not my favorite piece of software, that.

Still, all in all, I’m quite happy: I’ve had two computers die on me this year, and in both cases I had a quite functional replacement working the next day. I still don’t feel entirely comfortable with my Mac backup strategy—Time Machine is magic enough that it seems to me that there’s more scope for bugs than I’d like, and the backups there are physically colocated—but it’s definitely passed the test so far. And the new computer is really nice (and Miranda seems quite fond of it indeed, it turns out that she really likes 27″ screens), and I’m quite happy with Apple’s trackpad as well.

I’m tentatively planning to install Windows on it as well at some point: I can’t imagine playing major new Windows releases, but it would be convenient for indie games or for Vintage Game Club stuff. No urgent plans along that front; I’m tentatively thinking a Boot Camp install plus Parallels, but I might go pure Parallels, or change my mind entirely.

So: Osmos. It’s a lot like Art Style: Orbient, no? In the mechanism of circles absorbing other circles until they become the largest circle, in the simplicity of the controls, in the puzzle nature, in the simplicity of the presentation, in the amount of content that’s perfectly reasonable for a five-dollar game. I like Osmos‘s aesthetics a little more (some of its forms of circles are quite lovely), and actually as far as gameplay goes, some of my least favorite bits are where it uses the orbiting mechanic that’s central to Orbient. (Hmm, I wonder why that is? Maybe because it’s the situation where Osmos‘s control scheme starts to become a bit obtuse, turning into an indirect version of Orbient‘s control scheme.) I like Osmos‘s pacing more, too: the directed version of the levels ran out just as I was getting frustrated, and it’s backed up by a solid procedurally generated arcade mode.

A pleasant way to spend a couple of hours when I was home sick; who knows, maybe I’ll dip into it more in the future, maybe not. I’m certainly glad that games of this weight exist, I should play them more.

Rock Band 3‘s signature song is Bohemian Rhapsody; and, as a video game, that song is a very odd experience indeed. Unless you’re singing, you spend large portions of the song waiting for your next chance to play; whether or not you’re singing, the style and difficulty vary wildly from section to section.

This is a huge change of pace from most games I’ve played recently. Yes, video games frequently involve standing around, in the form of cut scenes: but those are short compared to the action sections and are in a different mode, whereas the gaps in Bohemian Rhapsody are fairly long and are of a piece with the rest—indeed, you would be playing during them if you’d chosen a different instrument. And, while games move you from region to region, they do that on level boundaries: you’ll typically spend an hour or more in a given context and, outside of platformers, different levels in a single game typically have quite a bit more in common than the different sections of Bohemian Rhapsody. And Bohemian Rhapsody’s difficulty curve spiky graph would be completely out of place in any game that I can think of.

The thing is, none of this matters! Or rather, it matters, but in a good way, in that these comparisons completely miss the point of the virtues of playing the song. The song has a (quite!) distinctive vision, and the goal of playing through one of the instruments in the song isn’t to go through a checklist of what makes a game-playing experience pleasant (or, for that matter, what makes a musical experience pleasant), it’s to experience a portion of that vision.

I don’t want to throw away traditional guidelines for what makes a video game experience enjoyable, what makes a video game well crafted: I enjoy the sort of refined experience that is produced by years of thoughtful evolution as much as the next person, and I would find it exhausting if all games were as idiosyncratic as Bohemian Rhapsody. Having said that, the game that I played in 2010 that is rattling around in my brain the most is Killer 7, and for much the same reasons: it presents an experience that is quite different from anything else I’ve ever played, and that experience is a powerful one that I still don’t know how to make sense of. If you’d asked me what sort of characteristics an enjoyable action game would have, being on rails would be very low on my list; but that sort of checklist comparison is completely overwhelmed by the vision that illuminates Killer 7, and I’m more than happy to place myself in the light of that vision and see where it leads me.

By all means, refine your craft, and don’t put barriers in your users’ way out of carelessness. But listen to what emerges during the night, and if those visions lead you somewhere unusual, embrace them.

And now I’ve come to the end of Matthew. (Phew!) Many thanks to those of you who have read this far and commented, especially to Roger for his many insights. (And I apologize if I mischaracterize his point of view below.)

I came in expecting to dislike a lot of what I read, and I wasn’t disappointed in that. God is presented as a figure of petty evil; Jesus is working in support of that. Or at least, that’s how I initially read it; as Roger pointed out, prophecy isn’t necessary inherently moral, it can be simply descriptive, and warnings of evil are useful.

But, as I read further, I felt less and less that those statements were directed at me. Roger’s comments helped me see this more as an exercise of community forming within an existing Jewish community; most of Jesus’s strongest attacks are directed at the existing Jewish priestly elite, he explicitly abstains from opportunities to attack the secular government of the time, and he probably doesn’t care at all about an atheist on another continent two millennia later! The prophecies about the arrival of the kingdom of heaven within a generation also helped me root these statements as concerning a battle involving specific people in a specific time and place.

I was surprised by my reaction to Jesus’s healing: I expected to like that uncritically, but the repetition eventually got to me. That probably says more about me (and not in a particularly good light!) than about anything in the text, however.

And I was also expecting to find a lot to like, and I wasn’t disappointed in that, either. So many strong statements about forgiveness, my favorite of which was the passage about turning the other cheek. Linked to that are statements about not judging others but instead judging yourself (the mote in thy brother’s eyes), and statements about caring for others, and of faith in the generosity of humanity; great stuff on page after page.

I’m glad to have gone through this exercise; but it’s also been a lot more work than I expected! I’m still planning to read through the rest of the gospels, but I’m certainly not planning to do many posts on them; if something catches my eye, I’ll write about it, otherwise not. Again, my thanks to those of you who have stuck with me; to those of you who think this topic has more than overstayed its welcome, I reassure you that I’ll soon be back to my normal program of video game pontification combined with occasional bits on software development…

I’m a bit confused by the parts involving Pontius Pilate. Some of that is simple ignorance: I understand that the Jewish priests don’t like Jesus, but I don’t understand why the Roman governor should care. And the part with the crowd clamoring for Pilate to free Barabbas doesn’t ring true to me. (E.g. the crowd shouting “His blood be on us, and on our children” from Matthew 27:25: in what circumstances would a crowd shout that?) Those issues aside, I’ll see Pilate’s lack of desire to kill Jesus as a sign that (as in Matthew 21-23) the real war here is between Jesus and the priest elite, not between him and traditional government forces.

We see a return of the humanity from Matthew 26 in Jesus’s crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (from Matthew 27:46), and for that matter, a crueler version of humanity in the mocking comments in Matthew 27:40-43. (Which do ring true to me, unlike the bit from Matthew 27:25 quoted above.)

At the end of Matthew 27, Jesus dies and is buried; and, in Matthew 28, he’s resurrected. I find that chapter very odd: there’s an amazing lack of detail, no power in the phrasing, and so much uncertainty that it’s acknowledged in the text in Matthew 28:15 and Matthew 28:17 with only a passing attempt at a rejoinder. A sad ending…

A fascinating chapter, because of the humanity that pervades it. The chief priests are the bad guys, but while I don’t defend their actions, I can see where they’re coming from: Jesus was really laying into them a few chapters ago. And Jesus knows what’s coming, so he doesn’t turn away the “very precious ointment” in Matthew 26:6-12; and the organization of the chapter then suggests that Judas gets fed up with Jesus because of that, and goes and talks to the high priests.

That passover must have been one of the most depressing meals ever (and I’m sure the creepy cannibalism bits didn’t help). And then, in their last night together, Jesus is lonely and unsure, asking the disciples to stay with him, but they fall asleep while he repeatedly asks “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (from Matthew 26:39/42/44).

Then there’s Peter: Jesus says Peter will deny him, Peter says never, but Peter does, leading to the end of the chapter Matthew 26:74-75: “Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.” And I can’t read Peter as being a bad person here: he’s one of many scared, fallible people in this chapter, and he remains the foundation of Jesus’s church.

And even in the middle of being seized by the priests’s men, Jesus gives us one last lesson in compassion and non-violence: when one of Jesus’s followers attacks one of the priest’s followers with a sword, Jesus says “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (from Matthew 26:52). Or at least that’s how I choose to interpret it: the context presents it more as a fulfilling of prophecy, and Jesus having faith that, ultimately, he has the upper hand. Still, that’s the lesson that I’d prefer to take from it.

Matthew 24 is one long, misguided prophecy of Jesus’s return: you have to believe, don’t be led astray by rumors or false prophets or doubts, and while we don’t know exactly when God is going to come and take away the just, nonetheless “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34). Well, no, it didn’t work out that way, and I’m a bit afraid of anybody who still holds to what’s in this chapter.

Matthew 25 also talks about the kingdom of heaven, but in a more discursive fashion. I rather like the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), with its notion that you shouldn’t squander what is given to you and its explicit acceptance of loaning money with interest. (Matthew 25:27, “Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.”)

Note, however, that in that parable, we’re talking about people to whom something has been given: the chapter ends with a paean to the virtues of kindness and charity to those who are in need, in Matthew 25:34-46. In fact, I’ll just quote Matthew 25:34-40 here:

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Amen.

Matthew 21 starts with the bit about the ass and the colt, and then moves on to casting the moneychangers out of the temple (“My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves”, from Matthew 21:13), and Jesus’s withering a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22). The former of which I rather enjoyed, but the latter is quite harsh: that poor fig tree! What happened to turning the other cheek?

At any rate, these leave you with the ideas that: 1) you shouldn’t mess with Jesus, and 2) those in the temple aren’t exempt from his wrath, indeed rather the opposite. Which leads directly to the next bit, with Jesus confronting the “chief priests and the elders of the people” (from Matthew 21:23). This lasts for a full two and a half chapters, containing: a couple of arguments about bible interpretation; a couple of parables all on the theme of “chief priests bad (directly going against the will of God), followers of Jesus good”; the “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (from Matthew 22:21) bit that makes it clear that Jesus is focusing right then on arguing with the priests rather than with the state; and Matthew 23. In that chapter he really lets loose against the priests, with seven verses starting with “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”, five verses where he calls them blind, one “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers”, and other fine examples of invective.

Ouch. But great stuff: it’s one thing when Jesus is telling me that it’s way or the highway, but I’m perfectly fine with him telling off other similarly judgmental types. Especially when it’s an argument between the old and the new, though I do feel a bit sorry for the priests here, with their fear that they’re on the wrong side of history.

I wasn’t aware of the parable that takes up the first half of chapter 20, but now I’m fascinated by it. It presents a group of laborers who worked for different amounts of time, but all got paid the same; the longer-working laborers complained, but got the following response, from Matthew 20:13-15:

Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

Emotionally, I’m on the side of the longer-working laborers here: but why? If they would have felt adequately paid in the absence of the other laborers, then why are they bothered by how the other laborers are treated?

The key here is, of course, the comparison. If the other laborers hadn’t worked at all, and it had been pure charity, I imagine that the laborers who had worked wouldn’t have felt bad. And then there’s another potential scenario that Jesus doesn’t give us: what if both sets of workers had worked the same amount, but they’d gotten radically different pay rates, the lower of which would, in other circumstances, be acceptable? The same argument seems to apply that the lower-paid set of workers shouldn’t feel bad; I bet they would, though, and they’d feel like the person in charge is unfairly playing favorites.

I dunno. I’m still mostly on the side of the longer-working laborers, and, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t set my alarm clock early the next day. But “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” is a very good question.

The rest of the chapter doesn’t strike me as strongly. I do, however, like the call to servant leadership in Matthew 20:26-28, in particular “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:27).

The endgame may be approaching, but we take another break from that here and return to our moralizing. Which starts off in a rather charming fashion, extolling the virtues of children! (A much more pleasant idea than staining them with original sin…) I wish the strongest statements weren’t in support only of “these little ones which believe in me” (from Matthew 18:6), but we’ve seen rather worse in that regard. And I like the parable of the sheep, too, “if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?” (from Matthew 18:12).

In between those bits, we have “Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.” (Matthew 18:8, with a similar bit about eyes in Matthew 18:9.) Which is a tough message, but yeah, doing the right thing sometimes requires tough choices. And the good thing here is that you’re cutting off your own hand or foot: cutting off somebody else’s to (in your view) help them is a different matter entirely.

The chapter ends with preaching forgiveness: “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:21-22), followed by the parable of the king and his servants in Matthew 18:23-35. Which is great stuff, though I am a bit bemused by Matthew 18:34, “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him”: I understand where the king is coming from there, but tormenting somebody (Lattimore translates the word as “torturers” rather than “tormentors”) isn’t going to pay the bills, either. Still, it’s an expression of the Tit for Tat strategy, and I’m happy with that; quite a chapter, all in all.

Matthew 19 is more of a mixed bag. I take my marriage very seriously, but that doesn’t mean that I support the strong anti-divorce pronouncements here. (E.g. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder”, from Matthew 19:6.) If I felt that Jesus appreciated sexuality or sexual equality more, then my reaction would be somewhat less negative, but still: marriages are more complicated than that. And the bit about eunuchs in Matthew 19:12 just seems odd.

Then we return to the themes that we saw in Matthew 18:8-9, this time taking the spin of selling your wealth to help the poor. Which is hard, but necessary: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (from Matthew 19:24). I’m not entirely comfortable with this, but maybe that’s just because it’s something that I don’t practice nearly as much as I should.

The tone deepens here. We start with themes we’ve seen before, with others who are engaging him but don’t want to believe. His response is to look around: “O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (from Matthew 16:3). But note the more wistful note, with the mention of sunsets and troubled sunrises in Matthew 16:2-3.

After which he gathers together those closest to him, and the endgame begins: “And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18), and the reason why that Petrus is necessary is that Jesus “must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day” (from Matthew 16:21).

Peter protests: “Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee” (from Matthew 16:22), but Jesus is uncompromising: “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” (Matthew 16:23.) I love that exchange, for the humanity that it shows combined with the principles that are behind it: earlier, I’ve been critical of such an uncompromising point of view, but here the consequences for Jesus himself are as severe as can be, so who am I to judge? He acknowledges that others might want to follow but will suffer in doing so (e.g. Matthew 16:24, “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me”), and ultimately leads to this question: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26) A very good question indeed, no matter what is important to you, what you see as your soul.

And then there’s the last verse in Matthew 16: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28) The problem with specific prophecies is that they are falsifiable…

Matthew 17 reinforces this core group of disciples, with their mountaintop retreat (complete with fancy outside guest appearances), and finishes sketching the tale of what’s to come: “The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men: And they shall kill him, and the third day he shall be raised again” (from Matthew 17:22-23). Along with a couple of other side bits: again, a call to the power of faith (“If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”, from Matthew 17:20, which I find strangely seductive), and a bit on taxes that the chapter ends with. I’m still not sure what to do with these tax sections: we’re seeing an expression of a lot of hostility in the air towards taxes, but both here and in Matthew 9 (where Jesus sat down with the tax collectors), Jesus seems willing to go along with them.

We start off with a defense against narrow rules: in Matthew 15:2, the scribes and Pharisees ask “Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.” And Jesus’s answer is Matthew 15:11, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” (Along with an accusation of hypocrisy in Matthew 15:3-9, for good measure.) Which is nice to hear: in Matthew 5:19, we were told that we shouldn’t “break one of these least commandments”, so I’m glad that Jesus has mellowed a bit. Though, having said that, I can’t say I understand exactly what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not allowed.

Then, in Matthew 15:22, we have the appearance of the “woman of Canaan”. I find this whole bit rather interesting: his first answer to her request for healing, from Matthew 15:24, is that “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Part of me really doesn’t like this at all: here’s somebody in need, and you turn her away because she’s not from your tribe? I am assuming, however, that Jesus can’t actually heal everybody in the world, or even everybody who comes to him, so some rationing of care is necessary; in that context, I can understand prioritizing those in need who are close to you.

I guess, to me, the upshot is: let’s find a way to fix that constraint. And others like it: in Matthew 15:32-38, we have a repeat of the loaves and the fishes. Here too I assume he’s operating under a similar constraint, in that seven loaves and a few fishes will feed four thousand people, but not the world. So let’s find a way to feed everybody instead.

And, indeed, Christian churches do try to feed those in need, and Christian hospitals try to cure those who ail. But they’re not going it alone: without the advances that science has brought, or indeed the flourishing of the overall economy that free markets have brought, there would be a lot less food and healing to go around. Still, they are trying, which puts them quite a bit ahead of smug bloggers pontificating from the comforts of their own home…

I was going to end there, but while doing the final proofreading, I took a break and browsed my RSS feeds, and ran into today’s (as I’m writing this) xkcd:

Which, if I ended there, could be interpreted a needlessly antagonistic spin. So, let me repeat: it’s awesome that Jesus cured the sick and healed the hungry. He was doing the best he could with the tools he had, and his best was far better than anything I’m managing today. But let us take from that the lesson that we should be compassionate to those in need, and use whatever tools we can find to that end, including (especially including!) tools that minimize the need for that compassion by reducing the number of those in need in the first place!

Next, we come to a chapter full of parables. Which I was expecting to like, because I’m quite fond of stories these days; but these parables, not so much. Instead, they’re just different variants of “here are the good guys, here are the bad guys”, and while I find that less distasteful in parable form than in other forms, it’s not my favorite topic, and it’s rather repetitive even within this chapter alone.

Still, there’s something pleasantly meta about running across the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3-9) when I myself am listening but, I have to assume, “seeing see not; and hearing [I] hear not, neither do [I] understand” (from Matthew 13:13). Also, at the end of this chapter, we see yet another take on family and group, this time leading to “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house” (from Matthew 13:57), putting a rather poignant spin on his words on the subject in previous chapters.

Matthew 14 starts out with the beheading of John the Baptist; only a handful of verses (Matthew 14:1-12), but such is the power of the Bible that they’ve been expanded into at least one opera, and countless other works. And then some good old fashioned miracles: the loaves and the fishes (Matthew 14:15-21), and walking on water (Matthew 14:24-33). Both of which I enjoy, though I don’t think I have anything to say about them in terms of the focus of this exercise.

And, with that, we’re halfway through the 28 chapters of this book. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have less to say about the second half of the book than the first half: my guess is that we’ll be shifting into a mode with more narrative and fewer moral pronouncements. I could be wrong, though (it’s been a while since I’ve read the Bible!), and it will doubtless also be the case that the narrative itself leads to some interesting moral questions. (Indeed, perhaps when mentioning John the Baptist’s beheading, I should have delved more into Herod’s feelings in Matthew 14:9 that “And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath’s sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her.”) My thanks to those of you who are still with me; for those of you who are getting tired, my apologies, and rest assured that I certainly don’t expect to spend nearly as much time on the other three books.