malvasia bianca

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.

I don’t have much to say about Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. It’s a Professor Layton game, and while that’s a good thing, it’s also a known quantity at this point.

We learn a bit about Layton’s past here; he turns out not to be particularly socially adept or comfortable around women, as one might expect in retrospect from his harping on being a gentleman. Also, my initial reading was that he and Luke shelter / infantilize Flora to an unpleasant degree in this game, and that the developers chose a lousy voice actor for Flora. But, actually, given how young the voice actor sounds, maybe Flora is supposed to be a lot younger than Luke, in which case both of those make more sense? I don’t remember from the earlier games what her age is supposed to be.

We start with a discussion of what is permissible on the sabbath and what isn’t. Which, if I’m in a good mood, I’m happy to take as a caution against uncritically using rigid laws to prevent you from doing good; e.g. Matthew 12:11, “And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?” Of course, it’s not quite that simple: part of his justification is that priests are allowed to do more on the sabbath than other people and, as he says in Matthew 12:8, “For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day.” So there is a bit of special pleading here, but it’s pretty sensible special pleading, and in general I like how the chapter starts.

I’m not so thrilled with how the chapter continues and ends: a repeat of the “you’re with me or against” me philosophy that I ranted about yesterday, complete with a recasting of family ties. But it’s gentler this time, and actually there’s a lot of good in the recasting of family ties that the chapter ends with: he’s not rejecting existing family ties, he’s instead broadening the notion of family, and I wholeheartedly support that.

And, in the middle, we have a rather interesting line, from Matthew 12:25: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand”. Which I quite like: people working together are ever so much more powerful than people working against each other, or even than people who are randomly working in related but not particularly well-aligned directions. Now, that statement alone doesn’t mean that you should take draconian measures to force people in line; but that doesn’t limit the statement’s utility as a diagnostic, or even say that parting ways isn’t sometimes a quite reasonable response to a serious difference in views and desires.

Here, Jesus shows the virtues of delegation; I can certainly get behind that. I can also get behind limiting that delegation to a small group that you know well, and accepting that you don’t have sufficient resources to be able to help everybody.

I’m not so thrilled with the “my way or the highway” (actually, “my way or eternal damnation”) philosophy here, though (e.g. Matthew 10:14, “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet”): what happened to the preaching of forgiveness that we’d just been seeing? When he says “And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death” in Matthew 10:21, one might think that this is a bad thing, and indeed he does think it’s bad, but not because of the brother against brother bit: as we see in Matthew 10:37, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me”, being divided against your family members is all well and dandy if you’re on the good side of that. So, sorry, Jesus, I love my daughter rather more than you, eternal damnation or no! (And Matthew 10:34, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword”, is an interesting counterpart to Christmas platitudes.)

This vengeful spirit continues in Matthew 11; he may call himself “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29) or, in Lattimore’s translation, “gentle and humble at heart”, but that’s not how I would describe “And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell” (from Matthew 11:23).

In fact, the more I think about this, the more these chapters bother me. What Jesus is saying here seems to me, to be blunt, evil. He wants to strip away your abilities to think for yourself: no grey area is allowed, you have to make an explicit choice to be either with him or against him, with the extremely strong carrot and stick of eternal grace and damnation separating those two choices.

This sort of absolutism is hard to pull off. Part of it is because we live in a world where matters are not so simple, and because we don’t actually get to see this alleged afterlife, but maybe that can be overcome with sufficient rhetorical prowess. Even so, though, stripping away people’s various personal loyalties and replacing them with loyalty to a single individual is a hard trick, and no personal loyalty is stronger than that of family; so Jesus goes right for the jugular and attacks that tie, knowing that it’s all simple after that.

The funny thing is that, were matters different, I’d be happy to complain about people for focusing too much on the virtue of family ties: that way lies tribalism, with its own host of evils. But here, those strong family ties are a saving grace against an unrooted vision of morality. (While, conversely, visions of morality can in other circumstances be an equally strong saving grace against uncritically following the actions of those near and dear to you.)

Phew. Not the sort of thing that I want to be writing about on a post that is scheduled to be published on Christmas day. Switching back to a less ranty tone:

There are some interesting bits before that relating Jesus to John the Baptist. In particular, I was struck by Matthew 11:18-19, “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.”

Indeed, sometimes you just can’t win: haters gonna hate, as they say. Or maybe not: just because X and Y are opposed for apparently contradictory reasons doesn’t mean that individuals are acting in contradiction: maybe it’s different individuals opposing X and Y, maybe X and Y are worthy of dislike for different reasons, maybe there’s a deeper consonance that X and Y are missing. But, a lot of the time, it’s definitely the case that the dislike comes first and that the justification based on particulars of the manifestation is only a retroactive attempt at rationalization; I know that’s the case for me most of the time when I dislike something.

And now we take a break from the context-free sermonizing, and turn to narrative. Specifically, about Jesus curing people right and left; hard not to like that! And, consistent with what we’ve seen earlier, he doesn’t want word getting around about his actions. (Though, as you might expect, it didn’t really work out that way…)

Part of me feels like I should be bothered by the man of great faith who got a long-distance cure for his household member; but I’m really not. “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matthew 8:22) seems a bit harsh, but only a bit.

Matthew 9 repeats much of the same themes, but there’s some new stuff, too. It starts off by saying that Jesus cures blasphemers, too, confirming my feeling that I shouldn’t be bothered by the man of great faith by the previous chapter. In fact, he turns this into a lesson on forgiveness, which I rather like: “For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?” (Matthew 9:5)

And then he goes to eat with “publicans and sinners” (Matthew 9:11). Which is a word I had to look up, and Lattimore translates that it as “tax collectors and sinners” instead. At any rate, an interesting pairing, especially in today’s political climate that pairs an absolutist anti-tax line with a refusal to examine the benefits that those taxes are bringing us.

Take, for example, health care. Yes, it would be great if we could have the son of God wandering around healing us whenever we get sick. But even two millennia ago that didn’t come close to scaling to meet the actual need, and these days our shortage of healing deities is even more sorely lacking. Fortunately, our health care has improved enormously over the intervening millennia, though (pace The Rational Optimist) I won’t credit government with much of the improvement there. But I will credit government with some of the improvement, and we need a health care system of last resort, one that will look after those who aren’t financially able to pay for their own care; hence, taxes.

Anyways, continuing on: not sure how I feel about the whole bit about Jesus eating instead of fasting, justified with “Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?” (Matthew 9:15): I’m all for moderation in appropriate contexts, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Still, I certainly won’t blame Jesus for wanting to have some food in his stomach, though, especially given what’s going to happen to him.

I also can’t say that I understand the “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment” bit that follows next (Matthew 9:16)—I get the feeling that I should be learning something there, but it doesn’t quite fit into the narrative flow to me. Or maybe I should read those verses as an affront against the virtues of refactoring, or as a caution that it can be taken too far?

A third chapter of moralization, and one of my favorites. It starts off in top form, enough so that I’ll quote all of Matthew 7:1-5 to you:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Words to try to live by, indeed. (And to remind us how badly we fail…) And we have expressions of faith in the goodness of humanity: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” (Matthew 7:9-10) And of caution: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14) And a reminder to judge by deeds, not words: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)

Amen to all of that.

Another chapter of moralizing, and again I have mixed feelings. I like the message about not doing good deeds for the purpose of being seen: but, to me, the message of “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward” (Matthew 6:5) is weakened by the next verse, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:6) Or, in other words, “you’re a hypocrite if you do good stuff to be seen by other people, unless the other people is the one person who can sentence you to eternal hellfire!”

I am probably sounding like a broken record on that regard, though; from now on, I should probably accept that yes, there are a lot of external motivators in here which range from nudges to naked threats. And I don’t have to like that, but it also won’t do me any good to spend time on that at the expense of seeing other bits that I could profit from more.

Like, for example, Matthew 6:24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Though the following verses I’m not so sure about: “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:25-26.) That seems to me to be at tension with the “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” bit that we saw earlier in Matthew 4:7; and, if I’m remembering a Radiolab episode properly, I think that actually birds do gather seeds for winter storage, and some have such fast metabolisms that they wouldn’t be able to survive a single night if they couldn’t remember where they left them. Still, I’ll accept the basic point that you shouldn’t be paralyzed by fear of the future: as the chapter ends, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6:34)

(And now, a temporary break from Bible commentary to our traditional fare of video game related navel gazing!)

So: Ben wrote this thing. Which I feel like responding to, and I can’t very well do that on his blog! Therefore:

1. Yes, we absolutely should experiment more with rhetoric. Forget “we”: I should experiment more with rhetoric.
2. Or rather, we should experiment more with form. But, while I would be happy if some of that formal experimentation took the form of rhetorical experimentation (i.e. using that form for persuasive purposes), I am completely unconvinced that improved persuasion should be a key goal for video game writers right now.
3. In fact, stepping away from persuasion might be a better goal. Yes, an excess of concern with objectivity is a serious problem; to that end, embrace the subjective, present views upon the world without worrying about whether anybody is convinced by them, or indeed about whether they contain an argument either explicit or hidden.
4. But: talks about the effects of changes in sniper rifle reload time are fabulous. Embrace details!
5. The work that Kill Screen is doing is an excellent example of breaking out of our formal ruts, but that doesn’t mean that we should fetishize print. I like books more than your average person (in both readings of that sentence), but there’s so much experimentation that can be done within an online format, not to mention the possibilities that the iPad and video games themselves allow.
6. Also, Kill Screen has a long way to go before their contribution matches that of Michael’s blog.
7. Yes, the fact that video games are played on computers has had an effect; I suspect, however, that video game programmers are less influenced by computer science than most other programmers. And video game bloggers less still.
8. C.f. Richard Bartle’s “Do you like beer? Why aren’t you doing a degree in brewing?” Though perhaps that quote goes against my argument; but his talk was awesome!
9. (Incidentally, my relationship with computer science is a strained one.)
10. My candidates for original sin are reviews (as practiced by large traditional sites) and (the various forms of) preview coverage.
11. I should read Prince of Networks.
12. Not a fan of Indie Gaming Bingo.
13. I like the phrase “there is currently no commenting”.

This is where we really start seeing moral pronouncements laid down. First, a sequence of “Blessed are the X: for they shall Y” lines, where X is generally something that’s good (or, at least, causes your life to be difficult), and where Y is a reward for that. In general, I support the X’s (sometimes more so in Lattimore’s translation than in King James: in particular, contrasting their versions of Matthew 5:5, I have nothing against meekness, but I actively like gentleness.) I have more mixed feelings about the Y’s: sometimes, it’s a simple “it gets better” vibe (Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted”), but sometimes there’s a sort of passive aggressiveness with a real edge to it (the aforementioned Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”).

Then the gloves start to come off: Matthew 5:16 “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven”, and Matthew 5:18-20, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Clearly, God is not messing around: jump when He says jump, or (as we see in Matthew 5:29-30) you’ll be “cast into hell”. And these verses support a narrow moralism that I’m not at all comfortable with: the “break one of these least commandments” bit quoted above, or “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” from Matthew 5:28.

Though even here, there are bits that I wholeheartedly get behind: e.g. Matthew 5:23-24, “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” In other words, while prayer is all well and good, you should get your actual actions in order first.

I actually rather like the bits against swearing, from Matthew 5:33-37: a sense of letting your actions speak for you. And then we come to the whole “turn the other cheek” bit (Matthew 5:38-48, e.g. 5:39 “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”) This is absolutely my favorite part of the moral pronouncements so far, a very strong statement indeed: don’t fight evil with evil, respond instead with compassion. I only wish that God would take Jesus’s advice on that score earlier on in this chapter, instead of threatening everybody with hellfire!

From a philological point of view, I really wonder what’s going on here. The different parts of the chapter seem to me to be in rather different styles and from rather different points of view; maybe I’m just reading my own biases into something that’s not there, but maybe the text is an agglomeration of different points of view.

Repenting your sins is all well and good; I can’t get behind the naked threats in Matthew 3, though. Take Matthew 3:12, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Even if you accept that the chaff in question really have done evil, how does that justify burning them with unquenchable fire? It reminds me of the “lock them up and throw away the key” philosophy that the United States has followed for the last three decades.

Matthew 4 is more to my taste: I particularly like the bit where the devil says to Jesus that God will look after him if he does something stupid, and Jesus’s response is “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (from Matthew 4:7). Even if you believe that you’re the chosen one, that’s no excuse to press your luck, or to abuse that privilege! On its own, I’m not so thrilled with “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (from Matthew 4:10), but in the context of having the Devil asking you to worship him and be rewarded with vast riches and power, it’s a pretty good response. And then there’s Jesus’s going around and healing people right and left; it’s certainly hard to find that as anything other than wholly admirable!

The heros of this section: the three wise men, a.k.a. the three Magi. I enjoyed listening to Amahl and the Night Visitors when I was growing up, glad to see them make their appearance here. (The night visitors, that is, not Amahl.)

Though I feel strangely conflicted about the gifts that they’re bringing. They’re giving riches to the son of God, to one whom they call “King of the Jews”: I don’t blame people for sucking up to the rich and powerful, but I don’t consider doing so to be a sign of good, either. The truth is, though, that Jesus and his family weren’t rich and powerful at this point in the story (at least I assume they weren’t, though I’m not sure what on the text I’m basing that on), and soon after the Magi show up, they have to leave town pronto: doubtless being able to sell the gifts was very useful to that end! So sure, let’s give the Magi the benefit of the doubt, and commend them for supporting those in need without worrying about their motivation in doing so.

And I’ll certainly enthusiastically support the Magi’s decision to not head back to Herod: he really was rich and powerful (and willing to kill to support that), so bully for those who work to foil the plans of the powerful who abuse said power. And, similarly, Herod is evil, boo Herod, to say the least.

Then there’s all the linking of various people’s actions with prior prophesies. If I were to take the most gratuitously ungenerous reading imaginable, I would wonder at the use of “that it might be” in Matthew 2:15, “And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.” (Lattimore takes a similarly deterministic tone.) Is this all some sort of twisted game that God is setting up? I don’t want to emphasize that too strongly, though: it’s just a choice of words in this one sentence, other similar sentences use different words to link the actions with the prophecies (e.g. Matthew 2:17, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,”).

So, while I do get uncomfortable (to put it mildly) at the idea of some God setting up chains of actions that include the massacre of innocent children, I don’t think it’s fair to read these sentences in such a fashion. But it is, perhaps, not quite so unfair for them to serve us as a caution against excessive fatalism, as a warning against what can come from saying that God is in charge and whatever he wants will happen, so we don’t have to worry about our actions ourselves.

And what about my use of that game metaphor in light of my status as a video game player and developer? Accepting for a moment the hypothesis of a God as powerful as the Christian God, he probably would be so different from us as to be almost incommensurable on moral terms. So maybe we should see this all potentially as one big game, a sort of Sim Universe, with this level of death no more of an issue to the player than are the fate of the units that I move around in a game of Civilization. Given my status as human rather than all-powerful divine being, though, I’d rather not go too far down exploring the morality of that point of view; and even if we were to do so, it would give a certain perspective on the moral issues behind such deterministic fatalism. After all, if the history of human civilization is a game, it’s probably not a game without constraints, so it’s probably very difficult indeed to reach a good outcome without some unfortunate events along the way.

The New Testament opens with a genealogy: 42 generations leading from Abraham to Jesus. To which my initial reaction was a bit of bemused snark: I thought the whole point was that Jesus was the son of God, so why recite that list? But I actually felt a little bad after thinking that, because the text immediately launches into a discussion of Jesus’s parentage, in the context of Joseph’s reaction. Which is a very personal issue, enough to make me feel abashed about the whole idea of blogging about anything having to do with morality: what do you do when your wife is pregnant, and you know it’s not your kid?

His initial reaction is Matthew 1:19: “Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.” I wish I knew quite what the ramifications of “put her away” are (which, incidentally, is the same phrase that Lattimore uses, though the rest of that verse reads a bit differently), but I’m willing to accept that Joseph is being a decent guy about a sticky situation. And then he has a dream where an angel tells him what’s really going on, and he’s happy to get with the program.

What I like about this is what it says about the meaning of family. I can only imagine the thoughts that would go through your mind if you learn that your wife is pregnant with somebody else’s kid; and I wouldn’t for a moment blame people for having any of a wide range of reactions to that. But if you end up deciding that the marriage is important, then yes, the child is very much a part of that marriage and will be very much your child, and the facts of the biological parentage have nothing to do with that, any more than they do in, say, a case of adoption. So actually leading off with that family lineage is a pretty awesome statement about what family is, and I was kind of being an asshole by thinking snarky thoughts in response to seeing that lineage. (Score: Bible 1, David 0!)

What I don’t like about this chapter: we don’t see anything about Mary, or indeed about women in general (the family lineage at the start is all men). For this verse, at least, women are just vessels, men are what’s important.

(A side note: when writing the first paragraph, I wasn’t sure whether to write ‘god’ or ‘God’, probably as a reflexive atheist reaction against the whole concept. But I’m going with the latter: among other reasons, in this context I’m happy to treat it as a proper name, and we capitalize those.)

I’ve decided to start a series of blog posts where I read through the gospels (i.e. the first four books of the New Testament of the Christian Bible), with an eye towards trying to figure out what I think of the morality therein. To be completely honest, I have very little idea why I’m doing this; it’s an idea that’s been floating around in the back of my head for a couple of years now, and my brain seems to have decided that now is the time for it to go into practice. (The fact that it’s Christmas is sheer coincidence.) I apologize to those of you who are here for video game or programming material and aren’t interested in this; the project will, for better or for worse, probably lead to a fair number of posts, but they’ll stop soon enough, and they’ll all be clearly labeled in the subject.

Some background that may (or may not!) help explain the doubtless curious approach that I take here: I’m an atheist, and my parents didn’t go to church when I was growing up, either. And I grew up in a college town; many of my friends were Christian, but many weren’t, and in general I don’t remember religion as being a big theme. I actually have a bunch of books on various religious topics lying around the house, but relatively few of them are Christian: there are a lot more books on Buddhism (I even took a couple of years of Pali courses in college) and Taoism than on Christianity. The flip side, of course, is that I live in a country where Christians are dominant, so I can’t avoid picking up some amount through osmosis. (And some more through reading, of course.) Still, my ignorance on this subject is vast; I apologize in advance to Christians reading this who feel that I am mischaracterizing the Bible, as I surely will frequently do.

I’m mostly reading Richmond Lattimore’s translation, though when I quote here I’ll generally grab the King James version for familiarity.

Earlier this evening, I wanted to dust off some JavaScript code I’d written a little while ago. The editor I’d used while writing it initially was TextMate, which I’d liked okay but not enough to convince me that it was worth spending fifty bucks on once the trial period expired. So I opened up the code in Emacs, and started reading around in it.

And then I started making changes, at which point I hit the tab key, and Emacs indented the line by four spaces. The problem is, the file used two spaces for tabs. But I’ve done this enough times, surely I can quickly figure out how to configure this? Let’s see: C-h tab-width looks promising, but it has the value 8, so surely it isn’t relevant. The first answer while googling mentions c-basic-offset, which sounds just dubious enough (that c- prefix) to be right; but its value, rather than being a number, is “set-from-style”.

At this point, I have a few options. I can set c-basic-offset to a number, to see if that works, and then figure out the appropriate mode hook to do that for me. I can figure out what set-from-style means, to do it right. I can do more googling, to find a better answer.

But, I think, the best answer is: realize that I have better things to do with my life than to put up with that sort of user interface crap. (Or with the absolute joke that is Emacs’s “Preferences” menu item.)

(Another charming instance of Emacs’s user interface: on a lark, I thought I might as well go through the motions of looking through menus, though I’d be shocked if anything relevant was found there. And, of course, I didn’t find anything relevant; but what I did discover was that one of the menu options was “Read Mail (with RMAIL).” How many people in the entire freaking world are using RMAIL? Is there even one such person? I read my e-mail in Emacs for a very long time, but even I moved off of RMAIL more than a decade before I gave up on reading e-mail in Emacs.)

So, I guess, that’s the reason why I’ll buy TextMate: because I want an editor that doesn’t have an actively hostile UI (and no, don’t suggest vi, its UI is at least as hostile), that can be used for programming, and that isn’t as super-bloated as IntelliJ or NetBeans or Eclipse or whatever. (Admittedly, I haven’t used NetBeans and Eclipse much, so maybe I’m mischaracterizing them. But I doubt it.) $50 still seems like a ridiculous price to pay for it, and I’m worried by its apparently stalled development, but it has enough supporters that maybe it has virtues that I’m missing? If anybody has other editor suggestions, though, I’m all ears.

It’s been a little more than a year since I joined Playdom, so I figured I should collect my thoughts about how it’s gone so far and get ideas about what I might want my next year to look like. Looking back, it’s kind of amazing how many different things I’ve done over that last year; it’s certainly been a lot of fun!

Things I’ve liked:

• Great teammates: I’ve been on two teams here, and quite enjoyed being a part of both groups.
• Having what I do make a difference in somebody else’s life in a matter of days or even hours; a huge change from my last job.
• Being able to talk to people on the business side about what I’m doing, showing them the current state and asking for (and responding to!) feedback.
• Learning technologies I wasn’t previously familiar with: JavaScript, a bit of ActionScript, a bit of Hadoop. And getting a chance to put a CSS Zen approach to concrete use, too.
• Tools supporting agile programming: getting to use an IDE with refactoring support; using a mocking framework.
• Brushing up on Java isn’t a bad idea, though not inherently exciting; at least it helps reduce my risk of being pigeonholed as a C++ guy.
• Doing front-end work; I love getting to work with what our artists create.
• Being a programmer instead of a manager.
• Working with games; getting back to playing board games regularly.
• Deepening my appreciation of testing by looking at business metrics.
• Getting experience with growing a successful product.

I could probably write one or more blog posts about each of those; lots of great experiences, in retrospect it’s a bit hard to believe all that happened over one year! But that’s last year, what do I want out of next year?

More exposure to new technologies would be nice, though I imagine the rate there will slow down. Still, there are some possibilities: I imagine I’ll get more familiar with ActionScript, I might get exposed to Lua. (And I might get more exposed to PHP, though I can’t say that I’m excited about that.) Might get to learn more about data scaling ideas, too.

Helping add significant new features to an existing game has been rather interesting, and I’m glad I did it. On the flip side, though, I’d like to work on a new game at some point, to get a better feel for the tradeoffs that are relevant there.

And then there are teams and roles. I’d been a manager on a team where we had some agile theory but had a hard time putting it into practice, especially on the business side. It’s been nice being a non-manager, and having a much tighter turnaround for the customers and customer proxies.

Ideally, I’d like to be on a team merging some of my previous experience with the virtues of my recent experience. Adding a bit more agile theory (and lean theory) to what we’re doing at Playdom would help, I think, but not at the cost of losing the virtues of our current approach. And the more the team (broadly conceived, of course, not just the programmers) works as empowered individuals evolving a common creative vision, the better. (I don’t want to be a manager, but I don’t want to be told what to do by a manager, either!)

Good times past; looking forward to good times future.

When I play a puzzle game (or do puzzles on paper), my goal isn’t to find solutions to the puzzles: my goal is to prove that there is a unique solution to the puzzle, with the production of that unique solution a side effect of that proof. This approach is so deeply ingrained into my approach to puzzles that I’d never really considered whether or not other people treat them the same way; thinking about it a bit more, I’m now assuming that I’m a bit of a freak in this regard, but I’m curious how y’all approach puzzles. (It wouldn’t surprise me if y’all were freaks, too, admittedly.)

The reason why I’m bringing this up is that Piczle Lines forced me to think about what I meant by uniqueness. The game has you connecting numbers with paths of the same length: for example, if you have two 9’s, then you connect them with a path of length 9. Also, each number has a color, and you can only connect numbers with the same color. Given that, the strongest form of uniqueness would be that there is a unique set of legal paths connecting the numbers.

That turns out to be too strong, though. Say that you’ve got a 3×3 square with 9s in the upper left and lower right. Then you can fill that square with paths going up and down or paths going right and left; and, it turns out, choices like that show up all the time in Piczle Lines puzzles. While it’s possible to come up with puzzles that have a unique solution under this definition I also suspect that such a constraint would be excessively limiting.

I was going to say that the puzzles working under such a constraint would be too easy, but, actually, Numberlink does have that constraint, and my memory is that Numberlink puzzles are plenty difficult. (Incidentally, don’t be misled by the use of numbers in that puzzle, they have a completely different meaning than the numbers in Piczle Lines, but both puzzle types share other core concepts.) Still, it’s a constraint that I don’t think is inherently beneficial; I certainly enjoyed Piczle Lines more than Numberlink, though I’m now planning to revisit the Numberlink book I have.

But it’s not the only possible definition of a unique solution. The next level of uniqueness would be that there’s a unique way of pairing up the numbers, and that the regions traced out by the paths is unique. (So, returning to the example above, that those numbers would always be linked through a path tracing out the same 3×3 square.) This also turns out not to be the solution that Piczle Lines chose: fairly frequently, you’d find a decent-sized region with two pairs of numbers that could divide up a given chunk of space in multiple ways. Again, you could probably design puzzles using this form of uniqueness (though I don’t have a good feel for how that would turn out), but it’s not what we see here.

The weakest form of uniqueness uses the colors. Piczle Lines puzzles aren’t abstract puzzles, they’re drawing a picture, so maybe all solutions to the puzzle end up drawing the same color regions? For a while, I thought that this was what the game meant by uniqueness, because most of the puzzles do have a unique solution in this regard, but eventually I ran across a puzzle where you could trace out one region of the border between colors in two different ways. Still, such examples were relatively rare, and my tentative opinion is that they’re a bug: if the idea behind the puzzle is that we’re trying to make a picture, then puzzles should pin down the picture that they’re making.

My confusion about what uniqueness meant in the context of the puzzle solutions was mirrored by confusion about tactics to use. One of the quirks of the puzzles is that it was possible to leave squares blank: most puzzles filled up the entire board, but not all of them. This has an effect on how you can reason: if a corner square is filled up, for example, then there’s only one way for a line to enter and leave the corner, but what if the corner is blank?

The interesting thing about this (at least if you share my psychological peculiarities) is that you can calculate from the outset whether or not there are any blank spaces: you have enough information from the numbers alone to determine the total area traced out by the paths in the puzzle, and you can compare that area to the size of the area you have to play with. Or at least you could, if you really wanted to: it would be a pain, though. What I ended up doing was having faith that, most of the time, the puzzles would fill out the entire space, and that, the rest of the time, the blank areas would be fairly obvious, instead of isolated squares here and there. Which proved to be true, and if a puzzle did have white space, it generally came in large clumps whose borders were fairly clearly marked. (Frequently in large part by straight lines, where uniqueness is obvious.)

This same sort of calculation was also theoretically possible for smaller areas of the puzzle: perhaps there would be an area of the puzzle where you had filled out all of the boundary except for one area. Then, by calculating, you could at least figure out how much the boundary in that area extended into the surrounding region (or, conversely, how much the surrounding region pushed back into the area in question); sometimes, that knowledge alone was enough to uniquely determine where that boundary was located.

What makes this last sort of example different is that adding up the numbers inside to calculate how the boundary was shaped really could be useful. (In contrast to the whole-puzzle situation, where it’s confirming something you were almost positive was the case anyways.) I didn’t actually go to the trouble of carrying out the calculation (or at least I rarely did), but it added some real pacing to the structure of solving the puzzle: I’d get nervous if I had a large area and then would feel relieved when I got to where I understood exactly where the boundary to that region had to go.

So, in two different ways, the game managed to present me with a fair amount of uncertainty (what uniqueness meant, what the results of adding up the numbers in a region of the puzzle would be) in a way that still had some scaffolding for my desire for proof to cling to (my hypotheses of uniqueness, how I would use the result of adding if I were to carry out the exercise). And at least partly because of this, the game did quite a bit towards allowing me to push towards solutions that I couldn’t prove were unique. I’d trace out lines that seemed to make sense (but not connecting them all the way, to give me a reminder that I hadn’t proved their validity); and, once I got to a choke point for a region and could prove that the boundary had to look a certain way, being able to connect a half-dozen of uncertain lines at once felt great!

Mind you, I still spent a lot of time just staring at puzzles, not tracing out anything, looking for something that I could prove was true. Liesl noticed me playing it constantly, started playing it herself, and got just as hooked as I was, and the contrast between our styles is quite striking. She traces out lines that make sense, runs into situations where something has gone wrong, and fiddles with them until everything fits properly. So the result is that she spends a lot more time actually putting stuff on the screen than I do, spends a lot more time backtracking, and ends up getting to a solution at about the same speed as I do. (She is a rather experienced puzzle solver; incidentally, Miranda has also been known to pick up the game, it’s a good thing that we have multiple devices in the house that are capable of playing it!)

The business model for the game is a free initial download with subsequent downloadable puzzle packs available for purchase; and, in fact, one of the download packs is free. (They’ve since released another free one.) And the download packs are very cheap: you can get quick a lot of puzzles for a buck.

Also, not all puzzles are created equal: in particular, some of them fit into a story mode. Which I found surprisingly effective, despite its extremely threadbare nature (or, perhaps, not so surprising, given my “video games plots as musicals” ideas). In particular, once, I’d gone through the first chapter of story mode, and found that could buy the entire rest of the story mode (containing another hundred puzzles!) for the princely sum of ninety-nine cents, there was no question that I was going to buy it. (I’m not at all surprised that story mode was, by far, the most downloaded content pack. And yay for developers who share blog about their experiences, see here and here as well.)

And, once I’d finished those, I’d gotten more than enough pleasure out of the game to immediately buy the rest of the DLC. Who knows what the right set of price points is for this sort of content (and, if the developers are reading, I’d be happy to buy more DLC, especially if it consisted of large puzzles!), but it makes me happy that a free product that narrative hooks, free DLC to get you started, and a crystal-clear value proposition (the hardest puzzles would easily take me a half-hour or more to solve while costing just over one cent each) can lead to a good conversion rate. I just hope that the total sales are enough to keep them going!

Here’s a summary of what I’ve done in Dragon Age so far. Note: when I say “city” or “dungeon” in the following, I don’t mean a literal city or dungeon, but rather a relatively free-form inhabited area (with other traditional associated trappings, e.g. shopping) versus a relatively linear combat-focused area.

• I decided to play as a female elf mage, so I went through the mage opening story. Which started off with a quite small dungeon, then had some city exploration, a micro side-storyish dungeon, and finally ended with another (more normal size for a start of a game) dungeon. (Which, incidentally, had me feeling a lot more conflicted than almost any other quest in recent memory, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
• Then on to the first area. Again, some city exploration, a dungeon, a brief interlude, and another dungeon.
• At this point, the plot opened up, and I apparently had a choice of four tasks ahead of me. One of which seemed like it should be done last, but I wasn’t so sure about the other three. I didn’t have a choice, yet, though: the next area was chosen for me. Which had city exploration, but the only dungeon was a micro side-story dungeon. That exploration did serve to push me along one of the possible four tasks (pushing a layer onto its stack of intrigue), so I went in that direction next. And was, incidentally, quite happy with the pacing at this point: the cities had been interesting, the dungeons hadn’t overstayed their welcome.
• A city, where I got a third layer pushed onto that task’s stack of intrigue. This was followed by a battle that’s longer than normal but not intricate enough to qualify as a dungeon, and then a real dungeon, with a bit of a twist at the end. (And a reappearance of the same conflicting feelings from the first dungeon.) Which was where I started to wonder a bit: my tentative hypothesis had been that the new layer here was a twist on the layer I’d heard about in the previous location, but no, it’s a separate problem. So the result is that I’ve popped the new layer of intrigue back off the stack, but the intrigue level is still where it was when I entered the city. (In other words, I hadn’t actually made any progress at all!)
• But I did have a next direction to go in. Which wasn’t a place I would have gone to otherwise at this point, but it was an interesting enough city to be in. Relatively rich in side quests, so I did one sequence of micro-dungeons (that, I suppose, added up to a smallish dungeon), plus another dungeon. (And accumulated lots of other side quests; this game likes throwing side quests at you, but they seem quite small on average.) I didn’t get any closer to resolving the quest that I was in the middle of, but did get told the next place to go.
• So I went there. Which was a micro-city, existing only to front a dungeon. Which I entered, and made it through the ruined temple. But the item I’m looking for wasn’t at the end of the ruined temple: instead, there were caverns. So I went into them (through one of two routes, thinking that surely I’ll come back soon along the other route?), wandered for quite a bit, and by now had slaughtered four or five times the number of people that apparently lived in the micro-city outside the dungeon. Finally, I made it to an opponent whom I talk to before killing. But even this isn’t where the item is: instead, there’s a passage out to the mountaintop. Which is, admittedly, a reasonably suitable location for a major plot item, so surely it will be waiting for me there, possibly after another boss battle? Well, no: there was a dragon there, but no item. I tried (and failed) to fight the dragon once, it seemed quite tough (probably significantly tougher than anything I’d seen so far), but also optional. Whether or not I fight the dragon, I’ll have to go into the next area, which I discovered upon stepping into it was called “The Gauntlet”: apparently neither the lengthy dungeon leading up to this nor the quite difficult dragon qualified as a gauntlet, I have something even more, um, enjoyable waiting for me?

That’s where I am so far. I’ve done something like eight dungeons worth of content, six of which are on the main plot line. I may be close to finishing the first major non-introductory quest but, well, I’ve thought that before, and I’ve been wrong. I may be close to finishing this dungeon but, well, I’ve thought that before, and I’ve been wrong. I started playing yesterday when Miranda started getting ready for bed, I gave up for the night at least half an hour later than was wise given when my alarm clock was going to wake me up the next day. (In retrospect, of course, I should have stopped earlier, but nobody wants to stop playing in the middle of a dungeon, and surely the game wouldn’t make me slog through another half hour of this stuff, would it?)

The game has a limited inventory system, and despite my buying every backpack that was for sale, I’ve had to throw away decent-sized chunks of my inventory on three separate occasions in this one dungeon alone. The game is being generous enough with money that I don’t feel like my progress is being actively hindered by losing that potential item sale income, but it does manage to take any joy I would have out of accumulating items in the dungeon. (I haven’t quite gotten to where I head the other direction when I see a chest, but I’m pretty close.)

I still have three major plot quests ahead of me; maybe this one is unusual, but I don’t yet have any reason to believe that is the case. And, for that matter, I don’t have reason to believe that further quests won’t pop up: indeed, it seems quite likely that there will be an endgame segment that I don’t know about, though one of the quests I do know about has the vague potential of being the endgame segment. So I think the best case estimate is that I’m a third of the way through the game, but being only a fourth of the way through the game is probably more likely, and even that could easily be optimistic.

I’m sure there are people for whom this sort of pacing is wonderful. Right now, though, the game’s main accomplishment (despite its considerable virtues in other areas) is making me grateful for another one of BioWare’s teams: Mass Effect 2 was designed to be playable in chunks that are an hour long or even shorter, and that was a much better fit for me. In fact, to my surprise, I’m wishing that Dragon Age were more like Persona 3: that game rather overstayed its welcome, and had a fair bit of padding right from the very beginning, but its rhythm was admirably consistent. I wasn’t always excited about the dungeon crawling, but I knew how long each dungeon crawling segment was going to take; the plot progression was somewhat roundabout, but was roundabout in a known fashion; and while I played it for longer in total than I would have preferred, after the first couple of sessions I never had to worry about whether or not I’d be able to save the game at a good stopping point by the time I wanted to go to bed.

Quite an accomplishment, really: it’s a rare game that can make me look fondly back at JRPG pacing.