Hey all -- I've had several requests over the last few months to provide full-text RSS feeds! I was too lazy until now to do it, but I think I've got 'em set up.

I say think because I'm not sure I've set them up correctly for full text. Let me know in the comments below if I've done it right!

We now return you to your regular programming.

I've written in the past about the "Uncanny Valley" -- the phenomenon that as computer graphics become more and more lifelike, the characters they create look more and more ghoulish. The problem, as I wrote in Slate last year, is that we humans are good at anthropomorphizing very crudely-drawn figures, such as Charlie Brown or Calvin and Hobbes. We fill in the details and find them cute and cuddly. But when a graphical representation of a human becomes so close to reality that it's 99% perfect, our attention shifts -- and we suddenly start noticing the 1% that isn't right. Usually it's something wrong with the face: The eyes look dead, the skin doesn't move correctly. The characters start looking, quite inadvertantly, like zombies. I sometimes wonder whether computer games and animators will ever get past this hump; maybe we'll always find nearly-realistic human animations freaky-looking.

Ah, but maybe there's a much, much weirder solution waiting in the wings. What if people -- real people, in real life -- stop looking fully realistic, and start looking almost-not-quite-real?

This is the incredibly interesting idea put forward in a new essay by Robert Fabricant, a creative director at Frog Design. He points out that the rise of plastic surgery is producing a new wave of people who look just as surreal as our computerized avatars. As he writes:

It is ironic that, as we perfect the algorithms for simulating facial expressions in 3D software, we are embracing cosmetic treatments that reduce the fidelity and individuality of our own facial expressions. Over the last few years there has been a 20-50% annual increase in the number of minimally-invasive cosmetic procedures (depending on the procedure). And there has been an utter acceptance and celebration of cosmetic surgery in the media with shows like Fox's "The Swan" and ABC's "Extreme Makeover." It is easy to imagine a point in the future when these two trends converge and we all look like Angelina Jolie -- errr, Lara Croft.

That chart above is from Fabricant's essay, and wittily illustrates the merging of these two trends. He also points out lots of other weird mergings of digital and real-life aesthetics, including the Xbox game Yourself!Fitness, in which a hot virtual chick enjoins you to develop a body as perfectly sculpted as hers.

(Thanks to Michele Tepper for this one!)

Dig this: A space station inside the online, multiplayer game Project Entropia has just been sold for $100,000. The buyer was Jon Jacobs, a very popular in-game figured known as "Neverdie". Why spend so much on a piece of virtual property? Because it's just like owning the Mall of America -- it's a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.

From Project Entropia's web site, here's a description of the space station:

Designed as a Pleasure Paradise, the Resort built on an Asteroid is a monumental project aimed at being a primary destination for Entertainment in the known Virtual Universe.

Boasting a 1000 Apartment complex, Commercial Space Ship Docking, Themed Shopping Mall, Mega Stadium for championship sporting events, Nightclub with multiple Dance floors, Live Amphitheater, lounges, and 10 Hunting Biodomes with individual land management facilities which will enable the creative owner to create Rare, Unique and Exotic creatures. Mining and PVP areas are available. In addition the Resort will feature Owner Operated PA System for Streaming Music and Video to biodomes and screens/billboards strategically placed throughout the space resort and for a fee even a Planet side Video Billboard Network located in all major towns and cities can be accessed for marketing.

No teleporter available at the resort, travel to and from the resort only by Space ships.

Gotta love that last detail. As readers of this blog know, I've long been intrigued by in-game economics, and wrote a huge piece about this last year for The Walrus -- it's online here if you want to read it.

(By the way, that picture above is not of the space station -- I couldn't find any images of it online. That's just a random in-game shot.)

(Thanks to Morgan for this one!)

In the last week, the Blue Angels -- a team of Navy performance pilots -- have been zooming across the skies over San Francisco. The blogger Nivi decided he was going to pull out his digital camera and take some pictures of them for his friend Christa Favot.

But then he realized ... hmmm, there were probably already oodles of such pictures already posted to Flickr. He checked and, sure enough, users had put up dozens of superb, magazine-quality shots.

This led Nivi to posit a funny new meme: LazyPhoto. If you've ever heard of the LazyWeb concept, it is, as Wikipedia describes it:

The idea if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had... (or already has!) Alternately, that if your blog or other publishing outlet has enough readers, a reader will know and provide the answer to a question you are too lazy to research yourself.

Nivi defines LazyPhoto as:

The idea that you don't need to take photographs anymore because someone will take the picture for you and put it on flickr.

I love it. I've often suspected that Flickr could easily morph into a photo-database that puts Corbis -- and other commercial photo-providing services -- to shame. After all, the whole reason commercial photo-provisioning services exist is that photography has traditionally been a highly skilled trade. But digital cameras are rapidly deskilling it, the way that Microsoft Word deskilled word-processing (a "profession" back in the early 80s that people took college-level courses to master), and the way that audio apps like GarageBand are deskilling music production. Since Flickr, which has no barriers to entry, is thus growing many times faster than Corbis is, what would happen if Yahoo made it possible for people to sell the rights to their digital photos for a cheap micropayment? You'd have an enormous, sprawling database of cheap photos of virtually anything on earth. (Indeed, many Flickr users already allow liberal use of their photos under Creative Commons licenses.)

You could even pursue a Google Answers mode: Post a request for a particular type of photo, and buy rights to the best first one taken and posted to Flickr. Of course, this model would be open to all manner of abuse and unintended consequences. But the fact remains, as Nivi pointed out, that Flickr's growth changes the stakes of modern picture-taking: If you can think of it, it's probably already been photographed.

(Thanks to Nivi for this one!)

There's nothing worse than getting the wobbly table at a coffeehouse and spilling a drink all over your lap. (Okay, okay, realistically, there are quite a lot of things worse than that. The rhetorical trick of saying "there's nothing worse than ..." is, when you think about, incredibly stupid because it implies you've done a comparative assessment of all possible bad things that could happen in life and selected the most genuinely ghastly, gruesome experience. But hey: As rhetorical tricks go, this one's a classic! I'm sticking with it.)

Anyway. The point is, when you get stuck with a wobbly table, is there any way to un-wobble-ify it? Most people attempt to stick a matchbook or piece of napkin underneath the leg. But André Martin, a physicist at CERN, would use a different trick: He'd rotate the table, working under the assumption that the legs were all the same length and that ground would eventually yield up four areas at the same level -- producing a perfectly stable table. He's always able to find a good orientation. That got him wondering: Could he mathematically prove his technique will always work?

Thus was born "On The Stability of Four Feet Tables" (PDF link), Martin's recent paper arguing the proof indeed exists: Rotate a round table for long enough and you will inevitably produce stability. Mind you, Martin makes several assumptions that may dice out your particular coffeehouse: The table must be round, its legs all perfectly even, and while the ground has any number of bumps, the inclination between any two points must never be more than 15%. As a story at news@Nature points out:

Whether it will help during the coffee breaks at CERN is another matter: the ground there might be too irregular. "The trouble with the terrace is that there is both grass and paving slabs," Martin says.

The bigger problem is that, in my experience, the problem with wobbly tables is not that the ground is uneven, but the legs are uneven. Would Martin's proof obtain for a table with uneven legs? Assuming the legs are off by a gradation of no more than 15%, would the bumps in the floor be able to compensate for the legs? And more to the point, would the damn coffeehouse owner go out and like, buy some damn tables with even legs? And while you're at it, pal, turn off the Bob Dylan. There's only so much Dylan anyone can take.

(Thanks to Steve Emrich for this one!)

Wired News has just published my latest gaming column, and this one is about the curious arc of video-game addiction: The way you become totally obsessed with a game, can't stop thinking about it, and then one day it's just gone. The column is online permanently here at Wired News, and an archived copy is below:

The End of the Affair
An obsession with a game always ends suddenly. Why?
by Clive Thompson

My addictions always run the same course.

One day a few weeks ago, I picked up Burnout: Revenge -- the superb new car-racing and -smashing game -- and within an hour I was hooked. I abandoned all work, blew my writing deadlines and ignored my wife. The few moments when I could pry myself from the console, I'd fantasize about when I could return. It seemed like I'd never be able to stop, and indeed, like any addict, I didn't want to.

Until suddenly, after two weeks of monomaniacal play, everything ended.

I finished a three-hour binge of racing, clicked off my Playstation 2, and ... it was over. My compulsion had vanished. I still enjoyed the game, and had plenty more challenges to complete. But I didn't need to play it any more. For some mysterious reason, Burnout had suddenly released me from its talons.

This is one of the abiding mysteries of games: Why do they let us go so suddenly? Every gamer I know describes the same abrupt drop-off, totally unexpected, arriving after hours or even weeks of feverish play. It is like a curious, unintentional form of cold turkey. You wake up one day fully expecting to spend another four hours in an eye-glazed stupor, only to discover that the thrill is gone.

Now, I'm not describing the "end" that comes when you complete a narrative game. In that case, it's obvious why you'd stop playing. I'm speaking of the open-ended addictions -- including online worlds, puzzle games, sports titles or Xbox live play -- where you theoretically ought to be able to play ad infinitum.

I called several of my hard-core gamer associates to see what they think. Jonathan Hayes, a forensic pathologist in New York, regularly falls hard for gorgeous-world games like Ico, and recently he was swallowed whole by Resident Evil 4. He thinks the reason he stops playing a game is that he's unwrapped every skin on its onion.

"You kind of see through the game to its underlying mechanics," Hayes says, "and it suddenly seems no longer worth the investment of time." This is much like what Raph Koster argues in his Theory of Fun: We humans seek constant novelty, so only gameplay that has nearly infinite permutations -- like chess -- can hold our attention forever.

And not many games rise to the complexity of chess. Indeed, one of the reasons it's hard to get there is that there's a paradox built into success. The better a game, the longer we play it -- and the longer we play it, the more likely we are to notice tiny, subtle flaws in the game design. "For a while, with a really amazing new game, it's all you do, all you think about," says Luke Smith, who writes for the game blog Kotaku and recently has spent weeks fanatically rolling a level-60 character in World of Warcraft. "But then it's balance issues, buggy play, poor online optimization. You keep trying to 'make it work,' and it won't."

Perhaps a game "ends" because teensy frustrations build up like plaque in our brains -- until one day we suddenly rebel, and our attention shifts. In fact, this might be part of the reason I finally ended my servitude to Burnout. I hit upon a class of vehicles that I couldn't perfectly control, and the joyful sense of mastery -- the cybernetic loop that made me one with the machine -- was suddenly tainted.

Though it's also true that our addictions aren't always, or even chiefly, about the games. Sometimes the forces that drive us into the arms of a game -- and then release us from its grip -- are in ourselves. Greg Sewell, a friend of mine, has been swept up by everything from Quake to "casual games" like Blix and Collapse; he thinks his periods of addiction are driven as much by the high quality of the games as by the occasionally crappy quality of his life. His peak gaming moments occurred as a way of avoiding his thoroughly cipher-like dot-com jobs.

"For me, the obsession is sometimes a coping mechanism -- with a job that is boring, or some other life rut. And the obsession seems to end when the boredom ends or the situation I'm avoiding sorts itself out," he says. He compares it to the emotional curve of a breakup. You pick an album that seems to embody your woe -- then play it over and over and over. When the hurtin' ends, the album instantly goes into the dustbin.

Indeed, top-40 hits are the only pieces of pop culture that behave like games. They flare brilliantly, demanding incessant and constant replay -- until one day when we suddenly can't abide them. Virtually no other forms of entertainment suffer this same drastic drop-off. When we fall out of love with TV shows and comic books and favorite writers, our attraction peters out. (I faithfully watched Alias for three seasons, and then slowly drifted away as the fourth season's scripts got progressively duller.)

Conservative pundits have long fretted over the addictive quality of games, of course. But maybe the psychological curve of addiction is the ultimate tribute to the medium. They're a form of culture so intense and delightful that we only have two options -- delve in wholeheartedly, or walk away.

Many people have heard of the famous "six degrees" experiment, in which psychologist Stanley Milgram asked individuals in Boston and Omaha, Neb., were asked to deliver a letter to a target stranger in Boston, using only a chain of acquaintances: You'd pass the letter to someone who might be closer to the target, and they'd pass it on, and so on. Milgram discovered that on average, it took roughly six links to get the letters to their destination.

A cool finding, indeed. But got network scientists wondering: Is there an algorithm that could scan a network and automatically deduce the fastest possible route for a message? If you had, like, 4,000 nodes all loosely and chaotically joined, could one algorithm grok the speediest way to get from any point A to any other point B?

It sounds pretty abstract, but this science has a lot of practical applications. Wifi "mesh" networks, for example -- which I wrote about last month -- could work much more quickly and efficiently if the mesh "knew" the fastest route for a message to travel. And it might be possible to stop computer viruses and worms in their tracks if one could automatically intuit the fastest route between computers online. So for years, scientists have developed various solutions that map out networks, with varying degrees of success.

Now two researchers at the University of Amherst have published what appears to be the best algorithm yet -- and it's based on human psychology. As they note, our connections in society aren't random; we tend to know people based on shared charcteristics: Dentists know other dentists, Upper East Siders in Manhattan know other Upper East Siders, sixth graders know sixth graders. And then they point out the observation that Malcolm Gladwell made famous in The Tipping Point: That certain rare people seem to have a lot more connections than other people -- "superconnectors", as Gladwell calls them. So, as a press release on the research notes ...

This "degree disparity" leads to some individuals acting as hubs.

Taking these factors into account simultaneously results in a searching algorithm that gets messages to the target by passing it to gregarious individuals who are most like the target.

They called their new algorithm "expected-value navigation", or EVN. When they tested it against several pre-existing, popular algorithms, it worked better -- producing shorter, more efficient pathways. (It's the top one in the chart above, which is taken from their PDF paper on the subject.)

Here's the interesting thing, though. Ever since Gladwell's book, people have assumed that "superconnectors" are crucial to the transmission of messages and information through society. As Gladwell argued, if it weren't for those ultrapopular, massively gregarious people, memes wouldn't spread as quickly through mass culture; indeed, hunting down and targetting the ultracool, early-adopting superconnectors of the teen-and-youth world has been the holy grail of marketers for years now. And this study would seem to affirm that superconnectors are the glue that holds social networks together.

But other research suggests they really aren't so crucial. Duncan Watts, another famous network researcher, has spent years replicating the "six degrees" study by using email -- which allows him to carefully study the role of each node in message propagation. His conclusion? Superconnectors may well exist -- but they don't matter. Messages travel through society in a surprisingly democratic fashion, relying most often on "weak" and "intermediate" nodes instead of superconnected ones.

Curious, eh?

(Thanks to Robots.net for this one!)

One of my favorite parts of early, monster-infested first-person shooters was the names they'd give to the levels. Every time I reached a new level in Quake -- "Dimension of the Doomed", "House of Chthon", "The Ebon Fortress" -- I would quiver with laughter at the I'm-being-ironic-well-maybe-I'm-not aesthetic of John Romero.

Thus, I was thrilled to discover the "First-Person Shooter Level Name Generator". Pick the style of your imaginary level -- "military", "gothic", "alien", "industrial", etc. -- the various other vectors (such as whether it's characterized by "slime" or "fire", or whether it contains "Satanic words" or "Lovecraftian words"), and presto: It churns out a stylin' level name. I quickly generated such delights as ...

Entering Azathoth's Sepulchral Corridors
Zeus' Forbidden Zone
In Yog-Sothoth's Citadel of Hate
Crumbling Keep of Torment
Cathedral of Sickening Ruin

You could probably use this thing to generate the name for your next corporate project.

My dad forced me to learn how to golf when I was kid -- partly, I think, because he thought it would endow me with a crucial business skill. He worked in the stainless-steel industry, and I suspect more than one deal was consummated over martinis at the 19th hole. Anyway, I spent years trudging around golf courses and gradually learning a respect for this lovely, elegant, and quintessentially insane game. I also discovered that golfers are enormous gearheads, continually obsessed with improving their game via nanoengineered golf-club materials and pseudorandom ball-dimpling reverse-engineered from declassified US military spy-plane technology. This, ultimately, was the final lesson in life that I learned from golf: Everyone loves to work hard at improving their game -- but what they love even more is finding a quick cheat that improves their game without requiring any, y'know, work.

All of which brings me to the subject of this blog post: The epoch-3 -- the first bold new re-engineering of the humble golf tee. The inventors explain their innovation on their web site, in prose that wouldn't be out of place in The Onion ...

You're standing on the first tee. You unsheathe your new $400 driver, engineered with the finest aerospace and structural technology. Then you carefully place the most expensive and technologically sophisticated golf ball ever designed atop its launch pad ... a crude wooden spike.

Truth is, there has been no significant performance improvement to the wood golf tee since its commercial introduction in the 1920's. Its surface imperfections and grain irregularities result in deflection and structural failure at impact, making it an inferior launch platform for modern golf equipment. Environmentally it's equally archaic, damaging expensive mowing equipment and introducing harmful fungal diseases into the delicate tee box ecosystem. And still there are those who would ask, "Why change the golf tee?" At Evolve Golf we realized it was time someone stopped asking, "Why?" and started asking, "Why not?"

Dare to dream; dare to dream. Anyway, the upshot is that these dudes did some interesting analysis of the physics of how tees interact with golf balls. They concluded that the traditional tee -- which touches the ball in a full circle -- produces undesirable deflections. The epoch-3, in contrast, touches the ball only in four places, for a smaller contact area. The result, they claim, is that the epoch-3 improves carrying distance by 1.81 yards, increases launch speed by 0.59 mph, and reduces side spin by 51.67 rpm.

It almost makes me want to grab my clubs, pack my briefcase bar, and hit the links.

(Thanks to The Book of Joe for this one!)

So, this Japanese company called Babot has made a new advance in the oft-neglected field of balloon technology. Their concept is intriguing: By putting extra flaps of skin in joints on the balloon, and using computer-controlled gusts to change the pressure inside, you can make it move. The description from Babot's site is thus ...

The internal pressure fluctuation of the structure can be controlled into a small rate during the expansion, large motion for expanding the structure can be quickly and smoothly achieved by small force, and therefore, the large motion can quickly respond to a control signal from the computer, and can play a powerful presence.

... though I suspect that text may suffer a bit from mangled translation. Anyway, I was particularly thrilled to see that to highlight their technology, they'd made a moving balloon of ... an octopus! Check here for a movie of it in action.

(Thanks to John T. Unger for this one!)

Here's a really clever little game: Poom. A ball drops down from the ceiling, and you control a little grid of flat squares with your mouse below it. Your goal is to move the grid around so that you bounce the ball; if you accidentally move an empty part of the grid beneath the ball, it falls down and you lose. Sounds easy! Except every time the ball bounces, the grid changes ... giving you barely a millisecond to quickly figure out where to shift it to next.

The gameplay here is so unusual and new that it's kind of hard to explain. Just go play it! But give yourself a half hour, because it's seriously addictive.

For years, I've been waiting for the advent of location-based applications -- apps that use your location as a key data point in delivering services. Up until now, the main appeal of the Internet is that it erases geography; it allowed the model-train freaks and Linux freaks and libertarian freaks and first-edition-of-Spiderman to find one another, no matter where they were located. I remember back in 1996, looking at Yahoo's original "subject tree" for cyberspace, and realizing that the Internet was organized like the Dewey decimal system. It was a library, not a map.

But now the Internet is penetrating our mobile world -- via phones, wifi-hoppin' laptops, and handhelds. And when you're on the road, your location is one of the most relevant things about you. Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to have apps that treat the world not as a Dewey-decimal library, but a map. Mobile-service providers have been babbling for years about how one day you'll pull out your phone and it'll tell you where the nearest Italian restaurant or Kinko's is, but really ... who cares. The most genuinely explosive Internet apps have been social: Email, instant messaging, P2P. So I always figured the first truly cool location-based apps would similarly be social.

Sure enough, the first actually popular location-aware tool is Dodgeball, which lets you keep track of your posse while you're out club-hopping. But though Dodgeball's great, you have to manually enter your location into the phone. The really wild stuff will happen with phones that are automatically location-aware -- as with cell-tower triangulation and GPS.

Thus I was really intrigued to hear about Mologogo -- a free new app that runs on any GPS-enabled Nextel phone, tracks where you are in real-time, and displays it on a teensy mobile-phone version of Google Maps. For Xtra social fun, you can authorize your friends to track your location, and you theirs. That picture above is a snapshot of random Mologogo users who publicly display their everyday locations.

Unfortunately, it only works on Nextel GPS-and-java-enabled phones. But as more and more phones include GPS, appls like this could create some neato social revolutions. One example? Mologogo was developed by the indomitable Jason Uechi, whose superb mobile-phone apps I've blogged about before. He collaborated with another coder he met online, Lemonhead. When they finally got the locationing code running, they pumped in their own co-ordinates, and then, as they recount on their website ...

... only then did they realized that they lived in the same town, .0056 longitude and .018 latitude apart. Some would call it fate.

Heh.

What's the fastest way to load people onto an airplane? Certainly not the way that it's normally done, as any business traveller will attest. They're all too familiar with the weird inefficiencies of boarding: You dutifully line up on time, but then get backed up by some family that blocks the entire aisle while sitting down; then as soon as you're finally secure in your aisle seat, your window seat-mate arrives and you have stand up again.

This is why United Airlines has recently announced it will try a new boarding method. As the New York Times reports:

It recently announced a logistics ploy it calls Wilma -- shorthand for window-middle-aisle -- that it claims will cut boarding times by four to five minutes, an eternity in the industry's on-time takeoff sweepstakes. The idea is to fill the window seats in economy class first, then the middle seats, then the aisle seats, thereby eliminating the free-for-all chaos that clogs the cabin when passengers are sent in by row numbers.

Judged as a sheer matter of physics, this is an elegant idea. If you think of people as marbles flowing into an empty vessel with gravity on both sides, they'd sort in precisely this fashion.

But no sooner had United announced Wilma than detractors pointed out that this technique has been tried before, by Shuttle by United -- and it failed. Why? Because people inevitably behave in erratic ways that thwart your expectations. Under a Wilma system, the people who ought to arrive first are the window-seaters. But all too often they stagger up to the gate late, and wind up having to clamber over their seatmates, and the whole system falls to pieces. Marbles are rational; we're not.

But what humans are good at is self-sorting anarchy. In a finding that would warm the heart of any libertarian, airplane analysts report that the airline with the single-fastest boarding time is Southwest Airlines -- which does not have any seat assignments at all. With Southwest, if someone wants to sit in a window seat (as I invariably do), they have to show up early and get first in line ... precisely the result that Wilma is intended to legislate.

Here's the next phase-transition in modern media: MTV videos shot using mobile phones. Apparently a video director named Grant Marshall was carping about the incredibly stingy budgets of today's videos, which force him to shoot on cheaper and cheaper quality film. "Next," he complained, "they'll expect me to shoot on my phone." Then he thought: Hey -- cool idea.

Thus was born the video for "Some Postman", the latest single from the power-pop band The Presidents of the United States. Marshall took 12 Sony Ericsson K750i phones and mounted them on tripods while the band played through its song 30 times in a row. But that was only the beginning of the tribulations of dealing with such a gnarly, lo-fi recording technology, as The Seattle Times reports:

The resolution on cellphones is equivalent to 1/3000 of the quality of normal video, Marshall said. [snip]

And although the manufacturer promised that they'd record 15 frames per second, they only did 10.

To overcome this limitation, the band performed at half time. Editors later sped the footage back up.

After Marshall was done, he used bluetooth to extract the video to his Mac editing suite. Though it was obviously a big hassle to produce, the resulting aesthetic is pretty cool: Marshall took advantage of the tight focus of the shots to layer images inside of one another. If you want to see the video, the original is here, and my friend Andrew has archived a less-jerky copy here. But it got me wondering: This can't be the first time someone has done this. Has anyone else ever seen a phonecam-shot video before?

(Thanks to Andrew Hearst for this one!)

The aliens from Space Invaders are easily the most famous icons of video-gaming, if not of the entire 80s. They've been ported to all manner of modern art, ranging from street installations to superb block-prints by my artist friend El Rey. So you have to wonder: How did Tomohiro Nishikado, the designer for Space Invaders, decide on the alien design?

In their October 2005 issue, writers at The Edge magazine published a superb Q&A with Nishikado in which they asked precisely this question. As it turns out, Nishikado originally thought of making the enemies airplanes, but they were too hard to render realistically. Human beings were easier, but -- and I just love this -- he thought it would be "immoral" to have a game in which you shot virtual humans. Eventually he drew inspiration from the recent success of this weird new movie called Star Wars, and decided to use aliens.

But the best part? He based his aliens on the Martians from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds:

In the story, the alien looked like an octopus. I drew a bitmap image based on the idea. Then I created several other aliens that look like sea creatures such as squid or crab.

That's just excellent. Those are pictures of Nishikado's workbook above. It's funny -- after all those years of playing Space Invaders, I never thought of connecting the lowermost "grunt" aliens onscreen to octopi. I did dimly think that the uppermost ones looked like squid, but never in my wildest dreams would I have figured they were based on Wells' aliens.

As a sidenote, I recently discovered that Edward Gorey once illustrated a version of War of the Worlds. Now, a Gorey-animated video-game version of Space Invaders? I would pay good money for that.

(Thanks to Joystiq for this one!)

Everyone knows it's hard to concentrate in today's email-ridden, mobile-phone-ringing, instant-messaging workplace. But is there any way to engineer a better way to work? In today's New York Times Magazine, I wrote a feature that examines precisely this question. A copy of the piece is online this week for free at the Times web site, and here's a permanent copy archived below:

Meet the Life Hackers
Can anyone find a way to make your constantly beeping computer leave you alone and let you work? Inside the nascent field of interruption science.
by Clive Thompson

In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list -- only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction of what she set out to do. "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30 things at once."

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined."

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark's study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work. Sure, the high-tech workers grumbled and moaned about disruptions, and they all claimed that they preferred to work in long, luxurious stretches. But they grudgingly admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work -- sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.

For a small cadre of computer engineers and academics, this realization has begun to raise an enticing possibility: perhaps we can find an ideal middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, then maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides. Is there such a thing as a perfect interruption?

Mary Czerwinski first confronted this question while working, oddly enough, in outer space. She is one of the world's leading experts in interruption science, and she was hired in 1989 by Lockheed to help NASA design the information systems for the International Space Station. NASA had a problem: how do you deliver an interruption to a busy astronaut? On the space station, astronauts must attend to dozens of experiments while also monitoring the station's warning systems for potentially fatal mechanical errors. NASA wanted to ensure that its warnings were perfectly tuned to the human attention span: if a warning was too distracting, it could throw off the astronauts and cause them to mess up million-dollar experiments. But if the warnings were too subtle and unobtrusive, they might go unnoticed, which would be even worse. The NASA engineers needed something that would split the difference.

Czerwinski noticed that all the information the astronauts received came to them as plain text and numbers. She began experimenting with different types of interruptions and found that it was the style of delivery that was crucial. Hit an astronaut with a textual interruption, and he was likely to ignore it, because it would simply fade into the text-filled screens he was already staring at. Blast a horn and he would definitely notice it -- but at the cost of jangling his nerves. Czerwinski proposed a third way: a visual graphic, like a pentagram whose sides changed color based on the type of problem at hand, a solution different enough from the screens of text to break through the clutter.

The science of interruptions began more than 100 years ago, with the emergence of telegraph operators -- the first high-stress, time-sensitive information-technology jobs. Psychologists discovered that if someone spoke to a telegraph operator while he was keying a message, the operator was more likely to make errors; his cognition was scrambled by mentally "switching channels." Later, psychologists determined that whenever workers needed to focus on a job that required the monitoring of data, presentation was all-important. Using this knowledge, cockpits for fighter pilots were meticulously planned so that each dial and meter could be read at a glance.

Still, such issues seemed remote from the lives of everyday workers -- even information workers -- simply because everyday work did not require parsing screenfuls of information. In the 90's, this began to change, and change quickly. As they became ubiquitous in the workplace, computers, which had until then been little more than glorified word-processors and calculators, began to experience a rapid increase in speed and power. "Multitasking" was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for every conceivable office task, and laying on the available information with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for communication. As a result, office denizens now stare at computer screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.

Information is no longer a scarce resource -- attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. "Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles," Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it -- at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships -- someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center -- if only there was some way to find it.

It is this middle path that Czerwinski and her generation of computer scientists are now trying to divine. When I first met her in the corridors of Microsoft, she struck me as a strange person to be studying the art of focusing, because she seemed almost attention-deficit disordered herself: a 44-year-old with a pageboy haircut and the electric body language of a teenager. "I'm such a spaz," she said, as we went bounding down the hallways to the cafeteria for a "bio-break." When she ushered me into her office, it was a perfect Exhibit A of the go-go computer-driven life: she had not one but three enormous computer screens, festooned with perhaps 30 open windows -- a bunch of e-mail messages, several instant messages and dozens of Web pages. Czerwinski says she regards 20 solid minutes of uninterrupted work as a major triumph; often she'll stay in her office for hours after work, crunching data, since that's the only time her outside distractions wane.

In 1997, Microsoft recruited Czerwinski to join Microsoft Research Labs, a special division of the firm where she and other eggheads would be allowed to conduct basic research into how computers affect human behavior. Czerwinski discovered that the computer industry was still strangely ignorant of how people really used their computers. Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?

To figure this out, she took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time -- a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

When Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same thing: Post-it notes. Workers would scrawl hieroglyphic reminders of the tasks they were supposed to be working on ("Test PB patch DAN's PC -- Waiting for AL," was one that Mark found). Then they would place them directly in their fields of vision, often in a halo around the edge of their computer screens. The Post-it notes were, in essence, a jury-rigged memory device, intended to rescue users from those moments of mental wandering.

For Mark and Czerwinski, these piecemeal efforts at coping pointed to ways that our high-tech tools could be engineered to be less distracting. When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their computers. They placed their applications on different screens -- the e-mail far off on the right side, a Web browser on the left and their main work project right in the middle -- so that each application was "glanceable." When the ding on their e-mail program went off, they could quickly peek over at their in-boxes to see what had arrived.

The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration -- like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly -- and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together -- making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.

In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O'Brien decided he was fed up with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a list of 70 of the most "sickeningly overprolific" people he knew, most of whom were software engineers of one kind or another. O'Brien wrote a questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies, and one night O'Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for clues. He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some common tricks.

He was correct. But their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some of O'Brien's correspondents said they opened up a single document in a word-processing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember -- addresses, to-do lists, birthdays -- and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information. Others used e-mail -- mailing themselves a reminder of every task, reasoning that their in-boxes were the one thing they were certain to look at all day long.

In essence, the geeks were approaching their frazzled high-tech lives as engineering problems -- and they were not waiting for solutions to emerge from on high, from Microsoft or computer firms. Instead they ginned up a multitude of small-bore fixes to reduce the complexities of life, one at a time, in a rather Martha Stewart-esque fashion.

Many of O'Brien's correspondents, it turned out, were also devotees of "Getting Things Done," a system developed by David Allen, a personal-productivity guru who consults with Fortune 500 corporations and whose seminars fill Silicon Valley auditoriums with anxious worker bees. At the core of Allen's system is the very concept of memory that Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you're doing is visible right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious. Thus, as soon as you are interrupted, Allen says, you need either to quickly deal with the interruption or -- if it's going to take longer than two minutes -- to faithfully add the new task to your constantly updated to-do list. Once the interruption is over, you immediately check your to-do list and go back to whatever is at the top.

"David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software in your head and follow automatically," O'Brien explains. "If this happens, then do this. You behave like a robot, which of course really appeals to geeks."

O'Brien summed up his research in a speech called "Life Hacks," which he delivered in February 2004 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Five hundred conference-goers tried to cram into his session, desperate for tips on managing info chaos. When O'Brien repeated the talk the next year, it was mobbed again. By the summer of 2005, the "life hacks" meme had turned into a full-fledged grass-roots movement. Dozens of "life hacking" Web sites now exist, where followers of the movement trade suggestions on how to reduce chaos. The ideas are often quite clever: O'Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever he's surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to know whether he's procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.

"In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves," says Merlin Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com. "We'd rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround ourselves with distractions. We've got 20,000 digital photos instead of 10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo'd than we'll ever see." In the last year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him only once an hour. ("Unless you're working in a Korean missile silo, you don't need to check e-mail every two minutes," he argues.)

Mann's most famous hack emerged when he decided to ditch his Palm Pilot and embrace a much simpler organizing style. He bought a deck of 3-by-5-inch index cards, clipped them together with a binder clip and dubbed it "The Hipster P.D.A." -- an ultra-low-fi organizer, running on the oldest memory technology around: paper.

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.

Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" -- sitting next to each other in cubicles -- versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk -- and they interrupt you accordingly.

So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up -- to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.

One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot -- the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.

Horvitz booted the system up to show me how it works. He pointed to a series of bubbles on his screen, each representing one way the machine observes Horvitz's behavior. For example, it measures how long he's been typing or reading e-mail messages; it notices how long he spends in one program before shifting to another. Even more creepily, Horvitz told me, the A.I. program will -- a little like HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- eavesdrop on him with a microphone and spy on him using a Webcam, to try and determine how busy he is, and whether he has company in his office. Sure enough, at one point I peeked into the corner of Horvitz's computer screen and there was a little red indicator glowing.

"It's listening to us," Horvitz said with a grin. "The microphone's on."

It is no simple matter for a computer to recognize a user's "busy state," as it turns out, because everyone is busy in his own way. One programmer who works for Horvitz is busiest when he's silent and typing for extended periods, since that means he's furiously coding. But for a manager or executive, sitting quietly might actually be an indication of time being wasted; managers are more likely to be busy when they are talking or if PowerPoint is running.

In the early days of training Horvitz's A.I., you must clarify when you're most and least interruptible, so the machine can begin to pick up your personal patterns. But after a few days, the fun begins -- because the machine takes over and, using what you've taught it, tries to predict your future behavior. Horvitz clicked an onscreen icon for "Paul," an employee working on a laptop in a meeting room down the hall. A little chart popped up. Paul, the A.I. program reported, was currently in between tasks -- but it predicted that he would begin checking his e-mail within five minutes. Thus, Horvitz explained, right now would be a great time to e-mail him; you'd be likely to get a quick reply. If you wanted to pay him a visit, the program also predicted that -- based on his previous patterns -- Paul would be back in his office in 30 minutes.

With these sorts of artificial smarts, computer designers could re-engineer our e-mail programs, our messaging and even our phones so that each tool would work like a personal butler -- tiptoeing around us when things are hectic and barging in only when our crises have passed. Horvitz's early prototypes offer an impressive glimpse of what's possible. An e-mail program he produced seven years ago, code-named Priorities, analyzes the content of your incoming e-mail messages and ranks them based on the urgency of the message and your relationship with the sender, then weighs that against how busy you are. Superurgent mail is delivered right away; everything else waits in a queue until you're no longer busy. When Czerwinski first tried the program, it gave her as much as three hours of solid work time before nagging her with a message. The software also determined, to the surprise of at least one Microsoft employee, that e-mail missives from Bill Gates were not necessarily urgent, since Gates tends to write long, discursive notes for employees to meditate on.

This raises a possibility both amusing and disturbing: perhaps if we gave artificial brains more control over our schedules, interruptions would actually decline -- because A.I. doesn't panic. We humans are Pavlovian; even though we know we're just pumping ourselves full of stress, we can't help frantically checking our e-mail the instant the bell goes ding. But a machine can resist that temptation, because it thinks in statistics. It knows that only an extremely rare message is so important that we must read it right now.

So will Microsoft bring these calming technologies to our real-world computers? "Could Microsoft do it?" asks David Gelernter, a Yale professor and longtime critic of today's computers. "Yeah. But I don't know if they're motivated by the lust for simplicity that you'd need. They're more interested in piling more and more toys on you."

The near-term answer to the question will come when Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, is released in the fall of 2006. Though Czerwinski and Horvitz are reluctant to speculate on which of their innovations will be included in the new system, Horvitz said that the system will "likely" incorporate some way of detecting how busy you are. But he admitted that "a bunch of features may not be shipping with Vista." He says he believes that Microsoft will eventually tame the interruption-driven workplace, even if it takes a while. "I have viewed the task as a 'moon mission' that I believe that Microsoft can pull off," he says.

By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees not of Microsoft but of Apple, the company's only real rival in the creation of operating systems -- and a company that has often seemed to intuit the need for software that reduces the complexity of the desktop. When Apple launched its latest operating system, Tiger, earlier this year, it introduced a feature called Dashboard -- a collection of glanceable programs, each of which performs one simple function, like displaying the weather. Tiger also includes a single-key tool that zooms all open windows into a bingo-card-like grid, uncovering any "lost" ones. A superpowered search application speeds up the laborious task of hunting down a missing file. Microsoft is now playing catch-up; Vista promises many of the same tweaks, although it will most likely add a few new ones as well, including, possibly, a 3-D mode for seeing all the windows you have open.

Apple's computers have long been designed specifically to soothe the confusions of the technologically ignorant. For years, that meant producing computer systems that seemed simpler than the ones Microsoft produced, but were less powerful. When computers moved relatively slowly and the Internet was little used, raw productivity -- shoving the most data at the user -- mattered most, and Microsoft triumphed in the marketplace. But for many users, simplicity now trumps power. Linda Stone, the software executive who has worked alongside the C.E.O.'s of both Microsoft and Apple, argues that we have shifted eras in computing. Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay.

Yet the truth is that even Apple might not be up to the task of building the ultimately serene computer. After all, even the geekiest life hackers find they need to trick out their Apples with duct-tape-like solutions; and even that sometimes isn't enough. Some experts argue that the basic design of the computer needs to change: so long as computers deliver information primarily through a monitor, they have an inherent bottleneck -- forcing us to squeeze the ocean of our lives through a thin straw. David Rose, the Cambridge designer, suspects that computers need to break away from the screen, delivering information through glanceable sources in the world around us, the way wall clocks tell us the time in an instant. For computers to become truly less interruptive, they might have to cease looking like computers. Until then, those Post-it notes on our monitors are probably here to stay.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Boxing and chess have always seemed like polar opposites -- games that sit on each side of the Cartesian mind/body divide. Thus I was intrigued to learn about the new sport that limns both regions: Chessboxing. The rules, according to the World Chess Boxing Organization, are thus:

In a contest there shall be 11 rounds, 6 rounds of chess, 5 rounds of boxing. A round of chess takes 4 minutes. Each competitor has 12 minutes on the chess timer. As soon as the time runs out the game is over. A round of boxing takes 2 minutes. Between rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear.

The contest is decided by: checkmate (chess round), exceeding the time limit (chess round), retirement of an opponent (chess or boxing round), KO (boxing round), or referee decision (boxing round). If the chess game ends in a stalement, the opponent with the higher score in boxing wins. If there is an equal score, the opponent with the black pieces wins.

The first annual competition was hosted in Berlin last week, and the victor was Bulgarian boxer Tihomir Titschko, who not only has a killer right hook but is one of the world's top-rated players of high-speed "bullet chess". A renaissance man indeed! Though as CNN found when it reported on the event, spectators were amazed that anyone could play this thing at all: "It's hard to imagine coming back from a round of boxing and remembering what you were trying to do on the chess board," said one. "You're probably sitting there preoccupied with the pain."

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

I don't know crap about football. But I do recognize interesting algorithms when I see them, and this is some of the finest football-related math I've seen in some time: Two researchers at the University of Michigan have used network theory to design an alternative ranking system for college football.

Currently, inter-university football competition is a strangely balkanized affair. Unlike as with baseball or basketball, there is no single ranking for all teams; they're broken into conferences, one of which is selected each year to be the "bowl" championship. But the problem here is that teams don't get a chance to be evenly measured against one another. As the authors note in their paper (PDF here):

One often hears sports fans arguments of this form: "Although my team A didn't play your team C this season, it did beat B who in turn beat C. Therefore A is better than C and would have won had they played a game." (See Fig. 1.) In fact, this argument is usually articulated with less clarity than this and more beer, but nonetheless we feel that the general line of reasoning has merit.

So they essentially wrote a computer algorithm that would crunch game stats for the last couple of years and rank the teams according to precisely that idea: If A beats B and B beats C, A is thus superior to C, even if they never play. When they checked their results against the actual team results, they i) produced the funky graphic seen above, but more importantly, ii) found that their technique did a better job of predicting actual victors than the annual poll currently conducted by the Associated Press.

It's Miller Time.

(Thanks to Samuel Arbesman for this one!)

Wired News has just published my latest column on gaming -- in which I read Bill 1179, the anti-game law signed last weekend by Arnold Schwarzenegger, then boot up a copy of The Suffering ... and try to violate the law as badly as I can. Much linguistic analysis ensures, including but not limited to the torture memos of Alberto Gonzales. You can read it online here, or check out a permanently archived copy below!

The Tortured Language of the Law
by Clive Thompson

I squeeze the trigger on my shotgun and pump a fusillade of lead into my enemy's chest. He topples to the ground lifeless, and I look down to see that I'm drenched in blood. But what I'm really wondering is: Have I just broken California's new video-game law?

This weekend, I cracked out The Suffering: Ties That Bind, one of the season's goriest titles. Just hours before, Arnold Schwarznegger signed Assembly Bill No. 1179 (.pdf) -- a new law that slaps a fine of up to $1,000 on anyone who sells a "violent video game" to minors.

Critics have mercilessly attacked the legislation, noting its many flaws: It violates the First Amendment; it claims without evidence that games cause "neurological harm to minors"; it was signed into law by a guy who has personally starred in Terminator video games that are treblecharged with carnage.

Fine critiques all. But as I discovered when I sat down and read the bill myself, the most intriguing thing is really the law's language. Why? Because when a politician drafts a ban, it forces him to state precisely what it is he's objecting to.

Bill 1179 targets games in which you "virtually inflict serious injury upon images of humans or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner which is especially heinous, cruel or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim."

Does any of this actually describe what goes on in a violent game? To find out, I played The Suffering with the specific intent of violating the law as badly as possible. (In spirit only, of course: I'm not a minor and I live in New York.)

My first question is -- what exactly is a character with "substantially human characteristics?" Most of the villains in The Suffering are mutant weirdos. At one point, I fight these gun-wielding dudes who have no heads, but do have entire bodies attached to six massive spider legs. Then there are some dog-like things with human faces. Are these "substantially human"? One reason mutants have historically been so popular -- from H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau to The Fly -- is that they're intended to make us meditate on what "human" really means.

Later on, the bill defines "depraved" violence to mean that in which "the player relishes the virtual killing." The problem here is, who precisely is doing this relishing? I threw the onscreen avatar -- Torque -- into some utterly nasty bloodbaths, but as soon as the battle was over and we walked onwards, he'd remain pretty impassive. (It's probably even more sociopathically creepier than relishing it, when you think about it.)

As for me? Sure, I "relish" each kill -- but mostly because my life is constantly in danger and I'm exuberant when I escape, rather like a running back escaping a huge tackle. It's true that I often take prurient delight in the enormously huge gibs of flesh that spray around when you use a rocket launcher on an enemy, but again, it's mostly because I find the art direction so intentionally cartoonish.

In other words, the law is so vaguely written as to be useless in addressing the real content of actual games -- and the behavior of gamers. This is probably because it was fashioned by people who neither play any games themselves, nor talk with those who do. This law is a classic example of "I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it."

A similar law signed in Michigan targets "ultraviolent" video games, a phrase that is even more histrionically bereft of serious meaning. These laws are really just political point-scoring: The more vaguely you define your threat, the more easily you can claim that it remains ever present, and that you are the only beacon of rightness.

Now, let's be clear: I absolutely support parents who want to keep their young children away from violent entertainment. I also think it's great that our politicians want to grapple with the moral content of violent games. But they're not going to succeed by remaining so willfully clueless about them. Even the anti-porn boards of the 1980s watched hundreds of hours of smut to educate themselves.

Interestingly, the one moment of genuine clarity in the California law is when it frets about games where you can "torture" someone. The legislators define torture as when you intentionally cause someone else suffering -- "mental as well as physical" -- that is quite apart from the cut-and-thrust of battle. The language is suddenly much crisper here, and I wondered why.

Then it hit me: Because this is the one area of law where our governments have deep, recent experience. Three years ago, the federal government was painstakingly crafting legal memos about torture -- not so they could ban it, but so they could perform it. Who could forget White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' intricately crafted prose, saying that torture "must cause pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death"?

Consider that your final irony: Politicians work hard to ban virtual torture -- while working just as hard to allow it in real life.

For a few years now, I've been on a hunt for one-button games -- video games that have a single button to control all the action. I argue that anyone designers who can create a game with one single control -- and a mouse-with-button-clicks doesn't count, because that's two buttons -- truly understand the ludological underpinnings of play, since they do not need to hide behind elaborate 3D to produce a sense of excitement. In games, as in poetry, it's the limitations that produce creativity.

So I was thrilled when Alexandre Houdent, a game designer, sent me a link to GlobZ Mini Games -- a site where he has created no less than twelve single-button games! And I am happy to report that they are all a total blast. That one above is UFO Panic (pictured above), in which the little turrent swings to and fro and you try to time your mouse-click so that you shoot the descending aliens. In KidSki, a single click switches your slaloming from left to right; in Roboto, the length that you click and hold the button determines how far your robot jumps. The concept behind each game is similar -- you have to time your button-pushes perfectly to navigate a system in which objects oscillate with regular periodicity. But they're beautifully, wonderfully done.

(Thanks to Alexandre for this one!)