qui tacet consentire videtur

In my previous post, I wrote that the answer is ‘regret’. That’s my answer, anyway. As my more… erudite (?) friends know, that’s not the only answer.

NWT: me, i prefer the words of the Transcendent One: “the answer is this, and you are proof. NOTHING can change the nature of a man.”

I think the point of PS:T’s ending is to illustrate that the answer differs and is a function of choice. I choose not to accept the Transcendent One’s fatalism.

What I regret most is having become one-dimensional.

I was wrong to write the unnice things that I did earlier, and I recognize the valid concerns that were raised. Though I felt some responses were uncharitable, they nonetheless exist and should be addressed.

The fact is that I will be leaving this island soon, and with it, all my friends and family, to a new life. Like KH says, it is a chance to leave the past behind and start over. But I would prefer to also leave behind all that is lacking in me: my own behavior patterns and traits that made my years here less wonderful than they should have been. My years in the army, which in taking away many of the safety nets that allowed these behavior patterns to develop, have helped me to see that. Still, some of them remain, poison in the wound. I will work harder on rectifying them.

What can change the nature of a man?

An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn’t certain of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: ‘Now your third wish. What will it be?’ ‘Third wish?’ The man was baffled. ‘How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?’ ‘You’ve had two wishes already,’ the hag said, ‘but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.’ She cackled at the poor berk. ‘So it is that you have one wish left.’ ‘All right,’ said the man, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.’ ‘Funny,’ said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. ‘That was your first wish.’

The answer is, of course, regret. I’m sorry.

So I went for [my college’s] admit reception, which is essentially the most important hard-sell opportunity for the college to fill up the admit-matriculate yield (beyond so-called interest-selection bias]. Ah, the distorted incentive structures of US News rankings.

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It has always struck me as somewhat incongruent that the RPG genre of games (from the original pen & paper to the computer and console species) is commonly defined by a ’statistical’ model. Characters i.e. the role that is played are defined by ‘attributes’ like ’strength’, ‘charisma’, ‘intelligence’ within a numerically defined space. In Dungeons & Dragons, that range is from 1-25(?). Everything that a character does is termed ‘experience’, which itself is defined in numerical terms - defeating monster A gives one B experience points. Upon accumulating C number of experience points, character attains level D. Everything in the genre seems to be quantifiable and definable in a precise, absolute sense. Even random outcomes and chance are determined by rolls of dice, where the odds and probabilities are easy for players to see with a calculator and some basic math. Dungeons & Dragons may be set in a fantasy setting of magic and wonder - but its mechanics are clearly otherwise.

In what sense can we call these role-playing games? Can the defining characteristic of an RPG be number-crunching instead of say, playing a role? Or are the boundaries set by absolute limits what give meaning to what is essentially a creative exercise?

I recently spent some time completing Final Fantasy X, a somewhat dated game I really wanted to finish at the time it was released but had exams and such to deal with. It belongs to a particular subgenre of RPGs that is about playing a strictly defined role through a linear, pre-defined narrative. One doesn’t actually have any meaningful agency within the game, with respect to the plot. Can we still call this a role-playing game? It seems to be that FFX (and the other Final Fantasy games) are best described as interactive movies with stylised tactical and resource management components. Yet the same can be said of most so-called ‘non-linear’ RPGs… Are the only true role-playing games pen & paper? Or MMOs like World of Warcraft and Everquest?

Though this is not my area of expertise, it strikes me that the many online market simulations (like marketocracy, virtual stock exchange etc) available have very little incentives to participation. The token sum awarded to top investors is usually below $500. Given the number of participants vs. the number of winners, the average expected payoff is quite small. Participation is only rational if the expected payoff exceeds the cost of participation (time, effort in learning about stocks) - but I suspect that those with high expected payoffs / lower costs would be disinclined to participate because they have better things to do with their expertise (like invest real money for real returns). How do these market simulations properly incentivize participants?