The Two Things You Should Never Argue About

There are two things you should never argue about: facts and opinions.

I took me nineteen years to learn not to argue about facts. I remember realizing it one day while riding in a car, having the usual argument with a person who shall remain nameless but loved to argue, when it occurred to me: why the heck are we arguing about this? Either I'm right, or he's right, or neither of us are right, and we'll find out when we go home and look it up.

Facts - facts that can be known or verified in some manner - are facts. What's the use of arguing about them? Now when I get into a disagreement about a fact, I meta the conversation: "We'll look that up when we can, but let us suppose that it is or isn't true for the moment. How does this affect what we're discussing?"

Of course, everyone basically understands that you can't win an argument about opinions: "This is better" or "That is better". No, "This is better to me", and "That is better to you". Better is in the eye of the beholder.

Even taking that conversation to meta level, you end up arguing "This is better because this has such and such properties, which are more important" vs "That is better because that has these other properties, which are more important". It's still in the realm of opinions.

For instance: Windows vs Unix. I think Unix is better. That's because I value X, Y, and Z about operating systems, which Unix is better at. If someone else values A, B, and C about operating systems, and Windows is better at these, then they think that Windows is better. So the real argument is whether X, Y, and Z are more important qualities in an operating system than A, B, and C.

Which is still a matter of opinion.

I'm sorely tempted to leave the post at this, because the statement:

There are two things you should never argue about: facts and opinions.

sounds like it encompasses all things, which would lead to the implied assertion: "You should never argue."

However, there is another thing, other than facts and opinions: ideas.

Ideas are when you argue about what it means that some people believe X, Y, and Z are more or less important than A, B, C in the design of an operating system. We're still arguing about whether ideas can be objectively worse or better, and which ones. Keep arguing about that.

One of my favorite quotes:

Great people talk about ideas.
Average people talk about things.
Small people talk about other people. - Anon

Variously attributed, in various forms, to Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others.

Yehuda

The Paradox of Faithful Service to God

One of the other major subjects that came up over Shavuot was the ideal nature of service to God.

A standard Jewish tenet asserts that someone commanded to perform a service receives a higher reward than someone who voluntarily performs the same service. For example, men are commanded to eat in a sukkah on the holiday of Sukkot, while women are not. A man receives a "higher reward" (whatever that means) for doing so than a woman does.

A very cursory look at this tenet might leave you confused: after all, one is doing it because he has to, while the other doesn't have to but does it anyway. Surely the latter should get a higher reward.

Looking a little deeper, however, reveals that the tenet makes some sense. It is human nature to resist things that you are commanded to do. Not only has the joy been taken out of it, but your will has been taken out of it. Whereas, a person who is moved to do what they want to do anyway, when they want to do it, and with the ability to not do it when they want - sure, it's a nice thing, but it's not the same effort.

Furthermore, if a task requires only one person to do, and one person has been appointed to do it, a second person is really superfluous. It's great that they want to do it, but not strictly necessary.

Hold this thought.

Angels in Jewish thought have no free will (no Enoch and the rebellious angels, sorry). [My wife would like to add that there are some early minority exceptional traditions regarding this.] In contrast, man has free will. The Torah was given to man, because the service of the angels is not Torah; without the ability to choose to fulfill the commandments, there can be no reward for doing so.

Free will is given to allow you to choose the right from the wrong. But life is a series of parts that don't fit together exactly. Some times you will have to choose one path over another, or even one moral choice over another, both seemingly right. If the path is not obvious, can God justify reward and punishment for man choosing incorrectly from a state of confusion, when that's the natural state of man?

There may be absolute rights and wrongs, but there are many right paths to fulfilling the Torah. If one person especially devotes himself to charity, while another to study, they are both doing the right thing (so long as they both do some of each).

So we see that there is room for latitude for choice and for decisions. The guideline's for your choices come down to the fact that you should always hold in your mind both the fear of God (some say awe of God) and the love of God as your determining factors.

There is, however, a stream of Jewish thought that argues that this is only a lower form of service.

In their argument, real service to God is doing so simply because you were commanded to do so. In other words, fear of God is a low service, love of God is a higher service, but no feeling whatsoever is the highest service.

This type of person walks around as follows: "I'm eating this fruit because God commanded me to have strength. I'm paying money for this item because God commanded me to follow the laws of the land. I'm going to the bathroom because God commanded me to keep my body healthy."

According to this philosophy, there is no thought of reward or punishment for doing or not doing these things, only that one was commanded.

The problem with this attitude is that there are two types of things that do exactly what they are commanded, with no thought of reward or punishment: robots and angels. Neither of which I aspire to be, nor do I think this is a good aspiration for any human.

But there is, indeed, a paradox here.

If one does things for reward and punishment, it's not exactly altruistic, it's self-serving. Surely one cannot be entirely pure and holy for that type of service. On the other hand, if one does something as if there is no reward and punishment, like a robot, then it's not really acting out of free will anymore. Well, they're freely giving up their free will, yes, but still.

I think the answer lies in how I treat my children.

I love my children, and when I do things for them out of love, it is not in the expectation that I will receive anything in return. And even if there are absolutely worse and better ways to parent, there is no single right way.

I am also in awe of the responsibility of a life that I hold in my hands, and some of my choices are guided by the fear of hurting another human being for life. I both accept the responsibility that I have for them - I am commanded to continue parenting them - and I freely do it.

A parallel example could be the way we love and respect our elderly parents.

That, it seems to me, is the correct attitude toward serving God. Not unfeeling, and not for the sake of reward.

Yehuda

Do You Get Credit for Enabling Good Deeds?

Does one get credit for enabling another to do a good deed? If so, how much?

The question as it was presented to me was as follows: who is given more "credit"? The one who gives charity, or the one who asks for charity, thereby providing an opportunity for the giver to give?

According to basic Jewish philosophy, charity is a good deed. It's one of those natural enough concepts that doesn't really require Jewish law to explain; it's self-evident and natural moral sense.

But according to a popular socialist Jewish philosophy, money is distributed unevenly precisely for charity to be given. You may think you work hard and earn the money, but God allots how much you're going to earn at the beginning of the year.

This doesn't mean that you can sit at home and do nothing, waiting for the cash to roll it. It's more like a retroactive prophesy; God knows how much you're going to work in the next year, and what calamities and windfalls will befall you. Therefore, do your best, have faith, and let God take care of the rest. This includes the amount of charity that you're going to give.

Under this philosophy, you are simply the caretaker of money that isn't really yours. It "belongs" to the poor person, and was given to you simply so that you can give it to them. Which kind of short-changes, in my opinion, the goodness of charity.

But enough about charity; what matters to me is the idea that the poor person enables the giver to give. Forget the fact that he is the recipient and beneficiary of this giving. What, exactly, is the measure of worth of this enabler's deed? More than the doer? Less than the doer?

My response to this was that the next time my father asked one of his children to get him a chair, I'll turn to my brother and enable him with the opportunity to do the good deed. Ha ha. Of course, in this situation, everyone knows that I'm just being lazy and forgoing to do the good deed myself.

But what if I've done this good deed for ten years straight, and my brother never did it once? Isn't there actually something to be said about allowing my brother to do it, thereby fostering a relationship between son and father that I've already established?

And how about when you teach your children to be good, or when you reform a criminal? Don't all of the good deeds they do as a result of your training somehow reflect back on you? In this case, of course, you are increasing the number of good deeds being done, as opposed to forgoing one yourself and allowing someone else to do it, as in the brother paradigm.

Frankly I find the whole good deed calculus to be rather distasteful. Once you are aware of doing something as a good deed, and not simply through the motivation of the Other, you are then doing the deed in order to receive the "reward". That's when the anti-altruists descend on you, claiming that all doers of good deeds really do it for the reward, and not because that are actually good people.

What if you knew that something you knew to be a good deed - such as charity - would ultimately be punished by God, instead of rewarded? Would you still do it? If you can't answer yes, then what exactly is your morality?

There's a classic Hassidic story about a Rabbi who sends his pupil to find an etrog for him and tells the student to pay any price. The student finds only one vendor, who demands all the heavenly reward that the Rabbi will get for using the etrog. When the student returns and relays the cost, the Rabbi thanks the student and says that all of his life he has been worried that he does the commandments for the sake of reward, and for the first time he knows for sure that he will not be doing so.

One subverts the point of this story by thinking that the Rabbi surely will get some reward for his devotion nonetheless; after all, heavenly reward is not a zero-sum game.

Yehuda

Humor in the World of Codes of Ethics

Speaking of Flak magazine, they have a great code of ethics on their site, which starts with:

1. A writer cannot have a direct fiscal or creative interest in anything he or she writes about. A direct interest includes contributing content, getting paid by the publishers/creators of the thing reviewed, or being directly related to the publishers/creators.

For this purpose, "directly related" includes "boinking."

and ends with:

Writers or editors who violate this ethics code may be subject to penalties up to and including a condescending lecture.

Ethicsweb points to Halliburton Co.'s code of ethics, but when I followed the link I was informed that "the page or file that you're looking for is not available." Ho ho. (Actually, their code of conduct is here.)

For what it's worth, neither the RIAA nor the IFPI have a code of ethics, code of conduct, or anything similar on their sites. Big surprise. Nevertheless, that didn't stop them from trying to get ISP's to adopt one that they made for them. And here's another one (PDF) they made for universities.

Yehuda

The Problem of Evil

Can there be a single answer as to why evil exists? Or, why bad things happen to good people?

So much depends on your preconceived principles of faith. I couldn't give the same answer to someone who doesn't believe in God as I could to someone who does. Furthermore, what is your conception of God? What are God's defining characteristics?

Atheism

Atheists have no problem with this question, of course. Some smart-aleck once said that atheists have no problem with the existence of evil, only with the existence of everything else.

I'll let that go, for now.

Theism

Assuming that you believe in something God-like, then you still don't necessarily have a problem with the existence of evil if you believe in one of the following things:

1. God is not omnipotent.

Even if you believe in a single deity, you can believe that God is not omnipotent. In which case, you can assume that evil things can happen beyond God's control.

By the way, this is the answer given in the book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", by Rabbi Harold Kushner.

2. God is not omniscient.

If you believe that God is omnipotent, you still may not believe that He is all-knowing. Perhaps bad things happen and the most He can do is react to them. Alternately, you may believe that God "wound the clock", so to speak, and then left, so that He doesn't have direct involvement in our worldly affairs.

3. God is not omni-benevolent.

Even if you believe the first two, evil is not a problem for those who do not believe in God's benevolence. I believe that that is the case for many people who suffer, or who view the terrible things that happen around the world.

If you do believe all these things, then you have to answer how an all-powerful, all-knowing, and good Being can let terrible suffering occur.

Explanations I Can't Accept

One explanation that I often hear is "because you've sinned". Rabbis and Preachers love that one. After all, it is hard to prove otherwise. No one can say that they're perfect.

I find this explanation to be pretty pathetic. First of all, you can simply look at thousands of people whose lives are roughly equal in virtue and see that the pain and pleasure allotted to each is wildly disproportionate. They can say that the sufferers must have sinned "in their heart", which is not only unprovable, but highly improbable.

In any case, if you're Christian or Jewish and believe in the Old Testament, you're completely contradicting the book of Job, whose entire premise is that bad things happen to good people, even when they haven't sinned. Job's three friends believe that he must have sinned, and both Job and God reject this.

Furthermore, a tremendous amount of suffering happens to babies and children, who cannot possibly have sinned before they were born.

The explanation given in Job is that God's ways are mysterious. He made the Earth and Heavens, and so it is not possible that you will ever really know the answer. While possibly true, to an extent, this explanation is not entirely satisfying.

Another explanation is that a person may have sinned in a past life. For this to make sense, you have to assume that suffering is not "correction" - i.e. used for instruction - but "absolution", in that it somehow cleanses the soul.

I find this a rather inefficient system. I can't see the point of having another life just to suffer for a previous one. Furthermore, the non-obviousness of this system is a stumbling block for human understanding. We have to make sense of it retroactively; otherwise, we couldn't hold our faith. But we only hold our faith because of this system. That's rather circular reasoning to me.

A similarly unsatisfying explanation is that the more suffering you undergo in this life, the less you will receive in "the world to come". This is another example of reasoning invented to explain what we cannot otherwise cope with.

Another explanation is that we suffer so that we are inspired to choose God as our savior. God is showing us what free will allows us, and why it's bad. Again, the number of babies and children who suffer without ever having the opportunity to do this, not to mention the suffering that occurs after choosing God, seems to preclude this as a possibility.

My understanding

Here are my thoughts.

In one of my wife's papers, she wrote about Emmanuel Levinas:

According to Levinas, it is "disappointment", the absence of God, which forces the individual to created a space within for God as Other. A separation, a distance is necessary. The individual is thus not enclosed in a totality which dissolves the self, but allows him to give himself over, turn towards the other, his fellow man. In other words, "ontological absence [of God, the Other] means ethical presence [for the other]".

Even better, Rachel once phrased this as: "ontological absence necessitates ethical presence".

Which means that God perforce gives humans something to do by absenting Himself, just a bit. Without evil to overcome, we are nothing but empty vessels.

Can an omni-benevolent God create evil and suffering? Yes, if by doing so even more good comes as a result: human compassion, human action, human striving.

Can this really explain a child born to twisted agony, destined for a short life of starvation in Africa? Or the Holocaust? By virtue of God's absence, we must act together to stop these things from happening. We have to invent the science to help the unborn, the economics to share the food, and the politics and militaries to stop the tragedies. We cannot rely on God to do this for us.

But an explanation is not an excuse. That's one of the points, I think. God's examples of prophets are Abraham, Job, Moses. These guys railed against, argued with, and condemned God. They wouldn't let God off the hook. And they took action.

If you don't like evil and suffering in the world, fight against it and, while doing so, condemn God for it. Bring God to task.

More on the subject of theodicy. And here's an entire blog devoted to the subject.

Yehuda

Update: Over shabbat I thought of one more important point to make on this issue.

I didn't really answer how my interpretation of why evil/suffering exists can explain a small child born into pain and suffering who leaves the world before cognition, something which the other explanations fail to address satisfactorily.

I don't have an answer for the pre-scientific world, but for today's world the answer is that we have failed the child, at least partially.

Where is the medicine and nutrition that didn't make it to the parents before the child was conceived? The screening before it grew in the womb? The surgeries and gene-splicing that could have cured the infant before it was born?

Our science and our social programs have a long way to go, in part because so much of our world's attention and resources go to other issues, such as war and other such nonsense. In a sense, war's cost can also be measured indirectly, by our inability to give our fellow humans the attention and solutions that they need.

I don't know if, suddenly, the world were to act in complete concert that we could solve all human suffering, but I bet we could make a big dent in it.

Yehuda

Much Ado About Something: The Blogging Code of Conduct

To paraphrase something Miss Manners is wont to say: those who are not in the etiquette business should not be making rules about etiquette.

I'm not an etiquette professional - merely an amateur - but I am a devoted follower of Miss Manners and I have written various articles on ethics and manners. I am not here to propose new laws about etiquette, only to clarify ones that already exist.

Tim Oreilly's First-Draft

There has been much brouhaha about the need for adopting a "Blogger Code of Conduct" in the wake of the events leading up to and following the threats to Kathy Sierra and her subsequent complaints. The most discussed reaction was Tim Oreilly's proposal of a Blogger Code of Conduct, which essentially proposed that bloggers:

1. Take responsibility for their own words and what comments they allow to persist on their site.

2. Not say anything online that they would not say to a person.

3. Try to resolve disputes privately before going public.

4. Chastise bloggers and commenters who attack people.

5. Not allow anonymous comments.

6. Ignore trolls.

The Web's Reactions to Same

While dubiously correct or complete, this "first-draft" proposal is just that: a first-draft proposal for a code of conduct. The reaction to this proposal has been expected, occasionally fair, but usually ridiculous. Some examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Let's examine some of the reactions:

- You can't enforce this

Well, of course not, or at least not in the way you are talking about. This is manners we're talking about, not law. Laws are enforced with guns; manners are enforced with social disapproval.

You can't enforce people getting up to let a pregnant woman sit down on a bus, either. That doesn't mean that such etiquette doesn't exist, only that we don't shoot those who don't follow the rules. We simply shun them.

- This is censorship

That's right, it is.

Oh sorry, you were looking for more than that. There is no better definition of civilization than one in which voluntary censorship occurs. We censor our desires to kill, steal, insult, libel, and so on. That's how we get along.

Some of these acts are particularly egregious, and so we use the threat of guns to enforce them. Others, while maybe just as painful, we enforce with social punishments. That's the point.

- These rules are a slippery slope to having a code of conduct in other areas of life

This is patently untrue, as all other areas of life already have rules of conduct. You are probably just unaware of them at the moment.

For what it's worth, rules of conduct already apply to blogging, as well, and you are also unaware of these. The rules that Tim proposes may or may not match these rules. He isn't creating any new rules. He is merely voicing the rules that already exist.

- Only people who wouldn't do these things already will follow these rules anyway

The same goes for all areas of life. Those who disobey the rules of etiquette in life suffer the consequences. It doesn't do any harm to teach the rules to those who don't know them, however, to help prevent innocent infractions of the rules by those who at least mean well.

- If someone from Iraq can't post anonymously, he might get killed

This is akin to saying that the rule about not grasping people violently without permission is a bad rule of etiquette, because how then will you save someone who is about to fall off of a building? By the time you ask permission, they'll be dead!

Rules of etiquette - and this applies to laws, as well - have built-in exceptions that cover the exceptional, the emergency, or the odd situation. In fact, the rules of etiquette are not universal for all places at all times. That's why Americans have different rules than the French, and New Yorkers have different rules than Texans.

Etiquette rules are, perforce, adaptable and flexible to the required culture and circumstances. That's why they are rules of conduct, and not formal laws.

There is no requirement for a code of conduct to be exactly the same on every site on the web. What matters is that the particular rules that apply are known to all participants at each site.

- The only rule we need is "be nice"

Obviously not, or we wouldn't be here.

Yes, in essence, all manners derives from the basic idea that people should make others feel comfortable rather than the inverse. However, the way to make others feel comfortable is to know what makes others feel uncomfortable. You can't simply assume that. A few basic guidelines as to what is generally considered offensive is welcome for this purpose; violate at your own risk.

My Reactions to Same

I posted my own code of conduct a week or two before this all became an issue. With regards to Tim's particulars:

1. Is fine with me. With regards to taking responsibility for commenters, the same rules that apply to copyright takedown should apply to commenters. You should be able to remove comments without being liable for those that you inadvertently miss, unless notified. Once notified, you are responsible for deciding whether to leave them there or not.

2. While others think this is fine, I'm not much of a fan of this attitude. Too many people I know are perfectly willing to be rude in person, so holding them to this standard online is not sufficient, in my opinion.

3. Is fine with me.

4. Is fine with me, except see 6.

5. I am not much bothered by anonymous comments, except for those that attack others. I believe that each site should set their own policy for this.

6. This is kind of a contradiction to number 4. I can hardly chastise those whom I'm ignoring. On the other hand, I approve of shunning trolls. Often it is better to ignore someone rather than to bring attention to them. However, once the news has hit, a reaction is sometimes called for.

In the meantime, I propose that we all think a few times before posting anything more on the subject. And if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

Yehuda

Love and Kudos For Kathy Sierra

Mere days after I post a Blogger Code of Ethics, Kathy Sierra posts about having to withdraw from a conference, and possibly blogging altogether, due to violent threats to her life, some with sexual overtones, from a few bloggers and commenters.

Kathy writes probably the best technical, inspirational blog in existence, Creating Passionate Users. I've been a passionate reader of hers ever since I knew it existed. Every post she writes is a treasure.

She never has a bad word to say about other people; she's not contentious or negative. Why she has been attacked with this type of vitriol is beyond me. Probably, there are simply a**holes who think that being negative, especially against good people, makes them cool.

Of the alleged attackers [Update: sorry, not attackers, but people responsible for and major contributors to the sites she named; the attacks were generally made anonymously], one has apologized. The rest are attacking again, claiming that she is besmirching them, and picking apart the words of a woman who is distraught and in fear for her life. Well done. Anyone remember what number that hits on the apology scale?

I see now that my ethics code is incomplete. I left out one thing that I thought was not necessary to address, but I guess it has to be said:

Do No Harm

I will not attack, embarrass, humiliate, or make others fear for their safety. I will certainly not do so and then accuse my victims of being overly sensitive or needing to have thicker skin.

I will firstly do no harm. Beyond this, I will endeavor to create what is good and beneficial for society, rather than hurt it or waste its time.

Yehuda

In Defense of Hypocrisy

I don't defend punishing someone for something that you are also guilty of, but try to keep secret. I also don't defend lecturing about something that you don't really believe in.

What I defend is, in some situations, telling someone to do something that you don't. Without this type of hypocrisy, the world collapses.

Ideals

Ideals are, by definition, hard to achieve. We progress not by making our goals so easy that no effort is required, but by setting goals that are obtainable only after a long series of trials and errors.

The fact is that even the best of people have trouble living up to ideals. This fact is not justification for discarding the ideals, even when the people who fail at them tell us to strive for them.

In fact, sometimes it is the very people who have failed who are the people we should listen to most. An addicted smoker whose lungs are collapsing can make a powerful argument not to begin smoking, or to quit while you can, even when he isn't able to do so.

The Lowest Common Denominator

We use every opportunity to not fulfill our ideals, and that includes finding any person who doesn't fulfill them as justification for us not to. We find one authority figure who has failed, and say "well, if it's good enough for him ..."

In this way we have perfected the art of sinking to the lowest common denominator of behavior. You'll notice that the argument never seems to work the other way. We don't point to an authority figure who lives up to the ideal and say "well, if he can do it ..." Not when it conflicts with something we want to do, anyway.

I believe that we need to stop using hypocrisy as an excuse for our own low moral standards and behavior. We should listen to people when they tell us something important, even if the person telling us is less than perfect.

We should stop being afraid of expressing ideals. If we wait until we are perfect before we speak, we will not speak at all. Don't let others use our own failures as an excuse. Two wrongs don't make it right.

Ideals do not suffer in the hands of man; man can only fail to live up to them. Man suffers when he runs from ideals, instead of to them.

Yehuda

A Blogger Code of Ethics

One of the great things about blogging is its quick time to press. The very quickness in which they post leads to highly colorful prose not found in staid, traditional print journalism.

But along with the positive come the negative.

Boring old facts are often thrown in the gutter in favor of more colorful rumors. Charges and attacks are leveled without proper consideration and often without the ability for the targets to properly defend themselves.

Popular blog articles pander to popular taste, rather than raise the bar to provide quality reading material. The same people who cry about intrusions into public privacy maliciously expose the private lives of celebrity and private individual alike.

Like the practitioners of any other art form or media, bloggers should adopt a code of ethics. It is better to self-police than to come to the point that others feel the need to regulate you. Furthermore, it is desirable to stay within the bounds of legality and ethics.

Adapting from a few other sources (cited below), here is my Blogger's Code of Ethics. Feel free to adopt and adapt, as you will. You can copy my seal using the text box below.

[Update: added Do No Harm section Mar-27-2007]

Blogger Code of Ethics

Accuracy

I will post as accurate only information that I know to be accurate. Whenever possible, I will provide sources and links.

If accuracy may be in doubt, I will convey this to the reader.

Attribution

I will not plagiarize material, nor quote without attribution.

Comments

I will delete comments only when they violate the rules of my blog, such as needlessly inflammatory, racist, or spam comments.

Completeness

I will try to ensure that what I post is not only accurate but presents a complete picture, I won't post only part of a story or an argument.

I won't crop photos to misrepresent news.

Confidentiality

I will not reveal details that have been given to me in confidence.

I won't publish private emails unless explicitly permitted to do so. I won't publish names or details when asked not to do so.

Copyright

I will respect other people's copyrights and not post without the copyright holder's permission, except when abiding by the terms of "fair use" (generally small excerpts for journalistic purposes).

Correction

Unless my posting inadvertently violates one of the other codes mentioned, I will generally not change the URLs or delete my postings, although I may correct for grammar, clarity, or spelling.

If corrections need to be made, I will try to use strikeout rather than deleting the material and mark all updates as such.

Disclosure

I will let readers know if or when I use affiliate links or paid posts. I will disclose whenever I am affiliated with a company or received items as gifts.

Do No Harm

I will not attack, embarrass, humiliate, or make others fear for their safety. I will certainly not do so and then accuse my victims of being overly sensitive or needing to have thicker skin.

I will firstly do no harm. Beyond this, I will endeavor to create what is good and beneficial for society, rather than hurt it or waste its time.

Editing

I will try to ensure that my posts are edited for spelling, grammar, and clarity, and that all links are correct.

Fairness

I will always provide all facts relevant to an opinion when criticizing. I will always assume possible confusion or misunderstanding before labeling something or someone as fraudulent. In this case, I will first try to work things out privately, and, if not satisfied, let the facts speak for themselves in as unbiased a manner as possible.

Originality

I will try to provide original material of interest to my readership. I will not simply quote or link to other blogs.

Privacy

I will not pass on gossip about private individuals nor report on embarrassing facts about others. I will not link to or report information that is accidentally leaked.

Respect

I will respect my readers, critics, and subjects of my posts. I will discuss and answer all people with respect, regardless of age, sex, race, religion, nationality, ability, attractiveness, and social or economic status.

I will not respond with rudeness to rudeness. I will apologize when appropriate and stand on principle only when absolutely necessary.

Responsibility

I will affirm what are my own words and posts, and not claim credit for others, or deny responsibility for my own. I will clearly separate what are my own words from others.

Safety

I will not post anything that could endanger others' safety, including identifying information about minors or vulnerable individuals.

End Note About Humorous Posts

I may occasionally post something that appears to violate one of these codes if it is clear that my post is meant to be humorous or satirical. For instance, I may pretend that someone said something that he or she didn't for comic effect. Any post of this sort will be obviously intended as humor and I will ensure that it cannot be misconstrued otherwise.

Yehuda Berlinger

Copy this text to put the Blogger Code of Ethics seal on your blog:

<a href="http://jergames.blogspot.com/2007/03/blogger-code-of-ethics.html" title="Blogger Code of Ethics"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/165/427972070_f0ae71447b_o.gif" width="115" height="115" alt="Blogger Code of Ethics" /></a>
Further Sources:

Cyberjournalist
Forrester
Rebecca Blood
Wizbang

Update Apr-16-2007: Modular Code of Ethics

There has been a call for a modular Blogger Code of Conduct, ala the modular Creative Commons licenses. Jon Garfunkle proposed a language to describe a blogging code (which looks suspiciously like a "Geekcode" you would find at the end of a signature).

To create a modular blogging code, the first thing to do is to analyze how to break the code into pieces. There are essentially three main aspects to a code of conduct:

1: The blogger's own content.
2: Content by others on sites he or she controls.
3: Content on other people's sites.

The Blogger's Own Content

People have many different political opinions - liberal, conservative, religious, atheist, anarchist, high-brow, populist, etc. - and while cultural norms vary widely from place to place, and time to time, good manners is good manners regardless of how it is expressed in a specific culture's etiquette.

Ethics provides even less leeway. Respecting copyright and citing sources is independent of your politics or nationality. I welcome any cogently-argued dissenting views on this.

Until then, the following sections appear to me to be inviolable to anyone who wishes to be taken seriously, whether writing a book, blogging, or simply conversing: Accuracy, Attribution, Completeness, Confidentiality, Copyright, Disclosure, Do No Harm, Fairness, Respect, Responsibility, and Safety. These are the core elements of any basic blogging code.

Which leaves the sections: Comments, Correction, Originality, and Privacy.

Some people treat their blog as a scratch-pad or diary, while others treat it as journalism. For the former, the sections Comments, Correction, and Originality may not be appropriate.

Furthermore, while personally I consider the Privacy section to be inviolate, I acknowledge that this is not true for other people, such as gossip magazines and the like.

In contrast, there are people who would balk at adult material, profanity, "heresy", and perhaps other sorts of content restrictions that they wish to impose upon themselves.

So for a blogger's own content, you have four choices:

Basic Ethics: includes Accuracy, Attribution, Completeness, Confidentiality, Copyright, Disclosure, Do No Harm, Fairness, Respect, Responsibility, and Safety.

Basic Journalist: includes Basic Ethics, as well as Comments, Correction, Originality.

Special Ethics: includes Basic Ethics, as well as one or more of: Privacy, No Adult Material, No Heresy, No Profanity, etc... (to be specified)

Special Journalist: includes both Journalist and Special Ethics.

Content by Others on Sites the Blogger Controls

Whether commenters or other authors under your editorial control must identify themselves, and if they must follow the same ethics that you do or risk having their content removed or censored. For instance, you might personally not write any profanity, but allow your commenters to do so.

If your ethics is journalist or special journalist, you have already committed to ensuring the permanency of comments on your blog, so long as they don't violate any basic ethics.

Your choices are essentially:

Ownership: Other authors must identify themselves, according to rules specified elsewhere (a pseudonym, a valid email address, a personal conversation with the blogger, etc..),

Vs

Anonymous: Other authors may be anonymous. Anonymous authors may be subject to stricter rules enforcement.

And

Same Policy: Other authors must adhere to all special ethical rules the blogger obeys.

Vs

Relaxed Policy: Policy is less strictly enforced for some special ethical areas, such as allowing profanity in the comments.

So for other's content, you have four choices:

Owned/Same

Owned/Relaxed

Anon/Same

Anon/Relaxed

Content on Other People's Sites

When linking to, reporting on, or cooperating with other bloggers who follow the same ethical principles, follow basic ethical principles but not some special ones you adhere to, or violate basic ethical principles.

Your choices are essentially:

Same: Links only to others with the same or higher ethical standards. Of course, this begs the question: what is a "higher" standard? If one blog won't allow profanity, and another will, both can claim to be following "higher" standards. So I mean only that the other site, at a minimum, follows all the rules of your site, and possibly more.

Vs

Relaxed: Willing to link to or discuss items from other sites that have different ethical standards, so long as they do not violate basic standards.

And

Ignore: Will not get involved with or discuss sites that violate basic ethical standards.

Vs

Denounce: May occasionally denounce sites that violate basic ethical standards.

Again, four choices:

Same/Ignore

Same/Denounce

Relaxed/Ignore

Relaxed/Denounce

A Complete Code

So a complete code would look something like:

BE-OS-SI

or

SJ(no profanity or adult material)-AR(profanity tolerated)-RD

Yehuda

The Politics of Force

Capitalism Run Amok

You make something or you provide a service and you get money. You use that money to buy something or service from someone else. And round it goes.

What happens to those who break the system? For instance, you do a service for me, or give to me something, and then I decide not to pay you. Or I pay you, and you don't give to me the something or the service.

Sooner or Later, it All Comes Down to Guns

I pay a tax to support the services of people who enforce agreements. If I have any sort of complaint, and I can't resolve it with you, I turn to these authorities.

Either they command one of us to pay up, or they negotiate a settlement.

If you refuse the settlement, you might get fined.

If you refuse the fine, you will be summoned to court.

If you refuse to go to court, sooner or later it all comes down to guns. I'm going to force you to comply.

If behind every threat we warn that force is going to be brought into play, it's merely an extension of actually wielding the gun yourself. Is that the way we want it?

Force and Manners

There is an alternate system that operates concurrently with our expensive legal and police system. It's called manners. Manners, in essence, comprises everything we do that does not involve guns.

All societies have a mixture of both law and manners. One tends to take off where the other ends. A great amount of tension in our society revolves around where that division line is.

Manners work very well for small groups. A small group is one in which one's reputation will precede him or her. We don't need locks on the bedrooms of houses, generally.

The larger the group, the closer to certainty that you'll have people who take advantage of the lack of physical force. It takes one rotten apple to turn a community that leaves its doors open to one that has to lock them, and that apple will come from outside the community.

Along with bad apples you get the misguided. The misguided are those who argue that unless there is force, then there is no compulsion to do something. They reject the idea of manners and see only law. They're the ones who enact more and more laws to compel people by gun.

The more law encroaches on manners, the more complex and oppressive it becomes. The more oppressive, the more people begin to try to find ways to wriggle around it. The more they wriggle, the more laws are created, until the absurd is just a distant line behind you, and no one can remember any other way of dealing with the situation.

The more force brought into play, the more resentful people become. People forced don't become convinced that they are wrong; they act resentfully.

Manners provides alternate ways of compelling people. We shun bad businesses, warn our friends. We protest and demand. We accuse and we argue. If you are faced with a near universal boycott of your person, you could argue that this is tantamount to force, but it really isn't. Not only can you still choose, you can choose at your own speed.

Manners does not always produce the immediate effect that force does. But sometimes, it produces a far greater effect over a longer period of time.

What Do You Get When You Lose Faith In Force?

What do you get when force no longer seem to be working? You're in the situation where you have created too many laws, resulting in too many annoyed and wriggling people. You get people who think that once they get around the law, nothing else stands between what they want to do. That's because the enacters of the laws rejected manners, preparing the ground for those who wriggle around the laws to do the same.

You have two choices: unravel the laws and go back to manners, ignoring or punishing the few who ignore it; or try to enforce the laws using physical force.

More force means treating people like children. It means that no one believes the law does anything, so let's try to make it physically impossible for them to do it at all.

Physical force is a hugely moral problem. What if someone has a good reason to break the law, an emergency reason, or simply a moral right to do so and thereby suffer the consequences?

As long as we're treating people like children, shouldn't we at least learn from how we treat children?

There's more to child rearing than smacking bottoms or physically taking things away from children. Unless talking about life or limb, you have to let children cross the boundary and suffer the social or natural consequences.

IP and DRM

IP laws are unnecessary in a small community. As an example, I belong to a community of board gamers that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Although this appears to be a large community, it is small enough that your reputation becomes known if you do something particularly good or bad.

If someone in this community were to appropriate a game idea that I had developed, the bulk of the community would likely shun this person and their product, even though legally there would be nothing wrong with it. All the more so if someone absolutely copies my game or words.

As a result, I feel no particular need to back up any request not to do this with physical force.

DRM is predicated on this politics of force. It conveys that the current laws and threats of violence are insufficient, and that physical blocking is required. Since DRM can be broken, more laws are required to prevent people from doing so. Since these laws are insufficient, more physical blocking is required.

The idea that manners can have as large an effect as physical force seems to be a non-starter. Which is a shame.

The more laws and physical force used for this purpose, the more wriggling and uncomfortable the recipients of these laws and technologies become, and the less manners they exhibit. It's a doomed system heading for a crash.

Fixed Price vs Pay What You Want

A whole host of movements around the internet is trying to unravel the laws by rolling them back to only what is necessary (e.g. Creative Commons). It would serve everyone well to remember that laws and force are not the only options.

Business blogs love to point to the exceptional business models of those who offer money-back guarantees, treat their customers as adults, give their customers the benefit of the doubt, and so on.

A money-back guarantee is the vendor's means of reducing the threat of physical force. It tells the customer that he can cancel the agreement.

Even more of a return to manners is "pay what you want". Assuming that there is a basic sense of what something's value is (which there probably isn't, generally), this completely eliminates the physical force from the equation.

The Culture of Free

In a sense, this is where we're heading on the web.

I don't charge for my blog posts, of course. If for no other reason, it's because people would never have known me to begin with if I did. And if I tried to force people to pay me, they have millions of other ways to get their amusement.

On the other hand, people who read my blog and are entertained by it will spontaneously donate some money to me, perhaps equating the entertainment they get from reading my blog to how much they would pay for a book, a movie, or a subscription to a magazine.

It all happens without force. It's pay what you want. And this, despite the "culture of the free" on the Internet.

It you have been following the posts on various popular blogs, we are shifting toward this concept of the non-force business model. The music released without DRM on the Internet. The free and non-free versions of various web sites.

In this day and age, when I can listen to pretty much anything I want when I want for free, it doesn't stop me from buying music out of loyalty. When I can mock up any game that I read about, it doesn't stop me from buying games for the nicer components, for loyalty, for convenience.

The "culture of free" is a reaction against the politics of force: if you force me to pay, I will find a way to get what I want for free or do without. The same is not necessarily true in a society where manners is given more prominence. In this world, business still works, just without the threat of violence.

Yehuda Berlinger

A Call For Privacy

Privacy intersects with the Internet in two ways: fanatical people screaming about other people violating our privacy, and fanatical people violating the privacy of others.

I don't see how you can ramble on about government databases, needless registrations, aggregated visitor information, and so on, and then pound away at youtube and break.com to view and pass around every embarrassing moment in the private lives of other people, and not only stars, but the accidents of plain folk whose video legacy is now going to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

One would think that a respect for individual privacy would translate into action. If you don't want other people prying into every detail about your life that they can get their electronic hands on, how can you justify doing the same?

Anyone with even minimal good manners has learned to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to certain things that occur to everyone, with the polite fiction that they didn't notice these occurrences. While some curiosity about the normal lives of very public figures could at least be understood (not condoned), where is your excuse in watching some unknown person caught doing something humiliating in public or private, and then worse, passing it on for others to see and enjoy? Would you want someone gleefully leering at your mother or father, or sister or son doing the same?

We have moved beyond the amusing blooper of an actor forgetting his line and having a good laugh on the set. We're now just being mean and disgraceful. We are destroying lives for cheap laughs. And worse, people are now actively seeking out others to secretly tape and humiliate for a few moments of publicity or cash.

If we can't respect others' privacy, how can we demand that others respect ours?

There's more than enough seriously amusing, touching, or engrossing material around the web that we don't need to view or encourage others to violate other people's privacy.

Yehuda

Poker and Gambling

Poker

Poker to me is just another card game. Like other card games, I used to play this as a child.

We would play for poker chips. Each player would start the game off with a large stack of white chips, some reds, and some blues. One kid actually had yellow chips, which we would use for 50s. We would play until one of us ran out of chips, or until our parents had to leave, and we with them.

One of my best memories from my first trip to Israel when I was six years old was playing poker around a kitchen table with my brothers and cousins using sweetened cereal as chips. That's the type of poker game where, at the end of the evening when the "chips" are counted, it turns out that everyone has lost.

There are hundreds of variations of poker, and I must have played a large chunk of them: five card stud, blackjack, acey-deucy, high-low. Cards laid out in crosses or boxes, stars, or patterns, one handed, two handed, with wild cards and without. And so-on, unto the limits of our childhood imaginations.

Poker as a Game, Good and Bad

Like any other game, the game of poker has good and bad qualities.

Good:

• Ability to catch up and win at any time as long as you're still playing.
• Low learning curve.
• Cheap components.
• Many variations.
• Balanced play for all players, regardless of seat position.
• Accommodates from 2 to many players with ease and little downtime.
• Each round is very short.
• Players can enter or leave the game between rounds.
• The game's tactics are straightforward, but just difficult enough to keep things interesting.
• There are gradated winning opportunities.; while not all players can win, more than one can, and winning is not an absolute "yes" or "no", but measured in relative terms.
• The opportunity to "play your opponent" and "bluff" are both interesting mechanisms.

Bad:

• The card mechanics are rather trivial as far as tactics goes, if you're basically good at math.
• There is a whole lot of luck, which can be annoying.
• Rounds are short, which leaves little room for strategy.
• There is early player elimination if you run out of chips.
• Without adding a special rule limiting bet sizes or allowing borrowing, the rich can easily leverage out the poor from ever winning.

Gambling

Note what I left out of the bad column, which is Poker's biggest drawback: "played for money". Poker played for money is not the same as Poker played for chips, regardless of using the same basic mechanisms and components.

We never played for money. I have a religious objection to doing so, so I never will play for money. If gambling is about winning and losing money, then it's not really fun. As Robert Heinlein said, "There is no such thing as 'social gambling.' Either you are there to cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it -- or you're a sucker."

People who actually try to make a living out of gambling are serious; the more serious, the more they have to forget that they are expending a great deal of effort to accumulate wealth without actually doing something constructive for the world.

Most people get paid, at least allegedly, for building something, contributing, producing, helping, or in some way passing on lasting value to people. Even entertainers fall into that category, since they know that they owe a good time to the people who are parting with money to see them perform. Gamblers don't think of themselves as entertainers, however; if they did, they would owe the people from whom they take money a better show.

Gambling as Entertainment

Poker for money can still be fun, but only if you treat it as entertainment.

If I went to a casino and wanted to play a game of Poker, I would figure out how much money I wanted to spend on this type of entertainment, just as I would if I went to watch a game of football, or to see a movie.

Let's say a hundred dollars is the price that I'm willing to pay. I would take a hundred dollars out of my wallet, leave my wallet with my wife, and bet on the cheapest table there was in the house, allowing me to play for the longest period of time. If I come out having spent less than a hundred dollars, great. Otherwise, I received my entertainment for the price I was willing to spend.

But I know, as everyone else reading this also knows, it's not that simple.

Gambling and Addiction

I can blithely say how I would approach gambling as entertainment because I am not addicted to it.

It's the same way that I approach drinking. I want to drink a glass of wine, I drink a glass, and then I'm done. I understand that there are people who want to do this but can't. One drink, or one gamble, and they can't stop. The fact (or supposition, perhaps) that I am not addicted to gambling means that I am blessed. I realize this.

Gambling and the Law

A strong libertarian opinion asserts that governments should not interfere with people's addictions; that people should take care of themselves. If addiction is really a sickness and not simply irresponsibility, I find this opinion somewhat lacking in moral authority.

Gambling, alcohol, and so on are legally restricted to adults, but beyond that no controls are enforced. There are laws prohibiting these activities in certain places, but nothing prevents people from binging, or from enabling others to binge. Which seems kind of strange to me.

Wouldn't it be logical for limits to be suggested for certain activities? For instance, a limit of no more than X grams of alcohol should be consumed in any 24 hour period. Based on body weight, or what have you. Shops could sell bottles based on this suggested drinking limit per day. Similarly, it would be suggested to not spend over a certain amount of money per day on gambling, or accept or entice others to do the same.

Voluntary enforcement would recognize violations on these limits not as criminal, with fines and so on, but as sickness. Violators would be counseled. This wouldn't force people to comply, but would allow helpers to keep tabs on, and possibly intervene for, abuse situations.

You couldn't really enforce these suggestions as laws without seriously violating privacy issues and fueling criminal activity. Proactively checking people would force people to illegally gamble and drink at home. And think of the cost of legal enforcement.

Some people argue that all gambling should be illegal because some people become sick when exposed to it. That was the same argument made about prohibition of alcohol consumption in the early twentieth century. While not without a small amount of merit, I don't think such a position is warranted.

Gambling and Blogging

I bring up the subject of gambling as I have been receiving an increased number of contacts from people to host ads on my site, which is flattering. One of them was from the site Learn Texas Holdem.

LTH isn't itself a gambling site, although they link to gambling sites and earn a cut from doing so. They have an excellent collection of articles about Texas Holdem, which I think would be interesting to people who play the game. Owing to the quality of the articles, I was prepared to accept an advertisement from them.

Only then did I learn two things: The first is that Google Ad-Words may not be displayed on any site that "contains or displays adult content, promotes gambling, involves the sale of tobacco or alcohol to persons under twenty-one years of age, or otherwise violates applicable law." The other is that my wife objects to my hosting ads having to do with gambling (something about a reckless relative from her family's past).

With regards to Google's restriction, is it illegal to promote playing Poker to people under twenty-one if not encouraging them to play for money? Isn't it more immoral to promote gambling to people who are over 21 who are addicted? Do children who start playing cards for chips at an early age become more addicted later in life? Or do they learn the lessons of gambling early on?

Gambling and Gaming

Gaming was once synonymous with gambling, and in some blog-site listings it still is. Other sites variously link games with toys, sports, or entertainment.

Gambling is a gaming mechanism, and apparently a popular one. I don't like it as a mechanism when I'm playing a strategy game; I prefer my longer games to be less about player psychology and luck, and more about deep thinking and inspiration.

Playing Poker for "chips" takes a lot out of the game. For one thing, it is easy to bet 500 Cheerios without experiencing any real tension should you lose, especially on the last hand of the night. You can't do that with real cash.

But as a play mechanism, it's still fun. Especially when played with sweetened cereal.

Yehuda

A Little Authority

I rejected my first non-spam comment, but I felt a little guilty about it. It basically said a) I didn't read your post, b) something that proved that he didn't read my post, and c) my blog is crap.

I started comment moderation to catch spam, not to censure comments. Your comments have changed my opinions, on occasion, or have helped me to solidify arguments. I just couldn't see the point of this particular comment.

Which brings me to a question about blogs:

One of the qualities of a successful blog is its "authority" (or so Technorati calls it). That's a rather biased way of looking at blogging. It supposes that blogs must, perforce, follow the model of journalists and academics: a blog is a one-way street of authority. I'm the knowledge bringer. You're the readers. I get to speak from on-high. You get to passively appreciate, comment, or question.

That's a particularly narrow view of blogging, although it may be the normative model. As my experience with releasing "untested" variants for Puerto Rico showed me, a vast majority of people don't want to be engaged in a process of dialog; they want to be told what to do.

Is there room for a blogging dialog? Where the author and the commenters work together to arrive at a consensus? If I am supposed to be "right" every time I post, then I should be doing a whole lot more research and citing before posting. But if I'm not right all the time, am I failing your unstated expectations? Would that make my blog "crap"?

It may be that discussions among equals belong only in forums and chats. One can't help notice the caste difference between the Blogger, whose words are front and center, who wields controls over posting and the format of the page, from the commenters, who can't even edit their posts without deleting the old ones.

In which case, blogging really should be more like academics, and the 99% of the bloggers who are posting without checking their facts are wasting everyone else's time. Yet, I find it hard to look at blogging that way.

I reserve the right to post humbly, to assert an idea while accepting the possibility that I may be wrong and have to retract or change my opinion. I think if I only stick to ideas that I have researched thoroughly, I may as well be writing books, not blogging. I hope you are not investing your time here to read the whole truth, worked out.

In fact, I require a bit more of you than other bloggers; you have to keep on your toes and catch me when I make a mistake. I want a place to share ideas that are not necessarily wholly formed and need peer review by equally intelligent and capable people: that's you.

--

I have drafted the half-yearly index for Gone Gaming, and with it I will be posting a farewell message. Although, I may send GG a few articles now and then.

The only reason that I haven't converted to the new blogger yet is because people whose profiles include blogs with multiple contributors can't convert to the new format; or I'm just special, or something.

After I post this Tuesday, I will drop out of Gone Gaming, and then hopefully convert. Hilarity then ensues.

--

I have a few links saved on my Firefox tabs at work, for which you will have to wait. In the meantime:

Thomas Laursen has unveiled Board Game Prices, an excellent web 2.0 game pricing site.

The New York Times weighs in on the Super Columbine affair.

Valerie Putman makes an intersting observation about the ethics of going for the "dumb win".

And Home Tribune News covers Euro-games.

Yehuda

Slamdance: The Controversy

As the few of you who read blogs other than this one may be aware, a large controversy is bubbling about the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition.

This controversy came to my attention via numerous blog and news reports of contestants withdrawing their games from the competition following the organizer's decision to first accept and then drop the game "Super Columbine Massacre", a lovely game of re-enacting the merciless slaughter of bucketfuls of defenseless children while the real-life victims are still warm in their graves.

And so the nature of the controversy is patently obvious to all: who the heck chose the name "Slamdance" for a video game competition? Is this supposed to hearken back to once-cool cultural touchstones like "breakdance" or to associate with the totally uncool "Dance Dance Revolution" craze?

In other news, Headz Games continues its descendancy from potential employer of 1,500 people and salvation for the town of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, to filing for bankruptcy. And there ends that.

d21 follows up yesterday's board game article with a great post about the old game of Dune.

And along with many others, I will point to an amazing work of journalism by Michael Totten, who travels through southern Lebanon and gives us a real look at what's happening there, post-war.

Yehuda

Whither art thou, tracksy?

I'm astonished not to have read anything about tracksy.com's outage on any other blogs. It's not just me, is it?

tracksy.com, one of the top blog stat services, has been out since at least Friday. On Friday, all you could see was the entire Perl code reprinted on your screen. Since about Saturday, this has been replaced with an apology for a temporary outage over the weekend. It's now Tuesday, and no signs of life.

I sent them an email simply asking how long the outage will be and have received no response. Considering how many other people use tracksy, I would have expected to hear more noise about it in the Blogosphere.

I also have Google Analytics running, and I've always considered moving to another stat system, since tracksy is only free until 25,000 recorded page views a month. I have come close to passing that on occasion. But then, tracky somehow manages to lose some of my stats anyway, and the number drops again. Not exactly the most reliable of services, although it is free and I like the formatting.

Hopefully, this is just a blip.

Update Jan 11: Finally, they're back up, although they have lost several days worth of information and apparently a lot of user accounts, as well. As I'm a free customer, I have no cause to complain. If I were a paying customer, however, I would be rather upset. Not professional, guys.

Game Links:

Board Game Speed Dating - a little racy, but there you have it.

An article about Virtual Research Ethics at gamesblog, analyzing the parallel ethical issues of research on people within virtual worlds to real world issues.

d21 talks about why we game as opposed to other activities, and flatteringly coins the word "Yehudesque". And I thought my wife was going to be turned into an adjective before I was.

Bil Toland of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette laments how even games like Trivial Pursuit are becoming dumber with each new edition.

Games Workshop, of Warhammer and some board games fame, is not meeting its profits expectations.

The Claremont Courier carries an article about a local game store, Gameology, and a nice article about new games. And several papers carry a similar article about the Changing Hands Book Shoppe, in Joplin, Mo.

Yehuda

Tag: tracksy

Linkety Link

I love you all so much, here's a bunch of links to help you through the week:

The Escapist tackles Games and Mythmaking. One article I particularly like is about a Hindu non-violent shooter game, if that makes any sense to you.

Next Generation has a list of fifty game related books, helpful for students of game design and game theory.

The Looking Glass has a nice article on the benefits of playing games. The article is by Dr Toy, and I found it via Bernie DeKoven. The article has a lot of interesting and useful links to follow.

Apparently there is a new hyped CCG on the scene called "The Spoils". It's not yet released, but you can download the rules and sample cards on their site.

More board games I never knew about:

Yet another sex ed game, this one called Contraception.

And a game called "Go Away, Monster!", which teaches children not to fear the monster under the bed.

Mainstream Press:

Covers OshCon.

The huge Alliance Game Distributors center in Fort Wayne, TX, holding 16,000 games and products, and host to a Retailer Summit next week.

Bridge in Baltimore, and how it used to be as popular as Poker is today.

Session Report, in Which Offense is Inadvertantly Given

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is here. Games
played: Quo Vadis, Santiago, Rheinländer*, Cosmic Encounter, Princes of Florence, Magic: the Gathering, Settlers of Catan, Capitol*, Bridge.

*games abandoned midway

Here's the story:

One of last night's players brought Rheinländer, another of your typical Euro-abstract games with a medieval theme thrown onto it. In fact, like many of these games, the artwork for the theme seems designed to make the game more confusing, rather than more interesting. The board winds back and forth, and it is sometimes hard to see when border areas touch and to which areas the castles and churches adjoin.

Anyhoo ...

The owner of the game felt uncomfortable with the Christian symbols that appear on some of the game's useless pieces. There's nothing unusual about this.

Some of you may recall that I felt uncomfortable about one of the phases in Amun-Re, the one that required me to say "now we all make sacrifices to Amun-Re". In order to get around this discomfort, I simply changed the phase to "now we all bribe the corrupt water official". If I had actually owned the game, I probably would have blackened out any references to the sacrifices on the game's pieces, but mine was a borrowed copy.

I don't particularly feel any discomfort with simply having Christian symbols on my game pieces. My wife is a PhD candidate in medieval literature, so I'm used to having the New Testament and the Koran in my house, books I would otherwise have no use for.

However, I perfectly understand those who would feel uncomfortable with symbols of other religions on their games. Such as the owner of this game. So it didn't surprise me that the owner had blackened out these particular pieces in order to cover over the crosses.

As we began to play the game, I had absolutely no idea about any of this, of course. I saw some little disks with black abstract squiggles on them and didn't look closely at them. Those pieces were wholly irrelevant to the game play, anyway. Nor did I notice when Brendan began to take notice of them.

Brendan is a lovely guy from Australia who is in Israel for the better part of a year, and has been a regular at the group. He is also a religious Anglican. We have become friends, even though we find ourselves quite divided over certain political issues with regards to Israel.

Brendan is very friendly, and usually smiling, even when he is upset by something. So I took no notice when he was closely examining these little pieces.

Somehow he figured out that the pieces originally had crosses on them that had been squiggled over. I looked at them later and still have no idea how he figured this out. They were covered very well.

Brendan then asked the owner why he had drawn on them; he appeared to be considering the possibility that the owner may have had some visual problems with the pieces and had drawn on them simply to up their contrast or something similar. I don't remember the owner's answer. But I remember what came next.

Brendan, still smiling, but obviously troubled, said that he could no longer play the game, as he felt uncomfortable playing a game where his religious symbol had been desecrated. This was my first indication that something was wrong, and only then did I begin to piece together what I have already explained up until now.

He left the room and came back. He magnanimously said that he understood why the owner had done this, but that he couldn't continue with the game. I got the feeling that he was struggling with a certain amount of anger with the owner despite knowing that the owner had a right to do as he wished with his own game.

Naturally, we put the game away. We suggested that either we avoid playing this game in the future, or simply replace the marked pieces with poker chips which would serve just as well. We left this up in the air.

It got me thinking about Judaism's own symbols. Jews couldn't care less about a drawn over Jewish star, assuming that it was not drawn over specifically as an insult, in which case it is the insult, not the star, that would bother us. This is because the star is a nationalistic symbol, not a religious one. We don't feel it's destruction as any real sort of desecration.

On the other hand, we would feel that way about holy books or scrolls that have God's name in them, or about certain spaces, such as synagogues or our temple, or certain times, such as Yom Kippur.

I apologized to Brendan on behalf of the group. And I put it to you: Has anything similar ever happened to you?

Yehuda

Weekend Coming

I traded Goa for Santiago; I finally received my game. Of course, this is also the week that I asked Binyamin to leave me his copy of Santiago until next game night, so now I have two copies lying around for a week.

Weekend is coming. Saarya is with us, and I hope to play something with him. Eitan is also with us, but he doesn't play games except for war games, and only if there is a lot of killing in them.

Rachel and I may play something, and Nadine may come over, too. That would be nice.

Kris Hall has written an interesting article in my field of games and ethics on Gone Gaming. In the article, he covers the game I mentioned about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Apparently, the designer has come under attack for the game and has decided not to print it after all. He then asks the usual questions about game themes: do we stay away from offensive themes in order to avoid the situation of players having "fun" doing something morally problematic, or do we print these games in the hope of educating and memorializing the events?

I've dealt with these issues before, such as here.

Yehuda

Board Game Geek Game Awards

Board Game Geek is finally entering the fray with their own board game awards. These are going to be user voted awards for best game in six or seven categories each year. As others have noted, it's hard to see a point behind this, considering that a) the board games are already ranked on BGG, and how will the awards be any different? and b) there are too many darn awards already for board games.

Link: As Guy pointed out in one of the comments, here is an article in Scientific American studying "expertise" through the lens of chess players.

Addition: And Board Game News is starting a column answering reader questions, apparently about ethical situations (and maybe other questions as well).

Yehuda

A one off

This is not the first article in my series, but a criticism of one recent article on the topic: The Brain Workout by Brian Anderson on OpinionJournal.

I am NOT going to argue whether or not I agree with the thrust of the article, which is a defense of video gaming. I am only going to point out that I think he doesn't do a good job of it.

Brian is responding to charges leveled against the video game industry for its R-rated graphic violence. His defenses are, essentially: a) there's not as much violence as they say, b) violence is good for you anyway, and c) there are good things about video games as well.

As for a), he cites:

more than 80% of the top-selling titles for the past five years came with the video-game industry's "Everyone" or "Teen" ratings, meaning that parents can assume reasonably inoffensive game content ...

and a few paragraphs later writes:

A T-rated game for example, might warn: "Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language and Suggestive Themes."

I don't know about your family, but blood, gore, intense violence, strong language, and suggestive themes are not what I would consider reasonably inoffensive game content. My own look at the top selling games on Amazon and Wikipedia reveal that, with the exception of The Sims, Myst, and Railroad Tycoon, they sure look pretty bloody to me. Some of them are probably reasonably inoffensive, but not most.

Compare this to the list of top selling books and movies. Sure, some of the top selling books have some sex and violence in them here or there, but not for hours on end, unrelenting, without anything else in between, and not as the single primary plot point. Ditto for movies. Perhaps the important words here are "unrelenting" and "primary". The fact is: the majority of these games are based around entertainment using depictions of violence, with some strategy or tactics used to control this. Don't beat around the bush.

As for b) , two of his defenses are:

And with many titles selling for $50 or $60 a pop, how many children can get a hold of games without mom's or dad's consent in the first place?

If you're through laughing at this, let's move on to the next one.

Some observers speculate that playing violent video games may be cathartic, channeling pre-existing violent impulses into virtual reality, where they can do no harm.

This is a great theory, and probably the most bandied about one in the history of the defense of video games. It happens to be the only thing that can get you off the hook. However, please note that no sources are quoted to support this theory. I am sure that there are such sources (just go to Techdirt, they're sure to have some), and I'm just as sure that I can point you to many more sources pointing out the opposite.

The problem here is that a video game advocate pushing this defense is as believable as the Tobacco industry pushing the "not proven to cause cancer" defense. Isn't there just a little self-interest in wanting to believe this? The fact is that video games are vastly more violent, unrelentingly, and primarily, than other forms of entertainment. The fact is that this entertainment is in its infancy and that this is the first generation of children who commit this virtual graphic violence for many hours a day for years at a time. And the fact is that this industry is raking in colossal amounts of money, and is no more interested in your welfare than is the tobacco industry.

Are you really prepared to possibly let your children come to permanent harm on the basis of what appears to be a pretty flimsy defense with direct contradictory evidence? If a really attractive candy were made available to kids, with ten studies showing that it caused brain damage and another ten showing that it was not entirely proved to cause brain damage, wouldn't some more fact finding be the appropriate step before letting kids go wild and consume as much as they wanted?

In the meantime, we come to argument c). It is hard to argue that some video games can teach many benefits. However, this ignores a few points:

First of all, reading can also teach many benefits, but not all reading teaches benefits as effectively as any other reading. If you digest reams of junk literature (just look at the top selling book list ;-) ), you are not getting the same value as you would from making critical choices with your reading literature. It is not popular literature that is worthwhile, but good literature. I'm not in the business of telling you what is good or bad; but you have to at least make some sort of value-assessment. I will go out on a limb and suggest that the same would apply to video games. Which is why Brian's statement

As for my kids navigating the game, wouldn't it be comparable with
their playing chess for hours?

is almost as unbelievable as his "children can't get a hold of video games without consent" sentence above. In short, no. Chess is a great game. It teaches you to calm down, focus, think many many moves ahead in advance, act slowly and with deliberation, and consider before acting. The game provides a well structured goal even when you probably can't win, there is no visceral violence, and the metagame includes mannered rules of analysis, social behavior, and etiquette. There is a clear path to understanding how to manage scant resources, and how influence and positioning delicately balance. And there are no cheat codes. I doubt there are many video games that can compare to chess as far as worthwhile uses of one's time.

Second of all, even if you prove that a game has many great values, this does not make up for any negative values, any more than a highly nutritious piece of wheat bread is good eating if it is soaked in floor cleaner. I'm not saying that any particular game is or is not this type of equivalence; I am merely saying that promoting benefits does not answer the criticism of negative effects.

Yehuda

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