Another session report from the Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club is up here. Games played: Fluxx x 2, Scotland Yard, New England, Goldland, Bridge.
Yehuda
P.S. I lost a few subscribers shortly after my "civil marriage" post. Did it really offend anyone? I can't understand why; it seems like at the very most people would simply dismiss it as impractical.
Am I simply posting to frequently? Is that a turn off? Wrong subject matter? Content not high enough quality?
I'm happy with what I'm writing. If you're not, feel free to comment. I may not change what I'm writing, but I'll listen!
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
My history with electronic games, part 1: 1970s
I was trying to make a larger post, but I came to realize that I was never going to get it out unless I broke into pieces. So here is part 1, my history with electronic, computer, and video gaming in the 1970s. Part 2 is here, part 3 is here, and part 4 is here.
I was born in 1969, so the 1970s were the kid years for me. By the 1980s, I was already in high school or college.
The following list is alphabetical. Some images are creative commons, others are not, but links are provided back to their source. In some instances, links go to sites where you can learn more about the game or even play the game.
Air Hockey
This was probably my favorite thing to play in an arcade. The object is to knock a flat puck into your opponent's goal eleven times before he does it. The clack-clack sounds of the puck and walls was hypnotic. Playing against a human had something that even the best arcade games didn't. It was also one of those games that I'm just pretty good at.
I would bank shot a lot. If the volley continued, I would break the flow of their concentration by knocking the puck faster and faster back and forth to myself against a few walls until finally knocking it right in to their goal.
I loved the way the delicate air pressure felt when you put your hand onto the surface of the board.
You can still play air hockey in arcades. In Israel I don't know that many of them, and I'm not disposed to losing my shekels in them for a few minutes of play.
Arcade games
I would play arcade games with any spare change that I had by the time I was eight or so. There were always a few at the pizza store, bowling alley, or outside the supermarket. Full rooms full of arcade games didn't hit until the eighties.
Asteroids
You shot the spinning asteroids and spaceships, and the asteroids broke into little pieces that you also had to shoot. I definitely played this in both arcade and console versions. I was ok, but not great, and I usually began to die quickly after the little more accurate ships appeared.
Atari Game Console
Yeah, we had one of these, while my neighbor got one of the Intellivision systems. We probably owned no more than fifteen cassettes over its lifetime. Those funky joysticks with the red button took a lot of abuse.
Blip
You had to choose the right button to press before a little red blip went past your side of the board. This was pretty dumb. As I recall, the little red led would come at a random paddle, so even though it looked like you were playing against an opponent, you were really both playing against the electronics.
Breakout
Knock the blocks out of the wall and then get a new wall and do it again. I played this just a bit in the arcade versions, and more so on the Atari. I also programmed my own version on both the Commodore 64 and Apple II computers.
I also programmed many other games on these computers. Whenever our computer had fairs of some sort, I would bring in the computer and kids would have to pay a "ticket" to play my game in order to win prizes.
Centipede
This was also one of my good ones. You have to kill the centipede and falling spiders before they ran over me, but if you hit the centipede mid-section it broke into little pieces. Mushrooms were in your way. If you cleared out all of the mushrooms on the bottom of your screen, which were meant to interfere with your movement, new ones would be planted. I was good at leaving only the ones at the side of the screen, which didn't interfere with my movement. Also, if you could arrange it, you got the centipede to go straight down a mushroom corridor where automatic fire would kill the whole thing at once before it could split up.
Collosal Cave Adventure (Dungeo, Advent, Zork)
This was the original text based adventure game. Probably almost every computer game today is essentially based on it. It evolved into graphical adventure games, and then into the shooter and resource civ games.
The game gave you text descriptions of what was happening, and you had to respond in some terse style of text commands. The game remembered where you picked things up or dropped them.
But the original spawned many famous hacker culture phrases, such as "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", and so on.
I played this on the PDP-11, occasionally on a printer monitor (that is, not a TV type screen like the one you are sitting in front of, but a monitor that is a printer. Everything you typed in or was typed by the computer showed up on the printer.
I never actually finished it. XYZZY.
Digital Derby
Gosh, I still have this on my shelf, although the battery cover is missing. And it still works. It is really noisy and obnoxious.
Your car doesn't move. Instead, there are two strips of plastic with cars printed on them that scroll by at different speeds, which you can adjust by "changing gears". You have to simply move your car back and forth as they scroll by, avoiding collisions. If you fail, a loud red light and a buzzer flash.
The game is timed at 55 seconds, and your score is related to a counter that increases depending on your speed.
Donkey Kong
Played on both arcade and Atari versions. This big ape rolls barrels at you which you have to jump over while climbing ladders. This game eventually became Mario Brothers.
Galaxian
The first color computer game, all the spaceships would drift back and forth in a holding pattern (like Space Invaders) while a few would peel off and try to attack you. If you didn't kill them, they would reappear at the top of the screen and rejoin their brothers.
Not as good as it's similar successor, Galaga.
Mattel Classic Football
This was one of our handheld led games. We had this one, an advanced version that also let you go backwards (the first one didn't), and probably something else, too.
You were a bright red blip on a 3 by 10 field. You had to move your blip past the dimmer blips to the other end of the field, while they tried to intercept you. You could only move forward if they left a hole for you to slip through, so you had to click the buttons fast when the hole appeared.
And I didn't even like sports.
Microvision - Block Buster, Bowling, and Pinball
We had this cartridge system. It was my brother's actually, some sort of birthday present. We ended up with the three games listed. They were about as diverting as snake is on your cellphone. Back then, that meant a lot.
Operation
I never liked this then, even. It was pretty stupid. You had to take the objects out of the part of the body indicated by a spinner without touching the metal surrounding the hole. If you touched, a buzzer went off.
Pacman
You had to move around in a maze devouring all of the little dots while avoiding the monsters chasing you. Yeah, I played it, but I never got past level 7 or so. A later monochrome computer version was pretty cool and I got much further. The reason to do well was to see the little animated sketches that appeared after every three levels.
Perfection
Another timed game, where you have to fit the pieces into the right slots before the board shoved them all up into your face. Also dumb.
Pinball
I do enjoy a good game of pinball, when I can find an uncomplicated one that doesn't have a huge hole between the flipper's reach. If the game is too short, I don't feel like I got my money's worth.
Pong
Did I have a dedicated Pong machine? I think I did. You played against your brother, so again, it was cool. I think my brother won about 60% of the games. I was already learning about wiring and television cabling by this point.
Simon
Each player was responsible for timely pressing their color in order to replay sequences after they were played (at increasing speeds). I don't recall playing this all too much. I probably would have been very good at it over the last twenty years, but I'm starting to slow down.
Slot car racing track
These were made out of plastic and tended to break a lot, or the wires wouldn't connect well and required some hacking. Most of these had little pins on the bottom of each car that kept it in its slot, but some allowed you to switch tracks through some sort of magnetic changeover feature.
Space Invaders
Aliens would march across the screen, move down one step, and then march the other way across the screen. You had to kill them before they reached the ground. In the meantime, they fired at you, and you had some protective blocks.
If you eliminated the bottom row of ships, they moved faster. But you had to ignore the rows and think columns. By eliminating the end columns, the marching took that much longer. Also, the best trick was to shoot your own hole through a protective block from the bottom and then shoot straight up with cover.
Simple and addictive.
Stop Thief
The game starts with the thief in a random location. When ever you push a button, you hear clues as to where he moving and what he is doing. Footsteps (yump yump yump) or breaking glass (brinkle brinkle!). The first to move to the correct location and guess the thief's whereabouts wins, or something like that. The thief's location would scroll across the LED screen.
Wumpus
A simple game to pass the time. Each game was a unique maze, and you had to shoot the wumpus before he killed you. It was a text game, where the information you had was only what exits there were in your current room, and some mysterious clues like flying bats. If you moved without first acquiring a light source, you were likely to fall into a pit or be eaten by a grue.
Silly, really, but nifty programming.
By the end of this decade, I had also gone through dozens of card games, become passable at bridge, and began playing both Cosmic Encounter and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
Yehuda
Technorati tags: game, games, computer games, video games, console games, vintage games, gaming, atari, arcade games
I was born in 1969, so the 1970s were the kid years for me. By the 1980s, I was already in high school or college.
The following list is alphabetical. Some images are creative commons, others are not, but links are provided back to their source. In some instances, links go to sites where you can learn more about the game or even play the game.
Air Hockey
This was probably my favorite thing to play in an arcade. The object is to knock a flat puck into your opponent's goal eleven times before he does it. The clack-clack sounds of the puck and walls was hypnotic. Playing against a human had something that even the best arcade games didn't. It was also one of those games that I'm just pretty good at.
I would bank shot a lot. If the volley continued, I would break the flow of their concentration by knocking the puck faster and faster back and forth to myself against a few walls until finally knocking it right in to their goal.
I loved the way the delicate air pressure felt when you put your hand onto the surface of the board.
You can still play air hockey in arcades. In Israel I don't know that many of them, and I'm not disposed to losing my shekels in them for a few minutes of play.
Arcade games
I would play arcade games with any spare change that I had by the time I was eight or so. There were always a few at the pizza store, bowling alley, or outside the supermarket. Full rooms full of arcade games didn't hit until the eighties.
Asteroids
You shot the spinning asteroids and spaceships, and the asteroids broke into little pieces that you also had to shoot. I definitely played this in both arcade and console versions. I was ok, but not great, and I usually began to die quickly after the little more accurate ships appeared.
Atari Game Console
Yeah, we had one of these, while my neighbor got one of the Intellivision systems. We probably owned no more than fifteen cassettes over its lifetime. Those funky joysticks with the red button took a lot of abuse.
Blip
You had to choose the right button to press before a little red blip went past your side of the board. This was pretty dumb. As I recall, the little red led would come at a random paddle, so even though it looked like you were playing against an opponent, you were really both playing against the electronics.
Breakout
Knock the blocks out of the wall and then get a new wall and do it again. I played this just a bit in the arcade versions, and more so on the Atari. I also programmed my own version on both the Commodore 64 and Apple II computers.
I also programmed many other games on these computers. Whenever our computer had fairs of some sort, I would bring in the computer and kids would have to pay a "ticket" to play my game in order to win prizes.
Centipede
This was also one of my good ones. You have to kill the centipede and falling spiders before they ran over me, but if you hit the centipede mid-section it broke into little pieces. Mushrooms were in your way. If you cleared out all of the mushrooms on the bottom of your screen, which were meant to interfere with your movement, new ones would be planted. I was good at leaving only the ones at the side of the screen, which didn't interfere with my movement. Also, if you could arrange it, you got the centipede to go straight down a mushroom corridor where automatic fire would kill the whole thing at once before it could split up.
Collosal Cave Adventure (Dungeo, Advent, Zork)
This was the original text based adventure game. Probably almost every computer game today is essentially based on it. It evolved into graphical adventure games, and then into the shooter and resource civ games.
The game gave you text descriptions of what was happening, and you had to respond in some terse style of text commands. The game remembered where you picked things up or dropped them.
But the original spawned many famous hacker culture phrases, such as "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", and so on.
I played this on the PDP-11, occasionally on a printer monitor (that is, not a TV type screen like the one you are sitting in front of, but a monitor that is a printer. Everything you typed in or was typed by the computer showed up on the printer.
I never actually finished it. XYZZY.
Digital Derby
Gosh, I still have this on my shelf, although the battery cover is missing. And it still works. It is really noisy and obnoxious.
Your car doesn't move. Instead, there are two strips of plastic with cars printed on them that scroll by at different speeds, which you can adjust by "changing gears". You have to simply move your car back and forth as they scroll by, avoiding collisions. If you fail, a loud red light and a buzzer flash.
The game is timed at 55 seconds, and your score is related to a counter that increases depending on your speed.
Donkey Kong
Played on both arcade and Atari versions. This big ape rolls barrels at you which you have to jump over while climbing ladders. This game eventually became Mario Brothers.
Galaxian
The first color computer game, all the spaceships would drift back and forth in a holding pattern (like Space Invaders) while a few would peel off and try to attack you. If you didn't kill them, they would reappear at the top of the screen and rejoin their brothers.
Not as good as it's similar successor, Galaga.
Mattel Classic Football
This was one of our handheld led games. We had this one, an advanced version that also let you go backwards (the first one didn't), and probably something else, too.
You were a bright red blip on a 3 by 10 field. You had to move your blip past the dimmer blips to the other end of the field, while they tried to intercept you. You could only move forward if they left a hole for you to slip through, so you had to click the buttons fast when the hole appeared.
And I didn't even like sports.
Microvision - Block Buster, Bowling, and Pinball
We had this cartridge system. It was my brother's actually, some sort of birthday present. We ended up with the three games listed. They were about as diverting as snake is on your cellphone. Back then, that meant a lot.
Operation
I never liked this then, even. It was pretty stupid. You had to take the objects out of the part of the body indicated by a spinner without touching the metal surrounding the hole. If you touched, a buzzer went off.
Pacman
You had to move around in a maze devouring all of the little dots while avoiding the monsters chasing you. Yeah, I played it, but I never got past level 7 or so. A later monochrome computer version was pretty cool and I got much further. The reason to do well was to see the little animated sketches that appeared after every three levels.
Perfection
Another timed game, where you have to fit the pieces into the right slots before the board shoved them all up into your face. Also dumb.
Pinball
I do enjoy a good game of pinball, when I can find an uncomplicated one that doesn't have a huge hole between the flipper's reach. If the game is too short, I don't feel like I got my money's worth.
Pong
Did I have a dedicated Pong machine? I think I did. You played against your brother, so again, it was cool. I think my brother won about 60% of the games. I was already learning about wiring and television cabling by this point.
Simon
Each player was responsible for timely pressing their color in order to replay sequences after they were played (at increasing speeds). I don't recall playing this all too much. I probably would have been very good at it over the last twenty years, but I'm starting to slow down.
Slot car racing track
These were made out of plastic and tended to break a lot, or the wires wouldn't connect well and required some hacking. Most of these had little pins on the bottom of each car that kept it in its slot, but some allowed you to switch tracks through some sort of magnetic changeover feature.
Space Invaders
Aliens would march across the screen, move down one step, and then march the other way across the screen. You had to kill them before they reached the ground. In the meantime, they fired at you, and you had some protective blocks.
If you eliminated the bottom row of ships, they moved faster. But you had to ignore the rows and think columns. By eliminating the end columns, the marching took that much longer. Also, the best trick was to shoot your own hole through a protective block from the bottom and then shoot straight up with cover.
Simple and addictive.
Stop Thief
The game starts with the thief in a random location. When ever you push a button, you hear clues as to where he moving and what he is doing. Footsteps (yump yump yump) or breaking glass (brinkle brinkle!). The first to move to the correct location and guess the thief's whereabouts wins, or something like that. The thief's location would scroll across the LED screen.
Wumpus
A simple game to pass the time. Each game was a unique maze, and you had to shoot the wumpus before he killed you. It was a text game, where the information you had was only what exits there were in your current room, and some mysterious clues like flying bats. If you moved without first acquiring a light source, you were likely to fall into a pit or be eaten by a grue.
Silly, really, but nifty programming.
By the end of this decade, I had also gone through dozens of card games, become passable at bridge, and began playing both Cosmic Encounter and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
Yehuda
Technorati tags: game, games, computer games, video games, console games, vintage games, gaming, atari, arcade games
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Linkety Link
I played a game of San Juan with Tal. Tie score, 36 to 36, and no cards each. I had Guild and City Halls and a 3 card Chapel but only 10 buildings. She had 12 buildings with Guild Hall and Palace.
We decided to play after unsuccessfully trying to create pieces for a new design I want to test out. It became clear that drawing the cards by hand wasn't the way to do it. I will have to do it digitally first and then print it out.
A few links:
Jewlicious noted a post on top 100 blog Daily Kos which sure struck me as being an anti-semitic diatribe, and then posted a link to Ace of Spades. AoS linked to Jewlicious, and the comments on its linkpost are quite amusing. A catalog of Jewish conspiracies.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo, another top 100 blog, just discovered Carcassonne.
Raph Koster's Theory of Fun site includes this little presentation on why games matter.
Eh. I had another, but I seem to have misplaced it.
I will be missing game night tomorrow night. Nadine has kindly offered to host it. Hopefully we will hear some report after the evening.
Yehuda
We decided to play after unsuccessfully trying to create pieces for a new design I want to test out. It became clear that drawing the cards by hand wasn't the way to do it. I will have to do it digitally first and then print it out.
A few links:
Jewlicious noted a post on top 100 blog Daily Kos which sure struck me as being an anti-semitic diatribe, and then posted a link to Ace of Spades. AoS linked to Jewlicious, and the comments on its linkpost are quite amusing. A catalog of Jewish conspiracies.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo, another top 100 blog, just discovered Carcassonne.
Raph Koster's Theory of Fun site includes this little presentation on why games matter.
Eh. I had another, but I seem to have misplaced it.
I will be missing game night tomorrow night. Nadine has kindly offered to host it. Hopefully we will hear some report after the evening.
Yehuda
Monday, June 19, 2006
It's Time to End Civil Marriage
Here we go: a rare political post from me.
As you may know, I am a religious Jew. For some reason, many people assume that that means that I am in favor of imposing my religion on other people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jews and Missionizing
The Jewish religion is perhaps unique in not only not caring whether other people are Jewish, but actively discouraging them from being so. Why? Because it isn't necessary.
Consider the following: Jews consist of priests (cohanim), levites, and lay persons. Only those descended from the tribe of Levi become either levites or priests, and only those descended from Aaron become priests.
The priests and levites have a very specific role in Judaism: to serve in the temple. Without a temple, the modern day distinctions between priests and lay people is that priests ascend before the congregation at prayer time and give over a blessing to the congregation, acting as a conduit for God's blessing. The levites job is simply to wash the hands of the priests before the blessing.
In return for this service, priests and levites get first crack at being called up to the torah during public torah reading. That's it.
I don't know a single lay person who has every said "I wish I was a priest". Do you know why? Because being a priest means being chosen to do more work. It doesn't earn them a higher place in heaven, and the small honor given to them at torah reading is not worth fighting over. Anyway, the priests minister to the people. If everyone is a priest, there are no people to minister to.
Jews consider themselves a nation of priests, who have special work to do in order to minister to the world. It's just a job, given to us by birth. It's like if a father asks one of his kids: go out and fetch me a chair. Ten kids fetching the chair doesn't do him any good, nor does it mean that the other nine kids who didn't fetch the chair are being neglected. OK, we may get a pat on the head afterwards for doing the work. But we also risk all that is associated with bungling the job.
Why on earth would you want to volunteer for that?
I tell you all this only to prove to you that I have no interest in imposing my will on others. Especially as a Jew, a religion whose people who have had others' wills painfully forced on theirs so often, I can tell you that I am a firm believer in the separation of church (or synagogue or mosque) and state.
That includes right here in Israel.
Marriage in Israel
One of the sad things about Israel is that it does not have rigorous separation between church and state. This is a huge problem, and stems from the dual nature of being both a democracy, yet having to ensure that the country remains a place where no majority will ever be able to make Jews and their practices feel unwelcome.
In Israel, there is no civil marriage, but the state forces anyone who wants to get married to do so via state sponsored religious unions. If you are Jewish, you must go through the rabbinate, and if you are Christian, through a church accepted and overseen by the state.
Unfortunately, the rabbinate is entirely religious, what you may call Orthodox. Other forms of Judaism, such as secular or Conservative, are not recognized by the rabbinate. So to get married if you're Jewish, you have to get married in a religious Jewish ceremony.
Various politicians have tried to change that over the years, and a new initiative is trying to claim that absence of civil marriage is a violation of human rights.
In my opinion, this is not addressing the heart of the problem, which is the tight linkage between church and state in Israel. If the state did not force everyone to go through a religious ceremony to get married, then there wouldn't be a problem. So the best solution is to introduce yet another state sponsored ceremony, a secular ceremony, right?
Civil Marriage
No.
The best solution is to once and for all separate church and state, and end the state's hand in enforcing, deciding, or recognizing marriage, altogether. In other words, I propose the following, and not just for Israel, but for every country in the world:
End civil marriage.
By what right does any country or any state have the right to care or declare whether or not you are married? Why should they give a damn, or have any say in the matter?
Marriage is no business of government. People have sex and have babies, married or not married. Why should any government care whether or not you are married?
Marriage is a religious or a personal ceremony. It has nothing to do with what anyone thinks other than the people themselves or whatever personal religion, family, or organization that the people belong to.
Adultery and infidelity are religious and personal issues, not governmental ones. Excepting minors or rape, why should the government care whom you are sleeping with? If you want to sign a non-promiscuity contract when you get married in a religious ceremony, then it becomes a contractual issue, which the government can deal with.
The government doesn't interfere with property when you live together with roommates. Why should it suddenly interfere when you live together after a religious ceremony? If you want to sign an agreement indicating property rights when you get married, that's your business. If not, then the same laws for all property disputes should apply.
Homosexuals are fighting for civil rights to have state recognized civil marriage. Without civil marriage, you have no more problems with homosexual marriage. Do what you want, just as you do anyway.
The only thing that civil marriage does is ensure that two people are committed to continue to support a child after the sad event of a marriage ending. But consider the following.
One, it's not as if only formerly married people have obligations to children right now.
Two, we can end the stupidity of a husband being obligated to support children born by other men. A woman should take responsibility for having multiple sex partners and then not being able to identify the father of a child. Even if you want to offer some solution to alleviate impoverished women, it surely shouldn't automatically fall on the poor sap she is married to.
Three, religious marriage documentation can continue to be used as evidence of paternity until proven otherwise. Couples who have children without being married are no worse off than they are now.
All of the ridiculous rights given by the state to married people, like citizenship, tax relief, housing subsidies, and so on have no place in a secular society with a separation of church and state. A whole lot gets made much simpler.
People can continue to marry, as they will, and according to their personal religious choice. The same rule should apply to America as well as it applies to Israel.
Marriage is a religious issue and should have no jurisdiction by any state. It's time to end civil marriage.
Yehuda
Update: Just found this article arguing the same thing from three years ago on Slate.
And another one on Slate from 1997. Apparently my position is a libertarian one.
Technorati tags: marriage, homosexual marriage, same sex marriage, civil marriage, chuch and state, politics, Judaism, religion, chosen people, Israel
As you may know, I am a religious Jew. For some reason, many people assume that that means that I am in favor of imposing my religion on other people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jews and Missionizing
The Jewish religion is perhaps unique in not only not caring whether other people are Jewish, but actively discouraging them from being so. Why? Because it isn't necessary.
Consider the following: Jews consist of priests (cohanim), levites, and lay persons. Only those descended from the tribe of Levi become either levites or priests, and only those descended from Aaron become priests.
The priests and levites have a very specific role in Judaism: to serve in the temple. Without a temple, the modern day distinctions between priests and lay people is that priests ascend before the congregation at prayer time and give over a blessing to the congregation, acting as a conduit for God's blessing. The levites job is simply to wash the hands of the priests before the blessing.
In return for this service, priests and levites get first crack at being called up to the torah during public torah reading. That's it.
I don't know a single lay person who has every said "I wish I was a priest". Do you know why? Because being a priest means being chosen to do more work. It doesn't earn them a higher place in heaven, and the small honor given to them at torah reading is not worth fighting over. Anyway, the priests minister to the people. If everyone is a priest, there are no people to minister to.
Jews consider themselves a nation of priests, who have special work to do in order to minister to the world. It's just a job, given to us by birth. It's like if a father asks one of his kids: go out and fetch me a chair. Ten kids fetching the chair doesn't do him any good, nor does it mean that the other nine kids who didn't fetch the chair are being neglected. OK, we may get a pat on the head afterwards for doing the work. But we also risk all that is associated with bungling the job.
Why on earth would you want to volunteer for that?
I tell you all this only to prove to you that I have no interest in imposing my will on others. Especially as a Jew, a religion whose people who have had others' wills painfully forced on theirs so often, I can tell you that I am a firm believer in the separation of church (or synagogue or mosque) and state.
That includes right here in Israel.
Marriage in Israel
One of the sad things about Israel is that it does not have rigorous separation between church and state. This is a huge problem, and stems from the dual nature of being both a democracy, yet having to ensure that the country remains a place where no majority will ever be able to make Jews and their practices feel unwelcome.
In Israel, there is no civil marriage, but the state forces anyone who wants to get married to do so via state sponsored religious unions. If you are Jewish, you must go through the rabbinate, and if you are Christian, through a church accepted and overseen by the state.
Unfortunately, the rabbinate is entirely religious, what you may call Orthodox. Other forms of Judaism, such as secular or Conservative, are not recognized by the rabbinate. So to get married if you're Jewish, you have to get married in a religious Jewish ceremony.
Various politicians have tried to change that over the years, and a new initiative is trying to claim that absence of civil marriage is a violation of human rights.
In my opinion, this is not addressing the heart of the problem, which is the tight linkage between church and state in Israel. If the state did not force everyone to go through a religious ceremony to get married, then there wouldn't be a problem. So the best solution is to introduce yet another state sponsored ceremony, a secular ceremony, right?
Civil Marriage
No.
The best solution is to once and for all separate church and state, and end the state's hand in enforcing, deciding, or recognizing marriage, altogether. In other words, I propose the following, and not just for Israel, but for every country in the world:
End civil marriage.
By what right does any country or any state have the right to care or declare whether or not you are married? Why should they give a damn, or have any say in the matter?
Marriage is no business of government. People have sex and have babies, married or not married. Why should any government care whether or not you are married?
Marriage is a religious or a personal ceremony. It has nothing to do with what anyone thinks other than the people themselves or whatever personal religion, family, or organization that the people belong to.
Adultery and infidelity are religious and personal issues, not governmental ones. Excepting minors or rape, why should the government care whom you are sleeping with? If you want to sign a non-promiscuity contract when you get married in a religious ceremony, then it becomes a contractual issue, which the government can deal with.
The government doesn't interfere with property when you live together with roommates. Why should it suddenly interfere when you live together after a religious ceremony? If you want to sign an agreement indicating property rights when you get married, that's your business. If not, then the same laws for all property disputes should apply.
Homosexuals are fighting for civil rights to have state recognized civil marriage. Without civil marriage, you have no more problems with homosexual marriage. Do what you want, just as you do anyway.
The only thing that civil marriage does is ensure that two people are committed to continue to support a child after the sad event of a marriage ending. But consider the following.
One, it's not as if only formerly married people have obligations to children right now.
Two, we can end the stupidity of a husband being obligated to support children born by other men. A woman should take responsibility for having multiple sex partners and then not being able to identify the father of a child. Even if you want to offer some solution to alleviate impoverished women, it surely shouldn't automatically fall on the poor sap she is married to.
Three, religious marriage documentation can continue to be used as evidence of paternity until proven otherwise. Couples who have children without being married are no worse off than they are now.
All of the ridiculous rights given by the state to married people, like citizenship, tax relief, housing subsidies, and so on have no place in a secular society with a separation of church and state. A whole lot gets made much simpler.
People can continue to marry, as they will, and according to their personal religious choice. The same rule should apply to America as well as it applies to Israel.
Marriage is a religious issue and should have no jurisdiction by any state. It's time to end civil marriage.
Yehuda
Update: Just found this article arguing the same thing from three years ago on Slate.
And another one on Slate from 1997. Apparently my position is a libertarian one.
Technorati tags: marriage, homosexual marriage, same sex marriage, civil marriage, chuch and state, politics, Judaism, religion, chosen people, Israel
Strategic Games: Computers vs Humans
This post is a merging of two previous discussions. One is the familiar tactics versus strategy discussion, and the other is the computer versus human opponent's discussion. The point of the article is to compare the challenge of strategy versus a computer with that of strategy versus a human.
In a previous article about strategy versus tactics, I wrote that strategy is essentially the human aspect of game theory. That doesn't make any sense out of context, so I will recreate the context here.
Strategy and Tactics: Definitions
The first definitions of strategy and tactics are that strategy is the "grand view" of how you will be achieving your goal, and tactics are the specific steps taken to implement a strategy. For instance, if the goal is to annihilate an army, one strategy is to attack their left flank, and the tactics to implement this strategy are to move under cover, take the high ground, and use burst fire on the artillery on the left flank, followed by infantry.
A contrary view defines tactics and strategy as functionally identical. In this view, a strategy is only a grander type of a tactic. In other words, let's say that the strategy is "attack the left flank", and the tactics are to "move here", "achieve cover", and "fire your weapons".
These tactics can also be broken down into further components. "Move here" also requires tactical decisions about how to move, what to move, and so on. And the strategy is only part of a larger strategy "annihilate the army", which breaks down into "aerial bombardment, "feint forward attack", "attack the left flank".
So, the argument goes, there is no real division between strategy and tactics.
Another view is that strategy is what you do when you don't know what the correct tactics are. For instance, as long as Chess is unsolved, your strategy is to control the center or pin pieces. If chess becomes solved, then every act is either better or worse for achieving your goal of winning, so all acts devolve into better or worse tactical moves.
The next view is that strategy gives positional advantage without changing other metrics, while tactics achieves a measurable movement towards your goal. For instance, if your goal is to kill 100 units, a strategic move is one that does not kill or weaken any units, but that puts your guns into a positions that makes killing easier. A tactical move is one that kills or weakens at least 1 unit.
While these views have their differences, they overlap in some senses.
Strategy as a Human Element
Let's assume that a better strategy offers opportunities for more effective tactics, either through reduced resource expenditure, more available tactical options, or more effective progression towards your goal.
My interest is in describing what to do when you are faced with two relatively equal strategic options. Even if you know exactly what tactical superiority can be achieved, your decision as to which strategy to implement depends on non-measurable quantities.
One strategy might be the correct move to exploit a weakness of your specific opponent, which may induce him to make a mistake that only he would make. Actually, this may be measurable through previous experience with your opponent, or by having studied him.
Or, one strategy may simply have less variables associated with it. Familiarity with a strategy can make you more comfortable in implementing it. Actually, this too is a measurable advantage, as your mental energy is freed up, preserving resources.
These decisions require experience, both with your own style of play and with your opponent's. As computer games evolve, we see games becoming better and better as they implement strategies input by their creators. But, what they still don't do well, is change strategies during play, from one skirmish to the next, or from one game to the next, based on assessments of wins and losses against particular opponents.
I won't say that these types of strategic decisions cannot be programmed into a computer. But they are, still, uniquely human experiences.
What Should an AI Do?
Computers can be programmed to learn about an opponent, from tactic to tactic, from game to game, to weigh previous battles and decide when they should learn from a victory or defeat to try something new. Computers can be programmed to examine an opponent's weaknesses to decide whether to play against them, or maybe even judge that that is what they are expecting and try something totally surprising.
An AI with no ability to learn and adapt, or with glaring repetition or weaknesses is a boring AI.
However, an AI with no weaknesses is also a boring AI. AI's should not be perfect reactors to every situation. If they are, then an entire facet of human strategy goes out the window. What is the fun if you can't exploit a weakness? If you have to choose between two strategies, and either of them are equal on the books, then there is little reward or punishment for choosing either when your opponent will competently handle either with aplomb. You expect your opponent to learn from exploitation, but not to not have any.
Perfect AI doesn't mean that it can't be fooled, however. Even a perfect AI can't (shouldn't) know whether an advancing column is a feint or a main attack. It has to juggle risk versus what it knows about you, while you have the same opportunity to do so about it.
One of the main arguments by Gary Kasparov against the famous Chess match of 1997 was that the computer was fed incredible amounts of information about him while he was not privy to information about the computer's previous matches. That gave a decided strategic advantage to the computer.
Even if the game is solved, so long as both players aren't give enough time to exhaustively search the solution space, each needs to make strategic decisions against their particular opponent.
Yehuda
In a previous article about strategy versus tactics, I wrote that strategy is essentially the human aspect of game theory. That doesn't make any sense out of context, so I will recreate the context here.
Strategy and Tactics: Definitions
The first definitions of strategy and tactics are that strategy is the "grand view" of how you will be achieving your goal, and tactics are the specific steps taken to implement a strategy. For instance, if the goal is to annihilate an army, one strategy is to attack their left flank, and the tactics to implement this strategy are to move under cover, take the high ground, and use burst fire on the artillery on the left flank, followed by infantry.
A contrary view defines tactics and strategy as functionally identical. In this view, a strategy is only a grander type of a tactic. In other words, let's say that the strategy is "attack the left flank", and the tactics are to "move here", "achieve cover", and "fire your weapons".
These tactics can also be broken down into further components. "Move here" also requires tactical decisions about how to move, what to move, and so on. And the strategy is only part of a larger strategy "annihilate the army", which breaks down into "aerial bombardment, "feint forward attack", "attack the left flank".
So, the argument goes, there is no real division between strategy and tactics.
Another view is that strategy is what you do when you don't know what the correct tactics are. For instance, as long as Chess is unsolved, your strategy is to control the center or pin pieces. If chess becomes solved, then every act is either better or worse for achieving your goal of winning, so all acts devolve into better or worse tactical moves.
The next view is that strategy gives positional advantage without changing other metrics, while tactics achieves a measurable movement towards your goal. For instance, if your goal is to kill 100 units, a strategic move is one that does not kill or weaken any units, but that puts your guns into a positions that makes killing easier. A tactical move is one that kills or weakens at least 1 unit.
While these views have their differences, they overlap in some senses.
Strategy as a Human Element
Let's assume that a better strategy offers opportunities for more effective tactics, either through reduced resource expenditure, more available tactical options, or more effective progression towards your goal.
My interest is in describing what to do when you are faced with two relatively equal strategic options. Even if you know exactly what tactical superiority can be achieved, your decision as to which strategy to implement depends on non-measurable quantities.
One strategy might be the correct move to exploit a weakness of your specific opponent, which may induce him to make a mistake that only he would make. Actually, this may be measurable through previous experience with your opponent, or by having studied him.
Or, one strategy may simply have less variables associated with it. Familiarity with a strategy can make you more comfortable in implementing it. Actually, this too is a measurable advantage, as your mental energy is freed up, preserving resources.
These decisions require experience, both with your own style of play and with your opponent's. As computer games evolve, we see games becoming better and better as they implement strategies input by their creators. But, what they still don't do well, is change strategies during play, from one skirmish to the next, or from one game to the next, based on assessments of wins and losses against particular opponents.
I won't say that these types of strategic decisions cannot be programmed into a computer. But they are, still, uniquely human experiences.
What Should an AI Do?
Computers can be programmed to learn about an opponent, from tactic to tactic, from game to game, to weigh previous battles and decide when they should learn from a victory or defeat to try something new. Computers can be programmed to examine an opponent's weaknesses to decide whether to play against them, or maybe even judge that that is what they are expecting and try something totally surprising.
An AI with no ability to learn and adapt, or with glaring repetition or weaknesses is a boring AI.
However, an AI with no weaknesses is also a boring AI. AI's should not be perfect reactors to every situation. If they are, then an entire facet of human strategy goes out the window. What is the fun if you can't exploit a weakness? If you have to choose between two strategies, and either of them are equal on the books, then there is little reward or punishment for choosing either when your opponent will competently handle either with aplomb. You expect your opponent to learn from exploitation, but not to not have any.
Perfect AI doesn't mean that it can't be fooled, however. Even a perfect AI can't (shouldn't) know whether an advancing column is a feint or a main attack. It has to juggle risk versus what it knows about you, while you have the same opportunity to do so about it.
One of the main arguments by Gary Kasparov against the famous Chess match of 1997 was that the computer was fed incredible amounts of information about him while he was not privy to information about the computer's previous matches. That gave a decided strategic advantage to the computer.
Even if the game is solved, so long as both players aren't give enough time to exhaustively search the solution space, each needs to make strategic decisions against their particular opponent.
Yehuda
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Computer Games, Board Games, and Puzzles
DoctorJ says in a comment:
An excellent point.
Although I labeled some game as "puzzles", let's not denigrate that term. A puzzle like "The Sims", with no clear solution and continued juggling is possible only with computers and is brilliant.
Puzzles can keep you happy your whole life, even if you find yourself mastering their form. Consider crossword puzzles.
Puzzles require strategy and tactics, just like games. The difference is that a particular puzzle can be solved in a practically short amount of time, i.e. less than a lifetime. Once you learn good strategies to solve one instance of a type of puzzle, the same strategies will apply to other instances of the same type of puzzle. The particular types of tactics will also generally apply, with experience guiding how and when to use these tactics.
Let's break down the computer game into its puzzle and non-puzzle parts. This time, we will be careful to distinguish between what is really a puzzle, what appears to be a puzzle because the AI isn't any good, and what is really a game.
Myst is an example of a pure puzzle game. Once you have solved Myst, it is solved. That makes it a puzzle.
RTT (real time tactics, which include your classic shoot 'em games) games are not puzzles, but games. However, when playing single-player with poor AI, they become puzzles. As a comparable but not identical example, Tic-Tac-Toe is a "game", but everyone knows that the game is solved. The act of playing a solved game such as Tic-Tac-Toe is not gaming. It is an exercise in memory, if anything.
On the other hand, playing a RTT game with good AI, or against another player, is a game. It has all of the benefits that computer games offer vs board games (slick graphics, heavy calculations handled by the computer, no physical presence, ...) and all of the negatives that computer games suffer vs board games (requires expensive equipment and software, limited rules changes, no physical presence, lack of social gaming etiquette or out-of-game socializing, ...).
RTS (real time strategy, which includes civ building games) games are both puzzles and games. If you separate out the strategy part of the game from the tactics part of the game, i.e. the resource building versus the battles in Civilization, you separate out what I would call the puzzle aspect from the strategy aspect.
In other words, the current definitions consider "strategy" the resource building and acquisition, and "tactics" the fighting the battles. In contrast, my definitions consider the resource building and acquisition the "puzzle", and fighting both "strategy" and "tactics".
The building part of the game takes place entirely removed from any other player or even AI opposition. The initial map may change, but thereafter you are not playing against anyone. There is then the right way to do things and many wrong ways to do things. By round X, you have to have the most A, B, and C.
OK, I'm not being entirely fair. Which of A, B, and C you want to have the most of depends on your strategy going into the next part of the game, the combat part. So, yes, strategy comes into play IF AND ONLY IF a single correct strategy cannot net you the most of ALL of A, B, and C. If it can, you either do it right, or you don't. That's a puzzle, not a game.
The same pejorative use of the word puzzle has been used against any number of board games that have such minimal player interaction as to bear such comparisons. But even these board games have some interaction. Imagine a board game where you played a dozen turns completely without any interaction at all, and only then intersected with the other players. (Games that seem like they should do this, like Diplomacy, Civilization (the board game), and so on, don't.)
Once the fighting kicks in, you are back to "game mode". Despite the game now being in what is called the "tactics" phase, there are still major elements of both strategy and tactics in games like Red Alert, Civilization and all those other combat games.
Of course, it would be nice if there were other ways to interact in competition without having to resort to combat. Wouldn't it? I welcome any suggestions for computer games that involve resource building followed by something other than combat.
In the meantime, if you like full-time intense strategy and tactics, and you don't want to spend lots of money or sit in front of your computer all day long, and you want to actually gain more than strategy and tactics skills, but also social skills and manners, go play good board games.
Yehuda
Bonus Link: a kick-ass article about the relative value of roleplaying vs traditional games.
I think your complaint about computer/video games is not really about computer/video games themselves but about the weak state of AI. The reason the games play like puzzles a little bit is because of the limitations of AI. We would make the same complaint of a game like Puerto Rico if the opponents you played used exactly the same strategy every single game. After a while you'd figure out the effective counter-strategy and win every time. Would we conclude that Puerto Rico isn't a good game because of this? No, it would mean that you're not playing good players. There's nothing intrinsically different about strategy computer games: they have rules and pieces to move around and actions to take. It is taking a long time, though, for the AI to catch up and be able to present a challenge to human players.
An excellent point.
Although I labeled some game as "puzzles", let's not denigrate that term. A puzzle like "The Sims", with no clear solution and continued juggling is possible only with computers and is brilliant.
Puzzles can keep you happy your whole life, even if you find yourself mastering their form. Consider crossword puzzles.
Puzzles require strategy and tactics, just like games. The difference is that a particular puzzle can be solved in a practically short amount of time, i.e. less than a lifetime. Once you learn good strategies to solve one instance of a type of puzzle, the same strategies will apply to other instances of the same type of puzzle. The particular types of tactics will also generally apply, with experience guiding how and when to use these tactics.
Let's break down the computer game into its puzzle and non-puzzle parts. This time, we will be careful to distinguish between what is really a puzzle, what appears to be a puzzle because the AI isn't any good, and what is really a game.
Myst is an example of a pure puzzle game. Once you have solved Myst, it is solved. That makes it a puzzle.
RTT (real time tactics, which include your classic shoot 'em games) games are not puzzles, but games. However, when playing single-player with poor AI, they become puzzles. As a comparable but not identical example, Tic-Tac-Toe is a "game", but everyone knows that the game is solved. The act of playing a solved game such as Tic-Tac-Toe is not gaming. It is an exercise in memory, if anything.
On the other hand, playing a RTT game with good AI, or against another player, is a game. It has all of the benefits that computer games offer vs board games (slick graphics, heavy calculations handled by the computer, no physical presence, ...) and all of the negatives that computer games suffer vs board games (requires expensive equipment and software, limited rules changes, no physical presence, lack of social gaming etiquette or out-of-game socializing, ...).
RTS (real time strategy, which includes civ building games) games are both puzzles and games. If you separate out the strategy part of the game from the tactics part of the game, i.e. the resource building versus the battles in Civilization, you separate out what I would call the puzzle aspect from the strategy aspect.
In other words, the current definitions consider "strategy" the resource building and acquisition, and "tactics" the fighting the battles. In contrast, my definitions consider the resource building and acquisition the "puzzle", and fighting both "strategy" and "tactics".
The building part of the game takes place entirely removed from any other player or even AI opposition. The initial map may change, but thereafter you are not playing against anyone. There is then the right way to do things and many wrong ways to do things. By round X, you have to have the most A, B, and C.
OK, I'm not being entirely fair. Which of A, B, and C you want to have the most of depends on your strategy going into the next part of the game, the combat part. So, yes, strategy comes into play IF AND ONLY IF a single correct strategy cannot net you the most of ALL of A, B, and C. If it can, you either do it right, or you don't. That's a puzzle, not a game.
The same pejorative use of the word puzzle has been used against any number of board games that have such minimal player interaction as to bear such comparisons. But even these board games have some interaction. Imagine a board game where you played a dozen turns completely without any interaction at all, and only then intersected with the other players. (Games that seem like they should do this, like Diplomacy, Civilization (the board game), and so on, don't.)
Once the fighting kicks in, you are back to "game mode". Despite the game now being in what is called the "tactics" phase, there are still major elements of both strategy and tactics in games like Red Alert, Civilization and all those other combat games.
Of course, it would be nice if there were other ways to interact in competition without having to resort to combat. Wouldn't it? I welcome any suggestions for computer games that involve resource building followed by something other than combat.
In the meantime, if you like full-time intense strategy and tactics, and you don't want to spend lots of money or sit in front of your computer all day long, and you want to actually gain more than strategy and tactics skills, but also social skills and manners, go play good board games.
Yehuda
Bonus Link: a kick-ass article about the relative value of roleplaying vs traditional games.
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