Blood, Sweat and Pixels
Jason Schrier’s book takes a look at the development processes behind several successful, and not so successful, games. For anyone that wants a lightly investigative take on the graft, rather than craft, of making games then I’d certainly steer you towards it. It is though a very… frothy book. It contains few unexpected revelations, rarely gets into the weeds of the politics it occasionally voyeuristically references, and is likewise short on surprises. I was a little disappointed actually. I expected that someone that had done such sterling work in actual game journalism, which is a rare beast indeed, might have managed something that felt more consequential. It reads very easily – Schrier’s style is light and friendly – but that just emphasized just how slight the actual content is. Rather than being blisteringly critical, as his reporting often is, Schrier is most often conciliatory and a little bit fawning in the way he talks about game industry practices.
It reminds me a bit of the book Gamers at Work, which is one of my absolute favourite explorations of game development as an industry. Unfortunately for Blood, Sweat and Pixels it does not come out as the victor in the comparison. Gamers at Work really drills down into personal insight. Blood, Sweat and Pixels basically tells the same story several times. It does well in establishing a narrative in terms of how difficult and unpredictable game development can be. In fact, the theme of the book is laid out in the first few pages. Jason relates a story. A source describes the horrifying game development process behind their latest release. ‘Wow, sounds like it was a miracle it got made’, replied Jason. ‘Jason, it’s a miracle any game gets made’, comes the reply.
It’s a good line. But did anyone likely to read it actually need to be told that a half dozen times though? That, more than anything else, is what I mean when I say the book feels frothy. As light and as insubstantial as the foam on your latte. It’s an enjoyable, interesting read – you just could have probably constructed 80% of the book yourself with a few developer interviews you picked up from a casual google search. Disappointing really, but only because I really expected better from the author.
The Coddling of the American Mind
You’ve probably grasped some of my views on the modern culture of ‘extreme wokeness’ from previous posts. I think it’s profoundly destructive, emotionally abusive, and counter-productive for the professed aims of its practioners. Mostly though I hate it because of how hard it makes it to enact genuine change. I find a lot of the pushback on the accessibility work I do, which I consider to be ‘moderately progressive’, comes from the assumption that I’m some hyperwoke social justice vigilante. Yes, I want a more equal society. Yes, I want people to have access to the things that they don’t currently have access. Yes, I want fairness to be at the heart of civilization. However, I also appreciate that such things are a process. I believe the views of people with whom I disagree are often worth listening to, and even if they don’t change my mind they should inform my arguments. I find the extremes of the left and the right to be unbearable but I wouldn’t argue for a second that they shouldn’t be permitted to have, and agitate, for their opinions. I’ve said before in various places on the site – I’m a free speech fundamentalist. I think it’s the only way things can truly work. If you open the door to shutting down viewpoints you disagree with, what happens when the power dynamics shift and your views become disagreeable?
Anyway, The Coddling of the American Mind is a scholarly and convincing discussion of the culture of ‘safetyism’ in American society, particularly in Higher Education. The basic idea is that society suffers from ‘concept creep’ where words take on meaning beyond their original definitions. That’s fine – that’s how language works. But occasionally they take on meanings that, as a result of prior connotations, make the concept too unwieldly to manage. The idea of ‘safety’ is one of them, as is ‘violence’. ‘Silence is violence’ is a common refrain for example that is used to bully people into expressing an opinion on whatever fashionable issue is dominating online discourse. But it’s not – of course it’s not. Likewise having someone present a viewpoint in a lecture that you find personally repellent isn’t ‘violence’. It might be ‘harmful’, in that it can inflict stress and stress can lead to physical injury. But so can exam deadlines, loud noises, and the sounds of a crying baby. ‘Harm’ does not equal ‘violence’. Being ‘uncomfortable’ is not the same thing as being ‘unsafe’. And yet many of us are allowing these definitional distortions to creep into the dictionary without considering the alarming consequences.
Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture. Entertaining someone else’s distasteful perspective can be educational. … When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress — temporary and not harmful to your body — and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning.
Essentially, although it’s never directly stated, the core argument in the book is an examination of the idea that ‘the difference between poison and medicine is dosage’. Many woke positions are, in moderation, healthy and worthwhile and merit inclusion into daily life. In excess, they lead to cancellations, revenge-based discourse, and suppression of those that manifest ‘unpure thoughts’. That creates over simplification in debate, badly reasoned societal interventions, and a corrosion of the bonds we have in society. They lead to massive over-reactions of employers and institutions that have a legal responsibility towards academic freedom. They lead to an intense sense of fragility that requires civilization to swaddle itself in ever more smothering blankets of cotton wool. It’s such an exhausting, and stressful way to live.
There are life situations that make people fragile. Serious traumas and horrifying circumstances can create psychological wounds that never truly heal. However, most people – absent those incidences – are actually ‘anti-fragile’. They become more able to deal with the unpleasantnesses of life by encountering them. ‘You prepare the child for the road’, quotes the book. ‘You don’t prepare the road for the child’. Part of the book’s more interesting analysis relate to how a generation of overprotective parents have created the circumstances under which children cannot prepare for the road, and the culture of safetyism in universities and beyond is the somewhat baffled response to that.
The book doesn’t dismiss any of this though. It’s not a polemic. It’s actually a very thoughtful and respectful examination of how, why and where this happened. Common enemy identity philosophies’ the book outlines, will always create tensions because they look for opposition to strive against. Common humanity philosophies work better because they turn enemies into allies. I couldn’t agree more.
Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.
It’s a really good book – an important book, even.
The Creativity Code: How AI is Learning to Write, Paint and Think
Mmm, this is an odd duck of a book. I’m not sure quite how I feel about it. It’s a book that irritated me immensely by making a cogent argument that was absolutely crucial to the author’s point, and yet utterly irrelevant to the larger topic of the book. I found it very interesting, deeply insightful in places… but also unforgivably self-indulgent in how obtuse it makes the discussion.
Essentially the book is an exploration of what creativity is, how we recognize it, and how artists have always been driven by algorithms in the production of their work. That’s great – a really fascinating topic covered well in a book that’s (mostly) well written. But the author, being a mathematician, spends an inordinate amount of time in the book relating everything back to his own subject specialism. If you’re thinking ‘Well, mathematics isn’t really a creative discipline in the sense that the book title implies’, then a) I disagree, and b) the author is going to spend a good third of the book trying to justify his own indulgences to make sure you do as well. If you’re also thinking ‘There are better ways to fill a book than trying to explain the parameters of your own initially unconvincing premise’, then bingo. You just hit on the reason why I found myself frustrated at regular intervals in every chapter. Yes, I agree with the author… but my goodness he could have written a much better book if he’d just come at it from a less self-centred perspective.
Other than that – a good, interesting read right up until the final chapter which reaches a conclusion that seems utterly at odds with the rest of the book. He spends hundreds of pages explaining how AIs are generating work, derivative as it may be, that can fool even trained audiences. And then he dismisses it all with a hand-wave and says ‘I think free will is a necessary part of creativity’. I mean, mate – where did that come from? I’m not saying I disagree but this seems like the last-minute shifting of the goal-posts that’s all too common when people are drawing judgements on machine intelligence.
There are a few sections of the book where I hoped he’d get into a really interesting aspect of creativity – that it’s the way to explore an inner world, and we’re being somewhat unfair in judging the creative efforts of computers against the aesthetic sensibilities of humans. There’s a moment in the middle where he talks about how Google has exposed the ‘dreaming’ of its image analysis algorithms. The results are spooky, distinctive, and utterly alien… and honestly I think this is what discussions of AI and creativity need to acknowledge more. Chess algorithms don’t beat humans because they play chess better. They beat humans because they play chess differently.
Back when I spoke about Detroit: Become Human in a previous newsletter I pointed out how disappointed I was that the imagined ambition for machine intelligence was ‘Just like us, but synthetic’. Computer creativity, when it comes, should be different. We can’t look at inferior generated works of human art and say ‘Thus, computers are not creative’. All we can say is ‘They’re not creative in a way that appeals to us’ That would have been an amazing topic for a deep-dive in the text, but it’s just a casual aside discarded as easily and as indifferently as it was introduced.
If art is a way to get deeper insight into the human condition, what we should really hope from machine creativity is that it gives us deeper insight into what it means to be a machine. If the singularity is coming, and I fear it is, then it’s important that we understand something of the inner world of our future algorithmic overlords. We don’t get that at all when we ask them to crudely mimic our own obsessions.
A worthwhile book, but not one I’d recommend unreservedly.
Digital Minimalism
Ironically given the central thesis of this book it could have made all its most pertinent observations in about fifty pages. Instead it meanders on for 200 on the theme of ‘Life would be better if you cut down on your mindless reliance on digital devices’ And yeah, I’m sold on that – but if I wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t have been convinced by what felt like 75% additional padding.
Perhaps though I’m not exactly a good test case for that. I went into the book already resolved to address my relationship with my online distractions. Most of you will already be aware of my Depth Year commitment, and how I came out of it feeling much more grounded than when I went in. And while it wasn’t without its psychological costs, it was generally an extremely positive process. So positive that I often think about doing it again.
Instead, I think I’m going to enter 2022 with a project centred around unplugging myself from those parts of online life that aren’t optional. I don’t think humanity works at Internet Scale. Civility certainly doesn’t. Nuance doesn’t. As someone I forget once insightfully noted, ‘the first casualty of page clicks is context’. One of my favourite comparisons, as historically incorrect as it is, is that ‘The Internet is the modern equivalent of the lead in the water that drove the Romans mad’. So I’ve been taking stock of my online activities this month, and making my plans for a phase that is not so much Digital Minimalism but a kind of Digital Monasticism. Instead of living a life of loud desperation, I plan to explore my own personal Wifi Walden.
No more dicking around on social media – Facebook has already been pared down to a sliver of what it was before I began thinking about it. No more screwing around on the Internet in general – I plan to have a strict ration of Internet time. I plan to have a paper list of things I need to research, and a fixed time limit within which the Internet is available. No more wasting hours watching nonsense on Youtube – I’ll be downloading the videos I find most enriching. They’ll be watched mindfully instead of listlessly.
I’m sure I’ll talk more about Project Unplug 2022 over the coming months. For now though, Digital Minimalism gave me some insight into how best to approach the endeavour but it really needed to take to heart the implied message of its own premise.
Elysium Fire is the sequel to The Prefect (which was later renamed to Aurora Rising). It’s another of Alistair Reynolds’ entries into the Revelation Space series, and it’s great. Reynolds doesn’t usually accomplish the paciness of, say, the books in the Expanse series but his explorations of (reasonably) hard sci-fi build up a momentum that is unquestionable. This and its precursor differ from his usual work in that they’re more ‘Film Noir’ – they’re about a hard-bitten detective working across a glitter-band of autonomous habitats. The only thing that binds these self-governing space-stations together is a shared reliance on micro-polling, which is policed by Panoply. That’s where the main character – Dreyfus – works and it has an overarching jurisdiction to investigate and regulate democratic violations.
I won’t spoil the plot, but while the twist at the end is predictable I found the whole story to be absorbing from start to finish. It makes me think that Revelation Space, particularly the Dreyfus series (of which this book is one) is the greatest untapped treasure in sci-fi literature. Amazon, HBO or Netflix should snap up the rights and make a series of sci-fi crime thrillers where every new episode can introduce a new world, a new political context, and an excitingly interesting offence against a referenda-based democratic system.
Anyway, I highly recommend this if you’ve read The Prefect. If you haven’t, I highly recommend you read The Prefect.
Endurance: A Year in Space a Lifetime of Discovery
This is kind of an embarrassing book because I was about 75% of the way through before I realised it wasn’t about the person I thought it was about. It’s a personal memoir of life as an astronaut and it’s actually fascinating for the focus it gives to the reality of living aboard the International Space Station. But I had mixed up my authors here – this is a book by Scott Kelly and for some reason I had mixed him up with Chris Hadfield. So I was making my way through this as if it was about someone else. When I realised the mistake I had made, it was a little disorienting.
I guess it didn’t really make a difference in the end – it’s a good book regardless – but it just felt disrespectful to have mixed them up. I’m on record (somewhere, probably on this site) as saying several times that I think astronauts are god-damn heroes. Their training – both academic and physical – is beyond intense. They go through years and years of hard, demanding work in order to go to space. And let’s remember what that means – being strapped aboard a rocket driven upwards by barely controlled explosions until it leaves the bonds of Earth. Astronauts are the best of humanity and the least I can do in recognition of that is get their damn names right.
Anyway.
There’s a lot of warmth in this book, but I think my favourite part of it is the low-level grumbling about spending almost a year in space. Things that you would probably never think of. Issues about food and waste reclamation. The geopolitics of trash management. The discomfort of long space-walks and the scheduling software that is used by NASA to wring every ounce of performance out of astronauts. The rage-fuel of velcro dots. It’s not a bitchy book, but it is definitely one that isn’t concerned with varnishing the reality of spaceflight in favour of a propaganda piece.
It’s probably only a book for space nerds, but if that describes you I think it’s well worth your time.
Chris, if you’re reading (I know you’re not) – I’m sorry and I’ll definitely read your book(s).
Enlightenment Now
I think this book is probably extremely comforting – if you want it to be. It makes the case that the arc of human life always bends towards progress. We have never been richer, never been healthier, never been more educated, never been more fortunate. And a lot of that is obviously, demonstratably true.
I’ve spoken to students before about how poverty now doesn’t mean the same thing poverty ‘then’, and that wealth ‘then’ doesn’t mean the same as wealth ‘now’.
‘Mansa Musa’, I say, ‘Was perhaps the richest man who ever lived. His net worth at the time was perhaps equivalent to $500bn in today’s money. He was so rich that when his caravan moved through nations, he destabilised their economies. He had a fortune that was functionally limitless.’
Then the question.
‘So, how much of his wealth do you think he’d sacrifice in exchange for the phone you have in your pocket? A magical artefact that can create light out of nowhere. A device that can play any song instantly. A device that has access to almost all the world’s knowledge. That you can use to take magic pictures of anything around you. That can tell you the weather, or the position of the stars. That can direct you anywhere you want to go. How much would that be worth to Mansa Masu?’
And really, I bet he’d give a very sizeable fraction of that fortune to get his hands on this holy artefact which contains a power greater than any God of holy writ. And it’s probably only one of several phones the average person has lying around the house. Then imagine what he’d pay for that house, with its fridge, air-conditioning (maybe?), hot water on demand. Imagine what he’d pay for the contents of your fridge, which contains richness drawn from across the world and blended into treats beyond historical comprehension. What would Mansa Masu pay to live your life, in your flat, with your Xbox, and with access to abundant healthcare, double glazing, and infinite education?
So, it’s definitely true that even those on the poorer end of modern democracies enjoy a lifestyle that the richest emperor could only dream about in the past. And that’s kind of the core of this book.
The problem is that you need to want to believe his scholarship, because it is criminally shallow, drawn from cherry-picked comparators, and utterly bereft of any nuance. It’s a collection of graphs that, sure, show a clear progress from ‘shitty’ to good’ over time across the world. They’re more significant for what they don’t show, and the casual dismissiveness that goes along with the conclusion. ‘I looked at this website, which did some magical analysis on factors X, Y, and Z. The graph improves over time, so everything is great. Let’s move on to the next topic’. In essence, every graph is a balloon animal squeezed into the shape the author wanted. All Pinker ever does is take vast, macroeconomic trends and correlate them to vast, unmeasurable incomparables. The higher the level of abstraction, the more nuance is lost. Pinker is basically viewing the world from orbit, raised up beyond the stratosphere by nothing more than his own hot air.
Nowhere is this more blatant than in the book’s offhanded treatment of happiness, which is something almost impossible to measure accurately. He cites a study saying essentially that kid on social media report being happier and have lots of friends, so all the thousands of studies carefully exploring the link between social media use and teen depression are wrong. Recent work showing that as social media use decreases, so too does depression… ignored. Pinker, the apparent authority on everything, has closed the book on the worrywart catastrophising of the thousands of researchers who have given the topic more than a lazy afternoon’s casual thought.
But, of course, he hasn’t. Where’s the chart correlating depression versus social media use? Or the investigation into whether the number of friends is the same as the quality of friends? Or how endless comparison online creates multiple, regular social interactions where each is degrading to the overall quality of the experience? How we overemphasise the start and end of an emotional experience and disregard the middle, thus over-estimating our satisfaction when we end on a high note? Where, in other words, is a discussion that would pass muster in even an undergraduate’s analysis of the literature?
It’s nowhere, really, and the arrogance of the author is shocking when you consider just how juvenile his scholarship actually is. It’s cherry-picking in its most egregious form. In fact, the narrative of this whole section is genuinely comic. It leaps from ‘happiness is difficult to measure’ to ‘let’s check suicide rates’. I would argue that, perhaps, this has skipped several (dozen) levels of escalation in its attempt to reinforce the pre-decided point. And when it does talk about depression, it shows the… uh… intellectual pliability at play. Pinker talks about Western over-diagnosis of depression as an explanation for why his statistics are facts and everyone else’s facts are merely statistics. He says that the rise in modern depression is because in modern years it has been conflated with what would have been called grief, sorrow or sadness. Maybe that’s true, but this is not evidence. It’s not even rhetoric. It’s post-conclusion rationalisation. Exactly in the same way he’s happy to use wooly, self-reported measures of happiness and disregards them when it comes to self-reported measures of depression. He takes song lyrics and then compares them to scientific studies, and dismisses scientific studies on the basis of the punctuation within their titles. He relies on poems that support his arguments over hard research that doesn’t. He references themes in novels in the 18th century to demonstrate why things were bad, without acknowledging the shocking gratuitous violence that is mainstream in modern cinema as evidence of why things are bad.. If it doesn’t support the argument now, it doesn’t support it then. It’s genuinely ludicrous, and I think intentionally, maliciously dishonest. I don’t think Pinker is a stupid man, which means that he’s far more intentional in his deceit.
The point at which I lost all faith in the rigour of this book, and the credibility of the author, is when he blithely says, in effect, ‘Look at all the fuss people made about Y2K and nothing happened’. Now, I’m well aware a lot of people conned a lot of money out of a lot of companies in the lead up to Y2K… but surely the obvious reason why nothing serious happened was because tens of thousands of developers spent millions of person hours funded by billions of dollars to pre-empt the worst fallout. The reason payroll systems didn’t go haywire is because people fixed it in advance. Pinker’s argument is the same you’d see your climate-denying friends making, after a lifetime of successful ecological protectionism. ‘Well, nothing happened. I guess it was scare mongering all along’. We have no way of knowing how much Y2K spending (~$200bn in the US alone) was unnecessary, but only an fool or a liar would think the outcome would have been the same had it not been spent.
It’s like it was written by a Redditor constructing a smug pwning from random Wikipedia articles. As a piece of feelgood pap about ‘ain’t humans peachy keen’, it’s fine if impossibly pompous and riddled with turgid writing and sophomoric scholarship. But it’s more significant for the questions it doesn’t ask and the answers it never hints at. A mendacious piece of outright propaganda, and I would advise you to steer well clear.