Game Diary: Feb 2021

On Pillowfort, I’ve been writing a “video game diary” where I write mini-reviews of video games I’ve played recently (or watched my husband play). This diary is the inspiration of a few of my articles, including “Bugsnax’s twofold queerness” and “Practice and sight-reading in video games“. Since Pillowfort has been down for an extended period, it seems like a good time to try importing the feature here. I’m just calling it “game diary” because I might occasionally include a board game.

I may or may not decide to continue this feature on this blog, so let me know if you like it.

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Blogging and ambition

When I started blogging in 2007, I had ambitions of being popular blogger with a certain amount of authority. Those ambitions burnt out within a year or two, as I realized I did not actually want to be a famous blogger, and would rather satisfy my own preferences in blogging. Why did I have such ambitions, and why did they burn out? More broadly, how do other creators experience ambition, and are there differences from my own experience?

Okay, so 2007. Towards the end of the Bush administration, when Bush reached peak disapproval. New atheism was just getting rolling, and blogs held a particularly important place in the conversation, much like lefttube or twitter hold an important place today. I was an undergrad, and had been reading blogs myself, starting with Phil Plait, Hemant Mehta, PZ Myers, and branching off into many smaller ones.

My ambition was to become as well-known as the big names, or perhaps at least one of the smaller ones. It’s hard to remember why I had this mentality, especially since I now see it as irrational. I suppose I had a lot of opinions to share, and believed my opinions were the Good Ones that would transform how we thought about stuff and resolve all the issues that bloggers argued about. I have always been very modest, and though nobody throughout my education would ever let me forget that I am “smart”, I have never felt that my opinions are super valuable just because they are my opinions. Nonetheless, in my experience reading blogs, there were countless places where I thought bloggers and other readers were missing something important, and I felt I could supply that something if only people would hear me.

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Link Roundup: February 2021

This month’s link roundup includes a wide range of articles, from masculinity, to blogging, to commentary on Gamestop.

What Hades Can Teach Us About Ancient Greek Masculinity | Wired – Recommended even if you’re unfamiliar with the game Hades.  And if you’d like to read even more about ancient greek masculinity, I recommend an article by cartomancer a while back.  Among other things, I was amused to learn that classical observers disagreed on whether Achilles was the erastes or eromenos in his relationship with Patroclus.  It’s like the ancient version of an argument over which character is the top and which is the bottom.

My Life as a Failed Pundit | Tris Mamone – I enjoyed this first-person account of the stress that comes from trying to have an opinion about everything.  I don’t consider myself a pundit, I’m an analytical blogger.  There’s some superficial similarity, but I don’t feel the need to comment on any of the hot topics of the day, because nobody is paying me to do so.

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Origami: First cubes

I try to post origami every month, but as of late, my rate of production has been less than that.  That’s okay, I still have a huge backlog of photos.  One thing I’ve never posted, are my very earliest photos, when I started doing modular origami in………. 2012.  Well here’s the very first one:

sonobe cube

Sonobe Cube, by Mitsunobu Sonobe

I started out by folding designs from Beginner’s Book of Modular Origami Polyhedra: The Platonic Solids by Rona Gurkewitz and Bennett Arnstein–it’s not the book in the photo, it’s more beginner-friendly than that.  It’s a good starter book for modular origami, I recommend it.

I didn’t dedicate much effort to the photos at the time.  The book is there because that’s what I had on the shelf.  I put my hand in the photo to give it a sense of scale; also, as if to say “Zap!  A cube!”  I went on to zap more cubes from there on.

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Review scores: a philosophical investigation

Normally, in the introduction to an article, I would provide a “hook”, explaining my interest in the topic, and why you should be too. But my usual approach felt wrong here, since I cannot justify my own interest, and arguably if you’re reading this rather than scrolling past the title, you should be less interested than you currently are.

So, review scores. WTF are they? I don’t have the answers, but I sure have some questions. Why is 0/10 bad, 10/10 good, and 5/10… also bad? What goals do people have in assigning a score, and do they align with the goals of people reading the same score? What does it mean to take the average of many review scores? And why do we expect review scores to be normally distributed?

Mathematical structure

Review scores are intuitively understood as a measure of the quality of a work (such as a video game, movie, book, or LP)–or perhaps a measure of our enjoyment of the work? Already we have this question: is it quality, or is it enjoyment, or are those two concepts the same? But we must leave that question hanging, because there are more existentially pressing questions to come. Review scores do more than just express quality/enjoyment, they assign a number. And numbers are quite the loaded concept.

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The speed of light in different directions

As a reminder, I’m open to requests to discuss any popular physics articles or videos, to append to my “I read popular physics” series. This video was not requested, but was shared by a friend of a friend a while back, and I have things to say about it.

Recently, the YouTube Channel Veritasium posted a video “Why the Speed of Light* Can’t be Measured”. The video argues that all measurements of the speed of light involve sending light in one direction, and waiting for it to come back. However, the light could theoretically be traveling faster in one direction than the other. It seems we are not directly measuring the speed of light, but rather the average speed of light in both directions. The constant speed of light in all directions is a matter of theoretical convention rather than empirical fact.

In the Facebook thread where I first saw the video shared, many people were incredulous. As for myself, I immediately understood the argument from the title, and immediately agreed that it was correct. However, I feel the video is misleading, as it does not explain why there is a theoretical convention that the speed of light is constant. And by doing so, I feel it misses the point of relativity theory.

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Bugsnax’s twofold queerness

cn: no spoilers in the OP, but spoilers permitted in comments

Over break, I tried playing Bugsnax, a video game about catching snack-themed bug monsters. I expected a light and colorful game, but I got something more story-oriented, and way more queer. And that’s not just me reading into it–basically anyone who plays through the game will know that there are not one but two same-sex couples in its cast of 13. Fewer players realize this, but there is also a nonbinary character.

 

bugsnax cover art

Source: Young Horses

My attitude towards queerness in video games is as a nice-to-have. I don’t really expect it, and I expect little out of it. Bugsnax having many queer characters is a pleasant surprise. But I read webcomics whose casts are 100% queer, so for me the novelty is only in the medium, and not in the queerness itself.

What really pleased me about Bugsnax is that it is an excellent example of what I’m calling twofold queer representation. It has queer characters… and queer-coded themes. The queer themes are never explicitly labeled as queer, and have no direct connection to the queerness of the characters. Nonetheless, the significant presence of queer characters cues the player to look for queer interpretations of the rest of the story–and find them.

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