PZ Myers finally watches a certain DVD!

You may all recall that a certain bad movie was released in mid-April…a movie which I have not yet seen, but which is now available on DVD. I was just at the local gas station/grocery store/video store, and there it was, available right there on the shelf. I considered it for a few minutes, and then, since I was paying for gas anyway, I tossed it on the counter and brought it home. Yeah, I know, I wasted $2.12, but it’s about time I got it over with.

I’m about to sit down and watch it. I figure one way I can recoup my investment is by live-blogging it.

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The dumbification of Spore

As anyone who has followed computer games at all lately knows, Spore is the recently released computer game from Maxis that was initially touted as a kind of partial simulation of evolution. Unfortunately, It wasn’t a very good simulation of much of anything, and as a game it has only been a partial success, with some parts being quite entertaining and others deserving a resounding “meh”. (Disclaimer: I have the game, but haven’t bothered to install it yet; I’ve let Skatje play it for me, and I’ve read the reviews, and suffered a noticeable loss of enthusiasm from that exposure.)

Now there is a revealing inside view of the Spore development process, with some tantalizing hints of some really great stuff that was implemented in early versions of the game, that never made it to release. Here’s the problem: the developers divided into two competing/complementary teams with radically different goals, a “cute team” and a “science team”. Guess who won?

This was Spore’s central problem: Could the game be both scientifically accurate and fun? The prototyping teams were becoming lost in their scientific interests. Chaim Gingold, a team member who started as an intern and went on to help design the game’s content creation tools, recalls a summer spent playing with pattern language and cellular automata: “It was just about being engaged with the universe as a set of systems, and being able to build toys that manifested our fascination with these systems and our love for them.” But from within this explosion of experimental enthusiasm came an unexpected warning voice. Spore’s resident uber-geek and artificial intelligence expert Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. “I was the founding member of the ‘cute’ team,” he says with pride. “Ocean [Quigley, Spore’s art director] and Will were really the founding members of the ‘science’ team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!’ and some of us were thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that.'”

(That, by the way, is from the Seed magazine article on the game. You’ve probably already seen it since you all subscribe, right?)

This is the annoying mantra of far too many people, from Barbie to Chris Hecker: “science is hard”. Yes, it is…and that’s what makes it fun! Games are also hard, if they’re any good — you often have to master difficult moves, arcane strategy, work fast or plan far ahead, or solve tricky puzzles, and that’s why we choose to play them, that’s the appeal. What I was looking for in Spore was for someone to take a look with a gamer’s eyes at the process of science and extract from it the puzzle-solving essence and make it approachable and entertaining; instead, they seem to have given up on the science and instead created animated plush dolls for amusement’s sake.

It’s a real shame. There is a little hope in an unlikely suggestion:

I hope that Maxis announces that it intends to rectify this odd deviation from their plan through expansion packs, including a complete overhaul of the Cell Stage and Creature Stage, at minimum. The forced linear progression of the game and forced evolution should also be removed from the Cell and Creature Stages, as it is not faithful to the freedom of the advertised product. (Evolution to a better brain should be optional, at least in the Creature Stage, as it was in the earlier videos.) I do not believe that we have a right to demand it be free, as the development costs of this game are already astronomical. This may have not been as much of a problem if they hadn’t been spending the past few years removing content.

Somebody at Maxis should have encouraged everyone to embrace the science. It could have been great. I don’t know why they didn’t, but I suspect that a bean counter somewhere noted that it never hurts to underestimate the intelligence of the buying public…and decided to embrace the lowest common denominator instead of aspiring to greatness.

Happy Halloween!

It’s Halloween, and I’m on my way to Toronto, where I’ll be spending a most unhallowed evening giving a talk. The one thing I regret about this is that I won’t be indulging in my favorite guilty pleasure for this time of year: watching an old horror movie or two. I’ll just reminisce here for a few minutes over my favorites. Don’t expect profundity, I admit up front that my taste is indiscriminate.

  • All of the Hammer films — I happened to hit adolescence just as there was this renaissance of British horror, so these caught me at an impressionable age.

  • The Abominable Dr Phibes. Vincent Price at his cheesiest. Vincent was splendid in lots of movies: The House of Wax, House of Usher, Witchfinder General, The Raven. And The Raven starred Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff as well!

  • Cat People, both the Val Lewton original and the remake with Nastassja Kinski. It’s one of those movies that tangled sex and horror together wonderfully.

  • Speaking of sex and horror…The Lair of the White Worm. Amanda Donohoe is my kind of woman.

  • The Wicker Man. Not the awful recent remake, but the creepy one with Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee.

  • Quatermass and the Pit aka Five Million Years to Earth. Who cares that it had cheap special effects — intelligent writing always wins out.

  • Cheesy Japanese rubber suit flicks. These are ridiculous and weird, which is the appeal. I can snarf ’em down like popcorn.

  • Mad scientist movies, for some unfathomable reason, appeal deeply to me. From Colin Clive tho Jeffrey Combs, if it’s got a deranged maniac with a gift for violating the laws of god and man, I will identify.

  • There are a few movies that can only be described as surreal which are wonderfully disquieting: Eraserhead and Tetsuo come to mind.

  • I haven’t been too impressed with more modern horror — grisly gore just bores me — but one recent movie that I thought was well done was El Orfanato. If I were staying home tonight, that’s the one I’d be watching while handing out candy to the kiddies at the door.

Your turn.

A little comparison

This new movie, Religulous, is doing reasonably well on its opening weekend, bringing in about $3.5 million. This is comparable to what Expelled brought in (about $3.7 million). There are a few differences, though.

  • Religulous hasn’t had much of an advertising campaign. Remember all the Expelled commercials everywhere, including The Daily Show? Maher’s movie has only relatively recently been getting plugged. It’s ads are more intelligently targeted, though.

  • Religulous only opened on 500 screens, compared to Expelled‘s 1000.

  • Religulous is coming off its opening weekend with great word of mouth and good critical reviews. Expelled attendance plummeted steadily from the first day onward.

  • One to think about, and maybe this isn’t a difference: Expelled had a built-in base of evangelical Christians to draw on (although many were disgusted by it, too). Does Religulous also draw upon a base of freethinkers? Is there a neglected audience for more godless entertainment? Will advertisers and investors figure this out?

They also have something in common. I’ve seen neither. I don’t think Bill Maher would throw me out of the theater if he spotted me in line, though. Or maybe he would — it was such great PR for Mark Mathis and company, wasn’t it?

Religulous opens tonight

And it’s not showing anywhere near me. In fact, I will be very surprised if it opens anywhere in this rural, religious area…I’ll probably have to wait for it to come out on DVD. Religulous is the new movie by Bill Maher, an agnostic who thinks religion is a “load of nonsense”, which by all reports is going to mock religion mercilessly — if this hysterical review by a devout fundamentalist is any indication, it’s going to be great. Maher, though, isn’t exactly an unblemished source with a deep dedication to reason, since he’s fallen for some embarrassingly silly altie medicine nonsense before. I’ll have to wait to see it before I can judge, which may be a while.

Any of you out there who get a chance will have to leave a comment. Go ahead, you can gloat that you live in a civilized part of the world burgeoning with readily available material goodies that are obtainable with a snap of the fingers (…and an agonizing ride through heavy traffic to park on a monstrous sheet of asphalt and pay exorbitant sums for admission…)

Still, I can have the fun of criticizing the critics. Andrew O’Hehir interviews Maher, and although it’s largely a sympathetic review, there’s a big chunk in the middle that is the usual aggravating deference to religion that everyone makes without thinking about it.

But as I gently tried to suggest to Maher during our recent phone call, his scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don’t add up to a coherent critique, and he’s not qualified to provide one.

“Scattershot” is grossly unfair, since he is attacking religion. Go ahead, stack up Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Scientology, Hinduism, etc. next to each other: it seems to me that the fact that there is no possible rubric for judging the validity of any of them, that they typically contradict each other, and that religious belief is so diverse and so inescapably weird means that it is ridiculous to demand a simple, coherent narrative that addresses the flaws in all of them. There they are, the existence of multiple god-beliefs is sufficient in itself to refute them, and it’s perfectly reasonable to expose their various absurdities in brief snippets.

Any serious theologian from the mainstream Christian or Jewish traditions would have eaten his lunch for him, and that’s why we don’t see anybody like that in this film for more than a second or two.

No, I think it more likely that it is because serious theologians are a) dead boring, b) irrelevant to an extreme degree to most varieties of religious beliefs, and c) are just as silly when their ideas are examined. Except for all those serious theologians who have ended up as atheists, of course.

During their brief appearances, for instance, Vatican Latinist Reginald Foster and astronomer George Coyne, who are both Roman Catholic priests, make it clear that contemporary Catholic theology resists literal readings of Scripture and is not in the least antiscientific. You can find liberal Christians who will argue that the resurrection of Jesus was somewhere between a con game and a dream sequence, and numerous Jews who treat the Torah as legendary material and God as a distant hypothesis.

Yes? And this refutes the contention that religion is absurd how? The only way most religious beliefs can be rationally justified is by running away from them very fast, and then making a delicate and distant wave of appreciation, acknowledging their past role in the intellectual tradition, while denying the substance of their arguments. Fine with me, probably fine with Maher.

It’s perfectly legitimate to argue that all such people are putting lipstick on a pig, to coin a phrase — that they’re apologizing for a ruinous and ridiculous body of mythological literature whose influence on human history has been overwhelmingly negative. But Maher’s idiots-of-all-nations anthology in “Religulous” doesn’t even try to make that case; it’s as if he doesn’t even know that religion has centuries’ worth of high-powered intellection on its side, whether you buy any of it or not.

Now there’s a valid criticism of the movie, and until I’ve seen it, I won’t know if the show makes a poor case or not. O’Hehir may be right, but I’m immediately rendered dubious by this justification that “religion has centuries’ worth of high-powered intellection on its side”. I don’t see that at all. I mainly see that religion has had centuries of cultural monopoly, where intellectuals had no choice (and no alternative) but to work within the framework of religion. All the intellectual circle-jerking over religion? Pfft. Nothing useful came of it. Progress came only when smart people started breaking free of the straitjacket.

Maher and Charles’ film also doesn’t engage the value of religious narrative in moral or existential terms, nor does it even try to address the ubiquitous nature of supernatural and spiritual experience in human life.

I do wish people would knock it off with the automatic bestowal of moral authority on religion. It was the only game in town for millennia, and it didn’t make people better — deeply religious cultures have always been as nasty and brutish, if not more so, than more secular cultures, and religious individuals had as much capacity for evil as atheists. Religion gets no edge here.

But OK, I suspect the movie doesn’t ask the question of why so many people are religious. So what? It’s a comedy-documentary. It’s not supposed to answer all questions, especially not tragic-serious ones about the universal human affliction of faith.

But of course this is actually an interview with Maher, and he does answer those questions — so read the whole thing.

What kind of music do Minnesotans like?

Let’s see…it must have a lot of accordions in it, or cowboys singing drunken love songs to their trucks, right? Just to blow your minds, my colleague with esoteric musical taste, Nic McPhee, is getting interviewed tonight, and he’ll be playing some of his favorite songs on the radio. This is our local university radio station, which has a limited license and can’t play anything that has cracked the top 40 in the last 10 or 20 years, but I don’t think Nic’s taste will conflict at all with the station rules.

So tune in to KUMM, 89.7FM, at 6:00pm Central and have those rural Minnesotan stereotypes broken. If you live farther away than Starbuck, Minnesota, you can also listen to the internet stream.