For years, I've been meaning to try making iced green tea with mint and lime. The idea just struck me as a good one, and a quick internet search showed that it would work. Not sure why, but I never got around to actually brewing it until yesterday, and when I was looking up iced tea recipes to get a sense of proportions, I saw a couple of people with the brilliant idea to mix it with rum.
Wow.
I'm not sure I ever want to drink anything again, at least not when it's summertime.
First up, the tea mixture, which is pretty freaking delicious by its lonesome.
2 quarts water.
8 green tea bags
Several sprigs fresh mint (maybe 6 or 7?)
3 mid-sized limes
2/3 to 1 cup sugar (depending on preference)
Bring water to a boil, then remove it from heat and add the tea bags and mint. Let steep for 8 minutes or so, occasionally swirling the tea bags and mint sprigs around (I'm not sure this does anything, I just get impatient waiting). Remove tea bags and mint leaves with a slotted spoon. Juice the limes (you may need more than 3 if you don't have a juicer/reamer) and add the juice and sugar, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Allow to come to room temperature and then chill.
Fill a lowball glass with ice. Add a shot of white rum and top off with the tea mixture. Enjoy many in the company of friends.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Games, Language, and Meaning
Note: This is my second (and final) paper for my cognitive science survey course. It is a response to Robin Clark's Meaningful Games. This is ~4300 words including lots of armchair prognosticating about language and rhetoric as well as plenty of complaining about the ideas Clark presents in his book. You have been warned.
Within five minutes of Professor Eisenberg mentioning Meaningful Games in class, I had placed it in my Amazon shopping cart. I am not certain I had ever been more excited about a book. I am positive that a book for class had never excited me as much as the idea of this one did. You see, Robin Clark’s book proposes to “explore language with game theory”, an idea that immediately intrigued me as a reasonable, if not immediately apparent, approach to a topic that we tend to treat with a highly analytic eye despite its undeniably human nature.
I will say right now that I see no good reason to look at language as something that’s biologically evolved or that can be universally described. We spent time in class looking at animal communication that we described as being somehow sub-linguistic. We noted that many species, especially more evolutionarily advanced ones such as primates, seemed to have developed distinct cries for denoting various circumstances in the environment -- leopards, snakes, etc. The tendency to vocalize and share information with the surrounding world, then, would seem to be evolved. I do not believe that language (the fusion of semantics and syntax) itself is, though.
Language seems, to me, to be more like a tool. The basic components of this tool -- those surprisingly varied vocal notifications that animals of many advanced species use -- are available to less evolved creatures. They use them in their simple way, just like otters cracking open sea urchins with rocks and chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks. But humans are more advanced. We perceive more of the world and recognize relationships in the world more acutely. Just like we combine simpler physical resources into more elaborate contraptions, why wouldn’t we devise ways of combining vocal emissions to more effectively and efficiently relate truths about our surroundings -- in both the immediate and abstract senses. Would anybody say that (specific) tool use is evolved?
Would anybody claim that Japanese macaques have somehow become genetically predisposed towards washing their sweet potatoes? That seems downright silly. Why, then, would I have a genetic determination to recognize noun phrases and formulate clauses? Some people may point to the similar structures of languages across the globe as a suggestion that we are built to process languages in a specific way. I would say that even these similarities can be explained by the tool metaphor.
First of all, tool use is taught generationally. Successive generations, being taught how to make and use the tools of their forebears, do not have to waste their lives re-inventing the basics. Instead, they can move on to expand on existing technologies or invent new technologies -- including linguistic “technologies” -- previously unimagined. Over time, some tools survive and others are replaced. Some tools are simply better than others, and people with superior technologies of the moment tend to spread farther and subjugate those with weaker tools. In this way, the technological ecosystem evolves concurrently with our culture.
Linguistically, we expand and evolve our tools by inventing new ways of describing new experiences and more effective ways of describing old ones. Today we see this primarily through the invention of words, but that’s the microevolution of a language. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done at the moment. Is it unreasonable to think of the addition, removal, and adaptation of grammatical structures as the macroevolution of a language? A more flexible syntactic structure is going to allow for more efficient communication, and thus ease education and cultural advancement in other areas. Just as multiple civilizations concurrently developed nautical and agrarian technologies that eventually converged to similar solutions, it’s reasonable to believe that grammatical structures across independently developed languages would also converge to similar standards.
Why would these structures be similar? Because they need to be processed in the brain. We live in a physical world, and the features of this world, including our biology, can be modeled mathematically. As such, there are logical structures, perhaps nested hierarchies like those often used to describe modern languages, that may simply coordinate better with the design of our brains. Just like we wouldn’t build a scythe that takes three arms to wield, we wouldn’t keep around a language for long if it did not make concessions to the way we focus our attention and process information. Over time, it’s very possible that we could select for traits that allow individuals to use an especially important tool more efficiently. Certainly, I operate in a mental space that is almost entirely linguistic, but I still see no reason to think that language itself is built into us any more than a tendency to build and drive automobiles.
I apologize for this protracted rant, but it’s necessary to explain my excitement over the prospect of Meaningful Games. If language is, as I see it, a socially constructed tool and not some sort of Platonic Form that has always existed, then it makes little sense to analyze language as something independent of communication. Communication fundamentally occurs between rational agents, and rational agents tend to be aware of one another’s rationality. When I hear the words “exploring language with game theory”, I presuppose an account based on this principle. I think of explanation that would account for the semantic richness of and the syntactic flexibility of languages from a perspective of the ways we use language; a perspective that respects the fundamentally social nature of the topic.
Clark’s preface to Meaningful Games suited to wet my appetite quickly. He touches on some of these very same issues I mention, especially the communicative purpose of language. He recognizes that language is defined by its use and that its use is defined by social circumstance. He talks about Tarski and Grice and logical models and meaning; he talks about truth making and algebras and grammars and what these things mean in a context of multiple rational agents. He talks about social context and developing techniques to describe language by its use -- to evaluate it, essentially, as a tool. He said all of the right words to get me excited about what he had to say.
Clark then begins his book proper by discussing the concept of “mentalese”, the sort of universal, Platonic “language” of thought. Mentalese, as Clark describes it, is basically a set of constructs that describe the interactions of objects and agents in the world as we perceive it. These constructs are expressed in a sort of predicate form, relating state transitions on individual objects and causal relationships between these transitions. For example, Clark gets hung up on the notion of what it might mean for A to “kill” B. He denotes a predicate kill(A,B), which suggests that A caused B to die.
We can imagine a complicated series of such predicates and the potential to conjoin and disjoin them and forming propositions of them in first order logic to express even more complicated relationships. These predicates can then be compared to the world we know and we retain those predicate pairings we know to be true. We can even conceive of what a world would be like if other predicates held true, as well.
The problem that Clark has with Mentalese is fairly simple: as Clark describes it, Mentalese effectively embraces the computational metaphor. Mentalese is an analytic thought form, only serving to hold a representation of the universe that is dependant on a detached, sensory experience that may or may not accurately resemble the world as it truly exists. Verbal language, under the assumption of mentalese, is simply a way of translating our own mentalese into an intermediate language that another person can then place back into their own version of mentalese. But this has two problems.
First, of all, we obviously do not operate simply on first order logic. We regularly use constructs like “most” or “many” or “often” that are vague and difficult, if not impossible, to construct into first order logic forms. But first order logic is the most complicated logical system for which we have correct and complete proof systems for. We cannot just be computers, then, because we cannot simply compute much of what we store and communicate. More troublesome for Clark is the simple fact that a world where we only work in mentalese is a solipsistic one, where individual understandings of reality are isolated, answering only to some higher standard. In the real world, though, it appears as though meaning is derived socially.
Clark lays these objections out in such a convoluted form that I am not sure either of us understands where his problem with Mentalese actually lies. He walks through the uncanny valleys of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room en route to an objection that is social rather than computational. And he never quite seems to resolve the two issues. Clark spends a chapter examining the social nature of meaning before taking time to describe game theory and the way we evaluate the design of games and strategies. By the time he actually starts to talk about linguistic games, suddenly people are computers once more, though he may not realize it.
Part of the problem is that the first linguistic “game” that Clark constructs is not really a game at all. It involves the verification or falsification of statements, the very thing Clark suggests Mentalese is designed to do. (In)Appropriately enough, Clark spends an extended amount of time discussing how we might translate statements into propositions in first order logic and how players might take turns stripping down the logical operators to check the truth of the statement against some publicly shared model of the world.
After nearly 60 pages, Clark acknowledges that this is a trivial game and not particularly useful. What he does not acknowledge is that his “game” fails to be a game. There is no actual strategy to be played, no matter what Clark might suggest. A proposition in first order logic is either true or false with respect to a model. The “winner” is determined not by player behavior but by the model over which they are playing. In the middle of all of this, Clark establishes more troublesome trends that will persist throughout the rest of his games. For one thing, his players are not communicating with each other. They are projecting information into and extracting information from a void. More important, none of Clark’s players behave in any less computational a manner than those in his verification game.
These problems become most clearly apparent when Clark starts talking about common knowledge. This chapter begins with an example of generals trying to coordinate an attack on a superior force. Not wanting to risk attacking alone, they send messengers back and forth between camps ad infinitum, believing that they cannot be certain that a confirmation was received until they receive a confirmation in turn.
Clark extrapolates this problem to individuals trying to discuss going to see a dance troupe when one performance has been cancelled and replaced with another. The problem, in this case, revolves around the definite description “the dance troupe” as opposed to specifying which troupe by a unique name. In our fantasy land, both players know about the cancellation, but neither knows what the other knows. They want to avoid confusion, but they also want to save effort of using the full name for the troupe that is actually performing. Clark suggests that this requires that they model each other’s mental states. That is, A needs to know about what B thinks A knows. Which means A needs to know about what B thinks A thinks B knows, and so on and so forth.
For asynchronous (or mono-directional) communication, this is a reasonable (if absurd) problem. We need to be aware of what our audience may not know and make concessions to ensure clarity. Direct communication between individuals, however, is inherently synchronized. When conversing, we may attempt to model one another’s knowledge, but we know that we can count on our partner’s awareness of their own knowledge to ease the burden. Individually, we can recognize when uncertainty enters the picture and make explicit reference to it. We can request clarification when we encounter confusion. Such active error correction may require more effort than simply knowing what referents are in play during a discussion, but it certainly requires less effort than infinite recursion.
This is what I mean when I say that Clark, despite his earlier complaints, continues to treat people like computers. We are communal creatures who operate on heuristics. We share information, including information about our own knowledge. Moreover, we generally do not build exact models or find exact solutions to problems as our first course of action. Rather, precision is a last resort once our estimations prove insufficient. Why would Clark even waste space talking about an effort to build a perfect representation of the cognitive world of others? This is not something we even attempt in indirect communication, as heuristics of charity encourage greater clarity than may be necessary. No model is perfect. The only perfect map of a territory is the territory itself. Anything else, by necessity, involves abstractions meant to communicate only the most significant details at the appropriate scale.
It is at this point that I started to get frustrated with Clark’s writing and began wondering if and when we would get to the meat of things. Was there ever a point where we would look at “games” that were concerned with something more elaborate than ambiguity? So I read. And I read. And I read some more. Eventually, on page 197, when Clark was still discussing types of copresence and their usefulness in resolving ambiguity in pronouns and definite phrases, he provided these two sentences:
(19) Because it was broken, I returned the plate I had just bought to the store
(20)Because the plate I had just bought was broken, I returned it to the store
Clark’s response to the variation in this sentence is as follows:
“The pairing of (19) and (20) immediately suggests another level of strategic decision making, one more allied to the general problem of stylistics and rhetoric. I leave this as an open problem for the reader.”
Suddenly everything that led to this point made sense. Clark is not concerned with communication strategies in the same way I am. When I think about use of language between agents, my concern, first and foremost, is with the rhetoric that Clark ignores. I am intrigued by strategies we use in our diction and our phrasing to affect the way our words are perceived by others. I am curious about implicature and subtler ways we make our ideas more or less palatable to listeners, and the ways in which we listen for these cues in an effort to reduce their impact.
Clark, on the other hand, is solely concerned with notions of clarity and economy. He looks at meaning in explicit ways, ignoring implicature in favor of understanding how sentence structure and “public information” (the very existence of which, Clark questions) can alleviate ambiguity. He invents quantifications of linguistic economy in an effort to explain our use of ambiguous phrases. He then justifies these efforts by making games to describe how we spare ourselves effort in our speaking and the risks that we take in doing so. Even in this regard, on a playing field of Clark’s own creation, I am not entirely certain how his “games” hold up.
Let’s look at an example involving pronoun use. We start out with two players, the speaker and the listener. We then have a statement. Clark uses the example “An undercover cop was observing a suspect. He stayed in the shadows.” In order to eliminate lexical cues, we could generically use “X ____ed Y. He ____ed.” In any case, Clark looks at this game as one of information states. The speaker begins in one information state, in which “he” refers to either X or Y, depending on the situation. His goal is for the listener to reach the same state. The speaker then has four options. He can use a proper name in place of “he”, or he can use “he” to refer to whichever of X or Y he intends for the listener to identify with the pronoun.
If the speaker chooses a proper name, then the listener has an easy choice: she can recognize the subject of the second sentence as the one directly referenced. Communication succeeds, both parties benefit. If the speaker chooses to use a pronoun, the listener gets to choose which of X and Y she believes the speaker to be referring to. A failure to choose the proper antecedent leads to confusion and both parties lose. Choosing the correct antecedent results in a benefit to both parties.
Obviously, to make this a game worth playing, the benefit for successful communication using a pronoun needs to surpass the benefit gained from using a proper name. As mentioned earlier, Clark is concerned with a concept of “economy” in language use. Since it takes more effort to generate a proper name (or a more descriptive phrase) than it does a simple pronoun, it is beneficial to the speaker to use the pronoun. Supposedly, it is also easier for the listener to process the shorter phrase. With this in mind, he devises a game that effectively looks like this, with the speaker’s options listed along the top and the listener’s options listed along the side:
Where do these values come from? Imaginationland, of course! That’s not quite fair. Clark does have some rules that he follows to create the rankings. Successful communication, obviously, carries the highest benefit and unsuccessful communication the highest cost. Encoding an element as a pronoun provides a larger benefit as opposed to using a full name. More prominent elements (such as the subject of an immediately previous sentence) are “cheaper” to encode, increasing the benefit of that encoding. Not immediately relevant is the fact that pronouns are cheaper than descriptions.
Continuing to ignore the fact that the actual values are wholly arbitrary, this is why the highest reward comes from using “he” when the speaker wants to refer to X. Playing the game backwards, we see that this is the choice the speaker should make if, indeed, he wishes to refer to X in the second sentence. If the listener hears “he”, she will be inclined to assume that there is a 50% chance that the pronoun could be in reference to either X or Y. X’s prior prominence makes it the safer option. As such, if the speaker wants to refer to Y in the second sentence, he ought to make the reference explicit.
Does this final decision make sense? Mostly, again assuming that the context fails to provide further lexical cues. What doesn’t make sense is the reasoning that led to it. Specifically, why is the pronoun beneficial to the listener? She has to take the mental effort not only to process the auditory emission, but to attach it to some other concept. Depending on the situation, this could be a lot more work than processing an exact name. Pronoun use is not symmetrically beneficial. It is selfish on the part of the speaker.
Of course, this is not the only game that Clark plays. He looks at situations where individual words create ambiguity by carrying multiple definitions. He also looks very lightly at implicature through the lense of sarcasm and hinting/politeness. In these cases, he suggests that we can design games that use social context, familiarity, and/or focal points to create probabilistic strategies. Prior experience as well as physical and lexical context dictate our initial response to a word’s definition when there are multiple options. Familiarity determines our likelihood at properly interpreting sarcasm or recognizing a hint as such.
Of course, with every situation being unique, we can’t devise universal games for these sorts of problems any more than we can for pronoun use. But Clark thinks that the approach is still useful in the way that it grounds our use of language in a particular context. I do not. I do not believe that games are at all a necessary construct in recognizing how we generate meaning. I am not even sure this central question of meaning is a linguistic one. The bigger issue, though, is this: does anybody actually think this way when speaking?
Here we find the real problem with Clark’s attempt to leverage game theory on topics of meaning and ambiguity. Game theory requires that its participants are rational decision makers who are, at some level, aware of the game that they are playing. In an ordinary, conversational setting, such as those that Clark describes, I do not think that human beings can be described as rational actors. We tend towards preoccupation. If we are playing a game, it is one of minimal energy expenditure, and over thinking every lexical decision we make is certainly not a winning strategy in that situation.
In order for game theory to be applicable to a given situation, there needs to be a reason for maximization. In order for human beings to behave as rational actors, there needs to be meaningful cost or reward. There needs to be risk. Under these sorts of circumstances, we are more likely to take the time to explore our options and try to improve our expected result. Typically, conversation is not such a situation. We are free to identify and correct misunderstandings. Any serious consequences are not immediate and irrevocable, and any direct consequences of poor communication are not overly costly.
If we are looking for a situation where people play games with language, designing (and responding to) rhetoric is exactly such a situation. When we engage in rhetoric, as a writer or an orator, we work with an agenda. We manipulate language as a tool to promote that agenda, and our ability to use language and anticipate the response of our audience is what determines immediately our success or failure. As an audience, we try to identify linguistic ploys and focus on facts. The game is plain, but, as an example, I suggest my experiences serving jury duty.
In the summer of 2010, shortly before moving to Colorado, I was under going voir dire in the Hennepin County court system. Since I was preparing to leave the state and had a lot of preparation to do, I did not want to actually sit on a jury. Effectively, the attorneys and I were locked in a game. They asked questions. trying not to violate procedure or give away the case they were building but still seeking jurors who would be sympathetic to that case. I phrased my answers in such a way that, without lying or being contemptuous, I could suggest that I would not be easy to sway or take kindly to their efforts at persuasion.
Both of us had something to gain and/or lose. I might have to risk days of my life hearing a case I really didn’t have time to hear, and possibly a boring one at that. The attorneys were trying to find people who would be willing to consider the story they wanted to weave. We played the game with language, leveraging various grammatical forms and semantic particularities to implant opinions and ideas without violating the constraints of the situation. By acknowledging and responding to their rhetoric, I pushed the situation towards one that was favorable to myself -- and which I believe was favorable for the attorneys.
So, rhetoric is obviously a game, and likely a better game than the ones that Clark creates in Meaningful Games. As much as this helps explain my frustrations, the fact that I would have preferred this as a topic has no bearing on the quality of the book itself. Even discounting these desires, though, Clark’s approach and his games did not do much to think about the way I think about language or say anything novel about meaning. Maybe I would feel differently if I were a linguist, but Meaningful Games mostly just left me frustrated with Clark’s insistence on treating heuristic bits of human behavior with such an analytic eye.
By my estimation, Clark seriously inflates the value placed on economy of speech. The best reason to do so is simply that it lends credence to his arguments, but it also means he overcomplicates the entire issue. There is also the problem of incessant tangents -- about mentalese, garden path sentences, focal points, logical proofs, and anything else Clark thinks of as mildly relevant. While fascinating in subject, the added value is of little comfort when the stated purpose of the book comes to so little.
Had I entered with lower expectations, I may have enjoyed Meaningful Games. Clarks’ writing is, for the most part, accessible, and his examples tend to be light and entertaining. It takes a joy in itself and manages to cover large swathes of ground, even if much of it is tangential. I would actually consider recommending Meaningful Games to people with no prior knowledge of any of the topics contained within it, but certainly not to a person looking for a serious read on topics of game theory, language, or meaning.
Work Cited:
Clark, Robin. Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory. Camebridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012
Within five minutes of Professor Eisenberg mentioning Meaningful Games in class, I had placed it in my Amazon shopping cart. I am not certain I had ever been more excited about a book. I am positive that a book for class had never excited me as much as the idea of this one did. You see, Robin Clark’s book proposes to “explore language with game theory”, an idea that immediately intrigued me as a reasonable, if not immediately apparent, approach to a topic that we tend to treat with a highly analytic eye despite its undeniably human nature.
I will say right now that I see no good reason to look at language as something that’s biologically evolved or that can be universally described. We spent time in class looking at animal communication that we described as being somehow sub-linguistic. We noted that many species, especially more evolutionarily advanced ones such as primates, seemed to have developed distinct cries for denoting various circumstances in the environment -- leopards, snakes, etc. The tendency to vocalize and share information with the surrounding world, then, would seem to be evolved. I do not believe that language (the fusion of semantics and syntax) itself is, though.
Language seems, to me, to be more like a tool. The basic components of this tool -- those surprisingly varied vocal notifications that animals of many advanced species use -- are available to less evolved creatures. They use them in their simple way, just like otters cracking open sea urchins with rocks and chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks. But humans are more advanced. We perceive more of the world and recognize relationships in the world more acutely. Just like we combine simpler physical resources into more elaborate contraptions, why wouldn’t we devise ways of combining vocal emissions to more effectively and efficiently relate truths about our surroundings -- in both the immediate and abstract senses. Would anybody say that (specific) tool use is evolved?
Would anybody claim that Japanese macaques have somehow become genetically predisposed towards washing their sweet potatoes? That seems downright silly. Why, then, would I have a genetic determination to recognize noun phrases and formulate clauses? Some people may point to the similar structures of languages across the globe as a suggestion that we are built to process languages in a specific way. I would say that even these similarities can be explained by the tool metaphor.
First of all, tool use is taught generationally. Successive generations, being taught how to make and use the tools of their forebears, do not have to waste their lives re-inventing the basics. Instead, they can move on to expand on existing technologies or invent new technologies -- including linguistic “technologies” -- previously unimagined. Over time, some tools survive and others are replaced. Some tools are simply better than others, and people with superior technologies of the moment tend to spread farther and subjugate those with weaker tools. In this way, the technological ecosystem evolves concurrently with our culture.
Linguistically, we expand and evolve our tools by inventing new ways of describing new experiences and more effective ways of describing old ones. Today we see this primarily through the invention of words, but that’s the microevolution of a language. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done at the moment. Is it unreasonable to think of the addition, removal, and adaptation of grammatical structures as the macroevolution of a language? A more flexible syntactic structure is going to allow for more efficient communication, and thus ease education and cultural advancement in other areas. Just as multiple civilizations concurrently developed nautical and agrarian technologies that eventually converged to similar solutions, it’s reasonable to believe that grammatical structures across independently developed languages would also converge to similar standards.
Why would these structures be similar? Because they need to be processed in the brain. We live in a physical world, and the features of this world, including our biology, can be modeled mathematically. As such, there are logical structures, perhaps nested hierarchies like those often used to describe modern languages, that may simply coordinate better with the design of our brains. Just like we wouldn’t build a scythe that takes three arms to wield, we wouldn’t keep around a language for long if it did not make concessions to the way we focus our attention and process information. Over time, it’s very possible that we could select for traits that allow individuals to use an especially important tool more efficiently. Certainly, I operate in a mental space that is almost entirely linguistic, but I still see no reason to think that language itself is built into us any more than a tendency to build and drive automobiles.
I apologize for this protracted rant, but it’s necessary to explain my excitement over the prospect of Meaningful Games. If language is, as I see it, a socially constructed tool and not some sort of Platonic Form that has always existed, then it makes little sense to analyze language as something independent of communication. Communication fundamentally occurs between rational agents, and rational agents tend to be aware of one another’s rationality. When I hear the words “exploring language with game theory”, I presuppose an account based on this principle. I think of explanation that would account for the semantic richness of and the syntactic flexibility of languages from a perspective of the ways we use language; a perspective that respects the fundamentally social nature of the topic.
Clark’s preface to Meaningful Games suited to wet my appetite quickly. He touches on some of these very same issues I mention, especially the communicative purpose of language. He recognizes that language is defined by its use and that its use is defined by social circumstance. He talks about Tarski and Grice and logical models and meaning; he talks about truth making and algebras and grammars and what these things mean in a context of multiple rational agents. He talks about social context and developing techniques to describe language by its use -- to evaluate it, essentially, as a tool. He said all of the right words to get me excited about what he had to say.
Clark then begins his book proper by discussing the concept of “mentalese”, the sort of universal, Platonic “language” of thought. Mentalese, as Clark describes it, is basically a set of constructs that describe the interactions of objects and agents in the world as we perceive it. These constructs are expressed in a sort of predicate form, relating state transitions on individual objects and causal relationships between these transitions. For example, Clark gets hung up on the notion of what it might mean for A to “kill” B. He denotes a predicate kill(A,B), which suggests that A caused B to die.
We can imagine a complicated series of such predicates and the potential to conjoin and disjoin them and forming propositions of them in first order logic to express even more complicated relationships. These predicates can then be compared to the world we know and we retain those predicate pairings we know to be true. We can even conceive of what a world would be like if other predicates held true, as well.
The problem that Clark has with Mentalese is fairly simple: as Clark describes it, Mentalese effectively embraces the computational metaphor. Mentalese is an analytic thought form, only serving to hold a representation of the universe that is dependant on a detached, sensory experience that may or may not accurately resemble the world as it truly exists. Verbal language, under the assumption of mentalese, is simply a way of translating our own mentalese into an intermediate language that another person can then place back into their own version of mentalese. But this has two problems.
First, of all, we obviously do not operate simply on first order logic. We regularly use constructs like “most” or “many” or “often” that are vague and difficult, if not impossible, to construct into first order logic forms. But first order logic is the most complicated logical system for which we have correct and complete proof systems for. We cannot just be computers, then, because we cannot simply compute much of what we store and communicate. More troublesome for Clark is the simple fact that a world where we only work in mentalese is a solipsistic one, where individual understandings of reality are isolated, answering only to some higher standard. In the real world, though, it appears as though meaning is derived socially.
Clark lays these objections out in such a convoluted form that I am not sure either of us understands where his problem with Mentalese actually lies. He walks through the uncanny valleys of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room en route to an objection that is social rather than computational. And he never quite seems to resolve the two issues. Clark spends a chapter examining the social nature of meaning before taking time to describe game theory and the way we evaluate the design of games and strategies. By the time he actually starts to talk about linguistic games, suddenly people are computers once more, though he may not realize it.
Part of the problem is that the first linguistic “game” that Clark constructs is not really a game at all. It involves the verification or falsification of statements, the very thing Clark suggests Mentalese is designed to do. (In)Appropriately enough, Clark spends an extended amount of time discussing how we might translate statements into propositions in first order logic and how players might take turns stripping down the logical operators to check the truth of the statement against some publicly shared model of the world.
After nearly 60 pages, Clark acknowledges that this is a trivial game and not particularly useful. What he does not acknowledge is that his “game” fails to be a game. There is no actual strategy to be played, no matter what Clark might suggest. A proposition in first order logic is either true or false with respect to a model. The “winner” is determined not by player behavior but by the model over which they are playing. In the middle of all of this, Clark establishes more troublesome trends that will persist throughout the rest of his games. For one thing, his players are not communicating with each other. They are projecting information into and extracting information from a void. More important, none of Clark’s players behave in any less computational a manner than those in his verification game.
These problems become most clearly apparent when Clark starts talking about common knowledge. This chapter begins with an example of generals trying to coordinate an attack on a superior force. Not wanting to risk attacking alone, they send messengers back and forth between camps ad infinitum, believing that they cannot be certain that a confirmation was received until they receive a confirmation in turn.
Clark extrapolates this problem to individuals trying to discuss going to see a dance troupe when one performance has been cancelled and replaced with another. The problem, in this case, revolves around the definite description “the dance troupe” as opposed to specifying which troupe by a unique name. In our fantasy land, both players know about the cancellation, but neither knows what the other knows. They want to avoid confusion, but they also want to save effort of using the full name for the troupe that is actually performing. Clark suggests that this requires that they model each other’s mental states. That is, A needs to know about what B thinks A knows. Which means A needs to know about what B thinks A thinks B knows, and so on and so forth.
For asynchronous (or mono-directional) communication, this is a reasonable (if absurd) problem. We need to be aware of what our audience may not know and make concessions to ensure clarity. Direct communication between individuals, however, is inherently synchronized. When conversing, we may attempt to model one another’s knowledge, but we know that we can count on our partner’s awareness of their own knowledge to ease the burden. Individually, we can recognize when uncertainty enters the picture and make explicit reference to it. We can request clarification when we encounter confusion. Such active error correction may require more effort than simply knowing what referents are in play during a discussion, but it certainly requires less effort than infinite recursion.
This is what I mean when I say that Clark, despite his earlier complaints, continues to treat people like computers. We are communal creatures who operate on heuristics. We share information, including information about our own knowledge. Moreover, we generally do not build exact models or find exact solutions to problems as our first course of action. Rather, precision is a last resort once our estimations prove insufficient. Why would Clark even waste space talking about an effort to build a perfect representation of the cognitive world of others? This is not something we even attempt in indirect communication, as heuristics of charity encourage greater clarity than may be necessary. No model is perfect. The only perfect map of a territory is the territory itself. Anything else, by necessity, involves abstractions meant to communicate only the most significant details at the appropriate scale.
It is at this point that I started to get frustrated with Clark’s writing and began wondering if and when we would get to the meat of things. Was there ever a point where we would look at “games” that were concerned with something more elaborate than ambiguity? So I read. And I read. And I read some more. Eventually, on page 197, when Clark was still discussing types of copresence and their usefulness in resolving ambiguity in pronouns and definite phrases, he provided these two sentences:
(19) Because it was broken, I returned the plate I had just bought to the store
(20)Because the plate I had just bought was broken, I returned it to the store
Clark’s response to the variation in this sentence is as follows:
“The pairing of (19) and (20) immediately suggests another level of strategic decision making, one more allied to the general problem of stylistics and rhetoric. I leave this as an open problem for the reader.”
Suddenly everything that led to this point made sense. Clark is not concerned with communication strategies in the same way I am. When I think about use of language between agents, my concern, first and foremost, is with the rhetoric that Clark ignores. I am intrigued by strategies we use in our diction and our phrasing to affect the way our words are perceived by others. I am curious about implicature and subtler ways we make our ideas more or less palatable to listeners, and the ways in which we listen for these cues in an effort to reduce their impact.
Clark, on the other hand, is solely concerned with notions of clarity and economy. He looks at meaning in explicit ways, ignoring implicature in favor of understanding how sentence structure and “public information” (the very existence of which, Clark questions) can alleviate ambiguity. He invents quantifications of linguistic economy in an effort to explain our use of ambiguous phrases. He then justifies these efforts by making games to describe how we spare ourselves effort in our speaking and the risks that we take in doing so. Even in this regard, on a playing field of Clark’s own creation, I am not entirely certain how his “games” hold up.
Let’s look at an example involving pronoun use. We start out with two players, the speaker and the listener. We then have a statement. Clark uses the example “An undercover cop was observing a suspect. He stayed in the shadows.” In order to eliminate lexical cues, we could generically use “X ____ed Y. He ____ed.” In any case, Clark looks at this game as one of information states. The speaker begins in one information state, in which “he” refers to either X or Y, depending on the situation. His goal is for the listener to reach the same state. The speaker then has four options. He can use a proper name in place of “he”, or he can use “he” to refer to whichever of X or Y he intends for the listener to identify with the pronoun.
If the speaker chooses a proper name, then the listener has an easy choice: she can recognize the subject of the second sentence as the one directly referenced. Communication succeeds, both parties benefit. If the speaker chooses to use a pronoun, the listener gets to choose which of X and Y she believes the speaker to be referring to. A failure to choose the proper antecedent leads to confusion and both parties lose. Choosing the correct antecedent results in a benefit to both parties.
Obviously, to make this a game worth playing, the benefit for successful communication using a pronoun needs to surpass the benefit gained from using a proper name. As mentioned earlier, Clark is concerned with a concept of “economy” in language use. Since it takes more effort to generate a proper name (or a more descriptive phrase) than it does a simple pronoun, it is beneficial to the speaker to use the pronoun. Supposedly, it is also easier for the listener to process the shorter phrase. With this in mind, he devises a game that effectively looks like this, with the speaker’s options listed along the top and the listener’s options listed along the side:
Proper reference to X
|
“He” referring to X
|
“He” referring to Y
|
Proper reference to Y
| |
X
|
(1, 1)
|
(3.5, 3.5)
|
(-2, -2)
|
(-2, -2)
|
Y
|
(-2, -2)
|
(-2, -2)
|
(2, 2)
|
(1.5, 1.5)
|
Where do these values come from? Imaginationland, of course! That’s not quite fair. Clark does have some rules that he follows to create the rankings. Successful communication, obviously, carries the highest benefit and unsuccessful communication the highest cost. Encoding an element as a pronoun provides a larger benefit as opposed to using a full name. More prominent elements (such as the subject of an immediately previous sentence) are “cheaper” to encode, increasing the benefit of that encoding. Not immediately relevant is the fact that pronouns are cheaper than descriptions.
Continuing to ignore the fact that the actual values are wholly arbitrary, this is why the highest reward comes from using “he” when the speaker wants to refer to X. Playing the game backwards, we see that this is the choice the speaker should make if, indeed, he wishes to refer to X in the second sentence. If the listener hears “he”, she will be inclined to assume that there is a 50% chance that the pronoun could be in reference to either X or Y. X’s prior prominence makes it the safer option. As such, if the speaker wants to refer to Y in the second sentence, he ought to make the reference explicit.
Does this final decision make sense? Mostly, again assuming that the context fails to provide further lexical cues. What doesn’t make sense is the reasoning that led to it. Specifically, why is the pronoun beneficial to the listener? She has to take the mental effort not only to process the auditory emission, but to attach it to some other concept. Depending on the situation, this could be a lot more work than processing an exact name. Pronoun use is not symmetrically beneficial. It is selfish on the part of the speaker.
Of course, this is not the only game that Clark plays. He looks at situations where individual words create ambiguity by carrying multiple definitions. He also looks very lightly at implicature through the lense of sarcasm and hinting/politeness. In these cases, he suggests that we can design games that use social context, familiarity, and/or focal points to create probabilistic strategies. Prior experience as well as physical and lexical context dictate our initial response to a word’s definition when there are multiple options. Familiarity determines our likelihood at properly interpreting sarcasm or recognizing a hint as such.
Of course, with every situation being unique, we can’t devise universal games for these sorts of problems any more than we can for pronoun use. But Clark thinks that the approach is still useful in the way that it grounds our use of language in a particular context. I do not. I do not believe that games are at all a necessary construct in recognizing how we generate meaning. I am not even sure this central question of meaning is a linguistic one. The bigger issue, though, is this: does anybody actually think this way when speaking?
Here we find the real problem with Clark’s attempt to leverage game theory on topics of meaning and ambiguity. Game theory requires that its participants are rational decision makers who are, at some level, aware of the game that they are playing. In an ordinary, conversational setting, such as those that Clark describes, I do not think that human beings can be described as rational actors. We tend towards preoccupation. If we are playing a game, it is one of minimal energy expenditure, and over thinking every lexical decision we make is certainly not a winning strategy in that situation.
In order for game theory to be applicable to a given situation, there needs to be a reason for maximization. In order for human beings to behave as rational actors, there needs to be meaningful cost or reward. There needs to be risk. Under these sorts of circumstances, we are more likely to take the time to explore our options and try to improve our expected result. Typically, conversation is not such a situation. We are free to identify and correct misunderstandings. Any serious consequences are not immediate and irrevocable, and any direct consequences of poor communication are not overly costly.
If we are looking for a situation where people play games with language, designing (and responding to) rhetoric is exactly such a situation. When we engage in rhetoric, as a writer or an orator, we work with an agenda. We manipulate language as a tool to promote that agenda, and our ability to use language and anticipate the response of our audience is what determines immediately our success or failure. As an audience, we try to identify linguistic ploys and focus on facts. The game is plain, but, as an example, I suggest my experiences serving jury duty.
In the summer of 2010, shortly before moving to Colorado, I was under going voir dire in the Hennepin County court system. Since I was preparing to leave the state and had a lot of preparation to do, I did not want to actually sit on a jury. Effectively, the attorneys and I were locked in a game. They asked questions. trying not to violate procedure or give away the case they were building but still seeking jurors who would be sympathetic to that case. I phrased my answers in such a way that, without lying or being contemptuous, I could suggest that I would not be easy to sway or take kindly to their efforts at persuasion.
Both of us had something to gain and/or lose. I might have to risk days of my life hearing a case I really didn’t have time to hear, and possibly a boring one at that. The attorneys were trying to find people who would be willing to consider the story they wanted to weave. We played the game with language, leveraging various grammatical forms and semantic particularities to implant opinions and ideas without violating the constraints of the situation. By acknowledging and responding to their rhetoric, I pushed the situation towards one that was favorable to myself -- and which I believe was favorable for the attorneys.
So, rhetoric is obviously a game, and likely a better game than the ones that Clark creates in Meaningful Games. As much as this helps explain my frustrations, the fact that I would have preferred this as a topic has no bearing on the quality of the book itself. Even discounting these desires, though, Clark’s approach and his games did not do much to think about the way I think about language or say anything novel about meaning. Maybe I would feel differently if I were a linguist, but Meaningful Games mostly just left me frustrated with Clark’s insistence on treating heuristic bits of human behavior with such an analytic eye.
By my estimation, Clark seriously inflates the value placed on economy of speech. The best reason to do so is simply that it lends credence to his arguments, but it also means he overcomplicates the entire issue. There is also the problem of incessant tangents -- about mentalese, garden path sentences, focal points, logical proofs, and anything else Clark thinks of as mildly relevant. While fascinating in subject, the added value is of little comfort when the stated purpose of the book comes to so little.
Had I entered with lower expectations, I may have enjoyed Meaningful Games. Clarks’ writing is, for the most part, accessible, and his examples tend to be light and entertaining. It takes a joy in itself and manages to cover large swathes of ground, even if much of it is tangential. I would actually consider recommending Meaningful Games to people with no prior knowledge of any of the topics contained within it, but certainly not to a person looking for a serious read on topics of game theory, language, or meaning.
Work Cited:
Clark, Robin. Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory. Camebridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Vikings Post-Draft
The NFL Draft occurred over the past few days, and I was watching pretty contently through the first four rounds. Generally speaking, I really liked what I saw.
Things started with a bang on the first night. We used the Browns' fear that another team would trade up and take Trent Richardson to move back a single slot and pick up 3 additional late round picks. Then we grabbed Matt Kalil as we had intended to for months, no matter what Rick Spielman wanted everybody to think. Kalil is the top left tackle prospect in years, and while he's not Jake Long or Joe Thomas, he's immeasurably better than what we had (Charlie Johnson) or even what we have had for ages (Bryant McKinney). He's an athletic blind side protector who is intent on doing things the right way -- whether it's technique on the field or building up power in the weight room to improve his run blocking. Almost as important, it lets us move Charlie Johnson inside to guard, where a lot of people suspect he's a better fit. Along with some off season moves we made, our O line is suddenly adequate if not legitimately strong instead of one of the top liabilities on the team.
Later, we used some of the ammunition we got from that early trade to move back into the first round to pick up Notre Dame safety Harrison Smith. Smith was the consensus number 2 safety in the draft, and last season made it incredibly clear that we had nothing at the position. Smith worked with our coaching staff extensively at the Senior Bowl, and they fell in love with him. Not only his talent and his positioning on the field, but his presence in meetings and his leadership. He should be a day one starter and provide a serious improvement in our secondary.
Our secondary saw further improvement with Josh Robinson, CB out of the University of Central Florida. Robinson set the fastest 40 time at the Combine, running it in 4.29 seconds. On top of that, he put up 17 reps of 225 lbs on the bench press, more than many larger, supposedly stronger backs. He should provide a powerful jam at the line of scrimmage, and he has the speed to recover if he gets burned and make plays on the ball from the other side of the field, and he's a willing tackler. He's an early entry from a mediocre program, so he may not be ready to jump in and start immediately is up to question, but he could develop into something special.
The fourth round saw a number of interesting picks. First being Arkansas wide receiver Jarius Wright. I watched a lot of Hogs games last fall with one of my roommates who comes from the state. Wright is small and best fit to line up in the slot, where we already have Percy Harvin, so a lot of fans may not like the pick. I've seen him play, though, and he's nothing like Harvin. He's possibly faster and more explosive, even if he doesn't have the strength or dynamic ability in the open field. Most important, though, he's a great route runner, which can't really be said about, really, anybody else on the roster. Combined with his speed, this makes him a great deep threat down the middle. I'm honestly excited about the potential to line Wright and Harvin both up on the slot or, better yet, Wright in the slot and Harvin in the backfield and play games with opposing defenses.
Later in the 4th, we picked up a second Arkansas receiver, Greg Childs. Childs is 6'3" and possesses ridiculous speed (clocked at 4.38 at his pro day). He produced extremely well while healthy, but he tore his patella tendon in 2010 and tried to come back too soon, hurting his 2011 performance. Because of this, I haven't seen as much of Childs, but he's a prototypical number 1 receiver in terms of size and ability. Friends who have watched him insist that he's a first or second round talent if not for the injury limiting his exposure last season, and scouts seem to agree. He was a steal who could pay dividends for years to come if he adapts well to the pros.
Between those picks, we made an incredibly un-glamorous but essential decision with USC FB/TE Rhett Ellison. With Jimmy Kleinsasser having retired, we were seriously lacking in supplementary blockers. Current top TEs Kyle Rudolph and John Carlson are great receivers but are only adequate at best in the blocking game. Ellison didn't have a lot of buzz in the media, but Spielman insists that there were other teams planning on grabbing him in the fourth round. Ellison is a hulking guy who was responsible for making holes nearly every time he was on the field last year, and he did it well, considering the high power of USCs offense. I'm sure the Vikings saw plenty of tape on him when they were doing their homework on Kalil, and this is a pick that should pay dividends with AP returning from knee injury and Toby Gerhart being a less dynamic runner in general.
In the top of the fifth, we made possibly our most questionable choice, drafting another DB from Notre Dame. I really haven't been able to find out much about Robert Blanton, other than the fact that nobody seems to see him as a CB in the NFL, meaning he may move over to Safety next to his past and present teammate. Considering the decisions made up to this point, though, I'm going to express faith in the pick. Time will tell, and everything is a crap shoot at this point in the draft, anyway.
We finally started the hunt for a successor to Ryan Longwell in the sixth, where we grabbed Georgia kicker Blair Walsh. Longwell had his worst season in ages last year, missing six kicks, and it's fully possible that he'll continue to regress as he pushes on towards 40. Blair might get knocked for inaccuracy after going 21/35 last season, but 10 of his 14 misses came from 40 or more yards as Georgia kicked more than any other team in the FBS. Kicks that long are always a crapshoot for college players, and he hit a long of 56 yards, so he's got the leg. NFL conditioning and coaching should help his accuracy. It could be an interesting camp for the old guard in special teams.
I honestly don't know much of anything about either of our seventh round picks (UNC linebacker Audie Cole and Cal DE/DT Trevor Guyton) except that several scouts had fourth round grades on the both of them and both play positions where we can always use depth. Along with the bevy of undrafted rookie free agents we've already reached agreements with, they'll fight for positions throughout training camp and provide perspective on our current crop of players.
In short, we've become a much better team over the past 48+ hours. I'm not holding out that we'll be truly competitive, but climbing back up as 6-10 is certainly possible. We've got potentially strong pieces in place at positions where we had nothing. We won't have nothing to work with coming into the draft next year, meaning we can focus on depth and a much smaller number of holes. I feel good about being a Vikings fan right now. Much better, certainly, than I was after that dark, dark Packers game in November.
Things started with a bang on the first night. We used the Browns' fear that another team would trade up and take Trent Richardson to move back a single slot and pick up 3 additional late round picks. Then we grabbed Matt Kalil as we had intended to for months, no matter what Rick Spielman wanted everybody to think. Kalil is the top left tackle prospect in years, and while he's not Jake Long or Joe Thomas, he's immeasurably better than what we had (Charlie Johnson) or even what we have had for ages (Bryant McKinney). He's an athletic blind side protector who is intent on doing things the right way -- whether it's technique on the field or building up power in the weight room to improve his run blocking. Almost as important, it lets us move Charlie Johnson inside to guard, where a lot of people suspect he's a better fit. Along with some off season moves we made, our O line is suddenly adequate if not legitimately strong instead of one of the top liabilities on the team.
Later, we used some of the ammunition we got from that early trade to move back into the first round to pick up Notre Dame safety Harrison Smith. Smith was the consensus number 2 safety in the draft, and last season made it incredibly clear that we had nothing at the position. Smith worked with our coaching staff extensively at the Senior Bowl, and they fell in love with him. Not only his talent and his positioning on the field, but his presence in meetings and his leadership. He should be a day one starter and provide a serious improvement in our secondary.
Our secondary saw further improvement with Josh Robinson, CB out of the University of Central Florida. Robinson set the fastest 40 time at the Combine, running it in 4.29 seconds. On top of that, he put up 17 reps of 225 lbs on the bench press, more than many larger, supposedly stronger backs. He should provide a powerful jam at the line of scrimmage, and he has the speed to recover if he gets burned and make plays on the ball from the other side of the field, and he's a willing tackler. He's an early entry from a mediocre program, so he may not be ready to jump in and start immediately is up to question, but he could develop into something special.
The fourth round saw a number of interesting picks. First being Arkansas wide receiver Jarius Wright. I watched a lot of Hogs games last fall with one of my roommates who comes from the state. Wright is small and best fit to line up in the slot, where we already have Percy Harvin, so a lot of fans may not like the pick. I've seen him play, though, and he's nothing like Harvin. He's possibly faster and more explosive, even if he doesn't have the strength or dynamic ability in the open field. Most important, though, he's a great route runner, which can't really be said about, really, anybody else on the roster. Combined with his speed, this makes him a great deep threat down the middle. I'm honestly excited about the potential to line Wright and Harvin both up on the slot or, better yet, Wright in the slot and Harvin in the backfield and play games with opposing defenses.
Later in the 4th, we picked up a second Arkansas receiver, Greg Childs. Childs is 6'3" and possesses ridiculous speed (clocked at 4.38 at his pro day). He produced extremely well while healthy, but he tore his patella tendon in 2010 and tried to come back too soon, hurting his 2011 performance. Because of this, I haven't seen as much of Childs, but he's a prototypical number 1 receiver in terms of size and ability. Friends who have watched him insist that he's a first or second round talent if not for the injury limiting his exposure last season, and scouts seem to agree. He was a steal who could pay dividends for years to come if he adapts well to the pros.
Between those picks, we made an incredibly un-glamorous but essential decision with USC FB/TE Rhett Ellison. With Jimmy Kleinsasser having retired, we were seriously lacking in supplementary blockers. Current top TEs Kyle Rudolph and John Carlson are great receivers but are only adequate at best in the blocking game. Ellison didn't have a lot of buzz in the media, but Spielman insists that there were other teams planning on grabbing him in the fourth round. Ellison is a hulking guy who was responsible for making holes nearly every time he was on the field last year, and he did it well, considering the high power of USCs offense. I'm sure the Vikings saw plenty of tape on him when they were doing their homework on Kalil, and this is a pick that should pay dividends with AP returning from knee injury and Toby Gerhart being a less dynamic runner in general.
In the top of the fifth, we made possibly our most questionable choice, drafting another DB from Notre Dame. I really haven't been able to find out much about Robert Blanton, other than the fact that nobody seems to see him as a CB in the NFL, meaning he may move over to Safety next to his past and present teammate. Considering the decisions made up to this point, though, I'm going to express faith in the pick. Time will tell, and everything is a crap shoot at this point in the draft, anyway.
We finally started the hunt for a successor to Ryan Longwell in the sixth, where we grabbed Georgia kicker Blair Walsh. Longwell had his worst season in ages last year, missing six kicks, and it's fully possible that he'll continue to regress as he pushes on towards 40. Blair might get knocked for inaccuracy after going 21/35 last season, but 10 of his 14 misses came from 40 or more yards as Georgia kicked more than any other team in the FBS. Kicks that long are always a crapshoot for college players, and he hit a long of 56 yards, so he's got the leg. NFL conditioning and coaching should help his accuracy. It could be an interesting camp for the old guard in special teams.
I honestly don't know much of anything about either of our seventh round picks (UNC linebacker Audie Cole and Cal DE/DT Trevor Guyton) except that several scouts had fourth round grades on the both of them and both play positions where we can always use depth. Along with the bevy of undrafted rookie free agents we've already reached agreements with, they'll fight for positions throughout training camp and provide perspective on our current crop of players.
In short, we've become a much better team over the past 48+ hours. I'm not holding out that we'll be truly competitive, but climbing back up as 6-10 is certainly possible. We've got potentially strong pieces in place at positions where we had nothing. We won't have nothing to work with coming into the draft next year, meaning we can focus on depth and a much smaller number of holes. I feel good about being a Vikings fan right now. Much better, certainly, than I was after that dark, dark Packers game in November.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Gamification
Goddamn, I hate gamification. I'll admit, part of it is because every time somebody tries to shove Jane McGonigal down my throat (which has happened a lot over the past 15 months), I feel pandered to and underestimated as both a person who plays games and as a rational human being who expects people to actually back up their arguments (Malcolm Gladwell: not a credible source, even when you're not misrepresenting him). Mostly, though, the whole thing just takes an ugly view of humanity.
Gamification presupposes that the only thing we care about is our own sense of achievement. It suggests that the best way to get people to do things is to promise them immediate reward and recognition. It basically works to eliminate language of servitude from our lexicon in favor of personal growth.
Personal growth is bullshit -- at least when it occurs in a vacuum. If we abstract away the actual purpose of our efforts, replacing it with an augmented reality veneer that puts ourselves at the center of every action, then we won't actually learn the lessons that make us more Godly. Instead of coming to grips with our own fundamental insignificance, with the incredible value of the people around us and of creation as a whole, we will only grow and grow in our own sense of self-importance.
So, yeah, fuck gamification.
Gamification presupposes that the only thing we care about is our own sense of achievement. It suggests that the best way to get people to do things is to promise them immediate reward and recognition. It basically works to eliminate language of servitude from our lexicon in favor of personal growth.
Personal growth is bullshit -- at least when it occurs in a vacuum. If we abstract away the actual purpose of our efforts, replacing it with an augmented reality veneer that puts ourselves at the center of every action, then we won't actually learn the lessons that make us more Godly. Instead of coming to grips with our own fundamental insignificance, with the incredible value of the people around us and of creation as a whole, we will only grow and grow in our own sense of self-importance.
So, yeah, fuck gamification.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Games and Art
Most videogames are not art. I don't just mean "most videogames suck". I don't mean Madden or Call of Duty or other series that rehash the same principles under an annual release lack soul. I don't mean repackaged upgrades/expansions like Super Street Fighter 4: Ultimate Championship Edition are just cheap cash-in attempts. I mean legitimately good games that I love -- games like Final Fantasy VI, Ocarina of Time, or Mass Effect 2 -- aren't inherently art.
That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.
Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.
In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.
I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.
For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.
Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".
As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.
As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.
Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.
It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.
The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.
It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.
But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.
At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.
It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.
Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.
One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).
Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.
There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.
For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.
The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..
What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.
Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.
That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.
Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.
In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.
I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.
For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.
Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".
As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.
As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.
Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.
It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.
The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.
It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.
But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.
At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.
It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.
Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.
One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).
Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.
There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.
For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.
The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..
What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.
Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Vikings!
I'm going take an extended brain dump about the current state of the Minnesota Vikings. I'll be doing another one later about the Timberwolves. Sorry to those of you who don't give a crap.
The Vikings are coming off a terrible season. Their 3-13 campaign has landed them the third pick in the draft, and we have far too many needs to be competitive in a year's time. Many of my thoughts hold true with what I wrote after their incredibly depressing loss to the Packers last November. The chief exception is that I no longer value Lorenzo Booker higher than Toby Gerhart (a handful of well executed trick plays do not make up for an awful fumbling habit).
We're in a rough place right now, waiting to see how AP can recover from torn A/MCLs and if Ponder can watch enough tape and get enough time in with Musgrave to take a serious step forward after an increasingly worrisome debut. Personally, I'm optimistic on both counts, but, hey, you've got to be optimistic about something.
In terms of legitimate good news, we've actually made some savvy decisions this off season that should give us flexibility moving forward, and the draft is strong in the places we need it to be.
First up, Chris Cook was acquitted. Is it very possible that he beat his girlfriend and quietly paid her to recant? Yes. Does he need to be a perfect citizen to be an ascending cornerback, perhaps our position of greatest need? Nope. Sad, but true. I mean, Ray Lewis killed a man, and the city of Baltimore still loves him. Our secondary is a mess, but at least we have one of the positions set with a viable talent who will hopefully be committed to reaching his potential and staying out of trouble after this scare.
Second, we smartly re-signed Erin Henderson to a one-year "show me" contract and moved Fred Pugac back to linebackers coach. Pugac is, by all accounts, one of the better position coaches in the league. It's unfortunate that his stint as defensive coordinator didn't pan out, but we should be glad to have him back where he belongs. Chad Greenway took a step back last season under Mike Singletary, and Erin Henderson is a young player with very high upside if he can get a good teacher. If, under Pugac's tutelage, he can take the step forward everybody seems to think he can, we should lock him up longer term after the season and really solidify our LB corps moving forward.
Third, we've resisted the urge to make splashy moves that will cost us in the long run. There was some legitimate receiving talent available in free agency, but we refused to play ball with the inflated contracts that the young talent was demanding. 8 million a year for Pierre Garcon? No thanks. Similarly for defensive backs. 10 million a year for Brandon Carr and Cortland Finnegan? More tempting, but still too much. The draft is, by ll accounts, deep at DB -- especially since we play a scheme dominated by cover 2, where elite talent isn't as necessary as patience and good reads.
Instead, we've been trying to find value: players who flashed for a period but then regressed briefly or suffered injuries that deflated their marketability. Lots of one year and minimum contracts. Fill the camp with bodies, motivate people with a legitimate chance to win a starting job, and cut the ones who don't look the part. We've also been looking outside the NFL for players, including a pair of intriguing players from the Canadian and Arena football leagues.
Solomon Elimimian is slightly undersized as a Linebacker, but the kid's got wheels (4.6 40) and was named the CFL's defensive player of the year in his rookie season, and players voted him the hardest hitter in the league last year. That highlight video suggests he doesn't give up on a play, and in Tampa 2, where the MLB is responsible for the deep middle of the field, we need a guy who is a bit more athletic to cover the slot and, especially, the new breed of Tight Ends that are tearing up the game right now. Worst case, he's an effective contributor on special teams. Best case, he finishes rounding out the second level of our defense.
As much as an unknown as Elimimian is, even stranger is Nicholas Taylor. Taylor is a former Florida International point guard whom the Vikings grabbed on a minimum futures contract purely as an athletic prospect. Dude is 5'10" and runs a 4.27 40 and spent time last year playing defensive back in Arena Football. Zero risk, amazing upside if he can put that athleticism to use anywhere on the field (especially at corner or returner).
Neither of these are flashy acquisitions, but both of them show a front office that is serious about looking at all the angles while we start rebuilding. We should have money on the books next season once we've filled some of our holes and know where we need to focus our final effort before being truly competitive again.
What we spend this money on next year will be determined by this year's draft.
I'm assuming that we'll take Matt Kalil, an incredibly highly rated Left Tackle out of USC, with our first round pick. This one pick will do worlds for our offensive line. John Sullivan took an enormous step forward at Center last season (pro football focus listed him as one of the top centers in the league), Phil Loadholt still has all the tools to succeed at right tackle with the proper motivation. With Kalil in place at left tackle, we've suddenly got a competition between Charlie Johnson, Joe Berger, Brandon Fusco, and free agency pickup Geoff Schwartz at the two guard positions. Any pair of those guys would be a step up from the Herrera-Hutchinson combination from the last couple of years -- Hutch is an all-time great, but he's old and only just above average these days.
From there, we need to worry about finding starters at wide receiver and defensive back and insurance at linebacker and defensive tackle. In my dream world, Georgia Tech wide receiver Stephen Hill is still available at the top of the second round. This is made more likely by the Bears trade for Brandon Marshall and the cornucopia of receivers that San Francisco grabbed in free agency. I'm still not certain it will happen. Despite being relatively unknown 6 weeks ago, Hill is 6'4", ran a 4.37 at the combine, is an experienced and talented run blocker, and showed better hands and route knowledge than anybody expected at his pro day. The mock draft gurus have him ranked as the number three or four wide receiver available right now, depending on their opinion of Kendall Wright. The Broncos, Browns, and Texans are all possibly landing spots in the bottom third of round one.
If Hill is off the board, I think we pass on a receiver in the second round. There will be very solid prospects available. Alshon Jeffrey was considered a first round prospect for much of the season, and I'm really high on Mohamed Sanu. Both big guys with good body control. I wouldn't even grab a receiver in the early third round, where we could grab similar guys like Marvin McNutt or Nick Toon. These are all big, reliable targets who serve well in the redzone, but they're largely possession guys who won't bring the vertical dimension we need. We've got Michael Jenkins if you're looking for good hands and deceptive speed.
We need somebody who can consistently take the top off of defenses. Early in the fourth round, we should be able to pick up Miami's Tommy Streeter. The guy is a physical specimen on par with Hill but even more raw. I can deal with raw in this case. Sub 4.4 speed at over 6'4" is worth taking a risk on when we've already got Rudolph, Jenkins, Harvin, and now Carlson around for the underneath stuff. We need to make their lives, and Peterson's and Gerhart's, easier, and a guy like Streeter (or, better yet, Hill) can do that for us better than Sanu or Jeffrey much less McNutt or Toon.
Assuming Hill is gone, I'd use our round two pick on somebody like CB Alfonzo Denard. He's not a top tier player at his position, but he's big and physical off the line and plays the zone well. Depending on how the front office feels about Christian Ballard and Letroy Guion, the other option here would be to take advantage of the draft's depth at DT. Devon Stills, Jerel Worthy, and Michael Bockers could all still be available at this point, and while I'd like to have faith in the guys we've got in place, our defense always thrives on a strong rotation up front.
Beyond these picks, try to find value at safety. It would be great if we could trade to pick up extra picks and put ourselves in positions to grab guys like George Iloka and Markelle Martin where they're worth it. Look for insurance at linebacker, potential at WR, and depth along the line while we're at it. This isn't going to be a one year rebuilding, but the pieces are available for us to be somewhere near .500 next season. Considering the conference we play in, that would be absolutely thrilling.
The Vikings are coming off a terrible season. Their 3-13 campaign has landed them the third pick in the draft, and we have far too many needs to be competitive in a year's time. Many of my thoughts hold true with what I wrote after their incredibly depressing loss to the Packers last November. The chief exception is that I no longer value Lorenzo Booker higher than Toby Gerhart (a handful of well executed trick plays do not make up for an awful fumbling habit).
We're in a rough place right now, waiting to see how AP can recover from torn A/MCLs and if Ponder can watch enough tape and get enough time in with Musgrave to take a serious step forward after an increasingly worrisome debut. Personally, I'm optimistic on both counts, but, hey, you've got to be optimistic about something.
In terms of legitimate good news, we've actually made some savvy decisions this off season that should give us flexibility moving forward, and the draft is strong in the places we need it to be.
First up, Chris Cook was acquitted. Is it very possible that he beat his girlfriend and quietly paid her to recant? Yes. Does he need to be a perfect citizen to be an ascending cornerback, perhaps our position of greatest need? Nope. Sad, but true. I mean, Ray Lewis killed a man, and the city of Baltimore still loves him. Our secondary is a mess, but at least we have one of the positions set with a viable talent who will hopefully be committed to reaching his potential and staying out of trouble after this scare.
Second, we smartly re-signed Erin Henderson to a one-year "show me" contract and moved Fred Pugac back to linebackers coach. Pugac is, by all accounts, one of the better position coaches in the league. It's unfortunate that his stint as defensive coordinator didn't pan out, but we should be glad to have him back where he belongs. Chad Greenway took a step back last season under Mike Singletary, and Erin Henderson is a young player with very high upside if he can get a good teacher. If, under Pugac's tutelage, he can take the step forward everybody seems to think he can, we should lock him up longer term after the season and really solidify our LB corps moving forward.
Third, we've resisted the urge to make splashy moves that will cost us in the long run. There was some legitimate receiving talent available in free agency, but we refused to play ball with the inflated contracts that the young talent was demanding. 8 million a year for Pierre Garcon? No thanks. Similarly for defensive backs. 10 million a year for Brandon Carr and Cortland Finnegan? More tempting, but still too much. The draft is, by ll accounts, deep at DB -- especially since we play a scheme dominated by cover 2, where elite talent isn't as necessary as patience and good reads.
Instead, we've been trying to find value: players who flashed for a period but then regressed briefly or suffered injuries that deflated their marketability. Lots of one year and minimum contracts. Fill the camp with bodies, motivate people with a legitimate chance to win a starting job, and cut the ones who don't look the part. We've also been looking outside the NFL for players, including a pair of intriguing players from the Canadian and Arena football leagues.
Solomon Elimimian is slightly undersized as a Linebacker, but the kid's got wheels (4.6 40) and was named the CFL's defensive player of the year in his rookie season, and players voted him the hardest hitter in the league last year. That highlight video suggests he doesn't give up on a play, and in Tampa 2, where the MLB is responsible for the deep middle of the field, we need a guy who is a bit more athletic to cover the slot and, especially, the new breed of Tight Ends that are tearing up the game right now. Worst case, he's an effective contributor on special teams. Best case, he finishes rounding out the second level of our defense.
As much as an unknown as Elimimian is, even stranger is Nicholas Taylor. Taylor is a former Florida International point guard whom the Vikings grabbed on a minimum futures contract purely as an athletic prospect. Dude is 5'10" and runs a 4.27 40 and spent time last year playing defensive back in Arena Football. Zero risk, amazing upside if he can put that athleticism to use anywhere on the field (especially at corner or returner).
Neither of these are flashy acquisitions, but both of them show a front office that is serious about looking at all the angles while we start rebuilding. We should have money on the books next season once we've filled some of our holes and know where we need to focus our final effort before being truly competitive again.
What we spend this money on next year will be determined by this year's draft.
I'm assuming that we'll take Matt Kalil, an incredibly highly rated Left Tackle out of USC, with our first round pick. This one pick will do worlds for our offensive line. John Sullivan took an enormous step forward at Center last season (pro football focus listed him as one of the top centers in the league), Phil Loadholt still has all the tools to succeed at right tackle with the proper motivation. With Kalil in place at left tackle, we've suddenly got a competition between Charlie Johnson, Joe Berger, Brandon Fusco, and free agency pickup Geoff Schwartz at the two guard positions. Any pair of those guys would be a step up from the Herrera-Hutchinson combination from the last couple of years -- Hutch is an all-time great, but he's old and only just above average these days.
From there, we need to worry about finding starters at wide receiver and defensive back and insurance at linebacker and defensive tackle. In my dream world, Georgia Tech wide receiver Stephen Hill is still available at the top of the second round. This is made more likely by the Bears trade for Brandon Marshall and the cornucopia of receivers that San Francisco grabbed in free agency. I'm still not certain it will happen. Despite being relatively unknown 6 weeks ago, Hill is 6'4", ran a 4.37 at the combine, is an experienced and talented run blocker, and showed better hands and route knowledge than anybody expected at his pro day. The mock draft gurus have him ranked as the number three or four wide receiver available right now, depending on their opinion of Kendall Wright. The Broncos, Browns, and Texans are all possibly landing spots in the bottom third of round one.
If Hill is off the board, I think we pass on a receiver in the second round. There will be very solid prospects available. Alshon Jeffrey was considered a first round prospect for much of the season, and I'm really high on Mohamed Sanu. Both big guys with good body control. I wouldn't even grab a receiver in the early third round, where we could grab similar guys like Marvin McNutt or Nick Toon. These are all big, reliable targets who serve well in the redzone, but they're largely possession guys who won't bring the vertical dimension we need. We've got Michael Jenkins if you're looking for good hands and deceptive speed.
We need somebody who can consistently take the top off of defenses. Early in the fourth round, we should be able to pick up Miami's Tommy Streeter. The guy is a physical specimen on par with Hill but even more raw. I can deal with raw in this case. Sub 4.4 speed at over 6'4" is worth taking a risk on when we've already got Rudolph, Jenkins, Harvin, and now Carlson around for the underneath stuff. We need to make their lives, and Peterson's and Gerhart's, easier, and a guy like Streeter (or, better yet, Hill) can do that for us better than Sanu or Jeffrey much less McNutt or Toon.
Assuming Hill is gone, I'd use our round two pick on somebody like CB Alfonzo Denard. He's not a top tier player at his position, but he's big and physical off the line and plays the zone well. Depending on how the front office feels about Christian Ballard and Letroy Guion, the other option here would be to take advantage of the draft's depth at DT. Devon Stills, Jerel Worthy, and Michael Bockers could all still be available at this point, and while I'd like to have faith in the guys we've got in place, our defense always thrives on a strong rotation up front.
Beyond these picks, try to find value at safety. It would be great if we could trade to pick up extra picks and put ourselves in positions to grab guys like George Iloka and Markelle Martin where they're worth it. Look for insurance at linebacker, potential at WR, and depth along the line while we're at it. This isn't going to be a one year rebuilding, but the pieces are available for us to be somewhere near .500 next season. Considering the conference we play in, that would be absolutely thrilling.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Fiction Editing
Several months ago, I posted a blurb I wrote on a whim. I haven't had much time to expand on it, so I'm still trying to figure out where things go from there, but I've put it through a couple of rewriting passages as I try to figure the main characters out. Just to give a sense of how I edit things, here's the current draft. Hopefully I can actually expand on the story in the near future:
Darren groaned slightly as he woke up and tried to remember what day it was. Mostly, he just hoped it wasn’t Thursday. If it was Thursday, then his alarm would be going off in about 3 minutes. More pressing, today being Thursday would mean that Wednesday had actually happened. He could think of few ideas less appealing than that.
Wednesday had happened, though, and Darren knew there was no escaping it. Even knowing that, he continued to hope that it wasn’t Thursday. Maybe it was Friday and he would at least have some space from Wednesday’s embarrassment. Better yet, maybe it was Saturday and he wouldn’t have to face the consequences at all. Darren didn’t care if he’d slept through two days of work and gotten fired. He was good at his job. He could find a new one. What he couldn’t do was show his face to Angie.
Two minutes until the alarm and Darren’s imagination really started to run wild. Sure, it was almost certainly Thursday, but maybe there was some holday he’d forgotten about. Maybe 26 years ago, somebody had done something heroic. Maybe 43 years ago, somebody important had been born or died. Maybe there was some good reason that everybody got to stay home and sleep on this particular Thursday and he’d have time to nurse his wounds.
One minute until the alarm, and Darren crunched up his eyes and crossed every limb he could under the covers to no avail. History hadn’t re-written itself, time advanced normally, and the morning DJ promised a chilly commute accompanied by Darren’s favorite hits of yesterday and today. Darren cursed both of those days and dragged himself out of bed. This Thursday, even more than most, would need coffee.
Not remembering what he may have sitting around on the floor, Darren gingerly stepped across his one room studio to the cabinet and appliance adorned corner that served as his kitchen. Once there, he flicked on the light and, blinking a few times, let his gaze settle on the sack of fair-trade beans sitting prominently on the counter top next to a second hand French press. Today was going to be bad enough without his coffee trying to make him feel bad about his privileged existence. Besides, he’d decided that he didn’t really like that Guatemalan crap, anyway.
He pulled the traditional, drip pot and the can of grounds out from under the cupboard, where he kept them for family visits and days like this. He shoved the largest measuring cup he could find into the can, dumped the water into the pot, and hopped into the shower while the coffee brewed. Out of distractions, Darren finally let himself start running through the details of last night.
The problem wasn’t necessarily that he’d had too much to drink. Darren’s budget and conscience conspired together to pose a fairly strict three drink limit most nights. No, the problem was that nerves had led him to consume this allotment far too quickly. It had taken weeks to get Angela to admit that, in this instance, dating a coworker wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. They had fun together, and the potential for paperwork wasn’t enough to merit not giving it a shot. Now he wasn’t sure if she’d laugh at him or slap him when he inevitably ran into her at the office. He did know that he’d prefer the slap.
Outside of the warm steam of the shower, the apartment was still cold, and Darren felt the urge for coffee again as soon as he stepped out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen. He gulped down one cup before he even bothered to get dressed and another as a reward once he tracked down a clean pair of pants. Pouring the rest of the pot into a travel mug, Darren buttoned up his flannel shirt and headed down to the corner.
It was cooler than Darren had expected from the forecast, and he immediately questioned his decision to forego a jacket. He fastened another button and tried to ignore the cold while he waited for the bus. Ignoring one thing means thinking about another, though, and Darren continued to reflect on the events of the night before. It was Angela’s fault nearly as much as his. She’d caught him off guard. He’d intended to keep it casual, but then she came to the door with her hair up and wearing a skirt. She’d put in effort. She cared. He never had a chance to recover from the surprise, pleasant though it was.
He saw Roger’s grin as soon as he boarded the bus. Darren sat down across from him and took a swig from his mug, knowing full well what was coming next.
“So?” Roger asked.
“‘So,’ what?” Darren was not looking forward to this.
“Dinner. With Angie. How did it go?”
“Less well than it could have.”
“That’s not saying much. How, particularly, did it stray from the ideal?”
“I may have propositioned her during dinner.”
“May have?”
Darren glanced around and lowered his voice, “There was an awkward silence. Some part of me thought it would be smart to break it by asking what I’d have to do to get fucked that night”.
The dirty look he received from the octogenarian sitting ahead of them suggested that he hadn’t lowered his voice enough.
“Well, that was much less awkward.” Roger’s eyebrow was thoroughly cocked.
“It was a joke!” Darren insisted, “I said it in a funny voice and everything!”
“Could she really be that offended? I mean, I’m sure she didn’t think you meant it. It’s far from the first time she’s met you”
“She must have been disgusted. Made an excuse to duck out as soon as she finished her chicken. Left half of her baked potato right there on the plate.”
Roger paused but couldn’t bring himself to change the subject, “...what on Earth were you thinking?”
“Obviously, I wasn’t.”
“...well, it’s not like she’s the only cute girl in the sea.”
Darren pulled up a picture of Angela on his phone and thrust it in Roger’s face. “That, and she’s a Raven’s fan, AND she loves Bruce Campbell.”
“That sucks, man.” Roger knew he was defeated.
“That it does.” Darren took another swig of coffee and questioned his decision not to put a drop or four of whiskey in it.
Darren groaned slightly as he woke up and tried to remember what day it was. Mostly, he just hoped it wasn’t Thursday. If it was Thursday, then his alarm would be going off in about 3 minutes. More pressing, today being Thursday would mean that Wednesday had actually happened. He could think of few ideas less appealing than that.
Wednesday had happened, though, and Darren knew there was no escaping it. Even knowing that, he continued to hope that it wasn’t Thursday. Maybe it was Friday and he would at least have some space from Wednesday’s embarrassment. Better yet, maybe it was Saturday and he wouldn’t have to face the consequences at all. Darren didn’t care if he’d slept through two days of work and gotten fired. He was good at his job. He could find a new one. What he couldn’t do was show his face to Angie.
Two minutes until the alarm and Darren’s imagination really started to run wild. Sure, it was almost certainly Thursday, but maybe there was some holday he’d forgotten about. Maybe 26 years ago, somebody had done something heroic. Maybe 43 years ago, somebody important had been born or died. Maybe there was some good reason that everybody got to stay home and sleep on this particular Thursday and he’d have time to nurse his wounds.
One minute until the alarm, and Darren crunched up his eyes and crossed every limb he could under the covers to no avail. History hadn’t re-written itself, time advanced normally, and the morning DJ promised a chilly commute accompanied by Darren’s favorite hits of yesterday and today. Darren cursed both of those days and dragged himself out of bed. This Thursday, even more than most, would need coffee.
Not remembering what he may have sitting around on the floor, Darren gingerly stepped across his one room studio to the cabinet and appliance adorned corner that served as his kitchen. Once there, he flicked on the light and, blinking a few times, let his gaze settle on the sack of fair-trade beans sitting prominently on the counter top next to a second hand French press. Today was going to be bad enough without his coffee trying to make him feel bad about his privileged existence. Besides, he’d decided that he didn’t really like that Guatemalan crap, anyway.
He pulled the traditional, drip pot and the can of grounds out from under the cupboard, where he kept them for family visits and days like this. He shoved the largest measuring cup he could find into the can, dumped the water into the pot, and hopped into the shower while the coffee brewed. Out of distractions, Darren finally let himself start running through the details of last night.
The problem wasn’t necessarily that he’d had too much to drink. Darren’s budget and conscience conspired together to pose a fairly strict three drink limit most nights. No, the problem was that nerves had led him to consume this allotment far too quickly. It had taken weeks to get Angela to admit that, in this instance, dating a coworker wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. They had fun together, and the potential for paperwork wasn’t enough to merit not giving it a shot. Now he wasn’t sure if she’d laugh at him or slap him when he inevitably ran into her at the office. He did know that he’d prefer the slap.
Outside of the warm steam of the shower, the apartment was still cold, and Darren felt the urge for coffee again as soon as he stepped out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen. He gulped down one cup before he even bothered to get dressed and another as a reward once he tracked down a clean pair of pants. Pouring the rest of the pot into a travel mug, Darren buttoned up his flannel shirt and headed down to the corner.
It was cooler than Darren had expected from the forecast, and he immediately questioned his decision to forego a jacket. He fastened another button and tried to ignore the cold while he waited for the bus. Ignoring one thing means thinking about another, though, and Darren continued to reflect on the events of the night before. It was Angela’s fault nearly as much as his. She’d caught him off guard. He’d intended to keep it casual, but then she came to the door with her hair up and wearing a skirt. She’d put in effort. She cared. He never had a chance to recover from the surprise, pleasant though it was.
He saw Roger’s grin as soon as he boarded the bus. Darren sat down across from him and took a swig from his mug, knowing full well what was coming next.
“So?” Roger asked.
“‘So,’ what?” Darren was not looking forward to this.
“Dinner. With Angie. How did it go?”
“Less well than it could have.”
“That’s not saying much. How, particularly, did it stray from the ideal?”
“I may have propositioned her during dinner.”
“May have?”
Darren glanced around and lowered his voice, “There was an awkward silence. Some part of me thought it would be smart to break it by asking what I’d have to do to get fucked that night”.
The dirty look he received from the octogenarian sitting ahead of them suggested that he hadn’t lowered his voice enough.
“Well, that was much less awkward.” Roger’s eyebrow was thoroughly cocked.
“It was a joke!” Darren insisted, “I said it in a funny voice and everything!”
“Could she really be that offended? I mean, I’m sure she didn’t think you meant it. It’s far from the first time she’s met you”
“She must have been disgusted. Made an excuse to duck out as soon as she finished her chicken. Left half of her baked potato right there on the plate.”
Roger paused but couldn’t bring himself to change the subject, “...what on Earth were you thinking?”
“Obviously, I wasn’t.”
“...well, it’s not like she’s the only cute girl in the sea.”
Darren pulled up a picture of Angela on his phone and thrust it in Roger’s face. “That, and she’s a Raven’s fan, AND she loves Bruce Campbell.”
“That sucks, man.” Roger knew he was defeated.
“That it does.” Darren took another swig of coffee and questioned his decision not to put a drop or four of whiskey in it.
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