Archive for the 'Gaming' category

Feeling Chaotic Neutral: Character Alignment Paradoxes

Jan 12 2009 Published by under Craziness, Gaming, Miscellany, Pop Culture, Society, The Law

For the last hour or so, I have been discussing character alignment paradoxes with Aaron Brazell (@technosailor on Twitter) on Facebook. It all started with a simple status update.

Aaron is in a Chaotic Neutral mood.

For those who don’t get the reference, chaotic neutral refers to one of nine character “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons. Think of them like a matrix. Lawfulness versus Chaos is essentially your adherence to the laws of society, whereas Good and Evil are your moral/ethical disposition.

Now here’s the problem, and the jumping off point for the discussion with Aaron. I contend that chaotic good and chaotic evil are false choices. Good and evil, just like law and lawlessness, lie on a continuum. That is, there is an order to them. There are degrees between them.

Chaos, on the other hand, is completely random. There is no order at all. Therefore, a chaotic character would be just as likely to be good as evil. As Aaron said, everything becomes situational. A chaotic good character would always tend toward the good. If they are chaotic evil, they would always tend toward evil. By that logic, they have applied order to their own lives. They have chosen a path, and a path, by nature, is not chaotic.

It’s like Johnny Depp’s line from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.

A truly chaotic person can always be counted on to be chaotic, and that means they’re just as lokely as not to swing toward good or evil. As Paul Rodriguez (@pjrodriguez) said, “[A] Chaotic Neutral person might hit you in the face one day and gave you a $100 bill the next and then borrow your car, use all the gas, but [leave] a TV in the back seat.”

That’s pretty much exactly it. In a fight against long odds, a chaotic person would be just as likely to stay with you and fight as they would be to stab you in the leg so they could outrun you in retreat. They’re chaotic, and chaos defies patterns. If they always tend toward good (or evil for that matter) you could always know what they would do within a certain range.

So do chaotic good and chaotic evil exist? I don’t believe they can, and therefore the whole D&D continuum is off. I think the continuum should look more like this:

Anything below neutrality in regard to morals (good and evil) and lawfulness would fall into a base category of Chaotic. You would have no idea what they would do or what their moral leanings would be. I think it would be a much better framework. Frankly, with people stabbing each other in the leg, I think it would make the game more interesting.

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Questions For Wii Gamers

Apr 02 2008 Published by under Gaming, Nintendo Wii

So I got back from Vegas last night to find my Wii sports bundle had arrived. So psyched about that. Hooked it up, put the kiddos to bed and started to play around. I really like the tennis, baseball, and boxing. Bowling is alright. Golf sucks… a lot…

I got ready to tee off on the first hole, lined up and took a huge swing only to discover that the Wiimote really doesn’t want or allow you to swing away. The game is really looking for a finesse swing on a very short arc with little movement. Swing away and you overpower the ball with poor results. It’s not like the batting in baseball which actually awards you for vigor.

I’m also kind of irritated by the lack of club selection options. Driver, iron, wedge, and putter are poor choices.

So here’s my question… Are games like Tiger Woods 2008 or MLB 2k8 more accommodating for people who really want to get into the game? I’d really like a game that allows a full swing so I can practice my form. Does anyone have suggestions for a better golf game?

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Kung Fu Election

Jan 15 2008 Published by under Barack Obama, Candidates, Craziness, Democrats, Elections, Gaming, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Politics, Republicans

With a name like KungFuQuip.com on a blog covering politics, there was absolutely no way I could avoid commenting on Kung Fu Election. Choose your candidate and pit them against the other contenders in bloody death matches to determine the next leader of the free world. The intro song is really annoying and you should skip past it, but as it says, “China may have got our jobs, but we got their fighting skills.”

Now go out there and let John McCain, Mitt Romney, The Huckster, or Rudy serve up a hot plate of whoop ass on Obama, Richardson, Edwards or Clinton (technically Hill, but as you see in the screen grab below, just as in real life, she had to invoke the spirit of Bill to fight her battles for her).

Kung Fu Election at Atom Films

By the way, apparently they were going to include Fred Thompson, but they realized “Fred Thompson doesn’t decide who lives and who dies; he just makes it so.“

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Into The Pixel

May 14 2007 Published by under Cable, Gaming, Miscellany, Technology, The Internet

The Cable Show in Vegas last week had some interesting surprises, as these conferences often do. You never know which panel or exhibitor will have a new perspective, new gadget, or new service that gets you thinking. One of the surprises for me this year was an art exhibit. It’s part of an annual competition that comes out of the gaming world. Into the Pixel invites game artists to submit their original concept art for judging.

Some if the winners are truly breathtaking. The fact that most are produced without paints or canvas, but purely through software, is remarkable. The picture to the left, from Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, was created using Adobe Photoshop. I’ve worked with Photoshop a lot, and consider myself fairly proficient, but would have no idea how to even begin something like this.

If you have some time, and want to be impressed by some electronic art, take a trip through the winners from years past. The 2007 winners be unveiled July 11.

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The Lost Weekend And The New Playstation

May 09 2006 Published by under Gaming, Miscellany

Video GamesThe wife and kid are traveling, so I geeked out this weekend and spent much of Sunday gaming online. I hooked the Xbox up on the big TV, ran the sound through the home theater, plopped down in the recliner and plowed through a day of mayhem, destruction and chaos. It was fun, but the whole time I was playing, I kept thinking of how much better it would be with an HDTV and an Xbox 360.

I was still coming down from that rampage high when I heard the news about the Playstation 3. After months of online chatter about Sony’s plans, they had finally released details. Given the sticker shock and awe, I was disappointed.

[T]he PS3 will come in two flavors: a tricked out system for US$599 and one with fewer features for US$499 (Europeans will pay €599 and €499). Ouch.

The more expensive system will include a 2.5″ 60GB hard drive, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a memory card reader, built-in 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, support for HD displays up to 1080i and 1080p, one HDMI output, AV output, and digital optical output. That’s a nice bundle.

In contrast the cheaper system has a 20GB hard drive, loses the memory card reader, the WiFi support, and here’s the biggie, the HDMI output. So if you’re planning to rely on the PS3 to play Blu-ray movies, you may not have the experience you hoped for due to the lack of a protected output path on the lower-end model. Right now, the only two studios that have made a decision on the use of the Image Constraint Token on the next-gen optical formats have decided against using it for now. That may change, and there is no guarantee that all the movies you try watching on the cheaper PS3 won’t be downsampled.

In other words, the extra $100 is well worth it, but that puts the actual price tag for a decent system at $600. That’s a bit steep.

Sure, the controllers are cool, can detect the motion of the unit, and have no cord, but they lose the vibration, which I have grown used to. Game play would be completely different if I didn’t feel like I was fighting guerillas with a funky dildo.

I’m also not sure about the motion detection in the controller. I’ve watched amateur gamers play and they often flop around like fish – dodging imaginary bullets like some spastic-Matrix Neo. If the controller reacted to that, the character they direct would spend most of the day on their ass looking at sky.

Serious gamers may want to take this one home, but for me, the casual gamer, it’s too expensive, and not worth the commitment.

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