For example, the words – square, circle, a hundred etc convey to the mind notions so complete in themselves, and so distinct from everything else, that we are sure when we use them we know the whole of our own meaning. It is widely different with words expressing natural objects and mixed relations.

Take, for instance, IRON. Different persons attach very different ideas to this word. One who has never heard of magnetism has a widely different notion of IRON from one in the contrary predicament. The vulgar, who regard this metal as incombustible, and the chemist, who sees it burn with the utmost fury, and who has other reasons for regarding it as one of the most combustible bodies in nature;- the poet, who uses it as an emblem of rigidity; and the smith and the engineer, in whose hands it is plastic, and moulded like wax into every form;-the jailer, who prizes it as an obstruction, and the electrician who sees in it only a channel of open communication by which – that most impassable of objects – air may be traversed by his imprisoned fluid, have all different, and all imperfect, notions of the same word.

The meaning of such a term is like a rainbow-everybody sees a different one, and all maintain it to be the same.

Does it make any sense? Will it have any kind of lasting influence? Lord knows, but I really like Sterling’s views here (highlighting my own):

However, this is a pressing New Aesthetic problem, maybe the core problem at the root there. The bandwidth is available, the images are there, and the robots and digital devices get plenty of look-in. Where did the people go? Where is the aura, where is the credibility? Are robots with cameras supposed to have our credibility for us? They don’t.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.

If machine vision was our pal, then we wouldn’t need James Bridle [one of the New Aesthetic's main communicators] to assert that for us. We’d have a Bridlebot, a Googleized visual search-engine that could generate as much aesthetics as we want.

That won’t happen. Why not? Because it is impossible. It’s as impossible as Artificial Intelligence, which is a failed twentieth-century research campaign, reduced to a sci-fi conceit. That’s why the “New Aesthetic” isn’t about “robot vision” from “digital devices,” even when it claims that, as a rhetorical gesture to grant itself some aura.

His entertaining thesis, told in his typically layered and smartly paced manner, centres on the idea that underdogs, with nothing to lose, can break the rules and in doing so transform the terms of engagement in their favour. There’s David, facing Goliath not with a sword but a sling. There’s Lawrence of Arabia, not attacking the Ottomans directly but the railway that served them. And there’s a girls basketball team, which played aggressively to counter its lower skill levels.

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying” — they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

Gladwell seems to admire this creed, and it certainly makes for good stories. But I think he’s missing something – the idea that the battle is only fought on the battlefield.

George Washington … [abandoned] the guerilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in Violent Politics, “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons.

It’s not as simple as that. How do you form a nation if your people has seen you use tactics many of your new citizens would frown upon? Washington was doing more than just to win individual battles. Indeed, Gladwell – tellingly? – seems to focus more on winning than on the overall war, or game.

His main example is basketball, a very formalised game at its highest level. But as much as it’s fun to see a scrappy and less skilled team thrash the best teams by exploiting formality now and then, do basketball fans want to see all games become like that? Probably not – the grand ideal of all sports is to see great players play nobly.

Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience?

Brilliant psycho-entertainment theory from Teller, of increasingly legendary magician twosome Penn & Teller.

Points include the following, which come together in an explanation of how a single trick works:

Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.

Game designer Soren Johnson (Civ IV) has put together a mega-list of board games, some of which I’ve actually played! Mostly, I must admit, on iPhone, which has become a fantastic platform for board game conversions. Something of a follow-on to my thing about games for parties, here’s my take on what I’ve played on his list.

Dominion

Really big in gaming circles, Dominion (pictured above) is simple enough to appeal much wider, too. The aim is to amass a hand of cards, with the hand with the greatest value at the end winning, but you’ll need to balance your collecting, from buying value cards to earning the coin cards that allow you to buy them, as well as choosing cards that give you special abilities each turn.

I’m not quite sure about what Johnson means about the game only requiring you to take a single strategy – in fact you’ll need to switch strategies as a game progresses, from building up coin cards in the early phase to rushing to gather value cards at the end, while deciding whether to take an aggressive or defensive stance. That said, maybe Johnson’s right in that it’s hard to switch strategies once you’ve committed to a general stance.

The one thing that does give me pause is that at its highest levels, Dominion’s about card counting. But that’s about a billion miles off mine, so I guess I’m safe from that. There’s an iPhone version, but it’s not awfully pretty and besides, Dominion’s best played quickfire at a table.

Ascension

Johnson rates this over Dominion – Ascension’s a very similar game in the sense that both are about deck building, but it’s a lot more complicated. Rather than Dominion’s clear and limited number of card types, Ascension features huge numbers of one-off cards, each with specific effects and abilities. As a result, it doesn’t really have Dominion’s broad appeal, a point exacerbated by its fantasy setting. Lots to master, though, if you’ve the inclination. I’m not sure I do.

That’s the cluttered but detailed iOS version.

Battlestar Galactica

I’ve gone on about this before and think it’s really good, but Johnson feels the great aspects of this game are buried under busywork that takes up the bulk of the playtime. I can see what he means, but I fear his solution to remove it would wipe out an aspect of the game I really enjoy – the sense of working together in the face of awful threat. Fun!

Samurai

Johnson says this game’s a masterpiece, and I agree. Aside from an obtuse scoring system, it’s brilliantly simple, played on a map consisting of hexagons. Dotted over it are figures of three types – peasant, warrior and Buddha. You get dealt a hand of tokens of different values and types, each of which can help capture certain types of figure when placed on the map. When a figure’s surrounded by tokens it’s captured by the player whose tokens add up to the highest value, and the winner is the player who has captured the most figures.

Well, sort of – as I said, the scoring’s convoluted. But the rest of the game is incredibly elegant. Every turn has you wrestling with various options – attack, defence and what to focus on – a feature of any great strategy game.

It might not be as perfect-looking as Carcassonne, but the iPhone version of Samurai is great. Online, my name is Roto.

So there we go. I’d really like to also try Ghost Stories, for its cooperative nature, and No Thanks!, despite its Germanic wacky name, sounds fun, too. Oh, and The Resistance, mentioned in the comments, which is promised to be based entirely on traitor mechanics like Battlestar Galactica’s, could be ace. Board games!

That’s because Pyrex used to be made using borosilicate glass, which does not shatter when being subjected to the sudden changes of temperature you get when you splash water on a jug you’ve just taken out of the oven. When World Kitchen took over it started to make Pyrex products for the US market out of tempered soda-lime glass, which is more susceptible to, essentially, exploding in such circumstances.

My fascination with this is partly down to the fact I’ve been watching Breaking Bad, but anyway – part of crack cocaine production requires sudden cooling, which shop-bought Pyrex used to handle just fine. But the new type definitely did not, meaning vital equipment suddenly became hard to find.

The result was an increase in theft of lab equipment from laboratories. Chaos, eh?

Around 10 years ago I went on holiday to Morocco with a friend called Dave. We stayed in Marrakesh and went up into the Atlas mountains, where I’ve never been so cold and so hot in a single day. Towards the end of the holiday we visited Essaouira, a coastal holiday town. It was October – the sun was hot, but the wind, coming off the sea, was strong and sharply cold. Looking for something to do one afternoon we found ourselves taking shelter at a cafe in a sunny square.

Dave loves chess and go. I don’t know go, and I’ve never played chess with him. To be honest I don’t want to. Apart from being afraid of how good he is – and he’s really good – the thought of playing fills me with panic. With my pieces all laid out at the start, I’m frozen by the thought of all the intense thinking that lies ahead, the possibilities and patterns I’ll fail to see, the profound complexity. But strangely, I love turn-based strategy videogames. And I really love GBA Advance Wars.

When I suggested playing a game of Advance Wars at that cafe, Dave, who’d never played before, was puzzled why I liked it, given my dislike of chess. I’d never really thought about my preferences until then. In the face of Dave’s love of the stern elegance of chess and go, I couldn’t help fearing they were down to a childish delight in pixel graphics and bleepy noises.

Yep, ever the cringing videogame apologist. But looking back, I think it was actually a different sort of weakness. Strategy videogames give a lot more tactical freedom than chess. The abstract simplicity of chess leads to a far more disciplined and demanding game, one that, at its highest levels, is codified by classifications of opening moves. Compared to chess’ 32 pieces, Advance Wars throws many more variables into the mix, such as terrain types, unit types, special skills and objectives, with the result that you just don’t need to be so rigorous – at least to win a level. And I’m lazy enough for this to not only be OK but also attractive.

So we played a game. My initial advantage of, well, knowing how to play led to an early lead, but Dave’s innate intellect soon put us into deadlock and then me into retreat. We played the entire afternoon, drinking mint tea, passing the GBA between us and watching people pass by in the square. His slow crushing of what I suppose I hoped could be my game made it a tense experience, his methodical slow turns driving me wild with impatience. The light failed us as dusk fell, the GBA’s unlit screen impossible to see, and we finally stopped with Dave inching to a certain victory.

As hard-fought as the game was, I knew all along that Dave would beat me – I couldn’t hide behind the tactical complexity for long. I guess it’s a mark of Advance Wars’ brilliance. Both deeply attractive in a way in which videogames excel and logically exacting, the best player will always win in the end.

I’ve never played against another human player again, which means I still have the game saved in my Advance Wars cart. The record of that afternoon appears as sharply as it ever did – tanks and battleships frozen in battle, bases ready to churn out another wave of troops. I’ll leave it, I think, for as long as its internal battery holds out.

Having watched the documentary Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times, I am now totally in awe of the newspaper’s media and culture columnist, David Carr.

There’s an incredible scene where Carr is interviewing the heads of Vice magazine for an article on how Vice is diversifying its output in the face of the rising power of the internet. The team has recently made The Vice Guide to Liberia, a video that presents fighters claiming that they kill children and drink their blood before battle and a beach littered with human crap.

Carr’s interview style is amazing – laptop open in front of him, fixing his subject with a gimlet eye and furiously bashing out their words as they say them. His spacebar gets an especial hammering. And yet he’s intensely focused on what they’re saying, never letting them say anything other than what he’s after. He’s galvanising and totally in control. My skills now seem particularly feeble.

I should say now, by the way, that Carr is remarkable all over. Now in his 50s, he was editor of some local newspapers, a cocaine addict and brought up his children alone before joining the NYT. He’s leathery and rangy, his back and head usually bowed, but his pop-eyed face always keenly raised. A bit like a vulture, actually, but somehow highly charismatic. He seems pretty likely to be a bit of a nightmare to actually work with, opinionated and keen on being in the spotlight from the way he comes across in Page One. But hey, I like him.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from his interview at Vice, with co-founder Shane Smith (ripped from a transcription by New York Magazine):

Carr If you’re a CNN viewer, and you go, “Hmmm. I’m looking at human shit on the beach…”

Smith Well, I’ve got to tell you one thing: I’m a regular guy and I go to these places and I go, “Okay, everyone talked to me about cannibalism, right? Everyone talked about cannibalism.” Now I’m getting a lot of shit for talking about cannibalism. Whatever. Everyone talked to me about cannibalism! … That’s fucking crazy! So the actual – our audience goes, “That’s fucking insane, like, that’s nuts!” And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing, and I’m sitting there going like, “You know what? I’m not going to talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks me up.”

Carr Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.

And Smith does, but kinda taken aback. Carr is completely in charge. That’s how to interview someone. Unfortunately, none of this is in Carr’s resulting piece – though I like to think a little irritation comes through. I suppose that’s professionalism.

Ethics in videogames is a big, scary topic. Ethics? I mean the ways designers are using compulsion to entertain players and also to extract time and money from them.

It’s a pity, then, that the level of discussion around videogame ethics is so poor.

Like this article, for instance. Written by iOS developer Benjamin Jackson for The Atlantic, which really should know better, it’s a very compromised piece.

I should note that it’s an excerpt from a longer article that’s to be published elsewhere, but this is a standalone piece that will probably more widely read.

Taking it blow-by-blow, we have an introduction that relates FarmVille players with rats in psychology experiments, an emotive and barely illuminating introduction to the science of compulsion. This is a fascinating and complex part of the puzzle and deserves far more careful examination.

We then get what should be the meat of the article, a list of bad things that the evil FarmVille, Tap Fish and Club Penguin do – criteria for what makes an ‘evil’ game. But not one is fully examined:

• “Play on deep-rooted psychological impulse to make money from players” (no discussion of how this relates to other ways of selling and the fact that these games have to make money somehow in an online world in which everyone expects everything for free)
• “Take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up” (a technique that’s now so widespread that it would surely incriminate all videogames)
• “Randomly time rewards, much like slot machines time payouts to keep players coming back, even when their net gain is negative (no discussion on how this net gain is negative and whether it differs between players)
• “Spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls” (no discussion on how these games’ viral economies are in constant flux due to changing social network policies)

And then somehow America’s Army gets invoked because it’s used as an army recruitment tool, despite it having no relation to any of the criteria.

An idea of where this article is coming from is revealed when Tetris, Sword & Sworcery EP and The Legend of Zelda are denoted as ‘good’ games, as opposed to FarmVille’s ‘evil’. So, respectively, that’s the universal gaming exemplar, the brave indie darling and the classic gamer favourite. Each, more or less (Sword & Sworcery, cough), is a totem for people who have a long-term love for videogames – and presumably this writer is one of them.

As am I. But Jackson isn’t doing enough to understand why people who aren’t like us would want to play FarmVille. Surely that’s a big part of the whole subject? And I’d say a large proportion of keen FarmVille players don’t want to play Zelda because they’re alienated by some of the intrinsic qualities that make it so good – its level of challenge and being written in arcane videogame language.

Moreover, we get no analysis of why Tetris is “complex and enriching”, compared to ‘evil’ games that are based on similar design principles. Judging by Jackson’s criteria, Bejeweled Blitz would seem to fit – I’d rather like to read how they compare. I’m not questioning the conclusion, just how Jackson came to it.

“Value is created in different ways for different people,” he says later, but again, he misses an opportunity to examine the spectrum. Instead, he presents a rather unwieldy verbatim quote from a Zynga staffer and massages another into meaning that the staffer sees “one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games”. A bit over-reductive, I’d say. A better idea would surely be try to understand what’s going on in a Zynga designer’s head. Are they so cynical?

I don’t want to come across as defending companies like Zynga (lord, no), nor to bash Jackson’s motivations and ultimate opinions. I think this is a laudable conclusion:

…it’s our responsibility as creators and consumers of games to demand more honest and fulfilling fun from our entertainment.

Perhaps his full piece will, but in this article Jackson offers too little insight into how we might do this, or what this aim really means.

All this is a bit rich, coming from me, of course. Shouldn’t I be commissioning or writing what I’m demanding? Yes, I bloody should.