Friday 26 July 2013

Chloe

My dog died today.

We put her down because she has been ill for the past few weeks and the procedure is too painful and too expensive to justify.

I don't know how I feel about it. I saw myself begin to step through the 5 stages of grief. The bartering, denial etc. I don't know the order. I decided to shortcut it and jump straight to acceptance. Hopefully this won't have any dramatic implications on my psyche.

I wish I could show you a picture of my doggy dog but I don't have one.

Before you ask, I am okay.

I take comfort from knowing that it happens to everybody. It is not the end of life but a part of it.

To be honest it still hasn't quite sunk in.

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By having read this article, you agree
that I am not responsible for any
distress, discomfort, enragement or
offence caused by your reading
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Sunday 21 July 2013

Are video games addictive?

I missed my Friday deadline! I apologise and come back to you with an interesting article on the addictiveness of videogames.

The culprit? Dota 2. This game has been tearing through Steam on the back of free gameplay and outstanding game mechanics. It is a joy to play... Kind of. It can also be stressful but never in a demotivating way. Mostly I just feel the need to prove myself after a bad game.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer arena game. It is two teams of 5 fighting head to head on a battlefield punctuated with defensive towers and neutral forces. The core gameplay is blah blah blah boring.

Don't get me wrong, the game is fantastic but I've played a lot of fantastic games. What is the difference with this game?

It's really about the social mechanics at play. It's less about playing for yourself and more about playing with or for your friends or teammates. There's no easy way to describe the feelings you get when everything is going well and everyone on your team is happy. Similarly when it's all going down the toilet because their Sniper has killed you for the 50 billionth time and he already has his Mjollnir, Butterfly and Shadow Blade and you are totally powerless to stop him from building Daedalus.

Let's take 3 examples of fantastic Role Playing Games.

  1. Runescape
  2. Skyrim
  3. World of Warcraft
First, Runescape. Sure, it is an old game and many have described it as boring and repetitive but there was a time when I would play this game every waking hour that I could. Why? I had friends who would play with me. With whom I could compete. With whom I could share the joy of the good times and laugh with hindsight at the bad. Recently I have begun playing again and it is still the same game although much improved. I cannot however bring myself to play it all that much. I don't think about it when I'm doing other things. I don't obsess over how to improve at it. I play it for 10-15 minutes at a time and the log off to play Dota 2 (or go outside... one of the two).

Second, Skyrim. This game is again fantastic and I have played it an awful lot. But without any sort of community to get involved with, I see very little reason to actually play it. I really want to level my archery to 100 but I don't see any real reason to. Who would I tell? Who would care?


World of Warcraft. I'm sure this game needs no introduction. It has consumed the lives of countless people and even claimed a couple of lives. It is a wonderful game which is superbly built and has a sprawling community to keep it afloat. I played this game 14 hours straight for several days running at one point. I did nothing else. Needless to say, I was addicted. But why? I had an awful lot of friends (in the game and in real life) who I would play with. When I wasn't playing with them, I was playing for them so that when I did see them I could talk about what I had done and where I was up to. Recently I came back to the game. It is still the same game with the same mechanics and the same sprawling, vibrant community however I had no interest beyond a passing curiosity. My friends had stopped playing. Even signed into my old account, I could see that none of my old friends were online. I played for about 30 minutes before turning it off and uninstalling it.

Dota 2 has been a running obsession for me and for a lot of my friends. We first met when I was fourteen. She was just known as DotA back then or Defence of the Ancients. From humble beginnings as a custom game type for a popular game called Warcraft 3, the game was picked up by a company called Valve (developers of the Half Life series, Team Fortress 2 and the Portal games) who developed the game professionally and released it through Steam (an online game store) as Dota 2. My friends and I have never really stopped playing. The most significant breaks being due to lack of stable internet connection or due to examinations and degree pressures. I find myself constantly returning to this game whenever I get a chance. The reason I had not written my article in time was because I was playing Dota 2 for about 6 hours today. I actually completely forgot about my promise to publish every Friday. My addiction, I believe, stems not from well crafted gameplay elements or reward systems in the game. My addiction stems directly from the social aspects of the game. It is a chance and an excuse to spend time with my friends who are physically separated from me by over an hour's drive. It is the hearthfire that we all gather around to discuss the weather. It is my way of staying connected.

This sort of social addiction spreads beyond 'hardcore gaming' into the world of casual gaming. Who would play Candy Crush if everyone they knew didn't play as well? How does farmville even work without a social aspect? These games are hardwired to have a strong social dynamic because the developers know that this is what gets people to play their games and then to come play and play again. Every game gets boring if you have nobody to tell about it.

We do not become addicted to games. Games become boring as the challenge decreases. We instead become addicted to the social rewards we get from playing them.

*******************************
By having read this article, you agree
that I am not responsible for any
distress, discomfort, enragement or
offence caused by your reading
of this article. DFTBA.
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Friday 12 July 2013

Let's eliminate poverty!

Good morning John! It's Friday and today, I'm going to talk to you about poverty.

First off, is poverty relative or absolute? Is there a certain absolute poverty line below which is poverty and above which is prosperity? Some sort of permanent threshold? I don't think so, I think it's more like that poverty is comparative. As an example I'll talk two different imaginary lower class families. Both are below the poverty line in the UK but both have different outlooks. The first looks out of the window and complains about not having enough, about living in poverty and how hard it is. The second watches the news and reads the papers and looks at third world countries and is thankful that they do not live in such poverty.

I'm going to introduce you (or re-introduce you) to The Bell Curve or Gaussian Distribution.
It figures that the first picture I put in a blog in the past 3 months is a graph.

Before we continue, you must understand that when talking about poverty, about resources, about wealth distribution... this curve is god. Let's say that there are 100 people in the world and they are represented on that graph. We can see that 68 are in the blue area (the areas are separated according to something called standard deviation). These 68 people are neither exceptionally rich, nor are they exceptionally poor. They are the white collar workers. If we step out further from the peak, we come to the red areas, together counting for 27 people. The people in the rightmost red region are the wealthy ones. The lawyers, the doctors, the businessmen. In the leftmost region are the labourers. The builders and binmen. The store staff at Tesco's. Go further afield and we hit the green areas. On the right are the fabulously wealthy. We are getting into the ranks of investment bankers, venture capitalists, CEOs of multinational corporations. On the left we have the unemployed, the people living off benefits etc. If you really want to push it out to the 0.1% tail end we hit both the homeless and the FTSE CEOs.

The economy is a self correcting system. There is a famous quote about the economy concerning an invisible hand and the point is if we raise the income of every one of these 100 people to the same level, the myriad mechanisms guiding the economic system, this invisible hand, would soon re-establish a Gaussian distribution. 

Eliminating poverty is no more possible than eliminating death and disease. Both are laws of nature. The Gaussian distribution is a law of statistics. To eliminate poverty would be to subvert the laws of mathematics. Mathematics is more than just the universal language, it is also the language the universe itself uses to write the rules.

There is one thing that I am sure of. Eliminating poverty within capitalism is impossible. Within another type of societal structure it may be possible, but I lack the knowledge to really say.

Just as some supporting evidence, here is a graph of estimated incomes across the globe.


You can see that not only does each individual sub-population have a Gaussian distribution of income, but the world as a whole (the light purple line) has a Gaussian distribution. How do you like them apples?

*******************************
By having read this article, you agree
that I am not responsible for any
distress, discomfort, enragement or
offence caused by your reading
of this article. DFTBA.
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Friday 5 July 2013

What does it take to be a leader?

I attended a leadership course this week called Frontrunner for disabled students and met an awful lot of amazing people. All of us had different backgrounds and different goals and, seemingly, a different idea of what a leader is and should be.

We can all basically agree that the perfect leader has a certain set of characteristics (considerate, thoughtful, just, strong, resilient, intelligent, strategic, personable, charismatic etc.) but as individuals we all lead differently.

What is the goal of a leader? Is it a constant path towards identifying which qualities they posses and then learning how to use them or improve upon them? Is it picking which of these qualities they want and drawing that quality into their repertoire?

For me, being a leader is keeping an open mind, throughout all things you might experience. It is trying to gain something from every encounter. It is the day in day out struggle of every person to decide where they want to go and what they want to do.

I'm glad to know that there are 36 talented, ambitious and inspiring leaders stepping back into the real world to testing their strength; because without leaders where would we be?

*******************************
By having read this article, you agree
that I am not responsible for any
distress, discomfort, enragement or
offence caused by your reading
of this article. DFTBA.
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