In Control

So many people aren’t. It’s apparent anywhere on the Internet. Any half-decent comment thread, on any subject at all, descends into ridiculous chaos if it’s not moderated. Which really just goes to show that no one’s reading these posts here on my blog, because no one’s insulting me about them. Either that, or everyone who reads my opinions agrees with them, and I know better than to hope for that.

Why is it that people on the Internet seem to have no self-control in randomly insulting people for their honest opinions? Well, the most obvious answer is that people in general have issues with impulse control. I remember one memorable incident: I was waiting for the next train at a Boston commuter rail station, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the symbol of Brandeis University. Apparently, that T-shirt inspired someone to come up and tell me that they seriously disapproved of the university.

Open such a declaration of affiliation or opinion to the entire world, as one necessarily does when they post something to the Internet by any means, and the entire world full of people gets to find something to disagree with. No surprise, perhaps, that the kind of flaming or trolling behavior that practically characterizes many forums/comment threads is as common as it is.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company responsible for the ridiculously popular World of Warcraft and the highly-anticipated StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, have apparently decided that they want to do something about it. How are they going to do that? By making everyone accountable for the things that they say on the forums: forcing everyone to use their real names, through the RealID system, on the World of Warcraft and StarCraft II forums.

... I don’t quite know how to respond to that. I first learned about it from this post on the Shakesville blog, a blog I had started reading probably less than 12 hours ago by sheer random chance. Coming from the perspective that it does, the opinion there is openly hostile; by making people use their real names, it opens the door to stalking and similar privacy violations. I have to say, I see the point there. There is a reason why my full name isn’t displayed anywhere on this blog, after all.

Of course, however, there is a “but”. But what about accountability? Couldn’t I say whatever I like in this space, without any fear of retribution? As it stands, someone randomly wandering the Internet that came across this blog wouldn’t have much of an idea who I am. Which may not matter when I’m just randomly yapping about how I like StarCraft II, but if I was encouraging people to actually do something, I think it would matter a little bit more.

As the Internet is now, there is no accountability. And I think there’s something lost as a result. On the 24th of June, the Supreme Court of the U.S. decided the case of Doe v. Reed (link to Supreme Court website), a case in which the Court ruled that the names and addresses of people that sign referendums can be made public. The people that brought the case in the first place argued that they were being harassed as a result of the release of information about themselves, and tried to get the Court to block the public release of the referendum so as to prevent this harassment.

The Court refused. Eight to one, they held that in a broad sense, the disclosure of such information does not violate any First Amendment rights of the plaintiff. (They acknowledged that this specific release may be blocked on narrower grounds; that issue is still pending.) And for me, the most direct and convincing argument came from Justice Scalia. Which was somewhat of a shock for me considering that I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with him in the past.

As quoted by the Washington Post article on the case:

“There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance,” Scalia wrote in a separate concurrence. “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

Now, I admit I’m an idealist. I admit I am from the height of privilege, an upper-middle-class white male. And I admit I’ve never had anyone stalking me before. I can’t change who I am or what I’ve experienced. But I can’t disagree with Scalia here. If you wouldn’t be willing to publicly admit to your beliefs and opinions, why do you even hold them in the first place?

Internet trolling still functions because it’s anonymous. If I post an anonymous comment to a blog saying “you’re an idiot” no one will ever know that I posted it, and so I will never see any consequences for my action. I can hold and express that opinion without any recrimination from society.

Now, with what Blizzard plans to do with their forums, that won’t work anymore. Now, if someone wants to inform someone else on their forums that they think they’re an idiot, the troll will have to stand by that opinion publicly. If someone wants to repeatedly annoy someone else on the Blizzard forums, it’ll be plainly obvious who is doing it. If someone wants to ignore the consequences of those actions, including possible legal recourse... well, that won’t be possible anymore.

An Angel's Lament

So there's a new anime airing in Japan at the moment, called Angel Beats! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.) It's being produced by Key/Visual Arts, which is a company known for producing some damn good stories in the past. And by that, I mean the computer game Kanon. That game is one of the most well-known visual novels ever, and the story is nothing short of amazing.

With that to recommend it, it didn't take much convincing to get me to watch Angel Beats. (No, I am not going to put in the exclamation point every time.) In keeping with Key's typical mode of operation, the story varies between "depressing" and "really freaking sad" with a few glimpses of hope thrown in occasionally. It's surprisingly effective at getting one to care for the characters of the story, as both Kanon and Angel Beats demonstrate quite readily.

But I'm not really sure who exactly I'm supposed to be finding sympathetic. I guess the two obvious main characters from the beginning have been Yuri and Otonashi... but the third main character (or, possibly, antagonist - certainly she appeared to be that at first) has inevitably drawn a great deal of my attention. That third character? Tachibana Kanade, all too often called Tenshi. Those familiar with Japanese will know that "tenshi" in Japanese (天使, if anyone was curious) means "angel".

I would give a large deal of money to know how and when she got that nickname. To be fair, the anime is set in the afterlife. More likely some section of it, for the people that have had really, really crappy lives. And I mean that. Every backstory we've heard (Yuri, Otonashi, Ayato Naoi, Iwasawa, Hinata) has been damn near hellish. This is the driving force behind Yuri and her Battlefront: her goal is to go find God and have a word with Him. And somehow, I doubt that word will be "thanks"; considering that Yuri owns a number of weapons, it may not even be a word at all.

And that brings us to Tachibana Kanade, aka Tenshi. At first, she was the student council president of this fine part of the afterlife. (Did I mention that this section of the afterlife was a Japanese high school? No? Well, now I have.) Tenshi was thus charged with keeping order in the school. And she could: she's a short little white-haired emotionless girl that doesn't look like she could be a physical threat to anyone, until she says "Guard Skill: Hand Sonic" and summons a freaking armblade from thin air. And uses it to deflect bullets.

So that's why she's an angel! Except... no, actually. She developed those abilities herself, in what was implied to be a similar manner to the way that Yuri, Otonashi, and the rest of the Battlefront get their weapons. Oops. She's just Tachibana Kanade, another of the girls at this school in the afterlife, trying to maintain order as best she can, not because she has to, but because she wants to.

Not that Yuri cares. This "Tenshi", a nickname that the Battlefront themselves tagged her with, has been the target of their operations merely because she could be the link to God that Yuri's searching for. She's going after Kanade because Kanade is one of God's angels... except she started calling her that in the first place. Who's supposed to be the villain here?

What I'm trying to say here is this: when one is deciding on a course of actions, isn’t it a good idea to actually think about it a little first? Tachibana Kanade shouldn’t have had to develop an ability that gave her armblades to keep order in a school. She shouldn’t have ever had to use something like that to keep students under control. And yet, the Battlefront goes even more heavily armed as a matter of habit. Their target was a lone girl who was just trying to do what she felt was right.

Maybe I’m just biased. I’ve been teased before. I spent a large part of my middle school years as a target, or so I imagined. Never quite to the “friendless” extreme that anime characters like Kanade end up representing, but it felt that way sometimes. My personal experience aside, it just seems wrong to intentionally go after someone, either with words or weapons, unless one is damn sure of what they’re doing.

You don’t have to have a reason for everything you do. I blog because I like to express myself, or try to. (My update schedule does suggest that I don’t worry about expressing myself that often.) And for all that I argue that video games or anime can be educational, I enjoy them because they’re fun. I’ve never tried to claim that the benefits are anything more than side effects of what is primarily supposed to be entertainment. But if you’re going to do something more, something that affects other people... for anything from making jokes at their expense to shooting at them, don’t you need a better reason than just “it’s fun”?

Order, Control, and Gaming

Control. There are those people that like to have it, over themselves and the environment around them. There are others who could care less. This is one of the ways to look at the old Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 alignments of Lawful and Chaotic. One values order and control, the other sees them as unnecessary or even a hindrance.

And, in the story of .hack//Legend of the Twilight, it’s pretty obvious where the system administrators of the biggest MMO ever created fall. To quote, “What cannot be controlled must be deleted.” To be fair, it’s on some level an opinion shared by every single game designer and developer ever to make or run a game. Even the most basic games in real life have rules. Have a winner and a loser, and a set of regulations governing what can and cannot be done in the game.

Order and control are thus very important to games of any kind. It is the knowledge that the rules will be enforced that prevents a game from disintegrating. Who would play World of Warcraft if a high-level monster could just teleport into the low-level zones and wreak havoc, killing off all the low-level players that can’t fight back? It is the order present in the game world that allows it to function. That reassures players that low-level monsters are here, and higher-level ones won’t be found there.

And when that order, when that control, breaks down, it must be dealt with. If a player starts cheating to gain an advantage, they need to be removed; if a bug comes into the system, it needs to be fixed. This is a philosophy shared by both the administrators of “The World” in .hack// and the admins of World of Warcraft or any other MMO.

So then, it is clear that a Lawful alignment preserves the game and allows it to function freely and evenly for all players. But then, aren’t there some things that can’t or even shouldn’t be controlled? Surely it’s ridiculous to assume that everything can be brought under strict order, and even more so to think that that’s a good thing. Such is the Chaotic argument.

In today’s games, the systems and worlds are tightly controlled. There’s really not much chance of anything too odd happening. But in .hack//Legend of the Twilight, “The World” is a massive MMO, with far too many details to easily monitor… far too many details to keep control of. And maybe in a world like that one, it’s better to leave some things be.

An element that cannot be controlled is not automatically evil or unbalancing. It can be, but the default position need not be the above quote. Maybe it’s better to let the world change. If something isn’t harmful or dangerous, then why does a lack of control need to mean destruction?

It’s not just the massive world of .hack// that can’t be entirely controlled. In fact, there are elements of chaos in any game, even in our own tightly regulated games. There will be a lack of balance in any system we create. We aren’t good enough to create a perfectly balanced, perfectly fair game world; what’s more, we never will be. So we might as well recognize that some things need not be controlled.

The dichotomy, the divisions between Lawful and Chaotic opinions, can be seen in modern games. In the MMO EVE Online, there are rules to protect the newer players. Certain systems are under the protection of the law, and any act of aggression in those systems will merit a response from the police forces of the world. What’s more, surviving their attack is considered an exploit by the game’s designers. Again, we see that tight control over what can and cannot be done.

But. Unlike in some games, there are no restrictions on who can be attacked; many games with a Player vs. Player element give new players immunity to this warfare as protection. Nothing of the sort exists in EVE, only the police forces that, like in the real world, can’t respond immediately to a threat. And so, chaos works its way back in. EVE players can always be attacked, anywhere and at any time. There will be consequences for the attacker, but that may not save the victim any grief.

And in the systems where the law has no authority? That’s where the players come in. There are several major player-created alliances in EVE, and they’ve managed to fill in the hole that the designers left behind. The systems that the designers left chaotic and uncontrolled? The players have sovereignty over them now, and they can do whatever they like there.

The designers of EVE could have created a police state. They could have created a sprawling empire of powerful police forces that control every known system, lockouts on targeting systems that prevent the targeting of newer or weaker players, and a regimented system of growth and development that would have guided a player up the ranks. They could have controlled everything in sight, and removed any trace of chaos from the game.

But they would have destroyed the fun of the game in the process. By backing off, by creating a system that combines law and chaos, they created an incredibly compelling system. They control what needs to be controlled, to allow players some sense of security, and they leave the rest chaotic.

There’s a message in there somewhere. Control and order are important, to be sure. Without them, no one could live without being hindered by the random whims of others. And order is far more often than not designed for a good purpose. But also, not everything can be controlled. And sometimes, one needs to just let things run unchecked. At times, life needs to be kept on track through order and control. And at other times, life needs to be allowed to run free in a celebration of chaos.

Security and Responsibility

The games that bear the title of Command and Conquer are usually hailed as welcome additions to the list of real-time strategy games available. And they deserve that acclaim, too: the games are enjoyable and challenging additions to that genre of games. Lately, though, Electronic Arts, the company that is behind the latest Command and Conquer games, is coming under fire from consumers for something completely unrelated to the quality of the games.

I personally own one of the latest additions to the series, Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3. After playing it for a while, I find it to be an enjoyable and challenging game, one that certainly lives up to the Command and Conquer title. The tone does border on the ridiculous at times, what with the introduction of Empire of the Rising Sun and its army of Gundam-style transforming mech units alongside other crazy units from the series standard Allies and Soviet sides, but that doesn’t reduce the tactical challenge any.

So after all that, I must say I was somewhat surprised to see the average rating of the game on Amazon.com. With 154 total reviews, the average rating was a mere two stars out of five. (I got those numbers at 1617 hours on 12-31-08.) This alongside a review from 1UP.com giving the game an A- grade. I was pretty curious as to why the Amazon reviewers seemed to dislike the game so much; I certainly hadn’t found that much to dislike.

Well, as it turns out, there is a digital rights management system called SecuROM that Electronic Arts uses in an attempt to protect the game from piracy. And a good deal (not all of them, but many) of the negative reviews on Amazon never even mentioned anything about the game itself, only this security system that comes with the game. Now, I know I haven’t really had any problems with it. My computer hasn’t had any issues; the game runs without problems.

All the same, though, I do respect the decisions of people to refuse to buy the game with that system. After all, the power of the consumer in a capitalist economy is the power to choose what to support. If people want to refrain from buying the game, that’s fair. What I do have the problem with is the victim mentality that seems to be developing here. From what I can see, people are intent on punishing EA, because it’s the evil corporation that’s punishing innocent consumers with this restrictive system.

And frankly, that view makes little to no sense to me. It’s not just seen in the real world, either. From what I can see, some people have an interesting view of the way responsibility works, specifically who has responsibility for a given end result that develops. It’s not one that I agree with. Another example, this time from the annals of role-playing games, helps to illustrate what exactly I mean.

This is an example culled from the forums of Giant in the Playground Games; I have no idea who first proposed it. In this hypothetical scenario, a group of evil cultists are casting a ritual to summon a powerful demon to the world, a ritual which requires a human that the demon will possess. A group of heroic adventurers reach the room in which this ritual is being cast. That said, though, they are all but depleted, having fought through most of the cultists and their allies before reaching that room.

Knowing that the demon is far more powerful than they are, and fearing for the results if it is summoned, the adventurers must attempt to halt the ritual, but they don’t have the remaining strength or time to defeat the cultists that are actually casting the ritual. Thus, their choices are presented as a dichotomy: allow the ritual to complete and the demon to arrive, or kill the innocent human themselves to prevent the ritual’s completion.

Those presenting this scenario usually go on to argue that the morally correct choice is the second. The justification is presented thus: anything other than the assured halt to the ritual that that second option offers is tantamount to allowing the ritual to complete, allowing the demon into the world to wreak whatever havoc it likes. Furthermore, it is impossible to claim that it is morally wrong to kill an innocent, because refusing to do so makes the adventurers responsible for the summoning of the demon and any further havoc that it causes.

The idea that a third choice is present almost never comes up initially. Even when someone does ask, “Well, what about if they fight like all hell anyway, using more morally correct means,” the usual response is, “No, they’re still responsible for the ensuing chaos.” And again, we see this idea of responsibility. We see this idea that a group with limited resources and means that does its best within those bounds becomes the party responsible, regardless of who else is involved.

In the RPG scenario, with the demon, I cannot in good conscience give the adventurers much of the responsibility for the summoning, regardless of their choices. If they do their best within their bounds to halt the summoning and fail, then the responsibility falls primarily on the cultists that summoned the demon and the demon itself. Even if they stand by and do nothing, the responsibility still must be evenly split between them and the people who did the actual summoning.

Likewise, Electronic Arts is not the oppressor doing horrible things to the victimized consumers. Both EA and the consumer are the victims in this case, just as the adventurers and the populace are both the victims of the demon in the role-playing scenario. The analogue of the demon in the real world scenario is not Electronic Arts, but rather the people that lead EA to think that things like SecuROM are necessary.

Electronic Arts isn’t out to screw their customers over. Their stated intent (from the support section of their website) is this: “This solution serves to protect our software from piracy.” If we don’t like the digital rights management that EA put in its game, then we do have every right to refuse to buy from EA. But it seems to me that it would be more productive to go after the true root of the problem: the people that attempt to avoid paying for the game.

The customers may be the victims in this case, but Electronic Arts isn’t the demon that’s entirely responsible for attempting to add security to their games. The real demons in this case are the people that want to cheat EA out of what they deserve for producing such a good game. If such piracy could be shut down, then things like SecuROM wouldn’t be necessary. That seems like a better focus for our efforts than demonizing EA, when the true responsibility for this lies elsewhere.