Katawa Shoujo

There's this one game that my brother has recently gotten into. And it really surprises me how glad I am that he's playing it.

Katawa Shoujo's premise doesn't sound promising. A dating sim where you choose between several disabled girls could very easily turn out as an objectification of disability and girls, with a freakshow tone to it. But surprisingly, it's not like that at all.

Firstly, each of the girls has a unique personality, with many having traits that are completely unrelated to their disabilities. The blind girl Lilly, for example, is a very cultured half-foreign girl; and the armless girl Rin is an artist with a very unusual perspective on things. While many characters have angst, all of those characters have reasons other than disability to angst (Hanako, who has a bad facial burn, lost her father in the fire that burned her). The protagonist also has a disability as well, a heart problem which almost killed him and resulted in him being sent to the special school where the story takes place. This heart problem can actively impact your character during the storyline, especially if you end up with Emi, the legless track star.

And secondly, the approach to dating these girls is a very healthy one. As a visual novel, it has a structure similar to Choose-your-own-adventure books, so a few choices in the beginning determine which character you'll end up with - if you get a good ending (you can also get bad endings, one example being falling off a roof and dying). Then, you proceed to befriend the girl you chose, get to know her well, and only then does the relationship become a sexual one. It's usually the girl who initiates this shift, incidentally.

There is some explicit content, which you can choose to turn off if you wish. My brother has played it both ways. But the explicit content in Katawa Shoujo is far better than any porn you can find, because it's depicted in the context of a caring, healthy romantic relationship. You know the girl well and care about her deeply long before the sexually explicit interaction with them. They also provide a model for how to handle the sexual aspect of the relationship as well. With one girl, the second time you have sex with her, the two of you decide to try something unusual, which it turns out the girl really doesn't enjoy. She honestly communicates this to you and you both make the decision never to engage in that particular sexual practice again. (Also, every instance of sex in Katawa Shoujo includes condoms.)

My brother is a heterosexual teenager. Someday, he will be sorting out these questions for real, when he gets over his shyness enough to start a relationship with a girl. And if he follows the model of Katawa Shoujo, I think he'll make a great boyfriend for whichever girl is lucky enough to have him. And if he ever gets involved with a disabled girl, Katawa Shoujo will have shown him that there's a lot more to that girl than her disability, and that having a disability need not be a barrier to having a relationship.

First Video of Grandroids

I got permission to post this on my blog:



This is a video of Gollum, the prototype Grandroid, showing off his ability to visually track moving objects. So far that's about all he can do, but eventually every single aspect of his cognition and behavior will be as thoroughly and carefully constructed as his visual tracking is now.

Unlike norns, Grandroids do not see in terms of 'classifiers'. Norns don't see the difference between a block of cheese and a honey pot - both are classified as food, and that's all the norns see them as. From what I understand, their vision is hard-coded, with the game directly stimulating the norns' brain with the right classifier when they look at an object.

Gollum is different. He will actually see 'red round things' or 'square orange things' and have to learn how to recognize them. He sees by projecting rays from his eye (only one of his eyes actually sees so far) and having them detect objects in their path. He also has a reflexive instinct to follow moving objects, which is what this video is showing off.

There's something very special about watching a computerized creature doing the exact same thing that a newborn does, for much the same reason. To know that he can actually see those balls (even if he doesn't yet have the cognitive capacity to recognize what they are or really think anything about them) is simply amazing.

Everyone else agree?

Social Skills in Video Games

I recently came across this video:

I'm not sure how I feel about the overall point of the video. My impression is that he's probably describing a real phenomenon but overstating it's importance. But at 6:07 he starts trashing video games.
I take exception to his comment that video games are all about the present (what about grinding?) but that's not the worst bit. He says video games don't develop social skills. Since he tossed out Warcraft, I'll discuss the mopst popular game in that series - World of Warcraft - to challenge the idea that you can't build social skills through a video game.
World of Warcraft is an MMORPG - Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. This means you play on an online servor along with thousands of other players. You'll see other players wandering around as you walk through the world. Each one of those is another real person, who could chose to interact with. I'd say these incidental interactions are about as common as incidental interactions between people walking down the street. So not common, but it happens.
But World of Warcraft also has more structured multiplayer content, and to succeed at this, you have to interact. I'll talk about all the structured multiplayer content that I have personal experience with, one after another.
Trade
Sometimes players have items that other players want. You can make a lot of gold by trading items to other players. There are two ways to do so - trade chat or auction house (though some people combine the two by advertizing auction house products on trade chat).
Trade chat is a special chat room you enter whenever you're in a capital city. If you want to buy or sell something you can just ask repeatedly on trade chat until you get a taker. People also use trade chat to ask for advice, and to vent when they're frustrated, and occasionally to engage in some of the most bizarre and entertaining conversations in the game. A lot of these conversations take the same skills as the verbal part of real-life conversations.
The auction house is sort of like an ingame version of EBay. You put an item up for auction for a set period of time (usually 24 hours). You post a minimum price for bid, and you can also chose to set a buyout price for people who want the item immediately.
Whether you're trading through trade chat or the auction house, you need to use perspective-taking to make money at it. You have to think about what they will or won't want, and how much they'll be willing to pay for it. The easiest way to answer the second question is to see what others are selling that item for, and price yours near the cheaper end of that range. (I usually set mine as slightly cheaper than the cheapest.)
The way to decide what will sell is to think of what you'd want to buy. Stuff that can only be used by the same people that make it (like arclight spanners) will not sell. Stuff that can be used by a different profession than the one that makes it (eg enchanting rods) will sell quite well. So will raw supplies for professions, because although most people can get the raw supplies they need themselves, it's a lot more convenient to buy it if you have the gold. There are some characters referred to as 'gold farmers' because they'll spend ages gathering supplies that they can sell to others.
Dungeons and Raids
Some zones are designed to be impossible to solo. These fall into two categories - dungeons involve five players, raids take larger numbers. Both dungeons and raids have a team of players fighting very difficult non-player character opponents. And both have designated roles for specific characters, consisting of tanks, healers and damages (a dungeon team is one tank, one healer and three damages, most raids have a similar ratio).
You need to work cooperatively to do dungeons or raids. Firstly, many people may be at different levels of experience with the game, and some bosses have special tricks to them. Very often people will stop before the start of a tricky fight and ask if everyone's played that fight before. If you haven't, they'll explain that you need to get into the shiny triangle when the boss calls for Al-Akir's aid, or two players need to get a stacking debuff on themselves but not let it get to 100, or some trick like that.
You also need to manage conflict. Many people, admittedly, are not very good at this, and many dungeon teams fall apart as a result. But when teams work well together, you can have a very enjoyable experience, and people will often do several dungeons in a row if they have a good team.
Besides the size of teams, dungeons and raids have another difference. Dungeons have a tool for letting the game find you teams, either queueing for a specific dungeon or for a random queue. Raids don't have this system, so you have to find your own team. (You can find your own team for a dungeon too, if you want, or find part of a team and then queue to fill in the missing roles.) There's another city chat room besides Trade chat - it's called Looking for Group. I'm not sure exactly what skills are involved in finding a raid group, but there certainly are skills involved, because I find it really difficult to attract anyone to join my raids. One thing it does take is patience (who said video games are instant gratification?). You're going to have to stand around a long time, repeating your request for a raid group over and over, until you finally gather enough people. And if you decide to try it with the minimum number, you may end up with a frustrating series of whole-team wipes (deaths) because you misjudged your teammates' power.
Battlegrounds
World of Warcraft has two factions, Alliance and Horde. Most of the multiplayer content is for one faction only (there are two trade chats, single-faction dungeon teams, etc), but battlegrounds involve both factions forming raid-group-sized teams to fight each other. There's a capture-the-flag game, a capture-the-bases games, a defend-and-switch game, and a bunch with combined elements. Each require some degree of cooperation to succeed. Like dungeons, you can queue to play with random players, although there are also 'rated battlegrounds' (which I haven't played) which involve guild teams against each other.
I'll focus on the first battleground you can play, a capture-the-flag scenario called Warsong Gulch. In this game, if you aren't strategically inclined, you're likely to end up in the middle of the field, bashing on the other newbies. The more strategically inclined people either hang back to defend their own base, or run in to steal the flag from the enemy's base. When someone has the flag, they essentially have a huge target painted on them, so other people must defend the flag carrier. In addition, you can only capture the flag if your own flag is at your base, so if both teams are running around with the enemy's flag, you need to kill the enemy flag carrier and return the flag (by clicking it) before you can capture their flag.
Strategic behavior also requires knowledge of what other players will do. While several players hanging back to defend the base is good strategy, one or two hanging back are liable to just get killed when a huge horde comes to take the flag. In lower-level Warsong Gulch, virtually no one hangs back at the very start, so you're better off just rushing forward with everyone else. In addition, while a lone character grabbing the flag can make a pretty good distraction, they have very little chance of capturing unless a group comes to defend them.
Another skill in battleground involves the battleground chat, which can be used to communicate to your entire team. If you just use it to scream about how newbie your teammates are, you won't accomplish much. But if you give simple, clear suggestions for how to play more strategically (eg 'kill the enemy flag carrier' or 'everyone rush the green gate') you can often get many of the less skilled players to follow your commands, thereby improving the entire team. (I've been one of those less skilled players myself, so I know what kinds of commands are easier to follow for newbies.)
The battleground chat can also be used to report on the enemy's movements. 'The enemy flag carrier is on their roof' sends everyone who's paying attention rushing to the roof of the enemy's base. In another battleground, 'farm lost' tells everyone that a huge enemy army has taken the farm and we can't get it back, so it's better to go to other bases instead. Whereas 'farm needs help' means we still have a chance to fight them off, but only if more people come to defend it.
And even the simple battles involve social skills. The enemy players are people, and they require a different style of attack than a computer does. For example, if you use a skill that makes you invisible as long as you stand still (night elf racial skill), players know to check for you where they last saw you. They also know to go for the weaker, high-damage characters or the ones who are healing teammates, so the tank role, so effective in dungeons, is obsolete. Stealthy characters can often be found by area of effect attacks, unless the stealthy character successfully predicts where the AoE will be targeted and avoids it. Certain classes are weaker to certain strategies, such as silencing a paladin so he can't heal himself, or ambushing a high-damage ranged character. One of the most key skills to learn is to keep moving - stationary characters are easier to kill, especially stationary ranged characters.
Guilds
Most of the multiplayer content I've described so far is short term, primarily involving interactions between strangers. Not so with guilds. Guilds are long-term cooperative groups of players, who get their own shared bank, their own chatline, notification when a guild member comes online, and a calender to arrange guild events.
Each guild has it's own culture. Some guilds interact very little, others quite a lot. Guild chat can rival trade chat for bizarre playful conversations. You can ask guild members to help you with difficult solo quests, or give you advice or guidance. Guild members may give other guild members useful items, such as profession supplies or larger inventory bags. Guild members of the same level as you can also be recruited for dungeons, raids or battlegrounds, and some guilds have an established raiding team so they don't need to search for people to raid with. Guilds each have their own rules about things like who gets to remove stuff from the guild bank and whether it's OK to ask guild members for gold.
With a guild, you have long-term contact with the same group of players. If you don't like each other, one or both of you may end up leaving the guild, along with possible friends you've made. You may even be forcibly removed by the guild leader. As a result, it pays to be friendly to your guildies. If you get along, you can easily end up becoming friends, or in rare cases even lovers. (There are married couples who met through World of Warcraft.) In some cases, guilds can become extremely important to people. They are a community, just as much as any real-life community such as a PTA or a sewing circle. The one difference is that the demographic is much broader, including peoples of all ages and from different countries.
So anyone who thinks video games don't build social skills has not played World of Warcraft.

Watching A God At Work

I have just recently signed on as a backer to the Grandroids project. As a backer, I get access to a special website where Steve Grand provides detailed progress reports (for example, recently he got the motor system working and tested it out by giving the creature a seizure).

For those of you who don't know, 20 years ago Steve Grand made the first game of my favorite series, the Creatures series. In this series, you raise little creatures called norns (at least you're supposed to, but it's a very open-ended game so you could instead leave them struggle to survive on their own, do experiments on them, run game show type activities while getting forum members or blog commenters to vote on them, the possibilities are pretty much endless). It's not like most artificial pets games, for one big reason - the norns are alive. They have their own internal biochemistry - they digest food, breathe, get sick or poisoned, they even have ATP and ADP. They have a neural network brain that can learn from experience and decide what to do. And they have a genetics code that decides the structure of both, which is inherited from the parents but with a few random mutations - which means they can actually evolve.

However, this had to run on computers in the 1990s. So the norns are very simple creatures, by real-life standards (even though by digital standards they're the most complicated life simulation so far). A single worker ant would beat them in intelligence. Their biochemistry didn't require conservation of energy, so sooner or later they all evolve into immortals. (This is most well-known in Docking Station, where the warp system that allowed players to trade norns also allowed many generation lines that were far longer than the patience of any players.) Their motor control consisted of genes specifying animation poses and other genes stringing those poses together, allowing for some very unrealistic motor disabilities (such as a disability where, when angry, they'd step on the spot instead of moving forward, but any other time they walked fine).

That's where Grandroids comes in. Steve Grand no longer has anything to do with the Creatures franchise - this is his new project. The Grandroids (which will not be called that, by the way) will have most, if not all, of the above design issues fixed. They will have much more complex biochemistry, based on some of the features of real-life chemistry. They will have a motor system much like ours, meaning the kinds of motor disabilities they get will also be much like ours. And although we have no idea yet how smart they'll be, Steve Grand's goalpoint is orangutans, which are almost as smart as humans. Their genetics will also be more complicated, and at the same time more familiar to many users because it's more similar to mammalian genetics.

Some of the backers have jokingly compared Steve Grand to God, and vice versa. Which brings me to a new philosophical question. I don't know how smart the Grandroids will be, but either they, or some future project building on this one, might involve creatures smart enough to have their own culture, their own belief system, their own religion. They may be smart enough that people could tell them about Steve Grand, and they would understand that he created them. From their perspective, Steve Grand is, quite literally, God, with the players being lesser gods controlling their individual universes.

What impact would this knowledge have on their cultures? Certainly some players may tell them the story of Steve Grand, and others may not. Those who do tell the story will each tell it a little differently. What impact might that have?

Furthermore, each player has a different playing style, which will have a different impact on their lives. They may have a kind, nurturing god who cures their sick, teaches their young and protects them all from the dangers in their world. They may have an absentee god who hatches the first generation and then has minimal involvement, returning much later when the wolfling run is over. They may have a newbie god who tries to care for them but speaks gibberish to them, confuses them by calling things by the wrong names, and punishes or rewards them pretty much at random. They may have a mad scientist god who hatches children with serious disabilities, puts them through weird tests, or creates strange new objects for them to interact with (some of which may be intentionally or unintentionally harmful). They may even have a sadistic god who enjoys watching them suffer, and who only helps them in order to ensure that they survive for more torture.

Each of those gods will bring a very different experience, and this, too, might shape their culture. If, like Christians, they see god as an attachment figure, they may react the same way that they would to a caring or neglectful parent. (I'm guessing the first generation especially may see us that way, given that we'd be their only parents.) This may impact on how they treat their own children (assuming they raise their children, unlike norns). Or they may view god more like a king, and see in their god's actions the way an authority figure should manage their underlings.

If multiple players share the same world, or if they get traded or warped between players, they may even see different gods managing things very differently. For example, some norn torturers posted norns they'd tortured on their websites, and other players downloaded these norns and tried to rehabilitate them. It's pretty much lost on norns, but maybe these Grandroids would come to interesting insights based on this contrast.

Lastly, what impact might this have on human culture? If Grandroids becomes well known, will it cause a shift in how we view life? Will religious people draw parallels between Steve Grand or Grandroids players and their own God, for example wonder if God is giving us a wolfling run and the end times will come when he decides to return and see what we've evolved into? Will ethicists speculate on what rights Grandroids deserve, similar to how they speculate about animals? Will researchers write papers using Grandroids as analogues to humans? Lastly, what will the next generation think? People who played Creatures as children are now adults. When the people who played Grandroids as kids have grown up, how will they see life and the universe?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. And some of them may be my imagination running wild, and the Grandroids won't be in a position to raise those questions. But still, it's incredible to watch new life being made, and wonder about the meaning of life.

My Thoughts On Norn Torture

OK, first, a background. There is a series of games called Creatures. Currently, the series includes Creatures 1, 2 and 3, as well as a free game called Creatures Docking Station, and two children's games called Creatures Adventures and Creatures Playground, and soon there'll be a free-to-play online game Creatures 4. In each game, you raise these creatures called norns (though there are other species some players choose to raise instead, who differ only superficially from norns).

The really interesting thing is that this isn't just a pets game. It's a simulation of life. The norns have their own biochemistry, and their own neural network brains, with the features of both being controlled by individual genetic codes. If two norns have a child, the child will have the features of both parents, as well as a few unique mutations. Over time, you could end up with a population of norns substantially different from the ones you started out with.

It's also a very open-ended game. The manuals and such suggest raising and nurturing your norns, but there are many other things you could do. I prefer to run experiments on my norns. Some people code injectible objects for the game, or create new breeds of norns. Some ignore the norns to play with the ecosystem in the game. Some raise the other two species - grendels and ettins - that are present in most of the games. Some leave their norns to their own devices to watch natural selection in action. And some decide to torture their norns for fun.

This last point caused an outcry in the Creatures Community. A Creatures player named AntiNorn put up a website about torturing norns, including several agents that would help torture norns, and some norns that he'd tortured. Several other Creatures players proceeded to flame him viciously and try to get his site shut down. Debates erupted on Creatures chat forums about the ethics of norn torture and whether norns counted as alive enough for animal rights.

This was all before my time with Creatures. AntiNorn has left the Creatures community, other norn torturers are active but much less vocal, and the 'norn rights' people have mostly gone silent as well. It's interesting how certain things become topical at one time and less so at another time. But anyway, I'm weighing in on this issue now.

I consider norns alive. My definition of life requires that a creature have inherited variations between individuals, that they need to eat to live and that they can die. Individual varieties of norns don't meet those criteria, but norns as a group certainly do. However, I don't think norn torture is wrong.

Here's my reasoning. What makes torture wrong for other living creatures? The simple answer is that it causes suffering. But it's not just the immediate suffering at the moment of torture, it's the psychological trauma that results which causes the bulk of the suffering. If torture caused only immediate suffering and no long term suffering, it would be much less problematic.

Well, that's what it does with norns. There are several cognitive mechanisms required for psychological trauma to occur. One of the big ones that is present in almost all lifeforms is classical conditioning, also called Pavlovian conditioning.

There are two types of conditioning - classical and operant. Operant conditioning is when a behavior is either rewarded or punished. If the behavior is rewarded, it becomes more frequent, and if it is punished it becomes less frequent. So, for example, if a rat is given a treat for pushing a bar then bar-pushing will increase, whereas if the bar's presses cause the floor to electrify, the rat will avoid pressing the bar. Operant conditioning also takes into account the environment; if bar pressing provides food when the light is off and shocks when it's on, the rat will press the bar only when the light is off.

Classical conditioning, first described by Pavlov, is when a stimulus that automatically causes a certain response is paired with another stimulus, and the new stimulus comes to trigger the same response. For example, a dog salivates when food is put in his mouth; when a bell is always rung before the food is delivered, the dog starts to salivate at the bell. Classical conditioning can also involve conditioned emotional reactions, such as conditioned fear.

In real-life creatures, classical conditioning is more basic than operant conditioning. Most creatures have both, those that only have one always have classical conditioning without operant conditioning. Norns are the opposite - they are capable of simple operant conditioning (though not chaining), but they aren't capable of classical conditioning.

Which means that when a norn is tortured, they go through all the unpleasant emotions of the torture, but once it's over and they've calmed down, they're fine. They may have some weird learnt behaviors, but they experience no more emotional distress than a norn who has been raised kindly all his/her life. Unlike humans or even many real-life animals, they won't feel terror at stimuli similar to the torture setting.

Of course, there's more to trauma than classical conditioning. But most of the other parts of trauma require even more complex cognition. Learnt helplessness, for example, requires the ability to realize that you can't do anything to stop the situation, which means you have to have a running tally of what you've tried and a systematic trial-and-error process instead of just random behavior. Losing the 'just world' illusion is another important part of trauma, but that requires that you have a worldview, that you're capable of forming a general conception of the world you live in, which is a pretty high-level ability. Disrupted attachment can be a consequence of certain types of trauma, but only for creatures who care for their young. C3/DS norns can learn to like or dislike individuals, but don't need emotional attachment - prior generations of norns can't even do that much, only form concepts of norns/grendels/ettins as a group. They show no more interest in their young as in any other juvenile norns, and the offspring themselves have no need for parental affection.

So, though I think norns are alive, I think it's fine to torture them, because they can't be traumatized. Sure, they can experience immediate suffering, but they experience immediate suffering when they are punished, when they try something that was a bad idea (eg eating rotting stuff) or when they do not address their own needs (eg not eating when hungry). I see no problem with norns experiencing immediate suffering at times.

Even in a Very Simple Life Form Behavioral Analysis is too Simple

I like to play a series of games called Creatures. In these games, you have creatures called norns which you raise. There are also grendels and ettins, which differ mainly in one gene that tells the game what species they're supposed to be. (All examples of specific types of creatures are taken from Creatures 3 and some are not accurate for other versions.)
These creatures have digital DNA and very simple brains capable of learning. You can tickle them to reward them and slap them to punish them.
One example of how behavioral analysis doesn't explain everything is that although slapping a creature in this game is fairly effective in stopping most unwanted behaviors, it increases the tendency to run from whatever they're looking at. That's because they get scared from getting slapped, and run away from things when they are scared.
Another example is that something can have different effects on different creatures. For example, the standard norns, if they eat detritus (rotten food), they get pain, and therefore learn that they shouldn't do that (which is a good idea, because they are poisoned from it. But one type, called Toxic norns, are helped by things that are normally poisonous. Instead of getting pain from eating detritus, their hunger is decreased by it. So a normal norn learns not to eat detritus while a toxic norn learns to eat it, simply because the action has different effects on them. This is genetic.
Also, if you take a newborn normal norn and a newborn toxic norn, who have never before eaten anything, and offer them detritus, the toxic norn is much more likely to eat it. This is because they have instincts for eating detritus. Another example is that the standard grendels have instincts to hit norns (they're supposed to be the 'bad' guys). You can train a grendel not to hit norns, but these instincts will still pop up occasionally, and you'll have to reinforce the lesson. They will never be as safe for norns to be around as if they didn't have those instincts.
Drives are also important. Grendels tend to get angry easily, especially around norns. They will sometimes hit other grendels simply because they are angry and hitting creatures, of any type, reduces anger.
[Edit: On a completely different topic, I found out today that the song Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel is about an old woman entering a nursing home and how patronising the staff is towards her.]