Sports and “Sports”

I’ve been watching some of the Olympics this week (despite the fact that I think the USA probably should have boycotted them), and thinking about the nature of the competitions.

One thing I’ve noticed – and I’m not saying this is a particularly startling insight on my part – is that the sports can, for the most part, be divided into two categories. There’s the ones where you win by earning points, or runs, or whatever, through your own actions, and there’s the ones where you win by convincing judges to give you points. Examples of the former would be, say, baseball or soccer or tennis or the 100 meter dash or something like that; examples of the latter would be stuff like gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming.

Now, is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with the latter type of “sport”? I’m not sure they even deserve to be called “sports”. Sports are supposed to be tests of the athletic skill of the competitors. The competitors in gymnastics, diving, etc, are athletes, certainly, but it seems to me that these so-called sports are not testing their athletic skill – they’re testing their ability to convince the judges to give them points. This leaves the ultimate responsibility for determining the winner in the hands of the judges, not the hands of the competitors.

Which means that ideology-related bias (I could easily see a judge from the US not giving high marks to a gymnast from China because those two countries are seen as adversaries), home-field advantage (it seems to just be acknowledged fact at these Olympic games that the Chinese have an advantage in judged “sports” because the roar of the crowd is louder for their athletes, making them seem more impressive), and pure whim play much too large a role.

And don’t try to tell me that the way the judges determine the scores is in some way scientific and they are just applying a set of simple rules to what they see. Even if that is in theory the case, it is clearly not the case in real life – a sport where one judge can give a 10.0 and another an 8.5 to the same dive, for example, cannot be based on objective observation of what happened.

Still, you do have sports that are kind of on the border – I don’t know much about boxing, and so am not sure if it falls into the sports or “sports” category, and while it seems like wrestling is objective, there are apparently judged involved to determine when exactly to award a point. And even with sports like baseball or football or soccer, you have umpires or referees who have an influence on the game even though they are on neither team.

But I don’t think this is the same thing. With calling balls and strikes in baseball, for example, the umpire does have to make the call, but he is saying that an event happened a certain way. He is making a call about facts. With judged sports, they are not making calls about facts, they are translating their opinions into a pseudo-scientific scoring system. They are not saying “this dive was worth 8.5 points and anyone who disagrees with me is in error”, they are saying, “oh, let’s see, he did X, Y and Z well but messed up on W a bit… let’s give him an 8.5, that sounds about right”. And different judges can come to different conclusions, and give different point values, and this is seen as acceptable, even perhaps a good thing.

Good thing, bad thing, I don’t care – but it does make it, in my opinion, not a sport.

It would be interested to see what would happen to the Olympics if all of these “sports” were taken out, though. Most people probably wouldn’t watch if the Olympics consisted only of track and field and swimming and soccer and stuff like that. But it would be more of a contest of pure athletic skill. It would also probably result in the US beating China in the Olympic medal count; right now the US has more medals total, but the Chinese more golds, but I suspect this is largely a result of the Chinese winning in the judged “sports” (IIRC they swept men’s gymnastics, and diving too, and did really well in the women’s of both those sports too) – if you take those out, the US probably wins by a hefty margin. I don’t know, though; the US probably has a lot of medals in those sports too, after all.

Game Review: Portal

So, a few weeks ago (actually, five or six weeks ago… the summer is passing by rather quickly), I was at a friend’s house and ended up playing the game Portal all the way through. It’s only an hour, maybe two, long. Quite a fun game, even if it’s not Free Software.

Anyway, the gameplay of Portal is quick fun. I like the first-person-puzzle-game aspect of it – combining FPSs and geometry problems is quite brillaint. And the storyline is quite compelling and well presented. It manages to show the world of Aperture Science, GlaDOS, the portal gun, and the deadly neurotoxin in an extremely believable manner. But what struck me most was how it presents a rather complete world in such a short period of time. Like I said, the game’s only an hour long.

Now, Portal is not really autonomous – it is tied in with Half-Life (also a rather good game; I haven’t played Half-Life 2), and Aperture Science is presented as a rival company to Black Mesa, the location of the experiment-gone-wrong in Half-Life. However, the idea of a stand-alone story containing a stand-alone world that could be presented in a short period of time in a reasonably complete manner intrigued me. Portal comes close – really, if you ignore the references to Black Mesa, it basically succeeds.

This is, of course, a form of mythopoeia, but I’ve never heard a word to refer to this particular subset. There is, however, one that basically fits the bill – “microcosm”. A miniature world. As I’m using it, it basically means a fantasy world that is simple enough that its nature can be conveyed in something about the length of a short story. Fairy tales often fall into this category; Sleeping Beauty (my favorite fairy tale), for example, gives you a world of good and evil fairies who have the power to control the lives of mortals. That’s really all you need. Everything else is assumed to be the same as in the real world – even if Sleeping Beauty isn’t set in the real world.

The short story I recently finished writing (but haven’t finished revising, so I haven’t posted it yet) is this kind of story. It basically wants to get across the idea of – a giant spiral ramp, good guys at the top, bad at the bottom, and they fight battles in the middle. The middle is empty. That’s the microcosm “On The Staircase” takes place in. There’s a story to go with it, of course, about one inhabitant of the staircase – but the world is just as important as the story.

Life as a Strategy Game

It’s interesting, I think, to compare the mechanics of “real life” to the mechanics of different kinds of games. In other words, to look at life as if it were a strategy game.

Now, I’m a fan of turn-based strategy games – TBSs, from here on out. But they are, I will admit, somewhat unrealistic. Life is not like a TBS, but rather like an RTS – a real-time strategy game. If life were like a TBS along the lines of chess, we would have infinite time to consider the possible outcomes of our actions. Presuming that we would still have both free will and intellect, then all possible outcomes of our moves could be considered, and we would choose the best one. That would mean we could not do things we would later regret, and would be more like angels than men. We would still have free will, but in a form much different than what we currently experience as free will. I imagine this is the kind of free will angels have.

Though, do angels have absolute knowledge? I could imagine a TBS where you did not have absolute knowledge yet it was deterministic – say, Dark Chess, i.e. chess with fog-of-war. Is the angelic point of view more like that than like chess itself? (I’m fairly certain that angelic life wouldn’t have an element of chance, like, say, Wesnoth does. Angels don’t play dice, I would guess.)

As it is, human life is more like an RTS – it doesn’t wait for us to make our decisions, it moves on with or without our consent. This is one of the implications of being physical as well as spiritual beings. It’s funny how often we forget it, though; there is I think a tendency to approach life as if it were a sequence of decisions to make rather than continuous motion.

A Defense of Brawl

So, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out Sunday at midnight. A friend of mine bought it then, so I’ve had access to it for the last 96 hours. And I’ve spent way too much time playing it. (according to the game it’s been played for 40 hours, but I myself have probably only played for 10-15 hours. Which is still a lot.)

Sure, it’s fun. For those interested, my characters are going to be Zelda, Pit, Ganondorf and Wolf. I already knew how to play Zelda from Melee; I basically learned Pit on Sunday, since he’s a pretty easy character; I played as Ganondorf for a while on Monday, and I’ve decided I’m going to learn how to use him, but so far I’m not that great with him; I picked up Wolf yesterday and have played him exclusively since then, and have gotten decent with him.

But, I wonder, and perhaps you do as well… Is playing for 10-15 hours not a bit excessive? Am I not wasting my time?

I’ve thought about it, and in the end, I think – no.

Playing video games is justifiable in several different ways. I’ll look at three – (1) It’s a social activity, (2) it stimulates thought, and (3) really, what better stuff do I have to do?

1.  Clearly Smash is a social activity (as long as you’re playing in a group, not by yourself). And it’s truly social, not like sitting in a room with a bunch of people and watching a movie, which is either a solitary experience in a group setting or extremely unpleasant. You interact with the other people playing – taunting them, allying with them against the leader, yelling raucously, and generally getting into the competitive spirit. If you accept that social activity is a good thing (and I think you have to – if we were not intended to participate in society, we might as well not be corporeal beings), Smash seems like a fairly good option as far as social activity is concerned.
2. Indeed, I do think Smash is good for the mind. I have been gently mocked for using the term “strategy” in relation to Super Smash Brothers, but I think I had a point – playing Smash, or really any video game of decent complexity, does more than just train pattern recognition and quick reflexes. Take a stage like Hyrule Temple. It requires thought to decide when to go into the “cave of infinite life”, to decide when to charge the enemy and when to use ranged attacks, to figure out the best places to place mines, to decide who to target and who to avoid fighting (and this depends on the skill level of other players as well as the in-game situation). Really, Smash presents the players with a fairly complex system they must try to manipulate – and I think that probably helps with system manipulation in general. (I’ll stop now before it sounds like I think Smash should be taught in schools.)
3. This isn’t to say I think Smash is the ideal activity or anything. But, really… what do I have to do that’s more important? I can only spend so much time every day processing knowledge, by which I mean the verb “reading” generalized beyond literature, or producing knowledge, by which I mean writing generalized beyond literature. I honestly couldn’t stand spending 100% of my waking hours doing that, and I don’t think it would be natural for me to do so either – like I said above, man is meant to be a social animal, not just a knowledge processing/producing machine. So I might as well play Smash. It’s better than going out and getting smashed.

That said, I could probably stand to spend a bit less time playing Smash and a bit more working on Orbivm, etc… and I probably will. I only played for 10-15 hours over the past four days because the new game had just come out. Isn’t not a permanent thing. Really. I promise.

Crime and Punishment

A simple question – what is the purpose of punishing criminals?

A common answer is that you want to deter future criminals by showing what will happen when they commit a crime. Punishment as deterrent. Makes sense, right? Well…

The obvious problem with this is that you’re not showing what will happen when they commit a crime – you’re showing what will happen when they commit a crime and are caught. In a sense, this turns it all into a game of odds. As a potential criminal, you just evaluate what you will gain from committing the crime, what you will lose from being caught, and what your chances of getting caught are. If it ends up being an average gain for you, commit the crime; otherwise, don’t.

Following this reasoning, “an eye for an eye” is only effective if your chances of catching the criminal are greater than 50%. Otherwise, he gains an eye if he succeeds, the changes of which are >50%, and he loses an eye if he fails, the chances of which are <50% – the estimated result is a gain of a fraction of an eye.

Of course, most people don’t actually consider taking an eye from an enemy to be exactly equal to losing one of their own eyes. They’d rather have the eye themselves even if it leaves the enemy with the eye. But consider theft – there, you actually do gain something from the crime. Let’s say I’m planning on stealing $10,000. If I get caught, I’ll have to give it back, and I’ll go to jail for, say, 10 years. Let’s throw in that I’ll pay a $10,000 fine. So if I get caught – if I lose the crime game – I lose $10,000 and 10 years of my life. If I win, I gain $10,000.

Sure, that looks like a bad deal, but only if my chances of getting caught are fairly high. Let’s say I value a year in prison at $50,000 per year (in other words, that’s how much I’d be willing to pay to avoid that punishment). So, in defeat, my total losses would be $510,000, and in victory, my total winnings would be $10,000. That means that if my chances of success are over approximately 98%, I should commit the crime – it averages out to a benefit, not a loss. It all depends on how much risk I’m willing to take on, of course, but to reduce risk just ensure that your chances of success are higher. 99%? 99.5%?…

The point is that some people will have those chances at success – or at least they will think they do – and so people will still commit crimes. Even with a literal eye for an eye – at some point, if I want to harm the other person badly enough and I think my chances of success are high enough – I will take his eye even if there’s a chance of it costing me mine. It’s actually an even better deal than the theft because they can’t make me give the eye back.

And, as Saint Thomas More pointed out, you can’t just increase all punishments to be extremely harsh because then people have no incentive to commit lesser crimes not greater. If I’ll get hanged for stealing, why not kill the witnesses so there’s less of a chance of getting caught? If I get caught, I die either way. Might as well decrease the chances of that happening. So you need punishments that are fairly reasonable. But then people only have to have good, not even great, chances of success before it’s worth it for them to commit crimes – 70%? 60%?

So how exactly is punishment a deterrent? It deters criminals who were likely to get caught. It doesn’t deter the ones who will probably succeed. But that’s really what we need to do. They’re probably the more dangerous kind anyway. An executive at a large company who can steal $1,000,000,000 and probably get away with it is far more dangerous than someone who can rob a convenience story, get $100, and have a fairly good chance of getting caught for it. “Deterrence” might stop the latter, but it won’t stop the former.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wary of the idea that punishing criminals is useful as a deterrent. So what is it good for? Education? Retribution? The former sounds absurd (the criminals who get caught aren’t the ones who need to be convinced that crime is wrong) and the latter potentially blasphemous (who are we to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment?). It might well be that deterrence is really all that punishing criminals is good for – the idea being that you don’t have to deter all the criminals, just enough to have some semblance of order in your society. Anarchy tends to be unpleasant.

But I suspect that so long as we have to punish criminals at all, there’s no hope of creating some sort of crime-less society… that would, after all, be a Utopia, a no-place. And any claim that a change in how criminals are punished will somehow drastically reduce crime should be examined very, very carefully. The only way to reduce crime is to reduce the criminals’ chances of success.

Today is Thursday

I went to my Philosophy class at eleven o’clock in the morning. I did the same thing on Tuesday, and the same thing those two days last week, and the same the week before that. I’ve done it six times so far now.

Is that enough for it to be a “routine”?

It does seem like I’m already in the habit of getting up, eating breakfast, walking over to the building the class is in, spending an hour reading or whatever, and then going to class. But I’ve only done it six times so far – actually less, because on some of those days I haven’t done exactly that, instead, I’ve slept in, or went to Mass, or whatever.

How many times must you do something before it becomes routine?

It’s an interesting general question. I think our instinct is to say it’s a rather high number. In the book Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, an alien artificial intelligence is set to destroy any life form that acts in a routine, unvarying manner. It takes the same guy taking the exact same route hundreds of times before the alien reacts and instantly kills him. (It then takes them the death of another minor character and several more pages to figure out what the heck happened, but that’s a different story.)

This idea that it takes hundreds of repetitions seems flawed to me. Think of the game of chess. There’s an unofficial rule that if you get in the exact same situation three times, the game is a draw. The reasoning is that if the same thing happens three times, it’s going to keep happening, again, and again, and again, and the game will never progress. That sounds about right to me. After the first three Thursdays of waking up and going to the same class, it was almost instinctive to do so.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that we only have to do something a couple of times for it to become habit. At one level, it’s kind of disturbing that after only three Thursdays I know what my Thursday routine is for the rest of the semester. But, there are only around 15 Thursdays in the semester. I’m sure some of them will be out of the ordinary with one thing or another, and so really, it took over 1/5th of the available average Thursdays to find out what the average Thursday is like. That seems like a long time.

It’s because, I think, we don’t think of days in terms of how many there are, but of how frequent there are. There’s a Thursday every week -  but we don’t consider that the semester is only 15 weeks long, and after that, everything changes again. We’re already 5/52nds of the way through 2008. Etc. Really, our lives aren’t as long as we think they are. A year is 52 weeks long, and we live on average 80 of them; I will only experience around 4,000 total Thursdays in my life.

When said like that, it sounds like I should know exactly what I do with each of them. But again, routines come into play. I can’t remember many of my Thursdays at all. A few, perhaps, the most recent ones. I’m sure some of my memories take place on Thursdays, but I’m not sure which ones. Should that disturb me?

I think perhaps it should. By similar calculations, I’m only going to live around 30,000 days. It really doesn’t seem excessive for me to expect to remember more of them than I do – surely I can hold many more than 30,000 facts in my head, would it be too much to remember at least one thing that happened each day? In fact, it seems like most of my life I do not remember. Day-to-day living is just not interesting enough to make an impression in our minds – it’s too routine, too mundane. Nothing really interesting happened today, nothing I’m likely to remember. Perhaps I’ll remember that at one point in the vague past, I wrote about this subject on my blog, and I could then go back and look at it and see that I did so on Thursday, February 7th, 2008. But in a few weeks the particulars of this day will be gone forever.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I doubt I would enjoy the ability to remember the minutiae of every day of my life – why will I care, in the distant future, what I did today? And it really does seem to me that there is something fundamentally flawed with the practice of keeping a diary, of writing down every day something about the day itself (as opposed to just writing down interesting thoughts and doing so on a regular basis, e.g. this blog, which consciously is not personal in nature). Still – I do wonder what has happened on the 900 Thursdays I have already experienced, and what will happen on the several thousand that still await me. And it kind of scares me that in the end, all of that will be forgotten – my life will be summed up in a few defining events and the fact that the majority of my life did not have to do with those events will be forgotten.

Tetris

Recently I have spent a considerable amount of my free time (and I have a lot of it, until Jan 22nd when school starts again) playing tetris – or, rather, Gnometris, a Free tetris clone. It is a form of procrastination, yes, but it is also a good de-stresser, and it exercises the brain, according to Wikipedia. So it isn’t a complete waste of time.

Anyway, it’s quite fun, like I said, but I have one complaint with it. The scoring is absurd. The reasoning being that making harder clears should be worth more, you get 40 points * level for clearing one row at a time, 100 points * level for clearing two rows at a time (a 20 point * level bonus), 300 points * level for clearing three rows at a time (an 120 point bonus), and 1200 points * level for clearing four rows at a time, the maximum (an 860 point bonus).

This makes sense on paper – accomplishing what is hard should be worth more, right? – but in practice it rewards poor tetris playing. Take a look at these two screenshots:

About to get one row and 40 points:

About to get four rows and 1200 points:

The former is playing tetris well – clearing lines quickly so as to get to a higher level and more points. The latter is playing tetris poorly – stacking up as many rows as possible and waiting for that line-shape (that might never come) so as to get that giant bonus. The good strategy works on any tetris level – and indeed, I can get up to level 14 using it. The latter crashes and burns by level 10 – you just can’t stack up bricks forever, you know? But at level 10, if I’m playing using my so-called “good strategy”, I’m nowhere near my limit.

The problem is, playing using the so-called “good strategy”, my high score is 47520 (and I think I got lucky there and got a four-clear without intending to). After I sat down and decided to play a game using the “bad strategy” – without any practice at it, mind you – I got 79840 points, blowing my previous high score out of the water. This makes sense, after all; at those low levels, the blocks move so slowly you can afford to use that strategy, and doing so racks up an enormous number of points before you even get to a decent difficulty level. Someone using my “good strategy” simply can’t keep up.

It might be excusable if the “bad strategy” was advisable for the first ten or so levels, and then you had to switch to the “good strategy”. But this is simply not the case. The number of points possible in levels 10-14 using my “good strategy” is significant, but nothing compared to how many would result from one lucky four-clear, so the best strategy would still be the “bad” one.

Now, if the “bad” strategy works and the “good” one doesn’t, why am I calling it “bad”? Because it doesn’t require skill in the same way that the good strategy does. You play by stacking up as high as possible and leaving narrow craters for l-shapes to fall in, not by trying to keep the blocks as low as possible and leaving yourself room to maneuver. If I could capture video off my desktop, I would film myself playing using the good strategy and then the bad one. One clearly requires skill, and the other doesn’t. It feels wrong to have to play in a style that requires no skill in order to rack up points – when that’s necessary, it means the way points are given out is flawed.

So what would I suggest? Well, the bonuses could work if they were reasonable – 1200 points for a four-clear and only 40 points for a one-clear is absurd, and, like I said, leads to bad tactics, but 40 points for a one-clear, 90 points for a two-clear, 150 points for a three-clear, and 220 points for a four-clear, or something similar, might work.
Even better, though, would be to remove the bonus for clearing multiple rows at a time altogether. The fact that you’ve reduced the height of the structure by several rows and thus gained valuable maneuvering space is reward enough, and you shouldn’t gain extra points for getting into a bad situation and then escaping it. If you insist on having scoring variation – not a flat 40 points * level for clearing a row – give bonuses for dropping the bricks quickly. That actually takes skill – being able to decide quickly where the next block should go.

P.S.: The Tetris effect is very real. I see multicolored tetraminos…

Umpirical Infallibility

The baseball season is over. The Rangers’ record? 75-87. Disappointing, but not surprising, I would say. Better than one would have expected earlier in the season, at least. We were 23-42 on June 13. We actually had a winning record since that point in the season. But going 19 games below .500 a bit more than two months into the season is going to completely destroy any chances of, well, doing anything that season. On a side note, Michael Young managed to pull his average up to .315 (the highest on the team!) after going something like .192 for the first month. There’s a reason he’s my favorite current Ranger.

—

Anyway, the sports calendar presses onward, and now it’s football season. I really couldn’t care less. It is kind of cool that the best-known football team in the NFL is from here (the Cowboys), and it’s good for local morale that they’ve started the season 4-0 or something like that, but I just don’t like football. I watched the second half of the game against the Rams on Sunday for lack of anything better to do, and I was just kind of bored.

I also remembered one of the many reasons I don’t like football – ‘challenges’ and instant replay. For those not familiar with the sport: if the coach thinks a call went the wrong way against his team, he can throw out a challenge flag and the referees are obliged to watch the play again on these little TVs they have on the sidelines. If the refs decide it was a bad call, it gets reversed. If they decide it was called correctly, they charge the team that wasted 3 minutes of everybody’s time a timeout (in football, each team has something like 3 timeouts per half… I really don’t know exactly how it works). Each team can only make two challenges per game, though if they both result in a changed call they get a third challenge. You can’t make challenges in the last two minutes of a game.

Now, let’s assume that it makes sense that coaches should be able to challenge calls made on the field. Do any of the restrictions put on them make any sense? Well, the “only 2 challenges unless both are right and then you get at third” obviously makes no sense. If you accept that coaches should be able to protest bad calls, why can they only protest a certain number per game? Perhaps they should be penalized for frivolous challenges, but why should they be limited in the number of successful challenges be made? The same for the “last two minutes of a game” rule. The purpose of that rule is to make the end of games go quicker. But it just makes no logical sense that you wouldn’t be able to challenge at that point if the call was bad.

And what’s the deal with it using up a timeout if the call is frivolous? Football is a timed game (another reason I dislike it), so you have to penalize people for wasting time intentionally. But it just seems strange to me that you’d be penalized a time-out for frivolous challenges. I suppose this stems from my dislike of the entire system of “punishment” in football (and basketball and hockey and… well, the only sport other than baseball that gets it right is soccer). Unsportsmanlike conduct? 15 yard penalty! False start? 5 yards! And what about basketball? Technical foul? A free throw for the other team! Essentially, you make actions that don’t have to do with the game, but rather with player conduct, and punish them in ways that affect the result of the game itself. I much prefer the baseball method – if a player or coach does something so egregious as to merit punishment, eject them from the game. Otherwise, don’t do anything.

But my fundamental problem with instant replay hasn’t even been mentioned yet. It is the basic assumption that coaches should be allowed to challenge the referees’ calls while the game is still progressing. Baseball says, essentially, that for the purposes of the game the umpires are infallible. That’s not actually the case, but it is necessary to preserve the illusion, otherwise all respect for the umpires is lost. It turns from a sporting event into a contest of who can best convince the umpire to change his decision in order to favor their team. If an umpire makes a bad call, too bad. After the game is over, the umpire can be corrected for his error, but during the game the umpire’s word is law. (There’s actually 4 umpires, and the head umpire’s word is law – he can overrule the word of the other umpires.) This ensures that the game progresses smoothly, that there’s no stopping in mid-game to argue over the rules of the game, and that it’s a contest of athleticism and strategy rather than a contest of persuasion.

The principle can actually be extended to games other than sporting events. It is essentially that you need to decide before the game who is in charge of the rules and have that person, and only that person, adjudicate disputes. Otherwise you spend a bunch of time arguing over the nature of the rules and how to apply them in this or that situation. That can be fun as well, but it’s a different kind of fun. And if you’re trying to play an established type of game (baseball, soccer, Diplomacy, whatever), the former almost always works best. The latter is more for when making up a game among friends (as I and my brothers often do).

Alfhelm the Wise: Part I

has been released.

Download (from the add-on manager in-game), play (using the Wesnoth engine and the latest version of the Imperial Era), give feedback (there, not here, preferably).

Part I covers Alfhelm’s life up to his victory over the Wylflings and coronation as king of all Marauders. Part II will deal with his battles agains the Lavinians, and Part III with his vendetta against the Sidhe.

Big Houses and Nice Clothes

Given that the 7th and (hopefully) final Harry Potter book is coming out in about a week, I would like to discuss said book and analyze one of the things that really irritates me about it. If you have not read the books (though I know no one who has not), this may sound like a kind of boring enterprise. But perhaps it will not be; for at the end I will make an attempt to digest this analysis and come up with a ‘revised Hary Potter’ concept (more likely to be a completely new story idea), and this will give a (perhaps) interesting look at how I approach writing.

—

My main problem is with the economies of the wizarding peoples. The Weasleys are poor. This is shown by their inability to purchase new clothing or new spellbooks (all are second-hand and rather worn out), the ramshackle appearance of their house (“the Burrow”), and the presents they give (always hand-knit sweaters from Mrs. Weasley). In contrast, the Malfoys are rich. This is shown by their large manor (which, though never seen, is mentioned on occasion) and their expensive clothing and school supplies (including the ability to frivolously buy a Nimbus 2001, a rather expensive broomstick.

But… why would these things be the marks of rich and poor? Sure, in our (Muggle) world, having a big house means that you’re rich. But that’s because big houses are expensive to build. For wizards, why would big houses be expensive? You just magic one up.

So for the economy to make sense… well, I have three mutually exclusive explanations. All are rather interesting to consider.

(1) My first is that magic must be incapable of creating big houses and nice clothes. (I have no problem with this; in my opinion, magic shouldn’t be able to do those things – though it does a lot of other things in Harry Potter I think it shouldn’t be able to do.) But that doesn’t solve the problem. Because big houses and nice clothes are also made by Muggles. Why couldn’t the wizards just buy their big houses and nice clothes from the Muggles, trading for them some slight magical trinkets (which would be worth their weight in gold in Muggledom) or just counterfeiting some money?

The explanation might be that trading with Muggles is forbidden. By whom? By the Ministry of Magic. Which was established by… apparently, by the circle of wizards who were around however many hundreds of years ago. In other words, by the ancestors of today’s purebloods. It sounds to me like peoples were doing exactly what I described above (trading with the Muggles for big houses and nice clothes), but then a group of wizards who already had what they wanted prohibited it – not, as they claimed, because it was bad for the Muggles to be interfered with, but because they wanted to create artificial scarcity. And they succeeded. The poor chap who was stuck with the Burrow (probably because he was some ascetic who didn’t care about his surroundings) doomed his descendants to a life of poverty, while the ancestors of the Malfoys happened to have a big manor (which any one of the wizards could have acquired just as easily) and have been considered rich ever since.

(2) At least, that’s one possibility. Another is that, in response to ‘you could just magic up a house’; magic can create big houses and nice clothes, but it is a long, arduous process, meaning skill at wizardry makes you able to have these things, and wealth is a reflection of wizarding skill. In response to ‘you could just trade for one’, this was forbidden not out of greed, but because they truly believed the Muggles would suffer in the long run if they interacted with them. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see why parts 1&2 are linked and why a1 is incombatible with b2 and vice versa.)

But why would they believe that? It seems to me a rather foolish belief. I won’t delve into why it’s foolish, but here’s my explanation for why they adopted it… the Centaurs. The Centaurs are the ideal in wizarding society (even if the wizards don’t know it themselves). And the Centaurs refuse to share their second-sight knowledge with outsiders (most of the time – Firenze is an exception, and he gets banished from the tribe).

The reason for this, of course, is that the Centaurs (unlike the wizards) have no desire for big houses and nice clothings. They’re ascetics, essentially. They don’t think sharing their knowledge will help those who ask (they’re kind of fatalistic), and it certainly won’t help the Centaurs (what do outsiders have to offer them? They don’t need big houses and nice clothes, which means they don’t need money). So they don’t do it. But the wizards have seen the ‘what’ of the Centaurs’ philosophy without seeing the ‘why’. So they adopted it with regards to the humans, and thus harmed both wizards and Muggles.

(3) … Unless the wizards really do understand the Centaurs’ philosophy. Or have created one of their own that tells them to cease trading with the Muggles. Consider this – once everyone has big houses and nice clothes (or adequately big houses and nice clothes with the ability to get better at whim, which is essentially the same thing) – once they’ve fulfilled and doubly fulfilled the conditions for life of food, shelter, etc, – what is there to live for? If working can’t bring you any more happiness – as would be the case if magic takes essentially no work and can give you everything you want – what should you do with your life?

It seems to me that, once food, shelter, etc, are no longer scarcities, then only one scarcity will remain – other people. Relationships with others will become all-important. Romantic relationships, yes, but I was thinking more, who is friends with who, what cliques form, etc. If you accept this interpretation Harry Potter is actually a brilliant work of literature – the cliques of Harry, Ron, Hermione, vs. Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, isn’t about good vs. evil, it’s about how once every other need is satisfied all that matters is who your friends and enemies are, not why it’s those people. If there is no need for real conflict, then create mere competition. Griffindor vs. Slytherin. Quidditch is the true meaning of life in the world of Hogwarts.

And Ron, not Harry, is the ideal wizard, with his room covered in posters for his favorite Quidditch team, and the Quidditch World Cup in the 4th book is the most important point in the series. It isn’t like in the spectacles that were invented to occupy the masses while Rome burned. Instead Quidditch occupies the wizards because nothing else is worth being occupied about – no need to worry about food, shelter, etc, and in Rowling’s completely secularized world there’s no desire for God, no longing for a higher purpose. Kind of bleak, really.

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Contrived, you say? Maybe. None of these three sound like they were intended by the author. But the problem of economics in Harry Potter is a major one, and I see no better explanations. The reason is, of course, that this isn’t a question brought up by the author intentionally (in which case we’re supposed to rest assured that there IS an explanation, even if no one’s figured it out) but an unintentional one, brought about by J.K. Rowling not thinking through everything as she wrote the books.

Anyway, now that I’ve considered these three explanations (and went way more in depth with them than was necessary), I’m going to see what it’s shown me about the idea of wizardry, and specifically about having a society of wizards living in parallel with Muggle society.

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It seems to me that it is more interesting if our wizards are not like Rowling’s wizards, but rather like her Centaurs. It isn’t that for some reason they are unable to get big houses and nice clothes (since any explanation sounds contrived), or that they already have big houses and nice clothes (since that would probably be rather boring, though I suppose it might work). It would be better if our magicians, like the Centaurs, simply didn’t care about big houses and nice clothes.

Why wouldn’t they care? Well, perhaps because those things are only good because they provide (1) security, which wizards don’t need to worry about, and (2) prestige, which would be gotten in the wizarding world through other means – raw displays of power, perhaps? (After all, in a world where bigger houses and nicer clothes can be gotten with a metaphorical  press of a button, no one would really care about how big and nice their clothes are.) So the wizards wouldn’t worry about those things. They also probably wouldn’t tie themselves down to any particular location, since doing so doesn’t help them any (Muggles only do it for security), and it hurts them by not letting them discover new talent as easily (I imagine our wizarding community would be much smaller than Rowling’s – which, incidentally, seems to me of unclear size…). So they would form a kind of traveling brotherhood seeking out new members, training them, and…. What?

Clearly they aren’t looking for food, shelter, etc. Their basic needs are taken care of. Imagine what you would do if you never had to work another day in your life and all your needs would disappear. What would you do with your time? As I said above, I would think relationships would become much more important. Knowledge would as well – especially taking into account that learning is much more fun if it will teach you have to shoot fire out of your hand. Perhaps they would spend all their time creating art – art can give a life purpose, make it seem like it has a definite goal, completing the work at hand, and people need to have a purpose.

But of course if you’re going to make a story out of it you need conflict. Perhaps what I said above about conflict and competition holds true here – they would devote their lives to meaningless games, diversions, etc. Or to conflict just for the sake of conflict.

I remember someone telling me once about a movie called The Highlander, in which (if I remember correctly) there are a bunch of people that, for some reason, are immensely powerful, and can only be slain by decapitation. (They also have infinite lifespans.) For some reason they spend their lives wandering the earth, searching for others of their kind, and killing each other. Or something like that. This would be the same concept, except they don’t have infinite lifespans and they continually recruit new members. Hey, look, we’ve went from Harry Potter to The Highlander in just one page!

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Well, I don’t think a story idea has emerged full-grown from the ashes of Harry Potter, but one could certainly be gleamed from this post (which is, uh, 3.5 pages long in OpenOffice.org… sorry about that). I’m going to keep thinking about it and perhaps one will come to me. In any case, I think some interesting concepts have definitely emerged from my Harry Potter analysis (I was rather surprised by that “conflict -> competition” thing), and I’ve gotten in my requisite Harry Potter-related post (since the final book IS about to come out, after all) without sounding like I actually have a whole lot of respect for the books (which I don’t).

Incidentally, the above Harry Potter analysis happened in the form of a conversation between me and my older brother. In general talking over the flaws in a piece of fiction (book, movie, whatever) with someone else is the best way to get an idea of what you would have improved had you been the author (and thus what you can do better if you ever write something in that style).