Breaking the curse of the Bambino – do you believe in losing streaks?

Baseball: The Boston Red Sox finally beat the New York Yankees to make it to the World Series.
It’s one of the interesting things around sports, the myth-making, the belief in winning streaks, losing streaks, and curses.
In this case, the Red Sox may have broken “The curse of the Bambino“, which is the idea that the Red Sox were cursed because they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918 – and true enough, Red Sox haven’t won the world series since.

Perhaps all this because it’s hard to understand & predict why one team wins the match, but we humans cannot prevent ourselves from seeing patterns everywhere, curses, magic.

Update: There’s a New York Times piece where the writer explains that the Red Sox always lose if he watches them play. This time they won because he didn’t watch.

Derrida Dead

Story at BBC News. Le Monde (more fitting).

I am not sure what to say about that – he was a mythological figure when I began my university studies and I suppose I always thought he was interesting and provocative while being unintelligible and plain old wrong half of the time. And clever me always thought that while arguing against logocentrism, he was the biggest logocentrist of them all. And so on.

Perhaps the BBC piece doesn’t quite get what it was all about. When I watched the Derrida movie in Boston, the presenter explained that Derrida had always fought for the oppressed people of the Earth – which is a really far-fetched interpretation. I mean, he was an esoteric intellectual arguably working from a Christian/Jewish tradition of seeing everything as beginning with the word. (I read an article making this connection somewhere – makes sense.)
But I think the perception of Derrida-as-activist is going to stick nevertheless.

(Update: The New York Times obituary is much better and captures the whole range of responses to deconstruction from the accusation of defending Nazism to its contemporary association with progressive causes.)

5 Player Type Types

It was a major revelation when we stumbled upon Richard Bartle’s player type paper a few years ago – imagine being able to discuss such things!

Straightforward copy from Greg Costikyan’s excellent post on the subject. He lists 5 different categorizations of player types:

Ron Edwards: Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist.

Richard Bartle: Categories of achievers, explorers, socialisers, and killers.
Nick Yee: players who desire relationships, immersion, grief play, achievement, and leadership.

Nicole Lazzaro (at GDC 2004): desire for “internal experience,” for “challenge and strategy,” for “immersion,” and for social experiences.

Richard Rouse: Players want either a challenge, to socialize, a dynamic solitaire experience, bragging rights, an emotional experience, or to fantasize.

Game Design Workshop: At least ten player types: competitors, explorers, collectors, achievers, jokers, artists, directors, storytellers, performers, and craftsmen.

As I recall, Nokia also has a categorization somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.

And I think Greg is right in saying that it’s hard to justify any particular categorization. On the other hand, it’s usually pretty productive to do the attempt – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The story is true: Telling Stories with Sims 2

Mirjam Eliadhari presents her Sims 2 story about the Katt family here.

And yes, it really does work. In Mirjam’s recounting (making-it-into-a-story), it very much becomes some kind of daytime soap – people snapping in and out of love, high drama, and so on. And I guess that soaps just were one of the not-so-talked-about inspirations behind Sims.

The other big inspiration – at GDC Europe 2002, someone proposed that reality TV was one of the things that had paved way for the Sims. And if you think about it, it does look a lot like Big Brother.

Steven Johnson writes about how he recreated his family in Sims 2 only to have “himself” burn to death in an instant.

It wasn’t supposed to be my thing, but I find Sims 2 quite appealing (I would really like to play it instead of having to work now – and much more so than the previous incarnations.

It’s official: Will Wright is the new Emile Zola and the new Aaron Spelling.

Serious Procrastination: The PS2 startup screen recreated

It comes from looking too often at the Playstation 2 startup screen: I wondered what the principle was behind the 7 circling dots:
The PS2 startup screen, recreated

Here’s how it works: The 7 dots simply move around a circle, increasing the distance from each other while the sine and cosine parts of the circle go out of sync (this makes it look like the circle is “turning” in space). Sometimes the dots overlap to give the impression of fewer dots. It’s hard to explain, but I find it extremely cool that they chose to use 7 dots (rather than the more pedestrian 8).

So I recreated it using the new version 6 of wonderful Game Maker (the registered version). Download your own Project file, executable, windowed executable.