The expenses scandal might have confirmed the suspicion that the only thing our politicians are professional about is lining their own pockets, but it’s nice to see that of the £500 million we spend on Parliament (over a £150 million of which goes on MP’s salaries/pensions) every year a small proportion goes on education, or rather letting us know what politicians profess to be doing. 

MP for a week, the latest webgame from the Parliamentary Education Service, is certainly ‘a valuable interactive educational tool’, as ELSPA called it, replete with all sorts of useful information about the operations of parliament ranging from a glossary for the archaic lingo employed in ‘that place’ to the responsibilities, rights and duties of MPs. However, it also manages to convey a message, intended or not, that MPs have lives that are hectic, humdrum and gaudy, and that they’re well worth the cash.  

That implication comes partially from the artfully blurred photos that give the impression of a backbench MP’s life – such as the courtyard of Portcullis House (that posh office block above Westminister tube that cost over £1 million per MP that uses it), large plates of sushi being wolfed down, or dull constituency street scenes – and from the combination of tedious local and high-powered national tasks players are tasked to perform.

Playing the game

You start by picking your affiliation (opposition or goverment), gender, interests and constituency. These last two genuinely impact on the decisions you make as a backbencher, especially if you choose to live in Northern Island or Scotland, because of the great travelling distance involved. Then it’s a simple time-management game where you seek to maximise three variables (party rating, constituent confidence, and your media profile) by judicious answering of emails, questions in the house and phone calls, and by attending random tedious constituency events like fancy dress balls or face-painting competitions. There’s also a range of minigames that are both passably intelligent and tolerably easy, from assembling a panel for an inquiry to getting the speaker’s attention, that contribute to your score.

As a game, the information draws you on, but it’s not really compelling: after only two days into the virtual week, I was getting bored (perhaps because the target market is school-children). It’s pretty easy to max out the three variables, and the hardest difficulty just makes the outcomes of actions more random (and lifelike), and fills your inbox with more things than you can hope to do – which just irritates you because the game is designed against the average gamer’s completist tendency (or maybe that’s just me). 

The underlying message

The axe that the commons authorities want to grind is razor sharp – this game makes the average stolid backbencher look amazingly active and busy, hurrying between constituency and parliament, justifying that great wodge of cash we give each MP every year (around £175,000 including expenses, each), and the huge number of MPs. The simulation makes out that MPs single-handedly run inquiries (which isn’t strictly true), that they are endlessly over-stretched in terms of their daily commitments, and that an MP’s work is never done.

It doesn’t mention the tremendous support MPs get from their own researchers, constituency organisations and the commons bureaucracy. It also emphasises that MPs are mostly mouthpieces and figureheads – so little of an MP’s time, in-game and in-life, is spent on actually legislating, their core function (but one you can argue has been effectively arrogated by the cabinet, mediated by the civil service) and their constituency role is wholly remonstratory without any legal power.

The win element also implies that bad MPs always in the long run are losers, which is not strictly true. An MP who does nothing in parliament but bangs on in the local media, or a safe-seat MP who does nothing in his constituency, or even a media-friendly cheeky chappy like Charles Kennedy, Alan Clarke or Boris Johnson, will get re-selected and re-elected most of the time. 

Overall, this is a fine educational tool that highlights that MPs are mainly figureheads, would be passably challenging and entertaining for a school-age audience, but isn’t really compelling as a game.

Ratings

As A Game: 6/10

Interesting, but not really compelling

As Education: 8/10

Covers all the functions of parliament and illustrates the role-model nature of most MP’s lives.

As A Tax Payer: 5/10

Spending yet more of our money on non-essential flash games? Perhaps we should put in a FOI request to find out how much this cost to make.

As A Former Backbencher’s Assistant: 7/10

Accurate enough

What did you think? Good insight into MPs’ busy lives or a waste of taxpayers’ money. Let us know in the comments.

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I’ve been playing Zeno Clash recently. It’s a visceral first person brawler with a skew-whiff aesthetic, and the debut from small Chilean team Ace. It’s been cleaning up at review… and I can’t help but wonder why. Zeno Clash – despite its outlandish looks and unfamiliar take on genre – just isn’t a great game to play.

Are we giving indie games a get out of jail free card just because we love to bet on the underdog?

Zeno Clash is a four hour game, at a £15 price tag. It’s undeniably a visually arresting and inventive experience, although there’s no intelligible justification for the bizarre images and garbled narrative. It’s also rough around the edges, and features an inferior combat system that cannot handle targeting, weapons, range or multiple enemies – things that come into play on a regular basis. For a game of such singular focus and limited scope to be outdone by the melee combat in Riddick five years ago seems to me somewhat damning.

And yet it’s a point willingly overlooked by a growing number of reviewers: IGN, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun… some note and discard the combat inconsistencies, some fail to mention them (but they are objectively there).

It’s a growing trend that I’ve certainly benefited from in the past. If I had a penny for every time I’d read the phrase ‘Penumbra is a solid game made great when you realise it’s been made by a team of five,” I’d have a lot of pennies. Reviewers, it seems, are quite happy to note massive flaws in the makeup of a title, only to dismiss them because they’re understandable repurcussions of small teams and tight budgets.

Clearly we have to make allowances (and I’m glad that we do) for the fact that reviews are subjective things. Ultimately, the knowledge that a game was produced by a small team doesn’t make it an objectively better game, but it might legitimately affect a player’s subjective perception of it, and that’s something reviews should be aiming to capture and communicate. However, such an approach seems at odds with the issuance of an objective 80% or 90% score in the context of a write up that states the core functionality of the game is sub-par.

This seems to me to be doing both indie and mainstream games a disservice. How are we (as consumers) to be seen to be supporting innovation in AAA products when we don’t extend those games the same benefit of the doubt when they take risks and don’t succeed? Had EA put out Zeno Clash we would never willingly overlook a broken fight system and bipolar approach to polish.

Meanwhile, indie games deserve to stand up on their own two feet – giving them this head start only undermines their claim to legitimacy.

Zeno Clash looks gorgeous, and it’s a promising debut. I’d recommend checking it out. As a game, though, it’s just not all that. The sooner we stop convincing ourselves every indie oddball is a hidden gem, the sooner the gems will start coming out the woodwork.

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Bias out of the way: I was always in love with The Path. As an idea, and as an envelope pushing prospect, it’s a project I’ve been following for some time.

It’s also visually arresting. This is not an Unreal-powered title. Its visual style isn’t even all that distinctive compared to releases like Madworld, No More Heroes or Love. And yet Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn have added such unique detail to the forest world through which the young women travel that finding comparison is impossible.

For me, sadly, this is probably the level on which this ‘interactive poem’ most succeeds. As an art game, it is of course subject to… subjectivity that most titles are not. We can, to at least some degree, agree on how complex a game’s graphics are, or how good the AI is. Here, the only real target for criticism are the motif’s of the experience, and how they’re communicated. It’s a nice realisation, but not one the project will always prosper from.

Coming of Age, or Rape Simulator?

A variety of interpretations and reactions have already surfaced online, ranging from in-depth analyses of childhood, to allegations of ‘rape-simulator’. For me, the very fact that anyone has been turned off by the arguably dark portrayal of coming of age is a comment on the project’s success in some areas. I can’t remember the last time I felt appalled by something I’d seen in a ‘game’ and sadly that’s true of The Path as well.

Ultimately, though, your enjoyment of The Path will come down to how much you appreciate its end goal. While this is quite indubitably a work of art focusing on the nature of growing up, it’s an extremely open ended examination. By the creators’ own admission, their objective hasn’t been to say anything concrete, but rather to pursue some postmodern ideal of ambiguity and the absence of objective truth. As Samyn puts it, “I think of The Path as a tool to help me think about certain issues.”

That’s all well and good, if you’re of the Lynchian persuasion, but for me the unending confusion (across all media) between the artistic and the obscure is hard to understand. While wandering aimless through a forest – lightly interacting with various would-be symbolic environments, dripping with atmosphere – is certainly an agreeable experience, the somewhat nonsensical text and malleable plot don’t lend themselves to my nature. Just as Braid suffered for trying too hard to defend itself from any meaningful interpretation, so too does The Path – and if a discussion of postmodern obscurity were the goal, it could have been achieved without succumbing to the very topic under discussion.

Heavy on the ‘poem’, light on the interaction

Perhaps The Path’s greatest objective failing (since, after all, some people enjoy Lynch et al) is in its interactivity. Certainly Tale of Tales has delivered an experience that will be unique to every player – both in their actual progress, and in what that means to them – but it is unique in an almost entirely arbitrary way. The thing that singles out games’ potential amongst other art forms is the player – ultimately, our medium’s strength is to interpret the players’ actions and deliver something appropriate to him. Here, the directionless wandering and limited interactions means that though we may all have unique experiences, they will not be meaningfully so.

After the rain…

There are good things here, no doubt – things beyond the simple fact that a game like this has made it to market (though in this day of digital distribution, ‘market’ has something of a different impetus to what it may have had before). Beyond what’s been mentioned already, a superbly ironic scoring system reminds you of the boxed in mindset we as gamers and developers have grown to accept unquestioningly. The linear nature of the endgame – where any button pressed serves only to advance your girl’s on-rails progress through grandmother’s house – effectively communicates the inevitability of growth (and pain) in a way light years ahead of any other commercial product.

Looking ahead

For those final reasons alone, The Path is unequivocally worth playing. While I believe there are objective problems with this experience beyond matters of meaning, the fact that I prefer my art to be more grounded and graspable (think Façade, World of Goo or The Passage) is, of course, personal taste.

Indeed, if The Path is to be an indication of things to come, then no doubt there is an ideal ‘art game’ out there that’s yet to even be imagined. The Path, while unique, gorgeous and fascinating, isn’t there yet.

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Though by no means a new target, I was drawn recently to a Develop magazine column by Simon Byron discussing the multitude demerits of Metacritic and other review aggregators.

I use Metacritic on a regular basis, so I feel obliged to step into the firing line. I like being able to get multiple perspectives at once, and to quickly ascertain how well a game has done at review – and while I’m not going to jump straight into questions of artistic objectivity, I like avoiding the trap of reading a 90% review and finding out after purchase all the others were in the 50s.

The Decline of Journalistic Standards

Byron begins by attacking general post-web journalistic standards. “The barriers to entry have fallen so far over recent years that anyone with the ability to type words into the Internet can almost legitimately call themselves ‘press’.” Far be it from me to disagree with that statement – my first web review was off the back of four A Levels and a decent sample, and that was five years ago – but you can hardly blame the hobbyist reviewers.Byron, in fairness, also blames Metacritic’s selection criteria. “Its sources are a mix of top specialist review destinations and loads of My First Internet Sites.” This flaw is compounded by the fact that although Metacritic weights the reviews, this rating system is secret – “We’re just supposed to trust the opinion of a site which apparently doesn’t have an opinion.”

Again, it’s a hard accusation to deny, not to mention a strange flaw in the system – why does Metacritic reference such amateur sites? My disagreement is only with Byron’s interpretation of the facts.

The Defence

First, the weighting system may be secret, but at least it’s there – and I’m sure we can all guess which sites are the heavier hitters.

Second, his dismissal of the ‘lesser’ sites seems somewhat naive (I’m sure it’s not, it just sounds it) in light of front page scandals like GamespotGate and more recently the Tomb Raider / Barrington Harvey ‘score managing’ ordeal. Clearly it’s impossible to place all your faith in sites with everything to lose. The guys whose Bioshock review “…had been read by 451 people in its month since publication” are a lot less likely to be swayed by anything other than honest impressions – even if that doesn’t leave time for more than a casual nod to grammar.

I’m also swayed by the (un)canny accuracy of the aggregates. Certainly on the games I’ve worked on, the aggregate score in each case has been pretty closely matched to my own expectations. Further, the standard difference in scores is usually pretty tight. You get a couple of extremes, but everyone else is usually bunched up within 10% – 15% of one another, ie the scores are reasonably representative. An aggregate score is never intended to be all things to all men – but if it can capture the majority, surely it’s done its job?

What’s more, the ‘respected’ sites like Gamespot and Eurogamer seem to differ from one another just as much as any other – indicating, as if it needed pointing out, that this is a subjective game – there’s no such thing as a ‘correct score’.

The Value in Aggragation

On that note, I’m not sure what to make of Byron’s comment that, “Some sort of central hub of opinion is fine in theory – why make up your mind yourself when you can simply think what everyone else does?” On the one hand I feel Metacritic’s hub has proved defendable in practice, and on the other, I object to the suggestion that the site encourages sheepism.

Byron may feel that Metacritic panders to “score-obsessed autism that proper journalists… become legitimately dismayed about,” but I look at it the other way. To take a Metacritic score as the be all and end all of a purchase decision is clearly almost as flawed as treating a single review score similarly. To take a Metacritic review list as a reminder that no one opinion is objective – that one man’s 50% is another man’s 80 – is good business sense.

Conclusion

The value in a review isn’t found in the reviewer’s education, his readership, or even the quality of his writing (though the latter is certainly nice). A valuable review is one that reflects your own preferences, and that’s something Metacritic delivers in spades. I read the very best, and the very worst review in any given list, and it consistently does a better job of addressing concerns of importance to me than the sanitised mass market approach of the IGNs and PC Gamers.

Finally, to address accusations that Metacritic scores are too influential in publishing, I’d point out that Metacritic is a reasonable representation of critical success, and therefore anything which encourages publishers and developers to pursue quality as well as sales can only be a good thing.

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I blogged earlier in the year about the dangers Eidos was running by launching Tomb Raider Underworld so close to Thanksgiving: the late release date gave no room for slippage and ran the risk that it would squeeze out a poor quality game, or see its pillar title miss the crucial Christmas sales period.

OK, so I was wrong about the slippage.

But maybe not about the review score. Following the Kane & Lynch review scandal where Eidos was alleged to have pulled huge amounts of advertising and got a journalist fired as a result of a less-than-positive score, the company seems to be at it again. This time, it has been asking journalists to hold back reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld until Monday unless they score over 8.0.

According to videogaming247.com, Eidos PR firm Barrington Harvey said “That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.”

When asked why, the spokesperson said: “Just that we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”

Simon Byron of Barrington Harvey has been on an extensive damage limitation exercise (You can see the text at Kotaku.com), but Eidos has yet again been hit by a reputation that it is willing to pull no punches in order to get favourable reviews out of the independent press.

PR firms putting embargoes on reviews until a given date is perfectly fair: it enables journalists to get advance copies, to have to time to review the title and craft their editorial. But putting a score-based caveat on it is crazy.

Barrington Harvey are a respected firm (and I like Simon Byron personally), so I would like to think that this was a junior PR rep being overzealous (or possibly, over-honest). The alternative, that this is a tactic that PR agencies are using to strong-arm better Metacritic averages out of the gaming press, is shameful.

Tomb Raider Underword currently has a Metacritic score of 77.

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The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Could there be a better time to read The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s enjoyable discourse on probability and humanity’s blindness to it?

It’s a book that teaches you how to avoid – or even better, to profit from – once-in-a-generation events. Like the credit crunch, the meltdown of the global financial system, toxic assets and US Secretary of State from Wall Street letting a bank that is “too big to fail” go to the wall.

Fooled by randomness

The majority of this great book is devoted to explaining the source of blindness. Taleb argues that we are pre-programmed to see causal links where none exist because it was an evolutionary advantage. In our evolutionary past, we would confuse the two statements most killers are wild animals and most wild animals are killers, because, if we stopped to think to think about it, we would have been eaten by a lion. Evolutionary success means that snap judgements, faulty logic and “tunnelling” on sources of uncertainty and risk has been bred into all of us.

Unfortunately, the world has evolved faster than us, into a globalised, interconnected community where hugely improbabe events can have far-reaching consequences. These events are what Taleb christens Black Swans.

The world is full of Black Swans

A Black Swan is an event which is highly improbable (i.e. very rare), has an extreme impact and given our need for narrative causality, has retrospective (not prospective) causality. Taleb notes that a Black Swan’s very unpredictably makes it paradoxically more likely. For example, if 9/11 had been predicted, society would have taken precautions (such as fitting locks on cockpit doors) that might have prevented the attacks. This is not to say all Black Swans can be prevented. If 9/11 had been averted, “something else may have been taken place. What? I don’t know.”

This is the heart of Taleb’s thesis. That the great human need for causality, narrative and meaning has led us to frame the world as a controllable, malleable model. Targets of his opprobrium include historians, “experts” (particularly in risk management) and particularly what he calls the “Great Intellectual Fraud”, the Gaussian distribution or Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve is singled out because it fools us into believing that as an event or occurrence deviates further from the mean, the lower the likelihood of such an event or occurrence and the lower its impact. This is true for, for example, human heights, where a single Robert Wadlow measuring 8’11″ does not appreciably change the mean, but not in human wealth, where the presence of a Bill Gates or Roman Abramovich changes the average substantially. Taleb argues that because humans like narrative and scientific methods and predictability, the Bell Curve blinds us to reality: it not only denies the significance of improbable events, if fools us into a false sense of security where we believe that they can, to all intents and purposes, be disregarded.

The Black Swan was named from the observation that Old World naturalists were convinced that all swans were white following millions of observations of white swans; it took just one sighting of a black swan in Australia to convince them that they were wrong. One of Taleb’s most useful and illuminating recommendations is that if you have a theory (about anything), once you have made a handful of confirmatory observations, you should stop look for confirmation and start looking for disconfirmation instead. The logic being that observing another white swan after the first half dozen merely proves that some swans are white: you should instead be looking for a different colour swan to disprove your theory that all swans are white. Taleb convincingly shows that this trait of seeking evidence of what we already believe, rather than seeking counter-arguments, is a key culprit in the blinkered and restrictive vision that stops us from seeing risks and probabilities as they really are.

The narrative fallacy

Taleb also argues that the narrative fallacy, “our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths”, contributes to our blindness. For example, consider the following two sentences and determine which you think is more likely:

Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife.
Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritance.

To most people, the second sentence seems to be more likely, to make more sense. And yet there have been many reasons why Joey killed his wife. By restricting the cause to only one, we have reduced the likelihood of it being true, while increasing our own perception of the likelihood. This narrative fallacy leads us to underestimate the likelihood of extremely unlikely events that do not have an obvious causal chain or fit our current view of the world.

Historians are singled out because of their need to look for causality. Taleb does not write off the study of history, nor does he deny the value of it in understanding human civilization. But he argues strongly that history unfolded as it did because, well, it just did. A series of random events (wars, plagues, natural disasters or merely the failure of two people to meet in the street) interacted in a series of random ways. There is a causal chain, but only because we are here at the end of it. For Taleb, historians could argue endlessly over why the world was not destroyed in a thermonuclear war in the 1980s; he would argue that if the world had been destroyed, we wouldn’t have been here to seek the causal chain, and that is probably due to a series of lucky happenstances.

How to benefit from the Black Swan

Having broadly set out why everything we think about probability is wrong and having argued that modern financial risk management, being Gaussian (i.e. based on the bell curve), is utterly unsuited for the realities of a world where the unpredictable happens every decade or so, the recent financial crisis being a case in point, Taleb sets out his strategy for benefiting from the Black Swan. He starts by pointing out that not all Black Swans are negative: penicillin, the Internet, the Harry Potter books. These are all Black Swans. So Taleb seeks to maximise his exposure to positive Black Swans while minimising extreme negative risks.

The clearest example of what Taleb would seek to avoid is being a lending bank: exposed on the upside only to a few percentage points of interest, but on the downside to the Black Swan of a global meltdown. This is the misnamed low or medium risk, because it is only low risk if you assume that Black Swans don’t exist. But they do; it’s just impossible to model or predict them.

Instead, he would put 80-85% of his investments (time or money) into the safest place possible, such as Government Bonds. The remainder would be put in the riskiest ventures possible: venture start-ups, biotech, mining stocks. Or for a writer, into maximising the chances of success, by networking, writing lots of books, putting proposals in for screenplays, plays, novels or whatever, because, as legendary screenwriter William Golding put it “nobody knows anything” about why a piece of popular entertainment becomes a hit.

In other words, avoid the Bell Curve fraud of thinking that you are limiting risk by being in the middle of the road. Here you are maximising your exposure to negative Black Swans with limited upside. Instead, absolutely avoid risk wherever possible unless it carries the potential for a positive Black Swan. And be prepared to lose everything that you invest in pursuit of these positive outcomes. Which is why you should put the majority of your net worth into government bonds.

There is one element throughout the book that grates, and grates hard. Taleb is smug to the point of wanting to biff him on the nose about having been a “practitioner”, not an academic. He was not a practitioner, he was a trader. He put his theories into practice alright, but in the rarefied atmosphere of hedge fund speculation and proprietary trading. He is dismissive of people who run successful businesses as being generally “lucky”. Having worked in the City and in real businesses myself (admittedly Internet start-ups, which are still not exactly “real businesses”), I would argue that running a business is being a practitioner, whereas taking big bets on the basis of your probability theories is more ballsy than being a theorising academic but it is, at the end of the day, still closer to academia than reality. And to be fair to Taleb, his greatest praise for practitioners of uncertainty is reserved for the military, a class of thinkers that is rarely lauded by philosophers and yet seem to be the most comfortable with the idea that since so much of the world is unknowable, our job is to work out how to operate in a random world, not frame it in conceptual and inevitably flawed models.

This is a timely book that explains why this unprecedented crisis was inevitable (it was just the where, when and what that could not be predicted). Black Swan is not only supremely relevant, if offers a new and practical way of looking at the world.

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