11:14 p.m., July 8, 2013
don’t do that
probably it’s just me
when did your sister die?
11:19 p.m., July 8, 2013
May 1993. I was thinking about her a lot in the last few weeks and then I realized it had been 20 years. I think it’s interesting how the subconscious mind can keep track of time passing, and even seems to prefer round numbers. If we had twelve fingers, I probably wouldn’t be remembering her so vividly until 2017
11:22 p.m., July 8, 2013
old man! you made the exact same lame joke when you sent me the thing about your dad a couple of years ago.
11:24 p.m., July 8, 2013
wow that’s embarrassing
11:25 p.m., July 8, 2013
nah, it’s natural. what are you, sixty now? you’re getting stupid right on schedule
11:27 p.m., July 8, 2013
this 54-year-old relic needs to go to bed
“probably it’s just me” you said. things ok with you?
12:23 a.m., July 9, 2013
up and down
wondering about the meaning of life
12:26 a.m., July 9, 2013
whenever students of mine brought this up, I always used to say, “of course there’s no meaning, so what?” Strangely, this never seemed to cheer them. Then I heard a colleague say, “Life may have no meaning, but it can have purpose.” I liked that. So that’s now what I tell my depressed students
any more thoughts about college?
12:31 a.m., July 9, 2013
still don’t see why I need it; I like this job I got a few weeks ago, maybe I mentioned it? a startup in Vinegar Hill, developing code for 3D imaging effects
video games are huge, so it pays well
I wanted to ask you, Newman has an article on Cantor and set theory and it’s gotten me interested in the Continuum Hypothesis, this whole issue of using different models to prove the unprovability of a theorem. I have some questions, I’ll write them up tonight while you’re recharging your old-brain batteries and you’ll see them in the morning, okay?
12:34 a.m., July 9, 2013
sure; some of this is hard stuff
remember I’m an astronomer, not a mathematician. I’ll do my best
good night
Friday, February 19, 2016
A man and a woman are arguing in an upscale apartment. The argument has something to do with an errand the man has just run that the woman thinks was foolish and probably dangerous. Your first choice is, do you want to be the man or the woman? If you choose to be the man, you have a number of ways of conducting the argument, and you might even get physical, and there might be consequences to these choices down the line, but the short-term result is the same. The woman locks you outside on the balcony. You see New York City below you. You are on the 86th floor of a residential tower in lower Manhattan. The streets below you are canals. If at any point during the previous argument you had looked at your implanted wrist terminal, you would have seen that the year is 2120. You might also have seen the latest news report that some government agency you’ve never heard of is looking for you. Your second major choice: Do you climb over the balcony railing and negotiate the narrow ledge to the adjoining apartment’s balcony, or do you call your impetuous and untrustworthy contact in building security and tell him to come up and “talk sense” into the woman?
If you choose to be the woman, you also have a number of ways of conducting the argument, which might also have consequences later. But once again, the short-term result is the same. The man will try to kill you. Your second major choice is, do you kill the man in self-defense, or do you flee the apartment and—discovering that the stairway door is locked—heed the urgings of a mysterious woman who beckons to you to join her in the elevator?
The game, as Mette envisioned it back when she was interested in things (and still thought of gender as binary), would eventually require the player to make ten major choices—that is, ones leading to a branch in the narrative, with no possible return to the alternative choice. The player’s game could be saved only on top of the previous save, so choice was permachoice. There would be scores of minor decisions to make—dialogue options, which door to go through, whether or not to pick up an object. The player would not know which choices were the major ones. One consequence of the minor choices was that they would affect the way in which the next major choice was presented, thus influencing the likelihood that the player would choose one option over the other. Since there were a total of ten bifurcations, there were 1024 possible endings to the game, occurring in 256 differentiated portions of 32 basic worlds. For example, in one ending the player might be drinking a mai tai on a sunstruck beach with a loved companion of chosen gender (sorry!) and species. In another, Earth suffers a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. In another, the player is condemned for life to labor on an asteroidal mining colony. Of the 1024 possible endings, 916 exist somewhere on the spectrum between unhappy and horrifically miserable; 96 are mixed (e.g., you’re alive, but lonely; you’re a heroine, but everyone hates you; you won the war, but lost your legs). Only 12 endings are happy. (Little secret: 10 of those 12 are reserved for the female.)
The name of the game: Oops!
Back when she cared about shit like that.
The question was always money. Ideally, the settings would be fully navigable in 3D and the text would be voiced. Mette, Andres, and Seo-yeon in their spare time were scripting and programming a sample, then planning to crowdsource it and see how much they could raise. Branching narrative games have never been very popular, both among players and programmers. The latter’s dissatisfaction is that so much programming and scripting
