Link-dumping has never been an adequate stand-in for commentary of my own, and if you want to read what I read you are better off checking Twitter (the only circumstance where that is ever the case). Nevertheless, here is a slice of the pileup.

• Let’s lead this off with one of my great loves and frustrations in the world: science journalism. Begin with Martin Robbins’ incisive parody of sensationalist science reporting. Then read Ed Yong’s remarks on objectivity, neutrality, and whether journalists should take sides.

• “Our daughter isn’t a selfish brat; your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged.”

• Witnessing the Twelfth of July festivities in Northern Ireland this year led me to this must-read piece of ethnomusicology, where Stephen Howe scrutinizes the musical identity of the loyalist marching bands (the ones with the “kick-the-Pope” drums).

• Ron Rosenbaum explains agnosticism. I have a few problems with how readily Rosenbaum buys and sets up the all-too-common straw man of the so-called New Atheism, but the article’s spirited defence of uncertainty and rejection of tribalist debate makes it worth a thorough look.

• This has been a bumper year for exciting stories in espionage. By now everyone has read about the KGB’s suburban infiltrants and forgotten them too, but that doesn’t make revisiting the coverage any less fun. So neighbourly were they, yet so incompetent! Just look at those complaints.

• When I was a wee lad I co-moderated a Tolkien-themed discussion board that was, in later years, overrun by home-schooled creationist kids. Someday they will grow up to be Republican senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, whose views about Arwen and Éowyn are oddly more informed than her views about anything and everything else.

• Popular Science gives us a look at the Pentagon’s $58-billion killer robots.

• Lisa Poisso interviews a Lutheran pastor who runs a World of Warcraft guild and who has a host of insightful things to say on faith and fantasy.
• Finally, I must share Patrick Barkham’s remembrance of class and culture at Cambridge University—more reflective of the undergraduate life than the relatively new postgraduate one, I think, but still relevant today.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

Civilization veteran Soren Johnson, one of the foremost designers of strategy games and AI today and certainly one of the best writers on the subject, often remarks that the theme of a game is not to be confused with its meaning (slides here). Diplomacy may cast its players as the great powers of pre-1914 Europe, but it’s about simultaneity. StarCraft may put you in charge of Heinlein-esque space marines and alien civilizations, but it’s about asymmetry. If the theme and mechanics harmoniously cohere, then the mechanics can shed light on the theme in the way that art sheds light on the world. Pre-war Europe is an intriguing setting for Diplomacy because in all their backroom double-dealing, the empires didn’t take turns. Aliens are a good fit for StarCraft because you can map anything onto aliens, be it the collectivist swarm-by-numbers ethos of the Zerg or the judicious high-tech investment of the Protoss.

I am partial to this view, predominantly for reasons of aesthetics. If we are to conceive of game design as an art form, it does not suffice to decompose games into the artistry of constituent parts—the music, the models and sprites, the cinematic sequences, on rare occasion the writing. The aesthetics have to come from the specific properties that make something a game, whether it is played with a board and dice, a deck of cards, or a mouse and keyboard—and those properties come from the mechanics.

But that’s neither here nor there; I won’t elaborate today. Instead I want to turn to my favourite of Johnson’s examples: the evolution game. For your fill of Darwinian game mechanics, look not to Spore (which Johnson worked on), a game that is nominally about evolution from microbe to intergalactic juggernaut, but is actually about special creation. Back when I first played it, I wrote, perhaps a tad generously:

Let’s not bury our heads in the sand: by placing creature design into the player’s hands instead of leaving it up to random mutation, Spore inherently owes a lot to intelligent design. There’s still room for a real game about evolution in the Darwinian sense, where you set certain environmental constraints and preconditions, let a species run loose, and see if it survives in an ecosystem full of other models—kind of like how some engineers pit robots in mortal battle, but with adaptation.

Spore is a lot more creationistic than I gave it credit for; consider that the functional components of your custom-made species—the mouths, the horns, the flagella—are interchangeable parts from a specified, modular set, which is precisely what we would expect from a designing agent but not at all what we would expect from natural selection. But never mind all that. The evolution game exists, says Johnson, and it’s called World of Warcraft.

I would contend, however, that the Darwinian features Johnson ascribes to WoW are equally prevalent in most games with competitive and highly interactive player populations, provided there is sufficient strategic depth worth talking about. WoW is an evolution game because its core mechanic is community. Where there is a community of players and a developed metagame of optimal practices, strategic decisions are memes that compete for survival. Let’s call them strategemes.

Strategemes include everything from chess openings to Scrabble vocabulary: they are transmissible units of knowledge that players learn, study, and adopt—and crucially, copy. Copying them is not seen as unfair, but as an advantageous and often essential behaviour. They leave room for mutation, and we can perceive a frequency distribution of variations over a population of players and games.

But where does natural selection come into play? Let’s look at the exemplar we get from Johnson: the WoW talent tree.

World of Sporecraft

Every player in World of Warcraft belongs to one of ten character classes—Mages, Warriors, Priests, and so on—and every class has a range of “talents” (bonuses and special abilities) that fall into three specializations. As players rise in level, they gain points that they can allocate to configure their characters however they like.

Here’s the rub: all but the most basic talents are only available once you have already assigned points to the same specialization tree. To make your character as powerful as you can, the strategy is to allocate most of your talent points in one tree and distribute a few residual points in the other two; otherwise you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none.

The ramifications of specializing are most pronounced in classes like the Paladin, which can perform all three of the major roles in the game’s group-oriented content: healing, “tanking” (damage absorption), and dealing damage to enemies. For Paladins, these correspond to the Restoration, Protection, and Retribution trees. Within these trees, you can further allocate points in a manner optimized for the content you are playing through, be it fighting other players or raiding (killing bosses in coordinated groups of up to 25 people).

Who determines what is optimal? Not the game’s designers at Blizzard Entertainment, but the players themselves. Every few months the designers shift a few percentage points around to address balance issues, and the players involved in the game’s most challenging content scramble to adjust.

So far, this doesn’t sound evolutionary in the least. There is no heredity at work, and players can change their specializations at any point for a fee in the game’s virtual currency. Consider the following comment-box response to this article about Johnson’s recent theme-versus-mechanics presentation at the Game Developers Conference:

Soren Johnson knows nothing about evolution and [should] probably just never talk about it until he’s taken a biology course. His “Paladin Natural Selection” is completely off the mark. What he is describing is much closer to variable phenotypic expression where certain traits are expressed in an individual based on [its] immediate environment.

The commenter’s objection would be absolutely right were we to speak of the player characters themselves as individually evolving organisms. From this point of view, WoW characters do not evolve any more than an Englishman living in Boston evolves by speaking in a Bostonian accent. But it still makes sense to think of the English language as evolving, and look at traits of regional accents and dialects as they statistically appear in a population. Similarly, in WoW we can look at the player population as a whole and, with the aid of tools like Armory Data Mining, observe measurable changes in the frequency of talent allocations.

The underlying reason for this is in the way that talent choices spread. If you think WoW’s talent system gives players considerable freedom to customize their personal experience, you would be wrong. In reality, whenever the game is rebalanced, a few expert players proficient in mathematics run simulations and tests to crunch the numbers and figure out the best theoretical allocations under ideal circumstances. (Very few boss encounters present ideal circumstances, and almost no players have the ideal weapons and armour; but for the range of players serious enough to keep abreast of the theory, these findings usually suffice.) The experts debate about the data on discussion forums, update their FAQs, and release new versions of their simulation spreadsheets. Over time, more and more players adjust their characters to account for the theoretical recommendations. Players trying out a new character class will often model their choices after high-performance players whom they respect without comprehending the underlying rationale.

Talent trees can be replicated with perfect fidelity: a player can copy them point for point. They are unambiguously quantifiable, and it makes sense to think of them as genotypes. But they are only optimal provided the player behaves in certain patterns and within particular constraints, using their abilities in specific sequences. There we see phenotypic variation, which sometimes feeds back into talent-tree mutations within a tolerance of a few points; some character classes are inflexible while others are less rigidly specified.

Critically, a “cookie-cutter” talent setup is not necessarily what is best for every encounter, or even every player of that class and specialization. The fitness of talent choices—their capacity to replicate throughout the population—depends on social factors as well. Players copy talent choices that correlate strongly with success. This is observably the case for player-versus-player combat in arenas and battlegrounds, which involves considerable improvisation and is less susceptible to accurate mathematical modelling. As for raids, to adopt a theoretically endorsed talent allocation is to demonstrate that you stay informed, and minimize the risk introduced by your inclusion on the team. The raiding guilds that tackle even mildly challenging content will not invite players who deviate from the prescribed talents unless they provide an expert justification for why their modifications make sense.

In short, certain sets of talent choices have survival advantages over others. The fitter variations spread throughout the population while the frequencies of unfit ones decline. Players that do not adopt the most frequent choices are excluded from much of the high-level group content, and they (along with their decisions) are less likely to remain active in the game.

In this respect, World of Warcraft differs significantly from most video games. What does it matter what other people think, so long as you are having fun? When I play Super Mario Bros. I don’t care if the speediest route through the game is via the Warp Zones in Worlds 1-2 and 4-2; I can take the long road and clear every stage if I want. When I play Civilization I don’t care if early global conquest yields the highest scores; I like to win by constructing a spaceship to Alpha Centauri without ever building a city beyond my first. In adventure games like The Legend of Zelda the pleasure lies in figuring out the puzzles yourself; to look up the solutions in a guide is to admit defeat and cheat, and is held in lower regard.

Or look at Spore. In Spore there is abundant community interaction through an online portal where players can share their creations and randomly “seed” them on the worlds of others. Players can choose to preserve the creations they like, and the game tracks the most popular ones—which, for a time, was a roster headed by a model of Charles Darwin. In one sense this would appear to set up a competition to make the most creative and amusing models: the better your creature, the likelier it is to attain a high rate of incidence on other worlds. Why not consider the Darwin model a strategeme as well? Because the fittest creatures in the online community are not the ones that lead to the greatest mechanical success in the game itself. There is no selective pressure directed towards accomplishing objectives in the game, so players continue to make their in-game decisions independent of everyone else.

Granted, some WoW players ignore selective pressure as well: they impose various challenges on themselves and configure their characters specifically for the task. This can involve everything from controlling multiple characters at once to defeating high-level challenges in entry-level equipment. (Lisa Poisso’s 15 Minutes of Fame column routinely puts the spotlight on some of the most fascinating specimens.) But these activities are usually individual—rarely do they take place in large groups—and the special strategic decisions they involve do not tend to spread. From the population’s point of view, these innovations die out.

The dominant culture in WoW is one where copying strategic templates is not regarded as cheating, but is an expected precondition for accessing most of the game’s group content at all. This is not limited to individual characters and talent points, but extends to the behaviour of a raiding guild—who does what and who stands where. For all but the very best players, the raiding game is an exercise in fine-tuning locally appropriate variations on top of a broadly established strategy copied from somewhere else. Here, too, we see strategemes competing for dominance: successful variations spread to other guilds, and the most widespread ones become part of the orthodox strategic package that much of the player base comes to adopt.

World of Warcraft is an evolution game as a consequence of being a community game. But not all games with communities lead to evolutionary trends. What makes my concept of a strategeme unique among memes is that it applies to games where social learning, often in the form of direct imitation, is advantageous to the pursuit of absolute objectives embedded in the game’s design—so overwhelmingly advantageous, in fact, that it affects one’s inclusiveness in a community and the accessibility of the game’s content. There is feedback from the game mechanics that tells you if one set of choices is performing better than another. In WoW it may be your binary pass/fail success in defeating an encounter, or a metric of your damage or healing output. In chess it is your ability to win games (perhaps further broken down into your success as white or black, against certain opening lines, or facing various strata of opponents); this also generates social feedback as expressed in your Elo rating, which estimates your chances against other rated players and unlocks your access to upper echelons of competition.

Putting it generally, we see evolutionary change occur in games when the benefits of copying others far outweigh the qualitative value of making your own choices from scratch. This is a jarring philosophy of play when you consider that figuring things out for yourself is the central pleasure of games and puzzles that are free of social selective pressure—which includes most of the games people play in their ordinary experience. A game with no predesigned capacity for strategic evolution quickly develops one with the emergence of a community, so long as the mechanics are deep enough to reward the exploration of an immense variety of choices. An evolutionary account gives us the tools to explain how a player population prunes those choices, favouring some for widespread imitation while others are left behind.

The rest of the story

In future instalments, I will be looking at some other games that cultivate different kinds of strategemes, anticipate some reasonable objections to using analogies from biological evolution, and look at what strategemes may tell us about life outside of games (if such a thing exists). Depending on interest, I may also provide a technical supplement to this first part for readers who are comfortable with World of Warcraft‘s esoteric lingo and want to see some specific examples and hard data; I do have those at the ready.

• In a review of Mass Effect II, Jonathan McCalmont calls out video games for their uncritical acceptance of racial essentialism.

• A 1969 letter from Buzz Aldrin to a radio enthusiast offers some insight into the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s low-budget insulation.

• Jonah Lehrer draws on studies about primates and social hierarchy to express some concerns about the compulsion to count one’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends. (People do that? I don’t, but I sure like to comb through my website stats.)

• Finally, courtesy of Daniel Mendelsohn, a review of Avatar that says most of what I wanted to say about Avatar—and for good measure, puts it all in the context of James Cameron’s entire career.

• Patricia Cohen takes a look at the preservation of writers’ rough notes and scrap paper in a digital age, in which we discover that even Salman Rushdie is none too magniloquent to scrawl, “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.”

• Also in The New York Times: a special feature on politics and the modern science museum. I’m not convinced that the agendas underlying science exhibits were any less varied or complex a century ago, but as a look at where things stand today the article is well worth perusing.

• The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is commemorating the great Oscar Peterson with a statue to be unveiled 30 June. Please make a contribution.

• And while on the subject of jazz, Peter Hum criticizes the notion that musicians should contrive to make the genre culturally relevant—whatever that means. My preference, as always, is for art that strives for timeless resonance over fashionable gratification. That some things feel like one, and other things feel like the other, is not well understood and worthy of investigation.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

This week’s bag of links:

• In a rare sighting of the man behind Calvin and Hobbes, Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer interviews Bill Watterson fifteen years after the legendary comic strip ended its run.

• Peter Hum ruminates on the “ugly beauty” of avant-garde jazz.

• The big news coming out of Barack Obama’s 2011 budget was the abandonment of NASA’s plan for the resumption of manned spaceflight to the moon. SPACE.com has the analysis.

• Jonathan McCalmont, caught between the debate over high/low culture and his vehement dislike of the popular video game Bayonetta (“a game so dumb that it makes a weekend spent masturbating and sniffing glue seem like an animated discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)”), spun it all into a compelling essay on hypnotism and lowbrow art.

• This Charles Petersen piece in The New York Review of Books is one of the better histories you will find of where Facebook came from and how it has transformed, and offers a thorough look at the content-pushing pressures facing the social-network model of a nominally private Internet.

• Mark Sarvas identifies some common problems of debut novels from the perspective of a prize-committee veteran.

• In The Guardian, Darrel Ince implores scientists who rely on internally developed software to publish their source code.

Serious aficionados should take a look at this 1957 letter by Salinger explaining why he saw The Catcher in the Rye as unfilmable. Really dedicated junkies of all things Salinger may even go as far as perusing Joyce Maynard’s 1972 article, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life”, which led her to drop out of Yale and live with the author for a year. (I personally find it nigh on unreadable, but it’s evidence that the cliché anxiety about settling down with 2.2 kids has been around for nearly four decades at least.)

And now for something completely different:

• How to Write Badly Well is consistently superb, but Joel Stickley has really outdone himself with this legitimately amazing poem.

• Alex Abboud previewed the new Art Gallery of Alberta, which opened its doors this weekend.

• Juan Cole speculates that Osama bin Laden is probably dead and has ceased to be relevant even if he is alive.

• Ethan Iverson makes the case for extravagant public funding of Wagner’s Ring.

• This weekend’s New York Times Magazine featured a marvelous piece by David Hajdu on AIDS survivor and phenomenal jazz pianist Fred Hersch.

• Those interested in the history of computer games will appreciate this Wired article on how perfectionism killed Duke Nukem Forever, the most infamous piece of vapourware in software history.

There are a number of considerations that become quickly problematic, though, even if you dismiss the obvious practical obstacles and take for granted that we have the technology to build such a thing. In the legal sphere, what do you do about territorial sovereignty or customs law? And then there’s the basic hygienic objection—what about the risk of contamination and the transcontinental spread of airborne disease? Then again, chances are that by the time humanity is advanced enough that something like this becomes feasible, we will have undergone so radical a social transformation that the policy issues are moot.

In any case, the advent of cloud computing urges us to revisit that old sci-fi pipe dream of the Enterprise transporter: the conception of matter as data. Note that this isn’t the same thing as digitization. What I am speaking of is not the representation of matter as information, but the harnessing of matter in the same ways we harness information.

I thought of this today in the library whilst awaiting an order of rare books. Libraries are socially fascinating spaces: patrons share communal resources, but under a mutual agreement to behave in such a manner that everyone feels the library is his or her private space. People work and study in the library with the expectation that everyone else is silent and effectively invisible. Like car parks and highways in the age of the automobile, the major obstacle to the smooth operation of libraries (from the client’s point of view) is the conflicting presence of others, whether they are typing obnoxiously on clackety keyboards or requesting the same books.

In the world of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, the solution to the overexploitation of shared spaces comes in the form of instances—private copies of dungeons for individuals and small groups to slay beasts and loot sparkling purple treasures without any strangers in the way. The content in the shared world outside of instances often suffers from a tragedy of the commons, where you might be on a quest to kill ten boars only to find that somebody minutes ahead of you has already brought home the bacon. Instanced dungeons ensure that everyone gets a crack at the most rewarding content day to day, week to week.

Should we ever be able to harness matter-as-data—a holy grail of science fiction as unattainable, but arguably more consequential, than travelling faster than the speed of light—libraries would seem to be the perfect candidate for an instanced space. You wouldn’t disturb anybody, and nobody would disturb you; the library would work as designed. Granted, there might be issues with server load when entire libraries have to be copied and simulated for each individual who walks in the door. But the bigger problem is that in the absence of the social and institutional deterrence that others create, nothing stops you from disturbing the books.

Several months ago—it must have been around early October—I discovered a little something called World of Warcraft. You may have heard of it, if only in hushed, fearful whispers.

It so happens that WoW (as the awestruck polity calls it with the most gaping of valley-flanked vowels) is, like Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto, one of the few electronic amusements to have captured the imagination of peoples who don’t play games and never will. Surely the media has given us no short supply of public-interest coverage, be it of addicts collapsing from exhaustion at Internet cafés, parents charged with negligence for playing the game and leaving their children to die, friendships (new and broken), marriages (new, broken, and refurbished), teenage suicide threats (refurbished), happy families happy in their own way, unhappy families unhappy in their own way, or Chinese gold-farming sweatshops that deal in a shady black market of EULA-shattering virtual-goods transactions.

I dipped into it myself on the half-serious pretence of doing some private research in emerging narrative forms, but mostly out of a general curiosity: the first ten days are free, albeit with a curtailed ability to interact with other players and the economy at large—features you don’t need anyhow when you are new to the game. I had hitherto avoided WoW for so long—and wisely so, I might add—out of a principled opposition to monthly subscription models of any sort; I prefer to buy something once with a one-time fee and use it at my leisure forever. I was sampling the water. I was not there to stay.

Yet here I am, four months later, well into the endgame of the second expansion pack as a level 80 gnome rogue.

How, it is fair to ask, has it come to this?

I don’t make this confession lightly: in fact, I am fully aware that writing this statement so publicly carries a certain degree of professional risk. But there’s a lot I’ve wanted to write here about my travels in Azeroth and beyond, and I had to let the secret out first.

Not that it’s a secret to everybody. For weeks now, disinterested friends have put up with me as I regaled them with tales of how I built my own helicopter, single-handedly saved a tribe of walrus-men with Inuit-language names (but alas, few words for snow), and exerted limited monopolies over my server’s mineral and herbal industries with a full-time banker character who doesn’t quite resemble Karl Marx. And there’s no end of personal observations that I haven’t made public—like, for instance, how the game’s staple social activity of assembling five strangers together for a two-hour dungeon crawl is every bit like playing in an impromptu jazz combo.

(The analogy only goes so far. Imagine if a jam band were rewarded not with sporadic applause, but with a randomly selected musical instrument that one musician would get to take home; and should a trombone happen to drop when there is no trombonist in the group, someone would be expected to break the instrument into pieces on the spot and auction off the brass.)

Well, the cat’s out of the bag, so I can talk about it now—openly, I mean, in the embarrassing, Googlable places of the world where prospective employers and graduate school admissions boards can see. And so I shall, dear readers. And so I shall.

For my first act, I will hang my head in shame.

So I was surprised to discover that a video game band—and a jazz band, no less—had sprung up in my very own a mare usque ad mare backyard under the name of The Runaway Five, after the Blues Brothers spoof band that lets you hop on their tour bus in the oddball Super Nintendo classic EarthBound. I saw them live at the Beat Niq on Saturday, and walked away pleased with a lot of what I heard.

I am careful to say “what I heard” because, in a bungled cross-product of the sound engineering and where I was sitting (but mostly, I conjecture, the former), there were serious acoustic issues that worked against the band. Never mind the unfortunate trend of miking and amping everyone in sight in tight basement clubs where a live sound would serve them better—there were fundamental EQ problems with what was coming out the other end, as if the treble had entirely dropped out. A lot of what the band was trying to do harmonically got lost in the midrange mud-crunching.

As for the band itself—a guitar-piano quartet in the first set and an octet with four horns in the second set—it is the very archetype of the young 2000s band that draws on a potpourri of stylistic influences without necessarily committing to one or another. If their point was to illustrate the versatility of their source material, I’d say they got it across. I jotted down their whole set list but I won’t bother reproducing it here; instead, here are a few performance notes.

• The repertoire was dominated by Japanese RPGs of the Super Nintendo era—an interesting choice, because the work of composers like Nobuo Uematsu has a strong heritage in the progressive-rock idiom (in contrast to the Nintendo house style of Koji Kondo, Kazumi Totaka, and others, which is more conventionally adaptable to jazz). As it turns out, the alternating minor-seventh chords in “Eight Ringing Bells” from Secret of Mana are a fitting basis for some good old modal chord-stomping, though (again) the production issues muddied it somewhat.
• There was a lot of love for Keiichi Suzuki’s score to EarthBound, the game that provided the band’s namesake and also perhaps the most stylistically varied soundtrack of the SNES era. “Fourside” screams for a brassy, upbeat swing, and the band did just that. More interesting to me was their take on the de-zombified “Threed”, a tune that doesn’t get a lot of attention: they read it as a bossa, but preserved the odd 4-2-4-4 pattern in the opening phrases of the original piece.
• It was easy to get the impression that the writing chops behind their often ambitious arrangements outpaced their ability to play them. This is not to say they aren’t good musicians, only that for better or for worse, they had a habit of challenging themselves with ideas that had huge leaps to make from concept to execution. Sometimes it paid off, as in the electric Chrono Trigger medley that escalated into what resembled a multiphase boss battle and featured, at one point, an energetic interlude over a piano line that I counted as 13/8.
• Speaking of which, it’s quite interesting to see how the tunes of a Japanese RPG lineage had a tendency to gravitate towards their prog-rock and fusion roots, not unlike how they did in the obscure 1995 album Chrono Trigger Arranged Version: The Brink of Time. Tagging the familiar Final Fantasy victory fanfare at the end of a boss battle interpretation was a nice touch.
• The second set on the whole had a cleaner sound, likely because of the space that the trumpet and saxes added to the mix. Here the band had more of a cohesive identity resembling that of the first signature jazz band in video game music, The OneUps. Some of the horn writing was superb. The band closed the concert with a take on “Bob-omb Battlefield” from Super Mario 64 that replicated the mellow-yet-playful texture of the Birth of the Cool nonet, modulating into nearby keys this way and that and proving once again that when all is said and done, Koji Kondo remains the arch-composer at the root of video game jazz.

The Runaway Five’s next appearance is at the Edmonton edition of PLAY! A Video Game Symphony this Friday (9 January). If any of my local readers should catch them, let me know what you think.