Nick's Café Canadien

Shortly before I sauntered across the Atlantic, I remarked to an old friend of mine that moving would be far more convenient with the aid of extradimensional portals. The concept I had in mind comes from role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (and its many derivatives in the digital age) where players bear containers of fantastical capacity to keep their inventory of material possessions close at hand, but I envisioned it as something like an improved Swiss bank, where you pass through security, deposit your goods in the vault, and pick them up at the same vault at a different branch anywhere else in the world. The vault would therefore be a material analogue to the “cloud” that you hear about in computing these days, a singular storage space with unlimited access points. Not even Gringotts thought of that.

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.

I have a dreadful confession to make.

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.

My dedicated readers may be aware that one thing I used to follow quite closely, on this journal and elsewhere, was the composition and arrangement of video game music. I haven’t attended to it in some time, and am in no way up to date on what’s been going on with it apart from the occasional press releases that land in my inbox about how (to pick one example) contributors to OC ReMix provided the official soundtrack to a high-definition remake of Street Fighter II.

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.

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I’ve spent the better portion of the week playing Spore. Strictly speaking, one doesn’t finish the game—once your species has developed as far as it can as a spacefaring civilization, you can keep on playing for as long as you like—but sometime on Wednesday night, I completed the “42″ achievement for discovering the secret at the centre of the galaxy, which is the closest thing the game has to an ultimate goal. In the true spirit of Battlestar Galactica I have yet to find Earth, though I am assured that it exists, and that you can destroy it.

In case you couldn’t tell, Spore is rather fantastic. Will Wright couldn’t have been more correct when he said (to paraphrase) that there’s a great unexplored gulf between the massive multiplayer online game à la World of Warcraft and the joy of the classic single-player experience where you, you get to be the star of the show without any interference from the addicts, cheaters, and generally rude malcontents who dominate computer game culture on the Internet. So here you have a game of a scope that could only be satisfactorily populated by the freshness, diversity, and sheer staggering quantity of user-generated content in the shared online space—but the territory of the playground itself is yours and yours alone. It’s like Animal Crossing, but more so.

There are some design flaws, many of which are fertile ground for future bloodletting sessions at the hands of Electronic Arts (aka expansion packs), but I want to get the elementary what-works-what-doesn’t criticism out of the way quickly so I can talk about more stimulating topics like user-driven storytelling and everyone’s favourite weasel word(s), intelligent design.

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With 120 stars in hand, I’ve seen most (but not all) of what Super Mario Galaxy has to offer—and my favourite thing about this wholly remarkable game has to be the Comet Observatory waltz. In the many hours I spent with the game, I expended no small measure of time hopping and bopping about in those plumber’s overalls and immersing myself in the rhythm of the piece, which exhibits the sweet, stately lilt of a Tchaikovsky ballet. Like the level selection music in Yoshi’s Island, the instrumentation changes as you progress through the game, building from a lighthearted melodic statement by the flute to a fleshed-out lullaby of Straussian violins befitting a midnight hour with a Disney princess.

Galaxy is the first Mario title to feature live orchestral music, as opposed to music generated by the game system’s MIDI instruments. While most video games have been moving towards scores on par with movies in sound quality and composition—two of the most promising film composers of the past decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, come from a background in games—Nintendo has traditionally been reluctant to move away from programmed music, mostly because of its adherence to the philosophy that interface is always the highest priority (something we similarly observe in their attitude towards story). For instance, they insisted on programmed music in The Wind Waker so it could change dynamically in response to the actions of the player, such as consecutive hits with the sword, and to indicate changes in the environment like the presence of unseen enemies.

In the Mario series, the music serves an even subtler function: it determines the rhythm of the game. It’s there to push the player towards a natural tendency to activate sound effects associated with certain actions—jumping, hitting blocks, collecting power-ups—on the beat.

That’s what the composers claimed, anyhow—and that’s the kind of claim I just had to verify.

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I’ve long been reluctant to jump on the open source cheerleading bandwagon with quite as much zeal as most other people who work with computers, but I’ve become a convert overnight.

Oh, sure, I’ve been an end-user benefactor of the open source model’s more representative products for years, but that has only made me sympathetic to open-source software’s actual philosophical tenets to the same extent that feeling warm in a comfortable pelt on a winter’s day would make me exclaim, “Golly, it’s a joy that we still club baby seals.” By and large, it’s the product that matters, and as far as I was previously concerned, processes of production are pretty much interchangeable unless they hold things up or cause serious collateral damage. Like seal-clubbing, I liked open source when it worked, and it was not something I was ever clearly for or against.

No, what got me to believe in open source was a scenario where I really, really wanted something to work, and it just wouldn’t. Enter DarwiinRemote.

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Amidst all of the distractions in my immediate local orbit, I almost neglected to mention a certain item that made it to the U of A’s ExpressNews feed: a piece about Guillaume Laroche’s summer research project, which had something to do with variation theory as it pertains to the development of Koji Kondo’s musical compositions over the course of the Legend of Zelda series. (I’ll not go into it further, as I do not wish to misrepresent the argument.)

The article was originally filed under the Faculty of Arts news page (here). For some reason, the ExpressNews version adds this somewhat awkward lede:

September 4, 2007 – Edmonton – New university students will hear warnings that they won’t get much studying done if their room mate has a video games. But the opposite would be true if you roomed with Guillaume Laroche.

Having actually roomed with Mr. Laroche on one occasion, I seriously beg to differ. But I digress.

I was directed to the original article upon its publication on the Arts page about a fortnight ago, and I remember thinking exactly two things: a) “Well, that’s some good publicity,” and b) “I can’t believe he convinced them to print the word ludomusicology.” Ludo-what? Perhaps I should explain.

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