OK, I hope you used your real, actual email address when you commented. Here comes a big pile of overshare your way.

I make a lot of jokes about hating kids, but I don’t. I really enjoyed substitute teaching, and I still think about how much I liked being able to just swoop in and back out. Not long enough to get tired or exhausted or ruin anything?

OK this is too much navel-gazing so I will back away slowly

Thanks!

I’d like to know: Outside of parenting – outside of all the fear and responsibility and endless commitment – how well do you get along with the youngsters?

When he got to Kotaku, it still had a non-Bashcraft-fan readership that still hadn’t fled at that point. Jalopnik is 4chan for cars.

And Bashcraft is still leading stories with “sex doll? NSFW GALLERY WARNING”, so I sincerely hope the work there isn’t done.

But hacking is a very similar. It’s about making use of information that other people ‘know’, but don’t normally take advantage of. There’s also the sense that it goes past the scope of normal gameplay, just like using money or lawyers.

In the hacking world, ‘discoverable’ information is generally considered more unfair/hard then ‘created’ rules. Created rules is called ‘security through obscurity’, and is considered weak. Far safer, they say, is to create a system that is hard to discover information in, and publish all the rules.

I would call all the people in the article hackers (or scientists). They subverted the system with knowledge. Martha Stewart made use of a backdoor, but she’s basically just a script kiddie compared to Srivastava or Craig. Probably it’s not that created rules are more unfair, it’s that they require less skill to take advantage of, and being beaten by a person with less skill then us just doesn’t seem right.

I just posted on Grant’s page my thoughts on this whole ordeal and I figured before I get writing on it for my own site [and peace of mind], I figured I’d exercise some demons here.

”’He figured out how to beat people who maybe know a lot more about stuff but take the wrong chances. In a way, he won against people he shouldn’t have.’”

This comment here. I found it unfair.

It reminded me when I told mom that I wasn’t going to be a computer science graduate and instead I’m switching my major to photography. It reminded me about the increasingly difficult math courses that [almost] tempered by love of the science. Dragging down my GPA, and making that photography major look REAL good.

But it also reminded me of my first match with Daigo Umehara. My friends throw a local fighting game tournament here in Columbus. It got popular. So much so that Daigo and his Japanese Street Fighter-playing friends came. Which, conversely, meant that everyone outside of the local scene attended too.

I remember losing my first twenty dollars to Daigo in a money match. I figured, hell, when’s the next time I get to play against one of the best street fighter players on Earth? After the first round I had a reaction not unlike Jenn when she played a superior player in Tekken.

I got perfected in probably 9 seconds. I can still hear the titters and jeers.

A crowd gathered around. My palms were sweaty. I just kinda wanted it to be over, but there it is…that second round getting ready to start. As an aside, everyone knows me as the guy who writes or takes photos, not as anything that would be considered a real threat in fighting games.

So imagine how I felt when people clapped when they saw me land a single throw? I even managed to throw him a couple more times before a closer-than-expected inevitable outcome.

I want to thank you Jenn, because I think I see way it’s necessary to have variety in game design and in this social organism. Though I was raised Baptist as well, I usually envy those who hold strongly to those moral tenants. I, on the other hand, yearn to see the next rule broken. I vie for imbalance, because games not only function as a form of escapism, but as a means to gauge to true strength of our modern day superheroes and even our underdogs.

The Penny Arcade duo wield a lot of cultural power and influence in various videogame communities. This isn’t the first or last time that they’ll sic their fans on someone, deserving or un-deserving, explicitly or not, as they have done in the past.

It’s great that customers won, but this whole thing was ugly.

Hence, we live in the era of patches, updated board games and yes … the ever-evolving quiz show.

The special was mostly interviews with producers and the other contestants, so it wasn’t very “fair” to him. He was deceased after losing all of his money in bad investments and bad luck so he couldn’t stand up for himself. It made it seem like he was a “con man” always looking for a “get rich quick”. The producers seemed to have sour grapes, probably because they lost a lot of money, but they themselves said they couldn’t find a single rule in his contract that said what he did was wrong.

I think if your job is to make a game then don’t be like these producers. Don’t be mad at the people who found ways to exploit your game. Get off your butt and fix it.

Now, I am a woman who will see a great magic trick on the street, throw a five-dollar bill down, and the magician—who suddenly feels guilt because he thinks the illusion wasn’t all that deft or credible?—will say to me, “Let me show you two more, ma’am.” Man, that is great. I love that. I still love a good con, and I love being conned two more times for five bucks. Like, I will PAY for the privilege. We all love great gimmicks! That is WHY we play video games: for a deft illusion. We aren’t being ‘had,’ exactly—not completely, because we’re skeptical, not all-the-way complicit—but we admire how we are being manipulated. That’s highbrow stuff. That’s the same thing as admiring Roger Craig’s manipulation of the game Jeopardy!, in a way. We go, “Man, you are GOOD,” and we feel all this, uh, this vicarious feeling of success.

Then there’s the “cheap” stuff. “Cheap” is being mugged. “Cheap” is having your identity stolen in a way that doesn’t require, I don’t know, amazing counterfeits and painstaking replicas. “Cheap” is having your purse stolen when you aren’t looking. “Cheap” lacks dexterity; it is thug crime. (ETA: There is no strategy in thug crime at all! It is a sort of audacious “buttonmashing.”)

When we admonish an opponent, whether computer-generated or human, as “cheap,” we are assigning categories and values to these things, just as Roger Craig does when he is working out the rules and natural logic of a different game. See what I’m getting at?

ETA: It’s like, we’re all trying to recognize patterns—or “rules”—but we’re also assigning all these values, trying to prioritize all that information in a different way. Hmm. I dunno yet.

Problem is finding people who are at your level. This is why I always wanted a non-asshole roommate who played games so we could be rivals. Having a rival is the quickest way to improve at something, as it gives you a motivator. Chris Hardwick uses the example in The Nerdist Way of finding someone whose picture you can look at to inspire you to keep working on yourself. In a “fuck you!” or “I’ll show you!” kind of way.

There’s another idea here somewhere, and it’s kind of insidious and sticky: for all of us, “fair play” means “evenly matched” (which, yes, is what you were saying in your earlier comment upthread). Competing against a wimp is boring. Meanwhile, playing someone who outpaces and outranks us, that’s actually hugely frustrating. We shout “Cheap! That was cheap, man!” We shout, “This isn’t even fun now! I’m not playing!”

The other book I’d point to, Mike, is ‘Finite and Infinite Games,’ which is about ten pages long but I have never finished reading it. I’m scared to finish reading it.