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Portal

/ Adam / 3 Comments

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
Laser guided, a gun turret aimeth. — Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2

Portal is as much a poem as a game. The creators take the vernacular elements of the first person shooter and make a discliplined selection from them. For instance, the only weapon you equip doesn’t actually hurt anything, because that option is simply not available, and doesn’t make in game sense. Falling damage has been removed. They then add one new one element – the famous portals. In the words of Jeep Barnett, one of the developers,

We try to understand our limitations and work within those and in some ways embrace them.

And embrace them they did. Once the game’s chosen elements and their relationships are established, it recombines them with wit and grace. And it tries to kill you a few times too, but what is art without struggle?

Though analogies from one form of art to another are not perfect, and I doubt the team set out to write a poem, the description as poetry is apt because the formal constraints of Portal make it possible to describe it in a kind of ludic meter. The remainder may spoil. (I also owe a debt to work from the Rocketboom Institute of Internet Studies on image macro haikus).

Like Goethe’s Faust, Portal is divided into two distinct parts, which differ in structure and content. Part 1 has a whimsical tone, but a formal structure reminiscent of a sonnet. Each level can be treated as a stanza. The structure of each stanza is then

G (O B|B O|S)* G

G is dialogue from the AI Glados, half sexy librarian, half HAL from 2001. Each level starts and ends with AI dialogue, in a great performance from Ellen McLain. The repetition is not as strict as a villanelle, but is similar in linking the beginning and end of a stanza. The AI returns to themes throughout the game (eg, cake).

B and O are the blue and orange portals respectively. These form rhyming couplets. It is the chain of portal couplets that progress you through a stanza. When you go in one portal and out another, you move one or both portals and repeat the process. In terms of rhyme scheme, going in the orange portal, and coming out the blue is O B. Then, for example, moving the orange portal and returning into the blue portal is O B B O. A Shakespearean sonnet has the form (A B A B)^3 C C, that is, three sets of A B rhymes followed by a C C rhyming couplet to finish.

The structure of each line is not restricted by time meter as it would be in the iambic pentameter of an English sonnet. However, the deliberately limited vocabulary of Part I, using floor buttons, boxes, doors, lifts, energy balls and switches, and not much else, still gives a sense of formal restraint.

S is a substanza. As Portal proceeds, the levels get more complex, and the AI will bookend sections of a particular level with more dialogue.

What distinguishes this game from a conventional puzzler is the retention of a sense of flow. This seems to have come from Valve’s process of rigourous playtesting (mentioned in the interview above). This in turn fed back to the reduced vocabulary and minimalist setting, which reinforced the formal structure. It means you don’t get stuck on an impossible or frankly tedious puzzle. This also shows the limitations of playing a game in poetic mode. It’s as if you couldn’t go past page three of Paradise Lost unless you read out the fifth line exactly right.

At the beginning of Part II, the AI famously and hilariously asks you to assume the party acceptance position. When you, as the protagonist, reject this and scoot off into the factory innards of the laboratory, the game itself leaves its formal structure for something more anarchic. It’s actually a more conventional FPS setting, with more jumping onto lifts and such according to timing, though you still don’t shoot anything except walls. The climax, though, despite Eric Wolpaw’s hatred of plays, really does have a wonderful setpiece, a coup de theatre.

Valve, this is a triumph. I’m making a note here: Huge Success.

Confucius Gordon In The Twenty First Century!

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Jiang Qing (蒋庆) is a mainland Chinese scholar who proposes reviving Confucius as part of the Chinese political settlement. There is a good overview of his work from Daniel Bell in NPQ. He notes the revival of Confucius’s fortunes amongst Communist Party cadres, as well as critiques Jiang Qing makes of the current Chinese and Western systems.

Rather than subordinating Confucian values and institutions to democracy as an a priori dictum, they contain a division of labor, with democracy having priority in some areas and meritocracy in others. If it’s about land disputes in rural China, farmers should have a greater say. If it’s about pay and safety disputes, workers should have a greater say. In practice, it means more freedom of speech and association and more representation for workers and farmers in some sort of democratic house.

Jiang, who incidentally shares an English transliteration with Mao’s notorious wife 江青, and is therefore hard to Google for without using Chinese characters, has certainly been on a remarkable intellectual and biographical journey. Xujun Eberlein has provided a good biographical sketch, including his search through intellectual and spiritual traditions from Marxism, Christianity and Buddhism, and detail on his magnum opus, Political Confucianism (《政治儒学》). She also has also posted some a more detailed overview by Wang Rui-Chang and notes on philosophical attitudes to women. Bell also has a good interview with Jiang in Dissent.

I haven’t read Political Confucianism, not just out of native laziness and because I only heard about it last week, but also because it’s patchily available even in Chinese: no English language translation exists. You could call Jiang and his followers Neo-Confucians, except that term is already in use for a group of Song and Ming dynasty thinkers. It was the Neo-Confucians that laid out the obedience-centric doctrine – to government, to parents, to husband – that defined Confucianism until today. This also goes for the New Confucians, the term applied to Neo-Confucian twentieth century thinkers outside the mainland in places like Korea and Taiwan. (Such are the pitfalls of prefixed nomenclature. It has a touch of irony given Confucius declared in Analects XIII, 3 his first priority would be the rectification of names. I have visions of the great teacher giving Modernism, Post-modernism, Neo-classical economics, retro-futurism and Neo-Confucianism several weeks of detention.)

As the Wang Rui-Chang paper points out, Jiang attempts to revive an older, humanistic and individually moral strand of Confucian thought alongside the rather more pessimistic tradition of the Neo-Confucians. Arguably the realpolitik school goes back to the arch-pessimist Xun Zi 荀子, who believed people were inherently evil and needed it taught out of them.

to be fully legitimate, a political power or regime must simultaneously meet three conditions: 1), it must be at one with, or sanctioned by, the holy, transcendental Tao as expressed or implied in the Confucian Scriptures, and as interpreted by the prestigious Confucian Scholars; 2), it must not deviate from the mainstream of the national cultural heritage and break the historical continuity of the nationality; 3), it must comply with the will or endorsement of the common people.

He goes on to quote Edmund Burke; a conservative, moralist figure with a lot in common with Confucius considering they lived 1900 years apart and on opposite sides of the globe.

Skimming over Jiang’s proposal to re-establish Confucianism as a state religion, the key constitutional proposal is of a tricameral legislature, only one of which is directly elected:

The House of Profound Confucians (Tong Ru Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the sacred Way, the House of National Continuity (Guo Ti Yuan) represents the legitimacy of cultural heritage and tradition, and the House of Plebeians (Shu Min Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the common people’s will and desire.

Combining an elected house with two Houses of Lords is obviously not going to light a flame in any democrat’s heart. The obvious parallel here is with the American Tripartite Commission. The existing examples of this sort of thing – in Hong Kong and Iran – are not really encouraging. The emphasis on ethnic or cultural representation rather than geographic and democratic representation also seems both very imperial Chinese and inviting the nastiness of partisan splits on ethnic and cultural lines. Absent having seen the specific arguments Jiang has, and as fun as kicking an absent strawman while he’s down is, let’s just note my general support for the miracle of democracy for now.

What is more striking is the parallel to the golden age of the Westminster system. In 1855 the Northcote-Trevelyan report recommended adoption of a civil service entrance examination as one means of professionalising an inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. This was inspired in turn by the long history of Chinese imperial examinations for the civil service. Combined with the great Reform bills, by the end of the 19th century the United Kingdom had a democratically elected House of Commons (庶民院) and an aristocratic House of Lords including a number of bishops (国体院). And they relied on a career civil service to advise on, draft and execute policy, which exerted its own conservative cultural influence on the government (统儒院). This constitutional settlement started to change at the end of the 1990s with changes to the Lords and the relationship between the cabinet and civil service, (and in Australia due to the breakdown of ministerial responsibility) but it had a good hundred year run and is by no means finished with. Given it has both historical precedent and cultural suitability, I can’t help but wonder why Jiang didn’t think of it. Perhaps with all that visiting of monasteries, studying of Marxist texts and surviving the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t get much time for repeats of Yes, Minister. If someone has his postal address, I’m happy to send him a copy.

Sown In The Nature of Man

/ Adam / 1 Comment

As, immediately post the Australian election, our elected representatives wrestle over the spoils of power in a satisfyingly ineffective way, my mind turned to the partisan diversity we see in this parliament. We still have two large blocks of Labor and Coalition, plus the much ballyhood four or so independents, and a Green, in the lower house alone. Its worth remembering the Coalition itself is fractured in an increasingly complex and regional way. It is actually a coalition of four parties: Liberal, National, the NT’s Country Liberal Party and Queensland’s LNP. In the Senate, due to statewise proportional representation, we have an additional Green block plus Family First members going in and DLP members going out.

It seems, all in all, a rather nice demonstration of the inverse relationship between ideological homogeneity and faction size. Australian parties have extraordinarily strict whips. Voting against the whip can easily result in loss of preselection or even ejection from the party. An unwhipped vote is such a rarity that it has its own jargon – the conscience vote. According to the aforelinked McKeown and Lundie paper, in federal parliament only 32 bills or issues have gone to conscience vote between 1950 and 2007.

For a quick comparison, in US Congress, there were 858 non-party unity roll call votes. In 2007 alone. In that year, around 90-95% of members voted with their party on roll call votes, and that is historically high. Comparisons with British parliament also quickly show rebellion rates of up and above 40% for particular members.

This should be quantifiable and visualisable, using techniques like Fleisher et al’s or the striking graphs on informal voting Stubborn Mule produced for this election. A bit of munging together the different data sets would be needed though.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man — James Madison, Federalist No. 10

The Courtesans of Democracy

/ Adam / 3 Comments

集灵台之一

日光斜照集灵台
红树花迎晓露开
作夜上皇新授箓
太真含笑入帘来
— 张祜

On The Terrace of Assembled Angels

Sun shines over the slanting roof
Red blossoms welcome the dawn dew
Last night the Emperor selected a new girl
Her smile sneaks past the curtain
— Zhang Hu

This is a peculiar Australian election, one with an unusually febrile and brittle political class visibly unable to deal with a moment of tangible success and prosperity. As a nation, we are in a rare economic position to make strategic policy decisions on, say, climate change, or labour market liberalization. Our leadership has chosen to celebrate this by smearing itself with pork fat and staging a cream pie wrestling match in a giant circus ring.

Years ago on South Sea Republic we used to kick around an idea of government design patterns – recurring structures seen in recognisable forms wherever government is found. It’s a concept that is not exactly new to statecraft, but the format is, originating from architects like Christopher Alexander but finding perhaps most of its popularity in software engineering.

One pattern I thought worthwhile, but never wrote up, was Courtesan / Eunuch. Eunuchs and imperial courtesans are specialist professions to serve the executive, and have an explicit role in preserving the imperial mandate. In dynastic systems, this is usually based on genetic membership of the royal line. Loosely generalising from the Chinese and Ottoman imperial courts, you therefore have a harem to propagate the line, expanding the odds of a continued mandate beyond a few royal princesses. You also have eunuchs to manage access to the harem and minimise risk of other men’s sperm getting access to them.

The Chinese imperial system was established on a public philosophical basis of the Mandate of Heaven. And its true that this accommodated dynastic change, but the usual transition was expected to follow heredity. For an established dynasty, the Emperor had his mandate by virtue of being the Son of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven was not a simplistic doctrine of absolute power, either; it represented caring governance of the land and its people.

The specialists who formed the eunuch and courtesan classes included humanity’s usual mix of the brilliant and the venal. They provided a valuable service to many emperors, and I suspect sometimes a welcome buffer against the stultifying rituals of the scholar-bureaucracy. The power of these groups would wax and wane, but when the opportunities arose, clever courtesans and eunuchs could wield a great deal of formal and informal power. Indeed, since the civil service scholars hated having their power usurped in this way, there are plenty of detailed accounts of when and how it went wrong, and corrupt eunuchs and power mad courtesans, like Yang Guifei (杨贵妃), are a recurring theme in Chinese history. Another example is Suleyman’s consort Ruxanna, celebrated by poets throughout the ages.

Though we shouldn’t forget the scholars’ partisanship in this matter, they could have a point. Confined to the inner court for much of their life, prevented from formal training in matters of government, people from this class had little experience, sympathy or exposure to the broader country. When they reached exalted positions, they were prone to seeing government entirely through the lens of court or harem politics. How else to explain the spectacular devotion to face of someone like the Empress-Dowager Cixi (慈禧), who while China was being sliced up by colonial powers, spent fortunes rebuilding the Summer Palace rather than the Qing army? Or her eunuchs who spent the Navy budget building a spectacular marble boat on the lake of that same palace? There is an interesting revisionist view that Cixi was a Chinese patriot. She stayed on top of the Chinese court for 47 years, so she certainly couldn’t have been an idiot. But she must have had a spectacularly skewed view, in which appearances of courtly grandeur were paramount, to allow these decisions to happen.

Or to restate in another way: eunuchs and courtesans running the show were a good indicator the government had become detached from reality and ideologically inbred. The consensus reality of the court was fractured from the agricultural and economic realities on which it relied. This could happen even if these classes just did their job of preserving the mandate of the government.

Australian democracy is a far healthier system to live under than the imperial China mandarinate. Yet democratic leaders still rule according to a philosophical mandate, and they have professional specialists to protect and cultivate it. This is the spin doctor, servant to the executive, guardian of the flame of popular and electoral approval.

Again, in itself this is no bad thing. Democracy would hardly be worth the name if government ignored the people. The recent and unusual palace coup in the Labor party has thrown light on how the lens of opinion polls and focus groups distort the world for those that live in the scented garden of the spin doctor harem.

The courtesan here is not our historic first female prime minister. We are not quite at that stage of political inbreeding. Ms Gillard has trodden the unoriginal and traditional path of lawyer turned lawmaker. It’s people like the bumbling backroom eunuchs of the NSW Right, Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib. These are the movers who knifed the bureaucratic Rudd when he lost popularity for reneging on a pledge they advised him to renounce – around action on climate change. They have been playing the same game with NSW premiers for the last few years; three so far in just this parliament.

The theory here seems to combine admiring the power of our TV-age obsession with a party figurehead with disdain for the actual role of a leader. When this is overlaid with an imagined mastery of targeting key marginal seats without having any strategic direction, you get a content-free election like this one, which hasn’t even succeeded in making Labor popular, and even required Rudd had to be bizarrely resurrected to salvage the party’s chances in Queensland.

Both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull owed some of their appeal to their advocacy of strategic policy changes, and to their backgrounds at least slightly outside the official finishing school for politicians. This school is a matter of advancing from university through staffer roles and think tanks until landing a seat in parliament. And yet neither the diplomat or the merchant quite had the partyroom skills to stay in the leadership position.

Under pressure from the electorate it serves, our inbred contemporary political class tries to renew itself from related social groups by bringing them into the system. It then kneecaps those recruits for not having sufficient political skill, but crawls back to them for forgiveness afterwards. Devotion to tomorrow’s opinion poll numbers instead of the next decade’s policy is like living in a cruel casino of popular whim, which doesn’t even pay out very well, because people care about next year more than tomorrow. And when you spend too much time with the courtesans of democracy, you end up fucked.

Self-kicking robot chair

/ Adam / 1 Comment

If a key principle of robot ethics is not kicking the robot, what if the robot is designed to kick itself? This mesmerising chair continually collapses and reassembles itself. It’s a sculptural collaboration by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan.

Does this escape censure because the parts of the chair are not particularly damaged in their disassembly? It would then just be a robot just doing its job, and the entropic interpretation would all be in the eyes of its human beholders. I am inclined to think so, though it is interesting how close it skirts the line. Alternatively, by allowing us to contemplate, as Greg Smith has it, the existential plight of furniture, does it sin against the robot by condemning it to hell?

Via.