Beyond the game

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space fantasy, space warfare, video games

My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.

One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.

Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.

The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)

A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.

This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.

While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.

A quest against the longest odds

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, starships, video games

Consider a video game with just a few levels. You have no weapons, you don't know the rules of play, you begin with only one ally whom you have no reason to trust, and you soon realize everything else out there is trying to kill you. You've just awakened from an idyllic dream to a nightmare: you're naked, freezing, hungry and thirsty. You have to find your way somewhere, you aren't sure where; you will gain a few useful allies and avoid a host of enemies; you must find food and water that won't poison you; you realize you are on a damaged starship; and you hope to find out why and what and all the other questions any good reporter asks. You don't know your own name.

This is how Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear begins. It takes about a quarter of the book to set the stage to the point detailed above. The book really does read much like I'd expect a narrative of a questing video game. Before there were video games, we played a text version of "Adventure", on mainframe computers, using text terminals. The computer would write,

You are in a long hallway with closed doors along both sides. It recedes as far as the eye can see in either direction. The fifth door on the left appears open and lighted. Do you want to go forward or turn around and go the other way?

Depending on how smart the program was, you might answer "Go forward and enter the lighted doorway". Then it would tell you what you see now. And so forth… Adventure was hugely popular until it was replaced by Doom and similar games with a more visual interface.

The starship of Hull Zero Three is an intriguing design. Its fuel and water supply is a comet several kilometers in size, harvested from the Oort Cloud. Technologies we haven't yet discovered are behind the "diverter" (a shield against cosmic dust and debris), freezing and revivifying apparatus, cloning from an artificial DNA library, and the "bosonic drive". I must assume the drive has a specific impulse of about a million seconds for the craft to attain a speed of 0.2c while using only half its fuel.

Note: Specific Impulse is the number of seconds a rocket engine can produce one pound of force using one pound of fuel (or 9.8 Newtons using one kilogram of fuel). The best launch rockets currently in use have SI of around 500 seconds, and the best ion engines for off-earth use approach 8,000 seconds.

Back to the starship. It has three hulls, imaginatively named 01, 02, and 03. The protagonist, called the Teacher throughout, even after he is given a name, is awakened in 01, finds his way forward to some kind of control center, and gains a few allies along the way. They stretch the definition of human, but it seems they all are. They find a shuttle craft that takes them to 03, where additional allies await, but so does possible doom for Teacher. He has, at this point, found out that he has been cloned many times; he has seen rooms full of corpses identical to him. It was at this point that I began to think of the book's plot as a video game, because you get so many "lives" in video games.

In Adventure, there were no extra lives. When you died, the game was over. You could restart it, but you had to go from the beginning; no restarting from a "save point". In the book, I suppose it is somewhat like that, because this incarnation of Teacher starts from the birthing chamber just like all his earlier selves. He finds that he's been trying, and failing, for hundreds of years, after some kind of conflict, perhaps a civil war on shipboard.

The ship's hulls themselves are enigmatic. Apparently they reconfigure using some kind of shapeshifting technology similar to what we saw with the "liquid robot" in Terminator 2. I wonder, even if such a technology is possible, whether it'll ever be cost-effective outside certain very narrow applications. Many neat technologies were commercial failures. Nonetheless, the changing landscape adds to the challenges Teacher must face, the tests he must "pass", to make certain the ship is able to continue and complete its mission. In the end, his key asset is his conscience.

I like a book that keeps me thinking. Hull Zero Three is full of interesting ideas, has a compelling narrative, and was an entertaining read.

Phinal Phantasy?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, adolescence, video games

When I was a teen, we had a fireplace that we used a lot. It became my job to chop and split the wood. I soon found that going out and whacking big chunks of logs was a great way to blow off steam. So much so, that when I went away to college, I soon tracked down a Christian youth center with a big woodpile, and got permission to "help" split the wood. There is something very satisfying about setting up a slice of a 24-inch diameter log and splitting it with one blow.

Is there a moral difference between splitting wood to defuse my frustrations, and running a computer game in which the object is to messily destroy insectile enemies from Betelgeuse? How about if the "enemies" are human...?

There is a story I've read, an obvious setup, in which the "hero" visits two stalls at an amusement arcade. One, which he encounters first but passes by with disgust, is a shooting gallery in which the targets are beautiful young women. Who knows why they are willing to die, but they egg on all passers-by to try their luck (and aim). No, he goes instead to the nearby "True Love" attraction, where he experiences a 3-day "honeymoon" with a lovely woman. At its end, he is still smitten, but of course, the "ride" is finished and he cannot buy more time. It is explained to him that, yes, the young woman's love for him was real, as real as can be, but it was chemically induced, and just now she is experiencing true love with another. Our heartbroken hero must leave; as he does so, he passes back by the shooting gallery. When he sees it, he goes in and says, "Line 'em up!".

Sorry to anyone who finds the story ruined for them should they encounter it in a 40-year-old anthology. But...doesn't the story resonate just a bit? Doesn't it tap genuine reactions? As strait-laced as I am, I found myself nodding in guilty agreement at the end of the story.

Yet in recent days, I've forbidden my son from bringing into our Halo or any other video game "in which you gain points by hurting or killing people." Am I wrong?

When I began to read Grand Theft Childhood I expected a slam against video gaming that suited my prejudices. I soon realized the title is ironic. Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games (and What Parents Can Do) by Lawrence Kutner, PhD and Cheryl K. Olson, ScD, looks deep under the surface of the current controversy about video gaming, and presents the results of a study they have recently concluded with their conclusions.

It is clear that the field needs careful study. As they write, "In the course of our research, we ran across a lot of muddle-headed thinking, misuse of scientific data and political posturing on the part of people from all points of view." (p. 2) They took the refreshing step of actually asking kids and parents about what they do and what they think. No simulated electrical shocks, no air horns, and no lie-detector wiring here. Dialog, interviews, and questionnaires are their favored tools. And of course, lots and lots of reading.

Here I find fault: though they quote from a number of sources, the book lacks a bibliography. They do have more than a hundred references scattered among their end-notes, but I find this practice makes it more frustrating for anyone who wants to pursue further research on one's own. Even at the cost of more published pages, a scholarly, if popularly-written, book needs a well-ordered bibliography.

Their conclusions may surprise you. The primary one that sticks with me is that, while there seem to be a very few public scandals such as school shootings, in which you could point some blame at video gaming, the much greater risk many children face is violence in their own home. Poverty and abuse still rank as the most accurate "leading indicators" of violence by teens.

Yet I found myself wondering if the authors weren't bending over backward a bit too far to avoid the "correlation means causation" fallacy. There is a table on page 101 that shows the following: Of children (mainly middle school age) who played less than 2 hours of video games weekly, 4% or less were "classified as bullies", but of those who played more than 6 hours weekly, 10% or more were bullies. The table actually has seven categories, and a very clear trend. The table, and a companion table showing similar ranking by days per week, is also introduced by statements that refer to earlier material showing that M-rated gaming is strongly correlated with bullying. Now, after a bit of discussion, the next section heading, on page 103, is "Are Aggressive Kids More Likely to Play Violent Games?"

Much later in the book the question is asked in a similar way, and referenced by this quote by U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly: "...researchers in this field have not eliminated the most obvious alternative explanation: aggressive individuals may themselves be attracted to violent video games." (p. 203) These are two of a number of instances, and the point raised is valid. However, the question is not resolved by the authors' research, and in their conclusion they state, "We don't know if playing M-rated games inspires some kids to act that way, if acting that way inspires kids to play M-rated games or if something else is going on." (p. 223)

Thus, the most crucial question about video gaming—does gaming lead to violence or are violent people more drawn to gaming?—is left unanswered. I have to conclude, based only on my own experience, is, probably both, in some measure. Particularly because counter-examples abound. Some of the most heinous young criminals don't play video games at all...which fact alone makes them very abnormal! What I can glean from the book includes:

• Virtually destroying interplanetary slugs and spiders does help some kids work off aggressive and frustrated feelings safely.
• Video gaming is a much more social pastime than most parents realize.
• Loneliness and angst are part of adolescence, whether video games are involved or not.
• This generation is less violent, overall, than most prior generations.
• Parents ought to learn to play the games, and to play them with their kids.

And maybe that last item would go a long way toward alleviating parents' worries.