Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Weekend venting about videos games part 3

Last week I talked about cases 1 and 3 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. I know this is out of order but I’d like to put my thoughts to paper on Case 2 of that game. As always, this is a murder mystery game, so total spoilers below!

The case starts out strange but OK, we’re told that after the events of the first game, our protagonist (Ryunosuke Naruhodo) has been barred from lawyering in Britain.  This is… an odd twist as it kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t.  So spoilers for the first game but in the end of that game the protagonist uncovered a massive spy ring operating in the heart of Britain.  On the one hand yeah that’s a big thing, on the other hand he didn’t do anything wrong so why is he being punished?  Whatevs, it sets this up as a flashback case since he can’t do real cases

In a neat moment, this case is somewhat closely related to a case from the first game, with several characters lifted directly from it.  One of them is a bit of a reach though, you meet a man in a Victorian costume for about half a second and wouldn’t you know it he’s the victim in this case!  He’s not dead though since we needed him to be a kooky character for this one.

At this point I’d like to talk about the best character in Ace Attorney history: Herlock Sholmes.  You may remember when he was called Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, but to avoid copyright lawsuits the developers of this game LeBlanc’d him up to having a new name.  Anyway he’s absolutely awesome. 

His gimmick is acting like the all-knowing Sherlock Holmes from fiction, while actually being a clutz and a goofball (but surprisingly astute when the plot demands it).  He’s awesome for bringing the best of Ace Attorney wacky humor into a character who can also be serious when need be.  His main gimmick is the “Dance of Deduction,” in which he points out a bunch of unnoticable Holmesian clues and then uses them to build an impossible and hilarious theory, which Ryunosuke then has to “correct” to find the truth.  Anyway, this case gets +10 points just for including him.

Now as to the actual murder mystery, it started off good, had some great moments, but also had just enough frustrating moments that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.  It starts off well with the unexpected death of the guy in Victorian Costume (his name is “William Shamspeare” and he speaks in forsooth’s and thee’s naturally), who then unexpected isn’t dead and claims to have been poisoned. 

We totter about with a mystery about how he could afford to pay for gas heating when he was so poor (more on that later) until finding out that a victim of a stabbing from the 1st game (Olive Green) came back and tried to kill old Shamspeare in this game.  It’s all meant to be very tragic, as Shamspeare had poisoned her boyfriend, but it falls off for me at a few points with regards to its timeline.

The basic timeline of this case is supposed to be as follows: 

William Shamspeare learns of a buried treasure hidden in the second floor apartment unit of this lodge.  He is unable to rent the second floor however because it’s occupied by Olive Green’s husband, named Duncan.  So instead he kills Duncan by turning off the fire in Duncan’s gas lamps, causing Duncan to asphyxiate from gas poisoning.  The way Shamspeare does this is by blowing into Shamspeare’s OWN gas lamps, which disturbs the fire in Duncan’s lamps because they’re all on a single gas line.  Duncan’s death creates a rumor that the apartment is haunted, which allows Soseki Natsume (a real historical dude) to rent the unit for super cheap.  Shamspeare still wants the money though, so hatches a plan to kill Natsume too.

At this point Olive Green is distraught over her husband’s death, she hear’s Natsume talking about how haunted his apartment is and apparently deduces from this that her husband Duncan was murdered.  She writes a vaguely threatening letter to Shamspeare and then sneaks into his house, bringing strychnine poison with her. 

In Shamspeare’s room she finds proof that he killed Duncan, which causes her to deduce his method and put strychnine on his lamps.  Now when Shamspeare comes home, he wants to kill Natsume just as he killed Duncan, by blowing into his own lamps and causing a gas leak in Natsume’s apartment.  But since Olive Green put strychnine on them, he ends up ingesting some and very nearly dies.  The plot of this case begins with him (apparently) dead.

My problem is that Olive Green seems to deduce that Duncan was killed AND THAT SHAMSPEARE killed him on very little, almost no evidence whatsoever.  She overhears Natsume talking about how Shamspeare is weird and the apartment is haunted, and from that she concocts a scheme to kill Shamspeare.  The case when you play it implies that it was reading the note in Shamspeare’s apartment that causes her to hatch her scheme, yet she came to his apartment WITH THE STRYCHNINE so she was already planning a murder beforehand.  And she can’t have come into the apartment a second time after reading the letter because of the events of the case. 

So overall although there’s a wonderful bit of Agatha Christie-esque tragedy to the whole thing, it just feels weird to me that this lady leaped to MURDER on almost no evidence whatsoever.  The evidence she finds in the man’s apartment does prove her suspicion, but again she’d already decided on murder before even going in there.

Anyway that’s all for the plot of this case, now onto the question of gas, and I’m wondering if anyone knows the answer here: during this case, it’s revealed that Shamspeare is incredibly poor, but somehow has the money to pay for gas heating in his house every day.  In this era, you could pay for gas heating via a vending machine installed in your residence.  It’s a mystery where Shamspeare gets the coins to pay, but a further mystery is raised in that when the meterman comes to collect the money from his vending machine, it’s always empty. 

Clearly Shamspeare is stealing gas, but how? 

The only clues are a small hole drilled into the bottom of the vending machine, and a puddle of water beneath it.  The answer to this puzzle is thus: Shamspeare cuts coin-shaped depressions into bars of soap, and then leaves water in them outside to freeze in the cold London air.  What he’s left with is pieces of ice in the shape of coins that he then puts into the vending machine to pay for his gas.  The apartment he lives in warms with the gas heating, and the ice melts back into water.  Then the hole in the vending machine lets the water escape into the room, removing any evidence of his crime when the meterman comes to take the money out. 

What’s most interesting to me is that this mystery was actually lifted directly from a different book which I don’t know the name of.  I told this mystery to a family member who told me she’d read a book in which this exact situation plays out, with a poor man paying for gas using ice “coins,” but she didn’t remember the name of the book.  Does anyone remember the name?  If you do, please tell me!  In the comments below or at theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com.

Who is the “protagonist” of a narrative spanning over a century?

A few days ago I posted about my favorite Chinese-language media, and included in that list the Three Kingdoms TV show that can be watched on Youtube. The TV show is heavily based on the “Romance of the 3 Kingdoms” novel written hundreds of years ago, and I remember reading a(n abridged) version of the novel when I was in University.

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a Chinese friend of mine who had read the book in middle school. I basically told him “I really like this book, and it’s got some cool characters like Cao Cao, he seems to be the main character.” My friend said “really? I remember Zhuge Liang being the main character.” At that point I hadn’t even met Zhuge Liang in the book so was confused. In the sections I read, Cao Cao was in many ways the driving force behind the narrative: he tried to assassinate Dong Zhou, he helped raise a rebel army, many of the plot threads were from his perspective as he warred across the Central Plain.

And yet my friend’s memory was correct, as soon as Zhuge Liang enters the narrative, HE is the clear protagonist of the story. He is very clearly shown as the smartest, wisest, most dedicated general, and anyone who is in any way cool will at some point get shown up by Zhuge Liang to prove that Zhuge Liang is even cooler. Perhaps his only drawback is that he is too smart, I remember a conversation sometime before the Battle of Red Cliffs where someone admonishes him to remember that not everyone understands what he’s saying or doing because they aren’t as smart as him.

But of course the narrative lasts a very long time, many of these characters grow old and die before it is finished. So in a long-running character-spanning narrative, how do you even define who the main protagonist is? I guess in a way you don’t, Three Kingdoms is more an ensemble cast of characters who rise and fall throughout the narrative, and that’s part of what makes it so great.

I need to get more discipline about reading

I have a job that requires me to read. A lot. But sometimes I don’t really put my mind into what I’m reading. It’s not that easy to read long, dry, descriptions about other people’s work, but it’s necessary, and I need to get better at it. I’m writing this instead of another post on The American Challenge because I’ve sat for the past few days with my eyes glazed over as I look at (but don’t read) the same sentences multiple times, and it’s got to change so I want to vocalize my promise that I will make it change. I will get more disciplined about reading.

The American Challenge 3: why was America so economically strong?

On Tuesday I continued to discuss the American Challenge, a book from 1968 in which author Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber argues that the American economy is growing at such a rapid pace, it will quickly outpace most of Europe and enter into a neo-colonial system with the European countries, extracting their wealth and talents while leaving them without the ability to develop new industries on their own.  The big question that has yet to be answered is why was America’s economy so powerful in 1968?  I don’t know what the boomers think, but I don’t know of many Americans who look back on the 60s with fondness for its booming economy.  But according to Servan-Schreiber America’s economy was indeed booming, rapidly outpacing Europe, the USSR, and the vast majority of the world, steadily increasing the technological and quality-of-life gap between America and the rest of the world.

A discussion of America’s boom years should encompass both where it started and where it was going.  By 1968 America already amounted to 1/3 of the world’s GDP while encompassing just 1/17 of its population.  It controlled the majority of the world’s production in high tech goods, including chemicals (60%), electronics (68%), and automobiles (76%).  In addition to this strong base, America’s economy seemed poised for continued rapid expansion.  American companies were on average more profitable than European ones, and more profit was re-invested into new technology and ideas.  Servan-Schreiber’s thesis appears to rest at least in part on profits from big business as drivers of technological innovation.  The fact that IBM made over a hundred million dollars in profit and re-invested roughly half of that would guarantee it continued dominance of semiconductor technology in the years ahead.  I’m unsure of the validity of this thesis, many of the most profitable high-tech companies today didn’t even exist when Servan-Schreiber wrote his book, so it appears that a full study of startups and their position in the tech eco-system may be lacking from this book.

Regardless, it is clear that in Servan-Schreider’s time, American companies were making more money and re-investing more into new technology than their peers, and to Servan-Schreider and others this was causing a widening gap between the standard of living in America and the standard of living elsewhere in the world.  But we still haven’t answered why America was so able to do all this.  Why were its companies so profitable?  Servan-Schreider has a simple answer: education

According to Servan-Schreider’s data, in 1965 44% of University aged Americans were enrolled in education.  By contrast, France had 16% of University-aged young people enrolled in education, Italy had 7%, Germany 7.5%, Britain 7%, Belgium 10%.  The highest enrolment in Europe was the USSR with 24%, just barely half of the American enrollment.  Not only did America have more students enrolled, it had more poor students, the author states that working class children in France make up 56% of the population but just 12.6% of students.  By contrast, the author makes special note of the following: “In the United States, on the other hand, from three to five times as many children of workers and farmers have access to higher education as in the Common Market countries.  His conclusion is that social mobility was far more available in America than in Europe.

Finally, in addressing the education gap the author quotes Robert McNamara, who at the time was the US Secretary of Defense. McNamara strongly agrees that the growing gap between America and Europe is due largely to education, not just the education of scientists and engineers but of managers as well.  We may best remember that McNamara was a former business executive at Ford, and so he probably thought of most everything as a management problem.  Still, he argues that good management is required to take advantage of new technologies and ideas, as well as the new organizations to promulgate them.  The gap, he reasons, is because America has had the corps of trained managers capable of utilizing computers, logistics, and new methods of measurement in order to create better and more efficient companies, and that if Europe wants to catch up it needs to train managers of its own.  In a way this is precisely what Servan-Schreider lamented earlier in the book, that modern European countries are constantly looking to America for their managers and highly skilled employees, and this in turn makes Europe become more dependent and “colonized” by the American economy as it is unable to staff its own companies and build its own ideas separately from America. McNamara’s solution is blunt: train better managers.  Get more people into higher education, more people skilled in using and building off of new technology, and then you won’t have to import so many Americans.For me, a modern person reading the book, all this sounds very surprising.  I was not aware that in 1965 fully 44% of the college-aged Americans were in school, or that the number was so low in Europe.  A quick search says that for America this number has barely changed, 42% of Americans 18-24 years old are enrolled in college or graduate school.  I can’t find equivalent data, but in the UK 38% of 18-year-olds are going into University and in Europe 41% of 24-35 year-olds have a degree.  Although these numbers aren’t directly comparable to each other, they do seem to demonstrate that the gap in higher education has been all but erased between America and Europe.  Servan-Schreider’s book is in some way a clarion call for action, and his most direct solution presented thus far is an increase in higher education for Europeans.  That exact increase seems to have occurred. Perhaps this is why our two economies never diverged as he predicted, maybe Europe took his advice.

Language Post: my favorite Chinese media

Whenever I’ve studied a language, the most common advice I’ve been given is to consume as much media as possible in that language so that I can learn to use it naturally and with more fluency than how it is taught in a classroom. There are only so many hours in a day for in-class teaching, and most classes don’t have enough time to dedicate to actual language use, rather you spend most of your time studying the structure and fundamentals of the language so you can better pick up the language when you do use it, which the teacher hopes will be done outside the classroom. Also language, like most skills, operates on “use it or lose it,” and the more you use it (by consuming foreign-language media) the less likely you are to lose those lessons you picked up in the classroom.

But I live in a predominantly English speaking society, and don’t have much exposure to foreign-language media, so for a long time I didn’t know where or how I could find foreign language media. I’ve eventually found some media that I enjoy, and I’d like to share it so anyone else learning languages can also practice and enjoy. Pretty much all the media I’ve found is Chinese-language mainly, so if anyone has their own media from other languages, feel free to share.

In terms of TV, there was a long-running Chinese TV drama called Three Kingdoms, a retelling of the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel. The whole TV show can still be watched on youtube for free, and is an excellent way to at least listen to some Chinese, even if the speaking style is old-fashioned.

For music, the band Transition is a really fun band made up of some English gentlemen living in Taiwan. They sing in Chinese but what’s also great is that as English speakers themselves, they have a bit of an “English accent” to their Chinese which is recognizable to me since that’s how all my friends spoke in Chinese class. I sometimes recognize a word sung by them where I wouldn’t recognize it otherwise because the accent is familiar.

For video games, Pokemon is actually a really good one, the 3DS games (and possible the newer ones too) usually have an option to pick your language settings before the game starts. The games are simple enough that you shouldn’t have a problem beating them even in a foreign language, and it gives you a lot of opportunities to read the language. I played Pokemon Ultra Sun in Chinese, which is also great as the story of that game is that your character is an immigrant from Kanto to Alola, and playing in a foreign language lets you roleplay some of the immigrant experience. The game also is noticeable for pretending your character has agency while never actually letting you talk, so I pretended I was someone who was unconfident in the language so didn’t speak as much.

For books, I actually haven’t found as many good ones. I’ve read a few Chinese/Taiwanese kids books as well as the first Harry Potter book in Chinese, but they don’t keep my interest as much as something like Pokemon. If anyone has any suggestions for good Chinese lit that’s accessible for a non-fluent foreign speaker, let me know.

The American Challenge 2: why not let America run things?

In yesterday’s post I outlined the thesis of Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge. In this 1968 book, the author opined that America and a select few countries were growing and developing at such a rate that they would rapidly leave most of Europe in the dust. This predicament seemed to him as serious a divergence as the Great Divergence between the industrial and non-industrial economies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Servan-Schreiber relates that in his time, Americans were by far the largest investors in European economies, and American companies were the movers and shakers of the European markets. This foreign investment from America had provided immense wealth to Europe, the author continuously brings up the wealth and power of IBM-France, which in 1968 was one of the leading computer companies in the world, all backed by American investment.

In addition to the investment, American workers seemed to him to be key benefactors of this new economic reality. American multinationals had the wealth and resources to take over European markets, and American managers were usually brought in to train the Europeans in the American style and to manage the business how the American companies wanted.

Now, between the investment and the workers, it seems like Europe had a lot to gain from this arrangement. American investment brought with it jobs and new technology for Europeans, American managers brought their management style and their management technology, which Servan-Schreiber accepts was a net good for European companies, as American management had been proven to be more efficient. So if Europe was benefiting from this arrangement, why not just continue it? Why not allow America to invest more and more in Europe and thereby ride the rising wave of progress into a better tomorrow? Servan-Schreiber thinks this would be a terrible idea, because this system was a short term benefit but a long term hindrance.

Yes American investment provided jobs, but as long as it was Americans and their corporations which controlled the new products, new technology, and new money coming out of those investments, then America would continue to control Europe’s future. This wasn’t just nationalist hand-wringing, Servan-Schreiber claimed that any new product or idea, even ones developed in Europe, will be controlled by America and implemented first in America before spreading to Europe. America will get the fruits of technology progress first, Europe will languish behind. Secondly, the dividends taken by American companies will be reinvested first in America, the homeland of these companies, rather than in Europe. Already by his time, the dividends which flowed from Europe to America outweighed the investment flowing from America to Europe. This meant that the great wealth produced by Europeans would be concentrated in America and the hands of Americans, seemingly to the detriment of continued European economic progress. With Americans controlling not only the technology developed in Europe (since they made the investments and thus they control the patents) as well as the wealth of Europe (since they made the investments and thus they control the dividends), the relationship will turn into an extractive one in which the benefits flow in one direction and are mostly reinvested in the American economy.

Can this system be overturned? The most direct way Europe could try to save itself would be to nationalize these American companies, yet even this would not help according to Servan-Schreiber. Because a modern corporation’s wealth doesn’t come from the buildings or the factories, it comes from the technological know-how of the employees, the supply chains of the production line, and the management systems that ensure efficient distribution of resources, and these are all hard or impossible to nationalize. If you nationalized IBM-France, the most highly skilled workers might simply flee to IBM-America to continue their work there. IBM-America would continue to hold the contracts to the supply chains which are necessary for the production of goods, and the skilled managers would also likely flee with the workers to higher paying American jobs. You would be left with a bunch of empty buildings, with none of the input materials, skilled workers, or efficient management systems that are necessary to make products.

But even if you could circumvent that, even if you could convince enough of the workers and managers to stay at IBM-France, and even if you create brand new supply chains out of whole cloth, you STILL wouldn’t gain by nationalizing the company. IBM-France would simply be a smaller, weaker version of IBM-America, unable to compete with it in any market outside its home of France. Not only that, but by nationalizing one company you would likely scare away almost all of the American investment which has provided so much wealth and technology in the post-war years. American companies and investments would flee, taking with them the future promises of economic and technological development, and the smaller, weaker IBM-France would not be able to fill the void. So while nationalization seems like an easy solution, the author believes it would quickly turn the problem from bad to worse.

So if nationalization isn’t a solution, what is? Come back tomorrow while I continue my dissection of this fascinating book.

The American Challenge

The post-industrial societies shall be America, Canada, Japan and Sweden.  That is all.

I’ve been reading an interesting book from 1968 called The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber.  In it, the author notes that America and American companies had invested and profited greatly from the economic boom in post-war Europe.  Meanwhile, European companies had for a variety of reasons not reaped the same rewards (in the author’s opinion), and so by 1968 almost all the important multi-national corporations in Europe were either American owned or staffed by Americans rather than Europeans.  The author furthermore predicted that by the end of the (20th) century, American investments will push America to an unprecedented level of wealth and power, above and beyond what most of Europe could achieve.  He claimed that America would become a post-industrial society, one in which industrial revenue would skyrocket, labor productivity would skyrocket, and the coming cybernetic future would be used to build such wealth and power and to be almost unimaginable to the people living in his age.  

What he seemed to be getting at was the idea of a second great divergence.  The first “Great Divergence” was the economic divergence in the 18th and 19th centuries between Europe/North America and the rest of the world (Asia, Africa, and Oceania).  Within a relatively short amount of time, industrial Europe increased its GDP per capita many fold, enabling them to have more food, more goods and better services (things like trains) than any other place on earth.  It was the reason that in the 19th century, middle class Brits could travel all over the world by train or steamship and be warmed during the winter by gas heating piped into their houses.  These would all have been a huge luxury to people living anywhere else on the planet, and been almost unthinkable just a few centuries before.

This “Second Great Divergence” that Servan-Schreiber seems to expect would be similar to the first, in which some parts of the world experience rapid rises in living and technological standards, fueled by an economic system of “post-industrialism” (as he calls it) rather than industrialism. This post-industrial economic system would create a stark contrast with the industrial societies, which would include most of Europe. Post-industrial societies, he claims, will be to industrial societies as industrial societies are to per-industrial societies: richer, more leisure, more health, and able to control and dominate them in a semi-colonial fashion. Like the first Great Divergence, this second Divergence would be concentrated geographically, but unlike the first Divergence, Servan-Schreiber predicts that (most of) Europe will not reap its benefits.  His gloomy prediction in 1968 was thus: “[in 1998] the post-industrial societies will be, in this order: the United States, Japan, Canada, Sweden.  That is all”

Now, this divergence doesn’t seem to have happened, nor does it seem to have occurred that American businesses control all aspects of the European economy (as Servan-Schreiber predicted).  But it’s enlightening to look at the predictions he made half a century ago and see just what it was that made him think this was the future.  For the next week or so I will be going through parts of the book to analyze what he saw as the state of Europe in 1968 and why he thought it would lose so much ground relative to its peers.

More weekend venting about video games

Yesterday I talked about the first case in the second game of the “Great Ace Attorney” duology. Today I’d like to talk about the third case from that game. Yes the second case was also good but I don’t have my thoughts in order about it yet.

Once again, this is my thoughts about a murder mystery game, so total spoilers ahead!

I liked this case, 9/10.  The first day of the case built up to be better and better as it went along, although there were a few moments in this case as in case 2 where I didn’t know what evidence to give people in order to succeed.  They developers of this series have slimmed down everything in the game to give you more hints (Iris will directly tell you when you still have shit to do) but it can still be very illogical what things you have to show to which people to progress.

The investigation section for this case was incredible though.  Both days’ investigations built up so expertly to interweave so many competing threads.  Even though I guessed a lot of it early, I still had a wild ride and I didn’t guess everything.  The character work was also top notch, I found Van Zieks (the prosecutor for this series) a lot more boring during the game that preceded this one, he felt like a sub-par Godot (the prosecutor from Ace Attorney 3: Trials and Tribulations).  But getting to chat with Van Zieks face to face and hear his side of things really rounded him out, even if it’s a bit cliche that they gave him Ace Attorney Prosecutor Backstory A: dead family. 

I also think case 3 was a case where the writers sort of learned a lesson of what NOT to do from previous Ace Attorney games.  This case featured a defendant who helps the prosecutor (like Wocky Kitaki in 4-2) and a completely impossible “murder” (like Max Galactica flying away in 2-3).  And yet both of them are handled very well.  The defendant has a much better reason for “helping the prosecution” than Wocky Kitaki ever did, since this defendant truly believes his “teleportation” machine worked and that the murder that occurred was all just a tragic accident. Although he is “helping” the prosecutor by saying his machine worked, and that fact implicates him for the crime, his reason for sticking to his story are understandable. 

And although teleportation obviously isn’t real, pretty much everyone in this case knows that and it’s clear that they are sort of just humoring Van Zieks, who also at least presents genuine evidence of the defendant committing the crime besides “your machine did magic.” In this way we have an “impossible” murder mystery that doesn’t stray into parody territory with genuinely impossible plot points.

I do want to say that on day 1, the only underwhelming part of the story was Herlock Sholmes (the obvious Sherlock Holmes expy).  They’ve made him a lot more like a classic Ace Attorney protagonist, in that he has money issues. 

Ask Apollo, ask Phoenix, ask Athena, the Wright Anything Agency is always going on and on about how they have no money.  In the first game I thought Sholmes was absolutely loaded with dosh. He has a massive house filled with valuable trinkets and machines, and a partner who is constantly publishing his exploits in serialized form.  He has steady income and a lot of wealth, so why would he complain about money problems?  In this case though he’s a poor scrounger and on Day 1 that made him a lot less “fun” to be around, he was less bombastic and more pitiable.  I even thought the Day 1 “Great Deduction” was underwhelming. 

I think his Day 1 great deduction should have gone differently.  The first part of the scene is proving that Tusspell smacked a man over the head with an arm when he tried to steal, the second part is proving that what Sholmes thought was a real policeman was actually wax and what he thought was wax was a real policeman.  The two contradictions together demonstrate that a famous waxwork called “the professor” was stolen from Madame Tusspell’s waxwork museum. 

But… the deduction doesn’t flow to me.  It should be flipped: the first part should be with the policemen, and finding out that the wax one has a missing arm sets up a mystery of where the arm is, while finding out the other is on the case looking for something sets up another mystery.  Then part 2 solves both mysteries, she used the arm to KO a guy and she called the cops because “the professor” was stolen.  As it stands when we saw the wax cop missing an arm, I wasn’t surprised because I already knew where the missing arm was.

Day 2’s deduction on the other hand is the single best “anything” in Ace Attorney I’ve ever played. 

Ace Attorney usually doesn’t do these kinds of scenes well, I remember in GAA1 Case 5, where Gina gives you the disc and tells you not to give it to Eggs Benedict.  Both of them are yelling at you then the game just zooms out back to investigation mode.  The whole tension of the scene is lost because you now have to click on Sholmes to progress with the Great Deduction. 

But in this case the scene worked perfectly.  You bust down Drebber’s door and see a time bomb and upturned furniture.  Everyone’s scared but Sholmes’ deductions is that the bomb isn’t real.  Then you solve his deduction and use the crossbow to find the head of the “professor.”  But the deduction isn’t over!  For the first time we get deductions part 3 and find that Drebber is in the safe.  But it still isn’t over because the bomb was real!  And Sholmes disarms it and everyone says funny stuff.  I’m not describing it well but honestly this was the best Ace Attorney anything I’ve ever played, better than using the metal detector on Von Karma, better than using the Mood Matrix on Blackquill, this was just A++++++

This case was allllllllllllmost perfect.  I think my biggest quibble besides Day 1 Sholmes was when Ryunosuke had to name the accomplice to Drebber.  It was Courtney Sithe, but she was such a minor character that by the time I got to that point I had straight up forgotten what she had done up to that point.  When I finally named her I vaguely remembered the “500 scalpels” bit in her notebook, but that was not the part of the investigation that stood out to me.  If we’re going to make her part of this case she needs to be more involved, otherwise in such a broad ranging case like that she faded into the background of my memory and I was floundering to remember who she was and why she was in this case. 

We had focused a lot on Asman (who was a con artist) and Harebrayne (who had been duped).  Either of them could have fit the description of “accomplice” with  a little tweaking.  Maybe Harebrayne was told to do things and didn’t realize he was accidentally moving the body?  Maybe Asman set up this whole get-rich-quick-scheme with Drebber but Drebber double crossed Asman at the last minute?  We had focused on them so I picked them before picking Sithe, about whom I remembered absolutely nothing aside from her short blurb in the court record. 

I feel although there isn’t anything totally illogical about who you’re supposed to finger for the crime, but I just had so little to go on that there isn’t a compelling reason to pick the character you’re “supposed” to pick.  Sure it works as a shocking swerve, but it isn’t as compelling in a narrative sense.

I also find Sithe as the accomplice incredibly lazy.  I’ve noticed a trend in AA games (and other mysteries) wherein making one of the cops or lawyers part of the guilty party gives carte blanche to explain away any and all inconsistencies with “well the people investigating the crime covered up their own misdeeds.”  My challenge to mystery writers (and Ace Attorney writers in particular) is to make an entire narrative where the law enforcement is never part of the crime. 

Using them to upend the entire mystery isn’t out of the realm of possibility, there have been real detectives who used their position to cover up their own crimes, but narratively it lets you ignore all the “impossibilities” that had been driving the case up to the point the law enforcement is indicted.  GAA1-5 was a great case, but it also did this.  As did Rise From the Ashes, which this case in some way mirrors.  It starts to get a little predictable when at least once a game they need to make law enforcement be the villain so as to allow themselves to change up the evidence of the case half-way through.  There are other ways this can be done, law enforcement wasn’t evil in 1-3 (Steel Samurai case) but the facts of the case changed naturally as the thing built up, without ever contradicting themselves or needing to bring in “someone changed the evidence.”

Final thought: this is the ONLY time so far that I have truly liked the Jury in these cases.  In GAA1-5 I thought they were acceptable, but this is the first time I’ve LIKED them.  On day 1 at least.  Day 2 they again just get in the way, but on day 1 they actually add to the trial in a dynamic way.

Weekend venting about video games

Ace Attorney is a wonderful series of murder mystery games that I’ve enjoyed for years now. A while ago they brought their “Great Ace Attorney” duology to Steam, with 2 games set in Victorian London/Meiji Era Japan. I really really liked the games overall and I urge anyone who’s a fan of murder mysteries to pick them up. But the first case of the second game really really bugged me and so I’d like to write about why.

Note: total spoilers ahead! This is a mystery game so read only at your own risk

The day after I finished Great Ace Attorney 1, I started Great Ace Attorney 2.  I really loved GAA1 and wanted to dive right in, but the first case of GAA2 was just so damn frustrating, that I left and didn’t return to it until months later.  I’ve pulled up the notes I wrote on this case, both months ago and today.  I enjoyed the characters, the main character (Rei) and her friend (Susato) had a great dynamic going, and I think Susato is a great character to play as, perhaps better than Ryunosuke (main character from the first game).  Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut…

I predicted this entire case from about minute 1.  The moment I saw the photographer taking pictures of the writer, I blurted out “are you the fucking killer?!”.  The moment I was allowed to inspect the fountain pen, I knew it had been used to administer the poison.  The moment I saw the first picture of the hut, I knew the victim was stabbed from outside it. It’s just that I felt a lot like this awkward zombie comic, which I never have felt much like before.

Normally I do not do a good job predicting these cases.  I get taken for a ride by the story and am as shocked as the characters when twists happen.  So I’m perfectly fine with being misled in a murder mystery story.  What I do not enjoy is being punished for being correct.  As soon as you are allowed to examine the fountain pen, you need to use it as evidence make a contradiction about the facts of the case. 

I tried to use the pen as a contradicting piece of evidence because I knew it was used to administer poison. However, because the game wasn’t ready for it to be used as evidence, I was punished for being correct even though I was correct.  I haaaaaaaaaaate when mysteries punish you for being correct, it’s one of the big reasons I hate LA Noire and do not at all consider it a good mystery game.  All mysteries want to have that moment like in the very first Ace Attorney game with the metal detector, where you go “aha!  this seemingly useless piece of evidence turns the whole case around!” but when the evidence is too obvious, then the player realizes what is happening long before the game is ready for it, and the players’ attempts to honestly answer the game with their knowledge turn into the game saying “no you’re wrong.”

I ended up playing this game in such a way where I always second guessed what I was saying, not because I thought I was wrong, but because I wasn’t sure if the game was ready for me to be right yet.  “This contradiction seems obvious, but the last obvious contradiction gave me a penalty, so is the game ready for me to be right yet?” is not a fun way to play. 

Finally I just didn’t think the mystery in this case logically flowed.  A lot of the contradictions they used to meander around (before finally letting us use the fountain pen) weren’t actual contradictions, and at one point I’m pretty sure the game contradicts itself.  It says that the victim in the case mentioned the poison while visiting a University, and the witness Soseki then demanded to see the poison.  Another witness, Professor Mikotoba said ok and showed the poison to them, but the reporter Menimemo was not allowed to go in and see the poison since access to it was restricted.  However later in the case it is necessary information that Menimemo DID go in to see the poison, because that was when he stole it in his fountain pen.

So in the end I was correct, the photographer killed her, he used his fountain pen for the poisoning and the characters were all great.  10/10 characters, -5 for case logic and general gameplay flow.  5/10 overall.  When I put down the case I would have said it was the worst case I’ve ever played, because no case before has ever made me put it down in frustration like that, but after replaying and finishing it, it’s ok just really clumsy.  A shame since as I said I really like Susato as a lawyer, and this is probably the only time we’ll see it unless Ryunosuke gets Maya’d (kidnapped) in the final case.

Should hedge funds be allowed to short a country’s debt?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how credit rating agencies had cut their outlook for Italy, and how this was being blamed for Italy’s borrowing costs going up. Well, Italy’s borrowing costs continue to rise, and this time it’s being blamed on the hedge funds. Whenever I see an article like this make the rounds on social media, I invariably see some of the same comments come up: “hedge funds shouldn’t be allowed to bet against a country like that, they’re making money on other people’s suffering.”

First, I think the moral arguments are misguided. When two companies compete with each other and one drives the other out of business, the successful company could be said to be making money on the other’s suffering. But our capitalist system accepts this as the price we have to pay for an efficient economy, and so I don’t see the big difference between that and countries. Should people not have been allowed to short Lehman Brother’s because its collapse would likely harm the American economy? Surely not, so why should Italian government debt be protected in this way?

Secondly, it’s important to realize that the process of shorting is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the entity doing the shorting and the one lending them the bond. In order for a bond to be sold short, it must be borrowed, then sold, then repurchased and handed back to fulfill the borrow. The borrowing of the bond generates interest, which must also be repaid by the entity doing the short selling. So bond-holders have an incentive to lend out their bonds to short-sellers because this lets them generate interest and therefore income on their bond. If they were not allowed to generate this income, then the bond would be worth less to them and they would not be as willing to purchase it. This would reduce the demand for a nation’s debt and thus would increase borrowing costs, which is something we’re trying to avoid by outlawing short selling.

Third, how would such a short-selling ban be implemented, and what would that affect? The processes that go into a short sale: the borrowing, selling, and purchasing of a bond, are all legal on their own. You would have to write a new, more complicated set of laws therefor to outlaw short selling but not also outlaw these individual practices which seem good and legal. So once you add this new complicated regulation to the market, how many entities will decide that it’s no longer worth it to invest in Italian debt (which has these complicated regulations attached to it) and will instead just invest in German debt (which doesn’t have these complicated regulations). And even if you could ban short-selling EU-wide, then many organizations would just pull their money out of EU bonds and park it into American, British, or Japanese bonds. People think that countries have all the power in the bond market, that they can set the rules because financial institutions need to buy bonds to make a profit. But countries’ bonds are competing with each other, there’s always another bond market people can invest in, and if you want to save Italian borrowing, then scaring money out of the Italian bond market doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.

Finally, short selling is a necessary part of price discovery. Without short selling, markets would not so easily discover the true price of bonds, and so would operate far less efficiently. Again, let’s say you banned short selling throughout the EU. Empirical evidence has shown that banning short selling only increases trading costs and lowers liquidity. That means that if you banned short selling, there would be less money in the market to buy bonds anyway, which again is counter-productive to Italy’s current predicament. In terms of Price Discovery, the failure of price discovery would mean that all prices would tend to converge together, as there is no strong discovery mechanism to discern them. That means the price of Italian debt and German debt would likely converge because investors would not be able to discern their true prices. This would be good for Italy, in fact it is exactly what some people want to accomplish by banning short selling, it might make it easier for Italy to finance it’s debts.

…but it would be bad for Germany. Germany currently enjoys a distinct position as having perhaps the most highly regarded debt in the Eurozone. That makes its borrowing costs very cheap and makes it easy for Germany to finance its obligations. Now, if the EU wanted they could always ask Germany to help out Italy, in fact years ago there was a call for Common European Bonds aka Eurobonds. This proposal would mean that member states could take out bonds which were to be paid back by all members of the EU together, making it easier for states like Italy to get cheap loans (because they were leaning on the German economy) while making it more expensive for Germany to get loans (because they were propping up the Italian economy). It is important to note that this Eurobonds proposal was soundly rejected by the EU and by the Northern EU member states in particular. Absolutely no one was willing to make Germany’s borrowing more expensive for the benefit of Italy.

So with that said, banning short selling would only accomplish what has already been deemed unacceptable. It would cause liquidity problems in the Italian borrowing market, and it could only help Italian borrowing if it also hurt German borrowing due to obfuscating price discovery across the EU. So why even do it? If Italy truly truly needs help financing its debt, the idea Eurobonds would accomplish exact what is desired without harming the bond market.