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The American Challenge Part 7: Building an economy by predicting the future

I’m still going through The American Challenge by Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber, the 1968 book which opines on what Europe needs to do in order to not be economically dominated by America.  A consistent theme for Servan-Schreiber is that European governments should direct investment towards key industries which he thinks are important for the economy of the future.  In some cases he was incredibly prescient, he urges Europe to invest in semiconductors and computers years before they hit the mainstream.  In other cases he seems woefully misinformed, claiming that all future air travel will be supersonic and the Concorde will be surpassed by American supersonic planes.  And in some places he’s oddly silent, saying little to nothing about the future need for renewable energy and global reductions in carbon.

Now of course, he shouldn’t be dismissed for not correctly predicting the future, should he?  Who knew that supersonic flight would never take off?  And how accepted was the idea of global warming in 1968?  Yet this is exactly my problem with his economic model, he can’t predict the future, and no one can.  So his claim that the cure for Europe is to decide which industries are “the future” and invest heavily in those industries above all others doesn’t strike me as very sensible.  Instead of the government choosing which industries to invest in, why not create an economic system which allows good industries to start up and flourish?  A government is by its nature a centralized organization, and that centralization comes with both costs and benefits.  Notably, the people directing the government’s economic investments can’t always be experts in every industry they want to invest in, it’s just not possible for a few hundred government workers to include an expert in everything.  So what if you panel on government investment doesn’t include anyone familiar with computers?  Do you pass the idea up?  And what if your panel does include “experts” in cold fusion, do you redirect all efforts towards a futile project?

This to me isn’t an idle criticism, I don’t think a centralized entity can replace a decentralized market with the same kind of efficiency.  I’m not some harebrained anarcho-capitalism mind you, I’ll try to write later about where the government should get involved, but the maxim of “the government shouldn’t try to choose winners and losers in the market” is one I think has merit, the government just can’t be expected to have enough people and enough breadth to be an expert on all the decisions a market can make.

I think there’s more to this “can’t predict the future” argument too.  Servan-Schreiber has what I have called before a “Sid Meier’s Civilization” view of technological progress.  In essence, this viewpoint is that technology costs a certain amount of “something,” be in money or man-hours, and once you discover a technology it’s yours to use while your opponents don’t have it.  Technology thus progresses as a race where countries need to either catch up to the techs their opponents have (by spending money and man-hours) or find new techs their opponents don’t have (so they can have a decisive advantage).  The problem with this view is that there are many technological paths that prove to be a dead-end where you’d have been better off not spending your resources, and we don’t know which are dead-ends beforehand.  I said last week that the Concorde jet was one such dead-end, it costed billions of dollars with not a lot to show for it, and that was money that could have been invested in the NHS or other government services.  The idea was that if we just keep pouring money into Concorde, eventually we’ll create supersonic flight and it will be just as profitable and useful as we’ve always dreamed it would be. Or at worst we’ll learn a lot of lessons about what we need to do in order to create profitable supersonic flight and our next project will be the one that works.  That wasn’t the case, it turned out supersonic flight just couldn’t compete with moving a massive amount of people slightly more slowly.  Another dead end would be fusion power, an area where we still don’t know if we can do it with modern tech let alone tech from the 20th century.  Many many people predicted that fusion was The Future, and urged governments to invest in it.  But fusion wasn’t the future and it’s probably a good thing that a lot of money wasn’t spent on it.

You can’t predict the future, so a government can’t reasonably be expected to know which opportunities to invest in and which to avoid.  A market uses the wisdom of crowds to decide, and so can be relied on to provide at least some of the efficiencies a government board lacks.  It’s easy to look back 50 years and say “if only Europe had invested more in computers!  We could have had European versions of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon!”  But it’s hard to sit where you are today and decide which of the many investment opportunities are “the one” to invest in.  For example, if Europe should have invested in computers in the 60s, what should it invest in right now?  What is the game-changing area, with returns equal to or greater than the computer industry of the 60s, that Europe should throw all its money in?  3D printing?  Genetic modification?  Robotics?  What is the “investment of the future?”  I’d hazard a guess that no one can agree, and so it’s probably better to rely on the wisdom of the crowds than the political decisions of a government.

Weekend venting about video games part 5

I’m finishing my sort-of review of Great Ace Attorney 2 with it’s final case, Case 5.  Note that as always, there are total spoilers for this case and this game.  BUT ALSO I had a lot of thoughts about this case that related to previous games in the Ace Attorney series, so there are also spoilers for Ace Attorney games 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!  If you plan to play any of the Ace Attorney games, please do as they are on Steam and very good!  Here is the Ace Attorney Trilogy and here is the Great Ace Attorney Duology. But with that said, spoilers ahoy!

I’m gonna be honest, the ending of GAA2 Case 5 was kinda underwhelming  I felt like a lot of the mysteries that had lasted two whole games were solved with wet thud.

I think the most charitable review I can give of GAA2-5 is that it’s an Ace Attorney Final Case.  The series has fallen into something of a formula where in roughly half of the games the final case presents you with an impossible murder (here the murder of Detective Gregson) with seemingly no motive behind it.  Yet as you unravel the tangled web of lies you find that this murder ACTUALLY occurred because of an unsolved murder that happened 7, 8 or even 15 years ago (here the previous murder is “the Professor case”)!  Unraveling your present case necessitates you unravel the case from the past, which usually results in the protagonist solving two murders at once on the same day.  And sure I get it, this formula is pretty strong, but I never felt like GAA2-5 did anything to rise above formulaic.  

And that’s not the only way this case feels like Ace Attorney formula.  Pretty much every Ace Attorney game since the first one has had to have “the Edgeworth” arc.  So spoilers for a 20 year old series, but in the very first Ace Attorney game Edgeworth was an eeeeeeeeeevil prosecutor who acted as the game’s primary antagonist.  He forged evidence, coerced testimonies, and overall acted like a dick.  But halfway through the story, the game starts to humanize him a bit more, until the last case involves him being accused of murder and you having to save him.  This allows him to go from being an evil antagonist to being a good protagonist, and now he’s one of the franchise’s most beloved characters.  This character arc of 

be evil->get accused of murder->become good

Is repeated surprisingly often in these games, and even when they’re not directly accused the prosecutor character for the game has a tendency to start off evil but turn good halfway through.  So I wasn’t really surprised when the GAA duology’s antagonist, Prosecutor Van Zieks, ended up on the docket and had to be defended, he was just going through the necessary motions laid down by Edgeworth.

The only thing that isn’t really formulaic is the tropes this game pulled from other animes, where the childhood friend of the hero gets separated from the hero and turns into an antagonist with their own secret motives.  This happened with Kazuma, who was your protagonist’s mentor in the first game before dying in that game then undying in this one so he could come back as a new prosecutor to replace the Edgeworth-ified Prosecutor Van Zieks. Yes Kazuma was a cool guy, but I don’t think his de-dying between the first game and the second was cool enough for the job he does in GAA2-4 and 5.  He’s nice to have, but not overwhelmingly positive.

With all that, I kinda didn’t like this case.  And it’s hard to put down my feelings in a coherent structure so bear with me.  

I think one thing that keeps making me dislike this case and this game overall is how it undoes the good feelings I had for what came previously.  I really did like Case 2 of GAA1.  It had a bit of a flat ending with the underwhelming “murder” but it worked well enough with the emotional drama that I gave it an 8/10.

  In a way that case reminded me of Case 5 from Trials and Tribulations.  In T&T you had a man who was fundamentally justice-seeking (Godot aka Diego Armando) but who was filled with rage for the one who “killed” him (Dahlia).  He saw Misty Fey channeling Dahlia’s spirit and despite knowing that it was wrong, despite knowing Dahlia was already dead and couldn’t be harmed, he couldn’t help himself, he killed Misty Fey.  Misty Fey for her own part was not a bad person, she had her flaws but was trying to save lives, using Diego’s plan no less. 

This collision between two fundamentally justice-seeking individuals, and one killing the other for a terrible reason, played a lot into the emotion of that trial, and is part of why I hold it in such high regard. 

Case 2 of GAA1 also had some of this.  Kazuma was a good man, and the Ballerina who killed him was motivated by fear rather than hatred, so her feelings could be sympathized with.  A miscommunication between the two of them led to fear and anger and ultimately death.  It was an ok end to Kazuma as a character, even if it was somewhat underwelming.  Then this game comes and undoes all of that.  All my good feelings for Case 2 are completely washed away because now that case is *meaningless*.  Nothing happened, there was no tragedy, no hurricane of emotions, Kazuma didn’t actually die he was just hiding.  It turned one of the first game’s top 2 cases into a joke of IT’S ME RYUNOSUKE, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG RYUNOSUKE.

I felt the same way with this game’s Case 5 and how it altered Case 4 as a matter of fact.  Case 4 was not that good to me, it felt like nothing happened.  Some will try to compare it to Case 4 of Dual Destinies, but I strongly disagree with that. 

In Dual Destinies, Case 4 focused on Apollo and his relation to Clay and Starbuck, Starbuck was the defendant.  Apollo’s sorrow was not “fixed” by any means, but at the end Case 4 at least had a conclusive ending with Starbuck being found not guilty and saying that he would continue what Clay wanted to do: be an astronaut. 

Case 5 in Dual Destinies by contrast focused on Athena and Blackquill, with Athena as the defendant.  Although Clay’s  murder entered into it, it was primarily about the murder of Metis Cykes.  Dual Destinies had a Case 4 that led into Case 5, but it gave you a conclusion and an ending to Case 4 on the way.  This game by contrast felt like NOTHING HAPPENED in Case 4.  Nothing that happened or was discovered in that case felt in any way related to what happened in Case 5 because the entire murder scene and cast were completely different for the second case.  The closest connection you could make between the two cases was the prison warder who was hiding his identity, but he was a completely different character between cases 4 and 5 since his disguise was revealed. 

Case 4 didn’t end with a verdict or anything decisive whatsoever.  In Case 4, my only highlight was the bit at the end with Sholmes, Iris and Mikotoba, where the game SEEMED to be implying that Professor Mikotoba, our friend of two games, was secretly Iris’ father. But even that emotional ending is undone in the same way that GAA1 Case 2’s ending was undone. 

The emotional weight of “Iris found her dad and it’s Mikotoba” is undercut so we can have that same “Iris’ parentage” dramatic reveal a second time, only now with different parents (it’s Van Ziek’s dead brother).  Her new Van Zieks backstory adds really nothing to the emotional weight except to undo my one and only highlight from the previous case.  Instead of Iris’s dad being someone I’ve spent two games with (Professor Mikatoba), and the emotional connection between Iris and Susato (Mikotoba’s other daughter), Iris’ dad is someone I’ve never met (Van Ziek’s brother), and she doesn’t have any siblings or living parents now. 

We turned a tragedy from the first game (Iris’s dad was supposedly killed in the first game’s first case) into a less emotional tragedy (Iris’ dad was killed before the games even began).  All the fun misdirection in the first game, Iris straight up saying that her dad worked with Sholmes, that he went to Japan, all of that stuff made it seem like her dad was John Wilson. But the evidence COULD ALSO have worked if her dad was Mikotoba.  But nope, all of that was complete lies, her dad was someone we never even mentioned until this game, Klint Van Zieks. 

It reminds me of WWE in a way, you have a story that is careening towards an obvious and much anticipated conclusion, and so you change it to a different conclusion just to throw people off.  It may seem dramatic but instead it’s just emotionally unsatisfying.  Her accepting Sholmes as her new father figure is fine and all but feels incredibly strange when all of Game 1 was treating them like co-workers instead of family.  In fact, this revelation of her deciding to treat Sholmes as her father would have been much better served by being a part of THE FIRST game rather than THIS one. In the first game they had a sort of emotional distance, so becoming closer would have made a happy ending. In this game their relationship is changed without warning and the game treats them more like they already are a family, with Sholmes going out and doing odd-jobs to pay for her (despite Game 1 implying she was the primary breadwinner due to her writing the popular Herlock Sholmes serialized detective stories).

From the moment I saw him, I knew Mael Stronghart was a Damon Gant type of villain, someone who is powerful with the police and prosecutors but secretly kills people to maintain that power.  That’s not a knock on the game, it was satisfying to have been able to meet and talk with this major antagonist for two whole games before taking him down.  And this Mael Stronghart storyline is something that was done well, the opposite of how I felt about the Iris stuff.  These games were careening towards a dramatic confrontation with Mael Strongheart, and when we finally got to take him down it was satisfying. 

My biggest issue with Mael was his goofy animations, he was clearly drawn and animated for his role in the first game where he is always standing up.  But in this case he is sitting at the judge’s bench, so every time he needs to do one of his animations he has to first stand up in order to do it because they only programmed the animation for a standing character model.  Just kind of goofy overall even if his theme is badass.

The ending of this case was kind of my only highlight again (so if they somehow undo this in a hypothetical next game, I’mma be real pissed).  Sholmes wasn’t as wacky as I would have liked, but seeing Strongheart’s side of things, the things he did and the reasons he did them, it all made sense and was nice.  The investigation section before that was very underwhelming however. 

It was nice to play as Mikotoba for a hot second, he has a very different style to Ryunosuke, and a different relationship to Sholmes.  But the “Great Deduction” they did together was the second worst of the two games, only better than the one in GAA2 Case 3’s waxwork museum.  Mikotoba does a little dance every time he gives an answer, which was cute the first time but annoying by the 4th, and it’s always the same dance. 

Then the whole POINT of a great deduction was also undercut here.  The reason I liked them as a game mechanic was that Sholmes would make some insane logical leaps that were actually halfway on the way to the truth, and your character had to nudge him back towards a proper answer. 

Notice this: the things Sholmes says at the START of his great deductions area always true, he just goes off the rails.  In GAA2 Case 3 at Drebber’s hideout, Sholmes says “The device in the center of the room is genuine” and “Drebber is the reason for the upturned furniture.”  Sholmes deduces that the device is a gravity machine and Drebber flipped the gravity of the room.  In fact the device is a bomb and Drebber flipped the furniture to find the safe code.  But finding those little connections between the absurd and the dramatic-yet-true are the fun parts of a Great Deduction.  Sholmes does nothing like that here because instead Mikotoba just gives the right answers. It’s less wacky and a lot less fun.  The logic of it was nice and the character work was ok, but overall this was not my favorite investigation section by a long shot.

Then there was court, starting with Judge Jidoku and ending with Mael Strongheart.  You know, Ace Attorney has had every other character be the villain at some point, the Prosecutor (Mannfred Von Karma) the Defense (Kristoph Gavin) the Detective (The Phantom/Bobby Fulbright) the witness (most of them) and even the defendant once (that guy from 2-4).  Finally we had the judge kill someone (Jidoku and Mael Strongheart).  Now we just need one of the hyperactive female assistants to kill someone and these games can finally walk off into the sunset, having used every possible twist.

I thought the court sections were also underwhelming.  I felt like a lot of things that should have been proven with evidence were instead just told to us by Strongheart and Jidoku, it felt like the game was running out of time and rushing towards a finish line.  And because of that several things didn’t even feel explained despite all the exposition.  Sholmes claims he removed Kazuma from the boat in GAA1 and told everyone that Kazuma is dead because he wanted Kaz to stay in Japan and be safe (he thought Kazuma was an assassination target). 

But Sholmes also believed that John Wilson had been an assassination target, and John Wilson was killed in Japan.  Clearly the assassins were in fact operating in Japan and Sholme’s attempt to stick Kaz in Japan would have just put him in even more danger.  They try to say “oh Sholmes’ plan worked since Kazuma wasn’t forced to become an assassin” but Sholmes didn’t know about the assassin exchange, he thought these were assassination targets. 

Finally, a lot of animations just undercut the seriousness for me.  Van Ziek’s animations were obviously made to look good for his profile shot, they kind of don’t look so good when seen face-on.  Mael Stronhart’s animations were made for him standing, so he kept having to stand up to perform his animation instead of sitting down like the judge normally does.  Jidoku and Strongheart’s breakdowns also didn’t look great to me in general.

I think these two cases were just done in completely the wrong way.  Case 4 should have completely been about the murder of Gregson and the murder should have been solved in that case.  We should have had a lot LESS about the red-headed league and the street vendors, and instead had the ship section and convicting Jidoku be part of that case.  Then at the end Kazuma should have indicted Van Zieks as the “reaper of the bailey” and claimed that Van Zieks gave the order to kill, so case 5 could then have focused entirely on the professor, Strongheart, and Kaz’s father.  As it stood case 4 felt slow as molasses and case 5 rushed way too fast.  

So wow, that’s a lot of words about Ace Attorney.  And I have more words ahead!  I’m going to go and replay the first game some so I can talk about it.  I hope you don’t mind my ramblings, but it was enjoyable to write.  And do play the Ace Attorney games!  They’re great!

Coming soon (hopefully): More programming

So a while ago I discussed a tiny tiny Unity programming project that I wanted to work on.  I wanted to make it so I could create little boxes using a button, then have those boxes all explode outward depending on how many boxes were on screen.  I am proud to say I successfully did it, and am now looking to expand my Unity knowledge.

The most immediate desire would be to make these boxes act more like particles of explosive material, IE they should explode in directions that are away from the densest cluster of themselves.  Then I’d like to see if I can make the explosion start in a particular place and travel along the length of the material until all the material has been exploded.  I’m not sure at all how these would work, but they’re part of an idea for a game I’ve been having for a while now.

The American Challenge Part 6: The future will not be supersonic

As readers will know, I’ve been reading The American Challenge by Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber, a book written in 1968 about the problems Europe will face competing economically against America.  It’s always a joy reading through old books and seeing their predictions for the future, and while this book has definitely been a doozy as we’ve seen, I feel the author was WAY off was his predictions about supersonic flight and the French/British Concorde jet.  At a glance the Concorde venture seems to be an example of exactly the kind of public/private partnership that Servan-Schreiber says will be necessary and useful in the economy of tomorrow.  I didn’t take note of it but in discussing the “post-industrial” economy of future-America, he envisions that “private enterprise may no longer be the major source of scientific and technological development” and “the free market may take second place to the public sector.”  Essentially he envisions even the governments of capitalist countries taking on more of the burden of economic risk and development.  He even lays this out as part of why American companies are so successful: they grow to a sustainable size and then get big government contracts that launch them into international relevance.

Yet for all that, Servan-Schreiber spends most of his time griping about how the Concorde is an inferior product to what he expects Boeing will produce with the 2707.  He lays out all the ways Concorde has fallen behind: the Boeing will use titanium because an American public/private partnership has made that economical, and the Boeing will use a swing-wing design which the Concorde’s engineers in their risk-aversion did everything in their power to avoid.  The Boeing will even carry almost twice as many passengers as the Concorde, so while Concorde will get to the market first, Boeing will certainly gobble up its market later with a better, more efficient plane.  All in all, the author claims that Concorde will be the last plane of an old era, perhaps in service no more than 10 years, while the Boeing 2707 will be the first plane of a new era with a longer lifetime and much more to build off of design-wise.

My older readers will already be chuckling.  The Concorde lasted a quarter of a century from 1976 to 2003, while the Boeing 2707 was canceled before Concorde even entered service and Boeing never released a supersonic passenger jet.  Yet Servan-Schreiber’s griping about Concorde may have been vindicated for the exact opposite reason he envisioned: because the future was not supersonic.  The Concorde, for all its technological marvel and prestige, was regarded by the private sector as little but a technological boondoggle.  It costed about 2 billion pounds in R&D and only 20 were ever made.  Inflation adjusted, the tickets for a New York to London flight would cost about 13,000$ today, and they’d have almost zero amenities since every ounce of weight needed to be saved.  You were paying super-premium prices for economy class seats, and no recliners!  To the private sector, the Concorde was a failure and no supersonic passenger jets have followed it.  It was a government prestige project built partly on fear of missing out and losing to the Americans, and was sustained even after the Boeing 2707 was canceled due more to political than economic arguments.  The amount of investment never justified its return, and if you traveled back in time to tell Harold Wilson’s Labour government what it’s future would be, he might have been justified in dumping all that Concorde money into the NHS instead. The Concorde was an example of exactly the kind of public/private partnership that Servan-Schreiber thought Europe needed more of, yet most of his gripes were that the French and British weren’t playing nice with each other and they needed more unity to make the thing work. 

But alas, the future was not supersonic, the future was 747.  The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, over 1500 have been produced, and it still flies today.  And the development costs were comparable to the Concorde, total cost of 3.4 billion dollars for the 747 (in 2004 dollars) vs 2 billion pounds for the Concorde (in 1976 pounds), if someone wants to check my math with the inflation and conversion go ahead, but that looks pretty comparable to me.  And in some ways Boeing did succeed for a few of the reasons Servan-Schreiber defined, they had more capital than their European competitors, and better access to management and technology that would allow for big developments in engineering and design.  Having a bigger number (the biggest plane, or the fastest plane like Concorde was) is very important for national prestige and so always invites government investment, but sometimes just making something good and economical is better, and from 1970 to today American companies have been very good at doing just that.

A promise to myself

Today there are some people I need to say sorry to. But sorry alone doesn’t cut it. There needs to be a future where I don’t have to keep saying sorry because I don’t have all these problems. So in addition to sorry I need to be able to sit down and speak about how to make this not happen all the time in the future.

That’s the harder part. It’s easy to say sorry. It’s easy to show remorse and hope for forgiveness. It’s harder to change behavior. I read that humans evolved the behavior of showing our sadness to each other (crying, facial expressions etc) in order to encourage our friends and family to feel bad and want to help us. When we do something bad, and then show that we’re remorseful about the bad thing we did, the person we hurt will see our sadness and instinctively have some feelings of forgiveness towards us, even if we don’t deserve it and will just hurt them again. I’m not just talking about me here, I’ve seen this phenomenon everywhere, it’s taught about in Psychology as part of the cycle of abuse. Showing sadness is the easiest way to gain forgiveness, but it isn’t going to break the cycle.

So being remorseful is easy, changing is hard but necessary.

The American Challenge Part 5: Why can’t Europe Compete?

In my continued posting about Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge, written in 1968. We have come to the part in the book where he lays out why he thinks Europe fell behind economically by his time period. We have already seen that American Companies are seen as more dynamic, with higher profits, larger investments, and a larger educated cadre of workers to hire. For all these reasons, Servan-Schreiber claims that rather than being a boon to European business, the 1960s forerunners of the EU such as the EEC (European Economic Community) and others are simply being a boon to America. Now instead of needing to have different branches in each country, an American company can set up a single European branch and export its products to the whole EEC. American companies can take advantage of these efficiencies while European companies, still struggling with lower profits and less educated workforces (says Servan-Schreiber) are outcompeted. In short, Servan-Schreiber says that since the beginning of the EEC, the economic gap between America and Europe has only gotten wider.

One of his greatest laments appears to be a very modern one, that despite the supposed economic union, each European country continues to pursue its own goals and directives completely divorced from the others. The demand for unanimous rather than majority voting means that nothing can be done which is unacceptable to any state, and this means that all controversial problems are shoved to the side while the nations of the EEC continue to do their own things. Even when the nations do try to work together, he claims they spend most of their time arguing to ensure they each get a fair share of the money in the pot, rather than actually trying to get something done. He even claims that despite the common market for European Coal and Steel being the very first of the EU/EEC pan-European institutions, “by 1968, there is no longer a common market for coal and steel.” Each nation is busy protecting its own industries and the capital markets are completely divorced from each other. So a German or French industrial company operates almost entirely within their own nation, while an American industrial company will operate not only in America but in all the nations of the EEC as well, gaining an economy of scale benefit that EEC countries lack.

In short, Servan-Schreiber is a Eurofederalist.

As blithe as that statement may be, it feels an accurate one from my reading of him. He does have some other kooky ideas to be fair, he speaks about a future where each European state commits to specialization in a few areas “in the Sweden or Swiss model,” and to spend their resources prudently in only these areas, but that seems like a fantasy with a bad outcome. If Germany decides to specialize in cars, who’s to say their cars will always be the best? Why shouldn’t German cars face competition from Italian or Swedish cars that are also quite good and have investments from their own governments? But a few kooky ideas aside, his main point seems to be that the current European unity is an illusion, and Europe needs real unity in order to compete with the United States.

In some ways this may be oddly prescient. Remember the earlier chapters in which Servan-Schreiber made dark predictions that America would skyrocket past Europe economically? How Europe would be reduced to a near colonial status while America enjoyed unimaginably higher standards of living? Yeah, none of that actually happened, America and Europe are still close together in economic standards of living. I’m no historian, so I can’t tease out the cause and effect, but how much of this was caused by the EU itself? The EU is after all a Eurofederalist’s dream from the perspective of 1968. A truly common market where selling across borders in Europe is no different than selling across state lines in America. Add to that the prodigious increase in college educated workers that Europe gained during the 20th century, and it seems like perhaps Servan-Schreiber’s dark predictions did not come to pass precisely because Europe took the steps he suggested to mitigate them. It’s food for thought at least.

The American Challenge 4: The Computers of America

As I’m going through The American Challenge, one of the most fascinating aspects is the prescience (or lack thereof) the author and others had for computers. This book was written in 1968, and yet already computers were identified as a factor which would accelerate the economy of America, perhaps even launching it past Europe. It’s no secret that of the 5 largest companies in the world today, 4 of them are American tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon). The computer has been good for America, and it’s intriguing to see that having been predicted so early on.

The author envisioned the computer as thrusting America into a “spiral of progress” during the 1980s (which could roughly be seen to coincide with the development of home computers). The author even predicts an “information technology revolution” in which computers would be integrated into nearly every facet of the economy and culture of society, since their transformative power to replace human calculation and information retrieval is by no means limited to the hardest math problems or most complicated queries. The author does however repeatedly assume that this economic revolution will lead to a shrinking work week, which hasn’t happened whatsoever, American workers have continued to be more productive just as the author predicted, but we haven’t reaped all the rewards of that productivity.

The book goes further in sharing a speech from William Knox, of the Office of Science and Technology for the White House. In it he predicts:

  • Computers of 1980 will be a thousand times smaller than 1968, yet will be capable of a billion operations per second (Moore’s Law)
  • Computers will be small, powerful and inexpensive. They will be no more difficult to learn how to use than a car
  • Computers will perform processes in “real time,” they will be capable of all performing all their functions without having to wait for the insertion of punch cards
  • Computers in 1980 will be able to store all the written contents of the world’s libraries, and retrieve them on demand
  • With the help of satellites, computers will be able to link people together from different continents to send data back and forth almost instantly
  • Images will be able to be transmitted alongside text messages. (Cat memes are not far off!)
  • By 1980, American schools and colleges will have computers in them, not only to help organize the students but for the students to use as well

Now, he does stumble with some of his predictions, he thinks that we would soon interface with our computers primarily by voice whereas even today I don’t trust Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to understand me more than 7/10 times. However overall the insight that computers would be part of the next technological revolution was not far from the truth.

But of course, these things didn’t lead America to completely overtake the European economies like the author and others expected, and I think part of it comes down to this: while producing computers is good value for money, consuming them is as well. It’s true that most facets of the modern computer industry are controlled by American companies, if you want to buy a personal computer chances are it will be American branded. But inventing and producing computers isn’t necessary to gain their benefit. European non-tech companies also saw massive productivity gains by buying computers and integrating them into their systems. As I said in part 3, it seems like the education gap between Europe and America was closed sometime in the 20th century, and once that happened the benefits of the computerized economy were available for European companies and workers as well, without having to continue importing American managers and American technicians as the author had expected. In short, the computer revolution occurred, but its effects were much more evenly distributed than the first industrial revolution, perhaps in part because computers themselves are so efficient at transmitting information.

On a final note, one thing William Knox said struck me as prescient both for his time and for our own. He spoke of how computers would so completely transform our communication, that we may find it hard to even communicate with people who don’t have access to one, and those people may be left to the side of the wider global communication network. I think this is still true today, for people who socialize on the internet, those who aren’t on the internet aren’t really part of the culture and their voices aren’t heard. If you don’t have a computer or don’t use one, you’re basically muted from much of the wider culture of today, totally unheard except in extreme circumstances.

Weekend venting about videos games part 4

Yesterday I talked about case 2 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. Since I’ve done cases 1 through 3, I’d now like to talk about case 4, but not so much for the case itself but rather the pattern it follows that I’ve seen a lot of in murder mystery stories. As always, spoiler alert!

This case isn’t really a standalone narrative on its own, rather it is part 1 of a 2-part mystery which makes up cases 4 and 5 of Great Ace Attorney 2. Now that on it’s own is perfectly valid, but here’s the catch. The general pattern of an Ace Attorney or other investigative mystery story usually goes like this: the narrative is built as a trail of breadcrumbs in which the hero starts with a mystery that they have to solve and a bunch of suspicious people they have to talk to. Each person they talk to or clue they uncover is another breadcrumb leading to the truth.  One by one each suspicious person is interviewed and gives their side of the story, so eventually these sub-stories SHOULD build together to create a whole story that tells you everything that happened in the case, right?  Except what often seems to be the case is that everything learned in the first half of the case is basically thrown out as irrelevant, while the real revelations all happen in the second half of the case.  

To get specific with this case: the mystery we start with is the death of Detective Gregson, long-running character for these two games. In case 4, we get a lot of breadcrumbs relating to how Gregson was investigating a Red-Heads Society, and some characterization of the witnesses who found his body. But neither the Society nor the witnesses from Case 4 actually get us anywhere closer to solving the mystery of Gregson’s death. This is because Case 5 reveals that Gregson was ACTUALLY killed on a boat in the English channel, and his dead body was delivered to it’s location in London to be “found.” So everything we learned in Case 4 turns out to be pointless and irrelevant to solving the mystery.

This pattern feels common in a lot of mysteries, the story seems to have forward momentum as each character is interviewed and their part in the mystery is uncovered, but for the most part these characters usually end up having hidden backstories and suspicious circumstances that are completely unrelated to the mystery at hand, and which doesn’t always give any information to SOLVE the mystery at hand except for the fact that this character definitely didn’t do it (usually). So when the final BIG mysteries are uncovered, they at times feel unsatisfying because they’re completely divorced from pretty much everything our characters have been discussing up to this point.

Let me remind you, the Red-Headed Society and every witness from Case 4 are irrelevant to the final answer of who killed Gregson, they could be completely removed and the story would little change. I get why mystery stories do this, you want the player/viewer to constantly feel like mysteries are being uncovered and they’re getting closer to the truth, but you also want the ending to be a BIG UNEXPECTED TWIST that throws the whole case upside down.  But I feel like just completely trashing the first half of the case does this a disservice.

I think there are good mystery stories that avoid this problem, by having later revelations recontextualize what we learned earlier, rather than entirely superceding what we learned earlier, but I also feel like I’d need to spoil have a dozen other stories besides Great Ace Attorney in order to do that conversation justice.

So for now I’ll leave with a final few thoughts: this case was really underwelming but in part that isn’t even the mystery (although it doesn’t help) but rather the emotional weight of the story. Gregson is someone who has been with these characters for 2 games, and the player for more than 40 hours of playtime (by my estimate). He’s someone the players and characters should have grown attached to, yet besides his sidekick no one in the game seems exceptionally broken up about his death. The story kind of has to do this as you find his body and then immediately have to investigate the crime scene, so there isn’t much time in the narrative for sentimentality.

Still I feel it could have been improved by having all the main characters get together for a wake in Gregson’s remembrance right before the Court section, and them all not only remembering him but vowing to bring his killer to justice. A short scene like that could have made the emotional impact of his death work a lot better.

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.