What makes this story work is the tension between staying faithful to the original text and pleasing the gaming community. The game’s developers went out of their way to talk about how they kept many elements of the poem intact, while simultaneously reassuring gamers that they had ditched all the sissy stuff.
The gaming community was actually offended by the marketing campaign for this title. I think it would have been a lot braver, and commercially savvy, to create a game that used Dante’s fear and fragility instead of ditching it for an a stock action hero.
Still I applaud the developers for trying something this ambitious and for bringing attention to such a great work of classic literature.
Just wrote my first blog post for CBS on the real issue Google has with China. Google has managed to frame this as a matter of principles and politics, a smart move that helps them win back some of the support they lost for compromising with the Chinese on censorship.
But the truth is that Google’s was willing to compromise on “being evil” if it meant winning a share of the fastest growing internet market in the world. What they weren’t willing to gamble with was the heart of their global business, customer trust.
I remember playing Sim City as a kid I would leave the game on for hours, even when I wasn’t playing, and return to find my metropolis in flames. Then I would have to scramble to get everything back in working order, at which point the game would become boring, and I would abandon it again. For me, a city in crisis was more appealing than a stable one.
Still the game taught me to think about cities in ways I never had before. I was still in middle school at the time, and my conception of transportation and urban planning was next to nothing. Seeing the impact a well designed network of roads had on my digital domain did awaken a larger awareness of what makes a great city.
The military seems to have latched on to the idea that video games are good teaching tools. A new piece in the Atlantic details the development of a sort of Sim Iraq, where battalion commanders have to pacify an insurgent city by learning the social, cultural, economic and geographic needs of a diverse population.
I doubt any digital city can accurately predict the complex web of interactions that make up a real war zone. But as a thought exercise I believe the game could have real value. Apparently the game works off of real world data, and can be programmed to run “stories” tailored to fit different conflicts.
Over at Danger Room this topic has been bouncing around since 2007. The general consensus there seems to be while the concept is interesting, there’s not much value to these games, and anyone who thinks this will prepare our troops to understand an insurgency is just a couch commander with a hard on for control.
“John Nagl, who helped write the Army’s manual on defusing insurgencies, told Danger Room in 2007. “They are smoking something they shouldn’t be,” retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quipped to Science magazine. ‘Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.’”
I don’t think these games are anything more than a mental primer for the real experience. But as a means of getting commanders to think intelligently about the multiple factors that influence an urban insurgency, I would wager these games have real value.
The most astonishing thing I learned while doing this research was just how wrong my perception of terrorists and suicide bombers was. The idea that high level leaders in complex terrorist organizations are better educated doesn’t give me pause. But according to this article by Alan Kruger, a former Princeton economist now with the treasury, even suicide bombers in places like Gaza are likely to be wealthier and better educated than their peers.
Kruger says that crime makes a poor analogy for terrorism. A better comparison would be to voting. It’s the folks who are invested in ideas, politics and the future of the nation who bother to get out and vote, or who make the ultimate statement with their lives.
There is a prevailing sense among people of a certain age that kids who are sitting alone in front of their computers all the time are failing to build social skills.
But the experts in public health I talked with saw it differently. “Kids today are experts in their friends moods,” was how Christopher Le put it. Le helped write the suicide protocols for Myspace and Facebook and now runs his own company, Emotion Technology, that works on public health in the new media sphere.
I think Le’s point is important. There is definitely a sensation on services like Facebook and Twitter of constant contact. This is no substitute for deep friendships. But when a person puts out a cry for help, friends, onlookers, even strangers now respond.
Much of the subway’s complexity stems from the fact that it originated as two competing companies. There was the Manhattan based IRT and the Brooklyn based BMT, who not only laid their tracks without heed to each other, but sometimes worked at cross purposes. The end result is that the NYC subway is one of the more convoluted underground transit systems in the world.
1924 IRT
The two companies produced separate maps that focused on their own lines, often providing sketchy detail for the competition. This IRT map from 1924 shows all the boroughs, but doesn’t include any BMT lines. Often the maps would portray the company’s lines as straight and the competition’s as crooked. “The idea was simple,” writes Andrew Dow in Telling the Passenger Where to Get Off. “The straighter the line, the faster the trip would look to a customer.”
Fact – the genetically modified turkeys most people eat today grow much quicker than their wild ancestors.
According to Lancaster Farming, a leading agricultural newspaper, “If a seven pound [human] baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, it would weigh 1,500 pounds.”
In all seriousness, why isn’t smell a more popular art form. It’s clearly as evocative as instrumental music. True you can’t dance to it, but I bet it adds as much to the atmosphere in a club as flashing lights or fog machines.
June Trotta, a banker from Brooklyn, was riding the uptown 5 train into Manhattan recently, and she was lost. The train stopped at Bowling Green, Trotta checked the map. The next stop was Fulton Street, and Trotta’s ears were beginning to turn red. “Oh no,” she said, turning to the woman next to her. “Why am I back where I started?” Trotta, a native New Yorker, doesn’t normally ride the 5. “I made myself get on it today,” she explained. “I’m trying to be a grownup about this.”
Four-point-seven million people ride the subway every day. Many of them are grownups, and many of them are lost. Among the eight largest underground rail systems: Berlin, Chicago, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and New York, every city except for New York has a schematic map: a simplified diagram of the routes that run beneath the city, helping passengers get from point A to point B. The New York map, by contrast, is a mash up of underground lines and above ground geography, a dinosaur of design.
An old story I had forgotten about came back to me last week. It was a piece I did for Men’s Vogue, but sadly when that magazine folded the web archives were taken down. I thought maybe I would republish some parts of the piece here for posterity.
The men who built the New York City subway were known as Sand Hogs. They got dirty. They carved out the pathways that make this city work. They understood better than anyone the connection between these underground roads and the city above.
In 1916 Marchall Mabey was working beneath the East River with two other men when the pressurized shaft of the tunnel was punctured from above. As air rushed out Mabey was pulled through twelve feet of earth, through the river itself, and then ejected twenty five feet into the air.
“I was being held tight,” Mabey, the only survivor, later told reporters, “Tighter than any girl ever held me.” Few passengers today will experience the intimacy of subway and surface as Mabey did. A pedestrian walking above a train might feel it rumbling over the tracks below. The connection between that street and trains line on a map, however, is far less concrete.
