Sports

      I'm not much of a sports fan. I enjoy watching or playing sports every now and again, but I'm in no way a fanatic. So, you may be wondering, why am I doing a post about sport? Well, because I only have nine minutes left to post and this was the best I could come up with. But I also want to question the difference between sports and computer games. Again, I'm not what you might call a gamer, but I do occasionally enjoy playing them. Watching sports with some friends and playing games with some friends are similar in many ways, yet the latter is looked down upon much more, as though it indicates some sort of social ineptitude. I'm not too sure I'm about to defend gamers here, as I know quite a few and several of them are completely socially inept. But, importantly, many of them are not. One of the main reasons male gamers are considered less than their sport watching counterpart has to do with the lack of physical activity (excluding the wii, which true gamers wouldn't touch with a ten foot peripheral). But the fact is watching sport at a bar while drinking a pint and eating peanuts hardly creates a Herculean body.
      So, to cut a lot of ramble out of a post about a subject I don't really have a strong view on, I don't really like gamers or sports people much, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, it's likely the problem doesn't have to do with sports or games, but instead me.

Philosophy and retro games 2 (sort of): Ultra Neuron Pong

Some of you might remember a while ago I did a post on the philosophy of Pacman (read it here). Well I've finally gotten around to doing a sequel. Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything for most retro games (I came up with moral relativity in Space Invaders and the irrationality of love in Mario), so I've come up with a bit of a compromise. Ultra Neuron Pong (click link to play, might not work in internet explorer, but you shouldn't be using that anyway). It's a remake of the arcade classic Pong, but instead of the AI originally used, the opposition's paddle is completely controlled by a neural network (it's a computer thing, don't worry). What's more, you can shoot the network, effectively dumbing down the computer.
That is the point of this blog, dumbing it down. Well, the actual point of this blog is to entertain, inform and enlighten, but the topic of this particular post is dumbing it down. You see, despite my constant attempts at being modest, I occasionally need to admit that, secretly, I'm quite intelligent. I know, you wouldn't have expected me to say that, what with my modesty and all. But it's important for the purposes of this post that we acknowledge that I am smart. Not only am I smart, I also spend a lot of my time thinking. So much so that I often start contemplating going insane so that I can stop thinking. I'm not sure how that would work, but that's not the point. The point is that occasionally everyone needs to dumb down and shut up their internal monologue. There are many ways of doing this, but personally I like playing sub-par guitar or looking at random junk on Amazon. Alternatively I just write a blog, as that typically doesn't require much thought.
So I hope you enjoyed this post and I hope that next week's post doesn't suck quite as much.

Philosophy and retro games 1: Pacman

I'm going to do this blog slightly differently. By which I mean rather insane.

A couple of days ago I was in a car going home and, like everyone, I was thinking about existential philosophy. At the time I was thinking about the simulation of a universe (specifically one governed by aesthetic laws instead of physical ones, but that isn't really important) and how it would be possible to assign meaning and goals to the simulated beings. This lead me to question whether the assignment of meaning from a greater universe necessarily meant that meaning was valid. Then I had a revelation: Pacman is a great analogy for life.

To help explain, I've included Pacman below. Play it. (To those using a mobile browser or can't use Pacman for whatever reason: dress up in yellow, put white marshmallows down, then eat them while WACA-WACA-WACA. In fact, anyone who does this, with ghosts, in a public place and films it for evidence wins a blog post of their choice, as well as a cup of coffee. Seriously.)

Now, having played it, play through it again but this time with an existential view; don't do anything until you've worked out a reason for doing it. This will lead you to just sit there as you get eaten three times.

You know what you have to do (eat some white dots) while playing whilst avoiding death (literally represented by the ghosts). What you don't know is why you are doing this. You don't enjoy the individual white dots. All that happens if you fail is you get a game over. But does this affect you?

This is the same as life, we might know what we intend to do with life (get a job, fall in love, have sex etc.) whilst avoiding death. But we have no greater reason for this than pleasure attainment.

But the real revelation with this was the difference between playing the game without thinking of the point and playing just thinking of the point. The latter never comes up with a satisfactory answer. They also have a lot less fun in the process.

This is the same as life: you'll never figure out why, but you'll miss it if you try.