Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana

Three solid wins for Obama. Check out the lop-sided victory in Washington. I can find only one jurisdiction that Clinton won: Douglas county, named after Lincoln’s debate opponent. The landslide in Washington is probably because a lot of people had experiences like this one:

I live in a fairly liberal and affluent exurban community outside Seattle. I participated in our statewide Democratic caucus today. It was the first time in 24 years that I attended one of these events. I was not alone, as turnout was estimated at triple the prior cycle. My precinct was composed of mostly middle aged whites. A handful of African-Americans were there.

Obama received 80% of the vote and grabbed all the delegates except for one non-committed. Clinton did not secure enough votes for a single delegate to be sent to the next level. The few Clinton voters were older (60+) women who are either single issue voters of old Democratic times, or supporting Clinton because she is a woman. I feel bad for them because that first serious woman candidate has been Clinton.

Should we call a landslide of white votes for a black candidate an avalanche?

A Biometric Edge?

This is something I wasn’t sufficiently aware of:

The Special Forces are also using some new techniques in tracking and targeting. Commanders won’t talk about these new methods except in generalities, but one area of intelligence that’s visible to everyone is the collection of biometric data. At a border post on the Iraq-Iran frontier, I saw an Iranian putting a finger to an electronic fingerprint device. At the Torkham Gate crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. officers told me they are monitoring Taliban insurgents using new systems known as BATs (for biometric automated toolset) and HIIDEs (for handheld interagency identity detection).

These intelligence tools are shifting the balance of fear — making it more dangerous to join al-Qaeda, stay in its safe houses or meet with its operatives.

If technology can help police against terror without a large presence of occupying forces, perhaps the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can find a feasible way forward. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

McCain Trounced

Kansas’ Christianists do not seem aware that the race is over. This is not the Republican party that falls in line. It’s a Republican party into very discreet factions. Huckabee has no reason not to maximize his delegate count and ensure he gets bragging rights as the runner-up:

"I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles."

He has a good line for everything.

The Naked Talk Radio Emperor

Joe Tobacco writes:

…talk radio does two things very well: It whips up rage about issues that are already disturbing the GOP base, and it ensures that stories favorable to the right, or damaging to the left percolate up into the traditional media. That’s it. No one ever anointed these talkers leaders of anyone, or anything…they simply assumed that mantle for themselves, and were shocked, shocked I tell you when CPAC rolled around, and they saw in the mirror that the mantle didn’t exist: They were naked.

Video Games As Literature

A reader writes:

I’m not opposed to viewing games as art — they should be treated as such.  If Andy Warhol is art, then computer and video games are art. But making the leap to this is a mistake:

"We need more real writers getting involved in making video games, not fewer. The results could be astounding. It will happen. Elitist suspicion of a new way of storytelling will only last so long, and I doubt the next generation of writers, who grew up on the likes of Beneath A Steel Sky, would have so many prejudices. Heaven only knows what a great writer could do with this new format. I can’t wait."

I am a ‘real writer’.  I was a member of the WGA for a decade.  After that I worked in interactive for a decade, as a freelance writer and game designer.  I also wrote a number of papers on the critical problem in interactive entertainment, which has nothing to do with art and everything to do with what interactivity is and is not. After a solid ten years of trying to raise the level of discourse about the integration of narrative and interactivity I simply stopped trying.  Why?

Because there are very, very few people who really understand what this medium is about, while at the same time understanding how stories are made.  Not how they’re written, not how they’re categorized and not how they’re analyzed, but how they’re constructed. 

In the past ten years or so academics have fallen madly in love with what jaded interactive pioneers call ‘the possibilities’, but they’ve moved the medium nary an inch.  Why?  Because they are interested in talking about the medium, not making products.  (If you have any exposure to film criticism, for example, you’ll know instantly what I mean.)  For my take on this aspect of the problem, see here.

Five years ago I was invited to work on an R&D project that I still can’t talk about because of the NDA I signed.  It involved a very large software developer’s attempt to merge a popular fiction writer’s short fiction with the interactive medium, and we as a team were given permission to fail and fail grandly.  The only problem was that the entire conception of the project was itself fundamentally flawed — again, because of a lack of understanding about how stories work as machinery.  It was only by chance that there was another team member (a respected and cutting-edge French developer) who saw the same problem that I saw, allowing us to make that case.  In the end the project blew up (because we exploded it), but six months later I was again asked to work on it because the other members of the team had finally realized that we were right.  I declined because they still didn’t understand how impossible their goal was.

I urge you to remind yourself that serious, serious work has been done on this issue inside the industry for close to fifteen years.  It is not for lack of great writers that the medium resists progress, it is the medium itself that resists.

More background here and here.