The Quern

It's All Grist for the Personal Mill

Archive for category Writing and Philosophy

Narcissism on The Biggest Loser

Jan 29

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

Robin and I are big fans of the television show The Biggest Loser.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a weight-loss reality show where a number of severely overweight people are taken to a “ranch” and put through an intensive training program with two top physical trainers (Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels).  They compete in weekly weigh-ins and the people or team that lose the least are put at risk of elimination.

This makes it sound like a typical sleazy reality TV show, but The Biggest Loser generally tries to stay positive, with even the contestants who are eliminated first gaining a new outlook on life and, with the help of the show, losing a large amount of weight.  It’s a very positive-sum game.

Of course, though, the risk of elimination leads to “gameplay”: exploiting the parameters of the show to optimize weight loss to when it’s most valuable.  Although it’s never discussed on the show, the tactic of choice seems to be “water loading” — drinking large amounts of water to keep body weight high.  Contestants do this when they have immunity from elimination for the week, so they can load up to display only a pound or two of weight loss, and then really show a huge loss the next week.

In the current season, the red team has done this two weeks in a row.  This isn’t unusual in and of itself, but the interaction between the trainers and the red team (Melissa and Lance) is.  Melissa is the one who’s been sandbagging, gaining a pound one week and losing one the next.  When the trainers and the host questioned her about her gain the first week, she played dumb, claiming she didn’t know why she wasn’t losing.  When she lost only one pound the second week, they really jumped on her, up to and including calling her a liar to her face.

Her reaction was interesting to me.  Although her lies on the scale are completely transparent — you know she’s lying through her teeth — she gets enraged, tearful, and defensive when confronted with that fact, and that outrage is real.  Real enough that it cowed Bob, who questioned his own knowledge of the biology of weight loss when faced with her strident denials.  Jillian wasn’t fooled, but chose to just “move forward” rather than try to crack her stonewalling.

It just didn’t make sense to me why she would:

  1. Maintain such a pointless lie about something that is a legitimate gameplay tactic, to the self-destructive point of pissing off her fellow competitors and the trainers, while
  2. Exploding in rage when her integrity was challenged.

And you’ve got to wonder what all this is going to look like to her teenage and pre-teen kids.  Great example, Mom!

She has to know this can’t continue; in fact, she miraculously lost 11 pounds this week, even though she again had immunity.  Amazing!  Two weeks with net zero weight loss, and now 11 pounds this week!  It’s a miracle!

Well, as Jillian knew, it was because you can’t realistically drink 30 pounds of water.  I’m sure she’s water-loaded as much as she can, but that’s as far as she can go, and the rest had to show on the scale.

What’s the explanation?  Particularly for the rage?  I’m guessing, in the style of The Last Psychiatrist, that it’s narcissism.

Melissa sees herself as a honest person.  Sure, she’s in a reality TV show, so she’s playing the game.  She’s lying with every word, deliberately provoking other team members, and basically acting like a huge witch, but that’s not really her.  She wants herself to be perceived based on her own internal image of herself, not on her actual actions.

That’s why Jillian and Bob calling her on her lies is such a threat to her.  “You’re calling me a liar!  My ethics and integrity are everything to me!”  Sure, they are.  In reality, her appearance as an ethical person with integrity is everything to her.  Actually behaving ethically and with integrity, not so much.

Tags: ,

“Facilitated Communication” for Autism — Today’s Snake Oil

Jan 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Politics, Writing and Philosophy | 2 Comments

I’m not going to stomp on any parent of a child with autism seeking out therapies to try to improve their child’s quality of life and long term prognosis.  Robin and I are right there with you.  But how many more devoted parents of autistic children are going to have their lives ruined because of the unjustified belief in “Facilitated Communication”?

This story is typical of several that have come out over the past few years.  An autistic girl “says” through her facilitator that her father is sexually abusing her.  CPS is notified by well-meaning school administrators, and the parents’ lives are systematically destroyed.  The father is jailed, their autistic children are taken away and placed in foster care.  Jobs are lost, reputations are destroyed.  And in the end, when someone actually thinks to perform an actual scientific test to determine whether Facilitated Communication is reliable enough to let the girl testify at trial, the results are pure gibberish:

On Jan. 28 and 29, 2008, Judge Marc Barron held a hearing to determine the accuracy of facilitated communication so that it could be used when Aislinn testified in the coming hearings and her father’s trial. Barron ordered that Scarsella leave the room when Aislinn was asked a question. After the question had been posed, Scarsella could return and facilitate Aislinn’s answer on the keyboard.“Do you have a brother or a sister?” Aislinn was asked.

“3FE65,” she answered.

Could she clarify that answer?

“7BQJVWTTT7YI.”

“What color is your sweater?”

“JIBHJIH.”

Belief is a stubborn thing. There were plenty of signs that Aislinn’s supposed accusations against her father were never valid. In early interviews with police she was unable to name her dog or her grandmother, facts Scarsella didn’t know.

With Aislinn’s FC being the only evidence that abuse had occurred, the charges were dropped. On Feb. 22, 2008, after 80 days in jail, Julian Wendrow was released.

The police said they still feared for the children.

The police said they still feared for the children.

The police said they still feared for the children, yet there was no reliable evidence whatsoever that these accusations had even a shred of truth to them.

Of course this is a sad story.  It’s all too easy to put myself in the position of the father here.  I have an autistic daughter, whose verbal communication is very limited.  Should the school district decide that FC was something to try with Katherine, and some facilitator with an axe to grind decided to make up allegations, I could be lying sprawled out on a urine-covered concrete jail floor just like this man was.  Just like that.

But the real tragedy isn’t that this situation happened.  At least the truth came out, the father is released, and that family can start to work on dealing with the added burdens our wardens of society just heaped on their heads.

No, the real tragedy is that people still buy that FC works for communication with autistic children.  Despite the fact that in simple, blind trials FC has never been shown to work worth a damn, people still believe in it.  These tests are completely simple, folks.  Just like tests disproving ESP, just like they demonstrated above, all you need to do is to ensure the facilitator doesn’t have the knowledge that the autistic person does.  If they don’t know it, they can’t make something up, whether it’s consciously or via some sort of unconscious Ouija board effect.

Take the facilitator out of the room.  Show something to the subject.  Bring them back in and ask them to facilitate a description of the object.  That’s all it takes! If the questions are answered correctly, maybe there’s something to it.  But they aren’t ever answered correctly with autistic children in properly controlled circumstances.  The fact that a man was jailed and arraigned for raping his daughter on the basis of a communication modality that can’t pass this simple test is absolutely insane!

Famed debunker James Randi discusses FC here, specifically referring to the recent claims that a man that was paralyzed in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time.  He includes links pointing out the fraud, but I think my favorite quote from the article is this (emphasis mine):

My tests of autistic children at the University of Wisconsin-Madison clearly showed that FC was simply a tragic farce.  My findings were totally ignored. The full account of this matter will be discussed in detail in my next book, A Magician in the Laboratory.

They invited  him in to investigate the validity of using FC with autistic children, but when his results didn’t support the theories, they ignored him.

Wegner, Fuller, and Sparrow published a very interesting article tying FC to the “Clever Hans” effect, with a thorough (and damning) survey of scientific test results to date (the article was written in 2001):

The bright hope for FC was soon dimmed by research showing
that many facilitated responses originate with the facilitators themselves
(Felce, 1994; Jacobson, Mulick, & Schwartz, 1995). One
telling study delivered separate questions through headphones to
facilitators and clients, and the resulting answers were found to
match the questions given to the facilitators, not the clients
(Wheeler, Jacobson, Paglieri, & Schwartz, 1993). It turned out that
FC could not uncover facts unknown to the facilitator (Cabay,
1994; Siegel, 1995; Simpson & Myles, 1995). When clients were
given messages or shown objects with their facilitators absent, they
were not able to describe these items in subsequent FC (Crewes et
al., 1995; Hirshoren & Gregory, 1995; Klewe, 1993; Montee,
Miltenberger, & Wittrock, 1995; Regal, Rooney, & Wandas, 1994;
Szempruch & Jacobson, 1993). Although some proponents of FC
attest to its effectiveness even in the face of such evidence (e.g.,
Biklen & Cardinal, 1997), the overwhelming weight of research
indicates that FC consists largely of communication from the
facilitator (Twachtman-Cullen, 1998).

I don’t believe the facilitator in the case I described above acted with conscious malice.  I’m sure something was “facilitated” in the normal course of the daughter’s education that looked incriminating, and the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” effect took off from there.  Certainly the police still smell that smoke, even after it was proven there wasn’t any smoke in the first place.  It’s simply inexcusable that law enforcement personnel would accept what is effectively hearsay evidence without any determination as to the reliability of this communication.

People’s lives are in the balance, folks — people that already carry a heavier burden of duty and responsibility than you likely know.  Don’t let institutional stupidity and wishful thinking — heck, almost every cognitive fallacy in this list, really — drive these parents even further into the dirt.

Tags:

Inform 7 Development: Implementing Single-Keyword Conversations

Dec 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | 7 Comments

This is part 2 of a series.  If you haven’t read the first part, you might want to start there.  In that post, I describe how to use Aaron Reed’s Keyword Interface extension alongside Eric Eve’s Conversation Package family of extensions to implement highlighted topic lists for Inform 7 conversations.

In this post, I’ll share how to implement single-keyword conversation analogous to what Aaron Reed does in Blue Lacuna, and also share a few bugfixes for the code from the first section.  By the end of these two posts, you should have the tools you need to integrate these two extensions and implement a robust, TADS 3-like conversation engine using highlighted topic keywords and a single-keyword user interface, with surprisingly little work.  Of course, coming up with good content is another matter…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,

Inform 7 Development: Integrating Aaron Reed’s Keyword Interface and Eric Eve’s Conversation Package by Way of Emily Short’s Complex Listing

Dec 21

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | 7 Comments

Eric Eve has provided a wonderful conversational extention for users of Inform 7. Called “Conversation Package“, it uses a number of his other extensions to wrap up as full a TADS 3 conversation implementation as he could put together.  If you are curious as to why that’s so great, I encourage you to read the essay by Mike Roberts, the author of TADS 3, that covers his analysis of conversation methods in interactive fiction.  I’m pretty thoroughly convinced by his arguments that an ask/tell conversation system with topic prompting is the optimal way to implement conversation in a game where it’s going to be more than trivially important to the gameplay, and where there’s no pressing reason to handle it differently.

Likewise, Aaron Reed, author of Blue Lacuna, has published an Inform 7 extension called Keyword Interface.  Blue Lacuna uses a very user-friendly system whereby the user can perform certain actions by simply typing highlighted keywords — specifically: examining items, moving to different locations, and selecting topics in conversation.  The Keyword Interface extension provides drop-in support for examining and moving as in Blue Lacuna, but requires significant user implementation to make topic keyword highlighting work in your game.

In this article I’ll detail the steps necessary to make Aaron’s topic keyword highlighting work in the context of a Conversation Package implementation.  I’m not addressing what you would need to do to get one-word keyword conversations actually functional (mainly as I haven’t gotten around to that yet — when I do, I’ll post it) — this is just to get the highlighting working.

With that said, let’s get started!

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,

“Good Eats”

Dec 2

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Humor, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

alton_brown_geek_motivator[1]OK, this will be a special early post so I can get the link out there.  This month we’re hosting Dinner Club, and rather than our usual Iron Chef-style theme ingredient, we decided to go with an Alton Brown theme.

Part of the reason is that we’ve been watching a lot of Good Eats lately in the evenings after the two older kids are in bed but while Jonathan is still active.  Usually the choice is between Star Trek TNG and Good Eats as to decent shows to watch, and Alton has more… general appeal, shall we say.

So we came up with a comfort-food menu based on Alton Brown’s recipes, but I had a brainstorm after finishing the menu:  I’ve been working on interactive fiction lately — why not make an interactive menu?

I didn’t have enough time for that, but I did put together a short, themed interactive fiction work, loaded with Alton Brown quotes and quote-look-alikes, to serve as a companion piece — an appetizer if you will — to this month’s dinner club.

I used a couple of 3rd-party extensions and the core of one of my own proto-extensions to speed development, and after about 3-4 hours of work I ended up with “Good Eats”, an interactive menu.  Click on the link to run it directly in your web browser through Parchment, a Javascript interpreter.  The reason you can do this with this game and not with my competition game is because this one is small enough to fit in the old Infocom Z-machine format, which is the only one currently supported by Parchment.  You can, of course, also download the file directly and play it on your favorite standalone interpreter.

I hope you enjoy “Good Eats” as much as I enjoyed making it!  It was a nice break from longer, more involved projects; I now see the appeal Speed-IF has for participants where I didn’t before.

Tags: , , ,

IFComp 2009 Overview — Grounded in Space Postmortem

Nov 16

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | 6 Comments

pcm_trophy_lrg[1]The Rule 5-induced cone of silence has lifted, and the results are in!  Grounded in Space did reasonably well, placing 10th out of the 24 entries, very close to where I expected it would be (I had mentally blocked out 8th to 14th as the range I was expecting, based on reviews and my own experience playing the competition games).  I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people participating in this year’s competition.  Here are some of the major lessons I took away:

1.  I probably wasn’t ready to release Grounded in Space.  I vastly underestimated the amount of work required to make the game release-quality, especially post-beta work.  And I definitely did not know Inform 7 well enough to accomplish everything I wanted to; the triage required on the design to get the game playable was pretty severe.  Many of the cool parts of the original design ended up on the cutting-room floor, due to either lack of facility with the language or a self-inflicted lack of time.  I slacked a bit in the middle where if I’d put in more effort I might have accomplished quite a bit more.

2.  I’m glad I did release.  The experience of competing in IFComp ‘09 was invaluable; there are things I learned from the process, from the other games in the Comp, and from the discussions on the authors’ forums, that I probably couldn’t have learned in any other way.  In particular, I believe that I could not have learned the final process of making a game releasable — the testing and tradeoffs required in the end stages of development — had I not forced myself through it, even with a game that ended up deficient in some ways.

3.  Reviewers are all over the map in terms of what they like or don’t like.  I was pretty unlucky in that the first few reviews all either said or implied “I don’t like Heinlein.”  Well, that pretty much meant those reviews were going to be bad, since Grounded in Space is directly patterned on Heinlein juveniles to the best of my ability.  Later reviewers were more kind in that respect; there are some Heinlein fans out there after all!  Similarly, some folks liked complicated puzzles and some probably would have punched me if I’d been to hand when they got to the engine console.

4.  Notwithstanding #3, there were a number of valid criticisms of my game that were widely given:

  • The premise was really off the wall, and a lot of reviewers bounced off of it.  Sam Kabo Ashwell was very insightful here — it really was the result of me taking the shortest distance between two plot points.  Even a little more thought and effort here would have lowered the suspension of disbelief bar substantially, I think.
  • The introduction lacked interactivity — some objected to this and some didn’t, but there were certainly ways I could have improved interactivity in this section, and I simply didn’t have time to do so.  That was the first section I coded, so it was the one with the least language facility backing it.  I wanted to rewrite it, but bugs with the engine puzzle kept me busy right down to the wire, and I didn’t get the chance.
  • I got criticism that the engine puzzle was not suitable for the text format.  I disagree with this somewhat; I think that with a better text interface I could have made this more palatable for a lot of people.  But a subset of players was never going to be happy with a puzzle that required you to SET THETA DIAL TO -1575, and I didn’t realize quite how large that subset was.

5.  The game is likely unsalvageable.  At this point there are enough flaws baked into the design that trying to improve the game experience would require gutting and rewriting large sections of it, and I’m not going to do that.  I started on another work the day I submitted this one, and I’m planning to move forward with that instead.  There will, however, be a sequel to Grounded in Space at some point in the future.

6.  Inform 7 is awesome.  The learning curve is… interesting — you can get off the ground quickly, but getting really good with it requires you to cross the natural-language equivalent of the “uncanny valley”.  But the expressive power of the language is amazing, and I’m sure the pleasure (and it is, truly, a pleasure) of developing in Inform 7 is one of the main reasons — along with the great people in the community — that I’m so excited about continuing to write IF.

7.  Develop like you were developing any other kind of software.  I didn’t do this at first, treating it as if I were typing up an email.  Oh, I designed up front, of course, and had plenty of design documentation.  But I didn’t have source code control, nor any kind of issue tracking/prioritization system, and so I found myself wasting time on trivial issues or, worse, fearing to make changes in complex code (the reflectors, anyone?) for fear of breaking more things than I was trying to fix.  For my next project, I’ve addressed this; I’m now using Perforce for source code control and I already feel more fearless, comfortable, and productive as a result.

8.  Some of your beta testers should be from the IF community.  I used exclusively non-IF friends for testers, and although they found staggering amounts of bugs, helped me with aspects of the story, gave me a great insight into how newbies might interact with the game, and really got me to widen my net of synonyms, a few IF vets in the mix would probably have latched on to the more structural shortcomings of my work and made suggestions early on that might have helped me avoid some of the big design/architecture pitfalls I stumbled into.

9.  The whole experience was great, and an encouragement to proceed.  Even the negative reviews usually had something nice for me to take away.  The good ones (and there were more of these towards the end of the Comp, for some reason) were extremely encouraging.  Knowing my work clicked in a good way for some people, no matter how few, is a very powerful motivator to continue, and I will certainly be writing more IF and entering the Comp again.

So thanks to everyone who played the games this year, particularly to those who took the time to write reviews and let us know what you thought of our works.  I enjoyed writing for you and hearing both what you considered good about Grounded in Space and what you considered bad.  Next year I hope to improve quality on all fronts and produce something that will knock your socks off!

Tags: , ,

Posting Schedule Change

Oct 14

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

clock_screen01[1]With Jonathan’s arrival and the attendant extra work (and reduced sleep) I think I’m going to once again change the posting schedule of this blog, so as not to have to generate filler posts just to say I posted something.

I’ll be posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from here on out.  That should be a more feasible schedule and I should be able to come up with more substantial posts.

Tags:

IF Development Tools

Oct 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

Christopher2[1]

Chris Doesn't Use Source Code Control...

Although Rule 5 is still in effect, so I can’t discuss my IFComp-submitted work, I’m still working on IF.  I’ve started two new projects which will share a bit of infrastructural code.

This time around, I’m improving my processes.  As a professional software developer, I wouldn’t dream of doing a project at work that didn’t use a source code control system.  In my previous IF work at home, however, I didn’t bother to set one up in the beginning.  While I was just dinking around, it wasn’t a problem.  However, once I got serious about a project, the closer I got to completion the more nerve-wracking it was making changes, for fear I’d blast something and have to laboriously reconstruct it.

Source code control protects you from this single-point-of-failure problem.  With an SCC tool, you check out and check in versions of the source code, so losing your current copy only loses you the changes since your last checkin.  In addition, a centralized SCC gives you a repository, so there are multiple copies of your file in the event of a catastrophic disk failure (of course, you should have a backup strategy as well; that’s orthogonal to the SCC issue).

I resolved that I wasn’t going to walk the tightrope without a net again.  The question then became which SCC system to get.  There are several good choices:  Subversion; Mercurial; Git; and Perforce, to name the top contenders.

I didn’t want to spend any money, but I’m not particularly ideologically wedded to an open source project.  I also use Windows, which affects the types of UIs available for OSS systems like Git, where the primary focus is on Unix-based systems.  What cinched it for me in the end was that Perforce, the system we use at work, apparently offers a free, non-expiring download of a 2-person maximum server, which is full-featured and supports all of their client apps.

I downloaded it and fired it up, and it was perhaps the easiest setup and configuration of a software package I’ve had to date.  No more than 5 minutes and the server was up and running, configured as a service.  3 more minutes and I had P4V running on my development machine and was importing my files.

Everyone has their own taste in SCC, but if you haven’t tried one yet, and if you’re working in a Windows environment, you could do far worse than to use Perforce.

Tags: , , ,

IFComp 2009 Final Pre-Submission Update

Sep 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

The “last” bugs have been squashed.  The walkthrough is written.  BB1162-002The beta testers have been credited.  The file is uploaded.

Grounded in Space is finished.

You won’t hear much from me on the subject until November 15th, when the judging is complete.  As per Rule 5 of the Interactive Fiction Competition, I cannot comment on my game or respond to reviews at any time during the judging period.  I do hope to have an extensive postmortem after that point, where I go into detail about what I learned and what I’ll do differently next time.

I will say that I’m already planning at least one new project; this one was so fun, challenging, and rewarding that I’m sure I’ll be motivated to try again at least one more time.

I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, but it’s absolutely been time and effort well spent, no matter how I do in the competition.  It’s helped me to learn a new programming language and practice my writing, exposed me to some excellent interactive fiction in a community that I had no idea even existed before, and motivated me to follow through and finish a fairly large project purely on my own, with my own willpower and resources, giving me confidence that I can handle a project of this scale outside of the confines of work.

This last week was a doozy.  At the very last minute, one of my testers found a couple of issues that exposed a whole class of bugs that neither me nor my testers had found previously.  I spent Saturday evening frantically rooting them out, prior to bringing my wife home from the hospital with our new son on Sunday.  I’m pretty confident the bugs are cleaned up.  Of course, I’m also fairly confident there are others, and that there are weak spots in my writing that another pass might have addressed.

In the end, though, you have to call it a day sometime, and I choose now.  Play it and enjoy it; it’s yours now.

Tags: , ,

IFComp Update #15

Sep 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

3039522605_72b86b1e2e[1]Depending on how things go, this might be my final pre-submission update.  I’m up to Beta Release 7 at this point — my testers have been finding bugs at a truly staggering rate, which is testament both to their persistence and my questionable implementation decisions.

Beyond bugs, the testers also identified a lot of areas where the flow of the game was bad, or where I was dumping an unreasonably large amount of text onto the user at once.  Also, several of the testers are completely new to IF, so reading their transcripts is really helping me to identify alternate command formulations that I should support, as well as extraneous wacky actions, synonyms, and the like.  One tester in particular has been excellent at triggering almost every conceivable state machine misfire, and thanks to his work the game is much more solid and stable now.

The testers seem to enjoy the plot and writing so far, although not all have made it past The Big Puzzle yet, so we’ll see when they get to the end.  I’m definitely paying the price for some of my ignorance of the proper way of doing things in the early days.  I made some mistakes early on that are not feasible to fix at this point, and that cause some really wacky behavior.  Next time around I will definitely have a much better idea of what things are fairly straightforward to implement and which are error-prone.

I’m also disappointed (as I suspect almost everyone is at one time or another) with how conversation works in my game.  I use the standard “ASK X ABOUT Y” syntax, which is fine as far as it goes, but feels limiting even as it fails to provide any sort of ongoing conversational flow.  The next time I need to implement NPC conversation, I’m definitely reading Emily Short and Mike Roberts before starting.

The competition starts in just over one week, so I will likely be uploading my submission before Wednesday of next week.  What that means is that the next update will probably be a quick post-submission report before the comp kicks in, after which I will have to maintain radio silence as per Rule 5 until the judging period is over, which will be November 15th.  To fill the time, I should have a new son in the next week or so, so I don’t think it will be a tremendous hardship to wait.

Wish me luck!

Tags: , ,

The Quern is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache