Rhinocrisy

An Ohio town, during and after the blackout.

My friend John Hayden wants an annual holiday celebrating the night sky, complete with a universal blackout (of lights, not necessarily of power). He arbitrarily proposed August 4th as the date, although precedent suggests the better date is August 14th, the anniversary of the 2003 blackout that covered most of northeastern North America and left 40 million people in the dark. For romantic reasons I’d prefer Midsummer (traditionally celebrated June 24; coincidentally, the 25th is a new moon this year).

Financial considerations mean any such holiday would be impossible, since the enormous enjoyment people would derive from being able to see the stars would not result in any growth in GDP^*, and thus is, from a capitalist perspective, a useless activity not worth engaging in, and the total loss of consumption in a single night would probably amount to many billions of dollars worth of trade. Not to mention safety considerations (shutting down streetlights on highways, e.g.), enough to scare away even the wildest & craziest of municipal authorities.

This is unfortunate. Personally, stars are the closest thing I have ever come to worshipping, and the idea that one could, in the past, have been casually awestruck simply by gazing upwards at night both frustrates and inspires me. Sometimes I’ll catch the moon in a moment like that - it’s the only thing left that can still do this, and I think it’s difficult for it to bear the weight of the job that the entire firmament used to accomplish. But when it’s full and the sky is clear (or better, if there are only a few tufts of clouds), it can still quite take your breath away.

So light pollution is something of a nemesis of mine; even if its ecological impact is not that great, I believe it’s quite spiritually damaging to us. Heaven is one of the most awesome sights available; a huge body of myth certainly testifies to that. I think I can say quite safely that we have produced nothing that compares to it, and we never will. Our spirits are left bereft and weaker because of that absence, and our devotion to nature is probably also consequently smaller. This may come across as mystic garbage, but I mean it quite seriously; we should take some care as to how our environment reflects on our souls.

There are groups dedicated to fighting light pollution, of course, the best known of which is the International Dark Sky organization. There’s also this group of Neo-Luddites who in the past celebrated the anniversary of the 2003 blackout (though now no longer, maybe). On the other hand, if we want to be more pro-active, an enterprising group of individuals with some high-powered rifles could probably simultaneously knock down enough high-voltage power lines that they would trigger cascading power failures and take down a substantial portion of the electrical grid… but this sort of talk is quickly going to get me into trouble, so I’ll end here.

I don’t write about video games much; I don’t think I have ever, actually. And I don’t really play them all that much, since I find most modern games boring. There’s only so many variations on Wolfenstein-3D you can play before you realize that Id pretty much sucked the FPS genre dry by the mid-90s.

Anyway, so I was pretty excited by this video of Will Wright (creator of SimCity and The Sims) presenting a game called “Spore” at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. He’s managed to fold together many different games into a single one - SimCity, the Sims, Civilization, Pac-man, Space Invaders, etc. But what’s really neat is the introduction of what he calls “procedural” elements. E.g., much of the game involves designing creatures. In an editor you may fiddle around with creature design, add body parts, reshape skeletal structure, etc. The behavior of your creature is then computed by the game itself - that is, if you build a creature with five legs, the game will figure out how a five-legged creature will walk and build on that. This makes the game incredibly fluid in terms of what you can create - and in fact in the game is populated by creatures taken from a player-created database (it’s asynchronous, not massively multiplayer, though - you just download other people’s creations and the game animates and controls them), meaning that an intricate world grows out of your own (and other’s) creativity and interaction with the game itself, not from armies of unimaginative animators.

Pretty cool. If you’re not up for watching a 35-minute video, this Gamespy article has a good summary.