World-Building and Bioshock

Apart from taking care of our baby, working and a lightning trip to Moscow and Barcelona, I've been trying to play Bioshock Infinite lately.

I heard and read reviews about this game, and there has been lots of posts, screenshots and gifs around the internet. Just form the beginning, the game can catch your eye by looking like this:

It's not only graphics, which are really good...is the world that they're showing you. A world of fantasy, a floating city with rails connecting sections, huge statues, a thriving population, shops, houses...all this mixed with steampunk technology. It looks awesome.

However, this is not all, by far. I started playing and was immersed in a complex and weird story, starting with an introduction that takes a long while before you even fire a single shot (apart from firing in little fair tents that have games of marksmanship). This introduction is incredible, makes you feel inside this place...but more important, makes you believe such a place exists.

Maybe a great part of what makes art amazing is its ability to create worlds that do not exist. You can see that in movies, in literature, in dance, even in music and paintings...they can show reality, but they can go further than that, and show you the realms of the imagination. These realms can be amazing, scary, dark, cheerful, modern, dream-like, happy...and in these realms you can make your own rules, in history, in economics, or even in physics.

Games are art, even if not recognized by everybody, and good games create such worlds while putting you in control of someone or something inside that world.

When these worlds are created with art, it is very important that they're created well. A bad painting, that messes up proportions just because of lack of skill will remind you that it's just a painting.  You may enjoy it, but reality will point out the problems it has, and you will return to your own world much faster. You can apply that with any other world-building work.

That's why world-building is very important. The most clear example you can find are novels. Novels, by its extension, have lots of time to create a world. It's hard to put a lot of details in a movie that last 90 minutes, but in a book of 500 pages you have time to develop a universe inside. Books have a lot more margin to define this world, which can be slightly or a lot different than our own.

And nothing will make a story lose its appeal as a badly-build world. I believe Terry Pratchett (or somebody commenting on his work) once mentioned that his created city of Ankh-Morpork submerges you in it because you don't need the protagonists to be there for it to work. If the hero was not walking around, doing hero stuff, its inhabitants would still work, and live, and eat food, and buy things, and all that. That created world is so rich that when the heroes stroll around it, it's easy to believe you're there with them. It makes sense internally. Does it matter that magic is real, the earth is flat, and that the sun orbits earth in there? No, because its consistent with itself, and it works...if you imagine a world described as it is in the books, you can see that it's solid, it has its own life.

Now, that may sound blasphemous...but let's have a look at Tolkien. Let's concentrate on Gondor. What does exactly that region do? It basically fights the Dark Lord, permanently, always at war for who knows how many years, all their people soldiers, all their people closed inside their walls. Now, Tolkien has great world-building skills, and this world is rich and varied. However, Gondor in particular makes little sense, and personally that's why it seems also like the most boring part of the books, when Gondor defends itself or attacks (when Rohan helps it's fun, but while there's only Gondor, it's boring), because I cannot help but wonder how the hell it's still standing, or how people manage to live there.

Now, you can maybe say that Tolkien explained these details in some other work, or that some things are implied without being said...however, I still think that Gondor, in the Lord of The Rings, is not well made, and it fails to stand on its own logic. People would not live there if it wasn't for the plot.

There are lots of lesser books that nevertheless grasped quite well this concept of World Building. For example, the Belgariad and the Malloreon are not greatly written, or very original...but its characters are much more alive than some of Tolkien's characters, and there's a lot of details to simple facts...like the fact that, if somebody's going to wage war, that someone is going to provide food for the troops, and then if you invest in some cheap food, you may get huge rewards...or, that a moving war front needs a constant supply of materials, which needs to follow you and form a chain with the origin of the supply. That gives a lot of coherence to the book.

Before I mentioned that movies do not have as much time for world-building...but that does not mean they should not have a good one. The easiest way to see that a movie is full of bullshit is if the world is rather inconsistent with itself. Take Star Wars prequels, where in a galaxy of millions of planets, that have billions of people and species in each planet, there's like 6 characters that are always present when something important occurs, no matter the place. That's laziness right there, and returns you to reality fast enough to scream bullshit.

Games are in a middle term, taking longer than movies but not being able to say as much as books do. In games, immersion is very dependant on that world-building. The first Bioshock game was impressive, the water rendering was amazing, physics involved in its movement were pretty awesome, and the introduction was very surprising...however, the supposed "city" did not seem a city at all. Even considering that an underworld city needs to have small corridors, it never felt like corridors, just a single endless corridor that railroaded you from place to place, with a few exceptions where you had a couple of different rooms to visit. Also, everybody was an enemy. For a city that was supposed full of people, even after a disaster, it felt empty, lifeless....and the fact that the corridors were not a labyrinth, or a grid, removed the feeling of being in a city, putting you back in reality and saying "Game with linear design".

Bioshock Infinite, in just the first hour of gameplay, shames the first Bioshock by showing how it's done: It moves you to a great city in the sky, with people, with attractions, shows, shops, toys, children and adults, subculture, rebellion, social problems, radio shows, music.....in general, life. You can see that people live there, you believe so, because it makes perfect sense, internally. The game still has a linear design, but by defending these flaws as part of life in there, such as the fact that private houses are closed, or that flying streets sometimes are not connected and may have timetables or change depending on the moment, makes you ignore the fact that you're basically moving from point A to point B in a straight line.

You feel in a city, with people living there, and you see that it does not require your character for it to make sense.

This is world-building when done well. Great stories and great art will always have great world-building. And Bioshock Infinite does it very well indeed....

Country Full Of Idiots

We've been rather busy these days, as it's to be expected. However, we're managing so far, and enjoying our new life :).

In this period, there was a piece of news that I wanted to comment when it appeared, but I didn't have the time or the inspiration at the time, so now it's rant time. The article can be summarized in these graphics:

The first one shows average results in reading comprehension by country. The second one shows results in mathematics.

Any statistic like this needs to be taken with some scepticism. One never knows the exact details of the tested group, and if everything was fair and really representative. However, we can believe real situation is something close to this.

What this shows is that Spain is full of idiots. Maybe great people, but still idiots. This explains why governments don't know how to solve problems. Even if part of what's happening right now was done on purpose by our government to help their rich friends, there are things that escape to their control, that show they're not smart enough to find a solution. This is paired with a stupid society, and the result is that the stupid society keeps voting for the same idiots all the time.

For a while, I've been thinking that there are two new laws we should use. In each case, I can think of a soft way to apply it, and a hard way.

The first step that we need to improve things in Spain is to demand by law that any person in the government or in parliament has some kind of university studies. If a person doesn't have high-level studies, it means that this person has not shown to have learnt any complex knowledge, ever. If University becomes a privilege for a few selected ones, this could be discussed, but if we manage to keep it public and available to most, this needs to be a requirement.

In the soft way to apply it, any university degree would work. It would at least show your ability to complete more things than compulsory studies, and it would show you're able to learn and understand harder concepts than what a 16-year old knows. One could argue that a degree does not grant you intelligence, or experience, or the best decision-making....but it shows that the person who got the degree has dedicated some effort to it, has learnt something, and that it has been enough to actually pass some subjects and (probably) do a final project. That's how it works in most real-life jobs, at first nobody knows you're good or bad, so the only thing you can give as a reference are your studies. Politicians should be no different.

The hard way would be to actually make some particular degree that is required to be part of the government or to be able to represent people in parliament. The logic, of course, is that having a degree in computer science or art history does not guarantee that you'll be any good at governing a country. The studies itself should include a wide range of things, but economics should be an important part of it. These studies could be considered "second cycle" studies, so you would need first some other degree, and then you could enlist in this course. Again, this does not guarantee a good government, but forces politicians to be smart and put effort into it, not like now where several high members of the main ruling parties and government do not even have studies.

The other step is more controversial, but I believe it's also necessary...basically, I would apply a law that limits the possibility of voting. Basically, with this law, being 18 years old would not give you the right to vote, showing that you're smart enough to vote would give you this right.

Of course this is a very conflicting topic. One could say that being smarter does not indicate that you know what's best for everybody else. There's also the point of identifying what's considered smart. To address how to consider if you're smart enough to vote, again there's two solutions.

The soft way would be to limit voting people to those who have finished successfully the compulsory education. The compulsory education in Spain is at a very low level, but at least it shows you have some degree of studies. Of course this could not be applied for everybody from the start, but a date could be arranged, as in all the people born after a certain year would be required to prove they have finished the compulsory education before they're allowed to vote.

The hard way would be to demand to pass a simple exam before you could vote. This would be done every four years, and it would just require a certain grasp in comprehension and mathematics for example, like in the two graphs I posted at the beginning. I know this system could be abused in different ways, but the current system is also abused, so it's not a big difference actually, the point being that bad governments will abuse whatever system is in place.

Now, before being accused of being anti-democratic, I want to explain my reasons. Basically, I believe that a person should only vote if they're capable of understanding what they're voting for. I'm not saying to force everybody to understand what they're voting for, I'm just saying to prove they could do so.

I really really doubt that a person who cannot comprehend a written text is able to really understand all the implications of an electoral program of a certain party. If someone cannot read, I would be happy to accept their vote as long as they could understand an electoral program read to them. Smarter people may not be able to always know what's best for everybody, and people who may not be as smart should also give their opinion...but as long as their opinion is really their opinion, and as long as they do have an opinion. If huge amounts of Spanish people don't understand anything after reading a text...how the hell are they deciding who to vote? They cannot know if it's good for them or not, because they did not understand it correctly in the first place.

Dumb people are easy to trick and mislead. Dumb people will not understand what are the real intentions of a party, even if they're not lying with their goals. Therefore, I don't see why dumb people should vote. Again, to define who is dumb and who is not, you would only need to prove you're able to read/listen and understand the text, and to do some easy mathematical calculations.

Opinions are great and everybody should have one, but there are things that are facts, and there are cases when something is clearly wrong or clearly right. This is also true in politics, not everything can be defended logically, some facts are true and some are false. Not everybody's opinion should count, if their opinion regarding an established fact has been proven wrong. Emotions are not enough to decide who to vote, they should be accompanied with the ability to reason about it, and then you could do whatever you want. I think I said it before, but you don't ask the village idiot about his opinion regarding your brain surgery. You would only do that if he somehow has proven to have a great amount of knowledge in this topic.....

So why do we let the idiots decide about our life's future, as if it was something minor where all the opinions are good, no matter how stupid?