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LIMBO

Friday, August 27, 2010

I’m not in the business of reviewing games, or even caring whether anyone else likes the same games that I do. Having said that, I wanted to share my thoughts on LIMBO, the new XBLA title by PlayDead, which is precisely the kind of game I want to be making. I had my RROD’d XBOX repaired especially to play LIMBO, after having my interest piqued by the video. Style-wise it’s right up my alley, but I also love the physics and animation, and the similarities to Another World and Flashback (two “cinematic platformers” that I enjoyed playing on the old Amiga 500 many moons ago).

Limbo Confrontation

Confrontation. Image by: Playdead

The reason why I feel compelled to share my thoughts on LIMBO is that several friends have made statements to the effect that the demo was boring and that it’s just an average platform game with great lighting and artwork. I respectfully disagree, but I no longer find it important to convince everyone else they’re wrong (turns out you eventually grow out of that), and I appreciate having friends who have different opinions to me (I gave up wanting to be surrounded by clones of myself when I turned 8). So, rather than explain why everyone else is mistaken, I thought that I’d just try to explain why I like LIMBO, and why I think it’s more than a run-of-the-mill platformer with a pretty face.

Background

I’ve been playing games for 30 years or so. I used to be able to play Elite on the Commodore 64 from 5pm on a Friday to 5pm on a Sunday with few interruptions, but these days I have a wife and two small kids, which means I need to grab a spare 30 minutes here and there. The longest gaming session I’ve had in the last 5 years was playing Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube for 8 hours straight with the curtains drawn and the surround sound turned up, and only a six pack of beer and a few packets of chips for company, but that was Before Kids, and the wife was interstate at the time. The games that shaped me are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. I love puzzles, text adventures, the old LucasArts games and new games that favour atmosphere, exploration and narrative over precision, action and competition. These days I mostly play iPhone, XBLA and online Flash games. Yes, I’d like to try Red Dead Redemption, but I don’t think I can make a commitment to completing it. And no, I’m not a fan of the FPS genre in general. I do find many contemporary AAA titles repetitive and boring. Heck, I even thought Half-Life 2 got repetitive, and that’s supposed to be pretty good.

All of which means: perhaps it’s just me?

Style

The first thing you notice with LIMBO is its style. The animation, art, lighting and sound are all spot-on. Everything appears in silhouette, and a subtle vignette means that objects lose detail towards the edges of the display. In general, it looks like foreign arthouse cinema, and the typography used on the credits screen is consistent with that look. Everything contributes to an overall sense of foreboding. This puts you on the edge of your seat from the get-go. Something’s about to happen, and you don’t know what it’ll be.

Controls

The second thing you’ll notice is the controls. Or, should I say, the lack of controls. It’s the stick to move, one button to jump and a second button to manipulate stuff. Couldn’t be easier. No, I don’t want to spend time learning a complicated control system anymore; I don’t want that to be a barrier to entry. My time is precious, so I’d rather learn by doing. Character movement is fluid and natural, and platforming is as satisfying as it was in the original Prince of Persia.

Insta-Death

The third thing you’ll notice is the insta-death. Now, that’s often a sign of bad game design. But here I think it’s great. It never sets you back very far, and, although some instances (like the water) are unpredictable, you quickly learn the rules. All drops are fatal if you can’t see the bottom, so no leaps of faith are required. And many insta-deaths are forecast, and are therefore avoidable with careful play. When they’re not, the results are sometimes used to foreshadow a similar situation that occurs later in the game (one red herring is used to great comedic effect), or to form part of an intricate puzzle (such as turning the death traps against others).

Puzzles

These are what I really enjoyed about LIMBO. They’re so well designed. There’s no repetition, which is always so common in other games (as if the designer, happy with themselves for inventing a cool puzzle, decides to reuse it throughout the game, turning an original and fun idea into a chore). All objects that you can manipulate have a use, so there’s no blind alleys. And many objects have multiple uses, which is often really clever. Great puzzle design means that situations that initially seem impossible are surmounted after a little bit of experimentation, exploration and thinking. You get to experience that moment of insight throughout the game, which is very rewarding.

Game Length

I’m not an achievement whore, and I don’t care much for leaderboards, so, although they’re present in LIMBO, they’re not going to compel me to play through again. I’m very happy to have experienced LIMBO in 5 or 6 sessions of between 30 minutes and an hour each over the course of two weeks, and I found myself anticipating the next play session, as I do with the episodes of a great TV series. That synchronised pretty nicely with my wife watching some Mindless American Drama on the TV after the kids were put to bed, and didn’t hinder my ability to do other stuff after hours. Finally, the ending is really well done, and worth seeing. I will play LIMBO again, for the same reason that I watch great movies again; simply to re-live the experience. The short game length and lack of repetition benefits replayability greatly.

LIMBO is pretty, immersive and lean to the bone. An almost perfect game.

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Cleaning

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

People like cleaning up. Well, not always literally, and not quite everyone. But, for whatever reason, there seems to be something that’s intrinsically enjoyable about reducing entropy. I enjoy actual, real-life cleaning up once I get into the swing of things, and then I can’t stop until it’s “done”. But getting motivated enough to start in the first place is difficult, which is why I wait until I can’t stand the mess anymore. Or perhaps I just want to give myself a challenge?

As far as games are concerned, cleaning is a common metaphor. Tetris is perhaps the best example, as are match-3 games such as Bejeweled. In Tetris you interlock falling tetrominoes in very pleasant, satisfying ways in order to remove rows of blocks, while in Bejeweled et al you remove gems of the same colour by shifting them around. In both cases, the essence of the game is arrangement and removal. There’s something addictive about sorting like stuff into groups, identifying patterns, planning for what may happen next and progressing by removing groups of stuff to leave behind smaller collections of stuff.

Postal Worker, the game that I was intending to work on at the beginning of this year (and which suffered ludus interruptus due to the Global Game Jam and the Interzone Fiasco, and is yet to fully recover) was based around this concept of sorting things into groups. I do plan to return to it eventually, once I finish the Kranzky Engine for iPhone. But, I digress.

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking of two important issues that both involve cleaning in some form, and which are both inspired by recent events. I don’t want to make a federal election out of it, but I have been thinking about both the government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level filtering of RC content, and of the shelved emissions trading scheme.

I first learned about carbon trading about seven years ago when I read, I think, “The Armchair Economist“, by Steven Landsburg, which is a study of how incentives change behaviour (with famous examples including the fact that mandatory seatbelt laws result in an increased number of car accidents – you’d minimise accidents by requiring everyone to mount a metal spike on their steering wheel which is aimed directly at their heart). In essence, the intent of carbon trading is to incentivize individuals and corporations to look for alternatives to their energy supply by creating a marketplace that will inflate the cost of carbon-producing energy to the end user. That is, the operators of coal-fuelled power plants will need to pay more to continue polluting the environment, and will pass this cost on to their customers, who will then have an incentive to consider other means of fulfilling their energy needs. This will create a market for greener (in the sense of lower CO2-emitting) energy production. Along similar lines, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce a cholesterol trading scheme, to improve the overall health of the population and thereby to reduce the strain on the health care system? I kid.

The proposed Internet filter has proven unpopular, as so many of us are opposed to censorship of any form. It is difficult, however, to have a proper discussion around a subject that threatens to raise the spectre of child pornography (which is a core reason for wanting to implement a filter in the first place). Child pornography is quickly replacing Godwin’s Law as a means of nipping any debate in the bud. It’s similar to accusations of racism making any measured debate of policy regarding asylum seekers difficult. The truth is that censorship simply limits exposure to offensive material that needs to be deliberately sought out anyway, and won’t prevent those who deal in such material from continuing to do so. In fact, it may make it onerous to identify and bring to justice those who produce such material, as it will only serve to encourage them to go deeper underground, obscuring any handy evidence that would have been left behind had they traded the stuff online. The fact that the production of images of child abuse is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry is under-reported, and the success rates of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice are unknown. I want to know; we should all be in the business of protecting children everywhere. Just not  via censorship.

Enough with the depressing thoughts. Just cleaning out my brain. Please don’t get all Nazi on me in the comments :)

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Mental Procrastination

Friday, August 20, 2010

OK, I promise, last of these historic posts! The title was inspired by Andrew Braybook’s game diary in ZZAP!64 magazine, which you should immediately read. I wrote this 13 years ago, when I was young and stoopid…

Football

I went to a football game the other day with a few friends. One of them commented that the oval looked smaller than he had expected. I said, “What do you mean? It’s 100 metres wide and 200 metres long! Of course”, I added, “that’s only a ballpark figure.”

Axe Murderers

There was this news story on TV a while back about a young man who murdered his parents. When the reporter asked the obviously shocked neighbours about the man, they told him how quiet and harmless he seemed. Then one of them remembered how he had made constant death threats against his parents. Another chipped in with stories of him shooting cats with an air rifle. And then pandemonium broke out, as the neighbours started yelling about how he was a crazy freak, and how they all hated his guts.

Indian Food

Did you know there was an Indian version of The Beatles? They even went through a weird stage, hanging out with the Archbishop of Canterbury and playing acoustic guitars instead of their sitars. Here’s the lyrics to one of their most enduring songs:

Dear Sir and Madam, here’s your vindaloo
It took me days and days to cook it up for you
It’s based on a recipe I got from my mum
And it’s very very hot, so you’ll need to have some
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

It’s a lovely curry, with some lovely naan
(there’s some popadoms in the frying pan)
Sir, you appear to be turning pale
You’re an unsteady sod; so instead of beer
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

Words

Isn’t it interesting how words change their meaning with time? I was reading a book from 1895 the other day, and I came across a passage which read: “The chambermaid rushed sobbing from the room, followed by Mr. Dawkins, who was ejaculating wildly.” I was very offended, until I realized that the word “sobbing” has changed meaning drastically in the last hundred years.

Hollywood

I really hate those corny romantic American movies where, at the end of the film, the two lovers embrace in a public place and the crowd of onlookers break into spontaneous applause. I was in a restaurant once and this guy kissed his girlfriend, so I started clapping and whooping. But nobody else joined in. And then the guy said “Hey, what are you doing, buddy?”, so I said “I’m clapping man, can’t you see that?”, and then came on over and punched me in the nose. So that’s why I hate those movies.

Clothes

I was in the city with a girl, and she said to me, “Do you like the sarong that girl over there is wearing?”. I bellowed out, “What sarong?”, and a passing ethnic stereotype yelled back “Nothing’s a-wrong, mate! What’s da matter with you, eh?”

Ties

I have always found it rather odd that businessmen affect to wear their ties on their shoulders when outdoors in the city. I think someone should do a study on it.

Smells

I think the next big leap in technology will be smells. It will take just one geek to come up with some big breakthrough, and in no time at all everyone will be talking about the great new “smell chip”. Sony would develop a sleek smell machine, with their own smell format, but the other manufacturers would band together and develop an inferior smell format which would become successful through clever marketing campaigns. Televisions would be made “smell compatible”. If you wanted to smell in private, you could wear little “nose-olfactors”. Musicians would play special smell instruments at gigs, and you’d better watch out for the door-to-door smell salesman. Smell lovers would complain about synthetic smells, and they would harp on and on about the good old days, and how great the natural smells were back then. Computers would come with an optional “smell card”, and software for mixing smells. You could customize your desktop to have your favourite smell, and you’d be able to download new smells. When an error occurs, a special smell would be emitted.

Tattoos

The other day I pointed out a tattoo on a man’s arm to a friend. “That’s a Swastika”, I said. “You mean its not a real tattoo?”, she replied.

Body Piercing

I reckon if you’re lucky enough to have a big sticky-out mole on some weird part of your body, you should paint that mole silver and pretend that you’re into body piercing. People would express amazement at how you managed to get that part of your body pierced, and they would admire your impressive looking stud.

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Classification and Censorship

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I’ve been lurking on a thread over at the Pigmi Discussion List that’s been debating the pros and cons of Game Classification, in the wake of the news (reported on Kotaku) that the Australian Government is working to close a loophole that allows unclassified games and applications to be downloaded and used on mobile devices. Coincidentally, I was contacted yesterday by Ben Grubb, a journalist with the The Sydney Morning Herald, for comment on the very same issue. I wrote this blog post partly to express my thoughts to Ben (his article has now been published online), and partly to respond to Nick Lowe, who expressed some opinions in the Pigmi thread which irked me. Nick has since written an opinion piece that suggests he had a change of heart before I’d had a chance to change it for him :)

Classification exists to allow consumers to make informed choices. The Classification Website states that games are classified to “provide consumers, especially parents, with classification information to help them choose a … game to play”. This implies that game classification exists to help us protect our kids, which makes it especially annoying when games clearly only intended to be played by adults are banned from sale in this country. Besides which, I believe that these kinds of recommendations are of limited benefit, and are often ignored by consumers. When deciding whether or not to allow my child to play a particular game, I’d much prefer to base my decision on my previous experience with the game, or on the recommendations of my friends and family.

The Classification Website states that “every film and computer game, whether produced locally or overseas, has to be classified before it can be made legally available to the public”, which means that most of the games I’ve ever created, including my GameJam entries, and the iPhone and iPad games released on the App Store by RocketHands, are illegally available in Australia.

Apart from causing some titles to be banned, this mandatory classification system, which requires game developers and publishers to pay to have their games classified, has resulted in some content just not being available at all in this country (presumably because publishers/developers choose to forego the expense of getting a game classified if it is not forecast to generate a large return in this market). This robs us from experiencing small, independent offerings which, for mine, are where the fun’s at. These classification requirements mean that many smaller WiiWare and Virtual Console titles don’t get a release down here, and have prevented Microsoft from making the Indie Marketplace on XBLA available to Australians. This is a regrettable state of affairs.

On the other hand, countless downloadable games and online Flash games are readily available, and, due to their entirely unregulated nature, sometimes contain highly objectionable content. The behaviour of the Australian Government makes it easy to accuse them of revenue-raising (by fining Apple, and requiring them to pay for classification) rather that performing their stated duty of protecting the kiddies (although I’m presuming that they assume their proposed Internet Filter will take care of everything else).

I think Apple should be applauded for flaunting the letter of the law, allowing countless applications and games to be available to Australians via the App Store, while satisfying the spirit of the law, by policing the App Store themselves, ensuring that violent, pornographic content is not available, and rating all games and applications to allow consumers to make an informed choice. Rather than complying with the Australian Government, Apple needs to fight for a shake-up of our classification laws. At the very least, games should be treated the same as TV, where the commercial stations self-regulate based on an industry code of practice (which is essentially what Apple has been doing until now).

What I’d like to see happen is for the classification process itself to be deregulated and crowd-sourced, with each game initially released as unclassified (and, therefore, unavailable to minors), and for adult users to submit the age threshold that they deem appropriate after experiencing the game for themselves. I’d predict a wide standard deviation of responses (which begs the question of why we allow one or two public servants to make these decisions for us), but it’d be great to be able to see the average recommended age for a game as taken from members of my social circle.

P.S. Note that “Plants vs Zombies” has been classified as 9+ by Apple, but that I’m still happy for my 4+ daughter to play it :)

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Solresol

Monday, August 16, 2010

Another historic article, from the 1990′s. Of course, these days you’d just look it up in Wikepedia, but that didn’t start until 2001.

Introduction

My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting. I wondered whether Spielberg had made the whole thing up, or whether such a language existed.

I read all of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to find that none of them mentioned the musical language at all. Strange, given the part it plays in the movie.

Coincidentally, I picked up the “Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language” the day after watching the film, and read a paragraph on an Artificial Language called Solresol which uses musical notes as elementary symbols. My fascination had begun.

A web search turned up scant information. The only web page dedicated to Solresol didn’t exist anymore, and its author, Greg Baker, had changed jobs. After a few email exchanges with his former work colleagues, I tracked Greg down. Most of the information in these pages is based on the email he sent me.

History

Solresol, or “Langue Musicale Universelle”, was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre (1787-1864), a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language.

The French versions of these seven symbols are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si, although in this document I use so in preference to sol, and ti instead of si. So, in truth, Julie Andrews should have sung:-

Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
Sol, the closest star to Earth
La, the note that follows sol
Si, the Italian word for “yes”
Which brings us back to Do!

The words in Solresol are short melodies. I’ll represent words as a sequence of characters taken from the set {D, R, M, F, S, L, T}. For example, the word solresol will be written as SRS, which corresponds to the three notes so, re and so. The word itself translates as “language”.

Solresol may be spoken, sung, whistled or played on a musical instrument. It may be written compactly, simply by representing each symbol by its first letter. It may be signed, which is reminiscent of “Close Encounters” yet again; it may even be represented with the seven colours of the rainbow.

As with all a priori languages (languages which use an invented set of elements which stand for basic concepts and are grouped into supposedly universal logical classifications, based on scientific and philosophical issues), Solresol is difficult to learn. Even so, it became very popular in the mid-19th century, and won several prizes.

It was so popular, in fact, that the French army toyed with the idea of using Solresol as the official means of communication when on the battlefield. This is presumably due to the fact that pure tones may be broadcast over further distances than articulated speech, and the confusion it would cause the enemy!

Design

The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes.

Words need to be separated in some way if they are to be decoded uniquely; for this reason Sudre decided that word boundaries would be denoted with brief pauses. This requirement tends to break up the “melody” in an unpleasant way.

It is also interesting to note that Sudre didn’t use all combinations of three and four notes. It has been suggested that this was intentional, in order to avoid repititious sequences of notes. In fact, in the information I have, only 42 two-note words are defined—the seven repititious ones are omitted.

Combinations of one or two notes form the participles and pronouns, while three-note words are used for the most frequent words. There are seven classes of four note words, called keys, according to the initial note. For example, the key of do contains words which represent the physical and moral aspects of man. Finally, combinations of five notes furnish the names of the three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral.

To allow future expansion, Sudre included an encoding of the letters of the alphabet.

Grammatical categories may be distinguished by the position of an accent over the notes, which means the note should be lengthened to indicate stress. The verb is unstressed throughout, the noun is stressed on the first note, the adjective on the next-to-last, and the adverb on the last. The feminine is also marked by final stress.

The opposite of an idea is often expressed by reversing the order of the notes in a word.

Dictionary

This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, and converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one. I also changed the ordering of the words to Solresol order, which makes their grouping into classes more obvious.

One Note Words

These seven words cover the most frequently used words in the English language.

Solresol English
D no, not
R and
M or
F at, to
S if
L the
T yes, agreed

Two Note Words

Although Sudre planned on using 49 two-note words, this list omits the seven repititious ones. These words form the particles and pronouns.

Solresol English
DR I, me, we, us
DM you
DF he, him
DS oneself, himself, herself, itself, themselves
DL one, someone
DT other
RD my, mine
RM your, yours
RF his
RS our, ours
RL your, yours
RT their, theirs
MD for, so (so that)
MR that, which, who
MF whose
MS good
ML look!, here (is here!), there (is there!)
MT good evening, good night
FD what
FR with, together
FM this, that
FS why
FL good, delicious
FT much, very
SD but
SR in
SM evil, bad
SF because
SL always, without end
ST thank, thanks!
LD no-one, nothing
LR by (agent, means)
LM here, there
LF bad
LS never, ever
LT of (of the)
TD same (the same thing)
TR each (each one), every (every one)
TM good day
TF little, barely
TS mister, sir
TL boy, youth, bachelor

Three Note Words

Sudre planned on using 336 three note words; this list has only xxx of them. These words are used for common words.

Solresol English
DDR earth
DDM season
DDF winter
DDS spring
DDL summer
DDT autumn
DRD time, weather?
DRR January
DRM day
DRF week
DRS month
DRL year
DRT century
DMD universe
DMM February
DMS God
DFF March
DSD hungry (be hungry)
DSR eat
DSM bread
DSF thirsty (be thirsty)
DSS April
DSL drink
DST water
DLL May
DTD help, assist
DTF accomplish
DTT June
RDD one, unity, first
RDR think
RDS acquainted with (be acquainted with), know (person)
RRD July
RRM August
RRF September
RRS October
RRL November
RRT December
RMM two, second
RML give
RFD look at
RFR pass, cross over
RFF three, third
RFL ask
RFS encounter, meet
RFT reply, answer
RSD listen
RSM leave, come out of, go out of
RSF return, later (see you later)
RSS four
RSL pay
RLD sleepy (be sleepy)
RLL five
RTT six, sixth
MDD thirteen
MDF prefer
MDL reciprocity
MDS admire
MDT friend
MRR fourteen
MMD seven
MMR eight
MMF nine
MMS ten
MML eleven
MMT twelve
MFD pleasure
MFF fifteen
MFL wish
MSD come
MSR enter
MSL equality
MLR confidence, trust
MLT like, love
MTF husband
MTS happy, happiness, good luck
FDD eighty
FDM letter (probably mail)
FDF date (tell the date of)
FDS signature
FDT finish
FRD address, direct to
FRR hundred
FRM be
FRF go
FRL post, mail
FMD stamp, pay postage
FMR serve
FMM thousand
FMF stamp (postal stamp)
FML letter-carrier
FMS possess
FMT carry
FFR twenty
FFM thirty
FFS forty
FFL fifty
FFT sixty
FSR leave
FSL do, bring about
FST prepare
FLD necessary (it is necessary)
FLR able (be able to)
FLM means (means of doing)
FLF understand
FTR information
FTF want, wish
FTS cry, weep
FTL decide
SDD Sunday
SDR copy
SDS interpret, translate
SRR yesterday
SRF abridge, abbreviate
SRL dictionary
SRS language
SMD Devil
SMM today
SML remember
SFF tomorrow
SFL leave
SSD Monday
SSR Tuesday
SSM Wednesday
SSF Thursday
SSL Friday
SST Saturday
SLM pardon
SLL hour
SLS permit
SLT to go up, climb
STR joy, joyous
STM misfortune, unfortunate
STF laugh
LDM school, student
LDF read
LDT book
LRR fog
LRS lesson
LMR write
LMF pen (writing pen)
LML ink
LMS forget
LMT difficulty
LFF snow, hail?
LFD paper
LSD pencil
LSR entertain, amuse
LSF defeat
LSS ice, freeze
LST flour
LLF morning
LLS evening
LLT night
LTD something
LTF hesitate
LTT cold (it is cold)
TDD air
TDM enemy
TDF begin
TDL progress
TDS study
TDT learn
TRF exactitude
TRS correct
TMR explain
TMF meaning
TML ease
TFF sun
TFL repeat
TFT again
TST question
TLD compare
TLM detest
TLS to go down, descend
TTD rain
TTR wind, blow
TTS thunder, thunderstorm
TTL heat, hot (it is hot)

Four Note Words

The four note words are divided into seven classes, called keys, which depend on the initial note of the word. Each class represents some philosophical category. Sudre planned on designing 2268 four note words, although there are only xxx listed here.

Key of Do: Physical and Moral Aspects of Man

Solresol English
DDSD bible
DRDM body
DRDF head
DRDS hair
DRMR eye
DRFL arm
DMRD senses (the five senses)
DMRM see
DMRF touch, feel
DMRS taste
DMRL sense
DMRT hear
DMFD man
DMFR live
DMFS child
DMSF intelligence
DMLD say, speak
DMLR pronounce
DMTM liberty
DMTT superstition
DFDR wait for, wait on
DFMR quality
DFMM behind
DFFD Easter
DFSM beautiful
DFST truth
DFLD candor, sincerity
DFLR goodness, gentleness
DFLM sensibility
DFLF warmth (warm attitude)
DFLS generosity
DFLT humanity, humaneness
DFTF conscience
DFTS honesty
DSDR call
DSDS open
DSMF light, kindle
DSFM rise, get up
DSTF guide
DLDM accept, consent (consent to)
DLDF put, place
DLRS glass (drinking glass)
DLRT wine
DLFR food
DLFS soup, broth
DLSD meat
DTDR enough
DTDM vegetable
DTDF salad
DTDT egg
DTRD milk
DTRM butter
DTRF cheese
DTRL fruit
DTRT bakery
DTFD thoughtless, unwise act
DTFR beer
DTFS coffee
DTFT sugar
DTST chocolate
DTSF cooking, cuisine

Key of Re: Family, Household and Dress

Solresol English
RDRF shirt
RDRL shoe, boot
RDMD wash oneself
RDFF health (be healthy)
RDFT clothing
RDST umbrella
RRDR build, construct, construction
RRDL masonry
RMRM walk around
RMRD go, walk
RMRF car
RMRS visit
RMFL house
RMFT lodge, lodgings, reside, residence, rent
RMSD sleep
RMTS stairs
RFDM furniture
RFRF sit down
RFMD dead, die
RFFM locksmith
RFSD fire
RFSF equal, peer
RSDF hide
RFLD linen
RFLR tear, rip (rip up)
RFLM mend, darn
RFLF sew
RFTS cut, knife
RSRR pliers, pincers
RSTR work
RSML continue
RSFF hammer
RSLD tired (grow tired)
RSLM lie down, go to bed
RSLS rest, lie down
RSTD useful
RLDR bleach, wash, washing
RLML inexpensive, cheap
RLFF right (on the right)
RLFT hold, seize
RLSM find
RLLD cabinet-work
RTDD equipment, tools
RTDS family
RTDT father
RTRS son
RTMR brother
RTSR name
RTLM loan, lend
RTTD machine

Key of Mi:

Solresol English
MDDR how much, how many
MDRR almost, around
MDRF before
MDFL abandon, forsake
MDFS orphan
MDSD fear, be afraid of
MDLD refuse, reject
MRDL undertake (undertake a project)
MRRS gradually, imperceptibly
MMDM however, nevertheless
MMFD before, in front of
MMFR opposite, facing
MMFS everywhere
MMSR at (someone’s house), with
MFRD selfishness
MFMF laziness
MSDL change
MSRD remain
MSRS receive
MSRL meet, get together
MLRL slander
MLTR play
MTMF responsibility
MTFD indiscretion
MTSD experience
MTLL last
MTTR without

Key of Fa:

Solresol English
FDRM country, rural
FDTD gardening
FDTT comfort, relieve
FRDR agriculture
FRDM after
FRDF plow, furrow
FRMF harvest, gather
FRSD horse
FRTR dog
FRTM cat
FMRR camphor
FMMD convalescence
FMFR army, troop
FMFL regiment
FFDR sick, sickness, be sick
FFDM consultation
FFDF doctor
FFDL dentist
FFDS surgeon
FFDT occultist
FFRS chemist, druggist, pharmacist
FFLR left (on the left)
FSRL pull
FSMR strategy, tactic
FSLM sailor
FSLT boat, ship
FLDR sail, travel by boat
FLRL? heal
FLFR flood
FLST unite, unity
FTDR travel
FTRD railroad, railway
FTRF transport
FTMR speed
FTMT advance
FTFS accident
FTSF way, path
FTSR throughout, through (go through)
FTLL anatomy
FTLT station

Key of So:

Solresol English
SDDF chillblain
SDRM theatre
SDRL black
SDSD close
SDST succeed
SDTD orchestra
SDTR instrument
SRMF sing
SMFS tone
SMSR music
SMST harmony
SFDD suffocation
SFMD age
SFLL danger
SSRD migraine
SLDL painting (art of painting)
SLMF sculpture
SLLR purgation
SLTR know (know a fact)
STDD bier
STDR literature
STFT new
STLD telegraph

Key of La: Industry and Commerce

Solresol English
LDRD industry
LDRM manufacture
LDRF matter, substance
LDRS produce
LDRL sell, retail
LDRT bulk (in bulk)
LDMD establish
LDMR store, shop
LDFD commerce, trade, merchant
LDLD muslin
LRDR colour
LRDL buy
LRDS white
LRMR violet
LRMF green
LRMS yellow
LRML blue
LRMT red
LRFR propose, offer
LRLR count
LRLM calculate
LRLF number (symbol)
LRSM string, twine
LRSL take
LRTD price
LRTR value
LMDS mix
LMMD tinsmith’s
LMLF merchandise
LMLR expense
LMST all, everything
LFDR numbering
LFDM add, addition
LFDF subtract, subtraction
LFDS multiply, multiplication
LFDL divide, division
LFDT sharing, distribution
LFRL half
LFLD measure
LFLF litre
LFSD cash (on hand), money
LFSF money
LFSL franc, dollar
LFST centime, cent
LFTF gram
LSDD grocery store
LSRF metre
LSRL give back, repay
LSMR specimen, sample
LSFD display, show
LSFR exposition, exhibition
LSFM assortment, set
LSLF guarantee
LLRL bookstore
LLRT hardware store, iron monger’s
LLMD press, printing shop
LLFD watchmaker’s
LTDD butcher’s
LTMS notions (store)
LTLT earn, win?

Key of Ti:

Solresol English
TDRD town, citizen
TDRT street
TDMT municipality
TDFS restaurant
TDFT market
TDTD middle, midst
TRDR government
TRDS election
TRTD diplomacy
TRTR politics, political?
TRTL republic
TMLD magazine, newspaper
TMTF recede, lose ground
TSMR finance
TSTF kill
TSTL fall
TFRM country, nation
TFMR internationalism
TFLF rendez-vous
TLMD police
TLTL lose
TTDS magistrature
TTMD testimony
TTLF imprisonment, police station

Five Note Words

Sudre planned on using 9072 five note words, although there are none known at this stage.

Acknowledgements

Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.

Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.

Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.

My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solrisol.

John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he’s obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.

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Plants vs Zombies vs Eliza

Thursday, August 12, 2010

My 4 year-old daughter loves playing “Plants vs Zombies”. So much so that she used watercolour paints to dress up as a zombie, frightening her parents when they arrived home from work. We use the game as a reward for being good, and a five-minute session sometimes replaces storytime before bed. It’s amazing to me that a little poppet who can’t yet read can grasp so much of the strategy, and can create a consistent narrative for herself that explains how and why she’s playing the game. I couldn’t resist capturing her in action. Take a look!

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Gusher Sighted at Perth GameJam

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Another Perth Game Jam has come and gone, and what a huge bag of fun it was too! The mighty Simon Wittber once again outdid himself, making a fantastic venue available for the 20-or-so participants, who banded together to hack up nine games from nothingness over a period of 45 hours or thereabouts.

For me, this event was totally different to the Global Game Jam held earlier in the year. Due to the lack of other sites around the globe, I wasn’t spurred on by a sense of competition. It was more a case of manufacturing inspiration and enthusiasm by surrounding yourself with like-minded people and imposing constraints in the form of a deadline, a theme, and a “significant asset”. Also, the non-presence of that Louis Castle douchbag removed hate as a motivating factor, so I wasn’t keen to develop an evil game with Louis as the antagonist, as I did for GGJ.

Mr. Wittber chose to announce the theme and significant asset well in advance of the jam, giving everyone ample time to think about what they wanted to do. This was a great decision, as the amount of dithering about was reduced almost to zero, replaced with interesting discussions about several really promising game concepts. I went into January’s Global Game Jam wanting to make a flash-based game, which I’d never attempted before, and I used the time to learn how to write a game in ActionScript, using the FlashPunk framework, from scratch. This time, I knew I wanted to create a fluid simulation, similar to this one. I was pretty happy when I found out that the significant asset was a bubble, because that fitted what I wanted to achieve. As for the theme of “choose two at the expense of the other”, my first thought was the old project management adage “cost, quality, time: choose any two”. Kudos to Simon for choosing a much, much better theme than GGJ2010.

During the pre-Jam BBQ (during which Simon proudly revealed his massive cheese kransky, which both honoured and humbled me), I discussed two concepts with Jack, Nick et al.:

  1. A resource management game called Gusher, whereby you send out geologists to explore land and sea, them choose a suitable spot to drill an exploratory hole, then build an oil rig to extract the crude, then refine it, store it to manipulate the market, then pipe or ship it to sell. You’d need to manipulate the media and the authorities, and there’d always be the chance of an incident (either deliberate or accidental). Each choice would allow you to fix two of the three cost, time and quality constraints, so, for instance, you would get an inaccurate report of where to drill if you sent your geologists out on a tight deadline and didn’t pay them very much.
  2. A fishing game called Floater where you paddle your wooden boat across a turbulent ocean, choosing to stop and fish, bail out your vessel or move it left and right (only being able to do two of these things at a time).

After I began coding, I quickly realised that the fluid simulation would take a long time to code, and wouldn’t run at a decent framerate in Flash (I coded up a quick demo in C++ and in Flash, both using Box2D, to find big performance hits with more than 100 physics objects at once in Flash). So I started doing a little bubble simulation instead, using Box2D’s built-in support for buoyancy. This quickly led to an idea of a chef cooking a pot of soup on the stove, with ingredients being thrown in to raise the water level, and a game mechanic of merging like-coloured bubbles both to increase score (the deliciousness of the stock) and decrease heat (hence reducing the likelihood of losing an ingredient due to the intensity of bubbling, which would be the lose condition).

This worked out pretty well. Jack helped out with the graphics and playtesting, and the game mechanic came together nicely. You can have a go yerself on the RocketHands web site. Comments and feedback welcomed!

So what now? As I mentioned to Jack, Simon, Anthony and others at the end of the Jam, I treated things this time around as a great way of getting started on a project, rather than as a great way of finishing something off. So I plan to keep working on the soup-making game, which I’ve called Gusher2, until it’s at a point where I’m happy with it. With that in mind, here’s my to-do list:

  • Ask Simon Boxer to draw some lewd cartoonish graphics, inspired by Muscle March. We need an attract screen, the main game screen in the same style, a win screen, a lose screen, and five distinct ingredients (celery, tomato, carrot, onion and kransky sausage).
  • Add an egg-timer, and constrain playtime to 3 minutes, with a new ingredient going in every 30 seconds.
  • Make the ingredients change the water level when they go in, and change the tint and alpha of the stock, to ramp up the level of difficulty as the game progresses.
  • Display the current score somewhere on screen, and tweak the scoring mechanism to favour multi-merges.
  • Continue to improve the game mechanic. Some playtesters have said they’d prefer to click on bubbles, rather than click-and-drag. So I’ll try that out.
  • Animate some fire under the pot, some particles in the stock, some steam on top of it and so on.
  • Add suitable sound effects, musical stings and… voice acting. Oh yeah: “My soup… she’s a-ready!”

After all that, I’m going to perform an experiment with online flash games:

  1. Integrate with mochimedia. to experiment with in-game advertising as a revenue stream, to get analytics information, to keep online high scores, and so forth. Did I mention I want 5 different win screens, depending on whether you’re the top scorer, in the top 10%, and so on?
  2. Integrate with Kongregate, to do much the same thing with a different API (mochimedia and Kongregate have an agreement to stay off each other’s turf, so to properly experiment you need to do both).

I’m hoping that integration with these services will increase re-playability. After all, competing with members of your social network for high scores seems to work. I’d like to give it a shot.

I want to get all of this done in the next four weeks. I’m working on three other projects. I have two small children. I’m building a house. We’ll see how it goes!

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The Wall

Friday, August 6, 2010

Yes, yet another re-post of something I wrote over a decade ago.

The Wall

A Documentary by Jason Hutchens

Title shot, ‘The Wall’.

Establishing shot (outdoors, in a park somewhere or maybe near the city with views of the skyline). Pan to reveal Jas with a microphone, walking along slowly in a vaguely 60 minutes fashion.

Jas: “This is a story about how a wall came to be built. A very special wall, which has helped to unite a small community of University staff and students here in Perth, Western Australia. I was personally involved in its construction, and I have watched it grow over the past 14 months. When I got the idea to make this documentary, I thought I would be greeted with hostility from the students, who not surprisingly would want to protect the wall from the public eye. To my surprise my little project was welcomed with open arms. I was permitted to film the wall, and for that alone I am grateful. But a got more than just the wall – a lot more. I got the story behind the wall, a saga of mammoth proportions as told by the people closest to it. For the next 4 minutes you will become part of this interesting story. So sit back, relax, get yourself a glass of Coca Cola and prepare for enlightenment!”

Vox pops of people around the department talking about the wall, edited in a quick fashion, possibly with some background music.

Cut to Wil, Sonny and Bruce sitting outdoors, perhaps in the sunken gardens, with Jas off to one side in the Spinal Tap style.

Jas: “So, tell me how the wall began.”

Wil: “It all started with my parents camp fridge.”

Shot of fridge.

Cut back to close-up of Wil.

Wil: (continues) “I brought it in to Uni one day, you know, just to keep drinks cold and stuff. It all started slowly, but some of the other guys started putting their cans of drink in there too. Before I knew it, we were buying a carton of Coca Cola every week.”

Jas: “Right, so you split the costs between the three of you?”

Bruce: “Yes, that’s right.”

Sonny: “You’ve got to realise that students require caffeine. That’s really important – sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going.”

Cut to Jas nodding. Wil and Bruce generally agree.

Cut back to closer shot of Sonny.

Sonny: (continues) “Anyway, we all soon got tired of walking to the bin to put the empty cans away, so they started accumulating on the desk. One day I was playing around with them while talking on the phone, and when I looked down at them I realised I had built something.”

Cut to Jas.

Jas: (solemnly) “And what was that?”

Cut back to Sonny, extreme close-up.

Sonny: (pausing for effect) “It was a small wall.”

Cut to shot of a small stack of cans on a desk.

Cut to shot of Jas walking towards camera, hands waving, either in the street or down a corridor.

Jas: “Something seemed right about the structure that had inadvertantly been created. The small wall grew larger over the following weeks, and the students became active in it’s construction. They couldn’t satisfy their craving for empty cans quickly enough.”

Cut back to Wil

Wil: “At that stage, I decided it was time to start selling cans. We have a Coke vending machine in the building, and lots of people were using it, but it is expensive and unreliable.”

Cut to vision of Coke machine, with shots of hundreds of five cent coins pouring out of it, people hitting it, and several students rocking it about. Also show vision of the sign on the door, the fridge, the money pile and the cartons of coke.

Jas: (voiceover) “At 50 cents a can, the students underground Coke operation became both popular and self funding. They found that they were going out on ‘Coke Runs’ every week. On these expeditions they would buy up to a dozen cartons of Coca Cola.”

Cut to vision of a Coke Run in operation.

Jas: (voiceover) “The students sought out the cheapest cartons of Coke. Because there is usually a limit on the number of cartons that can be purchased, they worked in parallel, buying a few cartons each.”

Cut to shots of the Coke Wall itself.

Jas: (voiceover) “Today the wall has grown into an enormous structure. The students began keeping track of it’s growth.”

Cut to Wil sitting in front of a computer.

Wil: “I started counting the number of cans in the wall, and I made a graph that showed how quickly it was growing.”

Cut to vision of graph running under Netscape.

Jas: (voiceover) “Information about the wall was made available to millions of users worldwide on the Internet.”

Cut back to Wil in front of the computer.

Jas: (pointing) “So, why does the graph drop off suddenly at this point?”

Cut to close-up of Wil, with a sad expression on his face. He looks dejected, but says nothing. He then asks quietly that the interview be stopped.

Cut to Jas talking to camera, at an outside location.

Jas: “Obviously I had touched a nerve. Another student picks up the story.”

Cut to Sonny sitting on a chair, in a typical interviewee pose.

Sonny: “Students from another research group in this building stole my inflatable dinosaur. We got revenge by stealing all of the wheels from their chairs. This obviously pissed them off, because they retaliated.”

Cut to photograph of the dinosaur.

Jas: (voiceover) “This is the only remaining photograph of the inflatable dinosaur which sparked this rivalry. It has since been destroyed.”

Jas: “What did they do?”

Sonny: “They took our Coke wall.”

Cut to Jas talking to camera again.

Jas: “In a four hour operation, students from the other research group dismantled the wall, and stacked the 2,700 odd cans in the lift.”

Cut to shot of the lift.

Jas: (continuing) “This harmless prank became a disaster.”

Cut to Sonny.

Sonny: “When the cleaners arrived the following morning, they needed to fit their trolley into the lift. When they discovered it filled with Coke cans, they threw every last one of them away.”

Jas: “What, in the rubbish bin?”

Sonny: “Yes. They chucked them all in the bin.”

Cut to Jas, talking to camera.

Jas: “The students weren’t to be discouraged, though. The following year they slowly rebuilt the Coke Wall back to it’s former glory. However, the intense rivalry between research groups continues to this day. During the filming of this documentary, the Wall was defaced by students from the rival group. Understandably the students were upset, and I had trouble gaining admittance to their lab.”

Cut to shot of Jas fighting Adrian for admittance.

Cut to vision of Wil discovering the defaced wall.

Jas: (voiceover) “Typically, though, the students turned the defaced wall into something positive – a pillar.”

Shots of pillar being constructed, and discussion following its creation.

Cut to shot of Jas in the Coke Wall room.

Jas: “So, what is the future of the Coke Wall? Sadly, it seems, it has come to the end of its short life. The students are being moved to another lab, and the University has requested that the wall be dismantled. It seems that the saga of the Wall is drawing to a close. Jason Hutchens, reporting for the ABC.”

Cut to credits.

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Movie Science: My Theory of Inception

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

HERE BE SPOILERS

I loved Inception, and I’m convinced that, unlike many movies that leave questions unanswered, there exists a single correct explanation of what happened (I reckon Nolan does know the answer, and will have placed enough evidence throughout the movie to allow others to find it). Here’s my theory. I plan to re-watch the movie to see if this holds water, and I’ll update this post as I gather more evidence (and perhaps change my mind entirely).

Is Reality a Dream?

I say yes! Cobb’s “reality” is a dream of his own making. There are lots of clues during the movie that this is the case, from Miles (his father-in-law) telling him to “wake up” to Saito appearing out of nowhere to pull him into a car in Mombassa to the chase that saw him squeezing through a narrowing gap to him suddenly appearing in different places and so on. It’s a popular theory, and I’m subscribing to it. The entire movie is a dream.

The only time we see Cobb actually having a dream of his own, rather than entering someone else’s, is when he visits Mal (his wife) in their apartment. Ariadne follows, and chides him for recreating reality. Because that’s exactly what his “reality” is; a perfect recreation within his own dream, so believable that he’s convinced himself it is real.

But What About the Totem?

Cobb proves to himself that he’s not dreaming by using a totem (a spinning top) and watching it fall over. This reality test seems to suggest that he’s not dreaming. But that’s a red herring!

You see, we’re told that a totem is something personal that nobody else should hold, and that you need to be familiar with its weight and feel. Throughout the movie Cobb uses the spinning top, which was his wife’s totem. The clue is that we’re also told that other people’s totems won’t work, so the spinning top cannot be trusted. Remember that Cobb has presumably never held his wife’s totem “in real life”; he’s only held his imagined version of it in his dream. Therefore, it will behave exactly as he expects it to behave, because he can control what happens (subconsciously or not – think about the level of control Ariadne has over her dream world).

So where is Cobb’s true totem? He must have had one once. I think it’s his WEDDING RING (an object that’s intimately familiar to him, and which nobody else has held). In each of the dream levels, Cobb is wearing his ring, but, in his “reality”, he wears no ring (I never spotted this while watching the movie, but I’ve seen many forum posts that mention it). We are never told why he has no ring in “reality”. The big hint is what his wife does with her totem; she hides it from herself to prevent herself from realising that she is dreaming. Cobb has done the same thing with his totem.

Because Cobb uses his wife’s totem in a dream of his creation, he is able to control it, causing it to fall by concentrating hard (notice how he really focuses on it each time he performs a reality test). At the end of the movie his attention is distracted, which explains why it doesn’t fall (he’s in his own dream, and isn’t concentrating on the spinning top, so it keeps on spinning).

How Will Cobb Wake Up?

So Cobb is stuck in his own dream. Ariadne and Miles are attempting to rescue him. In “proper” reality the three of them are dreaming together. When Cobb witnessed Mal commiting suicide, he created a complicated dream world in which he was on the run, exiled from his country and unable to see his children. Ariadne and Miles (and perhaps others) need to make him realise he’s dreaming by leading him to his real totem. They do this by constructing an elaborate scenario that allows them to perform inception on Cobb – making him truly believe that he is able to finally return home.

Once Cobb finds his wedding ring, he’ll be able to prove to himself that he’s dreaming, and will wake himself up (presumably by suiciding). The wedding ring must be with his children at his home (either that or his children are another reality test – this is hinted throughout when he glimpses them in the various levels). This is why Miles so triumphantly reunites him with his children at the end of the movie – he and Ariadne have succeeded in their mission, and Cobb is about to discover that he is actually dreaming.

I’d love it if Cobb’s daughter was wearning a necklace with his ring on it at the end of the film, when she turns around. I must watch out for that next time I see the movie.

Why Doesn’t Mal Appear?

All of this begs the question why Mal, Cobb’s wife, never appears in his “reality” to let him know that her suicide worked. She appears in each of the levels as a projection of his, but never in his “reality”. Why doesn’t she just enter his dream and fix everything directly? Well, this is because his “reality” is a dream world of his own creation, and, as he believes it so deeply, and believes that Mal is dead, he simply cannot abide her presence. That is, if the real Mal entered Cobb’s dream, he would not allow himself to see her.

However, we know it is possible, with practice, to appear in a dream as somebody else. Therefore, I believe that ARIADNE IS MAL, in a different form. Cobb’s wife has entered his dream, with her father, and they are working throughout the movie to guide him out of it. This explains why Ariadne is constantly attacked by the projection of Mal. And it explains why Ariadne works her way so deeply into Cobb’s subconscious, ultimately convincing him to let go of the projected Mal.

I remember the moment when Ariadne used the mirrors to create a bridge that Cobb recognised (quick flashbacks showed him on the bridge with Mal – perhaps they met there). This scene is also evidence of the “Ariadne is Mal” theory. In that scene, Cobb warns Ariadne that building places from memory is the quickest way to lose track of what’s real and what’s a dream, and she says something like “is that what happened to you”. At that point, Mal’s projection knifes her (because Cobb, subconsciously, cannot accept the fact that Ariadne might be telling the truth).

Phone Call

One really fascinating moment is when Cobb receives a call from his kids. This is a man who’s on the run, yet his infant children can manage to call him up when he’s in some unknown location? What’s more interesting is that the kids on the phone sound older than those we see at the end of the movie, and that there’s someone else present during the call: their grandmother (Cobb’s mother-in-law, Mal’s father and Miles’ wife). We never meet her, but we can hear that she has a French accent. How about this for blowing your socks off:

  • Mal and Cobb live in America with their two kids.
  • Mal’s parent’s live in Paris, where her father lectures at the University.
  • When Cobb doesn’t wake up from his dream, he’s admitted to hospital in a “coma”, and Mal’s parents travel to America to help.
  • While Mal’s mother minds the kids, Mal and Miles stay at the hospital where they enter Cobb’s dream to attempt to wake him up.

So far, that all fits in with my theory. Now, imagine this. While Cobb is sleeping, the kids either talk to him Cobb directly, or over the phone (imagine Mal holding it to his ear). Cobb can hear his kids within his dream when they speak to him, in the same way that Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is used as a signal to the dreamers (they hear the song within their dream when headphones are placed on them in real life). Within his dream, Cobb explains away the fact that he can hear his kids by imagining that they call him on the phone.

Further evidence in support of this theory (that Mal’s parents are helping to rescue Cobb): Miles, the father-in-law, seems to exhibit no emotion at all over his daughter’s death. He’s happy and friendly and helpful, not resentful of Cobb at all, even though he could rightly blame Cobb for her death. Not to mention the fact, of course, that he pleads with Cobb to “come back to reality”.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Cobb is dreaming, and Mal (in the form of Ariadne) and Miles are working to wake him up (and they succeed). I think it’s a pretty consistent and believable explanation, and, like I said, I plan to watch the movie again to see how much evidence there is in support of this theory. Keep an eye on this post for updates!

Also, yes, I’m a tad obsessed with this movie.

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The Marriage Problem

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Another one from the vaults. I wrote this in the late 1990′s:

A society consists of equal numbers of males and females. Each female knows all the males and vice versa. Each female has a priority list of the males she would like to marry, and vice versa. The task is to marry them all off with the least shortfall in expectations, that is, with maximum of priorities being satisfied.

Let’s say that there are X males in a village, and, as luck would have it, there are also X females. Assuming monogamy, each and every bloke is guaranteed a partner, although she may turn out to be more of a ball-and-chain (and vice-versa—let’s not be sexist).

Being of a well-organised race, the villagers carry around with them, at all times, a stone tablet, onto which they carve the names of their favourite members of the opposite sex. In fact, they’re so fastidious about this that they keep the names of *every* member of the opposite sex, ranked from most desirable (assigned a ranking of 1), to the least desirable (assigned a ranking of X).

Whenever two villagers of the opposite sex meet, they compare notes (so to speak). Each quotes the rank they’ve assigned the other, so that both parties know their Mutual Attractiveness Factor, which is defined as the sum of the two separate ranks.

Hundreds of years ago, a rather forward-thinking village chief built a chess-board in the centre of the village, containing X*X squares in total. Each row of this board is inscribed with the name of a male villager, while the columns are reserved for the females. Whenever a couple meet, they make a pilgrimage to the board, and place upon the square at the intersection of their names a number of pebbles. The number they choose is always exactly the same as their M.A.F. (due to some ancient tradition, no doubt).

Each spring, when a man’s fancy turns to… chess, the village idiot stops playing with his dead rats, and instead sweeps the chess board free of pebbles. He does this with a straw broom, babbling all the while, about such things as “en-pee-’ard” and “low-cal-mini-mah”. The village idiot who, fortunately, is hermaphrodite, sweeps the board free of pebbles in a very strange way (using a process which he refers to as a “seaweed-with-musical-timing”).

What he does is this: he first looks for a pile of pebbles which, if it were to be swept away, would cause either the row or column which intersects it to become pebble-free. If such a pile is found, it is carefully gathered up and transferred to a leather sack, and the names associated with the row and column are recorded on a list. The row and column are then rather haphazardly swept clear. On the other hand, if no such pile is found, then the largest pile of stones on the board is swept into the forest. In the case when more than one such pile exists, the village idiot selects between them at random (there isn’t space here to describe how he makes the selection; suffice it to say that the process involves a chicken, several lengths of twine, and boundless patience).

This process, or “algae-rhythm”, is repeated until the board is free of rocks. When this happens, the village idiot hands his list to the local clergyman, who promptly marries all of the couples on it. The idiot then divides his bag of pebbles into 2X evenly-sized groups (which, more often than not, involves smashing the pebbles into bits). The number of pebbles in each group represents the average rank assigned to a person by their partner in marriage (which explains the low divorce rate, perhaps).

Once the weddings have taken place, the village idiot is given a bag of gold by the grateful couples, which he promptly spends on beer and rats.

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