Exasperated Calculator

Star Trek is a very influential show, and so I’ll be looking at a few other TV show episodes, movies and games inspired by Star Trek as part of the Trekathon.

First up is Mass Effect 2. The best Star Trek game ever made (even though it’s not a Star Trek game).¹

In fact, Mass Effect 2 might be one of the best games ever made. It succeeds on every level: gameplay, plot, acting, graphics, sound.

Personally, I think that the plot and characters are the main thing that keeps me coming back. Mass Effect 2 is incredibly selfish, having more strong well define characters in one game that you normally see in a year of releases. As I played I found myself becoming very attached to the characters I recruited for my crew. And that makes the ‘suicide mission’ dynamic of the game, where any character can die in the final act, one of the tensest gaming experiences I’ve ever had. This is’t a case of a mistake causing you to lose a life, it’s a case where a mistake causes a friend you’ve been playing the game with for hours to die.

It’s also the best sequel ever. I finished Mass Effect 1 recently, and the links between the games are deep and complex. Many of the decisions that you made in Mass Effect 1 have some sequel or another here. Other games have tried to do this, but this is the first time it’s been successful.

But finally, Mass Effect 2 is the first the real role playing game. Plenty of games before have aped the mechanics of role playing games. But this is the first time when playing a game that I found myself trying to put myself into the mindset and position of my character in order to make decisions. And the game gives you enough freedom that you feel that you really are making choices, rather than being railroaded down the game developer’s chosen path.

I wish I had the time right now to start playing the game again, just to try and go in another direction and build another character.

[Prince of Persia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(2008_video_game)) is the seventh 7th game in the main Prince of Persia series, and the 12th game overall.

Spoilers in this review, so you’ll have to click through.

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Bad Science is drawn from the Guardian column of the same name, as well as the many other things that Ben Goldacre covers on his website. The main focus is on the abuses of science that seem to proliferate in the press and on the Internet. Things such as scares over the MMR vaccine, scares over radiation from mobile phone towers, the infamous Brain Gym taught in some UK schools, and so on. Each topic is carefully examined, the faulty assumptions identified, and the real truth drawn out.

The author has a saying (available in T-Shirt form): “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than hat”. He revels in the complication. When it comes to the oft dismissed placebo effect he dives deeply into the inherent, wonderful weirdness of the placebo. If statistics are required for the explanation of something (often the case in modern medicine) he draws the details out. The combination of detail and accessibility is rare, and is a product of the author’s deep passion for the area.

It would be very easy for a book on this topic to be very depressing. There is so very much bad science out there, so many people profiting from people’s willingness to believe, and so many newspapers more than happy to put the simple answer on the front page, rather than all the footnotes. But I found the book energising, a call to action. It’s a book that brings the scope of the problem to your attention, and calls you to do something.

Of course, I don’t know a lot about science. But the book also made me think about the similar problems that are seen in journalism around economic issues in Australia (and probably elsewhere). But after reading this book I’m very tempted to start my own column on these things: Bad Economics. And that kind of result of reading a book is the sort of thing most authors would dream of.

I just finished playing through all of Half Life 2 (at least, all of what’s been released so far) for Rebel FM’s Game Club.

Yes, a little late to the party. But better late than never, especially for one of the best games of all time. I was playing through on the XBox – I’d bought the Orange Box edition last year for Portal, but had never got around to playing more than a few minutes of Half Life 2.

As an experience there are few things that have drawn me in as much as this. Other games have done the same with the strength of their plot – such as Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock, Knights of the Old Republic – but Half Life 2 is one of the few that does it on the strength of character. Alyx Vance is the obvious standout character from the games, but even the minor characters come alive in a way that is disappointingly rare for computer games so far. This is due to a combination of technology, writing and environment that makes this an experience anyone interested in the evolution of computer games should go through.

But as a game, it’s a little harder for me to recommend Half Life 2. If it weren’t for the press of Game Club there are parts that would have made me give up. There are sections, especially in the main game, that go on for far too long. It’s nice to establish a few gameplay mechanics and play with them for a while, but there’s a distinction between escalation (which is fun and challenging) and dragging things out. This is better in the two sequel episodes, although only by a matter of degree. While others found the climactic sequence of Episode 2 a lot of fun, personally I found the new mechanics cumbersome and annoying.

It’s also quite ‘gamey’, something that only distracts me because of the quality of the plot and the characters. Given how strong everything else is, it’s distracting to see the obvious ‘points of no return’, mostly driven by your inability to jump very far. And to have a section, as in one point of Episode 2, where you go from being inside an alien hive to being back in a mine because it’s convenient to the construction of the level is distracting and annoying. It’s an artefact of building the game to be as fun as possible (and hence avoiding backtracking, something the design does well), but it comes at the cost of the sense of place.

I enjoyed Half Life 2 and its episodes a lot. Something that I would say about only one other pure shooter (Bioshock). And I’m looking forward to Episode 3, when it’s eventually released. But I don’t think that I’d ever go back to play them again, and would probably tell most people without an interest in shooters or ‘games as art’ to try before they buy.

I’m a big fan of money.

I don’t just mean in the mundane “it’s nice to spend sense”. Money is a profoundly weird, incredible invention. It is ultimately very hard to explain money, and hard to see how it ever really came into use. The story of money is incredibly interesting.

Unfortunately, that’s not the book that Niall Ferguson has written. Rather than being the story of money, the book focuses on the development of financial markets. Bonds, shares and insurance. Fortunately, that’s a big a field to cover. As with his previous books, the scholarly approach that Ferguson takes gives the details that bring the story to life, although his approach sometimes removes complications to tell a simpler, more coherent story.

This isn’t the same as Niall’s previous books. The list of topics is actually somewhat eclectic: cash money, bonds, stock market bubbles, insurance, real estate markets, public pension schemes, and international financial systems. This is probably a product of the book being linked to a TV series (a pretty good one, actually), so some breadth of topic was needed in order to sustain interest. But that breadth comes at the cost of depth, especially by contrast to some of Niall’s other books. His history of World War I, for instance, goes into fantastic depth on topics such as the bond market’s movements prior to the declaration of war.

I probably would have preferred a book that was more along the lines of his previous work. That’s because I work in this field, and I find it very interesting. But it’s nice to see his voice and tone translated to a more accessible form. So while ultimately I hoped for another book, it’s a book that is easier for me to recommend to others as a result.

When I first started reading this book my wife thought it was a waste of time. She said that I was already pretty much in touch with my inner economist.

That’s pretty much true. And overall she was right – I didn’t really get much out of this book.

Tyler Cowen is an economist who I can respect. His work doesn’t always agree with my views, but it’s usually well argued and thought provoking. But what works well in short doses in a blog becomes grating in larger doses. Throughout the book points are belaboured to the point of pain, and the central insight overeexplicated at the expense of subtlety and nuance.

Nothing in the book made me go ‘aha’, nothing changed the way that I was planning to behave. The advice was either obvious, or it was things that I would never consider doing for one reason or another. For instance, the advice on how to motivate your dentist comes down to “supporting their self-image as a good dentist”. The discussion around the problems with incentives is interesting, but the final advice comes across as flat and dull. Perhaps it’s because Cowen is ultimately too honest – he knows the complications that behavioural economics causes in most classical economics predictions. Which in turn means that there is little that can be provided in terms of concrete, usable advice.

So all the book had to offer in the end was a slight discussion of some interesting economics, devoid of concrete advice that might be interesting or provocative, and without the interesting stories found in books such as Freakonomics. Most non-economists would come away from this book with at least a greater appreciation of the complexities of the science, but most professional economists will find little new here.