March 15, 2022

s11e16: Even Shorter Bullet Points

0.0 Context setting

It’s Tuesday, March 15 2022. We had a late start today – I’m going to blame the combination of the time change with doing the school run – which meant I started this in the morning and am having to finish it in the late afternoon. It didn’t rain much.

1.0 Things that caught my attention

Even shorter bullet points today:

• Unsurprisingly (or, rather, now published in nature machine intelligence) if you have an ML model tuned to find new drugs that aren’t toxic you can do the opposite and use it to generate drugs that are toxic.¹
• While the U.S. is waking up to the complexities of sign-on and identity in government services, the U.K.’s Government Digital Service is moving ahead with private beta partners for GOV.UK Sign In. This isn’t for public services, but internal government services, but still!
• I need to try this out, and I suspect this is for Android: but you can send a fax call to voicemail on a mobile phone and it’ll get properly accepted², so I’m putting this one in the file of “interesting side-effects of being able to liberally throw parsers at things that accept input, and not thinking too hard”
• Medical billing in the US is terrible (yes, medical billing shouldn’t even be a thing), but perhaps sketchnotes and/or graphical/visual billing and flow charts might make them more scrutable. I mean, they’d also probably make them less scrutable on purpose. Adversarial graphical billing. Anyway, this was a fantastic idea from Nikki Sylianteng.
• Two cyberpunk-wasn’t-a-manual tweets: 1) walk signs in Crystal City, VA are repeating the phrase CHANGE PASSWORD and via absolutely everyone, 2) that time Paramount+ lit up the sky above the port, sorry, SXSW, with the color of a QR code tuned to a Halo TV series promotion. (Previously: the sky above the port was full of drones, tuned to a 404ing QR code)

1.1 Red Dead Redemption: Grand Theft Robot Dinosaur

I have a short, not-quite developed thought/thing that caught my attention based on starting the latest game in Red Dead Redemption: Grand Theft Robot Dinosaur³, a.k.a. Horizon: Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn.

As briefly as I can, Horizon: Forbidden West follows the story of Aloy, the savior of humanity in a way that even Michael Burnham would concede is somewhat suspicious, as she succeeds in beating off one existential threat at the conclusion of the first game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, to learning about yet another existential threat at the beginning of the sequel.

Anyway: I had a fairly atypical experience, because I didn’t finish Horizon: Zero Day [sic] when it came out in 2017. Instead, I played through and finished it a couple weeks ago, doing it all in one go before starting Horizon: Pet Shop Boys. Which led to this super weird dynamic – you end Zero Dawn at the height of your powers. You have all the upgrades, all the weapons, all the body armor, everything you need to go pew pew pew shooty robot dinosaur with your bow, you can use your long pointy USB stick and plug it into the exposed port of any robot dinosaur to zero day it and then ride around, like it’s some sort of horsey you’ve grand thefted.

And then, for me at least, the next day you start Horizon: Journey To The West and your character has the equivalent of nothing. You don’t have your stuff. You don’t have your armor. You have to learn how to climb all over again, and, inexplicably, the ladders work differently.

Now look, I’m kind of making fun here in that some of these issues (ladders working differently) are, OK, environmental level design issues and they’re allowable in the grand scheme of suspension of disbelief because you’re playing a videogame where you have a magic USB stick and autorun.inf still exists.

But I think this is a problem with most chronological sequels. Note: I think. I remember Mass Effect dealing with this in terms of importing your previous character, but that was more like importing your previous character’s choices and so on for a more role-playing, narrative-based game. Mainly because Mass Effect had a great way of dealing with this if you didn’t have a previous save to import, through the fiction of having to reconstruct corrupted data.

Pragmatically, you’ve got the problem that most (many) of the players of the sequel, if you’ve done a good job, are coming to it cold, and you don’t want the game to suck for them. So you have to make sure you go through some sort of intro/tutorial sequence. And most people won’t be coming into your game having directly finished the previous game either, because I admit that I am weird in this case.

And yet, we do have a trend for videogames to support something called New Game+, where you get to start over after finishing, with a bunch of your stuff, on the general premise that ‘having more stuff’ and ‘being able to do more things’ more or less can correlate with ‘have fun’.

So. I’m idly thinking about how you balance new players and onboarding again with the tension of narrative continuity, i.e. the “what the hell, what happened to my stuff?” problem.

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Okay, that’s it! It’s the end of Tuesday? How was yours?

Best,

Dan