Virtuality (Eventually Featuring Spiders, If We Want Them... So, Folks, The Real Question is, Do We Want Them?)

Disclaimer and Rules of Engagement. It turns out to be the case that I enjoy writing this blog, for now at least. It also turns out to be the case that I have very little time to spend on it. [Case in point, I dashed off this little entry about two weeks ago, and between family obligations (I'm not complaining), doing the taxes and several workdays of 15 hours or more, I haven't had a moment to get back to this until now.] I've looked over what I've typed below. There are rough spots. I'm probably never going to correct them. I'm going to go to bed, and never look back.

Cue stream of consciousness furthering the virtual reality "thread" started below in the No Spiders post (read that post's content related to Star Wars Galaxies before proceeding):

When will the day come that a luxurious second home in version 87 of SWG will be as great a getaway or, coming at it from different angles, as prestigious or, alternatively, as good an investment, as a real-world second home by some real world lake? When will someone, hurt badly in a real-world accident, "pick up and move" to full-time residence in a virtual space where his avatar is uncrippled. Could the virtual space for such a person be tied into the real world, and vice versa, in such a way, by streaming exchange of data and corresponding rendering, that his avatar could walk among us in the real space, and we could walk with him in the virtual space? An idiosyncracy-mending two-way simulcast.

As people spend more time in virtual spaces, will we retool the physical rules of those spaces, or the capabilities of the avatars in it (See "City of Heroes" game), to deliberately deviate from (read: improve on) the path of slavishly modelling and simulating reality, as if reality "got it right" and was so worthy of mimicing "just so". Would such improvements eventually make a robust and well-designed virtual world a strongly preferable place to live, or will they suggest to us improvements some of which we'll realize we have the technology to actually implement in real space as well.

At what point, and I think the answer is "already", will it be right to recognize that "reality" is defined by the physical world as well as the growing square mileage of virtual ones.

When will a single currency be valid in both real and virtual spaces? When will I log into a virtual space, to see or experience something someone has created there, and pay for it, in the virtual space, by drawing on an account that services both real and virtual spaces? When will I earn real-world (or both-world) dollars for something I do or sell in a virtual place?

How should property rights work in a virtual space where nothing but sentiency itself need be scarce (and that, for how long)?

Currently, the several virtual worlds (e.g., SWG, Everquest, City of Heroes) are distinct, compartmentalized, and proprietary. You log into one of these specific spaces, and engage with it. Will a time come when the alternate virtual worlds are more like just really robust websites... Your interface (currently a keyboard, mouse, speakers, microphone and monitor... but surely this will improve) is connected to the Internet, and you choose the site with the content you want. Will the "browser", coding standards and our perceptions adjust, and expand, so that "going online" may come to mean logging into a more immersive virtual space and acting/ sensing in it through an avatar, or just going to some "flat" site, like CNN.com currently is?

Or, from another angle, when will the "canvas" of some virtual world space be "open", like the web is now? For example, I can register a domain name and build a website at the corresponding URL, putting almost anything there I want. I can go to some web sites and modify their content (e.g., message boards). When will I be able to register a plot of virtual land in virtual space, build whatever I want there - a virtual house instead of a flat website, fill it with whatever I wish...invite my friends over to give me house gifts and paint on the walls with me...

Hold On, Hold On... Let Me Explain...

I am about to tell you what I had for lunch today, but first you need to know the origin of the title of this blog, "365 Lunches", before you get the wrong idea.

We lived in Chicago for about seven years, ending this past summer. A couple summers ago, in 2003, I thought it would be interesting to keep a journal for a year that was centered simply on what I did for lunch. Who I ate with. What was going on in our lives at the time. What kinds of things were front and center in my consciousness at lunchtime on any given day. I think it started one day when I was wandering around in the Loop looking for a new place to try a burger or whatnot. I found a little pizza shop on the NW corner of Wells and Van Buren, took a seat, and started watching people. A cop came in and got lunch on the house. Some crazy guy was walking around outside. I was ruminating about some upcoming something-or-other. It somehow seemed like a lunch-centered diary kept for one year would provide an interesting "core sample" of life as a young-ish lawyer in a big firm in a big city.

I kept mediocre notes for a while, and the project had its merits, but there were too many things I didn't feel I could put to paper in good conscience. I of course couldn't record, in this fashion, anything at all about the fascinating transactions and matters I was working on in the office. And I didn't want to be the creepy guy who was writing notes about what he and his buddies discussed over lunch. So I quickly abandoned the idea. If it could be done, I'd do it, but it really just can't be done properly within the ethical and social parameters I think apply. It would have been very interesting because, among other reasons, that turned out to be my "wrap-up" year at that firm and in that city, since we quite suddenly decided to move to this entirely different part of the country right about the time the 365 Lunches would have ended.

So, this blog got its name from that defunct project. It is not a resurrection of the project. Also, more to the point I first made above, the title of this blog isn't meant to suggest that this is a food-centered blog. There will be some of that. But that's not the "charter".

Lunch today was at another one of the smartest choices in Copper Square: Seamus McCaffrey's. This cozy, homey spot seems a continent removed from the cactus and mountains of Phoenix. It's a slightly smokey, solidly self-confident, been-here-forever-and-here-to-stay-till-doomsday, check your BMW keys in the bucket by the door type of place. Seat yourself. Don't mistreat the staff. Enjoy ESPN on the tube. Relax and eat.

The past two times I've been there I had the Irish Stew, which is good enough to be a default, standby choice on any return visit. It is rich and hearty, loaded with beef, potatoes, carrots, onions and peas, and tastes like it was served right off the stovetop. But the last time I was here a friend ordered his usual, a steak boxty, and it looked so good I made a point to try it on my next visit, which was today.

Cribbing from the menu itself, the boxty is "a potato-based grilled pancake" rooted, if I am reading the menu correctly, in a traditional recipe unique to Galway, in the west of Ireland. The boxty at McCaffrey's is offered in four versions: Chicken, vegetarian, corned beef and cabbage, and steak and Guinness Stout. I tried the steak version. The small chunks of steak are marinated in the Guinness, then combined with seasonings, mushrooms and onions and poured into the plate. The potato pancake is set in the middle. The dish was excellent, with very strong, well-balanced flavors. The ingredients seemed to be fresh and of good quality. The sauce was a bit heavier on the mushrooms than I would like (the waitress noted that I left some mushrooms to the side and confessed she does the same).

Bottom line: add Seamus McCaffrey's to the list with Focaccia Fiorentina for great food, no-frills, down-to-earth lunch options in Copper Square.

Great Views, No Spiders

Here's a photo recently posted on Zabrek's Travels, a casual blog that follows the life of a character in the "Star Wars Galaxies" massively multiplayer online role playing game. The guy who keeps the blog has played the game since the beta was opened to a small number of folks early in 2003. The beta shut down when the game was formally launched on, I believe, June 30, 2003. The game readily permits you to take a screen capture at any time, to record what you are seeing. His blog is built around the screen captures he has taken at interesting moments, or of interesting scenes.

In the game, you walk around, seeing the world through the eyes of your character. You choose your character's race and customize its appearance, and you decide how to spend your time in the game, wandering around, talking to other characters, doing tasks to earn money or increase your skill levels in your chosen professions, buying stuff, making stuff, hunting, dancing, training animals, etc. The gameplay is persistent, by which I mean both that the game is going on whether you're logged in or not, and your character lives on from one session of play to the next, progressing, not starting over each time you stop or start playing. I only played a bit, for period of a few weeks, but it is pretty fun and I would do it more if circumstances permitted.

The point of this entry is to comment on the virtual world the game presents. There are several planets you can travel among, and the planets are massive. You can wander nearly forever in wilderness or city areas. You encounter other player characters as well as computer-controlled characters, and you can talk with all of them. Groups and friendships form, such as for example, hutning parties or task forces. Animals roam around. There are plants and grasses. Wind blows the plants and grasses. Day cycles to night, stars and moons emerge, dawn breaks, etc. This screen shot I have linked to above is very pretty, and I enjoy thinking that that scene is going on, existing, in that virtual world right now... along with thousands of others like it. I don't know how the virtual world works well enough to know if a scene exists if a character is not there to view it. I suspect not, or, more likely, I suspect the answer is that it exists to some extent.

I remember one time in the game, night fell and I was outside the city walls of Wayfar, a city on Tatooine. I looked skyward to see the stars, and realized I could see an Imperial Cruiser "parked" in the sky overhead. It was the equivalent of a few miles up there, but it was massive so I could see it clearly. I happened to be a few hundred meters from an imperial outpost in the desert, and shuttle transports were traveling between the outpost and the Cruiser. The game experience is immersive enough (if your personality allows you to be immersed in such a thing), that, for me, it was a seriously "interesting" moment to first catch a glimpse of that Cruiser up there. It felt like, "Hmmm, now I can add "Looking up in the night sky and seeing a really big spaceship in orbit" to the list of things I've done in life."

Stepping back, tangentially related is a comment an adult friend made to me in approximately 1999 or 2000 when he explained why he bought a Sega Dreamcast game console. He said he was at Best Buy, and he caught a bit of a football game on TV out of the corner of his eye. He walked closer to see who was playing, and then realized it was a Dreamcast videogame. And that's now a chapter or two in the past. We're not playing with Atari 2600's anymore.

I remember in 1993, during a summer and semester abroad before going back to college proper, wondering if, when "virtual reality" really got around to becoming, um, a reality, there would be tasks and professions to be done in that space, in other words, would there be things that people would be paid to do "in there". Would there be things that would be desirable to have done in the virtual space that a computer couldn't be made to do convincingly. This goes back to the decades-old question about artificial intelligence, which I think was along the lines of: What three questions could reliably, consistently be used to distinguish artificial intelligence from an actual human? If you sat at a computer terminal and typed three questions, and answers appeared in text on your screen, AI would have "arrived" if there was no set of questions that you could ask, the answers to which would betray whether the respondent was another human or the computer itself. So, back to the question, what things might someone want in a virtual reality setting that a computer can't simulate well enough on its own? Artistic things? Analytical things? "Appropriately irrational" things?

Another angle of all this relates to questions about economies in, and surrounding, these virtual worlds. In theory, most things don't exist in Star Wars Galaxies unless player characters make them. People can buy and sell things to each other in the game, both in person and through something very much like an in-game e-bay. Markets develop, and determine prices, for products and raw materials. To make things, players have to collect raw materials, get trained and practice.

The people behind SWG are trying to create a "real" economy inside the game. Other similar game worlds have had curious issues in this regard. I remember an article in Wired magazine a few years ago about "rares" in Everquest (stuff that wasn't supposed to exist, like portable pieces of a waterfall, arising from bugs in the game, and stuff that was deliberately made to exist in small quantities), which were selling for big bucks. And non-rare virtual stuff, such as houses in Everquest, were selling in the real world, on e-bay for example, for real world dollars. Someone was quoted as estimating that there were a half-dozen or so people out there making six-figure incomes brokering virtual property in Everquest.

It's late and I've got to sleep. Staying up late on this blog is killing my early-morning rides. I'm not covering this topic as clearly as I'd hope. The other thought I meant to open and perhaps will try to hit later was to consider what specific things these virtual environments hold out to folks that make them attractive alternatives, in varying degrees, for various people, to full-time residence in the real world. And is that OK?

Another thought, for a future entry -- wonder why we don't seem to see any(?) current-generation games that are solidly, profoundly, utterly built around entirely alternative reality-schemes. In other words, why just games that generally simulate some experience or activity that is available in the real world? I understand why there are, and will always be those games -- letting you do real-world stuff you couldn't normally go out and do -- but why not some games that are based on entirely non-human, non-animal, non-anything-that-exists schemes and paradigms? Roll out totally different physics, totally non-human "first persons"/ avatars, make objectives that simply don't match anything in the scope of known sentient activity... Are there any such games? Any that come close? Any that touch in that direction? I love first-person shooters. But would I actually love being some amorphous blob of energy expanding in space and, I dunno, spinning my energy mass around singularity points in a musical, cosmic gymnatism?

[More on all this nonsense later...]

Vodka, Thrasher and Pita

A friend advises me that the "not yet identified bird" in the photo below is a Curve-billed Thrasher. I think he's probably right, but I'll try to get another look if the bird shows up again, to confirm.

I had a quick lunch today at Focaccia Fiorentina. As usual, I chose the "two pasta special", which they serve in a single bowl. Focaccia is one of the top three or so Copper Square lunch options as far as quality of food is concerned. It's no-frills all the way at $8.00 for the pasta, a roll and a Coke assembled as you shuffle down the cafeteria-style line, but the pasta and sauces are as good as you could want. The pasta is always filling, the sauces are very tasty, and nothing in the mix of it all is prone to cause indigestion... which I can't say about the specials at a couple other Copper Square "hot spots."

We had dinner at Sabuddy in Tempe on our last night with guests, P&L. I had a perfectly fine falafel, but seriously wished I had chosen the lamb special after it arrived for one member of our party, who offered tasting samples to the table. Mental note: try it next time.

I did not ride this morning. Pure sloth in a hectic week. I need to get out there tomorrow, though, and just do it. In theory, I have committed to a 26-mile ride/race on April 2, to "formally" get back into this sport I played hookey from for... 15 years?

My parents and two of my siblings arrive this weekend for a one-week visit. We're really looking forward to this. Naturally, at work there's now talk that I may need to travel out-of-state next week...

Never Before and Never Since, I Promise, Will the Whole World Be Warm as This

I didn't ride this morning. Had to leave early to drop my car off at the shop before work. But this was good in that it also gave me good reason to leave work "early" at the end of the day to pick up the car before the dealership closed, which meant I could break out of the current work routine, get home in a timely manner and enjoy dinner with our guests from out-of-town. They're visiting from Chicago, where we used to live. We barbecued steaks, chicken and veggies on the grill out back. Great weather. P&L, our guests, are part of the core set of friends we made while living in Chicago. It is almost hard to really "get" that they are here, since that world we left and this world we're building here seem completely disjointed, as if the two do not exist on the same planet. And yet, here they are.

Add to the welcome presence of P&L another point of connection today, an unexpected but "I'd known this was coming", forty-minute phone call with another friend from the old crew back in Chicago. He's done some great, brave things that disrupt and redefine his life and, slowly but surely cast mine in changed light.

So... the song lyrics providing the title for this entry... From "These Are Days", on the album Our Time in Eden, performed by Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs. Song written by Rob Buck and Natalie Merchant. For a long time, with roots in the early days of my relationship with my wife, winding with flourish through the time I spent studying in Jerusalem, this song has been on my short list of "songs I want played at my funeral" or would want played, if such things were actually done. It's peaceful, simple and beautiful, and, with no agenda, as if it is talking only to itself, connects me -- or, alternately, reminds me that I am connected -- to "something bigger." I read this over the pulpit once, and felt I might have gone too far.

Here is a link concerning the Mourning Dove. In addition, I should explain that the inclusion of the line from Les Miseranimals, below, was prompted by my wife stumbling across the episode on cable last night. That line was a favorite, long forgotten.

Mourning Dove in Flight 

Mourning Dove 

That Hole is Much too Small, to Pull my Body Through... What Were You Thinking You Big Buffoon?

(Explanation...) Went for a bike ride this morning. Took my daughter to the park in the afternoon. Snapped some shots of the Mourning Doves. Got the house ready for some guests from out-of-town. Gorgeous weather.

For more interesting pictures...

... check out Zabrek Travels. Now that guy knows how to have fun. All I've got is bird and moon pictures.

Another Great Thing...

... about living in a less urban setting is that I can use my telescope. The moon shot above is not perfect, but I was pretty pleased with getting this result.

Moon Shot 

Not Yet Identified... 

House Finch (Third Attempt) 

House Finch
We've recently moved from a gigantic city to a not-as-big city. In the gigantic city, we lived right downtown. In this not-so-big city, we live in the 'burbs. I love having a yard again, after living maybe ten years or so without one. We get birds in the backyard. Principally, there are Mourning Doves (about four of them), House Finches (about three of them, only one is red like this, which I think means he's male), and a bird I haven't classified yet. There are hummingbirds, too.

Here's a link regarding the House Finch.