. . . but not about the game itself. I was just browsing around “Bungie.net”:http://www.bungie.net, where (among other things) you can view stats for all your games played online and even _look at maps of the levels to see where you scored kills and were killed_. Freaky and cool.

More importantly, the whole website reinforces what I had assumed from such a great pair of games: these guys are brilliant. It hit me most reading something innocuous enough — the “weekly update”:http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=weeklyupdatenov19 page where they answer reader mail. First of all, it’s cool that they do that at all, especially every week. Second of all, the answers to the questions — especially the first couple — clearly show that the designers have thought long and hard about this game and how to make every aspect of it work as well as it possibly can. And they’re willing to talk frankly and articulately about their design decisions and the rationale behind them.

The Bungie guys understand that good programmers and artists can make a great game, but it also takes dedication to the fans and ongoing development to make that great game a cultural phenomenon. They did it once, and they’re doing it again.

The laptop is in the shop, so I browsed to this site using the old laptop (Windows 98 — how quaint!) for what must be the first time. And it looked awful! The reason is best expressed in the form of a public service announcement:

…

Polytropos uses the fonts Palatino and Georgia to bring you an attractive, elegant, readable design. These fonts are installed by default in Windows XP, but not in many other operating systems. We sincerely apologize to all of those who are unable to enjoy a complete blog-viewing experience.

Sincerely,

The Management

Wednesday night: The ol’ roleplaying group brought to a close our long-running superhero game — with a bang, to say the least. Stunning victories, tragic turns, and an ending that made sense and yet wasn’t what anyone had really anticipated. A smashing end to a campaign that had a great run. Special kudos to “Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com/, who was the alpha GM.

Thursday night: Got a couple hours of Halo 2 in via Xbox Live, with ol’ college buddies Dave, Kiff, and “Chris”:http://eologism.blogspot.com/, all scattered across the country. Yes, it’s true, I took the plunge and got an Xbox (I’d better be right about that tax return now …). If the past couple hours are any indication, it was money ridiculously well spent. But I’ll save my gushing for later.

Truly, my gaming cup runneth over.

Part of me has always held the hope that, were Bush to be reelected, he would quietly purge his Administration of the neocon influences that had so badly bungled the Iraq War. We’d still have Republicans, but at least we wouldn’t have the disastrous foreign policy. But Rumsfeld’s not going anywhere; Rice is in at State. My (admittedly fleeting) hope has been taken out back and shot. Bush clearly believes that these people have served him and the country well.

My question: If the White House thinks the CIA is infested with liberals, what on _earth_ do they make of State? Is Rice going to start instituting Gossian purges there too?

The personal upside: I’m more and more glad each passing day that I didn’t take “that job”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000556.html.

Leave it to Bungie, the folks behind the original Halo, to make a followup that actually simplifies aspects of its predecessor. Conventional wisdom for the video game sequel is pretty well established: give it better graphics, more weapons, and some extra things to do. If it’s been a while since the first one, technology may have progressed to the point where you can throw in better AI too. The rule of thumb, though, is simple: more is more.

I made an iPod-Halo analogy recently to illustrate the notion that sometimes less is more, and this is clearly a lesson that Bungie has kept in mind when designing Halo 2. Sure, the graphics are better, and so is the AI. There are more weapons—but they’ve also taken some out. And the most significant change is a simplification: instead of having both recharging shields and non-recharging health points, in Halo 2 you just have the shields, and some indeterminate-but-tiny amount of health once they’re gone. The shields also recharge faster. The result is a different style of play, but not a more complicated one.

Similarly, you jump quite a bit higher in Halo 2, but this isn’t just a ramping-up of ability—there’s a tradeoff between the added height and distance you can move and the fact that you’re vulnerable for a longer period of time without being able to control your movement. Even the ability to wield two guns at once comes at a price—no grenades, and no punches without losing one of your weapons—so it becomes a matter of tactical choice and not just one of more firepower.

All these things point to a mature design philosophy, but in and of themselves don’t make a great game. So it’s worth nothing that, yes, Halo 2 totally and utterly rocks. Cool levels, frenetic action, beautiful visuals, elegant movement. This is all the more impressive when you consider that it’s a game built for the Xbox, a console system that is three years old. And I’m speaking just based on the split-screen multiplayer experience—by all accounts, the single player game is very strong, and the multiplayer options on Xbox online are even better.

Of course, I don’t even own an Xbox. Yet. Fate has conspired to present me with a daunting choice. The ol’ PC gaming box is getting old. The fan on the graphics card creaks and whines; the processor and memory just don’t measure up to the demands of the latest iterations of Doom and Half-Life. But even if buying an Xbox and upgrading the PC was an option financially (ha!), it wouldn’t be a realistic one—I don’t have as much time for video games as I did in days of yore. It only makes sense to do one or the other. Financially and socially, Xbox is the clear choice, but PC gaming and computer building have been hobbies of mine for years—would I be giving them up, or simply acknowledging that, free-time-wise, they’re hobbies whose time had come anyway? Decisions, decisions . . .

I’ve done it. Thanks to a timely birthday, a generous family, and the best wife in the whole wide world, I have joined the iPod Nation. It’s only fitting for someone who once declared the iPod one of the “triumphs of our technological culture.” Long have I lived with iPod envy, and now that one of the beautiful white wafers (4th generation, 20 gig) is mine, it is everything I hoped it would be.

The iPod is no longer alone in offering high-gig storage and excellent sound quality in a pocket-sized mp3 player. But it still rules the roost, not because of the its cultural cachet, but because of the thousand little touchs that earned it that cachet in the first place: The clean interface. The elegant simplicity in its function. The cool touchwheel for navigating. The fact that when you pull out the headphones, it automatically pauses. So obvious, and yet so brilliant!

mp3 players have been with us for a while—I’ve had a 6 gig Nomad Jukebox for a few years now. But it’s the iPod that crosses that all-important line, bringing not just new technology but human accessibility. The Jukebox was the size of a portable CD player—small, but just big enough not to want to stick in your pocket most times you’re heading out. It had plenty of storage, but not enough for all the music. And the transfer speeds, on USB 1.0, were slow enough that updating it when my music collection changed was something of a chore. Consequently, after the first flush of excitement, it got relegated to permanent car duty, its contents gradually falling more and more out of sync with the music I was actually listening to. The iPod crosses all these bridges with ease. It holds all the music I could possibly want it to hold. Its less obtrusive in the pocket than my cellphone. And the transfer speeds are fast enough that time isn’t even a factor when updating it.

So now I’m re-ripping tracks off my CDs at a higher bitrate, just because I can. And in the process I’m discovering something else: iTunes is cool in all the ways that the iPod is. It’s all a bit much for my PC-accustomed brain to handle. I’m used to hunting down the small freeware utility that rips tracks for me because the built-in Windows one sucks, and being perfectly happy with the fact that it looks ugly but gets the job done and has a ton of configurable options. With iTunes, you stick a CD in and the tracks pop up on the screen and in the upper-right corner there’s a big button that says IMPORT. Best of all—and it seems like a small thing, but really it’s not—a little wavy icon appears by tracks that are current being imported, and neat green checkmarks appear by those that are done. And once you press it and the tracks start importing you can click over to your library and play something else at the same time without difficulty. It works, simply, and it just looks . . . nice.

Two lessons are at work here, both of which I have recently learned in other computer-related contexts before I even got the iPod.

Lesson #1: Less is More

Simplicity can be a virtue, even when it comes to the number of configuration options you have. Less choices mean that it’s easier to access all the choices you do have—the trick is making sure that the choices you keep are the right ones. At the end of the day, you do want lots of flexibility under the hood, but when it comes to the user interface, less is more.

I learned this lesson, or at least one similar to it, from Halo. I lamented my frustrations with Unreal Tournament 2004 back in April, and have since been playing a lot more Halo, both on Xbox and on the PC, and realizing that what makes it such a great game is, in large part, its simplicity. You can’t lug around a dozen weapons, only two: you have to choose. You can’t double-jump, flip-jump, or teleport, but you don’t miss it. The movement is cleaner somehow in Halo, something that shows up nowhere more than with the vehicles—in Halo, it feels like you’re driving something, but in UT2004 you’re just moving pixels around on a screen. Once again, it’s not about options, it’s about the visceral user experience.

Lesson #2: Beauty Counts

We’re back to the little wavy lines by the track that’s importing here. It’s not complicated—just Graphic Design 101—but it’s something that, the more I use computers, the more I realize is important. If what you’re using looks good, you feel good using it. It’s why I use Microsoft Office when I could be using “OpenOffice”:http://www.openoffice.org; it’s why I picked Movable Type over WordPress. And given Apple’s track record for cool-looking stuff, it’s why the iPod is going to just fine against all the competition that’s cropping up. The “iPod killers” may have the same raw stats, but if they don’t have the style, they’re not going to prevail.

I know what you’re thinking: “Nate! Dude! You’re turning into an Apple person!” Depending on whether you’re an Apple person, you’re thinking those words with a tone of either dismay or triumph. And it’s true—as Darren Cohen was the first to point out, the iPod is the gateway drug to all things Apple. And I’ll admit that I can see that path stretching out before me now, with a smoothly-drawn, elegant siren at the end of it, calling, beckoning. But I’m not going down that path just yet. I’ve still got plenty of time and energy and knowledge tied up in the world of PCs, for one thing. But the bigger reason has to do with the time I walked into the Apple Store. I was actually excited about it, since I had a real reason to walk into the place—I wanted to get a case for my iPod, something I could clip to my belt. And just like the iPods themselves and Apples everywhere, the Store was elegant and gorgeous and yummy. I even found just the sort of case I was looking for . . .

. . . it cost forty bucks. For a lousy case. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Apple: you pay to join the cult, big time. You pay not just for the product but for the prestige. I’m a happy citizen of the iPod Nation, but the taxes in the Apple Nation are just too high.

Apologies for the ominous Polytropian silence of the past few days. It’s a result of post-election doldrums followed by a weekend out of town followed by a cold, which I’ve just about shaken. Hopefully the regular schedule of occasional posts will resume soon.

Upon reflection, my “decision”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000589.html to scale back on blogreading is fueled somewhat by resentment — certainly not at specific authors, but at the general fact that, after all the reading and analysis, _none_ of the blogs I read, at any point on the political spectrum, correctly identified the driving force behind the election result beforehand. Jim, not surprisingly, “puts it well”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_10_31.html#005613:

[We] followed the campaign on TV and – blogs! Plus the internet sites of major metropolitan newspapers . . . And meanwhile, unknown to Alex and me and Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum and most operatives of the Democratic Party, the important campaign was the one we were barely watching at all. This one was taking place in “low church” pews and the basements of Catholic Churches; on Christian radio and among prayer groups. It was a ground-level meatspace operation that may have left cybernetic traces, but not where we, the vaunted blogosphere, were looking. Very occasionally it appeared before us, but as an oddity . . . The whole operation aiming to physically convey bodies to discrete spots in public buildings, full of an enthusiasm opaque to Technorati.

It’s ironic that in the election that brought us Howard Dean, Internet donations, and the campaign blog, the decisive factor was relatively low-tech GOTV efforts of the right people in the right places. There was media coverage of this, to be sure, but not with prominence or depth proportional to its significance. And the blogosphere missed it pretty much completely.

One thing’s for sure: in four years I’m getting out there. The whole “Virginia’s not in play, so it doesn’t really matter” schtick is seeming pretty lame now, especially since it’s clear that _the popular vote matters_. Bush is tossing around the word “mandate” like he won by thirty percentage points, not three. I wish I had spent less time reading these past few months, and more time _doing_.

I love reading my favorite blogs, but in the past few weeks I’ve been obsessed with a steady stream of political and polling analysis, while I remain a third of the way through _The System of the World_. Time for a change. I’m going to scale back dramatically on blog reading, which will hopefully lead to an increase in other reading, blogwriting, and other stuff. Accordingly, I’ve mashed together all the categories of the blogroll into one long list again. They’re all blogs I admire, though the number I’ll actually be reading will be small for the time being.

Until some as-yet-unreported source of missed Ohio votes appears, I assume that it’s over for Kerry. Items upon which I take only small comfort:

1. I wasn’t the only one who expected a clear Kerry win; in the final runup all the buzz on both sides of the fence was going his way, and it appears that both campaigns were equally surprised at the ultimate result.
2. Bush will now have to face his own mistakes and their consequences.

In my heart of hearts I was holding out for a very strong Kerry victory—clinching Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida all before midnight, or something to that effect. But new voters and increased voter turnout didn’t sway to the left; they stayed pretty much even, and so we got another razor-thin result that tilted Bush’s way.

Before I swear off paying attention to polls ever again, there are two things that struck me about the exit numbers reported last night. First, the Bush lead on the question of “who’s better to fight terror” was huge, and this despite the fact that when it comes to Iraq (mistake or not, success or failure, relevant to WoT or not) the results were more or less even. These numbers aren’t new, but seeing them verified in the voting booth reminded me of them, and of the fact that they make no sense to me at all and never will.

The other thing that struck me were the high numbers that put “moral values” as their number one concern. More did so than put “terrorism” or “the economy,” according to a couple of sources on TV last night. That, coupled with across-the-board passage of measures opposing gay marriage, tells me that the culturally conservative segment of our society is bigger than I thought, or at the very least way more motivated than I thought. It’s that resounding victory on the cultural front that makes things look especially bleak. Republicans have cemented their Congressional leads and now have a President who actually won the popular vote. Democrats are demoralized and will likely turn to if-only games and petty squabbling—at the very least they’ll be off their game for a while. Er, more off their game than normal.

Here’s a hopeful take on things, one that my mind tells me is valid even if my heart isn’t in it right now:

After 9/11 Bush had approval ratings in the nineties. These have steadily eroded since then, and will continue to erode—it just so happens that at the moment of the election he still had it together enough to squeak out a victory. He did this thanks to a highly motivated cultural conservative base and a significant segment of the populace that takes solace, against reason, in his “tough guy” approach to terrorism. That latter group is going to keep shrinking, and history is against the cultural conservatives too, though that may take more time. And let’s not forget that the margin of victory was miniscule. It feels like a big defeat, but as I noted yesterday, the election results were still basically a statistical blip on what is essentially a divided nation. There is all the chance in the world of a comeback in four years.