Simpson's Paradox

My morning before class started with sleeping through the alarm, and as always, rushing set off a series of other minor catastrophes. When I saw the No Left Turn – Train sign by Chapel Hill Road, I realized I’d have to teleport to make it on time, and my usual pre-class coffee was completely out of the question. (By the way, I haven’t mentioned how that wee sign next to the left turn signal gives me the giggles. Hmm, I didn’t notice the GIANT TRAIN blocking my intended path, it’s a good thing they put up that little sign!) I called my program director, and left a frantic message for him, apologizing for running behind, saying I’d be about 5 minutes late, promising that I was coming to class as soon as I could.

I’ve been on the receiving end of too many work-related last-minute phone messages to feel really comfortable about this news getting to the kids, but when I finally got to my classroom, they were all sitting in their seats, and the chatter wasn’t too loud. I figured someone must have come by to tell the kids to wait quietly, and I asked the kids if anyone from admin had been in.

“No, but don’t worry, Miss Meg. We wouldn’t have told them you were late!” one of my students said immediately. “We’d have said you were here, but off doing something really important!”

I would never ask or encourage the kids to lie to school administration for me, but, secretly, I’m a little flattered that they would have.

One day, you’re standing on the dock, waving goodbye to a friend, when you slip and fall and land in a crate, which is sealed and loaded onto a cargo ship, which is caught up in a storm and your Sim is shipwrecked on a deserted island! Your poor shipwrecked Sim must survive on this island, at first by finding food, building a shelter and starting a fire.

The zaniness we love about the Sims arrives in Castaway once you’ve gotten a handle on sleeping and not-starving. Your Sim can build an SOS sign for Dharma initiative-style airdrops of random things, like a victrola or a candy bar.  As you collect island items, you can cook tasty dinners (your Sim was getting tired of bugs and raw fish), make new clothes, make tools or decorations, build a new house, make a canoe and just create all kind of island crafts. You can even make and play an ocarina! And, as you explore more, you’ll also befriend the other island refugees, and check out the ancient temple. All tropical islands have an ancient temple, don’t you know?

I’ve written such angry things about sparkly pink shopping games as “girls’ games”, that I hate to admit when I fall into a traditional girl pattern, but, well, I love pretend cooking. I like it in World of WarCraft, too, if that make me sound any less like an eight-year-old girl. I also like making Sim clothes and playing dress-up. Castaway avoids being an unappealingly feminine game by also having survival puzzles and mini-games about fish-catching and fire-building. Oh, and the game’s not pink, which is always good in my book.

Sims 2: Castaway seemed to make much better use of the DS interface than Sims 2. In the regular Sims 2, you’re forced to ignore the stylus, and use the clumsy buttons to navigate, but you can’t put the stylus away completely, because you need it to select menu options that really should be hotkeys or at least accessible by arrow keys. Sims 2: Castaway takes better advantage of the DS-specific interface, using either the stylus to move, and even creating minigames that require use of the microphone. The top screen is used to display the meters that are very familiar to Sims players.

One interface annoyance is the crafting book. When crafting, your Sim cannot create multiples of the same item. You need to select the crafting spot, tap Craft Things, then click the item you want to make,which leads to a screen showing you what materials will be reguired. On this screen, you must click Make. Then you’ll see a picture of what you’re making, and you must click OK. Then you see a picture of what you made, and you’re forced to click OK one more time. If you want to make a duplicate (or a second item), you’re back at the crafting book, and you need to do it all over again. And if your item is on the second or third page of the crafting book, it can be even longer. And if you need three of one item to make something special, well, seems like EA figured out how to most of the suck the fun from a crafting game.

I was a big fan of Sims 2 for the computer, so I expected to like Castaway. It was even better than I expected, with the exotic island theme, a zany but cohesive storyline, and all the adorably realistic animations we expect from the Sims.

Sims 2: Castaway on the DS was originally published June ‘09 on Thumb Gods

I’m kind of jealous that with all the time I’ve spent waiting at Newark Airport (For Christmas 2006, I flew in on AirIndia, Stick came in on British Airways and we both lost our luggage), I’ve never seen a singalong.

Wisegal is actually the second time I’ve contributed to a Lifetime casual game. I also helped to test Lifetime / Large Animal Game’s Fashion Solitaire in 2008, although I didn’t make it into the credits. Maybe I shouldn’t make fun of Lifetime TV anymore…  Maybe.

This game also marks the second time Amanda d’Adesky and I have contributed to a game together. This is hilarious because I discovered Amanda’s blog through her reaction to Brenda Brathwaite’s Train when I was researching my ThumbGods’ piece on Train. Turns out that she lives in NC, and also focus tests at Merscom, and works on about ten thousand indie game projects, and is just all-around awesome.

I would always be proud of my name in a game’s credit’s, but Wisegal happened to come out just in time to save my self-image from becoming tied too closely to my new waitressing gig. I can’t really complain about the endless mango lassis, but sometimes it’s a bit hard to see people seeing me as a not-so-bright bearer of menus. I do try to work that time the BBC called me to comment on Chinese-Western relations into conversation, but usually people just want me to get them drink refills. Whatever.

I really like farm management games, which is odd since I can’t keep a real plant alive, but after playing Harvest Moon, FarmCraft, Farm Frenzy and so many others, I wasn’t sure there was any room left for new farming games. I didn’t know if Funky Farm 2 by SortaSoft could bring anything new that other farm sims hadn’t already done.

The premise begins just like any other time management game. Raise your chickens, sheep, and pigs to maximize profits, unlock new animals and farm tools as you improve. But when I saw the rewards, I quickly realized this is not another rinse-and-repeat farm sim. Players don’t receive the typical bigger watering can or a new seed to cover more ground. As you play Funky Farm, you unlock a mailbox for government farm grants, a pet llama, a pet duck and other funny farmyard surprises.

Your sidekick, Piper the hep cat, wants to help you get the farm going so you can throw a happening party.  He guides you through the first levels with beatnik words of wisdom, explains the rules, and encourages you to pick up some new duds for the party. Even the error messages arrive with hep cat style!

Any money you earn above your level goal can be spend on accessories. I was a little apprehensive about this part, because I expected the casual-game cliche of a portrait of your hep cat friend wearing each new accessory. (Much like the annoying rewards screen in Tropical Dream and similar casual games) Oh no. When you buy accessories, your new livestock appears wearing the Chucks and shades you selected.

Each animal type needs a different type of care, sheep (and your pet llama) need to be sheared, pigs need to be slopped and slaughtered, and cows need to be milked. I was a little grossed out by turning the cute piggies into plates of bacon, but then I took a harder attitude and harvested* all my cows, sheep, chickens and pigs at the end of the day to save herding them into the pens at night. Did I mention that your new animals come with names like “Count” and “Basie”?

Like all time management games, this is all about balance. Players need enough farm products to sell and continue to buy new animals. With too many animals — especially those messy pigs! — you’ll spend the whole time reseeding the ground. With too few, you won’t be able to make the cash for your beehive hairstyles and bowties. This is a very well-done farm management game, with the right level of difficulty and reward, but it’s the wild beatnik personality that really makes the funky farm stand out.

*special Meg euphemism for “killed off”

Funky Farm 2 was originally published Feb. ‘09, on ThumbGods.

Time Gentlemen Please, by Simpson’s Paradox Click for full-size version.

My latest piece in Indie Game Mag reviews the profanity-laden, filthy and hilarious point-and-click adventure Time Gentlemen, Please!.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, begins by introducing the protagonist, Susie Salmon (like the fish, she reminds us), who is dead, murdered by a neighbor who’s made smalltalk with her parents a few times. As her community searches for her killer, and finally come to terms with her death, Susie watches from heaven.

Heaven, in The Lovely Bones, is a non-religious afterlife where everything is just as you want. Susie encounters a heavenly intake counselor, a former non-profit caseworker whose heaven is working for people who thank and appreciate her, and a heavenly roommate, a Vietnamese girl whose heaven includes speaking accentless English and having an American name. Unfortunately for me, Susie’s own heaven was the least appealing one described, involving a townful of dogs (I think this proves I have no heart but I can’t really get into all the maintenance required for slobber machines), but the details here, like the 14-year-old reading of Seventeen or the smells she most loved on earth, make any reader imagine their own heaven, without harps and angels, but perhaps the smell of new plastic and endless brand-new scenes in the Harry Potter movies. At least for me.

Susie leaves heaven to watch her friends and family. She watches her sister learn of her death, and grow up as dead Susie’s younger sister in school and around town. She visits her siblings, parents and school friends, watching them live their lives for years, and appearing, now and then, in a reflection or for a second at the corner of their eyes.

She also watches her high-school crush, Ray Singh. The relationship between Susie and Ray is absolutely perfect. High school relationships in books and movies tend to appear as whirlwind perfection or unwatchable awkwardness. (I do pull the embarrassment pillow over my face when this happens, but this isn’t always effective, since my father and my boyfriend both like to narrate movies as they unfold.) The Lonely Bones perfectly captures the awkward beauty of teenage connection without turning either Ray or Susie into a caricature.

Susie also watches the man who killed her. She learns his habits, and his history, even meeting in heaven a collection of other girls and women murdered by this man.  Descriptions of him are almost sympathetic, which is the most disturbing part of the book, far creepier than Susie’s rape and murder. As Susie is almost omniscient in heaven, she looks through his life. In a book like this, with characters that are so fully developed, it seemed weird to track the killer’s life back to his mother’s abandonment, transferring the blame for all the deaths (and Susie is one of a long line) not on the killer, but on his mother.

Without giving too much away, Susie’s father and sister determine her killer,  but readers are brought not to revenge or retribution, but to healing. The story ends with a satisfying conclusion, a conclusion that’s more of a beginning than a resolution.

I have to wonder how this story will translate to a film. I can read about Susie’s death and be moved by it, but I don’t think I want to see it. This is entirely different from my usual skittishness towards movies based on books I enjoyed, I’m not worried that the filmmakers won’t show it the way I pictured it in my head, I’m worried that the filmmakers will show it at all. Tragedy and violence are moving on the page, but usually gratuitous and messy on the screen.

I also wonder how Susie’s appearances to her family and friends will translate to a movie. I’m reminded of the topiaries in The Shining, which terrified me in the book, tickling that creepy sense that something is moving just beyond our field of vision, but somehow killer shrubs just looked goofy on film. I found The Lovely Bones gentle and disturbing by turns, and it will be interesting to see how it appears in a movie.

The folks at Ology asked me to write a book review as part of their Lovely Bones Book Club, and, once I was assured that I could bash it if I hated it (What? I’ve been known to trash a bad book), I agreed happily.

My childhood Christmases always involved playing Monopoly on the family room floor, and if that doesn’t sound enough like an idyllic Dylan Thomas evening (A Child’s Christmas in Wales, people, not “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”), I have no memories of ever squabbling with my cousins over who got to be the shoe or the boat, just sheer excitement that we could fill out a boardgame, and endless hopes that the adults would keep talking over their sherry just a little bit longer.

So Stick and I went looking for a good Christmas game for our first-grade niece (since she wasn’t going to get her dreidel), a good Useless Present that we could play with her on Christmas, and Ron from the Game Connection recommended Labrynth.

Labyrinth is marked as ages 8 and up, but because Isabelle is so smart, we thought we’d give it a try. It’s very hard to put an age designation on the difficulty; there’s no reading involved, but players need a good sense of  spacial relationships, and they must able to plan ahead and anticipate future moves. This fits Isabelle — she’s a lethal Connect Four player when she remembers to plan her moves ahead.

The object of the game is to move your token through a constantly-shifting maze, collecting treasure and  hoping that the other players don’t ruin your planned path (either accidentally or on purpose!).  Izzy’s Nana joined us to make up four players, and, even if it’s a bit strange to me to be one of the adults playing, it’s still exciting to get a full boardgame going on Christmas.

Eight or nine years ago, I worked in a diner while on a, ahem, break from college. The Pioneer Valley is full of similar college-age breakers, finding themselves, forming bands, creating art, getting that awful first novel out of the way, or just drifting between minimum wage jobs amid an ever-younger college crowd. It was the right choice at the time, I embraced the freedom of leaving school, and I read more of the literary canon during my year of pouring coffee than I ever read in college, but it became increasingly clear that waitressing was not really how I wanted to live.

And re-enrolling was the right choice, too, because going back to school introduced me to more  books that I hadn’t read yet, and one day in a Roman history class, I met a boy called Stick — maybe I’ve mentioned him? — who’d left an underwhelming job at the phone company to come back to college. And that was good.

I started working at a local restaurant a few weeks ago.  (And Stick returned to the phone company a few months ago, but this is my blog.) This is slightly different from my mid-college diner job, although it still offers all the intellectual stimulation of carrying items from kitchen to table and back again, it’s really pretty nice. It’s a Middle Eastern restaurant, which means a kitchen full of cardamon and coriander, and the owners are very relaxed about letting me experiment (for me, I mean, not to serve to the customers), and I really can’t complain about all the mango lassis. The dining room is pretty, with exotic decorations, and the customers are not inhaling meals on the rigid work breaks like my diner patrons, and the hours work around my classes at Chinese school. As long as I don’t think too much about how going back to college was supposed to prevent exactly this situation from happening, the job’s good.

The Urdu-speaking chef likes to call me senorita, much to the amusement of the Spanish-speaking kitchen staff who respond with the throat-clearing noise that means miss in Urdu. After my stress and success differentiating the four and a half Mandarin tones, and forcing my mouth to make sounds that aren’t in our alphabet, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that there are sounds in other foreign languages that don’t sound like words. And even so, hearing Urdu is just as shocking as hearing full speed Yantai-hua again. That was a sentence? How can anyone possibly pick words out of that? I’ve already ranted here about my massive struggles to learn Mandarin, and overall, I’m quite proud of myself. Still, I look back on it, and keep thinking that if I’d just done a little bit more, and tried a little bit harder…  everything would have fallen into place. (Just another way Mandarin resembles my ex-boyfriend). I’ve been missing the daily challenge of speaking a second language. And Spanish is wonderful, with that nice alphabet for easy transition between reading and speaking, and nice Latin roots for guessing.

Even my mistakes in Spanish are wonderful. When I screw up un poco and pequeno, for example, I can be told that un poco is more like a little and pequeno is more like small, instead of that zhāng is a measure word used for flat objects, except not for paper and not for things that come in a pair or come in a bunch, and actually my tone was wrong anyway and I really said monkey balls. (I’m looking at you, Chinese.)

Our first-grader niece Isabelle asked Santa for a Snuggie (without irony) and a dreidel. We’d already gotten her a gift, but I’m hoping to spread the traditional Christmas latkes to the Malavette clan, so Stick went out searching for a dreidel.

He tried a few places before looking at the local K-Mart. Because, what could be more Jewish than a North Carolina K-Mart? Somehow I don’t expect this shopping trip to work out well for Stick. “Do you carry dreidels?” he asked an employee, after searching for a while.

“A what?”

“A four-sided top with Hebrew writing on it. Usually comes with gold-foil chocolate coins.”

“Dray-dell. I don’t think so.” she said, then called over to her co-worker. “Hey! We got dreidel?”

“Dreidel? She ain’t working today,” was the definitive reply.