BACKSTRIP

Those poor, crippled atheists: Glee does religion

Glee isn’t bad television. It’s good for what it is — a singing and dancing show about American teenagers, and it has a hard and funny edge at times. But that recent episode about religion? Awful.

(Spoilers coming up.)

So the jock discovers the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich (what is it about America and orange-coloured cheese?) and starts praying to it. This kicks off discussions about religion and ‘spirituality’. I put inverted commas around spirituality because I’m not really sure what it means, and it certainly wasn’t explained in the show, except to say that it wasn’t religion. There’s clearly a whole taxonomy of spiritualness and religiousness that I’m not aware of.

Anyway. Glee is the kind of show that attempts to represent a cross-section of a typical school. There’s a guy in a wheelchair, a pregnant girl, single parents, overweight kids, nerds, black people, gay people, and a Down’s Syndrome student. But importantly, Glee also represents (if only barely) the homophobes and conservatives. Compare this to, say, Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who and Torchwood, where no-one has a problem with homosexuality — it’s a kind insulting social commentary that undermines the point it’s trying to make.

And so it’s not surprising that this episode of Glee also featured atheists. For a TV show set in an American school in 2010 it’s perhaps unsurprising, but this is a big, fat mainstream show for teenagers, so it’s somewhat surprising. Or at least it would be if atheists weren’t portrayed as emotional cripples who’ve lost their way.

Let’s look at the token atheists: Kurt and Sue Sylvester. Kurt is gay, and his reason for being atheist is that, well, he’s gay. Why would God create gay people only so they would be mocked? Indeed. Sue Sylvester (played by actor Jane Lynch, who also happens to be gay) apparently spent her childhood praying to God to make her sister, who has Down’s Syndrome, ‘better’. Unfortunately, God didn’t get around to removing that extra chromosome and so Sue stopped believing. Fair enough.

But according to Glee, atheism is a result of trauma and, moreover, it needs explaining. In this world, theists don’t need to explain the delusion, it’s the atheists who need to explain why they’re not delusional. And that is one of the most arse-backward concepts I can imagine.

It’s a shame that Glee’s generally liberal tones don’t extend to religion. Maybe it’s an American thing. Either way, it’s a disappointing treatment of the subject, and I hope to god that we don’t see any conversions in the next part.

Also, Kurt uses acupuncture to revive his comatose Dad. I don’t know if this is a wink or a slap.

My demo of open standards is better than your demo of open standards

Make no mistake, Google and Apple are now having a proper, stand-up fight. But at least they’re fighting sensibly.

Easiest (free) ways to read ebooks on your iPad

In five steps:

1. Get yourself a free Dropbox account

2. Upload your ePub files to Dropbox

3. Download the latest version of Stanza for the iPad

4. Browse to your Dropbox folder in Safari, select the ePub file, then hit the Stanza icon

5. Go to Stanza and your ebook file should be there.

This is the easiest (free) way to get ebooks onto a suitable iPad ereader if you a) already own ebooks and b) prefer ePub files. If you’re into Kindle, then you’re probably better off just using the Kindle app; if iBooks are your thing (you sadist), then just use Apple’s own app.

Here are some other ways:

• Get yourself a Dropbox account and the Dropbox app. Anything in your Dropbox folder will appear in the app, and PDF, TXT and RTF files should be readable within Dropbox. You can also select a Dropbox file and hit the ‘Open in…’ button at the very top right of the screen to pump the ebook into Stanza or other compatible apps. Or…

• Get the Goodreads app, which is a better reader than Dropbox. You can use it to access your Dropbox files, as well as websites, FTP, Google Docs, IMAP servers, even WebDAV servers. Okay, so this isn’t free, but at US$0.99c, it’s near as dammit. Or…

• Advanced: Use Calibre on your desktop (Linux, Windows or Mac versions are available) to convert your ebooks into whatever format you need, then go to Preferences and start up the Content Server. Grab your iPad, load Stanza, then hit the Shared button at the top. There should be a link to the server running on your desktop, otherwise just add the IP address manually (usually 192.168.0.1:8080).

• Double advanced: Sync your Calibre library location to your Dropbox folder (via the desktop), so you can have all your bases covered.

Suggestions? Clarifications? Let me know.

The command-line is a (useful) lie

Here’s a big, meaty post by Emily Short on the role of parsers in interactive fiction.

But at the end of the day … the trick isn’t to make the parser understand whatever a novice might type, and that the average novice user would actually be happier with a smaller vocabulary that has been spelled out in full.

It’s a matter of making the game better at communicating to the player what kinds of things are valid actions in the first place — indicating the affordances of the system, in other words.

That will also help with the other problem that novices often report: a kind of paralysis of choice. If you can do anything at the command prompt, where do you start?

Yeah. That command prompt is a problem.

I agree, sort of. This is a carefully framed argument that discusses the role of the parser in terms of the novice, but I wonder if that’s beside the point.

Take, for example, the ‘problem’ of the paralysis of choice. I think IF works because of the paralysis of choice, but only in players who know their choices aren’t unlimited, i.e., they’re experienced enough to know that there’s actually a fairly small vocabulary and range of actions available. To experienced players, the parser becomes a canvas of hopeful experimentation, but for the novice, the parser represents hopeless trial and error.

To bring novices up to speed, some IF incorporates cues to help them understand which actions are available and, subsequently, how to translate their actions into the parser’s vocabulary and grammar. If you’re unsure how to use a parser, then graphics, maps, Choose Your Own Adventure-style ‘jumps’, underlined ‘actionable’ nouns and contextual menus are enormously helpful, and it’s easy to just take the next step and dispense with the parser all together, which is typically where these discussions end up (and if you’re not careful, they lose the IF altogether and end up as a graphical point-and-click, and we all know how that story ends…)

But to ditch, or even diminish, the parser creates a fundamentally different game — a game where the player plucks his or her actions from the scene in front of them, rather than issuing commands in their natural language (however illusory that might be). It’s not a worse game, it just has a narrower command space, as Short puts it.

Ultimately, I don’t think parsers are the problem here. I think the problem relates to player experience. But rather than remove the parser, or artificially embed aids, cues and other affordances into the interface, I suggest we concentrate on building IF worlds that are consistent, tighter and predictable. Even the best IF still consists of world models that are a mile wide, but an inch deep: they are generally inconsistent and lack operational depth, which is complicated by a broad and loose vocabulary. Let’s invert that process and make the text indicate the affordances — why should IF require anything else? — and then build the world accordingly.

Vale, Cimmerian

The Cimmerian, home of probably the best articles about Robert E Howard and Co, is closing down.

But of late, Deuce and I haven’t been able to be that involved — I’m ashamed to say I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to read many of the current posts at TC. And so every time Deuce and I see a mistake in a blog post we should have corrected before publication, or a critical take that it was our job as manager/editor to help expand or deepen, we’ve felt like we’re letting the TC name down. If I had it to do over, I would have closed the blog down back in 2008, but I don’t have that time-travel luxury. So now, in May of 2010, with less and less time for it, Deuce and I both decided that we should bite the bullet now, better late than never.

Read the full post, while it’s still there. Hopefully the site will be archived at Leo Grin’s personal site, but you can also try your luck at the Internet Archive. It would be a damn shame for this content to disappear completely.