An inconceivable analysis

One of my favorite scenes in any movie is the Battle of Wits from The Princess Bride, in which Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) must decide which of two goblets Westley (Cary Elwes) has poisoned. Almost everyone finds the scene amusing and clever, but it has subtleties that are easy to miss. They concern the following questions: What in the name of mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwiches is Vizzini doing in this scene? How did he arrive at the choice he finally makes? And how come he's so confident in that choice when it's so spectacularly wrong?

Consider his opening argument, which makes more sense than anything else he says: a clever man would be tempted to put the poison in his own goblet, except that Westley would have anticipated Vizzini would think so, and therefore he'd put it in Vizzini's goblet instead. (Game theory deals with reasoning such as this, where you try to anticipate not only what your opponent will think, but how much he will anticipate your anticipations. Many games have this dynamic, where it's a race to determine who will do the most determining. Various webpages and books have examined the role of game theory in this scene.)

He eventually sticks with his initial conclusion (that the poison is in his own cup), but not before rambling for an entire minute about Australia and giants and Spaniards, going back and forth on which glass he thinks was poisoned. What he's trying to do, I suspect, is gauge Westley's reactions. Since Westley already knows the poison's location, he will (Vizzini assumes) fear for his life if he thinks Vizzini is guessing correctly. (That's why Vizzini secretly switches the goblets--he figures Westley will forfeit the game rather than voluntarily commit suicide if he realizes Vizzini has won.) Vizzini's strategy, therefore, is to keep changing his answer until Westley's body language betrays the correct one. As Westley observes, "You're trying to trick me into giving away something." In light of Vizzini's sureness when he finally makes his choice, we presume he does manage to detect something in Westley's behavior at crucial moments--nervousness maybe.

Westley indeed is nervous, but for a different reason than Vizzini assumes. He's worried Vizzini will stumble upon his actual secret, that he has poisoned both goblets. Vizzini almost seems to be approaching the truth as he rambles about how he "clearly" can't choose this glass and "clearly" can't choose the other one either. He even says at one point, "You could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you." His own rhetoric contains the solution to the puzzle, yet somehow he never notices. He's just bluffing (a recurring theme in The Princess Bride).

He possesses the classic fatal flaw of overconfidence, or hubris. He may in fact be smart enough to figure out what Westley is up to. Immunity-building was a practice known to the Ancient Greeks, whom Vizzini references earlier in the scene when he declares that Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates were "morons." The problem isn't so much that Vizzini is less smart than he imagines as that he discounts other people's intelligence. Truly wise people accept the wisdom of others. Thinking everyone in the world but oneself to be an idiot is folly, not wisdom.

Essential to any game is sizing up one's opponent, and Vizzini seriously underestimates Westley every time the word "Inconceivable!" escapes his lips. He never learns his lesson even as Westley continues to do everything he thought wasn't possible, including defeating a master swordsman and a giant. He reasons that a man who can defeat those "morons" still cannot hold a candle to his perfect mind. As he explains to Westley, "I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains." It doesn't seem to occur to him that Westley used brains, not brawn, to defeat Inigo and Fezzik. Since he maintains such a low opinion of Westley in spite of all available evidence, he fails to consider there might be a trick up the man's sleeve.

Ironically, his lack of appreciation for other people's minds deprives him of a powerful tool he could use against his enemies. What makes Westley so formidable an opponent is not just that he's versatile and quick-thinking, but that he uses people's natures against them. That's how he handles all his adversaries throughout the movie: he takes immediate advantage of Inigo's fairness, of Fezzik's sportsmanship, of Vizzini's pride, of the palace guards' credulity, and of Prince Humperdinck's cowardice. In contrast, Vizzini is all tactic and no psychology.

You might think I'm reading more into the film than is there, but in the novel it's pretty obvious that the author, William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay), put considerable thought into the themes, the traditions, and the history this mock fairy tale draws upon. There are many interludes in which he speaks directly to the reader about various plot elements and their significance. Whether in movie or book form, The Princess Bride is not just clever and entertaining, but also well-conceived. It should not be underestimated.

Harry Potter, the jock

I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed, but quidditch, the imaginary sport from the Harry Potter books, probably wouldn't work very well in the real world even if you had all the technology needed to make the game physically possible--including flying broomsticks, and a ball with a mind of its own.

In this game, each team has a group of players called Chasers who try to get a ball through the other team's goalpost. Of course every team has a goalie. This would all sound like soccer on broomsticks were it not for a couple of really exotic elements. First, there's a heavy, enchanted object called a bludger which tries to knock players off their broomsticks. To protect the players, each team has special players called Beaters, armed with a club for batting away bludgers.

The trouble is, nothing the Chasers, the Beaters, or the goalies do has any effect in moving the game toward its conclusion. A team could go on scoring goals forever, and the game wouldn't end even if the score was 440-0. A team's ultimate fate rests entirely with one player, the Seeker, whose task is to catch a tiny enchanted object called the Golden Snitch which only appears on occasion and tries to elude the Seeker's grasp. Once the Seeker catches the Snitch, his or her team earns 150 extra points and the game ends. Usually his or her team then wins the game. Only if that team is more than 150 points behind at the moment the Snitch is caught does the team lose. One of the later Harry Potter books (I can't remember which) depicts such a game.

Quidditch therefore has one fundamental flaw: the Chasers, who make up the majority of the players and whose actions dominate most of what happens, have a very weak incentive for scoring goals. As long as they manage to remain within 150 points of the other team, they are in little danger of losing. The score could be 140-0, and the team that hasn't scored could still easily win. Most likely, a typical quidditch team would hardly score at all, focusing its energy simply on preventing the other team from scoring.

To compensate for this all-too-obvious flaw, teams get ranked according to points scored rather than number of games won. But that makes it heavily dependent on record-keeping between games. You'd have to commit yourself in advance to playing many games for it to have any impact. It's not the type of sport that lends itself to casual play in the backyard.

In our world, most team sports revolve around one very simple formula: one team tries to relocate a small object (a ball, a puck, etc.), and the other team tries to stop it. That's it. Right there you have the basic description of soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Soccer and hockey are almost moronically simple games. Baseball and American football have intricate rules of progression, and baseball (along with its cousins such as cricket) is slightly unconventional in that a team's ultimate objective involves the movement of players rather than the movement of the ball. None of these games, however, allow more than one ball on the field at a time, much less more than one type of ball. And a game where regular scoring doesn't count for anything more than a team's record is hard to imagine. In sports, complexity is not necessarily a virtue.

The Potter books, nonetheless, make quidditch out to be the most dazzlingly exciting sport in the history of mankind, far surpassing any of the familiar earth-bound ballgames. No other wizard sport ever gets mentioned, suggesting the wizarding world is quite satisfied with this one. Most readers consider it one of the charms of the series, an example of J.K. Rowling's enduring creativity. Somehow it's fun to read about, even if the rules are probably too unwieldy for it to work in the real world.

Whether it's fun to watch is less clear. Only the first two movies show the game in detail, and the fourth and fifth movie don't show the game at all. The novelty of seeing the magical sport on screen makes it interesting at first. After that, there's little suspense to be generated, apart from hoping Harry doesn't get hit by a bludger. As a Seeker, most of what he does during any game is sit around waiting for the Snitch to appear. As for the other players, since they do not determine the game's ultimate fate, what's the point in watching them play? (It's no wonder the films so often show cheating and other disturbances; they aren't confident the game will be interesting on its own terms.)

Had Rowling eliminated the business with the Seeker and the Snitch, quidditch would be more believable. It would be like soccer in three dimensions rather than two, similar to what Orson Scott Card envisioned in his novel Ender's Game, in which child soldiers conduct simulated space battles in a null-G environment. But the Golden Snitch is just enough to put quidditch over the top as something truly otherworldly. If all the game consisted of was players trying to score goals, it would quickly begin to sound mundane once the novelty of their flying on broomsticks wore off. The bludgers add a level of danger you don't associate with high school athletics, and the Snitch makes the game unlike anything you've heard of.

Quidditch is really part of the whole mystique of the Harry Potter series. In a world where magic dominates and where broken limbs can be mended within seconds, physical prowess is a lot less valued than in our "muggle" world. That's why a kid who looks to us like a class-A dork can get to be the star of his school's sports team. That's why girls can play along with the boys, without anyone turning their head. That's why even the school bully is a pint-sized kid. But considering that the magic in these books is a lot like advanced technology, one must ask: isn't this where our own society is headed?

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.

Entertainment about entertainment

Vivian Vande Velde's science fiction novels User Unfriendly and Heir Apparent brought back memories of the computer adventure games I used to play as a kid. I enjoyed even pure text adventures better than arcade-style action games, because of the unique mixture of creativity and logic required to win them. I will briefly discuss these games before reviewing Vande Velde's two books.

When I first began playing Infocom's text adventures at age nine, I felt hopeless without the clue books that came with the software. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, Mr. Prosser would have his bulldozer in front of my house, and no matter what I typed into the command prompt, he would demolish the house. So I consulted the clue book, which told me the solution: "Lie down in front of the bulldozer." It makes sense, if you think about it. Prosser won't kill to get his job done. But I simply didn't consider that possibility--partly because I lacked experience or cleverness, partly because I had never read the Douglas Adams novel on which the game was based.

Beyond Infocom, most text adventures did not come with clue books. But they helped prepare me for games like The Legend of Zelda that are part arcade-style action, part strategic adventure. With or without graphics, computer adventures all have the same basic setup. They can have any storyline, though they are traditionally magic tales featuring kings and castles and wizards and dragons. You always make your way through some kind of complex setting and collect various objects in your path. Figuring out the solutions to problems usually involves trial and error. Find a piece of cotton? Try throwing it, or eating it, or sticking it in your ear.

How well do science fiction books fare in portraying these sorts of games? A few weeks ago, I discussed Killobyte, Piers Anthony's 1993 novel about characters who become trapped in a role-playing VR game. I decided to dig up a particular young adult book with a similar plot, Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly, which I first read in 1992. I remembered very little about it other than that I enjoyed it.

The gaming machine in this novel actually places you into REM sleep and hooks directly to your brain to make you think you're in the virtual setting. The session lasts no longer than an hour, but feels like five days. You can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste your surroundings. You're able to experience pain, and you must eat and sleep in the course of your journey. You are provided with new memories and skills, corresponding to the character you occupy.

That almost makes the technology in Killobyte sound primitive by comparison. It brings to mind Orson Scott Card's warning to novice sci-fi writers about presenting an extraordinary invention without considering other uses it might have. If one hour can be made to seem like five days, then (doing the math) three days can be made to seem like an entire year. Such a device could in effect greatly prolong a person's life--or at least provide a little extra time for reflection.

As for the implanted memories, if a computer can do that, what need is there for school (much less Jeopardy)? Just hook your brain to a machine, which will feed you all the information you need to know.

Needless to say, the book does not deal with any of those possibilities.

The narrator is Arvin, an eighth-grader who enters the game along with several of his friends. One of his challenges is figuring out which of his friends appear as which characters. His mom is also playing, much to his chagrin. I may have missed it, but I didn't catch what she thought of the fact that they're using a pirated version of the software.

Vande Velde's greatest strength is her attention to detail. She has plotted out the game in great depth. She structures the book in numerous short chapters that end in cliffhangers, as the characters encounter wizards, elves, trolls, orcs, goblins, and dragons, not to mention enchanted boots, sand hands, and giant rat zombies. The book kept me reading, with its fun blend of excitement and humor. (One example of the latter involves a dwarf who feels compelled to recite his entire genealogy any time someone asks his name.)

But the book compares poorly with Killobyte, which spent many pages in the real world, fleshing out its two main characters. User Unfriendly begins in the game itself and stays there until the very last few pages, without any flashbacks along the way. There are more than a half-dozen characters, all vaguely drawn. Arvin comes off as a typical teenager, embarrassed in front of his mom, eager to prove himself before his peers.

In Killobyte, the characters weren't just trying to win the game but were literally fighting for their lives. The stakes are lower in User Unfriendly. Because the game is pirated, some bugs and glitches appear, and the kids cannot exit the game prematurely. But the book bases a great deal of its plot around our vicarious experience of the game rather than anything more urgent.

The game itself is lacking in the qualities of computer adventures I mentioned before. Most of the time, the kids seem to be winging it, and their successes feel arbitrary. Again, Killobyte does a better job on this front, which is doubly impressive since Piers Anthony admits to having very little gaming experience.

In 2002, Vande Velde published Heir Apparent, about another game from the same company. It is narrated by a fourteen-year old girl named Giannine, who was a relatively minor character in the first book. It makes no mention of the events in User Unfriendly, and it may take place earlier. The front, inside, and back cover do not mention the older book at all.

Vande Velde writes on her website that she does not consider Heir Apparent a sequel, just a story taking place in the same universe. I have another theory. I think she was attempting to do User Unfriendly over again, but better. If so, she has succeeded. It improves on User Unfriendly in all the areas I mentioned.

For the first time, we get to see the world these kids occupy when they remove their VR helmets. In the first chapter, we encounter a robotic bus driver and a tiny, genetically engineered dragon. The setting can't be too far in the future, however, for we also see conventional-looking email, Windows Freecell, and a $50.00 gift certificate enabling Giannine to play a VR game of her choice. (By the time all this advanced technology exists, wouldn't fifty bucks be pocket change? Never mind.) She chooses a medieval fantasy about a peasant girl who becomes king. The session will last thirty minutes but will feel like three days. The catch is that any time her character dies, she will have to start over from the beginning, which she can do indefinitely.

That reminds me of the old Atari game Pitfall II. Possibly compensating for the fact that the original Pitfall was almost unwinnable, Pitfall II was made literally unlosable. Any time you'd get hit by an enemy, you'd merely be transported back to the last red cross you touched. The only way to end the game without winning was by turning off the computer. In the VR game depicted in Heir Apparent, however, you cannot just turn off the machine, or leave it sitting and come back to it later. You're stuck until you win the game or a technician pulls you out. That's practically asking for trouble.

The trouble comes in the form of an activist group called Citizens to Protect Our Children, or CPOC (pronounced "sea pock"), who feel that VR games are corrupting the youth. To show just how concerned they are for the children's welfare, they break into the arcade and sabotage the equipment. The problem is, Giannine is already hooked up to the game.

A technician briefly enters the virtual world to inform her that if they detach the equipment, she may suffer brain damage. But if she stays hooked up for too long, her brain will surely fry. All she has to do is win the damn game--and avoid getting killed too many times.

Easier said than done. The game is set up so that that there are many ways to succeed, and a lot more ways to fail. At first, it seems that every time she stumbles, a character pulls out a knife and slaughters her. Then she finds herself back on the sheep farm at the beginning, where she has to do the whole game over again. This aspect of the novel has an intriguing Groundhog Day vibe to it, as she meets the same characters in a host of different situations that change depending on all the little choices she makes.

There is, for example, a boy caught by guards who claim he stole a deer. The evidence is lacking, and Giannine has no desire to sanction the boy's execution, even though he is only computer-generated. But if she simply frees him, more problems will occur.

The technician gives her only two clues on how to win the game: find a magic ring, and keep a weird, mystic nun away from Kenric, one of Giannine's three half-brothers vying for the throne. (The nun, who seems to worship Oneness rather than God, is made nondenominational by the game's manufacturer so as "not to offend anyone.") Among the many challenges she faces is a knight who will chop her head off if she does not create a poem he likes. The poem can be absolutely inane, so long as it's original.

Unlike User Unfriendly, she is the only real person in the game--the rest of the characters are computer-generated. But they all have personalities, and they seem able to carry on nuanced, naturalistic conversations. I presume they're simply responding to cues in her speech, but the effect is quite convincing.

One way or another, I enjoyed the book much more than User Unfriendly. The game is still not much like the computer adventures I remember as a kid. It's ten times better! Maybe that's the point of books like these, to depict games we wish we could play, but which exist only in the author's wildest imagination.

VR dreams

I've always been intrigued by how we refer to present-day technology using the names of far more advanced devices from science fiction. Real holograms do not look like solid objects, real robots do not have human-like personalities, and real spaceships do not visit faraway planets. Rarely is the human tendency toward hyperbole captured in science fiction itself, one exception being the "star destroyers" in Star Wars.

Virtual reality is an astounding example of the phenomenon. I first started hearing the term in the early 1990s, referring to machines placed over your entire head, sending imagery to the inner walls to make you feel like you're in a different world. I'm surprised this technology never caught on, and I'm disappointed that I've never had a chance to try it. Nowadays, the Internet has produced computer-generated alternate worlds like Second Life, but they're still presented through the flat screen of a monitor. They aren't like the VR that has been invented, let alone the VR in science fiction, where you enter a three-dimensional, fully sensory environment that feels the same as traversing the real world, even though you may be lying on a chair in your basement the whole time.

I was having those thoughts the other day as I reread Piers Anthony's 1993 novel Killobyte. It's the best of the dozen or so novels I've read by Anthony, though that isn't saying much, considering he's written over a hundred more. His books, while wickedly imaginative, have not generally had a lasting impact on me. I recognized in Killobyte many of the elements from his other books, including bizarre sexual scenarios, and the incorporation of medieval fantasy into a futuristic setting. (The sex scenes in his books have generated controversy, since children constitute a large chunk of his audience. In fifth grade, I almost did a book report on an Anthony novel in which an android has an affair with a female unicorn who can shape-shift into human form but still has heat cycles. I chose Charles De Lint's Jack the Giant Killer instead.)

The creativity of this book is accompanied by a page-turning quality that he claims he got from Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. There are also some astonishingly realistic chapters, including a painfully vivid depiction of a girl suffering from diabetes. These qualities are important, because virtual-world stories often get so caught up in world creation that the story just sits there. (That was a problem with the dreadfully dull 2000 movie The Cell.) Not so with Killobyte: the complex VR game conceived in the book is intriguing enough to keep us reading, before the book turns into a slam-bang thriller.

In Killobyte, players are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but also responds to brain signals to move a player's character in the virtual world. The only way to exit the game and return to the real world is by selecting that option from a menu that appears within the virtual world. Otherwise, you're stuck, like someone unable to wake up from a dream. (I doubt I'm giving away too much of the plot, since virtually all stories of this kind have the characters getting trapped inside the virtual world.) The game itself is pretty much traditional RPG, but it involves sophisticated voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and simulated sex so convincing it can work for a paraplegic who has lost that function in the real world.

It's amusing to read the book now, for there's no direct mention of the Internet, and all the players connect to the game's network using telephone modems. That's hardly surprising. Anthony apparently wrote the book in 1991, when the World Wide Web had only just been invented, and when the term "Internet" was still techno-jargon. He did not specify when the book was supposed to take place, and for all intents and purposes it felt very much like the present. He was optimistic that the technology described in the book was not far off: "I suspect we shall have games very like this in the next decade or so" (p. 308).

That this hasn't happened should give us pause. Science fiction hasn't forgotten: the popularity of The Matrix and its sequels proves that it's still in the public mind. And I have heard that inventors are on the brink of creating machines that respond to brain signals. But we aren't close to inventing virtual-world machines that effectively trap a user inside them, like an electronically simulated dream. The question is whether we will create such machines--or, more importantly, why.

Are video games a form of art?

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Those words are from Roger Ebert in 2005, when he caused a firestorm with his assertion that video games are inherently not a form of art. Whether you agree with him or not, the ensuing debate was interesting. Unfortunately, Ebert's credibility was suspect, since by his own admission he lacked familiarity with modern video games. And his statement sounds just like the sort of narrow-minded declaration that's almost asking to be discredited. A couple of generations ago, most people would have scoffed at the idea that comic books are art; nowadays, that idea has gained increasingly wide acceptance (though the respected comic books carry a new name, graphic novels).

Still, I understand where Ebert is coming from. And I say this as someone who knows even less about modern video games than he does. I largely stopped playing them when I was a teenager. I felt that I wasn't getting out of them anywhere near as much as I was putting into them. They were an enjoyable diversion, but left me feeling drained when I spent too much time with them.

I'm aware that video games have increased in sophistication since the days of Nintendo, by huge orders of magnitude. And apparently some gamers think these are works of the human imagination that deserve comparison with great works of literature--or at least that they have that potential, even if the genre is in its infancy right now.

If you think that video games will never be Shakespeare, I should remind you that most people in Shakespeare's time would have laughed at the idea that his plays would be studied centuries later. Most of his plays weren't even published during his lifetime. And it took a long time before critics viewed them as serious works of literature, much less ranked him as the greatest writer in the English language.

Nowadays, people study the heavily footnoted texts of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that the Bard himself would never have envisioned. Is it possible that a similar process will happen with computer games? Will students of the future be studying games in the classroom, in a format that would perplex the original designers?

I debated these issues with someone on a message board a few years ago. He took the position that some video games have achieved an artistic level comparable to great literature and film; I was skeptical, even while admitting my ignorance. It was a nice debate, and I think we both ended up learning something. I learned from him that some modern video games--notably adventure games--have fairly complex narratives, with even the rudiments of character development. But I managed to persuade him that the very nature of video games cuts against the kind of complexity found in literature and film.

Traditionally, games have nothing to do with art. Chess may be a high intellectual activity, but it isn't really a form of art. What all art forms have in common, whether they be paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, plays, films, or comic books, is that the viewer contributes nothing to them beyond his own imagination. Interactive fiction (like the Choose Your Own Adventure series for kids) has always remained a minor phenomenon.

Computers have the potential to blur that line, however, creating games with a high degree of artistic content in terms of both graphics and narrative. But there is a limit. The only way they could achieve full artistic status is if they stopped being games.

I'll give an example from an old game I used to play, Infocom's text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on the Douglas Adams novel. The novel contains a scene where Arthur is at a party trying pick up a girl, when another guy comes along and catches her attention by saying he's from another planet. Your goal in the game, as a player, is to make sure the scene happens exactly as it did in the book. You can have no effect on Arthur's chances of getting the girl. Arthur is a loser. That's part of the script. Even if in real life you're God's gift to women, as computer game addicts are known to be, you're not going to change what Arthur's like. The game has a lot of puzzles that require brain power, but your personality doesn't affect the outcome.

Would it be possible to create a game where your personality does make a difference? I can imagine it now. It will be called SimFlirt. Your objective is to go to a party and pick up a girl. (Or, if you are a girl, then you pick up a guy. Or, if you're gay...never mind.) Whether you succeed depends on what you do or say.

Of course, such a game would never compare to a novel or a film. The range of possible outcomes would still be relatively limited. If a character in a computer game can have any level of depth, then it must be written into the game's narrative, without the player having much influence. The problem is that the player's very presence dilutes this process. Games simply are not a good medium for exploring the nuances of human behavior, at least not to the degree found in literature.

The point here is that games are different, not inferior. They serve a different purpose. I'm reminded of something Orson Scott Card said in his 1990 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy: "In a fantasy, if magic has no limitations, the characters are omnipotent gods; anything can happen, and so there's no story. There have to be strict limits on magic. Dungeons and Dragons uses a seniority system that may work well for games, but for stories it is truly stupid: The longer you manage to stay alive, the more spells you know and the more power you have" (p. 31).

Note Card's implication that what works well in a game isn't believable in fiction. I would go further and suggest that what works in fiction isn't suited to a game. Even games with narratives, like D&D and computer adventure games, do not require the same suspension of disbelief as fiction does. That's because the narrative is only a means to an end, whereas in fiction the narrative is central. Perhaps the computer adventure games of today put a greater focus on narrative than ever before. But there comes a point when the integrity of the narrative must bow to the integrity of the game. Everything in a game falls back on the player's choices, and by giving the player choices, the narrative inevitably suffers.

If video games are blurring the distinction by taking on many artistic qualities, the question is how far they can go while still remaining games. And while there will always be people who devote their precious hours to these games, their impact may remain marginal simply because they forge that impossible middle ground between the artistic and the recreational.

Too stupid for chess

It's one thing to know that someone is smarter than you, it's quite another to be reminded of that fact week after week after week.

From my childhood onward, I used to play chess regularly with a friend of mine. He beat me a good majority of the time. This made the game a tiring experience for me. I could have viewed my losses as a challenge, an incentive to work harder. But these were times when all I wanted to do was relax. The mental effort needed to keep track of a chess game just didn't inspire me.

Occasionally, we played other games, where our skills were more even. We even invented a new game we called "losing chess." While we weren't the first to come up with either the idea or the name, our version was somewhat original. In the "standard" form of losing chess, the object is to force the opponent to capture all your pieces, and the king holds no special importance. But in our variant, the object was to force a checkmate on your own king--in other words, to expose your king to capture when the opponent is threatening no other piece. This game turned out to be rather interesting and unpredictable. I tended to win the game (or "lose," if you will) slightly more often than he did.

I still tried to improve my skills in regular chess. I read books about chess strategy. I downloaded a fairly decent chess program to examine the strategies of a computer player. That actually kept me busy for some time, but as with all other computer games played with myself, I grew bored of it. In any case, my friend continued to beat me.

Only in the last few years did my interest in checkers get revitalized. Windows XP comes with a game called Internet Checkers. The computer sets me up with another actual player. The only information I get about the other player is his language and skill level. Players get a choice of three skill levels: Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. I am set up with a player of the same skill level as long as one is available. Since the program rarely takes much time in setting up a game, it seems that numerous people around the world are constantly using this software. The only other possibility is that I'm unknowingly being set up with a computer player at least part of the time, though the instructions give no indication that the program ever does such a thing, and I believe I can tell the difference between a computer player and a human.

I can send the other player a message from the following pre-set list: "Nice try," "Good job," "Good game," "Good luck," "It's your turn," "I'm thinking," "Play again?," "Yes," "No," "Hello," "Goodbye," "Thank you," "You're welcome," "It was luck," "Be right back," "Okay, I'm back," "Are you still there?," "Sorry, I have to go now," "I'm going to play at zone.com," ":-)," ":-(," "Uh-oh," "Oops!," "Ouch!," "Nice move," "Good jump," "Good double-jump," "King me!" I assume that the comments get translated into whatever language the other player speaks. While I'm usually set up with another English speaker, I have also frequently been set up with players who speak German, French, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and many other languages. No wonder there seem to be players available at all times of the day, and the night as well.

When I first started playing, I had very little knowledge of the game. I had played checkers before, and I was familiar with the rules. But I knew no strategies or techniques, except for a belief that I should avoid moving pieces in the back row. The first strategy I devised was a simple copycat routine: as long as I was the player who moved second, I could simply imitate the other player, doing a mirror image of his every move. Of course, the game always reached a point where I could no longer do this. Sometimes the opponent's opening move made it impossible for me to follow the copycat routine. But this routine usually got me to a point where I could find an advantage, and I did often win the game when playing as a Beginner.

I began to learn some tricks. One rule that casual checkers players frequently ignore is that when you can capture, you must capture. I think people avoid this rule because they feel that it limits their choices. But the computer versions of checkers require you to play by this rule. I began to discover that this rule is what makes the game so fascinating and unpredictable. Because you can force your opponent to capture a piece, you can make him do things he didn't expect to be doing, and then gain a sudden advantage. The simplest form of this technique is when you force your opponent to capture one of your pieces, and you end up taking two in return. I discovered this technique on my own, in a situation that frequently occurs toward the beginning of the game, at the side of the board. I became quite adept at making my opponent fall for this trick. But the opponent must be gullible enough to put himself into this vulnerable position. Moreover, I had to learn to avoid putting myself into this position. Because this is one of the simplest tricks, even players with modest experience usually know better than to allow it to happen. But they remain prepared should the opponent make himself vulnerable to this move. It's one of the litmus tests early in the game that makes it easy to tell the experienced players from the novices.

After I discovered that I was beating Beginner players the majority of the time, I decided to move up my skill level to Intermediate. Soon I moved it to Expert. Of course there was no guarantee that I was playing someone who actually was on that skill level. All it meant was that the player identified himself as being on that skill level. But I did beat Expert players less often than Beginner players, and while the challenge was intriguing me, I sometimes went back to the Beginner level, for relaxation purposes. I had given up the copycat routine and started to learn more sophisticated strategies.

Finally, I got a book out from the library on checkers techniques. Reading this book greatly refined my skills, teaching me techniques that I still use to this day. For one thing, I radically changed my opening strategy. I used to open the games most often by moving my side pieces first. Apparently, this is a common error that beginners make. They move the side pieces because the side pieces are less vulnerable. Unfortunately, this strategy is weak in the long run, because it doesn't help break through the opponent's defenses. It is best to start by moving the pieces in the center of the board, and to keep one's pieces close together. I also learned that moving the back row is not necessarily to be avoided. What I should avoid is moving the second and fourth pieces in the back row, but the first and third often can safely be moved early in the game. I also learned to keep my own double-corner well-protected, and to work on attacking the opponent's double-corner.

Getting used to these new techniques took some time. At first, I experienced some difficulties, and it appeared that I was getting worse, not better. But I soon realized that I was simply taking time to get accustomed to using the techniques properly. This new opening strategy made it easy for me to fall into a devastating trap, where the opponent would get a two-for-one and a king. But as I learned more caution, I began to see the great advantages of this strategy. I began to win games without using any tricks, simply by having a strong defense and by either making the opponent's back row vulnerable or putting him into a position where he couldn't move except by exposing his pieces to attack.

Of course, I also learned some more advanced tricks, not just from the book, but from a checkers program I downloaded where I got to examine a computer player's strategies. I learned complicated moves that involved making my opponent capture one piece, then another, and then finally launching a devastating attack that he had no idea was coming. To play checkers well, you have to be able to think four-dimensionally, to anticipate future moves by visualizing the board in other configurations.

The strategies for handling game endings are just as complex. For starters, if you have two pieces left and your opponent has only one, you can definitely beat him--but it requires some practice to learn how. If you have three pieces and your opponent has two, your best bet is to force him to take one of your pieces in exchange for one of his. It is possible for him to prevent you from doing this, using one or both of the double corners, and such a game will end in a draw even though you have more pieces.

I wanted a way to track my progress. Internet Checkers does not record wins or losses. So I created my own file where I kept track of that information. Next to each skill level, I wrote how many games on that level I won, how many I lost, and how many turned out as draws. Here are my current stats, which are still ever-changing:

Expert: 2697/964/365
Intermediate: 422/141/38
Beginner: 830/101/278

According to this record, I win approximately two-thirds of the time at any skill level. But I suspect my Beginner and Intermediate record would be much higher if not for the fact that most of the games I played at those levels occurred long ago, before I improved my skills. I regularly play the Expert level now, only rarely venturing to lower levels.

I have my own rules for determining whether I have won, because Internet Checkers has an annoying but understandable loophole: any player can abandon a game at any time. Thus, if a player is losing, he may simply quit without selecting the "resign" option. Sometimes this is not mere rudeness: computer and Internet glitches can cause a game to be ended prematurely. But I made a personal rule that if a player quits and I am clearly ahead, with more pieces, I record that in my personal file as a win. Similarly, if a computer glitch causes the game to be terminated and the opponent is ahead, I record it as a loss. If I'm at the end of the game and the opponent refuses to draw even though he clearly can establish no advantage, I quit the game and record it as a draw. I have recently adopted a 40-move rule used in official competitions, which says that if a player can gain no advantage in 40 moves, the game is automatically a draw.

These personal rules which I have concocted are relevant only to myself. The opponent doesn't know that I play by them, because I have no way of communicating them to him, given the limited pre-set list of comments we can pass between each other. I am somewhat amazed at the lame tricks that some of my opponents attempt to pull. For example, if they are losing, many of them will ask for a draw, hoping I will accidentally click "yes" when the pop-up window appears. On rare occasion I have even fallen for this trick, but so what? It makes no difference as to the truth of who won, and the truth is all that matters to me when I keep my personal record. I view these games as practice and recreation, and the recognition of having the computer say "You won!" means nothing to me.

Apparently, all this practice has paid off. After coaxing my friend to play checkers with me, I discovered that I was suddenly much better at the game than he is. He's still good--he has a strategic mind. But he's nowhere near my level, and he hasn't come close to reaching it. I've actually become a sort of tutor to him, showing him some of the techniques I've learned and giving him corny advice, like "The best offense is a good defense."

Why did I discover such skill at checkers, when I was always so hopelessly bad at chess? Part of the reason is that I stumbled upon the software that allowed me to compete with real players. This not only has kept me from growing bored of the game, but has been enormously good practice. Most of what I know now, I learned simply from the experience of playing, not from the strategy books. Perhaps if I were to start playing Internet versions of chess, my skill at that game would improve as well. But so far I lack the interest. Checkers just seems more suited to me than chess. It's a much simpler game, with far fewer rules. You have basically only two types of pieces, and you use only half of the board space that you use in chess. I'm the type of person who has trouble multitasking, processing many different things at once, and that may be the key to why I find checkers easier to deal with. I'm not going to admit that it's simply because I'm too stupid for chess.