All is vanity

I have an interesting program on my iPod that I've been meaning to discuss. Allow me to get to it in a roundabout way.

I'm working through a bunch of magazine articles that everyone found through Kevin Kelly's list of best magazine articles ever. One I read the other night was Mark Slouka's “Quitting the Paint Factory,” kind of an update of Bertrand Russell's “In Praise of Idleness” (itself namechecked in graf 4).

Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity.... No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

(It's interesting, if you read the last section's dive into politics as a description of a man who epitomizes his time. Also if you can find the article to begin with, some place like here.)

The necessity of idleness further crystallized for me when I had my fill of reading and wanted some other activity on my iPod to calm down before sleep. All of the games I have are too—strictly as a measure of the mental activity required—exciting. Is there a place for software that eases the mind, rather than punching it with an actioneered chokeblast?

Technology to alter mood is the purest goal of design. After reading a little from friends about My Beating Heart, I got one to try. I'm not convinced how well it works, but it's useful as a tool to ritualize calm. However, it's only physical: it's up to you to bring your mind to rest. Without focus, my mind wanders as it normally would, and I think about work or projects I'm not working enough on or whatever, and suddenly it's twenty minutes later and I'm no more at rest than before. To come at the same question from this side: how do you make a device to relax the mind instead of the body?

I do have Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation, which is explicitly about meditation. It's calming when taken during the day, but its bobbing figure in a saturated Atari 2600 landscape and authentic buzz accompanying failure seem too harsh to use at night. Also holding the device flat with your thumbs in position seems difficult when lying down.

Instead, I wanted to discuss Vanitas by “game” developer Tale of Tales. Here's a video of some of it.

Vanitas is advertised as “a memento mori for your digital hands,” which it is superficially—but in terms of game play, it's the stars on the top of the box that remind you of your mortality. As you can see, I don't have any stars. Vanitas' description states a star lights up when you match three items. I've seen several pairs of things but not yet three. However, the App Store screenshots show box covers with one star after 210 openings and one with three after 888!

If you take scoring the stars as the goal of the game, the variable reinforcement mechanic makes Vanitas play like an extremely slow slot machine. As one does with slot machines, and as I did when playing Tale of Tales' The Path, I keep wondering if there's a trick I haven't learned yet to manipulate some oblique criteria on which I'm being judged. (One of the quotes that shows up on the top of the box is “Make light!” and I keep wondering if perhaps the game will use the camera to become covertly photosensitive, which of course disadvantages me with my iPod touch.)

However, the description also claims there are 35 objects, so if they appear completely randomly, three-of-a-kinds occur once in 1,225 selections. At around 700 openings, it's no suprise I don't have one. The description for the newest version also offers a tip:

It is easier to get a gold star at lower levels so, try your luck by resetting on the 3rd info screen.

so if that's true, it's not plainly random, which could explain the sample shots (assuming they aren't themselves fabricated).

Anyway, if there's no trick, you'd expect to have to open the box almost 15,000 times to win the star collecting game. Since I've been playing it as much as or more than the other iPod games I like, playing occasionally as a relaxation tool would give you months or years to finish. In a market full of games offering cheap achievement, lighting up all twelve stars would be a real accomplishment, a distant goal in an ever-refreshing software simulation that frames human frailty like a small wooden box.

markpasc

have you seen my scratch pad

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