Decision Time - 2007

I'm pouring a drink in the silence. They say you can do two things with your brain: take input, or process the input you've already got.

Charles just needs his alone time.

Time to what? The vodka cracks the ice cubes it pours over, splitting continents and driving icebergs aside. Ever since I started drinking, vodka has been the lonely man's drink.

I'm processing what I've got, trying not to take in any more. I remember the Gulf War from the strategist's table, and how they had all been so proud to get inside John Boyd's OODA loops, surrounding and crushing Iraqi tank battalions before they could react.

The Iraqis couldn't process fast enough. They couldn't come to a decision on what they saw. Agility over raw power, they say. Fine. But I'm getting bogged down - there's too much to process. How do you hit a moving target? How do I reach the level of tactical and strategic snap-analysis and decision-making I need?

Part of it, they say, is age. Wray Herbert's Mind Matters column on "Why Teenagers Do Stupid Things" puts it in context for me - as you age, you go from detailed risk analysis to simple axiomatic decisions. Those simplifications are tremendous time-savers, but I fear them; I fear covering my machinery in cement. How will it act?

No. No way. There's another way. We don't have to collapse into ape-man grunting over what's "good" and what's "bad". Herbert's column advocates teaching teenagers just that way - get them to enclose their head-gears in quickcrete early on by driving 1984-esque images like "school good, sex bad", probably through horrible posters all over the schools and subliminal ads during morning announcements.

I reject that line of thinking; it's reactionary, sensationalist, and patronizing. The axioms will only help you survive - they don't help you make accurate sense of the world; its nuances, paradoxes, and mountains of overflowing, contradictory data. Who's going to help us interpret that when we've all made a driveway out of our frontal lobes? A government brochure?

We've got to do better than this.

Can I really see the world for what it is? William Gibson spoke at a gathering I was at - he said, roughly, that people generally like to believe the world is what it was about ten years ago. Shapes in my mind, ten years past. I know it can't be. The vodka is getting watery.

Decision time. Everything is waiting on the fence. Victories lined up. Evidence in hand. I have to decide if I'm going to jump into this whirlpool. 2006 is a memory but for a few more Pacific Standard hours.

I have in front of me every opportunity, and every signal to do what it is I feel I've been training myself to do. What this blog has been about. What my work has been about. What I've been about.

I'm here to identify. To strategize. To educate. I vow now to keep the machinery running. To not fall out of the loop. To not pave my brain. To not sit back and pretend.

I vow to read the future. And to tell the future. And to be the future.

Finish the drink.
Start the clock.
The New Year is here.

CharlesNCox.com - Coming Soon.

The Vanity Gaming Experience: Your Face in Rainbow Six Vegas

Vanity gaming is nothing new. The concept of putting "you" in the game is as old as Ouija - which is more like putting "your dead uncle" in the game...and when I say game, I mean horrible screaming as the game board levitates, spins, and cuts somebody's head off.

Thank God for technology; we no longer have to rely on the deceased to supply our nightly entertainment. But ever since the days of the Atari 2600, when people struggled to make out squiggly lines and chunky pixels in search of the beauty of the human form - in such classics as Custer's Revenge - there's been a never-ending chorus that, to my mind, was screaming "opportunity"! Or maybe it was "go get your dad another beer", that's a popular one.

We're talking about the opportunity of seeing yourself as a character in a video game. We've gotten a huge wake-up call in the gaming business with the advent and subsequent mega-popularity of MMORPGs (you know, those online things with the gold and monsters and Leroy Jenkins, I'm not gonna spell it out); people want to create online versions of themselves. Superheroes, mythical figures, Janet Reno - whatever, they've got your fix.

But something's been missing. While you can strap on as much armor and buy as many daggers and swords and Potions of Your Mom's Basement as you want, that character will never truly represent you in the game - until they have your face.

Putting faces on characters has always been a dicey proposition, even with professional models. Remember the pain we all went through looking at Sean Bean's ugly mug in Goldeneye for the N64. It looked like Prince Charles' 11th grade yearbook photo pasted on a grapefruit. The technology just wasn't there to make it work right.

But with the release of the Xbox Live Vision camera and the new Rainbow Six: Vegas game for the Xbox 360, the possibility now exists to allow you to create your own multiplayer game character using your own face. Unlike the Sean Bean School of Face Mapping we saw several years ago, which just maps face detail onto generic three-dimensional face shapes, the system that creates the face in Vegas actually uses the contours it identifies in your face to mold the three-dimensional mesh that your face details are mapped onto. Bottom line - it got my nose right. That's impressive.

Still, I have my skepticism: as anyone in the industry can tell you, the history of this enterprise in general has been - less than inspiring. And I have to say, the current incarnation of the thing - and maybe just the principle of the thing itself - has been vaguely creepy.

I mean, you can't put your finger on it, but even if your character isn't getting mangled or hacked up - they could be just picking flowers and making shroom tea, whatever - it's very strange to see the bits of yourself you don't normally see, in anything that resembles a human form, doing human things.

And as it turns out, the individual who is being represented isn't the only one that's weirded out by it. Two members of my own squad were killed by snipers while staring at my digital mug. Later, to massage their wounded egos, they blamed me, and I quote: "Your face got us killed."

Your face got us killed. You know, if I was a younger man, that might be kind of traumatic.

Still, I hold high hopes for this technology, even if for the next several years it occupies a "gee-whiz" sector of gaming technology. We've broken the first ground by including this technology in a retail-available game. And to be fair, the version that ships in Vegas is the most impressive demo of this technology I've seen yet.


I just wish it hadn't given me a bald spot.

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