Kill This Guy, He's Taking Our Money

It was pretty clear when the moods at the poker table changed. 2:30 AM, with seven players. In the fifty-four person tournament, only seven of us were left, seated around the single table. An LCD on the wall read back the good news: win or lose, all of us would walk away with more money than we spent to buy in to this double-stack, no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. We were, as the casino regulars say, "In the money".

I'll admit it – I'm new to Hold ‘Em. Honestly, I've only been playing recreationally for a year or less. So Sunday's tournament, starting at midnight at the Auburn Muckleshoot Casino, was my first. I just wanted to know what it felt like.

And somehow, I ended up at the final table, after two and a half hours of bluffs, mucks, and gut-wrenching showdowns.

Here, in this intimate little setting among seven people and their chip stacks, I realized that the normal competitive behavior I expected to see out of the tournament players was about to take a turn for the communal...and cannibalistic.

2:30 AM. Seven players. A new line appears on the LCD. A figure we haven't seen before now. It's called "Chop Value". And it changes everything.

See, the way these tournaments run on TV, it's a big bloody free-for all until the last two players, then they duke it out until one person walks away with the bracelet and book rights. But in this tournament, and I'm sure in many more, there's a different option, called "chopping".

If we followed the tournament all the way to the blood-soaked conclusion, the top dog would walk away with about $1000. Second banana, $500, third, $250, in your standard inverse power curve down to 7th place, who got about $150.

But – if we decided to split it equally among the seven of us, instead of trying to kill each other, we'd each get $325. That's chopping: splitting equally.

It's a nice concept, and many of us wanted to do it. After all, we bought in with $65; the chop value was already way more than any of us expected to make.

But there was a dissenter. Then, two dissenters. Then, three. They wanted to go further. One wanted to go all the way. In a way, it made sense. If they could just knock out one more person, the chop value went up for everyone. Dividing a sum seven ways gives less individually than dividing it six ways. Surely, this half-altruistic, half-antagonistic behavior was interesting enough, but then, it got even creepier.

The four of us, myself included, who had every desire to walk away with $300 more than we started with, started altering our play to assassinate the dissenters. Didn't want to chop? It didn't matter what the rules were before, we were taking you down.

I confess I felt a heavy impulse, and gave in. Something about my internal logic said it was better to fight for the good of the community by taking down the most vocally dissenting players, than to do what I should be doing, and working to eliminate the overall weakest players. Balance, then, meant not necessarily taking out the easiest targets for the good of all, but the most vocally strong players. It was as if by making the decision to fight, each of the dissenters was directly attacking each of us.

The strategy of the dissenters was simple – to take out the weakest players first. What we all should have been doing in the first place!

Here's where I get off : Really, both sides of the camp would benefit best by attacking the weakest players. Until both sides eliminated the weakest players, neither the choppers nor the dissenters should have cause to attack each other.

That's classic economic theory.

And yet – the choppers ally with the weak to attack the dissenters, the dissenters get to play Germany in World War I and fight a battle on both fronts.

That's behavioral economics.

Rational choice agents we ain't. Emotional, we is. Proud, easily offended, easily scared. It was nice to learn that.

It was also nice to win $500 when we finally decided to chop at the end of the night.

GDC 2007 - Parties, Poker, and XNA

It's about a week away: The 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 5-9. I'll be there on the 6th through the 9th, working and partying. For those that'd like to know more about what I'll be doing and where I'll be going, here are the events so far:

March 6th, 9:30 PM
Starlight Foundation ISM Poker Tournament
San Francisco Mariott

March 7th, 6:00 PM
Massive GDC Party
101 4th St

March 8th, 12:00 PM
XNA Game Studio Express Hands On Workshop
Moscone Conference Center, Room 2011

March 9th, 2:30 PM
XNA Game Studio Express Hands On Workshop
Moscone Conference Center, Room 2011

Yes, I was able to weasel into a charity poker tournament even while on the road. But it's for a good cause: even if I lose, the Starlight Foundation makes sure that kids in need still win.

If nothing else, any GDC'ers out there had better cut a two-hour hole in their schedule on the 8th or the 9th to come play around with XNA Game Studio Express at my workshop.

See you in San Fran!

Oh, and one more special guest here at home:

March 10th, 9:00 PM
Lebowski Fest
Kenmore Lanes, Kenmore, WA

The dude abides.

She-Tox? Not For Long, Big Fella

Social convention is a big deal. On the short-term slice, usually the big deal. If they do something, you generally do it.

Take as a case in point, "She-Tox". The seven-step plan guys are supposed to go through to get over an ex. This guide on MSN makes it clear that there's a ritual way to do this thing, with the snapping off pigeon necks and the burnt offerings and the whole lot.

See, for example, #2. Bag and Burn, it's called.
They recommend: "Go all CSI on her, bagging every bit of evidence of her existence. Toss it or burn it."

I've always had a problem with this, fundamentally. I think it's a sham to believe that destroying visual evidence of a person will make them go away. That kind of imaginary juxtapositioning is as close as I think MSN's ever gotten to saying "hey kids, voodoo works!"

No, it doesn't. You dated her. And now you'll live with it. Because that's reality, not the relativist utopia you think you deserve when you break up with her and feed the picture of the two of you into the office shredder.

And there's something orbiting now that's making it even harder to disappear your former fling into the caverns of never-was. The digital overload. Cheap storage, plus easy interfaces, plus offsite, always-on servers, plus ubiquitous Internet access, equals digital continuity. Your life in the timestream, as a whole package.

Who would have thought that Web 2.0 would force us to own up to the fact that life is one continuous production, not a series of disconnected community theatre skits? (Oh good, it's Something Happened On The Way to The Forum. Again.)

Well, that is what life is, no matter how many pieces of content you want to pretend to throw away.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but there are pictures of me, of my former girlfriends, of me with my former girlfriends on my Flickr page. On my MySpace. On their MySpace pages.

With the spread of the Creative Commons (and even less restrictive) licensing policies around digital photography, especially with the implied freedom to share on sites like MySpace, and the relative unavailability of digital watermarking technologies, I no longer own that picture of me with my girlfriend on the net. Everyone does.

We're talking about a rapid growth in the shared memory space. Who uses "my" memory, where, and why, isn't up to me once I hit that "send" button.

Am I mad about it? No, I've been in the continuity camp since I could make the decision for myself. I'm sure some people are very upset about it, and the opportunity exists for them to withhold their precious photos from the web, or slap them with the restrictive licensing trout until they're black and blue and bloody and nobody wants to touch them. That works too.

But, it ain't the future I imagine. I see storage getting cheaper, access getting more prevalent, and ownership growing hazier. And pretty soon, holding your hands over your eyes really won't make anything you've done, anyone you've dated, anywhere you've been, ever go away. Sorry.

Okay, I'm not sorry. You got me on that one.

For the pour-bleach-on-it crowd, is there hope? Well, in the short term, maybe. Hell, you could go ahead and delete those 200 pictures from 20 different events you spread all over the net - if you still have access to the servers they're stored on, all of the accounts of the other people that reposted them elsewhere, all of the copies stored on the Wayback Machine, et cetera, et cetera...

But get ready to always find one more memory. Like fueling up at the gas station, you can shake that pump handle all you want when you're done, but it always has one more drop of gas to leak onto your shoes. It's difficult to delete memory, and that difficulty is trying to tell you a secret.

The secret, of course, is that all of this memory never really went away before. We all just sat around the campfire and pretended it did.

It's just a lot harder to pretend when everyone around the campfire sees the photos.

Shared memory. Finally - some accountability.

Ending Sesame Street: Come On, Folks

TV Week ran the usual "Reps Want to Cut Funding for NPR and PBS, and as a result, I get an alarmist letter from MoveOn.org in my inbox (hey, sometimes I like getting email from Barack Obama; I can pretend he's talking to me, okay?) spelling doom and gnashing of teeth for PBS.

But listen to how they spin it.

According to PBS, the cuts "could mean the end of our ability to support some of the most treasured educational children's series" like "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," and "Arthur."

I realize 25% isn't peanuts. But to tell me that Sesame Street, with 109 Emmy Awards, and 8 million daily viewers, and over 4,100 episodes under its belt, is going to just curl up and die because of some partisan budget katana practice, is just pure pablum.

I don't care what you think corporate sponsorship will do to the program - it's already sponsored by AOL, how much lower can you go - even if the budget gets whacked, and by some herculean misstep they actually decide to let Sesame Street die, it'll get picked up. Can you imagine any of the big networks looking at Sesame Street and saying: "forget it Jimmy, there are better bets in town, save your money"?

So, what do I figure when I look at it? I see the twisted reality curve. PBS says it "may" cut Sesame Street. And it won't, we all know it. If they get a 25% haircut at Bush's budget barber shop, are they going to cut Sesame Street? Cut it? The longest-running, most successful educational children's program in history?

Please. Shame on PBS for using scare tactics like this when it's their decision who to cut. Come on guys, you know you'll cut Red Dwarf long before you cut Sesame Street.

Why don't you cut Mark Russell? I can't stand that guy.