The Incompetence of Sarah Palin

Let the YouTube video speak for itself.  I am astonished we might have elected this woman.  Analysis below.

The Purge and the Scapegoating.

The Republican Party is currently annihilated, and in its first steps to trying to grow from this situation, they are beginning with the wholesale carnage of liquidating those responsible for this catastrophe: the candidates themselves.  You may have already heard that CPAC has not invited McCain for this year’s gathering, but has invited Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal as well as old party elders like Newt Gingrich and new would-have-beens like Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.  Other segments of the party are starting to widen into a rift and fighting over the heart and soul of the Republican Political movement.  It will be a bloody battle, and some really nasty things will be hurled in the process.  However, take everything a Republican (or Conservative Outlet) says about a fellow Republican with a grain of salt for a while.  There’s a great deal of self-loathing that will happen over the next few weeks and months before Republicans start figuring out how to get back to grass-roots and rebuilding the party.

Post Mortem

Balance of Power

 

Last night, the Republican Party bore witness to its own Annihilation at the hands of a confident and hopeful Democratic Party under the visionary leadership of now President-elect Barack Obama.  Despite some analysis suggesting that the result reflected regional polarization, I have no delusions that this was a complete route.  The American People have decisively rejected the political philosophy of President George W. Bush, but in doing so they have entrusted the Presidency to a man who embodies their Hopes and Dreams, the aspirations for a better tomorrow, when, as tomorrow inevitably becomes more terrible and horrifying, those aspirations will turn into Agony, Anguish, and Despair. Amidst the carnage, pundits and pollsters are trying to figure out how this happened and, more importantly, what this means.  

Inevitable Loss?

It is my contention that shortly after the economy began its downward spiral, it became increasingly impossible for a Republican to win in 2008, and even GOP candidates themselves, like Rep. Chris Shays and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, describe “a tsunami” against the incumbent party of the President.  However, to say that a loss was inevitable would be a major disservice to the achievement of the Obama campaign — from its brilliant national strategy, to its superior tactical groundgame.  In contrast, the McCain campaign has been derided as the worst campaign ever: from several major missteps that compounded a lackluster and directionless campaign that lurched from one twelve-hour news cycle to the next, Sen. John McCain failed to establish a narrative — much less a coherent strategy — to win over Americans.  

Cauterizing the Wound

There is a bloodbath afoot, a liquidation that Wisconson Rep. Paul Ryan comically admits the Democrats have helped get underway, but it highlights the very reason why Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006.  It was a well-known adage in Ancient Greece that “a Revolution begins with only the Power of an Idea, and it Ends when the Only Idea left is Power.”  When power became an absolute end to the Republican Party, it lost its ability to relate to and empathize with the People, and swiftly lost their confidence.  As both Barack Obama and Democratic Strategist James Carville mentioned last night, Republicans had built a paradigm of winning elections based upon exploiting divisions and manipulating turnout by leveraging the Culture Wars, and in this last election, Obama appealed to shared purpose and common values while McCain forewent any serious social or cultural challenges.  Yet, it was more than that, and the meltdown of the Republican Party can be traced to three major components.

1. Palin.  Though Alaska Governor Sarah Palin emboldened culture warriors in the base, she also alienated a significant portion of the independent and swing voter electorate.  Her future now, in fact, is causing a rift in the Republican Party and plunging the GOP into an identity crisis.
    
2. Message.  John McCain repeatedly told a story about his life to voters; Barack Obama established a narrative about the promise of a better tomorrow.  There can be no doubt that the message resonated, and the demographics show a general underperformance versus George Bush for the McCain/Palin ticket.
    
3. Substance.  Barack Obama had an actual plan, and John McCain had a set of principles.  Arguably, it was a year when experience could have trumped naivete, but McCain’s behavior was deemed to be too “unpredictable and unpresidential”, and Obama’s approach was always controlled, disciplined, likeable, and presidential.  

Looking Forward

While John McCain plans his life in the Senate, the Republican Party now enters a difficult period attempting to be an opposition party of a President and a Democratic Party holding a trusteeship in bankrupcy, and amidst the challenges that the country faces, the Republican Party can hope to return to grassroots efforts to learn from and understand how Obama was able to take New Media – like the Internet, Social Networks, and Mobilization – to build a powerful fundraising machine.  The Obama win spells the end of the public financing system, and it is believed that a successful presidential campaign in the future will need to raise close to $1 Billion to be successful.  Amidst this effort, the Republican Party will have to reflect and re-evaluate the voice of the voters.

The Annihilation

The Capitulation

What delicious chaos has unraveled in the global markets, wouldn’t you all agree?  With the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the acquisition of Merill Lynch by Bank of America, and the Fed’s bailout (and consequential nationalization) of insurance giant AIG, investors yesterday proverbially shat their pants as stocks plummetted throughout the world.  Some people may call this the Apocalypse. Others who look at the recent natural devastation and rise of totalitarian regimes might say we’re in the End Days.  I call it something less dramatic and more to the point.

Welcome to the Capitulation.

For the past two years, Democrats in Congress have had full control over all aspects of the economy, from Commerce and Finance, to Ways & Means and Appropriations.  Since their takeover, the World Economy, which had stemmed recessions following the attacks of September 11th, has essentialy flushed the toilet.  The Republicans in the White House haven’t exactly been stellar either.  Suffering from an apparent psychotic break with their political reality, they actually spearheaded grotesque spending and brutal bailouts that make no market sense.  In the words of Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, “there is no reason for this panic.”  Paranoia has always been patriotic in the United States, but this defeatism is laughable because all that is lacking right now in the world is confident leadership.  In its place is childish squabbling, ridiculous ranting, and pointless partisanship.  

The Capitulation is all about negativity and despair; Senator Barack Obama has made it a point to consistently criticize the economy while waxing doomsdayish about its ultimate fate.  Senator John McCain, on the other hand, has it right — the fundamentals of the economy are strong — but lacks the charisma to deliver his point with convincing grace and directed gravitas.  If the markets have been playing a bullish game of hope during the past two years, then, is what has happened in the past seventy-two hours a surrender to the reality of hopelessness?

Spore

Spore is an amazingly fun game. Its remarkable how a very simple formula can be so successful for games. So, I decided to share some personal thoughts about how this game works.

PREMISE

You play a series of mini-games, each of which taking anywhere between 30 minutes to a couple of hours to complete, to “evolve” your race. These “mini-games” are actually sophisticated tutorials, but they also allow you to fine-tune your species (especially their personality). I found the Artificial Intelligence engine behind species personalities to be remarkably well-done, and actions that I performed back at the Cell or Creature stage reflected at Tribal and Civ particularly well. For example, at the Cell stage, I used to start attacking slightly bigger organisms and then, when I realized that I was outmatched, I fled for my life. Imagine my surprise when, in Tribal, a group of my hunters wandered over to these giant creatures, and among hushed/suspicious whispers, decided to try and attack… only to flee screaming like fools. It was an awesome moment. At any rate, eventually, as you beat each of the mini-games and “evolve”, different personality attributes emerge — everything from how you fine-tuned your race, to how you played your race, to what your species actually accomplishes. It is in the final stage, the Space game, that the “real game” begins.

GAME PLAY

Game play is straight-forward, and follows the Blizzard model of “easy to play, hard to master”; pretty much anyone can start fooling around in Spore and succeed at the game. However, to get the most out of the game, min-maxers will be pleasantly surprised to find so many different layers of controls and information about content. You can zoom in on a granular level to pretty much everything: from the art and architecture of your species, to even creating a musical anthem (everything from melody, beat, rhythm, ambience, instrumentation, etc.) that forms the basis for the randomly-generated “procedural” music. You can then zoom out to a holistic view of your species in the mini-games and play straight-forward for the level’s objectives. Like I said, each of the mini-games can be completed in a few hours, and you should be able to get a fully evolved species in around half a day of playing if you rush through it. Most people will get their Space stage after a day or so.

The Space Game is an open-ended sandbox, where the more you experiment, the more you are rewarded. There are thousands of abilities (technologies, tools, weapons, techniques, etc.) that can be unlocked just by experimenting when you explore the galaxy: from trying to terraform different planets, to simply trying to spark an inter-galactic war among your rivals. I found the depth, and this open-endedness, remarkably rewarding and, when I wanted it to be, extremely challenging. The sheer size and scope of the galaxy also blows my mind: you quickly discover that your homeworld, this place where you’ve been playing for the past day or so, is just a single planet orbitting a single star in a single area of space that’s in a single arm of a vast galaxy. According to Will Wright himself, there are “tens of thousands of stars” and “millions of worlds”, and that it would take someone “playing the game non-stop for 70 years” before they ever encountered the same world twice. In other words, it doesn’t happen. Here’s why.

MASSIVE CONTENT

The reason why Spore succeeds at the Space stage (and even at the earlier stages) is because all content is pulled asynchronously from the Spore servers. Stuff that you create is automatically sent to the Spore database, where it will be used by other players around the world. For example, on my planet, I mostly started out with a lot of Maxis content — creatures produced by the game designers — but that’s because I was one of the first people to play the game. By night, over 100,000 new species had been created in the United States alone, and I started seeing content being pulled from Japan. I ran across a planet that was governed by a pre-industrial Chocobo species with their name written entirely in Kanji. I decided to drop a planetary bomb on them (to wipe half of them out), and then left so that I can return at a later time and see how they have fared in an attempt to recover. (Incidentally, when I was at the Creature stage, I also noticed an extraterrestrial space-craft entering the atmosphere and trying to abduct some creatures. That was a scary moment!)

The Editors — where you create your content — are amazing, and, frankly, anything is possible. There is a Creature Editor (which you use in the Cell, Creature, and Tribal Stages to fine-tune the look of your species), a Building Editor (where you design all types of buildings that will appear), and a Vehicle Editor (where you can design any type of craft that your species will use). As your species evolves and you choose designs, you will notice the AI making cultural “versions” of your art and architecture, and this is especially apparent during the Civ Stage (where your goal is to conquer the Planet and unify the different city-states of your people). I had played militaristically, and my buildings were largely fortified in style and design, color scheme, and textures; I noticed very similar-looking buildings but with slightly different takes depending upon which “other civ” I was dealing with. The similarities were just as uncanny as the distinguishing differences, and I really felt like these places were unique and real. That didn’t stop me from subjugating every last city and winning badges for my militarism, though! Maxis supplies a healthy assortment of “parts” (shapes) that you can use when sculpting your “stuff” (buildings, vehicles, etc.), but you can refine them further by reshaping them (changes in size, scope, molding, texture, angle, directions, etc.), and even design new ones. 

This game is geared towards creative people, and if you’re not the creative sort, I can see how the Editors may get on your nerves. Thankfully, you can just “select” pre-made buildings, vehicles, etc., designed by other users. I found some awesome-looking Entertainment buildings (such as an Intergalactic Movieplex Cinema) designed by someone else, and of course, Maxis provided around one hundred variations of each type of building making it extremely distinct. However, I think that if you don’t design, you’re denying yourself a huge component of this game, which is the creative aspect — you get to see how the game reacts to your creative choices (and this is where it can be very rewarding). Design menacing looking buildings, and people who encounter them will react accordingly: from alien species who will hover at a distance because of the scary spires you’ve designed in your City Hall, to the animals who will frollick curiously towards your shiny city walls, wondering what the glint is that reflects the sunlight (only to be later obliterated by my High-Compression Terreon-Beam Turrets!). 

REPLAYABILITY

I think this game has a lot of possibilities for replayability, because it’s essentially a goal-oriented version of The Sims, when you think about it. Each species has its own unique manifestations, and when I want to play like I am conquering the galaxy, I will play my militaristic avian-people, whereas when I want a cultural challenge, I may use my prancing teddy-bear people. Or when I want to experiment, maybe I’ll try and pit the two against each other. The races that the game imports from Spore’s servers also retain the same personality aspects that others have chosen for them, so I am eager to see how people will eventually deal with my avian-militants, especially when their mentality is to deceive, attack first, and then ask questions later. 

However, if you don’t like the replayability behind The Sims, you’re probably not going to care much for Spore in general. All of the replayability is built around different “takes” on the same gameplay that you have witnessed before. The rewarding aspect is purely in the experimentation, especially since the major game itself is a sandbox where you pursue missions and goals and tinker with your creation and how it fares in the universe. Will Wright made some great decisions — such as using Star Trek racial archetypes, so that you could clearly identify personalities of other civilizations when dealing with them and their diplomacy, while at the same time preserving the original creator’s cultural choices in molding their species. But if you do not like exploration and experimentation, had a violent/adverse reaction to The Sims, or have expectations that just aren’t in line with what Spore is, you may be disappointed. Spore is neither massively multiplayer, nor is it a civilization game; it is a huge social content exchange with simplified (but well done) mini-games in the tutorial (Cell is Pac-Man, Creature is a First Person Shooter, Tribal is a Real Time Strategy, Civ is Civilization), and with a huge open-ended sandbox at the end (Space) to allow you to “see what happens”.

L’Empereur – Secret Fifth Scenario

Some time ago, I published a YouTube video where I demonstrated my surprise in discovering a secret/hidden scenario in Koei’s Napoleonic-Era turn-based strategy game from 1989, L’Empereur.  Hilarious that I spent two decades playing this awesome game without ever knowing about this.