Assume your rules will be abused

(Since this post is a little bit political, I should make clear that views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. OK, with that out of the way, carry on…)

I don’t really intend to talk about politics or current affairs here much. But I read this morning that of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential block, only nine are paying council tax.  And that got me thinking: you know who would be good at writing laws?

Video game designers.

One of the first things you learn when designing game systems–either the easy way, from a more experienced designer, or the hard way from seeing how people play your game when it’s released–is to design rules with the assumption that they will be abused.

It’s not such a big deal with single-player games (where rules-abusers only affect themselves) or small-scale multiplayer games (where the group can police itself), but it becomes very important with massively multiplayer games. You’ve got to think about griefers (deliberately disruptive players), but you’ve also got to think about groups of players organising themselves to take advantage of the rules. You can design what you intend as a co-operative game, but if one player can get an advantage by screwing over the other players, that’s what they’ll do; and you can design what you think is a competitive game, but if players can maximise their rewards by co-operating, that’s what they’ll do. Players will always look for the way to maximise their rewards, even if it’s less fun to play that way and even if it screws over other players.

Game designers have to think about this as they design the game rules, so they release a game whose rules can’t be abused like this. And in most modern games, if they find after release that people are abusing the rules in a way that spoils the game for others, they can release a rules patch to fix it.

Maybe this is wishful thinking and betrays a lack of political knowledge, but when I see news stories like the one I linked to, I wish that the same design philosophy could be applied to real-world laws. Whatever legal hoops involving companies registered in the British Virgin Islands people can jump through to avoid paying tax, that’s clearly an abuse of the law, and the fact that the abuse is possible means the system is poorly designed.

I suspect that a lot of modern problems could be solved if we were to take a bit of games design wisdom and make it a guiding principle for our lawmakers: Design laws with the assumption that they will be abused, and if it turns out they can be abused, fix them.

The girl in Hal Jordan’s Bed

Ever since I posted my thoughts about the movie, a surprising amount of this site’s traffic has come from people searching for variations on one question: “Who is the girl in Hal Jordan’s bed in the Green Lantern movie?”

Well, I believe in trying to give the readers what they want, so: as far as I can tell (from IMDB), the character is listed simply as ‘Beautiful Girl’ and is played by Marcela Duarte Fonseca, who has no other film credits. I could be wrong, though: this is a mainstream movie aimed at teenage boys, so basically any of the female characters could be described as ‘Beautiful Girl’.

The film tells us very little about Beautiful Girl. Presumably Hal Jordan picked her up in a bar the night before the first scene, they had a one-night stand, and neither of them expects to see the other again. (The dialogue in that scene definitely implies that it’s the first time she’s been in his apartment.) Her presence in the scene is just to establish that he’s the kind of guy who picks up girls; having served this purpose, the character is forgotten about. Presumably Beautiful Girl goes back to her mundane, non-superheroic life, maybe occasionally noticing that the Green Lantern she sees on the news looks kind of like that guy she slept with one time.

But that’s boring. With so little to go on, we can invent whatever story for her we like. Here are some ideas:

• She’s a sleeper agent (yes, yes, pun intended) sent by the Guardians of Oa to observe potential Green Lanterns on Earth. She’s not actually a person but a tiny robot drone that projects a hard-light construct around itself, similar to the Green Lantern rings but able to do other colours as well. She keeps close to Hal by taking on new appearances that Hal will be attracted to, then letting him chat her up and take her home–in fact, almost every one of Hal’s sexual conquests have been this same robot. The reason Hal is fixated on Carol Ferris is that on some subconscious level he knows that she’s the only real woman to have ever been slightly interested in him. Because Hal is a jerk.
• She’s the real intended recipient of the Green Lantern ring, but a quirk of human physiology means that the rings can get confused between humans who have been in close physical contact recently. She’s genuinely brave, selfless, and kind-hearted, possesses huge reserves of willpower as well as being of peak physical fitness, and is also an accomplished sculptor with an amazing ability to imagine three-dimensional shapes. In some parallel universe, she led the Green Lantern Corps to usher in a new age of peace and justice for the universe. And she wouldn’t have been such a jerk.
• She’s a naive, romantic girl who’s had a crush on Hal Jordan for months, and has eventually got him to notice her. From his point of view, she’s just another of his conquests, but from hers it was a beautiful romance and Hal was clearly The One. But all Hal is interested in is the chase, so once he’s bedded her he forgets about her completely. She tries phoning him but he stops returning her calls, partly because he’s busy being a superhero, but mostly because he’s a jerk.

There are infinite other possibilities. Maybe she’s an alien construct as in the first idea, but rather than working for the Guardians, she works for an evil race for some sinister purpose. Maybe she will return to take part in a love triangle involving her and Carol Ferris. Maybe she’s quite coincidentally destined to be another superhero, and someday they’ll team up to fight robot zombies from the moon, during which Hal will wonder why she seems familiar but not be able to place her.

She’s a blank slate. Who do you want her to be?

P.S. to everyone who got to this page by searching for “slutty fantasy armour”: no.

NaNoWriMo

Tonight the dead walk, witches screech through the sky, and, more scarily, thousands of would-be novelists put finger to keyboard on the stroke of midnight to begin NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a self-imposed challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November.

After a month of umming and ahhing I’ve decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year. When I first did it back in 2009 it was a massive help to my writing, but right now I’m not at a stage in my writing development where it would be helpful. Tonight seemed the night to recommend it and to say a few words about its pros and cons, though.

The good

NaNoWriMo is a great help in turning off one’s inner editor for a month. Quality and coherence are jettisoned for the sake of churning out 50,000 words of prose. Back in 2009 that was exactly what I needed: I had written short stories, but I’d never finished something novel-length, and focusing on word count let me prove to myself that I could.

NaNoWriMo also helps you to spend time every day writing. You know you’ve got to write those 50k words, and the only way you’re going to do that is if you sit down and do 1,667 words per day, every day, for the month. You learn how to write quickly and you learn how to make time for it. Once November ends you might not be writing that heavily, but you’ll find sitting down to write a bit easier than you did previously.

Most importantly (for me at least) there’s the NaNoWriMo community. With NaNo you have a whole support network to help you achieve the things above: to give advice, to nag, to compare notes and to all be in it together. I made some great friends through NaNo, and it was only with their support that I got through the month. The reason I was even considering doing NaNo again this year was for the community element of it. But…

The bad

The bad is that NaNoWriMo is restrictive. It’s one-size-fits-all. The community pressure is great, but the community pressure is to write 50,000 words and nothing else. The only way people vary the formula within NaNo is to set themselves even more insane targets: 100,000 words, 200,000, more. The rules of NaNo become a straitjacket: you must write 50k words, the word count is more important than quality, you must start in November and not before. If that isn’t what’s best for you as a writer, you’re outside the community; it’s not fun to go to the parties and have people ask about your novel or word count and have to say, um, well, I’m not really doing NaNo as such. I was tempted to do NaNo just for the sake of being in the community, even though it would be a month wasted from the point of view of my development as a writer, and that was when I knew I had to give it a miss this year.

Another potential problem with NaNo is that it’s easy to stop there. It’s recreational novelling: you write a novel in a month but you don’t intend for anyone else to read it, and you might not write anything for the rest of the year. That’s great if recreational novelling is what you want, but if you’re serious about being a writer you have to step past that and judge whether next year’s NaNo is for you.

For anyone doing NaNo this year: good luck, and enjoy! If my local NaNo community is anything to go by, NaNoers are all brilliant people and I’m proud to be part of that community even if I’m not doing NaNo itself again.

And for anyone considering doing NaNo: it might not be right for you, but if you think it is, go for it! Depending on when you read this, it may not be too late to start. It’s a unique experience that’ll teach you valuable writing skills, even if there are other skills it doesn’t teach.