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Glitching and Learning

My theory of information dynamics says that knowledge cannot be maintained without the expense of energy. I'm finding an interesting inefficiency in my gaming lately. The presence of exploits both expands expertise and decreases propriety.

It is inevitable that as much as I game, that I will be using analogies to that in life. Get over it. Because Lombardi. But just in case you need an intro, here's a thick paragraph about the Destiny Raid:

Destiny Raid
Destiny is a free-roam open sandbox videogame in which the player takes on the avatar of a Guardian. A soldier who runs individual and small cooperative missions against legions of extraterrestrial baddies. The area of operations is the inner planets of the Solar System, Earth, Venus, Mars, Earth's moon, and Mercury. This sort of gameplay (PvE) falls into three categories, Patrol, Strike and Raid. Patrols are random in that there are not specific targets for your activity, although one can select various mercenary missions while on patrol. You can go solo or with up two two buddies as your loot and shoot. Strikes are more crafted adventures with a brief bit of story to get you going - rather like the messages at the beginning of Mission Impossible, you are assigned to take down this and such boss, facing several preliminary battles along the way. The Raids, however are the showpiece and crown jewel of Destiny. On a Raid, you need six players to accomplish tasks that are impossible to guess. Magical things happen that are not obvious, the rules of physics are bent and the team must figure out a way to overcome them. More than just sequences of enemy attacks, but changes in the physical enviroment take place on the way to beat the final boss. There are no instructions for these battles. Teams have to figure out what works. 

Now I'm going to talk about one particular Raid level and the exploit we have been using. It is the second level of the Crota Raid. Interestingly enough, I don't know what it's called. But here's how we play it, and playing it this way made me think about glitching and learning. In case you're not familiar with the term, 'glitching' means taking advantage of a weakness in a systems and short-cutting the process in a way contrary to the way the designers had in mind. For example, if you're hiking down a series of switchbacks, you might literally cut the corners by going down the middle of the hill instead of the gradual left an right on the beaten path. 

As our team enters the second level, we are stand at the top of a set of stairs over looking a pair of plazas. Between the plazas is a cliff. Each plaza is about 200 meters east and west and 75 meters north and south. The gap between the two is about 150 meters. On each plaza are three 10 meter radius circles forming a shallow triangle that points to the other plaza. The top of each triangle is the circle that lies at the foot of an invisible bridge between the two plazas. In the feet of each triangle are tall structures that hover above the center of their respective circle. These, are called 'totems'. So there are four totems, two on each side. The play begins once a player descends the staircase and enters the plaza.

Method One
Behind the near plaza is a large room cut into the face of the mountain. Our method is to hide five players in this room at its extreme rear while one player goes out and excites the enemies. How exactly he does so is a mystery, I've never seen what he does. I'm one of the hidden players. After about 30 seconds, two things happen. First an enemy called a Swordbearer comes out of the hidey room from a small door on the right, below the platforms upon which we are hidden. Then, all of the enemies that have generated out on the plaza dissappear leaving just the Swordbearer. We all then go out to the plaza and attack the Swordbearer who drops the sword. One player is designated to stand at the bridge circle, this materializes the invisible bridge between the two plazas. Two other players are designated to stand in the totem circles. Once gameplay begins, if no players occupy those circles the totems will begin to glow red, and after about 20 seconds destroy the entire team. The trick then is to create the bridge, destroy the Swordbearer, and keep the totems quiet. Then one player can take the sword across the bridge and face another enemy, the Gatekeeper. 

The most difficult part of this part of the game is that usually there are multiple enemies swarming the plaza harassing the players in the totem circles. The difficulty is defeated by the team using the rear platform of the hiding room which, for the purposes of generating enemies, makes the presence of the five hiding players invisible. Destiny levels up difficulty by taking into account the number and strength of the players. Few players, few enemies. More players, more enemies. By hiding, we eliminate the possibility of the game generating more enemies.

Method Two
In this version, all of us go out onto the plaza. One player must be the sort who can regenerate his life after death. We go and thin the enemies a bit. When the Swordbearer comes out we degrade him a small bit, but then all of the players jump off the cliff in close proximity to each other, including the regenerating player. The game begins a countdown clock to resetting the level and just as it hits 1 second, the last player regenerates his life and then restores the lives of the other players. The effect is that the multiple harassing enemies do not regenerate and only the Swordbearer is left. He can then be dispatched in short order and the sword taken across the bridge. 

Both of these methods are effective in eliminating the primary difficulty of defending the totem circles from swarming enemies while trying to kill the Swordbearer, who is more than any single player can defeat in a short period of time. Doing this will creating the bridge adds to the chaos, which is reduced through these glitchy methods.

However the result is that I personally, and certainly many other gamers who have passed through this level have done so without having experienced the game the way on presumes the designers intended. However this is different than a cheat because we were given an environment whose rules were discovered by experimentation, not explicitly laid out by its creators. The aim of the game is to survive and advance. Whatever works, works. Or as the meme says 'Everything bows to success, even grammar'. 

We avoided the difficulty of the challenge of harassment incurred defending the totems, by convincing the game that we didn't exist.

Harassment incurred defending the totems is a particularly apt way to describe a lot of life's challenges present in society every day. It has the virtue of allowing one not particularly skilled at defending totems to survive and advance. One might possibly, through all of the shortcuts, manages to beat Crota, the goal of the Raid. That's a win. The game only polices itself, but there's a meta game as well. How you beat Crota matters in some circles. Ultimately, the most skilled players will figure out how to defend the totems and win, or not waste their time doing so and still win. After all, only multiple wins in the Raid can gain you all the gear randomly distributed at the end of the final boss battle.  

I'm not so much interested in the ethical question here, because that's ultimately longitudinal in the meta game. Either the game creators will fix the exploit - say by resizing the hiding room, or find some way to raise the difficulty in another aspect of the mechanics of the Raid. The designers do indeed update the game to block usage of those exploits they deem to be 'cheese', while leaving others intact. That feedback loop is thus is self-correcting and the game becomes ultimately what the designers intend it to be. Their decision for popularity of a game level, or difficulty is the balance they must strike. But what about the knowledge?

I said at the outset that the presence of exploits increases expertise and decreases propriety. If I beat the plaza level, then I am an expert, whether or not I take the architected path. I will continue to play the way I do and teach others to play the way I do. They in turn will play according to the method they learned. There's an interesting dynamic at work in such cooperative endeavors obviously involving leadership and expertise but also consensus. Everybody on the team doesn't necessarily want to learn so much as win. So it's not so very likely that someone playing with the same circle of friends that team up to raid will learn multiple methods. Only going outside your small circle will you come to better understand the mysteries, and how many of them will be actually doing it 'the hard way' as the designers intended?

The proper way to beat the game involves defending the totems. (Sorry if I can't get over the aptness of the metaphor). And yet when certain methods are employed, that task - which was added for the purpose of making things more challenging (and fun?) - disappears as do the consequent difficulties. The skill of defending totems is lost, and over time their very meaning can be lost. As more experts figure out more alternatives to gaming the game, the rationality of the game design itself can come into question. This happens all the time in Destiny, as in life.

There is a meta game to which we take on various levels of care. The method by which you approach the game is a signal of your skill in the game, which others will interpret as you temporarily collaborate. But glitching itself is a skill which is not only valuable to the player who aims to survive and advance, but to the designer who has an opportunity to eliminate, modify or let the exploit remain. Sometimes you want to play with glitchers, sometimes you don't. 

The Municipal Grid

This year one of my goals is to ingratiate myself with minds and bodies in Los Angeles. That means thinking, eating, drinking, discussing. I'm all about putting together a bigger orbit of fellows. To that end, I've put together a new calling card and purchased some nice shoes. So far so good. Over the past few weeks I've made contact with four outstanding individuals, but let me tell you about the last guy, Codename Gambler. Gambler because he looks like Kenny Rodgers at the top of his game.

Among other things, Gambler knows streaming media. I was unable to disambiguate HLS from H.264 and don't know most codecs from each other, but I could generally parse the stream of info he burst to me yesterday afternoon. I asked him whether or not he could articulate a technical reason for going against Net Neutrality. It was mildy surprising to hear him say what I've said on my less chartiable days about the extent to which the likes of Comcast are justifying 'technology' price increases just for turning up dials they've already built. IE your bandwidth is throttled back to 3. I could turn the knob up to 5 in just a second, but defeating Net Neutrality allows me to charge you to turn it up to 5. (BTW it goes up to 10, I'm just pretending that it doesn't). In other words, the infrastructure is already there and paid for. 

Now I'm going to inject something I knew for many years. A long time ago when I drove a VW Beetle, I found myself driving from LA to Georgia to work in Alpharetta at Cingular Wireless. This was right about the time that Deutche Telecom was first putting a footprint into North America as T-Mobile. So I asked the obvious question. How the hell do they just put up a network and start doing business in the US? The answer, cell tower clearinghouse. Huh? What?  Since there is a standard for cellphone traffic, (GSM or CDMA or some such) all the electrical engineers with enough brains can build cell towers. Cingular owns some, Verizon owns some, AT&T owns some. If you have a cellphone and you drive away from a Cingular tower, chances are an AT&T or Verizon tower will pick up your signal. In other word, they share cell network infrastructure and have balances of payments settled at a clearinghouse. AT&T knows when your cellphone is talking to a Verizon tower and vice-versa, etc, etc. But none of those carriers own all of the electrical engineers building the towers.  Obviously it makes sense to have cheaper capital and build more cell towers vis a vis market share of the clearinghouse balance of payments, but it's in everybody's interest to keep all of the towers running. Now some of this may have changed with all that LTE 4th Gen blather, but I still think there's no monopoly of cell tower networks as they imply in the commercials. Speaking of which, do you keep track of whose network you are calling in order to save money? If you are AT&T, do you try not to call people with Sprint phones? Of course not, that would be rediculous. Carriers *could* charge you more, and I think they used to, but it's stupid now. My point is that infrastructure can be shared and clearinghouses can be kept, and the prospects for charging for cross-traffic is probably not a good long range business model.

Enter municipal broadband. I've got FIOS. Every time I go to Fry's and the Direct TV guys are there trying to sell me dish, their faces fall when I tell them I've got FIOS. They know that fiber rules when it comes to delivering internet traffic to the home. But guess what, a lot of that fiber used to belong to (still belongs to?) Level Three Communications, ex railroad guys who built lines in the railroad right of way. When it came to delivering to the legendary 'last mile', well all that has been done and paid for. And similar to cell towers, the technology is understood by many, not by a monopoly. Yet the monopoly for the consumer exists. My neighborhood, for better or worse, is a FIOS neighborhood. I used to live in a (horrors) Adelphia neighborhood, and before that a Time Warner Cable neighborhood.

Gambler tells me that there are smart people in Los Angeles city government who are proposing regulations that will remove that content monopoly by relicensing the physical monopoly. In other words, let the fiber guys build the right kind of fiber (that dials all the way up to 10) to every house in Los Angeles and then share it through a clearinghouse. If I want Comcast, it goes over the fiber. If I want FIOS, it goes over the same fiber. If I want Roku, it goes over the same fiber. Why? Because Google can play too, and why shouldn't they?

So I am now very clearly for, somewhat tangential and possibly obviating of Net Neutrality, a regime in which cities get rid of captive monopolies by forcing carriers to all talk to the same grid, the Municipal Grid, in the same way they do for cellphone traffic. And I think that just means that Net Neutrality will be a software setting in your cable modem dialed up by the main office. Sounds delicious. 

Three Databases

I just did something remarkably easy that reminds me about why Amazon is winning and will continue to win. I started up three different databases and then threw them away. For anyone who has worked in the Amazon ecosystem, this may seem like just an ordinary thing. Indeed it is, but let me take you back in time.

In 1985, I took my second summer internship at Xerox in El Segundo, CA. I reported to a guy named Jack Starkey who was one of those starched-shirt engineers of the first order. I loved the guy. My assignment was to build a data dictionary for the parts and service database that Xerox used to keep track of the maintenance of their top of the line laser printers. Xerox was considering migrating from an IBM VSAM hierarchical database to something called Focus, a new fangled relational database. My job was to insure that I had all of the definitions correct. I asked Jack if I could use the new Xerox Star Workstation in order to complete my job, which was essentially all about documentation. He agreed. 

My first internship was more interesting because it was more technical. I actually wrote a financial modeling program. But my boss was loathed and feared in that area and a lot of people hoped everything he did would fail. That guy, whose name I actually cannot remember Jim somebody, was a notorious pipe smoker back in those days when you could smoke in the office. He liked something called Amphora Green.  My project did not fail, although there were some interesting twists. My job was specifically to make a realtime pricing model that salesmen could use to develop a quote for customers based upon the way they actually did their electronic printing. At the time, most computer printing came out of printers attached to mainframes and the most popular one was the IBM 3800. But the Xerox printer had duplex and quadplex, meaning it could print on both sides of the same sheet of paper. My program would show the long term economic benefits of using the Xerox tech which often came down to power and supply costs. So I learned 'Total Cost of Ownership' at a fairly young age. The MBA intern with whom I was working had her HP calculator. My code was being held up because she was late in delivering a 'cost matrix' to me. I sat down with her finally to discover that she had just been plugging numbers into a formula run on her HP 12C. The MBAs didn't sit with the engineers, you see, so getting this meeting took weeks. I had to explain to her that this CP/M based computer could actually do that kind of formula calculation. She was shocked that Xerox actually made a computer that could do the same things as an HP 12C. We all learned a little something. I recall later on that a cat named Burkhart, whom I seem to have never forgiven in person, got the chance to present the wonders of my completed program to Xerox folks in London, while I went back to school that September. 

But that was the pace of things in the mid 80s. Three months just to build the equivalent of a DDL script to help move data from one database technology to another. Today I do that in realtime. Another dude I vaguely recall had the radical attitude I might have enjoined were I not so desperate to drive a BMW. He advised me to get all my hacking done before the implementation of ACF2. What we were dealing with was the gap between the time you could get engineers to understand a technology, the time it took them to implement it, the time it was adopted by the business, and the time that an actual payoff could be seen. Then there was the time it took for the capacity of the business to exceed the design limits of the system in place and the time it took for that problem to arise to the level of necessity and a new replacement process begun. 

In the 80s, all of that was glacial. Moore's Law kept us all expectant about the future, mostly in terms of how much of all of the business processes could be captured outside of the pocket calculators of MBAs, but the process of business adaptation as well as the process of re-sizing systems have continued to be slow all the way to the current day. Amazon has emerged to understand these kinds of problems very well because of how e-commerce begat DevOps. And yet the majority of businesses still use 'Enterprise' architecture in their systems implementations. 'Enterprise', for all intents and purposes, was the term used to convince IT buyers that UNIX based servers could handle all of the business once only owned by the sort of mainframe computers that spit data out to Xerox and IBM printers. And then came e-business which introduced the 'n-tier' solutions, multiple tiers required because no single vendor, not even IBM, could provide hardware, networking and software solutions for the new class of applications being envisioned and built.  

I don't have a buzzword we could reliably depend upon to be what this time of transition to cloud architecture will be. 'Post-Enterprise' is all I will hazard. However, what processes can and will be improved is a lot clearer. So I hope to speak to you, my fellows still using the systems designed with on-premise Enterprise class architectures in mind. That's my aim for this year, to help you see what I see and what my company, Full360, can do to help you realize some of the promises of computing that were made a long time ago and have been a long time coming. 

So what I just did, single-handedly, today and yesterday, was build three different database servers Oracle 11g, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. They were each 4 core 15GB servers with at least 300GB of SSD. They took about 15 minutes to configure and secure, with automated backups in an alternate data center. I was able to connect to them directly through a secure VPN I had previously setup with my RazorSQL client using JDBC. Today, I'm shutting down the Oracle and MySQL services because my customer only has the MSSQL license. But it was actually fun playing with the alternatives. Fun!

What's going to happen next is that I will start using AWS Config to keep track of all of my compute and networking assets for my customers. I'll be able to tell, at a glance, which server is doing what in which stack in which VPC. I will be able to manage services to an even greater extent for this and my other customers. 

Back in 2001, I had a dream about a company I might work for in the future. I called the company 3DB because as a fundamental competency I wanted people who understood object, relational and multidimensional database technologies. We could then build the kinds of systems I envisioned. Now I work at Full360, but the 3DB concept is reality. We use multiple database technologies in our data management framework called ElasticBI. I didn't envision them running in a cloud architecture, but that is even better. Stay tuned.