You know what's fun?

Playing games that are fun to play... I am currently playing the exceptionally highly reviewed Bioshock Infinite. It has lots of good features:

• Probably the best companion ever - she gives you cash, health and ammo
• The world is beautifully realised and engrossing
• The story is gripping and you care about the characters
• Travelling by rails on a hand held hook is awesome

Surely all these excellent points warrant the high ratings? Well, they would if this was a film, but it's not, it's a game, so it needs one more feature - gameplay.

To me, this is where Bioshock Infinite really lets itself down - it's just not that much fun to play. The shooter itself is fundamentally broken, here's what I think.

Battles

So, we've got a big dude with a massive gun - you do extra damage when you shoot him in the back. Ok, so, I have a gun and an ability to freeze this guy in place - strategy sorted.
This will work great if I have plenty of space, and I do. However, I am shot by lots of other NPC's, I don't die, but I am at low health now - maybe my strategy is wrong? Ah well,
there's some health over there, so all's well that ends well. I'll try a different strategy next time.

So next time, I take cover, grab a rocket launcher and shoot from a distance. I kill the machine gun dude, but am flanked and loose a lot of health. Hmm, not an ideal strategy either,
still, I don't die and there's a fair amount of health lying around, so onwards and upwards.

Next up is a guy who takes extra damage to the chest and does lots of damage at close range. I keep him at a distance using my vigors and shoot him in the chest. I take a lot of damage,
but I don't die and there's lots of health around... By this time, I am starting to see a pattern forming. So next time, I just stand my ground and shoot - I take a lot of damage,
but I don't die and there's lots of health around. Man, this kinda sucks, I wonder if the game is more advanced than I'm giving it credit for? So I take to the sky rails and use them to keep mobile.
Same deal... sadness descends.

Weapons

The weapons are largely functional, you shoot up close with the shotgun for maximum damage, the sniper rifle for long range and in between you have the machine gun. There's the RPG for splash damage, but not a single weapon that's fun to use. Nothing that makes you laugh and and smile when you first use it... Remember the gravity gun from Half Life 2, yeah you do! Or the first time in Dishonoured when you blinked onto a walker and cut the driver's throat? Getting the chainsaw in Doom2? The line-gun in Deadspace? Things that were fun to use and play with? I have never practised combat in a single player game the way I did in Dishonoured, but it was just so much fun, there were so many things to try out and play.

Also, you can only carry 2 weapons at once in Bioshock Infinite, which is a nice nod to realism in a game where you can shoot electricity from your hands. This would be fine, if there seemed to be a game play reason associated with it. So far, I've not come across a scenario where the RPG and a machine gun weren't sufficient.

Linearity

I've just finished playing Tomb Raider - which was awesome fun and very linear. My problem with Bioshock is that it seems to suggest an open world to explore, so it jars when I come to a door I can't open or a ledge I can't jump off. It's also the linearity of the combat. I've read reviews raving about how you can set an opponent on fire and then push them at others, or you can trap them in place and shoot them. My issue is that you have to do one of those combinations and it doesn't seem to matter which. Neither option is enough fun to overcome the lack of inventiveness in the options.

Other games

Now Dishonoured allowed you the freedom to kill in many different ways, it even offered you the option of not killing. You could play with the game mechanics and have loads of fun without following the linear plot. Take a look at this and tell me it doesn't look fun Dishonoured. Now I know they are different games, but they both need to be fun to be worthy of such high reviews.

Grinding my gears

What's bothering me

I keep seeing lots of random people in the entertainment industry speaking on behalf of science. They mock anything other than the standard scientific view as proposed by celebrity scientists without any real understanding of what they are talking about. I'm not just talking about Heather Mills talking about the dangers of eating meat, or Roger Moore claiming foie gras causes Alzheimer's disease.

Take this quote from Ricky Gervais:

"Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn't know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn't get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn't hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition."

All very true and correct as a principle, but it is hopelessly naive as a statement of fact. The scientific method is, of course, the best way we have of acquiring new knowledge and verifying existing theories. However, it is implemented by people and therein lies the rub. If you have made your career based on proposition X, how likely are you to be impartial when examining opposing proposition Y? Really? Is there any evidence to back my claim up?

"String theory now has such a dominant position in the academy that it is practically career suicide for young theoretical physicists not to join the field."

Lee Smolin - The Trouble With Physics.

"A study by the University of Edinburgh examined more than 4,600 scientific research papers published between 1990 and 2007 and found a steady decline in studies in which the findings contradicted scientific hypotheses.
Papers reporting null or negative findings are in principle as useful as positive ones, but they attract fewer readers and citations, so scientific journals tend to reject them.."

http://phys.org/news/2011-09-pressure-positive-results-science-threat.html

There are way too many factors that can distort the accuracy of information coming from the "body of science" to discuss here. However, imagine having to go to your boss and tell him that the work you have done in the last 2 weeks has lead nowhere. 2 weeks of work down the drain - would that be a happy day for you? Now imagine that you are heading up the Human Genome Project.
You have promised a golden era of bio-tech and unparalleled return on investment for your billions of pounds funding... Are you going to go with "For better or for worse, we've found out that it's more complex than we initially thought. Designer babies and the cure for cancer are going to have to wait a bit longer. So in conclusion, there are waaaaay fewer genes than we thought. Remember epi-genetics? Well that's coming back in a big way, so lets all embrace that new body of knowledge"?

"Britain's biggest drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, is facing fraud charges in the United States for allegedly concealing information that its leading antidepressant caused suicidal behaviour among children and teenagers during clinical trials."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/jun/03/mentalhealth.medicineandhealth

Why does it bother me?

Because the scientific method is the way forward, however, it is impossible to be sure that you have analysed all of the data correctly when you simply don't have all the data.
Ben Goldacre has made a career (and a valid contribution to science) of exposing this.
Yet, I continue to see people mock the views of others because of their dogmatic belief that anything the scientific community says must be true.

We need to move back to the old scientific standard of having an open and enquiring mind. A balanced view of all sides of the argument is the route to making up your own mind. Not choosing a science super hero on the basis of their personality and mindlessly vomiting their words into the ears of anyone who tickles your unscientific gag reflex.

If you read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man. If you read about the mind, read Hofstader, Penrose AND Sheldrake. Learning is fun! It's much more fun if you figure out the answer for yourself.

I have always liked this quote from Pierre-Simon Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where in his scientific thinking was the role for a creator, he replied "I had no need of that hypothesis".
It represents to me a beautiful neutrality, without a hint of the dogma I oppose in the current scientific zeitgeist.

Finally

And if you are going to mock religion, be careful! It's like playing pool against your kid - if you win, it's the slow hand clap of 'well played, you have better eye hand co-ordination than someone who still gets dressed by his mum'; if you lose, the mockery is, rightly so, endless.

I watched a comedian I follow on twitter make a comment about the death of Christ not being a big deal for God because he could always have more kids... Really? The basic premiss of this attack was 'you are stupid because your beliefs have no logical basis, I am superior to you because I am a logical man of science'. Who believes that people who lose a twin shouldn't be upset because they have a spare? On behalf of those of us who were atheists before Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris told you it was cool - please stop talking.