Baseball isn’t really an exciting game, except for a few select moments. What it is, especially late in the season, is a suspenseful game. To an invested viewer, the wait between pitches becomes excruciating, and each pitch represents an individual battle. If you’re ahead, every ball feels like a tiptoe closer to the ledge. If you’re behind, every out represents your finite number of chances slipping away. Moneyball uses your standard cinematic tricks to pump up the suspense behind its in-game moments (slow motion! backstories! cherrypicking the most exciting moments!), but in doing so gives the average viewer an experience closer to that which a die-hard fan has than any scene from a real game ever could.

- Eliminate mortgage interest deductions.
- Eliminate corporate healthcare deduction.

In principle, I agree with both of these ideas. You’re right that these deductions introduce market distortions; they are also regressive, especially the mortgage interest deduction. However, I feel that an instant end to either would cause some extremely unpleasant short-term disruptions to the housing market and health care markets, and I’d be careful categorizing these as bugfixes. If I had made an investment in a house based on current tax law, I’d be pretty upset if that law suddenly changed. That goes double for health care; I really really don’t want to shop for insurance as an individual. The incidence of these deductions means that they have a large base of support among middle-class and wealthy Americans, making their repeal a giant political undertaking.

The best path forward I see is to cap each of these deductions. This will undercut the regressive nature of the deductions, and allow for a natural phase-in mechanism, as inflation pushes the real value of the cap lower. Note that Obama has proposed this for mortgage interest, and a similar scheme is currently law as part of the Affordable Care Act.

- Abolish payroll taxes and shift that all into income tax.
- Reduce social security by making it means tested.

From a social justice angle angle, I agree that these are good changes. I’m not sure that I would actually implement them though; one of the most important components of these programs is that they’re baked into the American social contract at this point, which may explain their remarkable resiliency. I feel that program’s political sustainability is as important as its fiscal stability, and I think that having Social Security apply broadly to all Americans is a good way to ensure it has the support of the vast majority of Americans.

- Reduce social security by raising the threshold age.

Disagree on this point. Studies have shown that longevity is correlated with income, and as such this would be a deeply regressive cut.

- Reduce military spending.

Totally agree on this point, though I think that free riding by American allies is an important reason for the “as much as N other countries combined” stats. As such, hopefully cuts would ensure a more multilateral foreign policy where a number of other countries that generally support American foreign policy share more of the costs.

How you want it to be

The problem is, our current situation is out of equilibrium. The financial crisis caused two major shifts. On the supply side, there was a large amount of deleveraging (shifting from debt-backed consumption to savings). This shifted the supply of loanable funds outwards, decreasing the equilibrium rate of return. In addition, the evaporation of a large amount of demand means that firms now perceive a lower rate of return on new capital expenditures; why invest in new factories and equipment if nobody wants to buy the additional output you produce? As a result, the demand curve based on rate of return contracted, also decreasing the equilibrium point.

Bad News Bears

As Paul Krugman and others have argued, this puts the equilibrium interest rate below zero, but interest rates don’t go below zero, so we have a gulf between the amount of usable savings and the amount of demanded money. As a result, we can pump a lot more demand in the form of deficit spending into the economy before interest rates start to rise and private investment starts to be crowded out.

The current CBA implements a (soft) overall salary cap, in addition to a maximum per-player salary. Because the maximum salary is set below the value the best players provide (which it has to, to be meaningful), multiple teams are willing to bid the max salary for a player like Lebron or Carmelo. This effectively removes salary as a potential point of competition, leading to a dysfunctional labor market. With salary off the table, teams are forced to compete on other issues, such as quality of teammates (Heat), or allure of playing for a hometown team (Knicks). As a result, the owners are competing on metrics they have no control over, as they have voluntarily taken away any employer’s best method of obtaining leverage over their employees. In retrospect, player movements that we’ve seen in the past few years seem inevitable.

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a social science concept which states that when studying a situation, we tend to attribute actions people take to the individual personalities, rather than to the situations people find themselves in. It seems to me that blaming the players, rather than the system they operate within, is yet another example of it.

Update: Andrew found an Actual Sports Journalist making the same point

(Whoa, are we returning to form with short, on-topic posts?)

IBM has accomplished something impressive by building a computer system that can answer Jeopardy! questions with decent confidence, particularly given the wordplay and nuance for which the show’s writers are known. But if the computer emerges victorious in this week’s exhibition match, does that mean it is “better at Jeopardy”?

Arguably, it does. But not for any really exciting reason.

Over the last week or so, I’ve rambled on a bit at people who will listen (and many who won’t) about the fact that Jeopardy is really two different games.

1. A contest of knowledge. This is, of course, what the show is known for. At its core, Jeopardy is about awarding points to players who know stuff.
2. A contest of reflexes. Viewers often underestimate the importance of speed in any Jeopardy-like game. Speed of recall is important, of  course, but reflexes prove even more important in close games.

(Well, it’s really three different games: Final Jeopardy is almost purely a game theory puzzle, as the optimal wagers are typically independent of a player’s confidence in the category. And it’s actually four different games, if you count an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. …I’ll come in again.)

It’s useful to understand some rules. Players may not buzz in until the host finishes reading the question. (This wasn’t always true, but it does tend to make for better television.) When the question answer is over, somebody off-stage arms the buzzers. This activates a set of lights surrounding the game board, signaling to the players that it is legal to ring in.

Watson is required to physically actuate a button. But that’s still blatantly unfair; it’s undeniable that a computer could easily win a reflex contest against humans. That is why I have a problem with the portrayal of the Watson match as pitting man versus machine in a battle of knowledge and wits. The game outcome purportedly measures Watson’s question-answering (or answer-questioning?) skill, but that characterization is founded on the idea that Jeopardy is purely a game of knowledge.

It’s impossible to know whether Watson is winning the knowledge contest, because it is winning the reflex contest hands-down.

All three players are really, really good at the knowledge contest. Brad and Ken have demonstrated that throughout their nearly 100 combined previous appearances on the show. As for Watson: on the 30 Double Jeopardy clues aired on Tuesday’s show, Watson was confident in the correct answer for 25, had the wrong answer for 1 (“Picasso”), and opted not to buzz in for 4 (on one, the Daily Double, its best guess was correct; on the other three, its best guess was wrong). That’s damned impressive, and a fine achievement. The Jeopardy round was less good, but still impressive: Watson had the right answer for 19 clues, a wrong answer for 5 clues, and abstained from 6 (1 of which, “the 1930s”, would have been correct).

But when all three players know an answer, the game becomes a buzzer race. The popular portrayal of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge gives far too much credit for Watson’s past victories to the question-answering capabilities that IBM has developed.

The last two nights have made it very clear that Watson is absolutely dominant on the buzzer. Of the 29 clues in the Jeopardy round (Daily Double excluded), Watson successfully rang in first on 17 of 24 attempts. Of the 28 Double Jeopardy clues, Watson successfully rang in first on 22 of 25 attempts. In total, Watson rang in first on over two-thirds of all opportunities (39 of the 57 non-DD clues read). During Ken’s 75 regular-season games, he was similarly dominant versus mere humans, ringing in first 61.45% of the time. A significant fraction of those wins presumably were uncontested—coming when neither opponent was attempting to buzz in—a much less common scenario when facing Jeopardy’s greatest champions, making Watson’s .684 average all the more absurd.

Incidentally, how can you tell that the humans are trying and failing to buzz in? As the camera switches back to show the players at their podiums, you can usually see Brad twitch a bit as Watson’s podium lights up. That’s how he buzzes: he’s found that contracting every vaguely-related muscle is faster than trying to move just his thumb or finger. Some players have been known to hold their arms crossed, with the signaling device against their body, so that any arm movement activates it. Ken’s movement is much less pronounced–the best indicator that he was trying to ring in is that he looks frustrated a split-second after he fails. (This happened frequently when Brad pounded him in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions.)

It’s looking increasingly likely that Watson will win in a blowout thanks to its buzzer dominance and the resulting Daily Double opportunities. But news stories that scream “Computer defeats humans on Jeopardy!” give too much credit to the computer by ignoring the aspects of the game that are heavily rigged in its favor.

First, a quick complaint. I recognize that it comes down to a good old-fashioned generation gap, and that I may be requested to evacuate the immediate lawn-like area, but it still catches me off guard how many people of the older generation don’t get video games. At all. They both fail to recognize video games as legitimate media, and fail to recognize that video games have continually evolved over the years to meet the demands of their growing audience. Because they remember that 20 years ago, video games were strongly geared towards children, they continue to labor under the assumption that video games are something to be outgrown. I consider my parents to be technically competent and generally aware of technological trends, yet even they frequently express surprise that I “still” play video games.

My mom is a little better in this respect; she seems to like the idea of the Wii, even if she never actually plays hers, and she had my old DS for a while to play a mahjong game we picked up in Japan. (There’s also her late sister, whose Tetris-playing stamina was nigh legendary.) Maybe with the four major video game platforms now embracing the “family gaming” concept, the DS and Wii having done it for years now, and the Move and Kinect bringing the other two into the fold, we’ll see the old assumptions fade away a bit. There is hope, after all–I don’t think I’ve heard anybody refer to a non-Nintendo game as “playing Nintendo” for a little while now.

With that, let us continue on to a mildly-cliché “end-of-year review”. These were my two favorite games of 2010. As some warning, my tastes are not particularly, er, mainstream, so I haven’t played Gears of God of War Solid: The Sands of Liberty, and don’t intend to. But then, my esoteric choices will be evident shortly.

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

This is a game you have never heard of. Unless I’ve told you about it while playing it, or you read Jeremy Parish’s stuff (which maybe you should).

This is not a game with a large target audience. It’s a little old-fashioned. There are no fancy cutscenes, there is no tutorial, and I actually had to read the manual once. On the surface, it’s tedious as all hell: the player is tasked with exploring a vast labyrinth and mapping it—by hand!—on the DS touchscreen, while fighting random battles. As the first few hours tick away, depending on the player’s tastes, this either does turn out to be tedious as all hell (the majority case), or reveals an intricate, elaborate world with fascinating corners to explore and rich details to discover (I guess I’m weird like that). I can think of pretty much one other person I know (a Mr. Legion, of the Connecticut Legions) who would likely fall into the latter camp with me. This is a classic, old-school RPG experience mildly reminiscent of the Bard’s Tale series.

Etrian Odyssey delivers a classic dungeon-crawling experience, yet is informed by a quarter-century of game design wisdom and evolution. There are no sudden deaths lurking around blind corners, no ridiculous Shadowgate-esque kills. Virtually every party death, of which there are plenty, is accompanied by a sense that it was the player’s own fault for getting in too deep, for getting careless and skipping necessary precautions, or for just being downright dumb.

On top of that, the game is beautiful, and the soundtrack is fantastic, with the PC-8801 sound lending it an appropriately retro feel. The music is made pretty distinctive by being full of drums, which is easily missed as they don’t really come across that well on the DS’s tiny speakers. But when fed through headphones, or, say, your computer’s speakers, the music really comes alive:

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

There’s no in-game clock, so it’s hard to know how much sleep I’ve lost diving into the labyrinth under Armoroad. Seven DS batteries is the best estimate I can tender.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Mario Galaxy, unlike Etrian Odyssey, is highly accessible, was widely-advertised, and contains a variety of dissimilar gameplay mechanics. What it has in common with EO is that it doesn’t really bother with plot, per se. What few threads of plot exist are woven weakly into the game, never getting in the way of interesting gameplay mechanics, like combining hot peppers and dinosaurs, and thoroughly confusing children about how gravity works.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The game has shed even what sparse packaging its predecessor had. Gone is the sprawling Mario 64-style overworld that was Rosalina’s observatory, replaced by a lightweight, mildly retro world map for choosing a stage. Interludes laying out backstory for the world are eschewed, most such details being relegated to optional dialogues with NPCs. The result is distilled Mario action with minimal padding added to tie the many disjoint galaxies together into a single package. The game boils down to being an expansion pack of the first Galaxy game, with fresh platforming gimmicks and little tweaks and improvements scattered about. Considering what a solid game Galaxy was, it’s hard to ask for anything more.

Also, the Throwback Galaxy (spoiler alert?) is incredible.

Some of the others

On the puzzle-y front, I finally played World of Goo, which I recommend highly (thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle). I spent far too much time on Manufactoria, a Flash game about Turing machines (no, seriously). Finally, I dropped about 60 hours over two months into Star Ocean: The Last Hope, which is actually a pretty bad game in many ways, but which I am a little ashamed to admit I really enjoyed.

So, did you play anything good this year?