I've been doing a lot of thinking about artificial intelligence lately – where it's going in the next several decades, how it might be integrated into our society and culture, how it might impact the way we live and the course of history. It's the kind of thing you spend time thinking about when you're writing a sci-fi backstory for a game where one of the two main characters is an AI.

This is not, however, a post about where we might be a century from now, but more about the starting point for those speculations: where we are now and what direction things seem to be moving in. And for the time being, it seems to me that where we are now is best described as "high-octane stupid being branded as 'smart.'" I say this as not as an indictment of present-day technology itself — the scientists, programmers, and engineers behind some of the techie toys we take for granted these days have done amazing things, and it's because of them that I think we have better days ahead of ourselves. No, rather, I am pointing the blame at pretty much every other link in the chain: the business folks selling dolled-up stupid as "smart" and the everyday consumers who buy it. These people are why, before the wide-eyed promises of The Future start to manifest, things are going to kind of fall flat for a while.

As with any indictment, it follows that I should provide evidence, and I will. But first, so we're on the same page, let me explain what I mean by "high-octane stupid." Imagine, if you will, two people, both American citizens. The second has never actually been to Europe, never actually plans to go to Europe, and does not correspond with any Europeans, but has for whatever reason decided to memorize the Fodor's travel guides for every European country. The second has not done any of that memorization but has actually been on two or three trips to Europe and has a handful of friends out in Europe.

The first person represents what I am calling "high-octane stupid." He's not useless, far from it. Knowing the addresses and operating hours of every museum in Prague can come in handy if that's what you're looking for. But he only understands Europe on one level. He can tell you where the most popular cafés in Paris are, but not what the food tastes like. He doesn't have any stories about that one cute waitress in Barcelona or any photos of Venice.

Our second person represents "low-octane smart." Sure, he's never been to Poland or Switzerland or most other countries for that matter and can't tell you anything about them. But he knows all about this one great pub in Dublin, remembers what the ruins in Crete smelled like, and can show you a cool video he took of sunset from the Eiffel Tower. Both of these people have something useful to share, but they have something very fundamentally different to offer and it's important not to confuse one for the other.

As an aside, these two individuals hint at a third we have not yet spoken of, a "high-octane smart" specimen who has somehow acquired several lifetimes' worth of intimate knowledge about every teeny little bit of Europe. It's possible that we'll get there some day, but we are not there yet. That's an article for a different day.

So back to my charge that we have been sold high-octane stupid in a wrapper that says "smart." Where's my evidence? Computers seem to be doing some pretty smart things these days, you might think, and you'd be right: Computers seem to be doing some pretty smart things. I can think of no clearer example than Watson, the computer that quite handily defeated a pair of mere mortals at a game of Jeopardy!. Watch what it does during Final Jeopardy:

The category is U.S. Cities, and its response, "What is Toronto?" is a city that is decidedly not a part of the U.S. Watson effectively demonstrated that it is a magnificent word association machine that has no solid internal concept of what a Toronto is. However, if you watched the entire episode of the show, you'll notice that despite Watson's single-layer understanding of the world, it still had enough raw computational horsepower behind it to outperform by an order of magnitude two of the greatest Jeopardy! contestants our species has been able to produce.

Still not convinced that Watson isn't "smart?" Willing to write off Watson's mistake as a small wrinkle that will be ironed out in a short amount of time? Exhibit B is a cute feature that Google added to Google Docs spreadsheets at some point, and you can try it at home. Go to any Google Docs spreadsheet, type two similar terms in two adjacent cells, select them, then hold down the alt or option key as you expand your selection. Google will work some magic behind the scenes and auto-populate the cells with terms it thinks are similar.

It works amazingly well in certain specific situations. Type "Wisconsin" and "Minnesota," expand your selection to 50 items, and you'll have a list of the 50 U.S. States — Ask it for 4 more and it'll give you DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam. Type "Genesis" and "Exodus," expand it, and you'll have a list of the books of the Bible. Pretty smart, huh? Well... it seems that way until you see the system break down.

Try the same exercise with "Ontario" and "Quebec." For the first 10 entries it does just fine. It lists seven of Canada's eight remaining provinces as well as its three territories. But... for the thirteenth entry, rather than tell you about Prince Edward Island, it gives you an entry called "Newfoundland Labrador," demonstrating that not only does Google think the word "and" is unnecessary but that it thinks that "Newfoundland Labrador" is some province that is fundamentally different from "Newfoundland," which it already listed on line eleven. Expanding the list further, it will first suggest Québec — with an accent, as if that's enough to make it different from Quebec — before just listing a half dozen Canadian cities, followed by French translations of a couple province names, and doesn't give up its grudge against PEI until about the 22nd entry in the list (and even then, only refers to it by abbreviation).

Google sets, just like Watson, are great at making word associations, but terrible at understanding the concepts those words represent. Play around with it for a bit, you'll be surprised what works and what doesn't work. Type "Hydrogen" and "Helium," and not only does it fail to list the elements of the periodic table but it deviates from chemistry entirely within a couple dozen entries.

But go back to our Canada example for a moment. Strange grudge against PEI aside, where it really starts to get peculiar is when you ask it for 100 entries. I won't criticize it for getting weird after filling up the first thirteen cells. After all, imagine being presented with the same exercise as a human: "Ontario," "Quebec," 98 blank lines and the only instructions are "complete the list with items similar to the two already listed," and you'd have to make some judgement calls and get creative once you get done listing the provinces and territories of Canada. One person might decide it is a list of Canadian places, and start listing cities, national parks, and geographical features to complete the list. Another might decide it is a list of the administrative divisions of North America and go on to list the states, territories, and districts of the U.S. and Mexico. Both people would have just as valid a list by the end.

So the really interesting part isn't just that Google sets starts grasping at straws after a while. The interesting part is that it just goes ahead and makes a judgement call and merrily presents a list to you as if nothing is wrong. Do it a second time, and it will give you the same exact list. At no point does it say, "Hey, I wasn't sure what you wanted after I listed every province that wasn't the setting for Anne of Green Gables, so I just listed a mish mash of Canadian cities and U.S. states, but you might want to double-check the list to make sure it's what you want." A truly smart system would start a dialogue. "I filled in what I could? What else do you want? U.S. States? Canadian cities? Historical regions like Keewatin? Or were the provinces and territories all you really wanted, and you just didn't know how many there were?"

This is the part where it is going to get worse before it's going to get better -- not because the technology itself is going to get worse, but because it's going to become more prevalent at a much faster rate than it becomes more helpful. Google sets are a bell and whistle that are easy to ignore if they aren't working for you, but they're far from the only place that Google has decided to make an ass of u and me. Google's primary search is just as guilty of this. A prime example: last summer I was searching for something with "Newfoundland" in the query. Trying to be helpful, it also included websites with the postal abbreviation "NL" in its query. Unfortunately, this brought in a bunch of false positives with locations in the Netherlands, also abbreviated "nl." The most maddening thing was that I couldn't figure out how to turn this functionality off so I was stuck sifting through a bunch of Dutch results I never asked for and didn't want.

Google is far from the only culprit. Take Apple's infernal auto-correct: For reasons I will never forgive, Apple made their autocorrect opt-out instead of opt-in. Likely, there are studies that show that people prefer quick and simple to accurate, and given the number of people that don't immediately disable autocorrect (mercifully, unlike Google's "helping" features, Apple's can be disabled) probably prove that they're right. There must be people out there in the world for whom not needing to remember the difference between "there," "their," and "they're" is worth turning a trip to Disney World into a divorce once in a while.

But high-octane stupid technologies getting rolled out to individual consumers are just the tip of the iceberg. Remember Watson? A machine that didn't know what he was doing, got a lot of answers comically wrong, but still managed to outperform low-octane smart? The sad extrapolation of this means that fast and inaccurate is going to be better for the bottom line than slow and accurate in a lot of situations. Heck, marketing companies have been using high-octane stupid techniques for years, using bizarre statistical correlations to decide whose throats to shove their ads down. They get it wrong sometimes, a lot of times in fact, but it generally doesn't hurt them because they're mostly just annoying the people who weren't going to buy their product anyways. And that's just one example. You think automated phone customer service labyrinths are awful now? They're about to get a whole lot worse. Companies using high-octane stupid techniques to decide who to hire or fire? Wouldn't put it past them. Legislators using high-octane stupid techniques to inform their votes on legislation? Hell, they're already using low-octane stupid techniques, so that might even be an improvement.

Here's the worst-case scenario, though... a perfect storm of technology becoming an industrial scale irritant before it starts to improve. There are a couple other trends going on right now. First, "attention" has become a currency of sorts. Companies are vying for likes and shares and retweets and a bunch of other things that were not nouns ten years ago. They are finding new ways to worm those memetic pathogens they call "advertisements" into our brains. They want your attention and good ratings because they know they can convert that attention into money. Second, technology is following us more closely than ever before. Whether or not Google Glass bombs, over the next few years, chances are, we're going to have more technology in our face than we have today. Add these two things together the high-octane stupid algorithms they're rolling out in adolescence under brand names like "smart" and "genius," and you know what it's starting to remind me of?

I don't think we're headed towards GLaDOS, or Skynet, or the Matrix anytime soon. But if my fears are correct... we're on a direct course for Navi.

God have mercy on our souls.

The one saving grace is that this adolescent period of artificial intelligences in our lives won't last forever. Although the baseline strategy of the corporate world these days seems to be "make it popular first, make it good later," there still are going to be those folks behind the scenes legitimately improving things. And once we weather this storm, who knows what might be in store for us...

So, for a game that we're working on, there's an element for which I want the world divvied up into territories that can be reclaimed individually. It's a puzzle that I've returned to several times in the past year and a half, and it's been one that's surprisingly difficult to solve to my satisfaction, so I'm here to ramble on about why, because it's kinda interesting... I think so, at least. And since it seems like such an easy task, I'm going to organize this in a series of "Why can't you just?" questions.

Why can't you just divide the world into countries?

Because SO MANY REASONS.

1.1. Not all countries are universally recognized. Taiwan and Palestine are particularly politically-charged examples of this, and there's no way to divide the world up by national borders without receiving hate mail from someone.

1.2. Rather than a black and white distinction between "fully independent sovereign nation" and "fully dependent territory belonging to a nation," there is a gradient with a lot of different classifications along the way. Take, for instance, Puerto Rico. Organizations tasked with making these distinctions in the past do not always make the same national divisions.

1.3. You end up with a large disparity of scale. Liechtenstein and China get the same weight in this method, and I'd rather the pieces I end up feel like they have the same degree of localness. A good example of this is if, returning to point #2, I decide to divide things up like FIFA and the IOC, I decide to treat Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as territories separate from the United States, it feels incongruent to separate *those* divisions of the U.S. but then lump the main fifty states and a district together as one.

1.4. Nations pop in and out of existence over time. My specific purposes involve rebuilding the world as it will have appeared in the late 21st century. Turn back the clock by the same amount of time (about 75 years, let's say) and you'll see a lot of different nations. Although I'm not hoping to construct anything truly "timeless," I am hoping to make divisions that will remain recognizable for at least a few decades, and that would have been recognizable to folks who were living in the past few decades. Other human geographic features, like cities, seem to be more durable institutions than nations in the long-term.

1.5. Some regions have national identities separate from the nations that they are administratively part of. There may be personal bias here as well — myself being someone with much stronger regional identities than national identities (an interesting topic I'd like to touch on another day) — but really, how many Tibetans are going to get all excited about the prospect of saving Beijing?

Why can't you just divide the world into countries, and then redivide the largest countries into states or provinces?

This was my next thought. Makes sense in response to point #3, right? If a few countries are too big, then split 'em up to make them smaller. As most of the countries with overseas territories count as "large," this also solves point #2 above, right? But then...

2.1. How do you define "largest" — population, area, a combination of both? And where do you make the cutoff point? The China, India, the U.S., Russia, and Brazil are prime candidates. Area-wise, it really makes sense to add Canada and Australia to the list; Population-wise, it seems we really ought to add Indonesia and Pakistan. And then there's the U.K. — 22nd in population, 80th in area, but still often it seems to make sense to add it to the list. From this shortlist of ten divisible nations it then becomes a game of, "well, if we have X, why not add Y?" Why not Mexico, or Argentina, or Algeria, or France, or Germany, or Japan, or South Africa, or Bangladesh, or the Congo, or... you get the point.

2.2. It doesn't actually resolve the issues of disparity of scale, it just moves them around. Not only do some countries start out bigger or smaller, but they divide themselves into larger or smaller groups. Compare Canada's provinces to Argentina's, for example. They have a similar population, but Argentina is less than a third of the size and yet it has twice as many provinces.

How about using some other approach to subdividing countries?

This was my plan for quite some time. I was going to use area codes for North America and NUTS-2 for Europe, then top-level administrative divisions for any country above a certain population. But...

3.1. It gets messy.

3.2. It creates areas that are statistical, rather than cultural.

3.3. Not all parts of the globe have divisional schemes that are quite as usable as the two I listed above. The scheme I mention above would have worked great at solving the issues raised in questions 1 and 2 for Europe, North America, and the Carribean — but would have left Africa and mainland Asia in particular a complete disorganized mess since I couldn't find any terribly unified schemes for dividing those areas up.

How about a different approach to it entirely — use large cities instead of territories?

4.1. Well, first off, that kinda leaves people who live in rural areas without representation.

4.2. How do you define large? A million people? That leaves a lot of cities off the list that I would want to represent. A hundred thousand people? That leaves well over three thousand cities to deal with...

4.3. How do you define a city? City proper, metro area, urban area? Do Minneapolis and Saint Paul get separate entries as separate cities proper, or do they get lumped into a single Twin Cities metro area? If the latter, do we want an upper limit on conglomerations, or do we really just let Tokyo-Yokohama share the same status as Grand Forks, North Dakota? And how about the boroughs of New York City — separate or together?

How about scrapping existing borders entirely and just draw your own regions from scratch, like a Risk board?

I mean, come on, aliens invaded the planet and divided the people up, why would they care about maintaining previously-defined earthling borders? Besides, games like Plague Inc. went ahead and pulled shenanigans like declaring Alaska part of Canada, and nobody seems too terribly upset.

5.1. This method requires making some calls on cultural boundaries in parts of the world I am not terribly familiar with. I could probably carve up North America into a dozen bits and get it close enough to right that it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows... but what about, say, East Asia? Which of the various GIS results for "Regions of China" do I want to throw my support behind?

5.2. Certain schemes of subdividing the world into regions — ones found in board games, geography textbooks, news organizations, etc. — are likely to be copyrighted, so I need to be careful where I'm getting my research from.

.... so that's where I am with this. It seems a bit of an anticlimactic post since I have posted far more questions than answers here and really haven't settled on a solution yet. I think what I need to do more than anything is just allow myself to settle for "good enough" and not worry about "perfect."

Ed Note: I had been writing this article for Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31) but then this whole Fallon Fox thing blowing up in the news, and I just couldn't sit on this article for another two weeks while so many people were busy flaunting their ignorance (If you don't know what "this whole Fallon Fox thing" is, don't Google it, the things people are saying are just depressing). I'm publishing the article early, but as originally written with its references to TDOV.

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Alright, folks, this is a topic I've never really made any public statements on, but considering I've become one of the more visible transgender athletes in town (if not the most visible), I'm more and more coming to view it as my responsibility to the transgender community to step up and say something about this whole transgender sportspeople ball of wax.

And so, for Transgender Day of Visibility, I give you a "breaking the silence" post where I clarify the nuances of my position and provide you, the reader, with juicy ammunition you can use if you ever get caught up in a conversation with some ignorant loud mouth.

It should be self-evident that I'm in favor of TG participation in competitive sports, but "in favor" still covers a wide array of opinions that sometimes include "if and only if" and "unless" in their arguments. My own stance is that TG athletes should be considered No Big Deal. "No Big Deal" means not mussing about with medical specifics like hormone levels or what surgeries a person has or has not had. It means not making a fuss about what letters appear on which forms of legal identification. It means not using some urban legend about some male synchronized diver from some 1863 Proto-Olympics putting on a dress in an attempt to defraud a competition as a basis for excluding an entire class of people from competitive sport. No Big Deal means exactly what it sounds like it should mean, that it is not a big deal, certainly nowhere near as big of a deal as it gets made into.

"But wait," I can hear opponents cry, "Teh Hoarmoans!!" Yeah, well... about that. As best I know, the verdict is not in about whether or not a post-op transsexual on hormone therapy has any advantages on a cisgendered female — I have yet to read any conclusive study that says this is or isn't true — but I maintain that this is the wrong debate to be having altogether. Let's just play devil's advocate for a moment and say that, sure, what the heck, transgender and intersex competitors have an advantage. I would ask you, then, in what other context does a biological advantage get anything other than celebrated?

Even staying within the realm of hormone levels.... how often do you hear outcry about a male athlete having an unusually high testosterone level? Heck, how often do you ever hear about a male athlete's testosterone level at all, much less seen it paraded about on the world stage accompanied by detractors claiming the guy shouldn't be competing in the men's competition because clearly he is übermensch. No successful male athlete is going to be put under a biochemical microscope like that, they're just going to be celebrated for being a successful athlete. Meanwhile, you get an athlete like Caster Semanya, who isn't even transgendered, and the media parades around her biology and acts like she was trying to cheat the world by having the audacity to be born with atypical biology. Where's the sense in that?

Furthermore, obsessing over hormone levels glosses over the fact that the human body is a complicated and beautiful machine that needs to be well-conditioned if it is going to be put into serious competition. I'm no biologist, and I'm no physicist, and I know nothing about auto racing, but I guarantee you, if you filled an AMC Gremlin with high-octane racing fuel and put an average driver behind the wheel, that thing is still not going to win a single race against a Formula One car. So, too, with human bodies. We aren't just a set of hormone levels. We're lung capacities, leg-to-torso ratios, blood vessels, body fat percentages, et cetera. Take, for example, Dean Karnazes, the guy who can literally just run forever without getting tired. Nobody is going to fuss about this guy needing to check his natural creatinine phosphokinase levels before he enters a competition. Likewise, nobody's going to go around to a swim meet measuring lung capacities and suggesting everyone who can inhale more oxygen then 97% of the field is going to need to wear a constrictive vest before they can compete. Can you correlate exposure to testosterone to athletic performance? Yes. But why put this one thing up on a pedestal at the expense of everything else?

Then there's the matter of training. I don't care about your physical makeup, if you don't train, you're not going to be competitive. Perhaps the least scientific yet most entertaining illustration of this is the short-lived miniseries Shaq Vs, in which you can watch Shaquille O'Neil lose repeatedly at sports he does not play. He gets bested in the boxing rink by retired boxers half his weight. He loses a game of Horse to a football player, which has nothing to do with my argument but is hilarious. More relevant to the discussion at hand is when he — along with an actual top-tier men's volleyball player — get soundly defeated by the gold medalist women's volleyball duo of Misty May and Keri Walsh. Physiology can be an asset but it's no substitute for training. Aside perhaps from beginner-level beer league recreational play (in which case, making a stink about someone's physiology is only going to make you look very, very sad), it doesn't matter how many penises you were born with, you are simply going to need to train hard to be competitive.

With all this in mind, I'd like to reiterate my stance, 36 years after Renée Richards managed to not destroy women's tennis by participating in the U.S. Open, that opening sports up to trans athletes is No Big Deal. Are there physiological differences between transgendered and cisgendered folks, between intersex people and your base-model males and females? Sure. But let's celebrate the differences, not incriminate them.

To wrap this discussion up, I'm going to switch gears and talk a bit about the state of transgender sporting participation. At the administrative level, things are slowly moving in the right direction. Compare the WFTDA gender policy, adopted in 2011, to the IOC policy, adopted in 2004. Sure, the WFTDA gender policy falls a step or two short of No Big Deal criteria (and the fact that TG players are expected to get a signed doctor's letter certifying their hormones are not crazy whereas skaters in general are not yet (to my knowledge) even expected to sign an affidavit stating they aren't using performance-enhancing drugs is especially incongruent, but... staying on focus), but the fact that it doesn't take the IOC route of trying to legislate specific hormone levels and surgery dates and such is an indication of things moving in the right direction. Also of note is the LPGA's 2010 policy — but I can't find details about online save for people criticizing it for not being as strict as the IOC rules. The fact that we have the governing bodies of both roller derby and golf — two antipodal nations on the wide world of sports — deciding that trans athletes are less of a Big Deal than the IOC made of them half a decade earlier, that's good news for all of us.

The bigger problem, it seems, is a cultural one rather than an administrative one. Every time a transgender athlete does well enough to make the news, someone is going to pipe up with tired arguments about why she should not be competing. I'm not just talking about internet commenters here, I am talking about people who are getting paid to write articles that choose to focus not on the hard work a person has done to get to where she is but rather on her biological history. These articles expose a lot of ignorance about transgender people in general — not just our role in sport — as well as a lot of persistent sexist double-standards.

This brings me to the other big reason I support No Big Deal transgender inclusion policies. My earlier arguments, you may have noticed, were directed more towards the contrapositive, talking about how including transgendered people isn't going to detract from sport, but I hadn't yet discussed how trans-inclusive policies are going to contribute to sport and to culture in general. What's that contribution? Heroes. Human beings are a species that looks to heroes for inspiration, and by allowing people from all walks of life to ascend to the ranks of heroes, humanity is going to, perhaps not even consciously, start to understand and accept those different lifestyles better.

Early in my derby career, I was at some sort of promotional event for the league when some guy came up to talk to me. He worked at a school, I forget if he was a counselor or an administrator or whatnot, but his school had a transgender kid in it, and this guy wanted to ask me if I was OK with being pointed out as an example of a positive trans role model in the community. This is the kind of thing that was only possible because my league welcomed me and treated my participation as No Big Deal. And that's something our culture needs more of across the board.

Ever since I learned about the White House's online petition experiment, I've had several dozen ideas of petitions to submit, some completely serious, some just plain ludicrous, but mostly ideas that are kinda goofy but have a grain of sincerity to them — I'll let you speculate on which are which. I haven't written all of them down, but here is as complete a list as I can generate from memory, sorted by category:

(and yes, I realize most of these suggestions lie well outside the official powers granted the executive branch. Tough beans.)

National Symbols and Stuff

• Change the national anthem to "America the Beautiful," a song not about blowing shit up and killing people
• Get Around to Actually Naming the Country
  "The United States of America" is just a vague description of what it is moreso than a proper name, if you think about it.
• Replace the Oval Office with an Iron Throne.
  See also the ASOIAF-inspired section of this list
• Require the several states with ugly flags that are basically just an illegible state seal placed on a plain-colored field, possibly with the name of the state slapped on there in boldface in a vain attempt to distinguish it from the dozens of other state flags that look exactly the same, to adopt a new flag design by 2014.
• Ditch the suit-and-coat/pantsuit federal important person dress code in favor of robes and powdered wigs, like the founding fathers intended.

Mechanics of Democracy

• Abolish the Electoral College in favor of direct elections
• Switch over to approval voting for all federal elections
• Require all congressional district boundaries to be drawn algorithmically
• Dissolve the Senate as it exists today, and replace it with a system where 100 random citizens are selected to serve in a legislative capacity for a three-month term.
• Hire the Pied Piper to lure all of the lobbyists and moneyed special interests out of Washington, D.C., and into the ocean. Apologize to the ocean.

Civil Rights

• For the love of all things decent, just proclaim same-sex marriages legal nationwide already.
• Punch any lawmaker who doesn't think men and women should have equal rights/pay/etc in the dick.

Economics / Financial Sector

• Get rid of the penny.
• Nationalize the whole credit card and ATM transaction infrastructure, officially declaring transaction fees to be "how they get you."
• Prohibit all forms of usury (in the classical sense of the word meaning any sort of interest charges, transaction fees, currency exchange fees, etc.)

Foreign Policy

• Construct a high-speed rail directly connecting Madison, WI and St. John's, NL.
• Pursue annexation by Canada as its fourth territory.
  Current US territory would be renamed the "Southern Territory" of Canada and would initially have a status similar to Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories.

Science

• Give the entire military budget to NASA instead.
• Create a new cabinet-level position, the Secretary of Mother Fucking Science. Appoint Neil de Grasse Tyson.
• Require any lawmaker at any level of government to pass a basic biology test before being eligible to author or vote on any piece of legislation which refrences the human body.
• Adopt an official administrative policy to just point and laugh at anyone who still denies climate change instead of being polite and listening to their nonsense.

Song of Ice and Fire–inspired

• Recognize my claim as the rightful queen in exile of the State of Wisconsin; denounce Scott Walker as a pretender to the throne.
• Divide the United States into seven independent kingdoms which can then proceed to have some sweet-ass power struggles.
• Establish a Night's Watch.

Revenge Fantasy Fulfillment

• Authorize a drone strike against Scott Walker.
• Subsidize the production of an additional six seasons of Firefly.
• Enact the death penalty for spammers and telemarketers.
• Waterboard the ever-living fuck out of the five justices who ruled in favor of Citizens United. Especially that smug sack of shit Antonin Scalia.

As a lifelong gamer and a (still kinda green) game developer, I've noticed a lot of things that game developers really ought to stop doing. This is more than a pet peeve list, every single gripe I'm going to make here is going to come with constructive solutions.

11. Interrupting gameplay for mundane events

Who does it wrong: The Legend of Zelda series, which has been steadily violating this principle more and more with every game since A Link to the Past (yes, as quick as I am to criticize Ocarina, I'll admit that the first hints of this bad design habit came creeping into the series during Link's Awakening)

"Hey! Listen!" aside, take Twilight Princess, for example. Every time you pick up a rupee in a new game, it stops to tell you how many rupees that color is worth. Okami is another example (I tried so hard to love this game, but I just couldn't -- I'll be touching on this one again in some later points) ... a wide variety of healing items, and every time you pick a new one up, your stupid firefly friend has to interrupt what you're doing to tell you about it.

The low health beep that's been in the series since game one is annoying enough, but at least it doesn't interrupt anything. However, in the three minutes that I played the Skyward Sword demo at Gamestop, when Fi popped up to tell me that the beeping meant I was low on hearts and that I could refill my hearts by collecting more hearts, that (as well as my point about motion controls, as I mention in a bit) was enough to convince me I didn't need to take the game home.

Who does it right: La Mulana

There are several denominations of coins here, too... and you learn what they are because little teeny numbers pop up when you collect them. (Many games do it this way, this is just one example). Furthermore, hints are e-mailed to you in-game and you can read them at your leisure, or just turn off e-mail notifications entirely and not be bothered. No "hey"s or "listen"s to contend with at all. When you pick up a new item, there's a brief celebration but if you need the paragraph-long explanation of how to use it, you can just check in the subscreen.

10. Tacking on motion controls just for the sake of including motion controls.

It doesn't make your game more immersive, it makes it less immersive, because while I'm trying walk down the hallway and shoot these aliens, then you throw me some door I've got to open and to open it I need to jerk my hands around like a buffoon? Not necessary.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against motion controls. There are a lot of really fun games out there that use motion controls well -- the Raving Rabbids games, Boom Blox, Wii Sports, the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics games... you'll notice what's in common with all of these games is that they were designed for motion controls from the ground up. When they're tacked onto a game that is mostly button-based, they're mostly just disruptive and annoying.

This goes for all those DS games that made you blow or shout into the microphone, too.

9. Unlockable Abuse.

Who does it wrong: Super Smash Bros., Soul Calibur

Super Smash Bros. Brawl boasts an impressive roster of characters and stages... if you've put in the hours of playtime it takes to actually unlock all of them. So now that you have, wanna take the game over to your friend's house to play? Well... unless you bring your entire Wii along with, you're going to be stuck with the default characters because you can't copy your save file onto an SD card.

While this is in part a flaw in the Wii's save game file design, it also begs the question... why keep so much content behind locked doors at the start of the game? This becomes particularly baffling when you get games in the racing or versus fighting genres, games that are basically designed to be multiplayer, that require you to put in hours upon hours in single-player campaigns before you get to unlock things.

Who does it right: Arcana Heart series

Arcana Heart just goes and lets you play as any character from the game from the moment you pop the disc into your console... and guess what? I didn't miss unlocking characters at all. There are unlockables, though, in the form of art gallery items, so if you want to get that single player 100% completion experience out of the game, it's still there for you -- but since the content you unlock is considerably less central to gameplay, unlocking feels more like a fun goal to strive for rather than a chore you need to complete before you're allowed to enjoy the full game.

8. Giving insufficient feedback about motion controls.

So, I got the first game in the Just Dance series not too long after I got a Wii. I had played plenty of Dance Dance Revolution in my day and was eager to try out a new dance game, but at first I was just frustrated by this thing. It's a fun game... if, and only if, you completely ignore the score. This game will tell you "Good" or "Bad" with every dance move, but it can be utterly mystifying why it gives you one instead of the other. The game tells you "Bad" but gives you no indication about what it was it was expecting you to do that you didn't do.

Continue on to nearly every swordfighting game made for the Wii, which divides your attacks into sideways slashes, vertical slashes, and thrusts, and no matter who developed the game, no matter how many extra gyroscopes they glue on to the Wiimote, invariably the action it makes your character do will be different from the action you wanted it to do about 30% of the time. You try to thrust, but it catches a little flick of the wrist at the end of your thrust and turns it into a vertical strike.

Buttons are great, because they're discrete and you can feel when you've pressed them or not pressed them. The feedback is right there built in to the controller. That natural feedback goes away when you're waving a wand in the air, so it's up to the game developers to provide that feedback somehow.

Who does it right: There are more examples, but the clearest one I can think up right now is the music minigame from Rayman Raving Rabbids. You shake the controller to the beat -- and there's a flash of light the moment it registers the shake as a beat. Your brain can calibrate what it's telling its hands to do against what its eyes are seeing. And it works.

I'll continue to enjoy Just Dance because it's fun, but when I'm going for a high score I'm gonna stick to Dance Dance Revolution.

7. Throwing in boss battles out of some bizarre obligation to throw in boss battles, despite bosses not making sense at all with the rest of your game.

Who does it bafflingly wrong: Adventures of Lolo 3

A lot of games, new and old (but mostly new) seem to fall into this trap, but I'm picking on Lolo 3 because its boss battles are some of the most ridiculously incongruent moments in gaming.

If you're not familiar with the series, the Lolo games are puzzle games where the title character has to push blocks around to avoid enemies and ration out a limited number of powerups, using them only at strategic moments, to complete levels.

Then you get to the third game in the series, where at the end of each castle full of puzzles they decide to throw in some kind of ghetto Super Smash TV knockoff showdown with giant versions of regular enemies.

Boss battles can be exciting if done right. Zelda, God of War, Mario 3, Final Fantasy, Gradius, all games that I can look forward to taking down a boss. The litmus test is, I don't ever want to say, "Ugh, another boss battle, I can't wait to get done with it so I can get back to playing the game." The bosses from Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams -- an otherwise extremely solid game -- failed the Ugh test for me... it was all about memorizing boss behaviors, the 'tells' before their attacks, sitting and biding your time in a fairly unforgiving environment for the scarce moments where the boss became vulnerable. Compare that to Mario 3, where you fight the bosses by jumping on them or throwing fireballs at them. You know, by doing the same things you've been practicing for levels on end. And as much as I love the Ratchet & Clank games, their boss battles, particularly that one in the first game where all of a sudden your 3rd-person action platformer turns into a 3D space shooter, are with a few exceptions my least favorite part of the series. Then there's Bit.Trip.Runner, and if that game weren't frustrating enough, it turns into utter crap when they throw some nonsensical bosses into the mix for no good reason.

And the thing is? Bosses aren't a hard-and-fast requirement. Games can do just fine without them. Look at the first Lolo game instead of the third: No bosses, not even at the very end, and wasn't any worse off without it. Look at old school arcade games like Q*Bert or Pac-Man or Space Invaders, and then take a look at the new crop of smart phone games like Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run, Cut the Rope, or even (ugh) Angry f#@&%ing Birds. All bossless, none of them any worse off for it.

6. Jacking up the difficulty right out of nowhere

Who does it wrong: Arcana Heart, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum

I don't have a problem with difficult levels in a game. Remember the first Super Mario Bros? Not everyone who played that game was able to beat it, and that's OK. I'm not going to cry foul just because someone made a game that I'm probably not going to beat... that just makes beating them a badge of honor rather than a participation certificate. Ramping up difficulty as you progress in the game? That's just game design 101.

What is frustrating, however, is when instead of a ramp, you're presented with a sudden 35-foot sheer ascent with no footholds. I love when the last level of a game pushes the difficulty to eleven... if, prior to that, it has given you time to train at seven, eight, nine, and ten. All too often I encounter a level that is insanely difficult but follows up a dozen soft and cushy levels.

Who does it right: Super Meat Boy, Jamestown

Both of these games will demand insane stunts of you by the end... but the important part is, they let you climb the ladder to insane videogame awesomeness one rung at a time instead of making you reach across seven missing rungs to get to the top. And in each of those games, even if you do hit a wall, you can still walk away satisfied. I got hung up in Jamestown somewhere in the 2nd level of the highest difficulty level, but I don't feel like I have unfinished business with the game. I made my mark, and it's a good mark. There are people better than me, but I'm OK with that.

5. Disabling the pause button... ever.

Not gonna spend too much time talking about this one, just let us pause during cutscenes. Even let us quicksave during cutscenes if you want to really make us happy.

4. Artificially limiting the number of save game slots

Once upon a time, disk space was a real issue, so I won't begrudge the fact that my 8- and 16-bit cartridges can only hold three saves. I get that, when Pokémon Red/Blue were released, they were seriously pushing the hardware boundaries and you could really only hold one save game on that cartridge. Nowadays, space is cheap, pretty much every device has a hard drive built in (even if it's a small one), and there's no technical reason you can't let me fill up all 2 terabytes of my external hard drive with save files.

3. Talking your ear off before you get to play

Who does it wrong: Okami

This is another one of those points where Okami fell short for me. (I swear, I tried very hard to fall in love with this game because it is so beautiful, but it just didn't happen). Games with rich stories are good. Rich stories require exposition, sure... but 20+ minutes of cutscene before you've got control of your character? There's gotta be a better way.

Who does it right: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII

Zelda 3 goes from powered off to controlling your character in about a minute. You don't know everything yet... but you know enough to care about what's happening. In the next ten minutes of playtime -- which is, like, four minutes before the controller even does anything in Okami -- you've already beaten the first dungeon, sprung a princess out of jail, discovered who the villain is, heard his evil scheme, and caught a lecture about destiny from your dying uncle. All while friggin' PLAYING the game.

Final Fantasy VII has about a two-minute-long introductory video to sit and watch, but they make good use of those two minutes. It gets you excited for what's coming up, and then it dumps you right into the action. Again, you don't have the entire backstory of your main character at this point. You don't need it all just yet. It will unfold in time.

Who does it amazingly dead-on stunningly right: Bastion

After a brief opening narration that takes up no more than 20 seconds, Bastion's unique take on in-game narration means you start playing right away and they virtually never interrupt the gameplay for the sake of the story... but the story doesn't suffer one beat because of it.

Seriously, watch this gameplay footage if you haven't seen the game already.

2. Deciding how fast your players should be reading

Who does it wrong: Legend of Zelda series from Ocarina of Time onward

OK, so not only is the text in Ocarina of Time painfully slow to begin with, but there are actually moments where they slow it down more. On purpose. It's like they think in lieu of actual voice acting, they're going to somehow create dramatic effect by slowing down the text speed, when all they are really accomplishing is getting people to mash the A button in hopes that the next letter will appear.

Who does it right: Comic Books

Just because your characters are animated and moving doesn't necessarily mean that the film and theater playbooks are the only thing you can pull from in order to introduce dramatic devices and stuff into your cutscenes. If you've got actual voice actors reading lines, then yeah, it is entirely appropriate to use the same design principles used in film. If you're using written words, however, we have a different artistic medium that is far better suited to the task, and that's comic books. Comics create drama and suspense and all that good stuff in their own way, and they do it without telling the reader how much time they need to spend on each panel.

1. Deliberately introducing flaws into your game design to try and make players pay you extra money.

Who does it wrong: Angry Birds, pretty much every game ever made for Facebook

Hoo boy, here's the big one.

I generally dislike the whole "pay-to-cheat" features that are so ubiquitous in smartphone and browser games these days, but I'm not here to demonize the practice in itself. Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run both offer a real money to pretend money currency exchange, but if you don't like it, you can go ahead and ignore it and not enjoy these games any less. With that in mind, if an otherwise well-designed game wants to throw in a pay-to-cheat feature, I'm not going to begrudge the developers their chance to make some extra money, especially not in a market where you can't charge more than a dollar for your game, and are half-expected by consumers to just give it away for free.

There are two things, however, that I cannot abide.

The first is when you ask players to cough up more money to cover up flaws in your game's design. This is the Angry Birds Mighty Eagle case. Angry Birds is the kind of game where it's easy to get stuck on a level. Any well-designed puzzle game, particularly one where the solutions are subject to the caprices of a physics engine, would be kind enough to let you set a level aside and come back to it later. Angry Birds, in its first release, had no such feature. Then they came up with an idea: sell people an extra bird that they can use to auto-solve levels. Make them pay to fix the broken game they bought. Nowadays they openly admit to trying to sell as many Mighty Eagles as they can, which means that the more frustrating they can manage to make the game, the more money they will make.

When the Mighty Eagle was announced, I cried foul. I pointed to Cut the Rope, which at the time allowed you to skip a level if you tried it a couple times and failed, as being a far superior game. A year or so later, that feature was removed from the game and replaced with a pay-to-cheat "Superpowers" feature. By making their game worse... they made more money. Now... here's where the whole gaming industry (and yes, I hate that word, but for this conversation, it is sadly applicable) is all backwards. Cut the Rope has come out with dozens upon dozens of new levels. I spent a dollar to buy the game when it had just 75 levels. Now, there are 375. I'd have happily shelled out extra dollars to get those extra levels, but they were handed out for free instead. How did we get to such a backwards state where developers are expected to hand out things for free that we really ought to be paying them for, and yet people routinely pay for features in games that should have been included at the beginning? (Yes, I know that people have done studies on this. That doesn't make it any less sad, or frustrating, or unacceptable).

The other cardinal sin -- and this is one most Facebook games commit -- is when you don't just include pay-to-cheat features, you actually design the game around them.

Honest-to-goodness game design comes second to these kinds of developers. Instead, they're more focused on exploiting the quirks of human psychology in ways that push people towards dumping more money in their hands.

Let me remind you about what happened to Williams Manufacturing. You remember pinball, right -- because it's awesome. They were making a lot of really cool pinball machines out there in the day. There still are, but they don't come from big manufacturers anymore, they come pretty much from hobbyists who make them in their garages for fun. Why did Williams stop making pinball machines? Well, it turns out there was a lot more money to be made in the slot machine business. Psychologically duping people into dumping coins into a machine that was programmed to spit out fewer coins than were put into it? Way cheaper than coming up with engaging pinball machines.

Back to gaming... in the extreme cases, many of these games designed to exploit pay-to-cheat transactions are little more than dolled-up operant conditioning chambers... they're kinda like, if someone found a way to make a slot machine that never actually paid out real money but people kept feeding it coins and pulling the lever anyway.

There are several articles out there that would tell me to suck it up and deal with it, and accept the fact that games designed around a pay-to-cheat core are going to dominate the market. But I can't just lie back and accept it. There are a finite number of people in the world, and only a percentage of those have the drive, means, and inspiration to make truly quality art and entertainment. I don't want to see us waste such a precious resource on mindless nonsense.