How the Mind Works

Good news and bad news. The good news is that upon completing this book - a book I've been reading on and off for more than three years now, dammit - I'm at 10,502 pages on the year for 2016, giving me an average of just barely a hair over 500 pages per book. So, yay! The year of #BigReads or #LongReads or whatever the hell I was calling it was a success! The bad news is that, as you can see if you've done the math, I only read 21 books in 2016 - a whopping three under my goal of two per month, which is especially disappointing considering I was perfectly on pace at twenty books through October. Oh well!

Next year, I'm not giving myself any goals or resolutions beyond "keep reading." I'll be back at work full time and likely still trying to cram in plenty of television and video games, so something will have to give, and everyone on the blog knows that the easiest logging habit to give up is reading. So I want to keep on reading! No page count goals, no overall counts to try to hit - just keep on reading. There are still plenty of books on my backlog, after all, and a limitless number beyond those. Far, far too many books for one lifetime, of course - but it doesn't hurt to keep on reading.

Oh, right - this book. This one's actually been on my backlog for close to ten years now - maybe even more? Written by one of the world's foremost cognitive scientists, it's an eight-chapter deep dive on the human mind and how it functions. Starts with the physiological properties of the brain and its components - how language is processed, how physical spaces are understood - and slowly transitions to the more abstract notion of the mind, including human behavior and evolutionary theories about how we got to be the way we are. I'm reasonably interested in psychology and social studies and evolutionary biology, and as such, I found the second half a lot more interesting than the first - especially since Pinker uses all kinds of unfortunately dated computer analogies that were surely more apt back in 1997 than they are today. (An updated version of this book might be able to milk a lot more out of "computational algorithm" metaphors, particularly given the huge advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the last two decades.)

Still a fascinating read with plenty to offer, and if you ever get a chance, check out some of Pinker's lectures and debates on YouTube. Guy's good at what he does!

And that's a wrap for me in 2016. Happy New Year, everyone!

Final Fantasy XV

When the night
has come 

And the land is dark 

And the moon
is the only
light we'll see 

No I won't
be afraid 

Oh I won't
be afraid 

Just as long

as you stand

stand by me

Oof. Right in the feels.

This was great. Certainly flawed, and definitely downright frustrating at times, with a few design elements that left me shouting at my controller, and they could have told the story a little more clearly (rumor has it some upcoming patches will add important cutscenes for more context), but, yeah, this was great.

I dumped over forty hours into this game - par for the course really, for a Final Fantasy main series installment - but it seemed like half of those hours were spent on optional sidequests. The open-world nature of the game has not been overstated, and you spend so much of it just driving around in the Regalia (your car) on the streets of Eos (the, uh, world) from outpost to outpost.

I have so much more to say about this game and the wide variety of elements they threw into it, and how well it all seems to work without any visible seams, but that can wait until more of you have played it.

And yes, it's better than XIII.

The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a 2016 first-person puzzle game that feels like a Portal knock-off in all the right ways. You play as Ava, an astronaut on Europa some 200 years from now, trying to reconnect with the rest of her crew after something goes wrong. When you enter the Europa base, a series of puzzle rooms stands between you and your objective. There are seven chapters with ten regular rooms and a bonus room for 77 total puzzles.

The puzzles consist of using orbs and boxes to provide power to and cut power from various devices - most of them doors - in order to progress through the rooms. Some of these puzzles are extraordinarily simple, and serve mainly to teach you about the mechanics of puzzle solving in this game; the entire first chapter is pretty trivial - lots of "move that box to that slot to proceed" and "learn how to use your orb gun" and things of that nature. Even toward the end of the game, some puzzles will just seem to click. In a lot of ways the game played like The Witness - just with platforming puzzles rather than grid-based mazes.

Throughout it all, you interact with an omnipresent AI system called T.O.M. At the beginning of every room, Ava and T.O.M. exchange some words and ideas, and through this - and some scattered audio logs - we are told what small amount of story there is to tell here. Anyway, some of you may have seen the game's title and immediately thought of the Turing Test. That and many other philosophical musings about artificial intelligence pop up throughout the game, and about two thirds of the way through, the rug gets pulled out from under Ava regarding a certain assumption she'd made about her own relationship with Tom. I was just fine with all of this. Give me two characters bickering and debating philosophy any day while I lug boxes around a room. Tom spends a lot of time trying to convince Ava (and us?) that he's got a real and valid mind of his own; he may not be a human, but he's sentient, dammit!

None of this was amazing, but the puzzles were challenging without ever feeling genuinely unfair - something I can't say for every puzzle in The Witness at all - and the gameplay, despite a few lengthy load times and one or two glitchy-looking textures, was smooth and bug-free. All in all this was a pretty solid puzzle game, and it's absolutely worth grabbing if it ever goes on sale or, better yet, gets offered for free under Games with Gold. It probably took me about five hours to complete, 1000 gamer points and all, and I only needed to look to the Internet for hints three or four times. (And two of those were for bonus rooms.)