Frozen Transparency

As someone who has done a decent amount of website coding, I can appreciate the difficulty in creating a dynamically-generated website that always works and is easy to use. The goal is to build an “application”, as it were, that is easy for the user to use—preferably without requiring much documentation-reading.

What baffles me, however, is the sheer number of websites I visit for people that handle my money that are poorly-designed and poorly-coded. If you are a business that offers doing business-like things online, why would you not strive to have a good online experience?

It frustrates me as a user when I try to view my account details and figure out 1. how much I owe, 2. when I owe it, and 3. if my bill’s been paid up to now—and there is no actual method of navigation for determining this. I have had to call these companies before in order to find out this information, which to me defeats the entire purpose of having account viewing in a website at all.

My conclusion is that either the company’s core business does not use the Internet (and therefore I am not in their core business), or that their core business does use the Internet, but the company does not care about their core business. This is not a question I should be having to ask for companies that receive regular payments for me for services I am legally obligated to purchase.

It’s possible that I expect too much, but it still astounds me how so many companies seem to not care how bad their websites are. There’s a reason Facebook succeeded where others (such as Orkut) failed (in the United States, at least): their website was easy to use and presented relevant information in a better manner.

The easiest part of any project is deciding to do it—and starting.

The hardest part of any project is actually doing it—and finishing.

For however much Valentine’s Day is a manufactured holiday, I must say that the Japanese have it much worse. Today is, as it turns out, White Day. The basic idea is that today is the day you reciprocate all of the gifts of chocolate and flowers that you received one month previous, and it doesn’t hurt if it happens to be much more expensive. It’s very much an example of a manufactured holiday because it’s started only within the last fifty years and was first popularized explicitly to sell chocolate.

Mind, I think that having a holiday to celebrate love and sex is not a bad thing. I have some reservations about the level of merchandising—that is, the claim that the only way to appropriately show love is a bouquet of roses along with chocolates and probably jewelry—but the concept behind the holiday doesn’t bother me. This is also why I don’t rail all too much against Christmas, just the merchandising aspects of it. White Day, however, is clearly meant to feed into the immense popularity that Valentine’s Day gets. And when you factor in the Japanese concept of giri choco (that is, chocolate that is given as an obligatory gift to co-workers, casual acquaintances, platonic friends and so on), the cost of reciprocating on White Day gets relatively high. I think it’s a serious question whether or not spending money is the best way of showing someone you love them.

In either case, I’m not that sure if chocolate goes on sale in Japan on March 15^th the same way it goes on sale on February 15^th in America.

There are also some who are trying to turn March 14^th into Steak And Blowjob Day here in America. This is done primarily as a response to the idea that Valentine’s Day is done for women. Admittedly, most flowers and chocolate are bought for women, but this new holiday operates under the assumption that men don’t care very much for romance, or the celebration therein. I don’t particularly think this holiday will catch on, if for no other reason than having a fairly obscene (in the legal sense) name.

It is worth noting that it is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. He was born 129 years ago today (give or take leapdays).

Personally, though, I prefer celebrating today as pi day. Its date, when written in either bass-ackwards American notation (Month/Day/Year) or in ISO 8601 (the universal standard) comes out to be “03-14″, which happen to be the first three digits (if you ignore the 0) of pi. This number only happens to be one of the most important numbers in the universe, so I think it’s a day worth celebrating. As a counterpoint to the holiday that celebrates love, a holiday that celebrates mathematics and all the achievements it’s given us.

It’s also a homophonic excuse to eat pie.

Whenever people talk about celebrities—movie stars and the like—I always wonder why they spend so much time worrying about other people. I question just how much influence celebrities actually have over society. Some, such as Oprah Winfrey, probably do. But Heath Ledger? Merely an actor; a footnote in the annals of history.

And when celebrities die, their fans mourn. People are saddened by death, especially of actors and singers and celebrities. Still, how much influence did that mourned celebrity have? How many people changed dramatically because of Heath Ledger?

This last Tuesday, Gary Gygax died. A lot of people probably don’t know his name, but he was a celebrity. He—along with Jeff Perren—created the game Chainmail, which few people have heard of; a few years later—this time, with Dave Arneson—he created Dungeons and Dragons. He took influences—fantasy, war games, literature—and wrapped them together into an interactive game.

His death is not something to be widely reported. Roleplaying games have a reputation of being played by “geeks” and “nerds”, and people often do not want to be associated with that. Yet the number of tributes to him is astounding. In the 30+ years since the game’s inception, it is astounding to learn of the number of people who played it. The number of people who have fond memories of spending high school evenings hunched around a table with friends, telling stories about warriors and wizards while waiting for pizza to get delivered and making bad jokes about sex.

What Gary Gygax did with his little game was unleashed the power of the imagination. His books said “Take this, and build on it. Do what you want to it. Create. Imagine.” And imagine people did. This was not passive entertainment. Not movies, not books. This was sitting with your friends and using your minds telling a communal story. How many people who now work in creative industries got their start with fighting dragons in dungeons?

Before Gygax, fantasy was the realm of Lord of the Rings. In a very real sense, Gygax is to fantasy roleplaying what Tolkein was to fantasy literature. They took threads of things that had come before but wove it together into a beautiful and unique tapestry and in doing so created something more. Dungeons and Dragons broke new ground: never before had fantasy roleplaying really existed in quite the same capacity. And the world has never been the same since.

Many early video games—the original Final Fantasy springs to mind—were based on Dungeons and Dragons. It set a standard for game mechanics that others emulated. The first MUDs were heavily influenced by D&D—they were, after all, roleplaying in a world over the Internet. And D&D evolved, and people continued to play: tables in their basements, or in desks pulled together after school, over chatrooms and MUDs.

Other roleplaying games emerged, all springing from this idea to use polyhedrons as random number generators. Other fantasy settings emerged, inspired by Tolkein and influenced by Gygax.

Today, we have World of Warcraft, which has more players than some nations have citizens. It is no small feat of the imagination to say that World of Warcraft would not have existed if it were not for the tradition laid forth by Dungeons and Dragons. Final Fantasy, along with its myriad spinoffs, would have been but a glint in someone’s eye.

It can be said that someone else might have come up with those ideas. Someone else would have thought of doing it. Perhaps. But that does not mean we should not honor the man who did come up with it. Both Monte Cook and Mike Mearls (both major names in gaming) have posted their thoughts–even the gamer comic the Order of the Stick has a tribute.

In the years to come, when people tally up the “most influential people of the 20th century”, I think Gary Gygax should be on that list. No, he didn’t lead armies to victory. He didn’t revolutionize physics. He didn’t save the lives of millions of people with his invention.

He got people to come together and form bonds of fellowship that to this day still remain. He created something new, and brought friends and acquaintances together in households around the world to imagine and create together. He inspired millions of people he never met, and changed the lives of millions of people he never knew.

To me, that’s enough to be considered truly influential.

Requiescat in pace, Sir Gygax. You have been an inspiration to us all.