Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City

Grand Theft Auto IV comes out tomorrow. Looks like it might be the best in the series, certainly one of the best games of the year. The early reviews gathered at Metacritic have an average score of 99 out of 100 as I write this. Rockstar Games, the gaming company that has made Grand Theft Auto, estimates a pre-order demand around $400 million. So it’s big. Huge.

But why?

I will make a simple argument. It is the combination of creative anthropology, sophisticated game design and game play, and the right brain hooks that makes video games like Grand Theft Auto work so well.

And the reviews show it. In the rest of the piece, I will draw excerpts from three places, the IGN review, the New York Times review, and the highlight quotes from Metacritic.

Creative Anthropology

Take creative fiction, and add world-building and a do-it-yourself story, and then you have what I mean by creative anthropology. Some Geek Love through role playing and fantasy, mixed with narrative to get the cultural buy-in.

So here’s GameSpy: “The very nature of the American Dream is the central theme in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, a gaming masterpiece that is a picture-perfect snapshot of the underworld of today’s big cities.”

The New York Times gushes, “The real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.”

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Review of Marcus’ ‘Kluge’

There’s a short review of Gary Marcus’ new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, on The New York Times website. The review, ‘Patch Job’ by Annie Murphy Paul, argues that the book is a good central idea that doesn’t have enough development to carry the weight of every chapter.

Marcus, it seems, has a problem: an appealing and intriguing idea that isn’t quite as big as he claims. To solve it, he reaches for that rhetorical kluge, the straw man, setting up and then sweeping aside the notion that the human mind is infallible.

Apparently, Marcus sets up a series of straw men to knock down — human thought as perfect and infallible — to oppose the kluge (rhymes with ‘huge’) model of the human brain.

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WordPress: Ways to Explore

WordPress has added a new feature, an automatically generated list of related posts that appears at the bottom of each post you view. This list will provide links both within this site and to other WordPress blogs, and occasionally to other blogs on other sites.

They’ve just started rolling this feature out (see the announcement here), and so far it’s mostly in-house: this blog and across WordPress. Posts like the ones on dopamine and addiction, two languages & theory of mind, and others already have links on them. Hopefully it should provide all of us a new way to network.

Of course if you are interested in the stuff on this blog, you can check out our Popular Posts page (just updated), as well as explore things through the category cloud, for example, on stress, brain mechanisms, and cultural theory. The entire category cloud appears on the left side of the main page, down past the blogroll.

A softer ‘neo-Whorfianism’

At Neuroanthropology, we’ve had a number of posts about language and the brain (such as here, here, and here); it’s a issue of lasting importance in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. There’s a really nice piece in The New York Times about it though, and for once, I just want to do a summary and reflection rather than a critique of one of their pieces. The article is When Language Can Hold the Answer by Christine Kenneally.

Daniel recently mentioned this piece in his post, A Times Trifecta, but I wanted to add a comment on it. Daniel relays the quote that the article uses to sum up the debate around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: ‘Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?’ He’s just providing a thumbnail sketch, so he doesn’t include the next paragraph, which I think helps to elevate this article above the usual either-or, black-or-white dross that happens in public press about the role of language in thinking:

The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.

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Dying Sooner: The New US Pattern

What the hell is wrong with this country? That is what came to my mind when I read a recent PLoS article “The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in Country Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States.” The basic conclusion: life expectancy is going DOWN in parts of the United States. How can that be?!

Here is what the PLoS article tells us: From 1983 to 1999, life expectancy declined significantly in 11 US counties for men and in 180 (!) counties for women. Why? “Life expectancy decline in both sexes was caused by increased mortality from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and a range of other noncommunicable diseases, which were no longer compensated for by the decline in cardiovascular mortality [driven largely by better drugs and interventions]. Higher HIV/AIDS and homicide deaths also contributed substantially to life expectancy decline for men, but not for women.”

In their conclusions, the authors Majid Ezzati, Ari Friedman, Sandeep Kulkarni, and Christopher Murray single out some specific health problems: “The epidemiological (disease-specific) patterns of female mortality rise are consistent with the geographical patterns of, and trends in, smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. In particular, the sex and cohort patterns of the increase in lung cancer and chronic respiratory disease mortality point to an important potential role for smoking.” So cigarettes kill.

But before we blame it all on individual behaviors, recall that these data are also geographic, by county. Where did life expectancy go down for 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population? “The majority of these counties were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.” In the worst performing counties, life expectancy dropped SIX years for women and two and a half years for men. In contrast, in the best US counties, life expectancy rose by as much as five years.

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