Positive Liberty

Scott has recently discovered geocaching. I quote from the official FAQ:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

To play, you need a GPS unit, which seems to cost about $140 minimum. You also need a car, and gas, and a computer, and access to the Internet, and something to leave in the cache.

Chances are I’m going to like geocaching, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be happy about liking it.

I’m an Eagle Scout. I loved scouting and still do, even if they’re never going to take me back now that I’m a godless homosexual. Our troop regularly used to go orienteering. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically geocaching minus the GPS. All you get are a map, a compass, and a set of coordinates. Advanced orienteering often does away with the map. Scott was hard-pressed to explain just what geocaching has over plain old orienteering, which he claims would be much less interesting.

“I guess I’ve just always wanted to have a GPS.”

Sure, it’s helpful in wilderness hiking, up to a point. But a good hiker with a map and a compass will never be lost, and in his hands a GPS would mostly be a lot of dead weight. Why not learn to use the natural signs around you, plus the age-old technologies that have worked so well for so many?

“One more thing” so often seems like it will make people happier, but so often it doesn’t. My possessions make me no more happy now than they did when I could still fit them all inside the back of a compact car. What makes me happy are people and ideas, and I can have both of those without any more stuff than that. The things I’d miss the most would be my books, but even then, I’ve always got the university library.

Back to geocaching. I suppose that by having a blog, I’ve given up my right to complain about geeky hobbies like this one, or about buying expensive little thingamajigs, or about having fun with them when much simpler things would do. But I don’t care, I’m doing it anyway.

This is from one of my favorite novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.”

A lot of people will probably think I’m working up to a diatribe against commercialism. I’m not. I am a technophile who believes in both capitalism and innovation. I’m reading Virginia Postrel right now and eating up every word of it.

But think of this: When we compare ourselves to the rest of the world, almost every American is filthy rich. We’ve gotten here through countless technological advancements, improved production methods, and better distribution channels, products of a capitalism that many people don’t fully appreciate. Our incomes have risen again and again, and with them we can buy more and more of our favorite things.

What happens, though, when our amusements themselves grow more expensive? Simply put, we become poorer, because we now can buy fewer units of amusement than we could before. Suppose that one unit of fun costs not $140, but $140,000. Now suppose it costs $140,000,000.

One day it will.

Should it have to? What if we put some effort into finding cheaper ways of having fun, rather than more expensive ones? If the price of fun goes down, then we pocket the difference, and that’s just good economics.

Consider the game of go. Go originated in China; it is a turn-based two-player strategy game with a remarkably simple ruleset; it’s often said that there are just five rules to the whole game. Go has been played continually for at least 3,000 years, and its rules have changed only slightly in the meantime. It’s played on a board of nineteen by nineteen lines; the pieces are 180 unmarked stones on either side. They can be reused forever.

After 3,000 years, people are still making new discoveries in go. After 3,000 years, it’s still endlessly diverting. It also remains perfectly, gloriously human. Where computers have matched or surpassed the very best human chess players, they can barely be programmed to play go at all: The game demands the kind of subtle positional judgments at which humans have always excelled. At go, the best computers are no stronger than a mid-level amateur. Even a weak amateur can usually spot the flaws in a computer’s strategy after a couple of games–and then beat the machine, game after game.

In chess, a computer can compensate for lack of positional judgment by doing a lot of calculation, but it can’t keep up in go. The game of go has just too many variations, too many possibilities for a machine to calculate, and it’s likely to remain that way for a long time. Compared to chess, the number of possible moves in a game of go is larger by thousands of orders of magnitude. Virtually every move is a new judgment call, a new guess, a stab into the total unknown. Go is ours.

Best of all, while it’s true that top-flight tournament go sets are made of extravagant materials and run to the tens of thousands of dollars, still, a perfectly satisfying home set can be had for under thirty. Even go strategy books aren’t all that helpful compared to the practical experience one gets by actually playing the game, so the price of fun is no more and no less than the initial start-up cost.

Thirty bucks, and infinity is yours.

Go is what recreation ought to be. So is yoga. Like go, yoga is infinite but centers on the human. It’s the pure antithesis of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, as Huxley was well aware. Yoga needs only the human body, a little knowledge, and an empty room. Anything more than that usually just gets in the way. Yoga is roughly as old as go, and again, people are still finding great value in this ancient exercise.

The twentieth century has also created its share of cheap-but-deep amusements. Indeed, it rivals the ancient past in coming up with new ones and has probably been the most creative era in the whole history of gaming. A few of these new games have intellectual possibilities every bit as deep as go: Contract bridge, stratego, scrabble, and many others originated within the last hundred years, and every one of these is a game of simple yet profound strategy, mixed with varying degrees of luck.

What is interesting, though, is that these games are competing with other, more expensive amusements, and the latter seem to be winning. We spend more now on video games than we do in movie theaters, and most video games are Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy minus the exercise.

I don’t want to be misunderstood–I’m not a luddite. The simple is getting lost, though, and it shouldn’t be. If everyone played go, or contract bridge, or even Dungeons & Dragons, rather than computer video games, how much more money would still be around to invest, to spend on more lasting commodities, or to use in inventing the next big practical thing?

Never mind the money–think of the time! How much fuller would all of our lives be, if instead of playing video games, we did more gardening, or wrote more poetry? Just a few generations ago, an well-educated man could be expected to compose a sonnet more or less on demand, on whatever topic was asked. What a great mental life they must have had!

Now I wouldn’t think of forcing anyone’s hand here, or of pushing my cultural preferences on another against his will. I’d just like us all to think a bit before we line up for the next game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. There’s got to be something better to do.

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