I have always been interested in games that cross between the virtual world and the real world. There’s something that really hooks onto me when there’s a connection to the world outside the console/network.
I recently picked up *Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops*; the first real Metal Gear game for the PSP (not that I minded the Acid series as a diversion). Despite playing like most Metal Gear Solid games, it doesn’t follow all the conventions – the most major diversion being that Snake has to recruit soldiers throughout the game to help accomplish his mission.
The primary method of “recruiting” is to knock out an enemy and then drag him back to your truck or other team members. This is certainly a workable method, but a little tedious depending on the level size.
While I was monkeying around in the menus, I noticed one labeled “RECRUIT”. The three options were:
* Access Point Scan
* GPS Scan
* Password
While the Password option is almost exactly what it sounds like, the other two are extremely cool:
The *GPS Scan* option requires the GPS add-on for the PSP, which just came out and thus I don’t have. But if you get said module, selecting this will show you locations you can go to with your PSP to acquire new soldiers. That’s right – you have to walk with your PSP to the right spot to acquire game resources. Essentially, you are participating in geocaching.
The *Access Point Scan* option does not require an add-on. The concept here is that every wireless router in the world “contains” a soldier. As you get your PSP closer to a wireless router you haven’t accessed before, the on-screen signal grows stronger. Once it reaches a certain strength, you receive the soldier. (If you can’t get close enough, it is possible to mash the Circle button to help “boost” the signal.)
Why is this cool? It’s [wardriving](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving) to acquire game resources – except since you’re not actually connecting to the router, there’s no legal grey area. The soldiers you receive from this scanning are (apparently) generated based on the MAC address of the router; I’d love to see if there’s a pattern to the types of soldiers based on router manufacturer or model. Beyond trying to crack the system – searching this city for wireless routers is just plain fun. It’s a mini-game that gives me another excuse to roam the city. I’ve already picked up eleven soldiers from the elevated stretch of the subway I ride every day – I can only think of the possibilities.
(I realize that, in many ways, this is essentially a modernized version of the [Barcode Battler](http://www.vidgame.net/misc/barcodebattler.htm). This isn’t a bad thing – the Barcode Battler concept was a good one, even if the execution was incredibly crappy. Yes, I owned one. Shut up.)
In closing – kudos to Konami for including two activities that I would’ve never thought to associate with gaming into MGO:PO.
I’m looking at another day to find that I’ve got nothing to say
Or I’m looking for another way to process what happened on that birthday
And either way, if you’re gonna call it art
Then there’s a cup in front of you and right away
If you’re gonna play your part, you must drink it down
But mind eyes have seen the glory
Of the fields of flowers and factory floors
And my mind’s content to lie at rest for hours
Behind my loved ones’ doors and if there’s a war
Another shitty war to fight for babylon
Then it’s the perfect storm in a tea cup
But you must drink it down
And what do you make of the nights
When you thought you’d make much more
Than being too tired to turn the lights out
And too drunk to drink more?
And what does it take to not hear the cynics at your door saying
“It’s time the turn the lights out, and you’ll want to keep it down!”
So I’m lifting up that poison cup to drink a draught of propaganda
Or I’m giving up that other stuff in hopes that it will make me madder
But either way, if you’re gonna call it art
Then there’s a cup in front of you and right away
If you’re gonna play your part
You must drink it down
And what do you make of nights
When you thought you’d make much more
Than being too tired to turn the lights out
And too drunk to drink more?
And what does it take to not hear the cynics at your door saying
“It’s time the turn the lights out, and you’ll want to keep it down!”
And what does it say of all the things you’ve said before
When you’re too drunk to turn the lights out
And too tired to drink more?
And what do you save, and what does it feel like to be saved?
And can you “pull – 2 – 3 – 4! pull – 2 – 3 – 4!”
Can you drink it down?
That subversion I was talking about yesterday? It doesn’t have to be sarcastic or shocking.
Sometimes the truth is more than enough.
(If you’re reading this via syndication or LiveJournal, click here for the video.)
The full transcript – and I apologize about the length, but this needs to be read – is courtesy of MSNBC:
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.
Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis — and the sober contemplation — of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence — indeed, the loyalty — of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants — our employees — with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.
It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril — with a growing evil — powerful and remorseless.
That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s — questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England’s, in the 1930s.
It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.
It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.
It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience — needed to be dismissed.
The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.
That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.
Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.
His government, absolute — and exclusive — in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.
It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today’s Omniscient ones.
That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.
And, as such, all voices count — not just his.
Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.
But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.
And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we — as its citizens — must now address, is stark and forbidding.
But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note — with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.
The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”
As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that — though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.
This country faces a new type of fascism – indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.
But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”
Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.”
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”