All’s Fair in Games of War

1Up recently posted an editorial on cheating in games. While the article primarily serves as an overview of the different kinds of cheating that are possible in games, it doesn’t really take a much of a look into any of the philosophy behind it (for instance, no Huizinga or unspoken rules). Then again, given the audience, you can’t really be surprised at the lack of any kind of material like that.

One interesting anecdote in the article though is the use of pornographic spray tags in Counter-Strike. While Counter-Strike has its own share of subversive play from Anne-Marie Schleiner’s Velvet-Strike, which uses anti-war spray tags as commentary, this is certainly an interesting tactic:

“There are personal markings in Counter-Strike called ’sprays.’ As long as it’s a still image, you can make it whatever you want. Sometimes you see lolcats, and sometimes you see porn. So when someone stops to look at the naked lady painted on the wall, someone else comes up and knifes them.”

Actually, this seems like a very valid tactic. A pornographic tag seems like the perfect strategy for distracting male would-be soldiers, so I don’t see how it can be classified as cheating - it’s simply a non-standard tactic, and one which Snake employs in Metal Gear Solid to distract guards. Our country wouldn’t exist today if we hadn’t relied on non-standard guerrilla tactics to defeat the British in the Revolutionary War instead of lining up in Napoleonic rows like the British wanted for a ‘fair fight’. You can’t even complain too much that kids are viewing the tags because the game is M-rated and thus wasn’t designed for kids anyway (this and online disclaimers abound).

Another strategy that some will call cheating is the suicide bomber (or kamikaze) strategy in Halo. Wired journalist Clive Thompson loves to play Halo, but he’s nowhere near as good as many online players, who quickly trounce him. He doesn’t have the time or the skill to play Halo dozens of hours a week in order to master the game. Instead, he runs up to the other player, throws a sticky bomb at them which can’t be dislodged once it’s hit, and earns a kill. His character will inevitably die, but will just be respawned later. Thompson writes:

“This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.”

So kamikaze tactics in Halo aren’t exactly ‘playing fair.’ Thompson isn’t using his skills with a weapon and with maneuvering through the terrain like the other players: he’s using a ‘cheap tactic’ of using a cheap weapon - the sticky bomb - to score a kill. Because death in the game is not death in real life, this is a logical tactic. Granted, it isn’t one that is going to make Thompson rise in the ranks, but it’s going to give him the ability to fight back in an otherwise lopsided fight.

Another tactic that’s often regarded as cheating is camping. Camping is used in games where players respawn after their characters have died in a limited number of predictable places. As a result, a player who has knowledge of the spawn locations can stay in a well-defended spot for long periods (or ‘camp’), and amass a large number of kills. This is a clearly frustrating tactic as it means other players often get very little reaction time before they can begin playing. As a result, designers often try to lessen the opportunity for camping and create rules which penalize players for doing so. Camping is an undesired strategy because in many respects it is a ‘broken’ strategy - it is one that works every single time it is used simply because it is much too difficult to remove the camper before he can make a dozen kills.

And here’s the difference between war and play. In a war, anything goes, so long as you can defend your actions afterward, something that is incredibly easier to do if you win (was Curtis LeMay ever charged as a war criminal for the firebombing of Tokyo, even though the Japanese were deplored for bombing civilians in Nanking?). In play though, there is a difference in playing to win and playing for enjoyment. A player who plays to win will not shy from using non-standard tactics to defeat his or her opponent, whether it is guerrilla tactics of spraying pictures of naked women to distract the enemy or utilizing game loopholes like camping. A person who plays for enjoyment (and here, I must add not only the enjoyment of himself but of others) will be more likely to play ‘fair’ by only using agreed-upon rules, often unspoken rules of culture and etiquette that determine what is a viable strategy. In such a game, relying heavily on broken strategies will usually not result in an ejoyable experience - but so will pairing a very experienced player with a novice.

What kind of game is war most closely related to? Cultural ideas of ‘chivalric war’ aside, war is like a game in which the players play to win. However, it is also a game in which the victor and, in the global world, the ‘uninvolved’ spectators, play the role of referee. The victor declares violations to the ‘rules of war’ as often as he ignores his own violations, dismissing them as necessary strategies for the sake of winning. The spectator declares violations when he witnesses actions which seem deplorable to his tastes. These violations are usually based on rules that the victor has agreed through the coopreration of other nations, such as the Geneva Convention or the United Nations as well as cultural beliefs of ‘common sense’. As a result, each side must walk a careful line between respecting the spoken and unspoken rules of warfare with bending or breaking them as little or as much in order to achieve victory.

War is thus unlike a game because its rules and enforcement are performed by the victors rather than by a neutral referee or clear-cut rules of play. The rules governing the actions of people in society are declared as much as they are agreed upon by the people as they are by the lawmakers, something which war transcends out of its operation and may only gain again through reflection, though usually only after hostilities have ended.

Horus, Prince of the Sun - Review

Recently I came across an old film with art direction by Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animator behind Studio Ghibli and such great films as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Horus, Prince of the Sun (196 is an animation from his early years as a key animator and background designer and is considered by some to be the first modern anime. The film was directed by Isao Takahata who went on to do Pom Poko and Grave of the Fireflies.

The name ‘Horus’ is misleading. Suggesting an Egyptian background, the Japanese name ‘Horusu’ is actually supposed to be ‘Hols’ as the characters are from a Scandinavian or Eastern European Stone Age era. I’ve never heard this name used before, and the OED says its root (hol) is ‘hollow’ or ‘hole’ which of course makes no sense to the story (unless of course it’s supposed to be ‘whole’). The film takes place in the frozen north with characters, costumes, and culture that seems related to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala while other elements, such as the unscrupulous adviser to the village leader, seem archetypes borrowed from Beowulf. Hols, a young boy, finds a magical Sword of the Sun while defending himself from a pack of wolves. He takes the sword and heads to civilization.

The villain of the story is Grundewalde, an ice demon who uses black magic, wolves, and monsters to assert control over humanity. This is significantly different from later Miyazaki films, which do not place the evil and darkness of the world in the hands of a single individual. Instead, evil and disaster arise from the nature of the world and from the hearts of people, and cannot be defeated by lopping off a head with a sword.

Hols takes on many heroic tasks in his effort to destroy Grundewalde and save humanity from his evil. He’s just a kid, but he’s got enough determination to make him a man. In a sequence reminiscent of Legend of Zelda, he fights a giant fish, and he also heads off into the woods fighting wolves. There is also the strange girl, Hilda, who plays the harp and entrances anyone who hears her songs.

The film contains some epic battle scenes as well, but they are a sharp difference from later Miyazaki films. The reason for this is it appears that the studio’s budget ran out and as a result, there are several sequences where still images or pans of still images made from key frames are used to illustrate motion. Thus, in a large battle scene between the villagers and a pack of wolves, there is no animation, but merely still images, which proves very shocking.

Though described as a ‘modern anime’, Horus, Prince of the Sun contains ties with earlier films. In it are many musical sequences, particularly the opening credits, which contains a lyrical song describing the adventurous and heroic spirit of Hols. As a result, it has more in common with the later Taro, Dragon Boy (1979) and seems more in line with an earlier era of Japan.

As there is better anime out there (and the film is hard to find), Horus, Prince of the Sun is probably best seen as a curiosity that is a key example of the evolution of anime, in particular Miyazaki’s style (or perhaps seen by big fans of Miyazaki or the Kalevala). This isn’t to say it’s not a bad film - if you ever get a chance to see it, definitely take that chance! It’s just not worth shelling out $60 or more to import.

Review of Roger Caillois’ “Man, Play, and Games”

There are several books which form the foundation of modern ludic theory, one of which is Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (previously reviewed), the other being Roger Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games. I recently finished the latter book, and here is why it is still relevant in some places (and not so in others).

To begin, Caillois is building off Huizinga’s work, where he established that play is a central part of human culture and society and produces the creative instinct by which progress is made. Rather than being mere frivolity, play creates art, science, and culture. Caillois expands the concept of play by dividing it up into a table composed of the play categories agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo) and by the degrees of paidea (freeform, spontaneous play) and ludus (rule-based, structured play). These six concepts are important to our understanding of play and games, though today the ideas are more greatly refined.

Agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx are all distilled forms of play. Agon is the struggle, the contest between two or more opponents to see who is better. Alea is passive reliance on chance, awaiting the throw of the die or roulette. Mimicry is the use of masks, of acting, of ‘playing at’ being someone else. Ilinx is the sensation of bodily movement, of dance and spinning, and of the roller coaster. Many games contain elements of more than one category (a game of Magic: The Gathering is based on the luck of the draw as well as the skills of the players) and even a supposedly ‘pure’ activity may be found to contain other elements (a player at dice will attempt to do anything in his power, any strategy to help ensure success rather than simply doing nothing). Paidea and ludus are also important in the study of rule-based games and ’sandbox’ games like Sim-City (Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology Meets Narratology is an excellent companion piece).

However, Caillois’ ideas become more controversial as he begins to apply them to the operations of society, and more importantly, to the evolution of human culture from primitive to civilized. Unlike Huizinga, who uses his descriptions of culture ot illustrate examples of games and play as being central to the operation of culture and civilization, Caillois uses them to define the natures of different cultures, with a clearly insensitive ethnocentric approach (though it’s not like Huizinga wasn’t ethnocentric either). While Caillois’s examples are fascinating (though not in as much detail as Huizinga’s), his attempts ot define cultures seem biased towards his concept of his own culture’s superiority. For instance, I doubt he would deign to apply his methods of analysis of masks and the bull roarer and their relation to mimicry and ilinx towards Christianity (he does not even discuss the subject).

The deepest error is his firm statements that the ‘primitive’ knows deep inside that the mask is a lie. It is akin to stating that the Catholic ‘knows deep down inside’ that the holy sacrament is not in truth the blood and body of Christ but merely wine. Indeed, it is spiritually so through the sense of allegory. The same is true of the mask. the mask and its representation of a god or spirit is serious business (and not simply because death and violence can result from its revelation to the uninitiated). The mask is truth, a representation of the spiritual, the intangible, even though there is really a mortal behind it. It simply operates under a different logical system than the visible and tangible - which is not to mean that the logical system of native culture is inferior to that of Western culture, but merely that this logic system is in its own respects incompatible with that of Western civilization, though some of its elements may be crucial to the nature of humanity.

As a result, I can’t highly recommend more than the first few chapters of the book, the two most important ones (the first two, covering agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx as well as ludus and paidea) of which are reproduced in Salen and Zimmerman’s excellent Rules of Play Reader. I can recommend the first six chapters or so (the first four are the true meat of the book) as well as the second appendix, but I place the others at suspect. The second appendix is important for its descriptions of the history of game studies up until that time and also his debunking and criticism of some previous work on the subject.

Overall, Caillois is still relevant today, and the interplay of agon, alea, ilinx, and mimicry is still important to our fundamental understanding of games and play, though ultimately some of his work is dated and in other places better refined through modern ludic theory.

The Future of the Game: Wii Fit or Ico?

There has been a lot of buzz lately regarding Nintendo’s Wii Fit. The ‘hardcore gamer’ audience doesn’t like it because it isn’t another Mario or Halo (i.e. not something they think they want to play), and their favorite designer is making this sort of stuff rather than another Zelda. 1UP, on the other hand, suggests that it’s this type of software - Wii Fit, Wii Sports, Brain Age - and the designs of the Wii and DS, that will help expand the market to new audiences. And it’s doing just that.

What the Wii and DS have done, that gaming consoles have not done since the days of the Atari when games were new and exciting, has been to expand the market to include more than just young males or the 18-35 ‘core audience’. And this is pretty significant because it means more people who don’t usually play games are now playing them and seeing the values inherent to them rather than just hearing about the latest GTA or school shooting on the local news. And yes, making games mainstream is indeed the future of the game: it has to be played by more than just a fraction of the population and it has to be recognized as something anybody can do that has products catered to everybody.

Yet while this is the future of the game as a market, it is not the future of the game as a medium. The game as a medium will not get very far with only Mario and Halo and GTA and Wii Fit. While those games are fine, it’s not the future of the game - the game as expressive medium with a capacity to critically explore the nature of the human condition. That future actually lies in the realm of art games and socially conscious games and…Ico.

What Ico (and its successor, Shadow of the Colossus) did was become one of the first games that we can actually call art without having to make up excuses or complex arguments to the point. Like MYST before it, Ico produced a world in which the environment itself was designed and represented as artistic and it also produced emotions in the player incredibly more complex than the simple fear, aggression, and humor that games are already pretty good at. And what’s more, it raised not just a series of unanswered questions about the game world but on the ethics of the actions of the protagonist. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus make you think, and they do so in a brilliant environment that is timeless beyond the limitations of technology. When I look at the future of the game, I see many works like this that explore the nature of our world and of humanity rather than simply providing another escapist pastime. That’s art, and that’s where games have to go if they ever want to become something more than glorified frisbees and Chess boards (not that there isn’t anything wrong with Chess or frisbee).

But Miyamoto is also right. Why? Because in order for games to become recognized as art, they need to be recognized as art by a mainstream audience rather than a ‘gamer elite’. Go up the street and ask anybody if they know what Ico or Shadow of the Colossus is and you’ll get blank stares. The only people who play these games are people who are already gamers, who own a PlayStation 2 and understand how to use its complex control scheme. You can’t share this game with grandma or an art critic because they just won’t know what to do.

Wii Fit does that. It opens up the market to those people who need to know how to play games and understand why games are so great. It does that by giving them something they’ll actually want to play. And once they learn how to play a game they like, they’ll be gamers forever and we’ll no longer have to use that silly term. Because you know what? Everybody will be a gamer, just like everybody is a movie goer.

And as this happens, we should be making second-level model games for this audience, games that will make them think about their world and the human condition just like a great work of literature or film. This isn’t to suggest that Fumito Ueda should stop making Ico 3. Ico 3, while on a level that pushes the concept of what ludic art is, is currently inaccessible by the audience of the likes of Wii Fit, even though it is something they should probably be very interested in. In order to get the audience to that point, we need to work with baby-steps, making smaller, more easily accessible - but just as significant - works of art.

Space Station Needs a Plumber

(From the Associated Press)

“The international space station’s lone toilet is broken, leaving the crew with almost nowhere to go. So NASA may order an in-orbiting plumbing service call when space shuttle Discovery visits next week.

“Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jury-rigged system when they need to urinate.

“While one of the crew was using the Russian-made toilet last week, the toilet motor fan stopped working, according to NASA. Since then, the liquid-waste gathering part of the toilet has worked on-and-off. Fortunately, the solid-waste collecting part is functioning.

“The crew has used the toilet ont he Soyuz return capsule, but it has a limited capacity.

“‘Like any home anywhere, the importance of having a working bathroom is obvious,’ NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said.”

Well, Allard, we’ve got just the man for the job! His hours are from 10AM - 9PM, Tokyo Standard Time (and yes, those ARE little space-Mario meteors!).

(Even though a broken lavatory is serious business on a space station, this is funny in so many ways - insert your own joke here!)

Automated Super Mario World Orchestra

Those crazy Japanese have done it again. You may remember seeing some self-playing Super Mario World levels on YouTube, but this is an entirely new approach: a self-playing Super Mario World level that produces sound effects in time with a massive medley! A self-playing or automatic Super Mario World level is one where no player input is used other than to start the level - the natural physics of Mario moving through the world and interacting with objects increases and decreases his speed and allows the game to play itself.

Simply amazing. I think the track is called ‘Nikoniko Douga’ and a karaoke version of it exists as well. The interesting thing about this is that it goes through such an incredibly roundabout way to produce music, you can recognize it as a piece of art, but one that has gone through a Rube Goldberg method of doing so! Is Rube Goldberg and giant Domino mazes art? Does it comment on the human condition in an overly mechanized and bureaucratic world where policy and procedure make it impossible to go from A to B without first going through points C, F, D, E, and G, in that order? Well, we at least know this sort of thing is entertainment! Though it makes me wonder if they can push automated Super Mario World levels any further than this…

Art and Entertainment: Exclusively and Mutually Inexclusive

I’ve found a couple papers now talking about the inseparability (or rather the ease of affinity) between the two. One is a presentation given by Ursula Le Guin called “The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen”, the other is a recent post on Select Parks entitled “Entertainment vs. Art” by Curtis Johnson (Incidentally, Loren Eiseley wrote another great essay, this time on science and art, called “The Illusion of the Two Cultures”). Definitions of art, entertainment, and games are inexact at best and generally vague. We have a good idea of what they are, but when you get down to it, you can’t quite place a solid definition on any of the terms. Which is a problem because they are essential to designing and talking about games as well as…well, practically everything else related to culture.

First off, it’s quite shallow and foolish to say that all art is entertainment or that no art is also entertainment. Even Roger Ebert would be hard-pressed to say that Buster Keaton’s The General is not entertainment as well as art (and thus his statements about how games are somehow not art are derived from arguments regarding participant completion of the work rather than ‘mere’ entertainment). I would also be loath to follow any statement that would suggest the likes of Schindler’s List and Idi i smotri may be defined so simply as ‘entertainment’. Art can be lighthearted, or it can be deadly serious and cathartic, void of ‘fun’, something the Greeks knew hundreds of years ago. I’ve been using the term ‘compelling’, an umbrella that can consist of ‘fun’ as well as other reasons for engaging in a task (quite literally, ‘fun’ in this instance really is a four-letter word). Either art and entertainment may be one and the same in a given instance - but by no means not ALL instances - or humans are all inherently as barbaric as the Romans who found gladiatorial sport to be entertainment.

In this regard, Ursula Le Guin, though discussing science fiction and not games (though SF and fantasy are significant genres of games, oddly composing at least 50% of the entire medium at this point), more firmly states that art and entertainment are not inseparable (would people find the art of Homer or Leonardo Da Vinci so interesting today if they weren’t so darn entertaining?). Further, her main point is that we not think of SF simply as ‘entertainment’ but that SF authors should go about creating their work as art, with masterpiece in mind rather than mindless drivel. The same holds true for videogames as well.

So the perceived barrier between art and entertainment is something that some would say is a result of our Puritan culture, as Le Guin suggests, a system that mistrusts any kind of pleasure. This is the same popular belief that suggests games are frivolous and barren of meaning. And then there is Johann Huizinga who suggests that play is inherent to human culture and is the key inspiration of creativity in the world. If so, play can be deadly serious, and if not all art must be entertainment and not all entertainment is art, then why should we expect games to be any different? We are limited only by our underlying cultural beliefs that find frivolity and suspect in concepts like ‘entertainment,’ ‘play,’ and ‘fun’ and thus do not seek to look toward new horizons.

Simulated Bubble Wrap?

What has lately come to my attention is a flash version of simulated bubble wrap.

This reminds me of Big Red Button that was reported on many ages ago elsewhere. The implicit objective is to pop the bubbles. We know this if we have previous experience with bubble wrap because when we find out what it does, we often become compelled to pop them all. This and sometimes people make ‘contests’ out of it where you try and pop the bubbles as fast as possible. As such, it’s more a ’sandbox’ environment that perhaps gets its more ‘game-like’ qualities from the point-and-click interface, added with a bit of inexplicable desire to pop the bubbles. Perhaps it is more the interface’s relationship to others that we know to be games where this relationship comes in.

But is it relaxing as the real deal? The trouble is, it doesn’t have the tactile quality of an actual sheet of bubble wrap (or in Red Dwarf lingo, “tension sheets” whose ‘invention’ made the guy filthy stinking disgustedly rich). The SFX are kind of muddy, too, which doesn’t add to the experience. It also makes one wonder just how effective this thing is (didn’t do anything for me but make me write this letter, but it’s being distributed via chain mail). Perhaps there’s just nothing else to do in the office.

Antiwar Games on Holocaust and Invasion

I recently discovered an old Escapist Magazine article on David Jaffe’s cancelled Heartland, a PSP first-person shooter that explores how United States soldiers might react to an invasion of America. The game was slated to take on a serious tone, with NPCs going mad and hatefully aggressive, committing war crimes you would only associate with the Axis in World War II. It was originally supposed to be a Chinese invasion, but Sony decided to drop the specific references and make the enemy undefined. The game was meant to express concerns about the current political situation in America and to denounce particular policies currently in effect. But it never got off the ground due to lack of personal involvement by the employees and resources being used by other game projects. For such an ambitious project, Jaffe even consulted with Gonzala Frasca, the designer behind such works as September 12th and Kabul Kaboom.

I suppose in a way it might also have been an antiwar game and raises interesting questions about not only how the press might have received it but also of how players would have received it. Jaffe describes two scenarios, one in which the player is ordered by his commanding officer to beat up a Chinese American family and then douse the family and the house with gasoline. Another has the player pick up a video recording of an American soldier beheading a captured prisoner; rewinding the tape shows the soldier’s vacation videos to Disneyland.

This type of heady material is something we might find in an antiwar film but is not the sort of events we associate with games. When the press does, it is usually to suggest that games are being tasteless and just being designed to allow players to commit horrible acts and encourage and reward players for doing so turning them into ‘the killers of the future.’ Which is all a load of hogwash. By this logic, Pac-Man and Mario teach us to become overweight druggies.

The real question I see is how players might have reacted to the situation. Gonzala Frasca has stated that such a game might be used by sadists for their own pleasure. While I admire and am inspired by his work, I’ll have to say that couldn’t footage from Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful also be taken out of context for similar uses? A work will always have the potential to be misread or used for a purpose other than what was intended. A lot of this might come down to how sensitive the work is at approaching the subject matter and ultimately what it has to say.

The real question is how the game would present the player with such difficult choices and how it might use the internal logic of games and common preconceptions about how they work to underscore its message. Follow the rules of the game as that is how you play and win then comes dangerously close to Be a good soldier and don’t question your orders. Couple this with direct psychological effects of these actions on the player’s character - direct cause and effect - and the game will not be about presenting a difficult situation and allowing the player to observe the result without consequence but to make the player ultimately think about that consequence. If the soldier does murder the civilians, how does this effect him as a person and what does this mean about humanity? When the game leaves questions for the player to answer, then the game has become intelligent and reflective, not superficial.

Another developer is working on Imagination is the Only Escape, a game about the Holocaust. It takes place from the perspective of a child who turns to his own imagination to escape the horrors of Nazi occupation. The developers have said this about the project: “There will be no on-screen violence in this product. I don’t see war as a game. I don’t find that amusing.” It may be possible that this could be the first full-fledged commercial antiwar game, and is a title I am very curious about learning more on. I think it is possible to develop such a game in a sensitive and thoughtful manner, to both stay true to the memories of those who died and to reaffirm the need to prevent genocide in the future.

ET Rare?

Discovery reports findings by Andrew Watson, who takes a new approach to determining whether or not life in the universe is rare.

I’m sure you remember the Drake Equation, an early formula for how to measure the chances for life evolving. This new research takes a different approach by looking at how long it took for intelligent life to evolve on Earth. Really, if you think about it, it’s a long time.

First off, we know it doesn’t take long for life to develop on a planet: given Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago (bya), the first single-cell organisms date from around 4 bya - only 600mya after formation, which is really rapid.

Second, estimates show that the sun will make the earth uninhabitable in another billion years or so, so our planet will be 5.6 (maybe even 6 billion years old).

Humans only arrived maybe 2.6 million years ago, but only started developing civilizations 3500 ya. This chart is always demonstrated quite well visually by drawing a map of time starting from San Francisco and going to New York City where 3500 years is only about one cinder block outside the Empire State Building.

Now even if we give the allowance that the extinction of the dinosaurs didn’t occur at 65 mya (or 250 mya for the Permian/Tertiary extinction), and suggest that within a few million years something intelligent might have evolved (more likely at 65 mya, really), for all intents and purposes, it still took 4 billion years for life to evolve into something intelligent (3.8-3.9 if you are generous and think foregoing extinction that something intelligent could have evolved sooner). And extinction events seem to happen pretty rapidly, but you also have to remember that animals also recover from extinction fairly quickly.

Still, 1 billion years is a long time and given the rate at which land animals evolved. Given that we’re talking only about 500 million years from the first amphibians to dinosaurs and mammals I’d say that’s a LOT of opportunity for something to evolve. Who knows…there might even be a pattern here similar to Moore’s Law, but we just don’t have enough fossil evidence.

Basically, I don’t think Andrew Watson is giving enough credit to the rate at which species evolve and the speed at which life was formed on earth. The more important question is why it took 3.5 billion years to create an amphibian and why that happened. Watson seems to suggest that it’s a fluke, but given the rate of evolution, I’d say something interesting would have happened sooner or later.