All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Games

Weaver of tales

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Arabian Nights (4)_reduced

CarcaSean received a shipment of new games last week so everyone was eager to try them out. Of these, Heroscape: Rise of the Valkyrie was easily the most visually impressive with its Lego-like terrain pieces and pre-painted miniatures. The most unusual however was the new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights which is barely a game at all and can be best described as a more advanced version of the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Each player takes the role of one of the famous characters from the stories from One Thousand and One Nights and sets off on a grand adventure. The point of the game is not to win per se, but to see what crazy scrapes you get into.

As a game that’s all about telling stories, there’s little in the way of rules. There are no statistics for the characters for example and everyone starts the same except for gender. Everyone does choose three skills to start the game with but that’s pretty much it in terms of differentiation. Victory is determined by collecting Destiny and Story Points over the course of the game and a neat little twist is that each player can secretly decide how many of each they need to win before the game begins, so long as they add up together to 20 points. Due to the randomness and unpredictability of the game however, this is obviously meant more to give an ending to the game rather than awarding victory to a player in the traditional sense.

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News & Politics, Politics

Thoughts on the 2010 Malaysian Budget

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Before I go into my views on the budget, I’d like to express my disappointment with the poor quality of the discourse that I’ve read on the topic over on the LYN forums. Most people over there, including at least one moderator, seem to be basing their evaluation of it entirely on how it benefits or harms them personally, completely discounting its effects on a wider scale. While this is somewhat predictable, I’ve also known LYN to offer intelligent and knowledgeable commentary on important issues in the past which is why this particular disappointment is so galling.

To me the most interesting aspect of the new budget is the re-introduction of the property gains tax. The original announcement of a 30% tax on gains made from the disposal of a property purchased within the first two years of acquisition  and dropping down in subsequent years seemed bold and promising to me. Since I’ve long been an advocate of capital gains taxes in Malaysia, I felt that this was overdue even though as someone with someone with significant investments in REITs, this would personally hurt me. I see today however that this has been toned down to a mere 5% tax regardless of length of tenure, which seems pitiful to me.

The other major move that most people are talking about is imposing a RM50 service charge on each credit card issued. Currently, it’s not clear whether this is going to take the form of an explicit tax or a mandatory minimum annual fee but the intent is clearly to rein in the preposterous pace of credit cards issuings in the country. Ordinarily, I abhor government-led social engineering even when I agree with the intent, but in this case I believe that the intervention is mild enough to give it a pass. However, I doubt that this will have any major effect as it will be easy enough for the banks to issue rebates to offset the cost.

The various tax breaks including the increase of personal relief from income tax are obviously designed to win some popularity with the voting public but was it really necessary to also throw in a 1% decrease in the tax rate for the highest income bracket? This looks like a particularly unwise move when the government deficit is expected to rise to record levels. Even if the government insisted on keeping the fiscal taps open for stimulus purposes, it would have a better idea to spend the money on a negative income tax on the poorest Malaysians rather than giving a tax break to the richest. A negative tax would effectively be a subsidy for cheap Malaysian labour which should also help to reduce the incentive for employers to hire foreign labour which so many Malaysians seem to be upset about.

Finally, I think that completely opening the financial sector to foreign equity is a great move. In fact, to those who argue that reducing the top rate of income tax would be useful in attracting top tier talent to the country, I’d argue that levelling the playing field is a far greater incentive. It would be even better if the government had the political capital to do away with silly NEP quotas and restrictions, but this is still a good start.

Overall, I favor an economic policy that concentrates on building the fundamentals for consistent and reliable growth rather than trying to jump start the economy for quick spurts of growth. For this reason, I disagree with the tax exemptions for the Iskandar project and believe that it will only open the door to more cronyism and corruption. A good budget should be fiscally responsible and while I agree that turning the taps completely off at this time would be unwise, I believe that the government has not made enough of a commitment to reduce the deficit in the future and I fear that this could lead to increased inflation expectations in the future.

Games

Avengers Assemble!

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Marvel Heroes(2)_reduced

Being somewhat of a fan of superhero comics, I’d noticed the Marvel Heroes box sitting on a shelf on the very first day I stepped into CarcaSean. It wasn’t until much later that I ventured to ask Sean about it. At that time, he told me that he had only played it once himself and didn’t quite understand what the point of the game was. He recommended that I get our resident Ameritrash expert Han to teach the game to me. Even that was quite a while back and only this week did I get a chance to play this out-of-print game with Han, Sean and my wife.

Initially I had the mistaken impression that it was some sort of miniatures-based battle game, perhaps something similar to the Heroclix system. That was incorrect of course as I soon realized after getting into the habit of looking games up on BGG. Instead, pre-painted miniatures notwithstanding, it’s actually a rather abstract strategy game in which the players race against one another to score victory points by resolving various crises. The miniatures aren’t used to track tactical positioning at all and I’d say that the miniature for each team’s mastermind villain doesn’t even have any gameplay purpose.

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Politics, Science

Anti-vaccination nutjobs

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As a skeptic, I’ve never been a fan of alternative medicine or even herbal remedies. I prefer that any medical treatments that I take be experimentally controlled, peer reviewed and statistically compared for efficacy against competing treatments. It feels however that I’m in the minority on this and even people who have a reasonably sound education in the sciences often just state that alternative medicine, while not necessarily being more effective than a placebo, is at least harmless and could provide some psychological reassurance to patients.

Frankly, I feel that this is conceding too much. Even if alternative medical treatments are physiologically harmless, admitting them into the mainstream dangerously blurs the line between truth and falseness. It means conceding authority to snake oil salesmen who claim to not only know better than trained doctors but that doctors aren’t to be trusted because they are in collusion with drug companies who poison patients. More importantly in the long run, it feeds the general perception that scientific truth is not objective and that you don’t actually need any academic qualifications in order to be a respected authority on scientific matters.

Currently the best example of how much damage the anti-intellectual crowd can do is the ridiculous argument against vaccinations. This profile of Paul Offit, a prominent scientist in the development and study of vaccines, in Wired should be required reading for anyone who isn’t convinced that the rise of alternative medicine is actively harmful. It is truly frightening how quickly the fad of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated has grown and how much damage it is already doing. Furthermore, it’s one thing if the parents are harming their own children by not getting them vaccinated, but it’s another thing when you consider that they’re endangering everyone else around them because a good vaccination program depends on everyone being vaccinated to work.

As the article explains, the fears about the risks posed by vaccines are completely groundless and even now diseases that were previously thought to have been vanquished are making a comeback because vaccination rates are dropping. The saddest part is that all this has happened before. In England and Wales in the late 19th century, an anti-smallpox vaccine movement got started causing the disease to flare up even though the vaccine had been invented in 1793. I guess this is what you get when people look to celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey and Oprah Winfrey for scientific advice instead of actual scientists.

Games

Life of a Martian terrorist

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rfg 2009-10-18 22-41-56-34_reduced

Is it just me or is there something about Mars that inspires stories about underground resistances against an oppressive authority? The 1990 film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger used this theme and it was a recurrent subplot on J.M. Straczynski’s Babylon 5 television series. Even in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the story about the establishment of an utopian colony on Mars quickly turned into one about a protracted guerrilla war against Earth.

In any case, Volition’s Red Faction series draws from the same wellspring. Its latest offering, Red Faction: Guerrilla is technically the third in the series. However as the first two were only middling successes I gave them a pass. Red Faction: Guerrilla has become quite a hit, especially in the eyes of game critics, plus it’s now an open world game for the first time, which makes it irresistible to me.

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Games

Zerg Zombies

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Starcraft(2)_reduced

The title is what you get when I try to combine a post about the Starcraft boardgame with a game about zombies. Last week’s in-fashion game at CarcaSean was Starcraft which some of the hardcore regulars played multiple times over the course of the week. I only managed to play once which admittedly isn’t enough to form a good opinion of such a complex game. As its title implies, it’s a boardgame based on Blizzard’s popular video game. As in the original PC version, all three races are represented in the game and there are two rival factions for each race, so that up to two players can choose the same race. Lore-wise, everything is fairly faithful. The two rival factions for the Zerg for example are the Queen of Blades and the Overmind who as any Starcraft fan should know, have little love for one another.

The board for this game is actually made up of interlocking tiles representing star systems that each player takes turns to lay down, which is reminiscent of Twilight Imperium 3. Each system is subdivided into separate areas, each of which offer different resources or conquest points for the player occupying them. The resources, minerals and Vespene gas as in the original game, is spent to purchase technology, build bases and upgrade them and of course build new units. Naturally, the higher tier units can only be purchased once you own the appropriate production building.

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News & Politics, Politics

Saudi Arabia seeks compensation for reduced oil consumption

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In a move so outlandish that one would expect to see it only in an Onion article, Saudi Arabia has demanded that if the rest of the world reduces oil consumption due to efforts to combat global warming, it and other oil producing countries should be compensated for the corresponding loss of revenue. That’s about as heinous as drug pushers telling government authorities that they should be compensated if addiction treatment programmes successfully reduce their customer numbers.

While this is the first time I’ve heard of it, it appears that this has been the position of the Saudis ever since the first global climate talks in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This time however they’re claiming that this is a “make or break” position for them, meaning that other countries must agree to pay compensation for reduced oil consumption or they’re going to walk out of any talks. Of course, Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries need to diversify away from an economy that’s almost a hundred percent dependent on oil sales, but it’s not clear to me at all why other countries need to pay up to help them achieve that.

The wealth that the oil producing nations have earned from their black gold is already the stuff of legend, so what have they been spending it on if not preparing for a day when oil is no longer king? Furthermore, it’s not as if the oil is an infinite resource. In fact, if anti-global warming initiatives fail to reduce oil consumption, their oil would just be depleted all that much faster. Do they expect the world to compensate them for the loss of that oil then? It’s like asking their customers to pay for the same product twice.