Intelligence is Not Wisdom – A Character Study of BigPika

I wrote this one for BigPika’s birthday.

bigpika: my friend it could ALL BE OURS

bigpika: the HOT CHIXX0RS

bigpika: um dude that's not a word.

bigpika: shut the fuck up dude.

bigpika: dude stop fucking talking to yourself.

bigpika: what the fuck?

bigpika: FUCK YOU

bigpika: NO FUC YOU

-one of the smartest minds to ever (barely) graduate from Stanford.

Imagine this - you are peacefully drinking from the water fountain in the hallway of your dormitory. All of a sudden, a door bursts open. From it, a disheveled Asian male pounds the floor, making a beeline from his room to the bathroom door. You hear a loud “OH GOD!” as he enters the bathroom. Presumably relieving himself in record time, he soon blitzes back to his room and slams the door shut, all while your mouth hangs agape over the drinking fountain.

This is a true story from my college days. The guy I speak about is none other than my good friend BigPika. Now, I’m sure the question burning in your mind is “what was BigPika doing that made him in such a rush, denying himself even the fundamental human right to pee?” Well, he wasn’t finding the cure for AIDS, I can tell you that much. He was playing a computer game. And not just any computer game. A COMPUTER GAME YOU CAN PAUSE.

Why would BigPika not just pause the game when he needed to pee, instead of desperately dashing to the bathroom during the cutscenes?

Simply put, if he thought that rationally, he wouldn’t be BigPika.

My friends tell me that BigPika is one of the smartest and best programmers out there. I believe it. He has demonstrated his ridiculous knowledge of computers time and time again by busting out random technical facts. BigPika also possesses the most computer equipment of anyone I’ve ever known. Need a gadget? You don’t go to Fry’s, you go to BigPika. Zephy made him throw away five keyboards – he still has another four. His new Radeon 9800 pro physically fried since he was playing video games 24/7. No worries, he replaced it with a slightly less new Radeon 9700 Pro he had lying around. Spamus wanted some thermal paste to help cool down his system – BigPika had it.

I don’t even know what thermal paste is.

BigPika’s prowess goes beyond simple technical support however – his raw smarts are solid. Last quarter, the team of BigPika, G$, and two other dudes won the best project contest in the Human Computer Interaction class. He also simultaneously placed 3^rd in the Othello contest of the grad-level artificial intelligence class (one of the hardest classes at Stanford). After this experience, AllSoundSame (who surely was belittling his own contribution) said “if there's anything I've learned from this week, it's that dominating a tournament of uber-nerds involves nothing more than a couple lines of code, a nice dry erase board, and BigPika.”

But as epic as BigPika's smarts are, his errors in judgment are somehow even more legendary.

Several times we would be on the way to dinner when we’d stop by BigPika’s dorm room. We’d say hi, and go through the pleasantries of checking up on everyone.

G$: “How’s the CS140 program going for you, BigPika?”

BigPika: “Wh… what program?”

G$: “… The one that’s due tomorrow.”

BigPika: (blood leaving face, mouth hanging open)

G$: “Tell me you’re joking.”

BigPika: “THERE A PROGRAM DUE TOMMORROW? WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME!”

All: (mutterings that attending class, reading professor’s emails, or glancing at the syllabus may help)

Most of the time BigPika’s foibles are caused by a combination of his addictive personality and love of video games. The game he was playing when he blitzed to the bathroom was Homeworld, a real time strategy game that he beat in apparently a single seating.

In Super Smash Brothers, BigPika once repeated a single move ONE THOUSAND TIMES in his quest to discover the true distribution of outcomes.

If BigPika can get so into allegedly non-addictive games such as Smash Brothers, what happens when he encounters the most addictive game genre of all time, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? Well, after he bought World of Warcraft (WoW), he immediately disappeared from the real world, playing apparently 24/7. In just two weeks, BigPika wrote in his blog that the game ruined him. He cancelled his account.

Less than 6 weeks later, he had reactivated his account.

BigPika is still subscribed and plays a lot. A lot. I think, though, what really separates him from other gamers is the way WoW has really affected his real life psyche. BigPika no longer uses “IRL” cuss words to yell at bad drivers; he instead yells “PVE NUB!” BigPika no longer compares trees to Redwoods and Sycamores; he instead sizes them up against the trees in Ashenvale or Silverpine. I am convinced when BigPika’s avatar takes damage, he himself feels physical pain. I’m sure Spamus would concur - he’s been woken up numerous times at 4 AM by screams when Warcraft monsters take BigPika’s character apart.

Though I’ve known BigPika for a while, and have tried my best to explain him, much still remains a mystery. How do you know the location of every powerup in every map in Quake, yet repeatedly turn up the wrong way on the same one way street? How can your Warcraft bank space be meticulously organized while dirty laundry and change litters your floor?

The truth is, to know BigPika is to not expect answers to these questions. And as this young man reaches the sweet age of [Age], I expect him to get less, not more, mature. But that really isn’t a bad thing. Knowing BigPika has, is, and will be an unforgettable experience.

Happy birthday, BigPika.

Gamer / Consultant Multiclass

It's before 7:30 AM, I've just landed in [Location], and Avis doesn't have my car again. I am sitting in an uncomfortable stool of a chair, grumpily waiting to see what the rental car roulette deals me. The Avis guy taps at his computer for a bit. Finally, he announces "Ford Taurus."

Fuck.

It's one of those days.

To be accurate though, it's always "one of those days" on Mondays. I'm not quite used to my new life as what's known as a management consultant, but I'm slowly easing into it. Instead of working out of our home office, our team spends four days a week at our client's offices in [Location]. For the last month and a half, I've been flying from [Home] to [Location] every Monday, staying in the Marriot for 3 nights, and flying back home on Thursday. Waking up Monday morning is particularly brutal, as I need to be up by 4:30 am in order to catch a 6:30 flight.

Though honestly, the early morning flight isn't solely responsible for my current tiredness – it's Bloodlord Mandokir. The Bloodlord is a boss in World of Warcraft, Blizzard's enormously successful massively multiplayer online game. He resides in a dungeon called the Zul'Gurub. Last night, 20 of us, some of us friends in real life, threw ourselves at this boss several times in an attempt to beat him. It is a tense battle for our "guild" – new we are to “raiding” Zul'Gurub. At 12:30 am or so, Bloodlord finally dies. Cheer erupt around the room, we distribute the rare items the Bloodlord dropped, and I get myself to bed.

This mix of serious gaming and professional work is one of the daily dilemmas in my life.

Take just last week. I was staying at the Renaissance near the client for the first time. I check in, and as normal purchase internet for myself. Unfortunately, the room I was staying in had access to the internet only through wireless. I thought briefly of the extra convenience of having wireless access, but then soon fixated on how I'll have extra lag when trying to make my Warcraft raid on Wednesday night (this is in fact a scheduled, weekly affair). I soon got myself transferred to a room with a wired connection.

Conversations also occasionally get into tricky territory. The Big 3 of wine, exercise, and cars dominated this team's non-work discussions. I have a limited expertise in one of those (cars), am ignorant but curious about another (wine), and know nothing about the third (exercise). Despite this, I can still navigate and enjoy these conversations.

The real question is whether my team can deal with my own contributions. This is a common one - at a team dinner, the partner asks each of us what we did for the weekend. Person #1 hosted his kids birthday party at the local Swim & Racket club. Person #2 competed in a sailing tournament. Person #3 went mountain biking. Person #4 is me. In truth, I had a great weekend, but what I have done is 1) competed but performed poorly at a Magic tournament and 2) went to BigPika's house to play Super Smash Brothers for a few hours.

While I love and believe in games, I'm not sure there's a non-awkward way to answer the question. I could blatantly lie, I could give the half-lie that all gamers know ("I played some poker"), or I could tell the truth.

That's why I was excited when Slowplay showed up. Slowplay is a fellow gamer who works on the same client as I do. Slowplay played WoW in the past, but quit when he realized it was a destructive addiction. Unfortunately, the day after he met me he started playing again (my bad). Anyway, while I try to reduce the amount of gaming talk that goes on to be courteous of not boring everyone to death, it's increasingly tough with both Slowplay and I hanging around the table. Normally, we get to the gaming discussion gradually, skip around a bit, then move on. My favorite, though, is when there is a lull in the conversation and Slowplay abruptly changes the subject to a WoW detail. During lunch one day he stopped talking, turned to me, and asked. "So… do you have the ZHC?" Everyone else just looks at us quizzically, realizes what we are talking about, then picks up where they left off.

I mean, to me it is still funny that we are sitting in the middle of the client cafeteria, where we are professionals working to solve complicated business problems, when someone asks "Hey … how's that virtual equipment going in World of Warcraft?" Maybe it will be common in the future with the way games are becoming more mainstream, but for now it is still funny.

Though for me gaming will probably never be as productive as actually, well, working, there are some hidden synergies between consulting and gaming. For example, my senior manager once noticed me working on rewriting some bullet points.

"You type really fast," he said.

"Oh thanks," I say. I hesitate a bit, but decide to carry on, "It's actually because I used to play this game when I was younger where you had to type to do everything." I explain that Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) were text-based precursors to online role playing games like World of Warcraft. In MUDs, you only know where you are by reading descriptions of each room, and pick up items by typing "Get Sword" into the console.

I continue, "Yeah so for example if you were walking around outdoors, and someone else who was way stronger than you attacked you, you would need to be super fast at typing 'flee' to run away, and then maybe "North,' 'East,' 'East,' 'South' in order to get to a safe place"

The team seems to enjoy the story – probably because the image of me furiously typing 'FLEE' to avoid getting player killed is good times. Everyone agrees that these games seem like a really good way to learn to type. I am satisfied for a moment as I have convinced yet another small group of people that there may be some merit in gaming.

"Okay, back to the slide," says the manager.

"Sounds good."