One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay the $5.9 million buyout of the contract up front, the team instead made the bonkers decision to negotiate a deferred payment schedule for that amount with 8% interest over the course of 25 years. The result is that the Mets will be paying Bonilla $1.2 million per year every July 1st, starting in 2011 and ending in 2035. And if you can’t make sense of the math on that one, it’s because you aren’t aware that the Mets ownership was one of Bernie Madoff’s many victims, which is why they had to defer the payments.

November 10th is not Bobby Bonilla Day. But it should be named “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.” The classic spy-shooter turned 25 on that date and, for the exact same reasons we’ve detailed for a god damned decade now, you still can’t buy the game.

Here’s the short of it. Due to a series of mergers, closures, and rights purchases, the IP rights for No One Lives Forever and its sequel have been potentially split into three pieces between Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox, like it was some kind of fucking horcrux. I say potentially because nobody really knows who owns what, if anything, when it comes to these games. When one company, Nightdive Studios, attempted to remaster and re-release the game as they’ve done with other titles, along with securing trademark rights to the game which hasn’t been sold in over a decade, all three companies complained that they may have rights to it and may sue over it.

All of those qualifiers are, again, because even these companies themselves don’t know what rights they actually have. And why is that? Well, because the gaming rights deals were inked before digital storage was widely used for this sort of thing and, well, nobody seems to be able to locate the actual paperwork denoting who owns what. Here’s an example of an exchange Nightdive had with Activision.

“So we went back to Activision and, [after] numerous correspondence going back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights, but that any records predated digital storage. So we’re talking about a contract in a box someplace.” Kuperman laughed. “The image I get is the end of Indiana Jones… somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision, maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed, they didn’t have [their] hands on it. And they weren’t sure that they even had any of those rights.”

Which didn’t keep Activision from warning Nightdive that it might totally sue if it moved forward with remastering the game. The other companies made similar noises.

So what’s a person to do if they want to play this game? You can’t buy it legitimately currently. It’s not even for sale anywhere. And a situation like that, which I’ve stated before, completely breaks the copyright bargain. The only option is, as Kotaku of all places notes, to download it for free from somewhere.

Downloading games that are available for sale is piracy. It’s illegal, and it’s not supportive of developers and their art. But when companies have gone out of their way to refuse to take your money for a game for the better part of two decades, it’s a very different situation. Look, I’m not your real mom and dad, and I can’t tell you what to do. But if you were to click on this link (link removed by Techdirt due to us not knowing where it takes you) and download both games (as well as spin-off Contract Jack), you’d end up with modernized versions of these classic games, with mods that allow them to work on Windows 10 and 11, and in widescreen. And what better time to do (or not do) this than on the first game’s 25th anniversary?

At this point (as indeed it was over eight years ago, the last time I suggested just downloading it, to no negative response at all) we have to consider No One Lives Forever to be abandonware. No one is willing to take ownership of it, although those that could do so sometimes mindlessly threaten to intervene should anyone else try to rebuild it for sale. Nightdive were scared off a decade ago, and it’s been sitting on GOG’s Dreamlist since that launched earlier this year (with 87,171 people saying they’d pay for it if they could). It’s far too small of a concern for any of the megacorps who might own it to spend the time and money to work out if they do, but it’s far too big of a concern within gaming history to be allowed to just disappear. Thank goodness for the anonymous heroes running NOLF Revival. I thank them for their service.

It’s the only option the public has to play this game and enjoy this small piece of our collective culture. The real answer here is some sort of copyright reform that makes this situation not a thing. If a company, or group of companies, won’t offer a piece of work for sale, can’t be bothered to understand what they own of it, if anything, and have no plans to figure any of that out… then how can this be copyright infringement?

So happy “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes” Day. Maybe we’ll be able to play this game legitimately by the time Bobby Bonilla stops making his million and change per year.

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new essay: things that arent doing the thing

Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, he became convinced something had happened to me, so he tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.

By the time I realized this was happening, he’d already escalated to the point that I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he’d just create another account or phone number, or find some other way in. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleas. When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided that there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and resigned myself to waiting him out.

Only he never tired. Years went by and I never responded, and still he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more pornographic, more violent. He told me he would come find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application, which he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me.

Enough! I thought, and snapped into action. Except that I didn’t. Instead, I curled up in a ball and cried, and told friends who suggested contacting the police that there was no point, that no one would be able to help as long as I was here and he was in India.

But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short order, he was in contact with the FBI, the US consulate in India, and, with the help of his friend Govind, who has family there, the local police where the stalker lived. Within months, the situation had resolved, and he will never set foot on American soil.

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help with your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety, as the years go by, you think, “hard problem, tried the main solution, didn’t work out.” Perhaps you just accept anxiety as a fixed trait, and your friends playfully rib you about it, which is nice but makes it seem even more like a static part of your identity. But you’re not 20 anymore. You’re, say, a 32-year-old CTO, and when a vital project at your startup doesn’t respond to your first approach, you vigorously try another, and another, trying to learn from every failure. That same persistence and curiosity don’t get applied to the anxiety that makes you suffer at work, though.

You don’t think, oh, I could probably:

• Check on my nutrition and sleep, in a serious way

• Look into supplements and medication

• Throw some resources at improving my rest and recovery

• Ask all of my friends about the best anxiety treatments they’ve ever heard of, or the best coaches/therapists they’ve ever worked with

• Research any emerging therapies designed for people like me

Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.

There is a relevant concept from Alexander Technique that I love, “faulty sensory appreciation,” which I learned about from Michael Ashcroft. The concept is that habitual tension distorts your sensory impressions—rigid stillness via bodily tension starts to feel like “good posture,” whereas relaxed uprightness feels strange, to the extent you might feel like your back is at a weird angle when you’re actually standing up tall. The right way feels like the wrong way. Apparently, this is demonstrated by having Alexander students lie in a position where your legs tell you that you shouldn’t be able to stand up — and then the instructor says, “by the way, you can stand up from here,” and you do.

Similarly, people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships feel hard for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid posture, the strain feels like correctness. But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.

I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel like an issue — it might just feel like sadness or anger, like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve surfaced something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?

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We are at that strange stage in the adoption curve of a revolutionary technology at which two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time: It has become clear that artificial intelligence will transform the world. And the technology’s immediate impact is still sufficiently small that it just about remains possible to pretend that this won’t be the case.

Nowhere is that more clear than on college campuses.

The vast majority of assignments that were traditionally used to assess—and, more importantly, challenge—students can now easily be outsourced to ChatGPT. This is true for the essay, the most classic assignment students complete in humanities and social science courses. While the best students can still outperform AI models, a combination of technological progress and rampant grade inflation means that students who are content with an A- or perhaps a B+ can safely cheat their way to graduation, even at top universities.

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Something similar holds true for the dominant mode of assessment in many science courses. If anything, AI models that have won top marks in math and science olympiads may be even better at answering the questions contained in problem sets in biology, chemistry, physics or computer sciences classes.

For the most part, professors have responded to this problem by ignoring it.

Some are in outright denial: Many academics and writers have convinced themselves that the real flaws from which chatbots still suffer, such as their tendency to hallucinate, make them far less competent than they actually are at fulfilling a wide range of academic tasks. Even as a significant proportion of their students are submitting AI-generated work, they proudly reassure each other that their courses are too demanding or too humanistic for any machine to understand them.

Others are well-aware of the problem but don’t really know what to do about it. When you suspect that an assignment was completed by AI, it’s very hard to prove that without a confrontation with a student that is certain to be deeply awkward, and may even inspire a formal complaint. And if somehow you do manage to prove that a student has cheated, a long and frustrating bureaucratic process awaits—at the end of which, college administrators may impose an extremely lenient punishment or instruct professors to turn a blind eye.

Alternative forms of assessment may be a way out. But oral interrogations and in-person exams with pen-and-paper have gone out of fashion. They are likely to inspire the ire of students—and in any case require a lot more effort to administer. So even for those who are conscious of the problem, the path of least resistance remains pretending that it doesn’t exist.

An old Soviet joke held that “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” At many colleges today, students merely pretend to do their academic work. For now, most professors still diligently read and comment upon the efforts of ChatGPT; but I suspect that some of them will increasingly decide to outsource their grading to artificial intelligence as well. Campuses will then have reached a new stage of AI decadence: the students pretend to do their assignments, and the professors pretend to grade them.

Denial won’t, however, be an option forever.

Over the next years, the technology will continue to advance. Students who have used AI tools throughout their high school careers will start to arrive on campus. They will be much more skilled at using those tools to complete traditional assignments. They may even become adept at accomplishing genuinely impressive things with the aid of these new tools. The pretense that current forms of assignment are meaningful, or that a college GPA gives employers a meaningful signal about candidate quality, will become untenable. At the same time, some of the basic skills students need to master to truly understand their chosen disciplines—or merely become fully-formed citizens capable of reasoning carefully about the world—will rapidly atrophy.

What should colleges do in response? Is the right path a full embrace of AI tools or a much more radical set of precautions against their widespread use?

The answer, I have increasingly come to think, is: Both.

Anybody who wants to make a genuine contribution in the future, whether in the workplace or even in academic research, will likely need to be fluent in exploiting AI tools. It is thus the task of universities to teach students how to make the most full and creative use of these tools, something many of them currently fail to do.

But even in a world in which AI tools become ever more powerful and widespread, basic skills like clear thinking and strong writing will remain extremely important. And this means that the ease with which AI tools can help students evade ever having to do the hard work that is required to pick up these skills is a genuine threat to their intellectual growth.

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Writing essays may feel like a deeply artificial exercise. And of course we are entering a world in which many of the writing tasks that were once involved in white-collar work, from email to business plans to PowerPoint presentations, can be outsourced to AI just as easily as college assignments. Some will be tempted to conclude that academic skills that were once very important, like the ability to write, have lost their significance.

But this ignores a point I have stressed to my students since long before the release of capable AI models: Writing is thinking. When we talk, it is easy to be vague about ideas we don’t fully comprehend, or to skip a few logical steps. The moment you try to commit an argument to paper, such weaknesses are mercilessly exposed. (Indeed, that is why I don’t really believe that people are being honest with themselves when they claim that they are merely bad writers: for the most part, people who are bad writers are bad at writing because they haven’t taken the effort to think through their own ideas.)

If you want to be a successful artist today, you will probably spend little of your time etching still lifes or producing work that involves challenging problems of perspective; but for the most part, art schools still recognize that mastering those skills is a necessary part of your education. Something similar holds for skills, like writing, that could in theory be outsourced to ChatGPT: While you may not need to call on them directly once you graduate, mastering them will give you the skills and habits that will make you much better able to understand the world and act in it.

This is why universities need to put more emphasis than we currently do on both basic skills and on the use of new technologies. The students best able to make a contribution in the future are those who have both been forced to write plenty of traditional essays without the use of digital tools and who are skilled in using AI to push the boundaries of human knowledge

At the moment, universities are choosing a dangerous middle path: they are persisting with old forms of assessment as though they remained meaningful, without leaning into the potential that comes from calling upon the prodigious powers of AI. Instead, they should bifurcate different forms of assessment: In some courses and contexts, students must be forced to prove their intellectual mettle without the use of digital tools. In other courses and contexts, they should be given the knowledge and the knowhow to use these tools to the best effect.

This is what I myself hope to experiment with when I teach two undergraduate seminars at my university, Johns Hopkins, next term. For the first time since I started teaching at the university, I will administer an in-person exam that students need to complete on pen-and-paper. They will have three hours to write three essays about the broad themes of the course, demonstrating their mastery of the material and their ability to make a compelling argument without any outside assistance. But for their final research paper that is the capstone of any demanding undergraduate seminar, I will encourage them to use AI liberally. While they will need to acknowledge and document the exact ways in which they use AI to assist them with that project, I will assess the final product exclusively on whether it makes a meaningful intellectual contribution.

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The most skilled pilots are both capable of flying a simple Cessna that contains little technology and of handling the myriad gadgets contained in a Boeing 787. Similarly, the best-prepared workers and scholars and citizens of the future will both be capable of thinking for themselves without the help of ChatGPT and of expertlyly calling upon the help of such magician’s apprentices when appropriate. Our task as their teachers is to help them accomplish both.

This essay grew out of a short contribution to a forum on AI and education in The Chronicle of Higher Education.