So, of course, I thought: I’d really like to be able to meet her at GDC and hear her thoughts about the event; also, she’s working on joining the game industry, and the industry could definitely use a dose of her style of subversion. Chatting with people over Twitter, I discovered that I’m not the only person who feels that way, so we decided to launch a fundraising effort to help pay for her plane fare and hotel.

And, if you feel the same way, please donate! Or, if money is tight, please spread the word on blogs / twitter / facebook / plus. I’ve been absolutely floored by the response we’ve gotten in the first twenty-four hours of this effort: I knew the game blogging community is a wonderful bunch, but this is really above and beyond the call, enough so that it looks quite likely that Mattie will be able to attend not only GDC but also PAX East and maybe even GDC Online. So, to those of you who have already contributed, my most heartfelt thanks; and to those of you who contribute in response to this, I thank you as well. I’m really glad to be a part of this.

• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

I was really addicted to SpaceChem when I started playing it, and I wasn’t the only one: both Liesl and Miranda had moments when it kept them glued to the iPad. It’s a very good game: I like the programming that’s at the core of it; I like the way challenges build on top of one another; I like the sense of accomplishment when you start a puzzle, realize your standard bag of tricks don’t work, and have to invent some sort of new technique to solve it. And, within each puzzle, there’s a pleasant enough range of possibilities: frequently multiple approaches to a solution (it was quite interesting comparing Liesl’s solutions to my own), and you could go back and try to optimize your solutions if you so choose.

The iPad is a good platform for it. Though the iPad version wasn’t executed perfectly, and there were some real head-scratchers, most notably the lack of a mechanism for resetting a puzzle. It’s bad enough being frustrated enough at a puzzle that you want to start over from scratch, but having to spend a couple of minutes getting to where you can start over is pouring salt into your wounds. So, in comparison to the iPad game I’d been obsessed with over the previous months, it definitely had its warts, but that’s pretty stiff competition.

So: why did I stop playing SpaceChem? Part of the answer is that it didn’t fit so well with my playing schedule: I was doing a fair amount of my iPad game playing in the middle of the night while looking after Zippy, and SpaceChem isn’t nearly as good a fit for that time as Ascension was. I would say that I thought the challenges were excessively linear, except that they built on each other, forcing you to discover new ways to approach problems, in ways that were rewarding and that would have turned to frustration with a less linear approach.

Though puzzles didn’t always strictly build on each other: new puzzles removed possibilities as well as adding them, by removing possible implementation choices. That frustrated me at times, though I’ll also freely admit that it was necessary to make the challenges workable.

I also didn’t always enjoy the constraints of the playing field itself, finding ways to fit my wiring into the space provided. Also, I often didn’t enjoy the puzzles involving multiple reactors: sometimes, that was an interesting challenge (on more than one occasion having me take an approach for quite some distance before realizing that my strategy simply wouldn’t work at all), but often that made puzzles drag on, and just finding ways to place the reactors and pipes was boringly annoying.

I guess that’s really the issue that the linear progression had: it meant that I didn’t have control over the game’s pacing. So if I wasn’t in the mood for the time investment (and, perhaps more importantly, mental investment) of a multiple-reactor puzzle, then I didn’t have much choice: either struggle through it, or put the game down. And one day, I chose the latter, and never picked it up again.

I still think SpaceChem is kind of a great game in its own way. But it’s also one of the very few games that I’ve played (at least since my Apple ][+ days) that has a well-defined endpoint that I made a fair amount of progress towards but stopped before reaching it.

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

The problem is, I disagree quite strongly with the premise here: I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”. My gut feeling is that there’s a core to myself—the way I think, the way I relate to people, the way I approach problems, what fascinates me—that would persist if I were of a different class, religion, race, sexuality and gender, and that this alternate David would be much more similar to me than a random atheist upper-middle-class white male who isn’t entirely sure whether bi or straight is a better label for his sexuality but leans towards the former. (Though, if we accept the third possible labeling of my sexuality as “besotted with Liesl Bross”, then yeah, that narrows things down quite a bit.) I have a hard time even typing the following, given the considerable amount of respect I have for Corvus, so I’m sure I must be misunderstanding him, but I think I find that gloss to be actively offensive on a political level: am I supposed to accept the notion that somebody else would be fundamentally different from myself by virtue of being Muslim? I don’t see any good arising from that line of argument.

Which does raise the question of what I think “fundamental differences” really means. The contrast that the theme gives is kind of interesting: it contrasts “fundamental differences” with “external circumstances”. And that contrast I’ll agree with; it’s just that I think of class as an external circumstance, religion as largely an external circumstance, and race as only important because of external circumstances. Gender and sexuality are more interesting, but for both of those the weight that society places on them has a huge impact on how they affect us. So what all five of those have in common (and are different from the examples of exploring alien worlds and swinging broadswords) is that they’re all categories that have a strong impact on how the societies we live in view us, how people treat us before getting to know us (with that impact continuing after people do start to know us as individuals), that that impact makes itself known from the moment we’re born, burying into our own psyches.

So, in particular, I certainly don’t want to get genetic deterministic: who we are is strongly shaped by external factors as well as genetic traits. But there’s a lot more to external factors than broad societal divisions—one’s friends and family, for example—and there’s a lot more to genetic traits than whether one of 23 pairs of chromosomes falls into the broad bucket labeled XY or the broad bucket labeled XX. (Or into neither of those buckets at all, and of course not everybody’s gender is best expressed by those chromosomes.) I realize that I live in a society where the checkmarks that I get in Corvus’s classification mean that I don’t get actively reminded of how society treats differences in that classification as frequently as people who get a different set of checkmarks in that classification do, so if somebody who gets a different set of checkmarks wants to make a case that those checkmarks really are what I should associate with the idea of fundamental differences, I will do my best to listen with respect and an open mind. (I’m certainly curious what the friend whom I had coffee with this afternoon will think about this post—she has a rather more informed insight into how fundamental a difference gender is than I do.) But right now the idea seems pretty strange to me.

Setting that aside, I’ll try to play along with the theme a little more. Though then I run into another possible difference: are games really most powerful when letting us identify with somebody fundamentally different from ourselves? That’s not implausible, but on reflection I’m not sure I agree: maybe games are most powerful when they allow us to learn something new about ourselves. I’m not sure which way I go on that, and upon rereading I’m probably misinterpreting that statement: I guess it’s saying that, when games are exploring differences, then that exploration is more powerful the more fundamental the difference is. And that sounds plausible enough.

So: what games have allowed me to “experience being other than you are”? That’s kind of an easy question to answer: I have a hard time thinking off the top of my head of any games that did any sort of fleshing out a character where I felt that the character was particularly similar to myself. Looking through the last 25 games I’ve played, Professor Layton was the only one that had a character that I particularly identified with; I was just watching Miranda play Portal, and it’s also not a bad example of a game where I feel a bond with the main character, albeit one whom we don’t learn much about. (I realize that, above, I haven’t given any specific examples of what I actually do consider to be fundamental differences or similarities; as those two games suggest, though, my enjoyment of solving abstract puzzles feels more important to me than my class, race, religion, or gender, though I would never suggest that other people should feel that way about themselves.) Actually, non-narrative games often speak to me more strongly than narrative games do: in some sense, I feel more myself when playing go or Tetris than basically any narrative game, and the same goes for Rock Band. And that last example has an interesting relationship to Corvus’s list of characteristics, given that, when I’m playing myself in Rock Band, my avatar is sometimes gay and sometimes straight. (Always myself, though; and yes, my relationship with music also feels more central to myself than my class, race, religion, or gender.)

But there I go again, refusing to answer the question at hand. Hmm, if I’m looking for game experiences where I felt rather different from the character I played in game, I guess Catherine was the best recent example? Which was a fascinating game, and my fascination was indeed driven in part by that difference. Not so much because of the specifics of Vincent’s nature, though (and certainly not because of any of the characteristics from Corvus’s list, where Vincent actually lines up well with me), but because of the way of dividing up the world that the questions in the game revealed: what an odd list of dichotomies to present, what a strange set of priorities it implied!

And what a strange topic for the BoRT. But it’s gotten me to write something; is that the covert goal here? Which, actually, makes it similar to Catherine: in both places, much of my interest is being presented with a foreign set of dichotomies, one that seems so misguided to me that I’m actively forced to think about something else. And there’s good in that, certainly.

Update: I felt uncomfortable enough about this post to follow it up with another where, I hope, I step back in several ways.

In particular, I Wanna Be Sedated starts off moving between the fifth fret on the E string and the seventh fret on the A string; so there’s our I-V, I guess IV is left out? It stays in that vein for a while, then mixes things up a bit: we see the seventh fret on the E string (II, or ii—it’s an open fifth, I guess I’ll go with II), has an excessively transparent key change that slides your hand up a couple of frets, and also spends time on the second and fourth frets as well (another key change, I guess?).

At this point, my readers who know the song and know a bit of music theory are laughing at me. (I was expecting yesterday’s post to be the one this week to lead to the most feelings of lingering shame for me this week, but nope: turns out that music theory is a more powerful force of shame for my brain than sex.) Because the above is quite incorrect; I figured that out eventually, but it took three or four times through the song before I realized that I’d made a mistake. The first curiosity was wondering about that II in the absence of a IV; and I also was trying to figure out why the shift down to the second and fourth frets didn’t actually sound like a key change. And, as my subconscious was pondering those issues, I realized that the song started on the 7th fret of the A string rather than on the 5th fret of the E string; if we go with my prior analysis, that would mean that we were starting on V.

Which, of course, the song isn’t: it’s starting on I. So if the chord that I’d previously (mis)labeled as V is actually a I, then the chord that I’d previously alleged was I is actually a IV, and that alleged II is really a V. In other words, instead of the song spending a lot of time going between I and V, it spends a lot of time going between I and IV, building up a rather pleasant amount of tension before finally throwing a V in there. (In fact, the fifth fret on A is an E chord, the fifth fret on E is an A chord, and the seventh fret on E is a B chord, so we have the same E-A-B progression that we saw in I Love Rock and Roll, just on different strings/frets, and with the E chord an octave higher.) Basically, there’s another pattern that you can use for power chords to get the I-IV-V progression: I is fret N on the A string, IV is fret N-2 on the E string, and V is fret N on the E string. I guess you use this if you want the I to be on the top, whereas you use the pattern I talked about in the first paragraph if you want I to be on the bottom.

The one thing I got right: yes, there is a key change halfway through. (That one is so ludicrously exposed that even my brain is unable to misinterpret it.) So we get the same pattern but shifted up two frets, on the seventh/ninth frets instead of the fifth/seventh. The stuff on the second/fourth frets isn’t a key change at all, though: the second fret on the E string is an octave down from the ninth fret on the A string, so that’s just I reappearing, on the bottom this time instead of the top. (And the fourth fret on the A string is the exact same chord as the ninth fret on the E string—V in both cases—with the position presumably being chosen to minimize the amount of vertical distance that your hands need to travel.)

Fun stuff: I enjoyed playing the song, I enjoyed learning something in the process. The main technical deficiency that it pointed out was my alternating strumming abilities: Dan Bruno confirmed my suspicion that I was supposed to be alternating strumming those power chords, and while I’ve been practicing alternating strumming individual strings, I haven’t been practicing alternating strumming power chords at all. Something to work on (and something I can practice outside of game), which is good; I imagine I’ll return to the song regularly over the next few weeks to if/how I’m improving.

And if my brain can get more consciously attuned to how familiar chord progressions sound (and feel!), rather than having me depend on mathematics plus lingering doubts from my unconscious, that will be awesome.

It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords possible: I-IV-V, where I is an E power chord (open E string, index finger on the second fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D string), IV is an A power chord (open A string, index finger on the second fret of the D string, middle finger on the second fret of the G string), and V is a B power chord (index finger on the second fret of the A string, ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, pinky on the fourth fret of the G string). So you move your hand between those three positions, with the occasional flourish thrown in.

And it’s the details of those hand movements that got to me. The I-IV transition is performed by shifting your entire hand up a string, reflecting the fact that each of the bottom four strings on a guitar is a fourth up from the next lower string. (Or, alternatively: the tuning on a guitar is chosen exactly to express that I-IV power chord shift; this is different from a violin, for example, where adjacent strings are separated by a fifth instead of the fourth.) Also lurking in this transition is the fact that you play the second fret on the D string in both chords: the chords in question are open fifths, so this expresses that if you go a fifth up from IV, you get back down to I, meaning that an E shows up in both of them.

Next, the IV-V transition. Here, the chords are a whole step apart from each other; that’s expressed in the simplest way possible, by shifting your left hand up two frets while playing the same strings. (So, in particular, the two chords have no notes in common.)

Finally, we go from V back to I. Power chords are open fifths, so the the two notes that make up the I are simply the E that’s its root and the B which is the root of the B power chord that’s the V in this sequence. (In any of these chords, the third note is repeats the bottom note an octave up.) In particular, B shows up in both chords, and in both chords, you’re playing that B with your index finger: and when making the V-I shift, you keep that index finger in place, but shift the positions of the other fingers. (Actually, when you make that transition in the song, it throws in a G (third fret on the E string, which in that context I play with my ring finger) between those two chords, but you can leave your index finger in place while playing that G as well.) This gives that transition a different feel from playing the I-IV-V power chord sequence in keys other than E: if you weren’t starting from an open string, then the V-I transition would involve sliding your whole hand left and up, so none of the fingers would stay in the same place.

So: your hands move less than you might expect, and that fact reflects something about the relationship between the chords involved, that they’re rotating somehow around the B. It’s not the only place where my hands moved less than I might expect: there’s a little flourish that you perform several times, and when I first ran into that in practice mode, I was a bit stymied by it. Eventually, though, I realized how little my hands had to move when performing that flourish, and it became much easier. (This unfolding of quiet simplicity happens to me all the time when learning bits on pro keys; not as often in the past on guitar, though I imagine that will change as I get better and have to deal with more notes.) That flourish sometimes comes after a I and sometimes after a V; in both cases, though, it’s approximately as easy to play, and in both cases that B you’re playing with your index finger is a key note.

Some other bits that struck me while going through the song:

• The flourish mentioned in the previous paragraph involves a pull-off; I can go through the motions well enough for the game to score me as playing it successfully, but when I play it unmuted and plugged in, I sound a lot worse unless I’m very careful and crisp with my finger movements. So clearly something to work on.

• Sometimes, when the guitar part comes in after being quite for a while, you play I, and sometimes, you play V. Which I hadn’t really noticed when listening to the song (my pitch recognition can clearly use some work!), but once I was aware of that possibility, I could tell which chord to expect: not so much because I recognized the notes but because my brain could feel that the V-I resolution was coming up. Which gave me a lot more appreciation for the Suzuki practice of listening to songs on CD over and over again before playing them: that’s what I’ve effectively been doing by going through every on-disc Rock Band 3 multiple times on multiple instruments before I first started playing them on expert pro guitar, and it’s seeping into my understanding at a subconscious level of how the songs are put together.

• The song has two sections involving lots of alternating strumming. In one of them, where I had to shift which note I was strumming, I had to practice at slower speeds; I eventually managed to play it successfully at 95% speed but not at full speed. Close, though, and I’m glad I’ve started practicing hard bits slowed down and going through the whole solo separately. (I’ll need to do that more and more to have any chance at not embarrassing myself as the solos get less straightforward.)

  In the other (much longer but much simpler) alternating strumming bit, though, I managed to keep my streak going for quite some time; listening to myself plugged in, I wasn’t quite as regular as I would have liked, but still: progress!

• One of my disappointments when playing Beatles Rock Band was how hard it was to play guitar while singing: those are songs I know well, songs I should be able to sing on autopilot, but I generally couldn’t manage that while playing expert guitar. I was curious how much that had to do with the fact that doing two things at once is hard and how much had to do with the artificial nature of Rock Band fake plastic guitar.

  As I started to get comfortable with the guitar part for I Love Rock and Roll, however, I noticed myself singing along with the song during easy sections and breaks in the guitar part; so once my guitar playing got decent, I pulled out a mic stand, turned on a second controller, and had the game score me on both simultaneously. I got 90% on pro guitar and 95% on vocals (expert in both cases), and while I can do better playing either side of that by itself, those scores are more than good enough to support the hypothesis that the structure of real guitar playing allows my fingers to work more on autopilot so I can devote more of my brain to my singing. Which isn’t to say that the two didn’t interfere: it was definitely a good thing that I didn’t have to sing during the aforementioned flourishes, and when alternating strumming bits showed up I generally stopped singing while my brain focused on establishing the rhythm, though I did manage to get back to singing after a few measures of the alternating strumming.

A great way to spend half an afternoon. And I’m only three songs in! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the songs are like in their full glory.

Of course, with that richness comes challenges: hard difficulty asks you to learn much much more on a technical level than previous difficulty settings. Looking back, I started playing pro guitar around March 12th; I started medium on April 3rd, so easy took three weeks to complete. I started hard on June 19th, so medium took two and a half months to complete. Which is longer than anything else I’d tried to do in Rock Band other than my attempt to ascend the pro keys leaderboards, but I didn’t make it to expert until December 4th, meaning that I spent five and a half months on hard, learning quite a lot along the way.

The first thing that I learned was the very existence of power chords: not having any real knowledge of rock guitar in advance, I didn’t realize that, in a lot of rock guitar, you’re playing three note chords that are open fifths instead of major or minor triads. In retrospect, I’m a bit embarrassed that I’d gone so long without being aware of that fact: clearly my ears need a lot more training! But now that I’m aware of them, I’m finding power chords rather fascinating: open fifths are, indeed, powerful to listen to (a fact that is getting reinforced by the current piece I’m learning on the piano, the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering, in which the entries of the second, fourth, and (amazingly) sixth voices all have open fifths that are simply glorious), and on a physical level power chords give my fingers something interesting to do (and in particular force me to be comfortable moving up and down the fretboard) without requiring too much in the way of precision.

I was aware of the existence of barre chords, and expected them to be a bit challenging at first; they proved to be a pain, both metaphorically and literally. The game’s training mode has a set of barre chord exercises, and the first time I tried them, it hurt too much for me to make it past the halfway point of the set. I made it further the second week, but even then I couldn’t finish the last of the exercises, which asked me to shift between barred E major and minor and barred A major and minor chords, on at least two different frets. Also adding to the difficulty was my uncertainty as to how to play barred A major chords: the game tells me to use my top three fingers to hold down the non-barred notes, but I had a hard time getting that to work. (My guitar consultants on twitter said that playing all three notes with your ring finger was more common, and that worked better for me.)

I confronted that difficulty head-on, practicing barre chords every night unmuted for a few weeks. And, sure enough, they became less of a disaster: the next week, I managed to make it through that problematic lesson, and fairly soon after that I managed to make it through barre chords in actual songs without too much trouble. Though, in retrospect, I stopped practicing barre chords outside of game too quickly, and should get back to them: they’re a core technique, they needs to be rock solid, and when I tried those lessons today, I made it through them all acceptably but not flawlessly and my hand hurt. So clearly there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

The other technique that I’ve been practicing outside of game is alternating strumming. I haven’t been doing anything fancy there, just spending two or three minutes strumming as quickly as possible on each of the strings. And it’s made a big difference, though there’s still room for improvement: I’m not as fast or as regular as I’d like, and I suspect my muscles are way too tense. Definitely glad I’ve been doing that.

And there are other techniques that I’ve been exposed to, all of which have quite a lot of room for improvement. I’m better at non-barred chords than barre chords, but not wonderful, and there are many more chord variants out there for me to learn. I enjoy scales when I run into them, but I’ve only barely begun to memorize them. I’m still a lot worse than I should be at playing arpeggiated chords. I don’t get the point of dropped-D tuning: it never feels easier to me. (It probably doesn’t help that it’s most heavily used in metal, which I don’t enjoy listening to and wouldn’t enjoy playing even if it used a standard tuning.) I need to experiment more with how hammer-on/pull-offs sound when plugged in.

But at least I have been playing songs plugged in. Not all the time, and rarely for very long, but if a song is in a standard tuning and isn’t solo heavy, I’d generally give it a try unmuted and plugged into the amp. (After practicing it a couple of times in the standard game mode, of course.) Sometimes, it sounds okay; sometimes it sounds dreadful. I haven’t been diving into playing unplugged, but that’s going to change with Expert.

In fact, a lot is going to change with Expert. You’ll notice in the above that there’s a lot of talking about techniques that I need to get better at, and very little talk about actual music. Which, in its own way, is actually a sign of how rich the game is: it asks me to do enough that I have to concentrate on the details of what my hands are doing, even performing abstract exercises outside of game, instead of going with the flow of the art of the music. And I’m willing to do that exactly because I can now see the art of the music in front of me, and I’m learning quite concretely what I’ll have to do to be able to bring out that art.

And, when I get to Expert, I’ll be asked to play the full guitar parts for pieces. At that point, it will (I suspect) no longer feel satisfying to me to treat the game as a game, to play each piece well enough to get three or four stars and then to move on to the next piece. So what I’m planning to do is pick a subset of the available songs (whether on-disc or DLC, I’m looking for suggestions for the latter) and really dive into them. Play them until I can get the notes right; play them unplugged until they sound good; play them unplugged until they actually sound like they sound in the recording. (I know essentially nothing about how to produce the range of available sounds from an electric guitar.)

If I can get to something I’m happy with after playing a song after an hour, that’s fine, but I’m imagining, even hoping, that there are songs that will reward me practicing them for weeks, that I’ll occasionally return to for months on end. And songs that suggest specific techniques that I should practice outside of game; my next-door neighbor is a guitar teacher, maybe I’ll sign up for lessons with her?

Actually, I’ve already dipped my toe into playing songs on Expert, trying out the first two songs on the disc, and the experience has been wonderful. They’ve already suggested more techniques that I need to master, and brought home just how little I know about producing sound on an electric guitar. They threw extra power chord variants at me, and it made a huge difference being able to hear what those variants sounded like; I ended up playing through each song several times experimenting with different strumming variants, trying (and failing, but learning!) to mimic what I was hearing coming out of the speakers. (And the one time I went back to a song muted after playing it unmuted was a bizarre experience indeed.)

Also: I was pleased how quickly I was able to learn the songs I was playing. Don’t get me wrong: they were both simple songs, each made out of perhaps three basic building blocks. But each building block had its variants, and I had to recognize what harmonic cues meant that I should switch building blocks and memorize what variants appeared when. A very rewarding experience, much more so than the simple effort of trying to get a not-embarrassing score on a song in game before moving on.

So: that’s Rock Band. What about the rewiring, though? For one thing, my taste in what I do in the game has changed. In past entries in the series, I’d mostly concentrated on (non-pro) guitar: I went through songs on the other instruments, but only once per song/instrument combo, and generally stuck exclusively to guitar for DLC.

And I still play non-pro guitar at times—it’s how Liesl and I go through new DLC, there’s been a ton of good songs showing up recently, and I fully support non-pro guitar as a way to listen to new music. But, in general, there are three other ways that I prefer to play the game: on pro guitar, on pro keys, or, to my surprise, on vocals. (Both solo and harmonies.)

There’s a lot going on with that latter choice. Part of it is that vocal harmonies are something that I can share with Liesl, and they’re rather more intimate than playing non-pro guitar/bass together. And part of it comes from psychological triggers. But what all three of those modes have in common is that they’re a lot more musically richer: and I’m finding that I really appreciate that. I want a deeper experience, I’m seeing musical forms that I’m not familiar with as a way to experiment and grow, and, well, I’m breaking down my sense of shame more broadly (those psychological triggers again!), and it turns out that singing is an area of my life where I’m happy enough to perform badly in public. (Or in private, I’m not actively seeking out exhibitionism.) It’s definitely an area where I have a lot to learn: I’m not taking singing as seriously as I am guitar, but I start to actually feel antsy if a couple of weeks go by without me singing at all.

These increased desires to make music have spread beyond the game as well. We bought a piano a couple of months after moving into this house, and it hasn’t been rare for me to sit down at it and play something (usually show tunes, but sometimes Flanders and Swann, sometimes Studio Ghibli music, sometimes classical music) on it. But it also hasn’t been uncommon for me to go for months without touching the piano, and I certainly haven’t put in concerted effort to work on pieces.

More and more over the last few months, however, I found myself sitting down at the piano; and, at some point, I decided: I’m enjoying this, I used to be a not-completely-incompetent harpsichordist, let’s get my fingers working again. So I decided to work on a piece that I used to actually be rather good at, namely the 3-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering: I haven’t practiced it every day, but I’ve done so often enough to make steady progress.

And wow, am I glad that I’ve been doing that. It feels so good to get a somewhat thorny piece back into my fingers, to be able to play another page or two a week without tripping up multiple times a line. Then there’s thinking about phrasing while I’m doing that, playing around with different conceptions of what the music should be.

But then something quite unexpected happened: just when I got to where I was making an acceptably small number of mistakes and was thinking it might be time to move on, the way I was listening to the piece completely changed. All of a sudden, I became much more able to pick out the voices aurally and conceptually, and a lot more possibilities appeared than I’d been aware of before.

Which, honestly, scared me a bit, and I’m still poking at the piece somewhat gingerly. And, in the meantime, I’m working on learning the 6-Part Ricercar, so I have the more straightforward challenge of getting that piece into my fingers while dealing with the musicality of the 3-Part Ricercar. Though “straightforward” is the wrong word for getting the 6-Part Ricercar into my fingers—there’s way too much going on at once in that piece for that to be an accurate description of what’s going on there! And, for that matter, it’s not like I’m not paying attention to the musicality of the 6-Part Ricercar: as I mentioned in the power chords paragraph above, I’m fascinated by places where open fifths show up in that piece. Still, it’s different, and I’m glad I have both sorts of challenges right now. (And I should go to Paris this spring to visit my harpsichord teacher!)

So I’m making a lot more music than I had been. Which is part of a broader manifestation that I want to be surrounded by music. Every once in a while over the last few years, I’d read an article talking about how multitasking is impossible; those articles would frequently bring up listening to something while working, I’d note that I have a lot harder time listening to music while working than I once did, and I’d idly wonder whether that had always been the case or whether my brain had better reconciled those back when I was in school. (I listened to music all the time when working when in college.)

And now, I will say: my brain had changed away from being able to listen to music while working, and it has recently changed back. Not that I never find music distracting: lyric-heavy music poses problems, and it’s certainly the case that I’m not getting as much out of the music as I would if I weren’t working. (And we really should get symphony tickets, or tickets to some other local concert series. Both in general and for Miranda’s sake: she’s getting a good exposure to show tunes and to opera, but I think she’d enjoy chamber and orchestral music if given the opportunity.) But in general I’m finding that, these days, I prefer my life to have a soundtrack, and I’m very much enjoying both diving into the hundreds of albums I have lying around and discovering new artists. (And I’d love recommendations on the latter front, please leave some in the comments!)

Except that sometimes I am finding music distracting in startling and unexpected ways, to the extent that there are several albums that I quite like that I’m finding are quite unsafe for me to listen to work. The first albums that I recognized as such are Mika’s albums; they make me want to break into song (break into falsetto!), which my coworkers would rightfully be dubious about. But, rather worse, listening to them also makes me want to kiss somebody. And that’s something my coworkers would be more than just dubious about, and (given that she’s not one of my coworkers) “dubious” would not be the word that Liesl would choose to describe such actions even were they interested!

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that latter effect. It’s not the thematic content of the songs themselves: last week proved that Brasta Ghibli (a fabulous fabulous brass rendition of Studio Ghibli themes) has the same effect on me, and there aren’t any lyrics there. It’s more that listening to that music fills me with joy, and an overabundance of affection (?) is one way that my brain decides to interpret that emotion.

Three months ago, I went through a manic phase; there were plusses and minuses to that experience, but I’m very glad it happened and, on balance, I miss it. I’m still not at all sure what caused that to happen or why it went away, but, in retrospect, it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that I was writing about Rock Band in the blog post where I first mentioned it. (And also not a coincidence that I was blogging about sex; I’ve got one or two more of those posts queued up too.) So if music can help me turn that switch back on when I want it, that’s great: it would make me very happy to have access to that mental state in a more controlled fashion.

Phew. And I’m only done with hard pro guitar: just imagine how I’ll be feeling when I’m in the throes of expert! Maybe I’ll get inspired by Taeyang and start dancing (I’m quite glad that ash-panic’s tumblr has been turning me on to K-pop), maybe I’ll stop blogging here and spend more and more time singing or at the piano. (Actually, I hope I won’t stop blogging, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I dialed down my video game playing soon, about which more in a bit.) Hopefully I’ll manage to stay productive enough at work to be happily employed; we’re a musical bunch, fortunately, and programming is also a creative outlet, so I’m not particularly worried on that score.

It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, I realized why. To dig into Apple’s place in my psyche, I had to explain my history with Apple products, and indeed with computers in general. And, as it turns out, that takes a while. The result is a post where the tail is rather wagging the dog; interesting to me, at least, but one that could most charitably be described as ungainly. (Feel free to skip ahead to the Apple bits.)

At any rate: the computers I have owned, and why I am fascinated with Apple.

Prehistory

My parents bought us an Apple ][+ in May 1982; I was in fifth grade at the time. That was the only computer we had at home through at least 1989, when I went off to college (my brother got a computer when he went to college a few years earlier); hard to imagine these days. I'm not sure when my parents got a second computer, and I know they continued using the Apple ][+ for several years after I left home, at the very least to run a program they wrote to help manage their finances.

I programmed some on that Apple ][+ (the high point being a text adventure that I wrote), but my memory is that I didn't program particularly seriously on it. I used it to write papers (and for some other writing projects, I went through a phase when I wrote short stories and a novella). And I played quite a few games on it, high points being various Infocom games and the first four Ultima games, but I also think fondly of Robot Odyssey, Le Prisonnier, Lode Runner, and Wizardry.

In 1987 (my junior year of high school) I started hanging out more at Oberlin College, and I spent quite a bit of time in the various computer clusters in the school library. I got to be a rather fluent VAX/VMS user, and (presumably through some of the math courses I was taking?) started hanging out with some computer science majors. They got me interested in learning to program in C and Scheme, and in the 1988–1989 school year I started using Unix more. I also remember helping one of them install GNU Emacs on that VMS cluster. (At the time, the computer science’s Unix cluster actually had Gosmacs installed instead of (or at least in preference to?) GNU Emacs.)

Oberlin College could send e-mail to other institutions via Bitnet, and had a DECnet connection with a half-dozen or so other colleges. (DECnet was pretty cool.) It also had Usenet feeds. It was not yet on any of the TCP/IP-based networks that became the internet.

College

When I went off to college in the fall of 1989, my parents brought me a Macintosh SE/30; I used it to write papers in non-technical subjects, play games, and do some amount of programming. (I wrote my papers on technical subjects in LaTeX; I’m honestly not sure whether I mostly typed those on my Mac or on one of the clusters mentioned below.) Continuing my habits from the last two years of high school, however, I spent much much more time on the various computer clusters around the college. I begged an account on the math department’s Sun workstation cluster, though the sysadmin and I had an iffy enough relationship that I didn’t spend very much time there. I begged an account on the computer science department’s Sun workstation cluster as well, where I spent more time. (There were probably Ultrix machines in that cluster, too?) And I got a part time sysadmin helper job on the general school cluster. (Mostly Ultrix machines, initially with dumb terminals but X terminals showed up fairly soon.)

I probably spent most of my time on the general school cluster: programming, playing around, and doing system administration work. Coming out of that, I was much more comfortable on Unix than in any other computing environment, and had installed various bits of free software (mostly GNU tools of various sorts) over and over again. I also had a friend from Oberlin who was then working at the Free Software Foundation, so I was getting a strong free software philosophical dose from him as well.

I took a couple of computer science courses (an intro theory course, a compilers course), but not many: mostly because I could learn how to program computers just fine on my own, partly because I had enough other interests competing for my course time. Also, at that time Harvard’s computer science department didn’t have the buzz that I’d gotten from Oberlin. (Though there were students and faculty members that I learned a lot from, don’t get me wrong.) I was into programming languages and compilers at the time: I did some sort of undergrad research project on compilers, I was a course assistant for a few courses on programming languages and compilers, and I spent three out of my four summers during that period doing programming-related work. (One summer at MITRE, one at DEC, one being a course assistant at Boston College; the fourth summer was spent at a math research program whose main benefit was that I became a not-hopelessly-incompetent cook.)

During this period, I had access to TCP/IP-based networks: ARPAnet had evolved into NSFnet, with the internet coming. The web poked its head out right at the end of this period, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me that it was anything more than a peer to the various other network protocol that were floating around at the time.

Life as a Mathematician

Then, after a year’s interlude, I went to math grad school in 1994. I still had my old Mac, Jordan bought a new Mac (that I played Marathon on), Liesl bought a 486 machine running Windows 3.1 (I played Myst, System Shock, and Dark Forces on that), and at some point I was given an X terminal that I could use at home. Most of my computer time was spent on the math department machines, though; and I essentially wasn’t programming at all during this time period. Also, a friend of mine gave me an NES, which started me on a spiral of depravity that I still haven’t emerged from. (One of the first things I did after getting my postdoc acceptance letter was to get a Nintendo 64; good thing my thesis was almost completely written by then…) Actually, though, my dominant leisure activity during that time period was reading books, I averaged more than a book a day over the course of grad school.

I can’t remember if I moved my old (9 years old at the time!) Mac with me when we went to Stanford in 1998; we moved Liesl’s computer, but I’m not sure if we ever turned it on. In general, I did my computing on the machine in my office at the math department; I can’t remember its specs (though I believe it had 4 GB of hard drive space?), but it was running an early Red Hat Linux version. I still wasn’t programming significant amounts: I was busy being a mathematician and a parent (Miranda was born in 1999), trying to figure out how to teach well, and playing video games, doing the latter almost exclusively on consoles instead of computers.

Returning to the Apple theme that triggered this post: during this period, my interest in Apple was quite low. I had a Mac, but barely used it; I certainly wasn’t going to use Windows machines, but really my focus was on Unix. (So, in terms of recent computing deaths, Dennis Ritchie’s is a lot more relevant.) I was at least partly anti-Apple at the time: the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom had boycotted Apple because of their use of user interface patents, and that had an effect on me.

Transitioning

In 2002, academia and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t as good a fit as I had thought. Fortunately, the Stanford math department was willing to let me hang around for another year; so I spent half my time that year teaching calculus and half my time brushing up my programming skills. I learned C++ and Java (object-oriented programming was far from dominant when I was an undergraduate), and contributed a fair number of patches to GDB.

It also became clear that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my employer to provide my computing resources; so I bought domains to use for my various internet presences, and, for the first time since 1989 (13 years!), acquired a new computer. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, a behemoth that was barely portable (and that, fortunately, I rarely needed to carry anywhere); we set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and I spent the vast majority of the time on the Linux side.

Also, befitting my academic nature, I started reading books and going to talks. A lot of the books that I read were C++-specific (and I learned a lot from them, C++ is an extremely interesting language); in terms of non-language-specific books, the refactoring book had a big impact. The talk that had the most impact on me was one that a couple of researchers in a local corporate think-tank (?) gave about their experiences with something called “eXtreme Programming”; that was my first exposure to Agile software development.

The GDB work led to consulting work at a startup called Kealia, and I started working there full-time when I left academia in the summer of 2003. We got acquired by Sun a year later; soon after the acquisition, I became a manager, albeit a manager who spent a lot of time programming.

Agile

I spent a lot of time trying to understand Agile software development over the next five or seven years. At first, I was just trying to do this on a personal level, practicing refactoring and trying out test-driven development. Kealia’s legacy code provided some interesting challenges on the former front; the company also already had a bit of a testing culture when I showed up, and we experimented with going farther in that direction. And becoming a manager got me interested in other aspects of Agile: the more explicitly people-focused aspects, the planning aspects. And, as part of planning, the idea that programmers don’t make all of the design decisions (which was quite a change from working on GDB!): other people have a better idea of what the end users really value, what will work well in their context.

As an academic, I’d been quite ivory tower (at least aside from my interest in teaching); that changed. I was working at a startup which got acquired by a larger company that had suffered a lot over the last few years; part of startup life is trying to figure out how to make your business work, and Sun was trying to figure that out at a larger scale. Sun also put enough resources behind StreamStar (Kealia’s video server project) that we had quite a lot of room to experiment with different business strategies, trying to find one that would stick. (Far too much room: the fact that Sun didn’t cancel StreamStar years before I eventually left was a sign of Sun’s own management problems.)

My boss was a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theories, and I got to see both sides of the difficulties of disruption first-hand. Sun was a large company that was already far along the path of being disrupted by commodity hardware running Linux, and was trying to figure out how to deal with that; StreamStar was trying to disrupt the existing broadcast television infrastructure, replacing it with IP-based solutions. In neither case did we navigate the difficulties well, but I have quite a bit of sympathy for both sets of difficulties: surviving being disrupted is extremely difficult, and when it comes to broadcast television, you have to deal not only with the existing technological infrastructure but with the existing broadcasters and existing content providers. So it’s not surprising that we failed to disrupt broadcast television delivery, whereas Youtube was much more successful with its end run around the last two issues.

During this time, I won an iPod (one of the hard-drive based models), and a couple of years later, an iPod Nano at company raffles. I wouldn’t have bought the first iPod on my own, but its presence made my jogging a lot more presence; I probably wouldn’t have bought the iPod Nano on my own, but I was quite surprised how much more I liked its small size, the lack of skipping, and the general elegance of its design.

Our Dell laptop died in 2006, and had been showing its age enough by then that I was already planning to replace it. For my own Linux use, we got a Sun Ultra 20; to have a computer that Liesl could use and that I could run iTunes on, I got a MacBook Pro. This was the first model after the Intel transition; I felt more comfortable going back to the Mac instead of having a Windows machine around, and the fact that there was now Unix underneath MacOS was a real bonus. (Incidentally, back in 2003 I’d turned down a job offer working on GDB for Apple: I like Unix and the GNU toolchain, but I wasn’t really interested in specializing in the latter.)

At some point while I was at Sun (probably in 2008), I got an iPod Touch. That was really a revelation to me: it was wonderful having a little computer in my pocket, one that was already fairly versatile and was becoming more so every year; I had Wi-Fi access most of the places I spent time (there was even spotty Wi-Fi available from Google when wandering around Mountain View), but I could tell that having a phone network provide almost constant network access would be so much better.

But more than that: Tweetie made me sit up and take notice. That was the Twitter client that eventually became the first-party Twitter client; and despite running on this quite small device, I far preferred using it to any Twitter interface I had available on computers that didn’t fit in my pocket. That didn’t make much sense to me; clearly there was something going on with design that I didn’t understand and that could make a real difference.

At this time, I was also getting more and more tired with having Unix on my desktop. I love Emacs, but it’s stuck in the stone age in so many ways: what really drove that home was once when I fired it up on a machine where I didn’t have my standard .emacs file and realized that, by default, Emacs put the scroll bars on the left. That may have been a perfectly reasonable decision when it was first made, but it wasn’t any more and hadn’t been for at least a decade; did I really want to be working with tools that were so willfully ignorant about design conventions? GNOME had helped civilize X Windows, but it had only brought the experience up to a minimally acceptable level, and even so there were too many non-GNOME applications around.

Reaching the Present

So, when I started work at Playdom, I asked for a Mac for my work machine: that way I could have a Unix command line and tools combined with a GUI that accepted the idea that design was a virtue. Which the IT department was oddly hostile to: you’d think that a company with a large contingent of graphics artists that deploys software to Unix servers would be a natural fit for Macs, but Playdom had its quirks, and its IT department was definitely one of those quirks.

At around this time we got a second Mac laptop at home, and I got an iPhone. (My first cell phone; I am a luddite at times.) The Ultra 20 died; I decided that I wanted to continue to run a Linux server (e.g. to host this blog), but that I would prefer to interact with it through an ssh connection, so I got a virtual machine at Rackspace. Also, I was getting older, and carrying around a laptop during GDC 2010 put a surprising strain on my back; the iPad had been announced, so I decided I’d get one the next time I went to a conference. Which happened sooner than I expected, since I decided to go to GLS later that spring.

My back thanked me for the iPad purchase; but my psyche thanked me as well, to a surprising extent. I found that I preferred reading e-mail on the iPad to reading e-mail in a web browser, and that I far far preferred reading blogs in Reeder than through Google Reader’s web interface, whether I used the latter to go to the blogs’ web pages or stuck with the RSS feed. In both cases, the iPad acted like a wonderfully adaptable piece of paper: the words I wanted were right there, with enough style to be pleasant (unlike the Google Reader web interface) but without any surrounding crap (unlike blogs’ web pages). Having a screen that was much smaller than computer monitors that I was used to, and that was in portrait mode instead of landscape mode, turned out to be excellent for letting me focus on what I was reading. (As it turned out, I even slightly prefer reading blogs through Reeder on my iPhone over reading them through a web interface on a standard computer, despite the rather-too-small size of the former’s screen.)

In early 2011, one of our laptops died; rather than replace it with another laptop, we got an iMac and a second iPad. Our current technology roster is an iMac and a MacBook (one of the white plastic ones); two iPads (one from each generation); three iPhones (one from each of the last three generations, though the oldest one is being used by Miranda as an iPod Touch instead of as a phone); a virtual machine located elsewhere running Linux; and half a dozen game consoles. (My rate of technology purchases has increased enormously since 1998.) Also in 2011, I started working at Sumo Logic; as is typical in startups around here (at least judging from the ones I’ve interviewed at), it’s largely a Mac shop for development (with deployment happening on Linux virtual machines), and my coworkers generally prefer various Apple products for personal use, though there’s more variation on the personal side.

So: that’s the computers and other technology that I’ve used over the course of my life. Apple played a large role when I was young and more recently, but in the middle there was a long phase where my norm was Unix + GNU toolchain, with a strong free software ethos. Why did I shift out of that, what’s behind my recent fascination with Apple’s products and, increasingly, Apple as a company?

Habitable Software

The first is the concept of “habitable software”. I talked about this last year: the idea is that there is software that my brain shies away from using, and there’s software that I actively look forward to using, where the thought of using it relaxes me or brings a smile to my face.

I actually think that console gaming gave me my first nudge in this direction. You stick the cartridge into the machine, you pick up a controller with a relatively constrained set of inputs, you turn on the machine, and it just works. Note too that a console controller, unlike a mouse and a keyboard, is explicitly designed for the task at hand: yes, gamepads may have a few too many or too few buttons and sticks for a given game, but at least it’s focused on the domain of playing games. (Hmm, maybe the controller/game match is why I think back on text adventures with so much fondness?) I keep on installing Windows on machines with the thought that I’ll finally play the many important PC games that are missing from my background; and I keep on deciding that no, I really don’t want to put up with the crap that PC gaming makes you deal with.

But shifting from X Windows back to the Mac also gave me a huge shove towards being sensitive to habitable software; and going from the Mac to iPhone/iPad software like Tweetie and Reeder was, in its own way, just as large a leap. Every time I use X, I find something that feels wrong; a Mac feels neutral, but I don’t generally look forward to turning it on; Tweetie and Reeder make me actively happy. It’s not just software that I’m learning from, either: I was surprised how much happier I was with the iPod Nano because of its small size, light weight, pleasant screen, and lack of skipping.

The Unix command line also makes me actively happy. It’s wonderfully coherent; for certain tasks related to writing and, especially, deploying software, it’s just what I want, I love the interface that it presents to me. So it’s no coincidence that I do my programming on machines where a Unix terminal window is one key combination away, and that I use virtual machines running Linux to deploy software on: I feel completely at home in those contexts when working on those tasks.

Designing Software

Habitability is how I like to express the importance of design in software to me as a user. But I’m a programmer as well, so I see design from that side as well.

When I was younger, I spent much of my programming time concerned with tools for programmers: thinking about programming languages and compilers, working on GDB. In those contexts, I didn’t have to think too hard about design: I was an acceptable proxy for the end user for the software, so if something felt good for me, then that was good enough.

That’s a relatively unusual subset of software, however; as I started to work about other kinds of products, I realized that my design instincts wouldn’t do a very good job. And, at the same time, I got interested in Agile: and one of Agile’s main tenets is that design concerns (personified as the “Customer”) are paramount when deciding what to work on. Not that the technical details aren’t important as well—you get great benefits from keeping your code flexible and well-architected—but ultimately it’s not programmers’ jobs to decide what’s important to present to the users.

Even though it carves out a space where design can happen, Agile isn’t actually very good at giving you advice at how to design well: specific recommendations are much more focused on the programming side of things (e.g. refactoring, test-driven development) or the programming/design interface (estimating, iterating) than on the design side of things. Also, my talents and instincts are much stronger on programming than on design: I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got some understanding of what’s involved in writing code that’s clean and functional from a technical point of view, whereas I have much less understanding of what’s involved in developing a product that people are actively happy to use.

And, to produce really great products, I’m not convinced by Agile’s engineering/customer representative split. The Lean concept of a Chief Engineer who’s immersed in both worlds seems much more powerful to me, and I see around me wonderful pieces of software written by single individuals, or startups (including Sumo Logic!) run by people with both a vision for what they want to produce and the technical chops to help bring that into existence.

Apple can probably be argued as providing evidence on either side of the argument about that split, but there are clearly individuals who made a huge difference in its products. Apple also points out how ludicrous it is to label the designer as the “Customer” if you really want to produce something new and great, and at the limits of the analytics-focused mindset that I saw so much of at Playdom; in general, Apple’s approach to iteration seems interestingly different from yet related to Agile norms. And their systems approach gives Apple many more design knobs to turn than they would if they were exclusively a software company. (Or exclusively a hardware company, of course.)

Business Success

Back in my academic days, I didn’t care about practical applications of my research. When I started working for startups, though, that changed: if you don’t have your eyes on how you’re going to make money out of your startup, you’re doing the wrong thing. (Not that startups don’t have a heavy dose of ego satisfaction in them, of scratching your own itch.)

Once I started paying more attention to making money, it turns out to be totally fascinating: if you like complex systems, capitalism is full of them. Just figuring out cash flow: where money is coming in, where money is going out, the difference between those two in quantity and in in time. So many possibilities there!

Apple’s business success over the last decade is staggering, of course. But they are fascinating far beyond their simple profit figures: the consequences of their systems approach to design, their use of their savings to buy vast quantities of parts from their component vendors (and even to allow those vendors to purchase tooling!), the role of their physical stores, the list goes on and on. There’s still a stereotype of Apple as making overpriced products, but their competitors are finding it very difficult to build products with the hardware quality of the iPad or MacBook Air while maintaining any sort of profit margin at all.

Of course, lots of startups aren’t focused on being profitable: Silicon Valley is full of company that are trying to get eyeballs, hoping that profitability will come somehow, and perfectly happy to sell the company to somebody else who can worry about that problem. We see echoes of this in the Android / iPhone fight, and these days I’m generally more interested in making money than having users without a good business model; but the iPod shows that you don’t always have to compromise, that you can win on both fronts.

Disruption

I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory above: living in Silicon Valley, there’s no end of startups trying to remake an industry, no end of once dominant companies that stumbled, got bought, died.

Apple looked like it was following that latter trajectory; it pulled out of its decline like no other company. And did so in a very interesting way: not only did it disrupt other industries, it also disrupted itself, with the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales and with the iPad cannibalizing laptop sales. This is extremely difficult to do: existing successes almost always lead to institutional antibodies that attack new products, leaving that success to newcomers.

Over the last decade, we’ve all become aware of disruption; the companies that can figure out how to repeatedly harness the powers of disruption will be the ones that flourish (the ones that survive at all!) over the next few decades. They will have to learn from Apple. And if I’m going to continue to build a career working at exciting companies, I’m going to want to learn from Apple, too, to help me figure out what sorts of qualities to look for the next time I’m on the job market, to pick employers that will disrupt successfully!

Repeatable Creativity

Disruption aside, though, there’s something amazing about Apple’s run of products over the last decade: one interestingly new product after another. I wish I knew how they did that.

It’s easy to ascribe this to a solo genius theory; but, while I don’t want to minimize Steve Jobs’s contributions, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Pixar is another relevant datum: they’ve also managed to be consistently creative, and they continued to do that after Jobs sold the company to Disney. Perhaps because of the domain, people don’t credit Jobs with the same influence on Pixar’s repeated creative success as they do with Jobs; but, to me, the two companies suggest that Jobs has learned something about helping groups to innovate repeatably in a way that goes well beyond his personal contributions.

Over the last couple of years, stories have come out about some sort of Apple University, which seems to be trying to systematize those ideas. This reminds me of Toyota’s conscious efforts to improve themselves as a learning company; Apple is, sadly, much more secretive than Toyota, but I hope more of Apple’s methods will become public over the next decade. And, of course, I hope that Apple will be able to continue to innovate over the next decade, that their innovation really is due in part to a systematizable process.

Bad Apple

During the mid-90′s, I was down on Apple. I hoped that had gone away with the new decade, however: their user interface patents had gone away, and they were active open source contributors, though that clearly wasn’t the company’s main focus.

Unfortunately, those problems have come back in spades. By far the one that I find most distasteful is their aggressive use of patents: I think software patents are bad for the industry, bad for the world, and while I’m more and more bored by other companies that seem to largely be trying to produce knockoffs of Apple’s products, I very much support allowing those companies to do so.

Apple’s recent systems are also much more closed than computing platforms I’d used before then. I would expect that to bother me; for whatever reason, though, it actually doesn’t particularly. Certainly it would if I didn’t have ample access to other computing platforms, or if the tools to develop for iOS platforms weren’t so readily available; and while Apple teeters on the edge of behaving in a manner I find unacceptable in their application approval process, for whatever reason I generally think they’re okay. (I’m actually more worried about Amazon’s behavior in that regard.)

I’m being ungenerous in saying this, but: these days, when I read Richard Stallman complaining about Apple’s closed systems, part of my brain interprets that as RMS wanting it not to be his fault if other people don’t have software they want to use: RMS has made an open system, it’s other people’s fault if they don’t take advantage of that. These open systems are, in all serious, a great good: but actually having good software on your computer is also worthy, and having software that’s a joy to use is a great good. It’s fine if having well-crafted software for the non-programming public isn’t RMS’s concern, there’s no reason why it should be; but I see him as a single-issue voter whose issue is no longer dominant to me, and who is willfully blind to other issues that are important to me.

To those of you who have read this far: I salute you. And to those of you who don’t like Apple’s products, who don’t care about what Apple has done as a company: that’s great, there’s no reason why others’ interests should be my own. And there’s no question that company has flaws, does things I really don’t like. But I’m fascinated for many reasons by what Apple has done over the last decade, and I fully expect to be trying to sort out the implications for much of the next decade.

Some Jobs-related posts that I particularly enjoyed:

• John Shook asking Was Steve Lean?
• Another lean-focused post, this time from Evolving Excellence
• Horace Dediu on what Steve Jobs didn’t do.
• A podcast reminiscence from John Siracusa.

So I’m pretty obsessed with the game: I’m writing this post not because I’m done playing it but because my playing the game has reached a steady state where I mostly only play during idle time in my day. I see its mechanics everywhere: some friends and I were toying with the idea of designing a game a month or two ago, and whenever they suggested a new theme, bits and pieces of Ascension mechanics would immediately come to mind, fitting themselves to that theme. But there’s also the surprisingly tactile feel of the iPad port, the way it lets you express the different gameplay actions by flicking cards in appropriate directions. And there’s the number of games I played in the middle of the night, passing the time until a round of achy Zippy squeaks subsided.

My obsession really took hold when I became fascinated with Arbiter of the Precipice. Most games have growth as their strategy for improvement: you get more and more powerful, but the new powers are layered on top of the old. With the Arbiter, however, you’re explicitly curating your hand by pruning less powerful cards. If you’re really successful at that pruning, you can end the game with a deck that contains none of the cards that you started with, but that contains powerful enough cards (and cards allowing enough further draws) that you can go through your entire deck every turn, grabbing the best cards off the board in the process.

That curation by pruning is still my favorite strategy: if you can pull it off, you can dominate with it like no other strategy. (Though a pure Mechana Construct strategy can come close if all the cards fall right.) But you frequently don’t have that choice: you have to live with the cards that appear on the board, the cards that remain on the board after your opponent has taken her turn. Which initially frustrated me in comparison to Dominion, but now I very much appreciate that aspect of the game: it’s all about contingency, about living in a web of possibility, about your feel for how your current hand and the cards on the board affect that web. A month ago, I wished I could reason better about that web, trying (failing!) to turn those possibilities into probabilities; these days, I just play by feel, going in whatever direction the cards are pulling me.

It’s a quite different game with three or four players than with two. When your turn comes around again in the larger games, the board will look completely different: not only do you want to actively curate your hand, but curating the board by banishing cards lest your opponents get them becomes increasingly important. And games take fewer turns, so you have less time to build your deck, you have to be prepared to jump on monsters when they appear. (You can’t count on constructs you’ve played hanging around, either.) The contingent nature of the probability web really reveals itself in those situation; I’m starting to get my footing with three players, but I still have a lot to learn; four-player matches are a complete mystery to me.

Playing with humans instead of AI opponents adds yet more wrinkles: the AI is more focused on maximizing its score improvement every round, while humans are better at building up latent power in their hand. So games with other people are more vicious, more visceral: your opponent is much more likely to grab that expensive card that you had your sights set on, where you’d just drawn a hand that would enable you to purchase it on your next turn.

And, with humans, there’s the different flavors of online multiplayer. Most of the time, my games with friends are spread out over the course of days, making a move every few hours: delightful, painful anticipation. Sometimes, though, we’re online at the same time, and blow right through a game. At first, I preferred that, but it’s really a double-edged sword. Because Ascension cards are a very low-bandwidth mode of communication with a friend: without even text chat, let alone voice chat or talking face to face, I’m left wanting to say more, I’m wondering why we’re playing together online instead of hopping in a car and spending time together in person.

I think I used to care more about game narrative than game mechanics, but the half year I spent playing almost nothing other than Minecraft and Rock Band 3 flipped that preference around. And Ascension feeds into that in spades: it’s an exposed presentation of a handful of mechanics (buying cards versus defeating monsters, cards that give you extra draws, banishing cards from your deck, banishing cards from the board, constructs versus heroes, the ticking down of the clock, cycling through your deck, the limited and random selection of available cards to purchase), you can go through a game in five minutes, and you can explore those mechanics through hundreds of games over the course of a month. (I’ve played Ascension many more times than any other board game.) So you spend a lot of time getting to know those mechanics, getting a feel for the implications of the different choices.

And mechanics beget narrative; if the mechanics are sparse and orthogonal enough, that narrative in turn begets metaphors for your life outside the game, even suggestions for how to live. Build up your hand, increasing your powers in the future. Do that as part of an explicit strategy of curation: pay attention to the mixture of techniques, set up reinforcing possibilities, prune actions that once served a purpose but are no longer as valuable. Seek out techniques that bring immediate value while not closing off further possibilities. But don’t be afraid to take immediate profit when opportunities present themselves.

Be aware of the most glorious success possibilities; be aware of the unlikeliness of succeeding with a strategy that focuses on them, even if the cards on the board seem to support such a strategy. (Mechana Constructs as a metaphor for startups!) But also: it’s up to you how you interpret success, whether you prefer a strategy that maximizes the chance of winning by at least one point or a strategy that has you winning somewhat less often but where those successes are truly glorious. (Arha Templars as a metaphor for lack of ambition: they’re the one card I refuse to purchase outside of the endgame.) Losing one match isn’t much of a setback if you’ve gotten something out of that loss: just jump right back in and play another one.

And always, always be aware of the web of possibilities: know what your hand suggests, know what the state of the board suggests, but be (painfully!) aware that that’s only a suggestion, that the future may bring something quite different from what you hope. And be prepared to find unexpected good in that change! So don’t get lost in that web of possibilities, that web of fantasies: constantly re-ground yourself in the actual cards in hand, in the actual cards in front of you, in the actual person you’re playing with. Or people: and as the number of people involved increases, life gets more complicated, contingency and incomplete information forces itself upon your awareness, to an extent that is at first unpleasant but that has its own beauty once you accept the transience of your plans.

And, as the name of the game suggests, you’ll eventually reach enlightenment if you study it assiduously enough? Seems a bit far-fetched to me, but much less so than it would have two or three months ago.

I play the series as FemShep; in the first game, I romanced Liara. Who survived to continue into the second game; I was looking forward to seeing how that romance would deepen. Among other things, because Liesl and I have been dating or married for twenty (wonderful!) years now; one manifestation of video games’ adolescent nature is the almost complete absence of games exploring long-lasting relationships.

That is, of course, not how Mass Effect 2 works out. I went to see Liara; she was happy to see me, but surprisingly distant. Or, perhaps, not so surprising: I’d been dead for a couple of years, and I’d gone gallivanting about the galaxy for a bit before stopping by and saying hello. A lot had happened to her in the mean time, and in particular there was a big project that she was quite a bit more focused on than on me; to make matters more complicated, that project involved rescuing somebody who was clearly very important to her, and with whom she might or might not have been romantically involved.

I’m not sure if the game let you explore that last question; my guess is that it didn’t, and certainly if something like that were to happen in real life, I would ask the question. But I would ask the question with a sinking feeling in my stomach, I’d be very afraid of what the answer is. Now, to be sure, I was also clearly very important to Liara—she’d gone to considerable lengths to rescue me as well, and in fact that’s how this other person got captured. (I’m not sure if that was made clear by that part in the game, or if it’s something that only shows up in later/external back story.) But my position and Liara’s were clearly asymmetrical: a lot more time had passed for her than for me (like I said, I’d been dead for two years!), and I would never tell her that she shouldn’t have moved on in the interim, indeed I quite likely would have done just that if our positions had been reversed. So: no foul, not the slightest bit of blame; that doesn’t mean, however, that the situation didn’t suck, that it doesn’t feel awful to see your love moving on past you, caring (to an uncertain but frightening extent!) about somebody else.

(Incidentally, one of the things I learned about from the podcast is what happens if you date one of the other characters in the original game: apparently, if you dated Kaiden, he sends you a letter at some point apologizing for having dated somebody else during the time while you were dead. Which, as several podcast participants pointed out, is ridiculous: having your partner be dead for years is in fact a pretty good excuse for dating somebody else! But it’s also very human to me: I can imagine Kaiden being in love with Shepard, wanting eventually to move on after Shepard dies, going on some dates, and realizing that he has a lot more healing to do. (And I feel sorry for whomever he went on a date with!) It’s a different reaction from Liara’s, but to me a no less realistic one; and, in fact, it may not be all that different from Liara’s, because the efforts that she went to to rescue Shepard show that there was something important going on there, and she may simply be feeling a bit numb from circumstances, trying to tie up loose ends and do the right thing by this other person.)

So: no Liara. And, honestly, through most of the game, I assumed that I simply wasn’t going to pursue a romance option. The person I loved apparently wasn’t in love with me any more; I needed time to process that, and in the mean time the galaxy needed saving. So let’s just get on with that, instead of worried about whether or not I’m getting laid.

I did talk to some (but not all, or even most) of my other crew members enough to trigger romance options if those options were present. Jack was one of them: I found her fascinating (because of her anger? her difference from me? her tattoos?), and I got far enough in the conversation tree so she felt compelled to make it clear that she wasn’t interested in me romantically. Which I salute the game’s developers for doing: one thing that bothers me about romance options in video games is how frequently they turn into wish fulfillment, that of course the person you’re interested in will reciprocate if you just do the right things. That’s just not the way that romance works in real life: sometimes you’re interested, even very interested, in somebody who’s not romantically interested in you (even if they may like you very much in other contexts!); it really sucks, but you also have to deal with it and move on, trying not to be an asshole in the process.

Though, to be sure, I don’t think I actually could have pursued a romance option with Jack, even if the option had been there, despite my fascination. Her horrible childhood made me uncertain of how emotionally mature she was; that combined with the fact that I was her captain set up an unbalanced power dynamic that I wasn’t at all comfortable with. (Of course, in real life, just the captain aspect alone would have made me unwilling, but I could have let that alone slide in a game context.) Still, ultimately: it wasn’t my choice.

And then Thane came along, and my heart just went out to him: his wife’s death, the problems he’s had with his son. (Which is another aspect of the game that I like: I’m not just Liesl’s husband, I’m Miranda’s father, and that latter bond is also extremely important to me; yet so few games explore parenthood.) And his dreamy spirituality; also, judging from my choices, I clearly have a thing for aliens! I think my willingness to pursue romance with Thane came more from the former factors than from the latter factors, which I’m not particularly comfortable with: I don’t think that a need to save / console somebody is a healthy foundation to build a relationship on. But it was good enough for me at the time; and, after all, I needed to be consoled, too.

So, Thane it was. But, of course, that’s not the end of the story: the final game in the trilogy is coming out next year, and in the mean time there was the Shadow Broker DLC. There, I helped Liara sort out her troubles, and we started talking again. Which, I assume, means that in the third game I’m going to have to choose between Thane and Liara. (Or maybe not: the series has surprised me once before, so maybe it will surprise me again!)

And, as is probably obvious from the above, my choice (if I’m given a choice) is going to be Liara. Which is a testimony to the strength of the game: I know which way my character’s heart goes, even though I might want to deny it. And the main reason why I want to deny it is because I’m going to feel like a complete asshole for dumping Thane: he hasn’t done anything wrong, and in the conversations he makes it quite clear that Shepard is extremely important to him, a sort of life companion role. Returning to the Kaiden example from above: these are the pitfalls that our brains leave for us, these are the minefields that you step into if you’re dating somebody who has recently been forcibly ejected from a relationship that was extremely important to them, where they clearly have issues remaining to process. For better or for worse, feelings in relationships are frequently asymmetric in complex ways; it is to the series’ credit that it allows players to confront these sorts of issues should they so choose, instead of presenting romances as wish-fulfillment exercises free from consequences.

Quite a game. Until writing this, I’d been thinking of Dragon Age: Origins as the BioWare game with the strongest relationships, and indeed the individual relationships in that latter game do have rather more nuance than individual relationships within a single game in the Mass Effect series. But, as I’m discovering, Mass Effect‘s serial nature packs quite a punch; I’m very curious (and more than a little bit nervous!) to see how the series’s designers will weave these threads together in the conclusion.

Because, while I enjoyed playing Bastion, somehow it never clicked for me. Which frustrates me, because in the abstract I’m willing to accept that it’s probably a quite good game. Lovely art in its own distinctive style; the music was pleasant and, in some cases (Zia’s song) rather more than that; the core game play was quite solid; and the themes of the story were unexpected. Not to mention other nice touches: I particularly liked the narrator’s description of your actions, and how that subtly shifts to describing the world more broadly.

So I’m more or less convinced that my lack of appreciation of the game is entirely my fault, not the game’s: I can write the above paragraph, but it’s all a checklist, not something that comes from deeper within me. And this frustrates me! I wish I knew why it was.

Some of it may be that I’m much more focused on gameplay these days than before my year of board games / Minecraft / Rock Band 3. And I though the gameplay in Bastion was well done, no question, it just happened to not be particularly to my style, and I didn’t see it as particularly reinforcing the narrative. (Anybody want to disagree with me on that last one? I’d be curious to read a post taking the opposite point of view.) Some may just be the timing: in general (and setting aside my weekend Rock Band binges), I play video games at best every other night, and frequently while playing Bastion it was every fourth night; so it took about three weeks for me to finish the game, and I wonder if it would have made more of an impact if I’d played through the whole game over the course of a single week. Or it may be my social positioning: these are important themes, but not ones that are as close to my heart as they might be?

Or it could simply be the random vagaries of my mood; and I’m somewhat curious how I would feel about Bastion if I went through a second time on New Game+. Not curious enough to actually do so, however…

It showed up a couple of weeks ago; and I will say: I’ve been playing video games for a long time, and games from the mid-80′s in particular had glorious packaging, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen packaging like this, the book is just amazing. Here are some unboxing photos (sadly, taken with a not-very-good cell phone camera), just to give an idea of what’s in there:

The top of the box, with the wrapper on

The top of the box, with the wrapper removed

The box opened, with the top of the book visible

The contents of the box

Side view of the contents of the box

From those last two pictures, you can see just how large the box and the book are: there’s a standard DS box as part of the packaging, and it’s a lot smaller than everything else.

Next, some pictures of the book:

For those of you who are really curious about the game, I’m planning to keep a diary of my experiences with the game on my other blog. Of course, being the bookish sort of person that I am, I haven’t actually started playing the game: I’m still struggling with the manual! (The regular DS-style manual, not the book.) But I’ll get into the game proper one of these weeks. (Months? Depends on how much I look at the book first, I guess.)

I back Kickstarter projects not infrequently, but I don’t talk about them much here. And the project I backed most recently, Bhaloidam, was going to be no exception: surely you’re all quite familiar with Corvus Elrod, have been hearing about this project for years now, and have already signed up to back it?

It’s about halfway through the funding period now, however, and the project is halfway funded; so, while I’m optimistic it will reach its goal, it’s by no means a slam dunk. So: if you haven’t gotten around to supporting it, please do so; if Corvus has had a positive impact on your life and your budget allows it, please do so; and, if this is the first you’ve heard of Corvus, then please watch the video above, read through the Bhaloidam blog, and chip in!

Because I think his system is rather important. I love games, including (increasingly often over the last year and a half) board games; but I’m also getting tired of a lot of traditional gaming conventions, and in particular of the way role-playing games try to fit storytelling into a procrustean bed of limited, combat-focused interaction options. So I’d like to see a game that supports storytelling by providing enough structure to guide players’ interactions and supports those of us who aren’t as gifted storytellers as Corvus is while giving as much free rein as possible within those constraints. (In particular, allowing us to tell as many different kinds of stories as possible!) Corvus has been thinking about this for years, the reports I’ve heard of early playtests have been uniformly positive, and I don’t know of anything else out there like this project.

So: read about it a bit more if you’d like, but please do chip in. There are only 14 days left, and I’d really like to see this project reach its goal.

Datum one: when singing in Rock Band, I prefer to sing in my head voice. (Or in falsetto, I’m not entirely sure what, if any, distinction there is between the two terms.) Also, I’m quite happy to sing female parts instead of male parts. This is an obvious (if not unproblematic) metaphor for being gay, and is one (though not the only) reason why I labeled my vocal avatar in the game as gay.

I’ve been singing more over the last month than ever before, and I’ve frequently been having the game chose songs at random. This means that I’ve been exposed to a wider selection of vocal ranges than I get from my standard diet of female singers. So I’ve been spending more time in chest voice recently, and I’ve also been getting used to the transition zone, moving from one to the other.

And if we extend the above metaphor, then my chest voice is a metaphor for being straight, and the transition zone is a metaphor for being bi. Or, indeed, singing as a whole is a metaphor for being bi! I am, as it turns out, okay with that.

Despite my recent experiences, I still prefer singing in my head voice over my chest voice; and, actually, the quality of my tone in my head voice has (I think) improved noticeably over the last month, which I’m quite pleased by. So this metaphor ends up flipping the way my sexual preferences reveal themselves in non-musical contexts. This is fine; actually, I’ll even say that having artistic experiences point at aspects of myself that I don’t normally explore as much, then it’s actively good! And the tension of shifting between the two registers is quite pleasant to explore.

Another datum: most of the time when I pick up a microphone, I ask Liesl if she’d like to join me, and most of the time she happily accepts the invitation. It turns out that our vocal ranges are rather similar; I think she has a note or two over me on the top, but I’m not sure, and I can sustain high notes better than she can; I’m honestly not sure which of our ranges extends lower. (She has a lot more singing experience than I do; I clearly need to work on expanding my range on the bottom.) But, unlike me, she prefers to sing in her chest voice rather than her head voice; I don’t think the same metaphors work for her in this context as work for me, but that fact does rather amuse me.

And: while I am (quite!) comfortable with my preference for singing in high ranges, there is a bit of regret mixed in there as well. Because it’s also the case that deep bass voices make me respond at a quite fundamental level; if I had the voice to carry it off, I think I would probably dive whole-heartedly into lower ranges instead. In general, my type in men has a relatively androgenous face (with a slightly high-pitched voice), but that’s not the only type that I notice. Deep voices (perhaps linked with large beards and bald heads?) can also draw my attention, and part of me wishes that I could fit that mold myself. (I have the beard part down, at least! And I may reach the “bald head” part eventually?)

Speaking of low voices: I really should give the game’s pro bass mode a try. Liesl is our house bassist, and Jonathan fills that role on VGHVI Rock Band nights, but the right sort of bass line makes me sit up and take notice in a way that little else can.

So: my fascination with the physical aspects of playing Rock Band continues. It’s not the only way in which I find singing more sexually charged than other instruments, however. Because: in a band, all participants are not created equal, and in particular the singer is generally the lead. Singing therefore brings out alpha male resonances, which of course has sexual implications.

It’s not the only time the question of the extent to which I want to act like an alpha male has arisen recently: it came up as part of my job search narrative, when thinking about my character build. In particular, I had to ask during the search to what extent I wanted an explicit lead role. (Which I was thinking at the time in the context of a managerial role, but it can be interpreted more broadly; though, actually, managers, at least first-level ones, really don’t do a particularly good job of acting like alpha males.)

The conclusion that I came to at the time was that I didn’t want to be a manager: I like getting my hands dirty programming too much! (Hmm, I seem to have a bit of a hand fetish these days?) As far as some sort of technical lead goes: that’s fine if it doesn’t prevent me from programming (and I’m happy to embrace such a label if it gets me a wider variety of work, I do hope that I have developed technical skills worth sharing over the last few decades), but I’d really rather spend time on a small team where such labels don’t matter, where what matters is how individuals actually behave. Certainly joining a relatively young startup was absolutely the right move for me this time, I’d be happy to go smaller still next time.

So: explicit alpha male labels turn out to be not what I want. But I don’t want somebody else to be in charge, either: I’m fairly allergic to authority, I don’t like being told what to do, though I’m quite happy to be convinced by others’ ideas. If I have to chose between dominator and dominated, I’ll go with the former, but really I’d prefer to wave the anarcho-syndicalist flag, to be part of a commune.

Which is sexually charged in its own way! Admittedly, in a way that I’m not so convinced that I’d be interested in in real life, though I won’t know for sure without trying it. (Which seems quite unlikely.) Going back to musical metaphors: while I obviously love Rock Band, I in some sense feel like an impostor whenever I play it: what I really want is to be playing chamber music with other equals. (I eagerly await Harmonix’s forthcoming game String Quartet; dibs on cello.) (Actually, arguably, I feel like an impostor when doing anything other than playing fugues on a keyboard instrument, but there are levels of imposture.)

Coming back to singing: as I mentioned above, I generally don’t sing alone, I’m much more likely to sing with Liesl. (Probably a good thing, given the topic of this post.) And the game’s vocal harmonies mode means that we have to chose who will sing the lead and who will take harmonies; generally I do the latter. (And I’ve been getting better at harmonies recently, too!) So, returning to the question of whether I’m more dominant or submissive, there’s another answer (and a different one than I gave two paragraphs up; sexuality is complicated stuff), and it again means that I’m not a good fit for an alpha male role. (I may have said earlier on that I “need to work on expanding my range on the bottom”, but perhaps I gave myself too little credit…) All dom/sub joking aside, the vocals that I most enjoy listening to outside of the game are a-capella and choral harmonies: again, a meeting of equals is where my tastes lie.

The third way in which Rock Band vocals are sexually charged: its performative aspect. Rock Band is always a performance, in fact a double one: you’re playing a game where you pretend to be a character who is in turn on stage giving a performance. And with vocals, both aspects of this performance are strengthened: your behavior as a player is much more nuanced than when playing any of the instruments, and the singer is the most prominent person on stage.

Also: singing involves lyrics, bringing explicit narrative into the picture. And, frequently, explicitly sexual narrative: when a video game discusses infidelity, it’s rare enough to throw me for a loop, but the topic is quite unremarkable in pop music. (That’s perhaps the saddest thing about Catherine, that it and Rock Band are such outliers when it comes to the nitty-gritty of relationships, comparing them to the other games I’ve played over the last year or so.)

And there’s yet another performative aspect to the game, one that affects me personally: as I mentioned above, part of me feels like an impostor whenever I’m performing pop music. (“Pop” in the broad sense, as opposed to classical or jazz.) There were only two or three years in my life when I regularly listened to pop music on the radio, and those years are decades in the past; I just looked over the track lists of the three main Rock Band games, and if I’m counting correctly, each game contains exactly one song that I owned a copy of before playing the game. (And my music collection isn’t tiny: I don’t buy music as much as I used to, but I have something like 500 CDs around the house.)

This isn’t to say that I don’t like pop music: I do, and I’ve been listening to it significantly more often than classical music over the last few years. (We really need to get symphony tickets so Miranda can listen to more classical music; not that there’s anything wrong with the show-tunes-heavy diet that we currently feed her!) But there are huge, huge gaps in my pop music background, and in particular Rock Band is full of both bands that I’m aware of but have never really listened to and bands that I’ve never heard of.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s great: the folks at Harmonix have excellent taste, I very much appreciate having my horizons broadened, and I happily listen to the new DLC released each week and buy pieces of it not infrequently. (I’m up to 510 songs in my Rock Band collection, and of course that doesn’t count the Beatles content.) But there are quite a lot of layers built up here: I’m doing a double performance in a musical genre where I feel like an outsider, singing about a wide range of topics indeed. (Or, alternatively: singing over and over about whether or not I’m getting laid.)

So it’s one big invitation for me to think about alternate identities. And not just any alternate identities: identities that are outgoing, identities that are flamboyant, identities that are (I hope) charming at times, identities that are (returning to the lyrics) obsessed with sex. (And that have screaming crowds in support of that last one!)

And an invitation to experiment with those identities: to pick up different ones, to see what I like and what I don’t like, what surprises me, what makes me feel just a little bit uncomfortable. In fact, the very word “experiment” has sexual overtones! (“Experiment: make it your motto day and night / Experiment: and it will lead you to the light”; I eagerly await Rock Band: Cole Porter.)

Le sigh. Back to my singing. Or perhaps I’ll find some other way to pass the time this evening…

After a bit of playing, though, I realized that the colored sections weren’t arbitrary, and that the fact that different sections included different numbers of keys was a virtue: each colored section contained a single group of black keys, along with the adjacent white keys. Once I realized that, I could find notes by touch: I’d move my hands to approximately the right place, feel out the location of the group of black keys, and use that to then feel out the individual key within that color.

That worked for individual keys; what about chords? Well, if the notes in a chord were one apart, it wasn’t so hard to find the chord by feel: find the bottom note with your thumb, say, then move your index finger a little bit higher, skipping one key. It got harder the more spread-out the chord was, however; and eventually, when chords got wide enough I became completely unable to figure out the spacing.

But then I had a happy realization: sight-reading fifths and sixths was okay for me (especially since they were generally the outside notes of a triad, so the note in the middle forms a bridge); larger than that and I had difficulties. But really, if I’m playing an interval larger than a sixth, probably it’s an octave? And a bit of experimentation proved that to be correct; in particular, as far as I can tell, the game never gives you chords wider than an octave. My hands know quite well what an octave feels like, so this realization removed the difficulty from wide intervals quite nicely.

Or rather, it removed that difficulty quite nicely for me. Much of what I’d outlined above could, I think, be done by somebody new to playing keyboards: using black keys to orient yourself, and transitioning from that to playing 1-3-5 chords. But somebody new to playing keyboards can not, I’m fairly sure, simply put down their hands and know what an octave feels like: that’s muscle memory that I’ve developed over years of practice.

It’s not the only such example, either. My hands can play scales without thinking; my hands know all sorts of chords; my hands even know all sorts of chord progressions. (Though I confess, I never expected the practice I put in years ago learning how to play figured bass lines to pay off in quite this context!) I’ve gotten better at reading the game’s notation, but it’s also the case that I can get quite good at the game without becoming fluent in reading that notation: if I start with my hands on a given triad, and see that the screen is telling me that the next chord is a little bit to the right with, say, the bottom note the same and the middle note on a black key instead of a white key, then there’s probably only one chord that’s going to make sense musically given those constraints. So my hands move along to that chord, and can frequently continue for quite some time on autopilot in that fashion.

Of course, sometimes it’s not that simple. In those circumstances, playing through sections of pieces in training mode is illuminating: I’ll be unable to parse a section, but then I’ll go through the section a couple of times, slowed down if necessary, and I’ll realize what the chord transitions are. After which that section becomes trivial to read and play, with a pleasing economy of hand movements.

And I will emphasize what I said above: this makes my experience playing the game quite different from the experience of somebody who didn’t take piano lessons (or harpsichord lessons—yay figured bass practice!) for years. I can see this on the leaderboards: while in general I do well on the leaderboards for all of the songs, I do better on some than on others. On songs that have you playing the same notes over and over again quickly and precisely, I do a mediocre job, frequently failing to make it past the triple-digit ranks. I could be imagining things, but my guess is that people who are very good at playing (non-pro) Rock Band guitar are also good at that sort of piece, and such people are who’s ahead of me on the leaderboard. Whereas if I hit a piece that’s slower but that transitions between chords more frequently, it’s not unheard of for me to get into the 30-50 range on the leaderboard for that song during my first playthrough and not feel like I did a particularly good job.

That’s pro keys; recently, though, I’ve been spending more time playing the game’s pro guitar mode. Which I came at from a quite different background: my only prior guitar playing experience was a little fiddling around with an acoustic guitar one summer during college. So, while I knew of the existence of five or so chords, there are many many more chords that I don’t know, and scales and chord transitions are a complete mystery to me.

As with pro keys, however, touching the instrument and getting my hands oriented was central to my experience. This was clear as soon as I started pro guitar mode: I’d been used to plucking guitar strings, but the game does a lot better at detecting your playing if you use a pick (and that is, of course, much more common for the actual musical performances that are on disc), so that is what I did. And, at first, I had a very hard time just finding the different strings with my pick! In fact, jumping between strings still occasionally gives me trouble half a year into this experiment; it’s amazing how difficult such basic actions can be.

That’s just my right hand, but of course there’s a lot more room for things to go wrong on guitar with my left hand. And go wrong they did: I initially had no idea where my hand should be at any given time. (Incidentally, I think the game and instrument’s ability to give you feedback on your hand position before you strum without requiring you to look at your hand is a huge advantage for learners.) But this turned even the easiest, chord-free mode of pro guitar into a wonderfully tactile and tactical experience: I would be confronted with a sequence of notes, and while it’s possible to approach them in isolation, it’s a lot more interesting to figure out how to position your hand so that you’ll be able to play as many of the notes in a sequence as possible without moving your left hand up and down the fretboard, playing as economically as possible.

And, of course, as you move up the difficulty level, the game throws chords at you, which is its own special experience. Learning the shapes of different chords on their own, learning how to maintain proper pressure to get a good sound out of barre chords, learning how to place my fingers on a barred A chord so that I don’t inadvertently mute strings. Learning how to transition between different chords, first slowly and then quickly, trying to hit each chord in the sequence crisply and accurately. Having common chord transitions slowly seep into my subconscious, into my reflexes; having right hand difficulties return when I need to master alternating strumming. All of the knowledge that’s in my hands for keyboards, I have to recreate when playing guitar.

As I go through the pro guitar experience, I’m constantly impressed at the tools the game gives to train my hands: the multiple versions of each song teaching different techniques, the range of difficulties across songs, the training mode letting you focus on key sections of each song, the lessons teaching you different playing techniques. With micro goals everywhere, with an attainable goal always nearby for my hands to strive for.

Video games have such a strange relationship to touch. By all rights, touch should be central to the experience of video games: your hands on your controller is exactly what mediates your experience, what forms the bridge between the desire for action in your head and the electronic representations that are inside the software and hardware that make up the games.

Yet, somehow, touch rarely contributes to my experience of games. At best, controllers are ready-to-hand, an unnoticed link in the chain of translation of action between my thoughts and my avatar. At worst, they’re present-at-hand, serving to frustrate with their clumsiness, with their lack of fidelity.

Rock Band points at what more is possible. I suppose that, if forced to choose, I would prefer a musical instrument to be ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand. But, to me, both of those concepts understate the importance of hands! I don’t want instruments to be invisible, I don’t want my hands to be invisible, I don’t consider either of them to be interfering with some sort of direct connection between my brain and expressions of concepts in the world. My hands are creative partners, I want them to contribute more rather than less, and I don’t want to sweep those contributions under the rug.

(Is that attitude a side-effect of where I am in the learning process? Do professional musicians’ hands vanish as they’re absorbed in the music? I doubt it, if only because of the vast number of hours they spend training those hands.)

Does this richness of physical interaction ever happen with traditional video games? For me, rarely. But, of course, Rock Band 3 has two huge advantages in that regard: it’s a game that I play obsessively, and it builds on physical interaction designs that have evolved over centuries. There’s not a lot that most video games can do about the latter; the former, however, is more promising. Yes, most video games are play-and-forget operations; but perhaps serious Starcraft players, serious Counter-Strike players feel that their hands guide them at times?

And, of course, despite my obsession, my hands don’t spend most of their time playing Rock Band: they spend most of their time typing. Which they are good at; not the same sort of experience, however. Though it gets a little closer once keyboard shortcuts get involved: using meta-period to elegantly assemble commands in bash, using refactoring keyboard shortcuts to rearrange code in IntelliJ.

I am grateful to Rock Band for its help in reminding me of the pleasures of my hands. (And, if I’m drumming or singing, the pleasures of my feet and throat! The latter deserves its own post, though.) Perhaps I should try out Dance Central next, to move that experience in from my extremities, towards the center of my body?

The name of one of the main NPCs, Logfella, gets at the the problems I have with the writing style. It seems to be going for a combination of stripped down, folksy style and reference to archetypes, and doesn’t get either of them right. This archetype problem continued throughout the game: the moon reference, the Zelda reference, the reliance on dreams all felt to me like they were trying to borrow power from elsewhere, and failing.

The music I didn’t mind quite as actively, but I didn’t like it. And the juxtaposition of the music with the Zelda reference did not impress me; they’re quite different styles, Zelda music wouldn’t feel at all right with this game’s visual style, but if you’re going to refer to a game whose music has such power, I’m going to compare you. And, in this case, find you (quite) wanting.

And then there’s the gameplay. Unpleasant adventurish gameplay, unpleasant movement controls, unpleasant combat controls, and not going all-in on any of that. With a weird “you can only visit these areas during these phases of the moon” mechanic thrown in: not sure who the target audience is for that, but it’s not me.

So: not my sort of game. I liked the visuals, I liked the fact that your character lost health instead of gained health after each boss fight, I liked the fact that your character was offhandedly revealed to be female. Mostly, though, I like the fact that the game is now in my rear-view mirror.

For me, the tone was set with the very first question I got asked in the confessional: “Does life begin or end at marriage?” Which is an analysis of marriage that I would never for a moment consider performing: while my marriage continues to be wonderful, I had a fine life before I was married, thank you very much (and indeed the ways in which my marriage is wonderful are themselves outgrowths of that previous life), and aspects of my life that aren’t tied to marriage continue to be very important to me.

So, with that question, the game made matters clear: not only is Vincent not an avatar of myself, but the game as a whole was coming from a foreign point of view. (And one whose gender politics I found rather distasteful.) For whatever reason, though, rather than having this put me off the game, I found it liberating.

Which, in retrospect, isn’t so strange, and may even be a healthy sign for our art form. In any other art form, I wouldn’t blink an eye if I were asked to follow characters who were quite different from myself, even in ways that I abhorred: part of what makes great art is that it lets me go beyond myself, and perhaps in ways that I can learn a bit more about myself in the process. In video games, however, I don’t find this happening very often.

Take, for example, BioWare games. They’re in large part about making choices that express whom you would like your character to be. They’re very well done in that regard, and Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening in particular ended up taking me to some unexpected places. Ultimately, though, BioWare games place your avatar front and center; and when the Arrival DLC for Mass Effect 2 made me (or: “me”) complicit in actions I didn’t feel comfortable with, the experience was jarring and unpleasant enough to make me quite a bit less enthusiastic about the upcoming conclusion of that trilogy.

Catherine, however, created enough distance right at the beginning to get me over that hump, to put me in a similar space to when I’m reading a book or watching a movie with a protagonist who isn’t particularly similar to myself. In fact, the game turned player choice into a virtue in terms of perspective: while I had to choose one of two in-game options periodically throughout the game, I always had a third mental option of rejecting the premise entirely, and that option felt completely valid to me in a way that rejecting the premise of the conclusion of Mass Effect 2: Arrival didn’t. I haven’t played the game, but I gather that the HD Prince of Persia reboot ended with a similar invitation to reject the premise of a player action; the moral of these three examples seem to be that, if you want to set up such tension, do it at the start of your game instead of leaving the option of rejecting choices until the last moment. (Or take a leaf from Shadow of the Colossus: make your player increasingly complicit throughout the game so rejecting that final choice isn’t really an option.)

In her GDC 2009 rant, Heather Chaplin lamented game designers and players who “fear responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery”. And it’s hard to imagine a better description of the themes of Catherine: our main character does, indeed, fear responsibility and intimacy. But, as it turns out, that fear isn’t paralyzing, he’s not completely mired in adolescence: he’s forced (rather more abruptly than he’d like!) into introspection, leading (with the help of a bunch of block pushing) to intellectual discovery.

The game explicitly reflects this forced introspection/discovery in the form of Thomas Mutton’s “culling the herd” idea. Which is another example of how the game’s surface reading is foreign to me, even bizarre, and with awful gender politics to boot. But, as with other examples in the game, I’m surprisingly okay with that. These themes of responsibility and intimacy are hard ones, with real bite and power behind them; by addressing those themes explicitly but from an unfortunate angle, it creates a space where the player (or at least where this player) is encouraged to think about them, without being bound by the parameters that the game puts in place.

When I finished the game, my first reaction to the surreal turn that the cheating plot took was to be disappointed in the game, even in the medium. Other art forms don’t shy away from discussions of infidelity, but in video games, the closest I get to that is listening to the lyrics of the music in Rock Band. So why couldn’t this game have the courage of its convictions, to dive into a real exploration of infidelity instead of pulling this succubus dodge?

A day and a half later (and, more importantly, 790 words of a blog post draft later!), I’m not nearly as disappointed. Continuing with what I’ve said above: just because the game uses Succubus Catherine to lighten the tone (or at least make it more surreal!), that doesn’t mean that we have to follow the same train of thought that the game presents. In particular, the questions of where the boundary between fidelity and infidelity lies, of how that’s affected by initiation versus reaction or by physical intimacy versus mental intimacy, and for that matter of whether you accept the fidelity/infidelity dichotomy as real and/or important in the first place, are all important and serious questions, with no simple answers.

The presence of Succubus Catherine provides one way of approaching these questions, but gives lousy answers while doing so; one tried-and-true teaching technique, however, is to give your students such bad sample answers to questions that they can’t help but poking holes in those answers, improving on them and surprising themselves with what they learn in the process. So, to that end, maybe Catherine‘s approach gives better results to such questioning than an approach coming from a place closer to how I normally think about these matters? I would be curious to play a game that addressed infidelity in a more realistic (in a more painful!) form, but I’m not sure that it would be as effective as such depictions can be in more voyeuristic artistic media: I don’t know how such a game would navigate between the Scylla of avoiding meaningful player choice and the Charybdis of removing the power of that depiction by letting the player not be an asshole.

That last uncertainty is, doubtless, more a failure of my imagination than anything else. And this game has certainly left me curious about where the Persona team is going next. The only other game of theirs that I’ve played is Persona 3; that game was wonderful in its own way, but the variety of social links was perhaps a bit overwhelming, and I didn’t find as much space for interpretation in that game as I did in Catherine. But the variety of links in Persona 3 makes it very clear that the team is willing (eager!) to address a whole range of interpersonal questions; I want to see more.

(On which note, I can’t believe that I’ve written over a thousand words on Catherine and not yet mentioned the fear of becoming a parent. “Child with Chainsaw has appeared! It’s a killer! Do not die!” And the use of children for entrapment; again, gender politics that’s so bad as to force you to explicitly reject the underlying premise/dichotomy, to approach the issue from a different direction.)

I can’t remember any more what I expected Catherine to be like when I started playing the game, but I’m quite sure that those expectations didn’t survive contact with more than my first couple of hours of playing the reality of the game. As is doubtless quite obvious, the game has set its hooks surprisingly deeply into my brain; I was hoping that writing this pair of blog posts would exorcise those hooks, but I’m no longer confident that that is the case. Fortunately, I’m also no longer as eager for that to be the case: if the game manages to continue to tumble around in my brain, I’m not sure I’ll actually enjoy the thoughts that it will surface, but I am sure I’ll find the experience interesting…

The night stages aren’t a pure puzzle game: they’re a puzzle game with a timer. Which, at first, annoyed me: timers are of course necessary in Tetris-style puzzle games that are all about quickly coming up with optimal (or at least not pessimal) responses to new information. But Catherine is a different sort of puzzle game, and the gameplay would make perfect sense in the absence of time pressure. The thing is, though, the game gives you an untimed variant of the gameplay in the form of the Rapunzel minigame, and I both didn’t like it as much and didn’t do as well on it. It may be that the Rapunzel levels were harder, having fewer options; but I also think that working under pressure forced my brain to experiment more with different lines, generating a wider set of options and helping me solve the puzzle faster. Even the repeated dying may have helped, in that it gave me an opportunity to solidify my understanding of sections that I had only managed to solve by accident the first time.

Also: the imagery in the final stage of each night, where you’re under the most pressure, was glorious in its own way. I’m still not sure what I think about all of that imagery, but I’m glad to have been exposed to it.

Even so, I was unsure how much I liked the puzzle levels, and whether I would stick with Normal difficulty, until about the halfway point in the game. The technique videos certainly helped, both by making suggestions that actively helped my gameplay and by showing that the gameplay is a good deal richer than it seemed at first blush. But then, a few nights in, it all started to come together: I learned the “climb a three-wide wall of arbitrary height” technique, and the presence of ice blocks forced me to come to grips with the power of moving laterally along a wall while hanging from it.

And, with those two techniques, a flip switched in my brain. Many more possibilities were clear; and, as I was trying to fall asleep at night (in real life, not in the game!), my brain would instead be imagining block sequences, running through them over and over again. Which is something that happens to me when I play puzzle games, and is a sign that the game is sufficiently rich to be a good one: it happened with Tetris, it happened with go, it happened with Slitherlink.

So: Catherine turned out, to my surprise, to be a rather good puzzle game. But, surely (sadly?), the puzzle gameplay is divorced from the game’s narrative themes, despite the imagery of the final stage of each night?

To my surprise, the answer is no. As I said above, the game had me lying away at night, thinking through possible courses of action, sometimes discarding bad ones and progressing while, other times (most of the time!), just repeating the same sequences in a rut. This is what I do when a puzzle game catches hold of me; it’s what I would also do when a person caught hold of me as well, however. I would lie awake at night thinking about whomever I had a crush on, imagining possible sequences of interactions, imagining a sequence of moves by which I would catch that person’s notice, we would talk, we would spend time together, a spark would ignite, we would fall… in love? In something, at any rate: the video game metaphor of progressing from level to level is not so bad here.

Catherine is a darker game than that: no simple crushes there. But these racing thoughts aren’t limited to infatuation: they happen when, for whatever reason, I’m afraid of a conversation. If I were in Vincent’s situation of having to break up with Catherine, of having to rescue his relationship with Katherine, of trying to figure out what he wants out of either relationship in the first place, I’d be lying away at night, tossing and turning and wondering. And playing through scenario after scenario in my head: if I do this, maybe she’d react in this way, she’d say that? No, that wouldn’t work, what if I said this instead? I’d make it a little farther that time, only to lose my grip eventually, to be crushed by the weight of responses, of expectations. I wouldn’t be climbing a tower in my nightmares: instead, I’d be lying in bed, living through an ongoing nightmare, trying to find a path to navigate through it.

Progressing through levels isn’t the only video game metaphor that fits. The game puts difficulty and skill front and center; and certainly when I had my first crushes, I was completely incapable of navigating them successfully. (As I imagine most people were, but I suspect I was abnormally bad.) I got better at navigating crushes, and then (mercifully? Wonderfully, certainly) I haven’t had to for the last couple of decades. Difficult conversations still happen; I’m getting better at them, too (protip: if you’re scared of a difficult conversation, then that’s a sign of the importance of openly talking about the issue in question, though the real issue may not be what your consciousness thinks is important), but my stomach remains no stranger to sinking feelings.

Despite the darkness of much of the game, the subtext of the puzzle gameplay is surprisingly supportive. When I’m imagining conversations (or stages in puzzle games!), my brain gets stuck in an unrealistic rut; when I later have those conversations during the daytime, the possibility that they can go horribly wrong is very real indeed. In the game’s nightmare stages, however, the pressure forced me to try out different routes, and the game gave me a safe space to hone my skills when I’ve figured out a good route through a particular section. (Indeed, the game made it clear that I had figured out a good route through a difficult section; in real life, what sounds like a good solution in my fevered nighttime imagination frequently collapses at the first sign of daylight.) There was always the possibility of running out of continues, but in practice the game scattered them around thickly enough that, after the first few nights, I never had to worry about dying: the worst that I had to fear was being stuck in limbo, neither dying nor being able to figure out how to make it past a given section.

Ultimately, the game presented a world where you can rework the traps and pitfalls that are lying in wait for you in your brain, turning them into a smooth (or at least navigable) path forward. If only that were so reliably possible in real life…

Recently, though, I found myself awake in the middle of the night, wanting a way to pass unpredictable amounts of time; Puzzle Quest 2 fit the bill, so I got a copy. (The iPad version, which I turn out to like quite a bit more than the DS interface that I’d played the prior games on.) And I was really surprised how much I liked it. And, to be clear: not just how much I liked it compared to what I was expecting based on the progression of the series: how much I liked it compared to turn-based RPGs in general.

Take a typical turn-based RPG. The way I play them, I have my standard attacks that I lean on, and in 95% of the battles I mindlessly select them over and over again. In the other 5% of the battles, I have to think more about the tactics that I use, trying out different combinations to see which ways the probabilities work best, but even that is a relatively static experience.

Even the most basic of battles in Puzzle Quest, however is fundamentally different: instead of dealing with a static probability space, you are dealing with a constantly changing collection of opportunities. And those opportunities aren’t isolated, either: the space of opportunities changes in a mostly but (crucially) not completely deterministic fashion depending on which move you make, leaving space for reading. Depending on the gems that you match, you’ll set up different opportunities for your opponent; or, if you do it right, you’ll set up different opportunities for yourself! Cascades are possible, but not always easy to spot: studying the board and reading ahead pays off.

That’s Puzzle Quest in general; why did I like Puzzle Quest 2 so much? I think the main issue there is that the strategies were somewhat different from the previous games, and didn’t fall into the same ruts. Before, I would have a three-fold pattern of: 1) grab 4-of-a-kinds; 2) grab attack/defense matches; and 3) control tempo, taking multiple turns in a row when I got the most out of it. That worked well enough, and actually picking the right spots to use spells to control tempo demanded some amount of thought, but ultimately I’d had my fill after two games worth of that same basic strategy.

In Puzzle Quest 2, however, those tactics weren’t as important. Grabbing 4-of-a-kinds is certainly a good thing, but I didn’t mind as much if I missed them. As the game progressed, though, I noticed that matching attack gems (skulls) wasn’t nearly as important as I was used to it being: generally, the skull attacks didn’t do as much damage as other forms of attack, so while I still matched them or prevented my opponent from matching them if I didn’t have anything else to do, they didn’t dominate my strategy. (And there aren’t any built-in defensive gem buffs, though you have access to spells that will provide different forms of defense in different circumstances; on which note, they also got rid of the annoying experience/money forms of gems, the combat is exclusively about combat.)

I was pleased when I earned my first spell that allowed me to control tempo; but the fact that skull matches aren’t so crucial means that, in turn, tempo control isn’t so crucial. So, while I experimented with that for a while, I soon moving on to other possibilities.

The result was that, for the first ten or so hours, I spent a fair amount of time trying out different spell combinations, attempting to understand how each new spell that I acquired would fit in with the other possibilities that I had available. (And experimenting with weapon possibilities, too: one-handed or two-handed, cheap small damage or expensive large damage?)

Unfortunately, that phase came to an end, and came to an end sooner than I would have liked. I don’t know what the other classes are like, but I chose the Assassin as my class, and it wasn’t too far through the game until I happened across a spell/weapon combination that worked extremely well against most opponents and acceptably against all of them. And once that happened, I stopped learning from the game; that is, I suppose, my own fault, nothing was preventing me from experimenting with the (numerous!) other spell possibilities that I had available to me, but why mess with success? To make things even more boring, four of the five spells that I had were just different-colored variants of each other, so I was really just working with two kinds of spells and one weapon (I had two weapons but never used one of them) doing the same basic patterns of attacks over and over again.

That was a bit of a drag; when I watch Liesl play as a Sorcerer, she’s clearly using a more varied range of spells, so maybe the Assassin is a particularly banal class. But, even playing through that banal class, I was still enjoying myself: yes, the broad pattern of how I approached each match was almost always the same, but I still had to deal with the realities of what the board looked like each match, at each point in the match, so there remained a not-unpleasant amount to think about. I stopped actively seeking out battles to fight, instead walking past enemies unless they were blocking my way to a door I needed, but I enjoyed the battles I had to fight. And I enjoyed the boss fights and special monster fights; even though I kept the same load-out for them, I did have to think about how to balance my use of the different parts of that load-out, and how to best use the board to frustrate my opponent.

So: good game. Nicely refined compared to its predecessors, and in particular the static map without wandering monsters (indeed, with monsters that were perfectly happy for you to walk right past them) worked well for me. If I could change one thing, it would be the chest rewards mini-game, but even that was more underwhelming than annoying. And I was pleasantly surprised that I managed (after quite a few tries on one or two of them!) to unlock all the spells: a good challenge level on those puzzles.

But I’ll come back to what I said above: the basic fact that reading ahead is a key part of the battle mechanic makes a huge difference to me. It gets me so much more engaged than a traditional turn-based RPG, turning battles from mindless button pushing exercises to something that’s reasonable rewarding even in the worst of times.

Playing those different instruments in short succession brought home something that I hadn’t quite realized: my taste in music changes quite a bit depending on the instrument I’m playing. And it changes in a specific way: my Rock Band vocal avatar is gay (as will be no surprise to anybody who has heard me sing in game, I suspect), while my Rock Band guitar avatar is straight.

(Which, rereading the above, adds another interesting twist to my singing vocal harmonies with my wife this morning. I won’t dig into that here other than to be quietly amused, but I will also note that our most common Rock Band pairing is me on guitar, her on bass.)

My drummer, I’m not as sure about. It seems like he’s straight, but drums are an instrument that I’m not particularly comfortable with, and I wouldn’t be shocked if something unexpected unfolded as he became more confident.

And then there’s keyboards. The situation with keyboards is rather more complicated, mirroring the fact that my keyboard self is a significantly better musician than any of my other avatars. The strongest part of my keyboard self is rather more of a monk, and doesn’t actually get very much nourishment from playing Rock Band. But Rock Band helps bring out another part of my keyboard self, and that part is a gay man, albeit a gay man with more complex tastes than my vocal avatar.

At which point, a joke suggests itself: a monk with a double life as a gay man? I’m shocked, shocked to hear that. Which is a cheap joke, and an unkind one; and its implication in this context is if anything backwards. As an introvert, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to present a gay male face as a more socially acceptable mask for my monkish self, rather than vice-versa; and, indeed, that analogy works musically as well. (Don’t worry, Kirk, I know you’re kidding! Or at least you’d better be…)

But, in fact, neither of those two parts of my keyboard self is a mask for the other. Yes, I love fugues, but I love show tunes as well. The former love perhaps gets more to my core, or at least to more private parts of myself, but they are both part of who I am. One could make a case that there’s tension between the two; but if we’re talking about sex here, tension is what makes flirting fun. And, ultimately, both parts are comfortable with whom they are and their preferences, which is a healthy attitude towards sex as well.

I’ve been somewhat manic this last week; its been a fascinating experience, and hope I’ll eventually figure out more of what’s been going on there. In the meantime, though: the most interesting aspect is how theatrical I’ve been feeling. Aspects of me have been coming to the fore that are normally more hidden, and I’ve enjoyed displaying them. And, as with my twin keyboard selves, or indeed with all of my Rock Band avatars, these aren’t masks that my true self is lurking behind: they’re parts of me, just not parts of me that I’m as used to showing.

I’m glad to know those emerging parts of me a little better, and to be a little more fluent at using them as part of my outward face. But, of course, they’re not the only part of me, they’re not any more my true self than the part of me that’s a strong introvert, that needs to go off to think, to recharge. (To write blog posts!)

I am large, I contain multitudes. Fortunately, those multitudes turn out to be pleasant for me to spend time with.