• 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else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date.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!

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.

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…

• When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that it’s a really great PDF reader. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a retina screen on it, but it works quite well as is.) And, as it happened, some of the early books that I bought were from the Pragmatic Programmers, which lets you get books in PDF and ePub (and Amazon’s format, but I don’t have a Kindle yet, so no reason to choose that if I’m not buying from Amazon). And, for now, I’m liking PDF books a lot more than ePub. I just hope that the book industry doesn’t take as long as the music industry to start embracing non-encrypted formats, so I can get PDF books from other sources.
• Having said that, non-page-based formats do have their uses. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Nicola Griffith’s Always on the Kindle app on my iPad. And then I found myself out of the house with some time to kill, so I pulled out my phone and switched over to reading the book on that. (I didn’t have my iPad with me.) And that worked great, much better than reading a PDF on my phone would have or sitting around being bored would have.
• Another unexpected electronic book benefit: our dog Zippy is getting rather old, and wakes me up squeaking a couple of times a night on average. (For better or for worse, I’m a much lighter sleeper than Liesl is.) Sometimes he needs to go out, but sometimes he’s achy and just needs cuddling for a while. And I like being able to read while cuddling with him without having to turn on a light.
• Speaking of Nicola Griffith, I’d forgotten just how amazing an author she is. Or rather, I’d been somewhat reminded of that when I read her memoir, and I like her blog as well, so I’d been meaning to dig back into her fiction, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until the last month. I don’t think I’d reread Ammonite since it came out, but it’s quite good; better still is Slow River, and rereading The Blue Place was eye-opening. I’d never read Stay or Always, but I’m quite happy to have remedied that omission.
• Speaking of omissions, I’d somehow stopped reading Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journal after the first two books. No idea why I stopped then; I went back and reread them just now, and they’re rather wonderful. Though so far I’m not enjoying the third one as much; maybe it will grow on me (it took a while for me to appreciate the first one, I seem to recall), or maybe it’s just more targeted at Christians?
• I’m very glad to have been reading a lot of fiction these days. I’d been weighting my reading rather heavily towards technical books over much of the last year; partly for good reasons, but partly because I’d been swayed by sales of electronic books at a couple of publishers. And while electronic books don’t raise exactly the same inventory concerns as physical books, they’re still inventory, and the fact that I own them still unduly influences me to read them. I’ll have to be more vigilant about that in the future.
• Sad that Borders is going out of business. I like independent bookstores, but to me it’s much much more important to have a large selection of books available for purchase, and Borders did a great job of that as a chain; I visited the local Borders about as frequently over the last few years as any other physical bookstore. Their time has passed, but I salute them and will miss them.

It took me several weeks of lunchtime matches to get used to the feel of driving in the game, but I have the basics under my belt now. And now that I’m somewhat competent at the game, I’m finding that the game gives me a rather different feel from other racing games that I’m used to: decisions in it can, in large part, be interpreted as being about risk management.

The distinguishing feature of Burnout Revenge (compared to others in the racing genre) is its use of traffic. There’s a lot of traffic; but you can plow right through cars going in the same direction as you (in fact, it fills up your boost meter, helping you go faster), while if you run into traffic going in the opposite direction (or, more rarely, cross traffic), you’ll crash. And you’ll also crash if you hit very large vehicles (buses, generally) going in the same direction as yourself.

Most of the time, this means that you stay in the correct lane, plowing through cars to fill up your boost. But if I’ve got a fair amount of visibility and not many cars to run into in my direction, I’ll move to the other side of the road, because you also earn boost if you’re going against traffic. (Going against traffic even if the lane isn’t empty is far from a death penalty, but it does increase your risk noticeably.)

It gets interesting, though, when you come to a turn. In a normal racing game, you want to approach a turn from a line designed to let you maintain as high a speed as possible. In Burnout, however, the distinguishing characteristic of turns is that they have a different risk profile. You have traffic approaching the intersection from multiple directions; if you’re making a left turn (or a right turn in the Tokyo/Hong Kong courses), you’ll always be crossing lanes that may contain approaching traffic, and even if you’re making a right turn, if you maintain any sort of decent speed, you’ll almost certainly slide into the left lane after the turn. (And if you approach from the best line from a pure racing perspective, you’d also want to switch over to the left lane before a right turn.) You can mitigate some of that (for right turns, at least) by sliding, but unless you’re better at sliding than I am, you’ll still fishtail enough while doing so to end up in the oncoming lane even while making a right turn. (This also applies when going around switchbacks on mountain courses, even without cross traffic.)

The result is that, when approaching a turn, I don’t think “how can I get through this at as high speed as possible?” Instead, I think “how can I maximize the number of options that I have, in order to react to surprises in traffic conditions?” Assuming it’s a left turn, I’ll rarely want to cut the corner sharply: if I do that, I’ll be in the oncoming lane with absolutely no information about what cars are there, so it’s a roll of the dice as to whether or not I’ll survive. Instead, I want to position myself so that I’ll get a good view of the oncoming traffic as early as possible, so I’ll have a few more tenths of a second to react to the conditions and plot a course to thread through traffic. Though, of course, the traffic as I approach the intersection may make that impossible: if that’s the case, I have to figure out how to avoid the oncoming cars that I can see (or the buses going in my direction) while getting a view of what’s approaching as early as possible.

This also plays into the design of shortcuts. There are a lot of them, and they often have traditional sorts of shortcut dangers: there might be jumps that are hard to make, or pillars to thread your way through. So their presence puts a premium on both course knowledge and driving skill.

What the shortcuts don’t have is traffic. Which can actually be a bit of a bummer, because if you’re low on boost, you may wish that you had more cars to run into, or oncoming lanes to cross into! But it gives the risk profile a quite different feel.

Except: occasionally they do have traffic. Some of the shortcuts lead you through alleys in the middle of blocks: so no traffic most of the time, but then you’ll blow through a street and be exposed to cross traffic. Even in the best such situations, you have very little time to react, and if a bus shows up at the wrong time, you’ll almost certainly crash no matter how good a driver you are.

The ends of shortcuts are also quite dangerous. They’ll dump you on a road, but they’ll frequently drop you on the wrong side of the road, without much time to react to oncoming traffic. That’s not as dangerous as cross traffic, but it’s still significantly more dangerous than a normal turn is. And it certainly puts a premium on your ability to parse a situation quickly: my improvement in that regard has been a bigger help in my recent increased competitiveness than my learning about the track layout.

So the upshot: shortcuts are generally shorter (duh) but tricker to navigate (which is normal in a racing game), but they also lead to riskier interactions with traffic at their ends and in street crossings in their middle (which is less common in a racing game). They’re still generally worth it, but you’re trading off better average returns for increased variance. Which makes the game more fun from a multiplayer point of view: your preferred amount of risk will change depending on your position in the race, and increasing randomness (within reasonable bounds) lets the best player win most of the time while increasing the chance of close races and upsets.

Fun game.

After I wrote that post on precedence, map, and function composition in Scala, I started to wonder: I’ve been thinking that I should experiment more with applying Compose Method. That refactoring recommends that, if I start with the original version of my code,

data.foreach(s => writer.addDocument(createDocument s))

then I should extract the body to a method. Which, I guess, would lead me to something like this?

data.foreach(addStringAsDocument(_, writer))

Except that that’s actually not what Compose Method really recommends: that’s merely one standard way of applying it to languages that are somewhat lacking in expressive possibilities. If all you have are manual looping constructs, and if you want to “keep all of the operations in a method at the same level of abstraction” (Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, p. 22), then yeah, you’ll pull out your loop bodies to methods, but there are other ways to reach that end.

So, looking at the code that I actually ended up with that post (with the kind help of my readers),

data.map(createDocument).foreach(writer.addDocument)

is everything there at the same level of abstraction? That’s not entirely clear to me: if I wanted to, I could certainly extract a couple of methods out of that, and end up with something like this:

addDocumentsToWriter(createDocuments(data), writer)

Examining Alternatives

We’ve seen four examples of how that code could look; let’s replace the first of those with one that raichoo suggested on the previous post, giving us the following list:

1. data.foreach(createDocument _ andThen writer.addDocument)
2. data.foreach(addStringAsDocument(_, writer))
3. data.map(createDocument).foreach(writer.addDocument)
4. addDocumentsToWriter(createDocuments(data), writer)

Anybody want to argue for any of these being noticeably better or worse than all of the others? I’ll have to say: while they all seem fine to me, I can’t get too worked up over the need for using Compose Method in this case. Though, as I’ve been typing them up, I’ve wanted to add “fromString” in various places, which suggests that the method name createDocument is perhaps not as well chosen as it could be: maybe I should have called it something like stringToDocument instead?

Hard to say, I’m still happy enough with the third option. It says fairly directly that I’m starting with a bunch of data, turning it into a bunch of documents, and adding them to the writer: fine by me. (The first option seems approximately similarly expressive to me, as well.) There are, of course, situations where one or the other composed method would be preferable (as I said at the end of that earlier post, I ran into one an hour after I ran into the above!), but this doesn’t seem like one.

Recomposing and Natural Transformations

Maybe it’s the category theorist in me, but this also raises one other question: consider the two composed methods, 2 and 4 in the above list. Say that you reflexively went with option 2, but then decided that it didn’t seem quite right. You could (probably would) inline the function, and then distribute and regroup to end up with the fourth version; that seems like a pretty standard sort of thing to want to do. (It wouldn’t be too much of an abuse of language to call it a natural transformation!)

So: if we’re going to make a taxonomy of micro refactorings, might we not only also want to list ways of composing them (as, indeed, Refactoring itself suggests; see also Refactoring to Patterns or the hierarchies of patterns in A Pattern Language), but also ways of undoing them and composing them differently, along the lines of associativity laws?

Which I do. But I also have no idea what to say about it! So I’ll fall back on my favorite technique of free-associating; and, given the scope of the game, that will be a lot of associating indeed.

RPG Conventions

Let’s start off with the “action RPG” label that I mentioned above. Dragon Age isn’t an action RPG, but a lot of the time its combat plays like one. Which is mostly good: it means that you don’t have to spend more time than necessary on the simple battles. (It’s possible for a turn-based RPG to have similarly fast battles—see Chrono Trigger—but these days the style is for turn-based RPGs to spend too much time animating you into and out of combat.) Though that does raise the question: what is the point of the simple battles, exactly?

For the hard battles, though, the battle system started to fall apart. You really want all of your party members to be working well together; for better or for worse, however, I’d reacted to the action aspect of the battles by only directly controlling my primary character, which meant that I had very little idea of how I wanted to use my other characters’ abilities, and the interface left me with no desire to actively switch between them. (Incidentally, one aspect of the “Leliana’s Song” DLC that I enjoyed was having an excuse to try out playing as a rogue.) Maybe the tactics controls would have left me with sufficient control to pull that off without pulling out my hair, maybe it would have worked better if I’d been playing on a PC instead of an Xbox; as it was, I just fell down to easy.

There were a lot of items to pick up; I bought all the backpacks I could, but on the long dungeons, they still got full, which just increased my annoyance at said long dungeons. There were, potentially, some interesting choices to be made in my choices of items to keep, of armor sets to target; I didn’t feel like thinking about that too hard or looking up the community’s recommended courses of action in that regard, though.

I was expecting to look forward to learning about the history of the world. Thinking back, though, I skimmed most of the encyclopedia material in Mass Effect 2, so perhaps that falls under the category of something that I think I’ll like more than I actually like it. (I do think that building a history for your world makes it richer, but that doesn’t mean that you benefit from making that material available to players.) I can’t say for sure one way or another, though, because Dragon Age combined a huge amount of material with an interface that made it impossible to find bits of lore that you hadn’t read: there’s no way to tell unread lore from previously read lore unless its entry happened to be on the first screen.

Interlude

Which all adds up to a feeling of meh. Is that fair? Maybe I should look at the game through my musicals analogy: embrace the set pieces? I don’t think that analogy is really relevant here: that analogy suggests that I shouldn’t worry too much about the overall narrative structure, but here my feeling is that the set pieces don’t hold together particularly well. (They certainly don’t have the crispness of a good song in a musical).

Failing that, what about the Bohemian Rhapsody analogy? Embrace the overwhelming nature of the game, its ungainly aspects, the ways in which it sails past convention, heedless of the sharp corners that result?

But, of course, Dragon Age doesn’t sail past convention: that’s exactly the problem! In a weird way, though, there’s something here nonetheless: the game was so overwhelming in its adherence to RPG tropes that I ended up ignoring them, ended up going through them and coming out on the good side. If it broke me of the habit of reading through history, of opening chests just because they’re there, of swapping out party members and going through endless conversation trees just to see all of the choices and answers that ensue, and that’s all to the good. I don’t entirely approve of the methods there, but the outcome was curiously pleasing.

Relationships and Story

Speaking of choices and conversation trees: I was a female city elf mage. The most interesting part of my origin story was Jowan: I can’t remember the last tIme I’ve felt so conflicted about a quest in a game. Normally, I jump at a chance to be helpful, but what a drip!

And then Ostagar, and Alistair. Whom I was charmed by immediately, with his self-deprecating humor. Followed by the arrival in short order of Morrigan and Leliana: I really enjoyed being around all three of them, in particular Morrigan’s bickering with the other two; by the time other party members showed up on the scene, I couldn’t imagine swapping out any of those three.

(Side note: Leliana’s entrance, covered in blood spatters, is ridiculous. I read those omnipresent blood splatters as the strongest signal that the game is intentionally going so deep into genre and game conventions as to point out the absurdity and come out on the other side. But the game doesn’t manage to do that wholeheartedly (far too little camp for that to be the case), so it comes out as yet another sign of the game not making up its mind. Which, in its own way, is perhaps the strongest argument for viewing it through a Bohemian Rhapsody lens: the game throws in everything, you make of it what you will, and don’t expect consistency. I just wish there had been more fevered dreams, or indeed any fevered dreams.)

And characters kept on surprising me, and my attitude towards them changed. Sure, Alistair’s revealed as the potential heir to the throne; oddly enough, I reacted to that by mentally withdrawing somewhat. Which ended up making a lot of sense when I reached the part of the game where that really mattered: yes, I could have put Alistair on the throne, but to me the queen fit much better there. (Incidentally, I really appreciated her behavior towards me when I botched one aspect of her rescue.)

And then there’s the approval system. I could have tried to keep everybody’s approval as high as possible; I ended up completely ignoring it when choosing my actions. But I still really liked having the approval system in place: it was an accurate feedback mechanism for how I and the various characters approached the world differently. And it helped me notice that I was much more on the same wavelength with Leliana than with Alistair; I’d been charmed by him initially and assumed that I’d go on to romance him, but I ended up with Leliana, and I think she was a much better fit.

Morrigan generally disagreed with my actions; somehow, though, that never mattered to me, and I found that I really respected her and never questioned her fitting in as a member of my party. So when, towards the end of the game, she made two rather serious requests of me, I did them without thinking twice (or with only a little bit of thought): she was a party member, I had faith enough to go along with what she wanted.

And then there were the fringe party members: I was fond of the dog, certainly, but I never got to know Oghren, Zevran, Sten, Wynne. (Though I did end up disliking Wynne from what little contact I did have with her.) I was a little surprised when Zevran turned on me, but I’d been ignoring him the whole time, so I certainly can’t blame him.

Conclusion?

I have no idea where this all ends up. I’m still ambivalent about RPGs in general, and about a lot of the details of the mechanics of the game. The game seems to some extent aware of those flaws, and I’m not sure if that makes matters better or worse.

But, ultimately, the characters make up for that. Not completely, but enough so that I’m happy to have played through the game. It’s similar to how I feel about Persona 3: too long, too much of a slog in places, but it lets me view relationships between characters that I’ve never seen before in a game. And, in both cases, I wish the game went all-in on what makes it special. But I’m also a little scared of what the results would be of doing that, because I don’t feel I really understand the virtues of RPG slogs.

Time to play some shorter games, I suppose.

A pleasant way to spend a couple of hours when I was home sick; who knows, maybe I’ll dip into it more in the future, maybe not. I’m certainly glad that games of this weight exist, I should play them more.

• I decided to play as a female elf mage, so I went through the mage opening story. Which started off with a quite small dungeon, then had some city exploration, a micro side-storyish dungeon, and finally ended with another (more normal size for a start of a game) dungeon. (Which, incidentally, had me feeling a lot more conflicted than almost any other quest in recent memory, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
• Then on to the first area. Again, some city exploration, a dungeon, a brief interlude, and another dungeon.
• At this point, the plot opened up, and I apparently had a choice of four tasks ahead of me. One of which seemed like it should be done last, but I wasn’t so sure about the other three. I didn’t have a choice, yet, though: the next area was chosen for me. Which had city exploration, but the only dungeon was a micro side-story dungeon. That exploration did serve to push me along one of the possible four tasks (pushing a layer onto its stack of intrigue), so I went in that direction next. And was, incidentally, quite happy with the pacing at this point: the cities had been interesting, the dungeons hadn’t overstayed their welcome.
• A city, where I got a third layer pushed onto that task’s stack of intrigue. This was followed by a battle that’s longer than normal but not intricate enough to qualify as a dungeon, and then a real dungeon, with a bit of a twist at the end. (And a reappearance of the same conflicting feelings from the first dungeon.) Which was where I started to wonder a bit: my tentative hypothesis had been that the new layer here was a twist on the layer I’d heard about in the previous location, but no, it’s a separate problem. So the result is that I’ve popped the new layer of intrigue back off the stack, but the intrigue level is still where it was when I entered the city. (In other words, I hadn’t actually made any progress at all!)
• But I did have a next direction to go in. Which wasn’t a place I would have gone to otherwise at this point, but it was an interesting enough city to be in. Relatively rich in side quests, so I did one sequence of micro-dungeons (that, I suppose, added up to a smallish dungeon), plus another dungeon. (And accumulated lots of other side quests; this game likes throwing side quests at you, but they seem quite small on average.) I didn’t get any closer to resolving the quest that I was in the middle of, but did get told the next place to go.
• So I went there. Which was a micro-city, existing only to front a dungeon. Which I entered, and made it through the ruined temple. But the item I’m looking for wasn’t at the end of the ruined temple: instead, there were caverns. So I went into them (through one of two routes, thinking that surely I’ll come back soon along the other route?), wandered for quite a bit, and by now had slaughtered four or five times the number of people that apparently lived in the micro-city outside the dungeon. Finally, I made it to an opponent whom I talk to before killing. But even this isn’t where the item is: instead, there’s a passage out to the mountaintop. Which is, admittedly, a reasonably suitable location for a major plot item, so surely it will be waiting for me there, possibly after another boss battle? Well, no: there was a dragon there, but no item. I tried (and failed) to fight the dragon once, it seemed quite tough (probably significantly tougher than anything I’d seen so far), but also optional. Whether or not I fight the dragon, I’ll have to go into the next area, which I discovered upon stepping into it was called “The Gauntlet”: apparently neither the lengthy dungeon leading up to this nor the quite difficult dragon qualified as a gauntlet, I have something even more, um, enjoyable waiting for me?

That’s where I am so far. I’ve done something like eight dungeons worth of content, six of which are on the main plot line. I may be close to finishing the first major non-introductory quest but, well, I’ve thought that before, and I’ve been wrong. I may be close to finishing this dungeon but, well, I’ve thought that before, and I’ve been wrong. I started playing yesterday when Miranda started getting ready for bed, I gave up for the night at least half an hour later than was wise given when my alarm clock was going to wake me up the next day. (In retrospect, of course, I should have stopped earlier, but nobody wants to stop playing in the middle of a dungeon, and surely the game wouldn’t make me slog through another half hour of this stuff, would it?)

The game has a limited inventory system, and despite my buying every backpack that was for sale, I’ve had to throw away decent-sized chunks of my inventory on three separate occasions in this one dungeon alone. The game is being generous enough with money that I don’t feel like my progress is being actively hindered by losing that potential item sale income, but it does manage to take any joy I would have out of accumulating items in the dungeon. (I haven’t quite gotten to where I head the other direction when I see a chest, but I’m pretty close.)

I still have three major plot quests ahead of me; maybe this one is unusual, but I don’t yet have any reason to believe that is the case. And, for that matter, I don’t have reason to believe that further quests won’t pop up: indeed, it seems quite likely that there will be an endgame segment that I don’t know about, though one of the quests I do know about has the vague potential of being the endgame segment. So I think the best case estimate is that I’m a third of the way through the game, but being only a fourth of the way through the game is probably more likely, and even that could easily be optimistic.

I’m sure there are people for whom this sort of pacing is wonderful. Right now, though, the game’s main accomplishment (despite its considerable virtues in other areas) is making me grateful for another one of BioWare’s teams: Mass Effect 2 was designed to be playable in chunks that are an hour long or even shorter, and that was a much better fit for me. In fact, to my surprise, I’m wishing that Dragon Age were more like Persona 3: that game rather overstayed its welcome, and had a fair bit of padding right from the very beginning, but its rhythm was admirably consistent. I wasn’t always excited about the dungeon crawling, but I knew how long each dungeon crawling segment was going to take; the plot progression was somewhat roundabout, but was roundabout in a known fashion; and while I played it for longer in total than I would have preferred, after the first couple of sessions I never had to worry about whether or not I’d be able to save the game at a good stopping point by the time I wanted to go to bed.

Quite an accomplishment, really: it’s a rare game that can make me look fondly back at JRPG pacing.

Which was fun, but then the set list we’d chosen proved to be a mistake: the first few songs were fine, but the difficulty ramped up too quickly for a keyboard novice. So we backed out, and went into the general quick play mode; that, however, confronted us with something like 360 songs. (And that’s before exporting the Rock Band 2 tracks!) Fortunately, they have a good filtering system in place, so we could get the game to only show us songs with keyboard parts, and sort them by difficulty; and we had a lot of fun starting on the resulting list. And, in fact, all instruments mode (with its associated karaoke vocals) ended up being an actively good thing: it was nice to be able to see the lyrics even though we weren’t singing, and when Imagine came along (which doesn’t have a guitar part), I could just drop out (which Rock Band 3 lets you do on the fly) and sing to it. It would have been annoying if we’d had a guitarist, bassist, keyboard player, and singer, all of whom wanted their score to count, though (and I still don’t understand why the game doesn’t allow that—it’s still only four controllers), but we weren’t in that situation, so it was okay.

Liesl and I poked around a little more later on in the evening. It’s a pity that you can’t import your Rock Band 2 band/characters, but creating new ones is fun enough. (Good facial hair options; Rock Band 2 had a much better top hat, though, if I’m remembering correctly, and to get the jacket I want, I’ll have to somehow earn 5,000,000 points with vocal harmonies…) It also doesn’t know which DLC you’ve played in previous versions of the game, so at some point soon we should go back to Rock Band 2 to find out which songs we haven’t yet played through; that’s reasonable enough, certainly. The career mode has been somewhat modified, but the new version seems pleasant enough, and I like the range of alternate band goals the game provides. And I’ve enjoyed what little of the the music I’ve played so far; not everything was to my taste, and perhaps the focus on vocal harmonies and keyboards has diluted the guitar play a bit, but it was good stuff, sometimes surprisingly so. (I’d never heard of Maná before, but Oye Mi Amor was a lot of fun to play; and while I certainly had heard The Power of Love before, I wasn’t expecting much out of it, but it turns out to be a lot of fun to play on (expert non-pro) guitar.) Nice usability tweaks, too—being able to drop in and out on the fly is useful, if you fail you can continue from the place in the game where you failed; and you can also change difficulty on the fly.

That was last night; today, I gave the keyboard a try myself. On pro keys; as one of my coworkers had warned me, trying to sight-read was kind of odd. I’m competent at reading traditional piano notation; that doesn’t transfer at all to the notation that Rock Band 3 uses, so I had to do a lot more thinking than I would have liked figuring out which key to play when something shows up on screen.

Fortunately, some amount of general musical knowledge does come through. Playing up and down melody lines felt pretty natural: once I found the initial note, I didn’t have to do too much thinking to find the notes after that. Chords were harder, but not infrequently, they’d click, and my hands would happily shift from chord to chord.

Which doesn’t mean that everything went swimmingly: I got lost pretty often. Just starting a song made me nervous: not having perfect pitch and not having played these songs before, I would have no idea where on the keyboard the first notes would be, and what notes I’d end up using! (Given that the tutorial has you go through various different scales, it might be nice for the game to tell you what key you were playing in, so you could prepare better?)

I started off on medium; the easiest songs have very little keyboard in them, though, so that was really boring, and I moved up to hard. Which was a good choice; so far, I’ve made it through the three-star songs without too many mishaps. Chord sections definitely give me a lot more trouble than melodic sections: sometimes they’ll click, and even if they don’t, if the chords are repeating, I can figure it out quickly enough, but if I get lost and chords are moving around quickly, it’s hard to orient. (I have to wonder how much harder the four-note chords that expert gives you will be.)

At first, even orienting myself on the melodic sections was hard, too, but my reading ability is already improving. The color coding of the regions of the keyboard is sensible enough; and I found that using the black keys to keep track of where in a section of the keyboard a note is works pretty well. (So, ironically, songs in C major turned out to be rather more difficult than songs in keys with a handful of accidentals.) It’s definitely a work in progress, though: I don’t see any reason why I won’t eventually able to directly translate between the distance of keys on the screen and the distance of keys on the keyboard, and I’m already better at that than I was when I started, but I’m certainly not there yet.

And it’s still the case that, when things go wrong, I have a surprisingly hard time getting back on track. Some of that is just the nature of the beast, but some of that is the relative lack of feedback that the game provides. You don’t hear the wrong note you played (just a clink sound followed by silence), so it’s possible to miss notes without realizing it at all, and it’s also surprisingly easy to not be sure whether you played the wrong note or the right note at the wrong time. And you also can’t use sound as feedback for how far you need to adjust your mistakes up or down, you have to resort to logic or visuals or touch.

The keyboard itself was pleasant as an instrument. My main quibble is that the pivot point for the keys isn’t very far back, so if your fingers are up on the keys, there’s not a lot of depth. At first, turning on star power was tough, but then I realized that there’s rarely much point in using both hands while playing keyboard, given that the game will only have you playing from a range of just over an octave at any given point, so my left hand ended up mostly free. The keytar handle had the downside that Zippy was lying next to my left leg, and would periodically bonk his head against it when he tried to look up and, but we solved that by moving Zippy. And it works just fine sitting on your lap, I have no desire for a separate keyboard stand.

Good stuff. There are tweaks I’d make—show what key you’re playing in, in particular—and the game’s in-song visuals have gone quite a bit too far into distraction. But still: it’s Rock Band! With keyboards! Where you can play more than five notes! I gave Bohemian Rhapsody a try on hard, and was feeling pretty smug through the opening section; I fell apart soon enough, though, but I’ll be a lot happier putting in the time to really learn it than I ever was with a song in previous iterations of the game.

Incidentally, Rock Band 3 is this week’s VGHVI game; chime in on that post if you’re free Thursday evening and want to join us!

The main question that I’d like to understand better in the current Vintage Game Club playthrough of Super Mario 64 is how the game fits into the taxonomy of the genre of platformers. Or, indeed, whether it fits into the taxonomy of that genre: while, at the time it was released, Super Mario 64 seemed to me like the natural transition of the genre from 2D into 3D, experience with later games has increased my appreciation of just how large a break with the platforming tradition it was.

At least, that was my theory; given that I hadn’t played Super Mario 64 since 1998, however, that theory could be complete bunk! So, with a replay of the first 30 stars under my belt, how do I feel now?

The Castle Grounds

The opening of Super Mario 64 is, to me, very telling. You’re not placed at the left end of a traditional level or on a map laid out like a game board: instead, you’re on the grounds surrounding a castle. And while you are “supposed” to head straight into the castle, I never considered for a moment starting by doing that. Instead, I wandered around here and there, climbing trees, swimming in the water, reading the signs and trying out the moves, wondering why there was an underwater door and so many underwater grates, trying to figure out if it’s possible to reach the coins that are hanging under the bridge.

And the music encourages this wandering. To me, it sounds significantly different from, say, the music in the original Super Mario Bros. The music in the original game isn’t relentless, but it’s always supporting your moving from left to right. Here, though, the castle theme starts off sounding like somebody tiptoeing around, wandering this way and that. Then, after three variants of said tiptoing, it transitions into a slightly more expansive bit, saying “wow, look at all this neat, stuff. (happy sigh)” That sequence repeats; and then, mimicking the player’s increased confidence, the theme has you wandering this way around the grounds, with a bit more purpose in your step. But still wandering: there’s not this feeling that you have a place to go, things to do. The plot may be suggesting that you should get to work rescuing the princess, but the music is happy to let you drink in the world.

There was a lot of talk about ludonarrative dissonance a couple of years ago; in its own way, Super Mario 64 exemplifies that, and I just can’t bring myself to consider that a problem. Instead, I’m going to stick with my earlier claim that musicals are a perfectly good model for video games: focus on your set pieces, and treat your plot as light scaffolding to let you hop from piece to piece, and good will come of it. And if the purpose of the opening set piece is to set the stage and motivate the entire rest of the game, then the wandering we have in the castle grounds is the core and foundation for the entire game.

The Levels

So: the opening is quite different from the 2D Mario games. It’s also quite different from the later 3D Mario games, Super Mario Galaxy 2 in particular. (Which also starts you off in an area outside of the levels that you can just mess around in; there’s surprisingly little scope for messing around, however, and it turns out that the area really primarily exists as a sort of trophy room for collecting guests.) But what about the levels proper?

They, too, have a completely different feel from later and earlier games. When I first played Super Mario 64, the levels seemed rather large to me; I was fairly sure that they’d look a lot smaller in the light of subsequent 3D games. And they are; but they’re also a lot denser than I remembered, and somehow manage to accomplish that without seeming abbreviated or cramped. Take Bomb-omb Battlefield as an example: there’s a small area at the bottom where you start, a medium size field on the right and a couple of small meadows on the left, a path that quickly spirals a couple of times around a mountain, and the mountain top that’s barely large enough for a boss fight. Yet somehow the game fits six stars in that area plus the hundred-coin star, and does it without feeling repetitive.

Ultimately, then, the core idea that I’ve gotten from replaying the beginning of Super Mario 64 is that what makes it special is the joy with which it invites you to explore a world. (I suspect the addition of the third dimension significantly affects the tenor of the experience, though I’m not sure I can justify that well right now.) And it’s a mistake to think of that as somehow inevitably tied to platforming: you can have the same feeling of exploration while driving, while leading a life of crime, while rolling around in a ball swallowing up everything in your path.

The Jumps

Having said that: while I no longer consider Super Mario 64 to be a model for a 3D platformer, and while I think it has ultimately been more influential outside of the platformer genre than inside it, diving back into the game has reminded me of how much it has to bring to platforming. Because it’s not about exploring a space in the abstract: it’s about exploring a space as Mario, as a person capable of superhuman feats of jumping. To that end, Super Mario 64 adds not one but four new moves to his repertoire: the backflip, the long jump, the triple jump, and the wall jump. I love the exploration that the game allows, and the extra moves let me travel more widely, with more choices of how I get from here to there; and one of my favorite challenges so far has been the “Wall Kicks Will Work” star in Cool, Cool, Mountain, forcing me to figure out exactly how I’ll be able to navigate my way up a series of crevasses.

In fact, this may be pointing out the narrowness of my focus: I say that those moves are new, but of course the 2D Metroid games featured wall jumping as well. And the Metroid games were about exploring environments much more than the 2D Mario games were. Though they’re much more cramped than Super Mario 64; part of that is the theme, but I’m fairly sure that a lot of that is the way 2D encourages you to fill your levels with walls if you want to combine exploration with the joy of movement. And, in a curious twist, the Metroid games shifted as much in their transition to 3D as the Mario games did; I don’t think that’s a coincidence, though I’m not sure I can justify that suspicion, either.

While I’m hesitant to label Super Mario 64 as a 3D platformer, that has more to do with the essentialist nature of labels than anything else. The game sure has a lot of platforming in it, and that’s very much a strength.

Roots and Offshoots

The title from this post came from an amusing choice of names that my computer made while copying files. But it’s curiously suggestive: the gulf between Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario 64 is, indeed, rather large. There’s clearly an ancestral relationship there; but there are a lot of other connections in the family tree, and the tree continues to spread.

What continues to impress me is the scope of the vision that the company has. They are not just trying to make a game that’s a lot of fun: they are trying to fundamentally alter humanity’s relationship with an art form that is older than recorded history, and to do so in an unalloyed positive fashion.

Guitar Hero, of course, kicked this off. It was mostly just a fun video game (though one with far reaching effects in the industry beyond video games, in its revitalization of alternate control interfaces), but it also tried to drag our interactions with music out of the relatively passive listening context, adding in some amount of interactivity. I don’t want to overstate the novelty of this—people sing along and play air guitar and drum along to music all the time, and there are karaoke games out there as well (though I haven’t done my research well enough to know how their dates compare to Guitar Hero‘s), but doing this in an instrumental game context was important and struck a chord.

I never played Guitar Hero 2, so I don’t have a good feel for how transformative its addition of bass was. My guess was that it wasn’t too transformative—bass and guitar isn’t all that compelling a fantasy context (though, having written that, I’ll have to admit that Liesl and I have a great time doing just that), and of course the mechanics of playing the two are very similar.

But I did play Rock Band, and the jump from Guitar Hero to that game was huge. Playing a full band is a compelling difference from just playing a guitar: it makes it a much much more social experience, and there are a lot of people who are naturally drawn to vocals or drums who wouldn’t be drawn to fake plastic guitar.

And that wasn’t the game’s only key advance: downloadable songs began to appear right after release, and they’ve come in a steady flow every week ever since. Harmonix’s support for DLC is in sharp contrast with almost every other gaming company out there, and it made it clear that they see Rock Band as a platform, not just a game, and one which they want to actively curate. And the steady flow of DLC began to raise the question: why aren’t all songs available this way? I mean, I know the practical reasons why that’s currently the case, but surely that’s a bug, not a feature? So what has to happen to fix that bug?

Next came Rock Band 2, which was an incremental improvement, albeit a solid one. It tweaked the social aspects, and its support for not only DLC for the original Rock Band but the ability to import Rock Band songs made it clear that Harmonix was serious about their platform vision.

And, a year later, we had The Beatles: Rock Band. Again, not a major advance (though vocal harmonies are surprisingly powerful), but I really appreciated the lovingly curatorial approach that the game showed. These games are altering our interactions with one of the most ancient of art forms; as such, they should treat music with love, care, and respect, and The Beatles: Rock Band very much did so. (Incidentally, that curatorial approach is another another strength of the band approach over Guitar Hero‘s single instrument: I got a lot more appreciation for the different musical parts once I was able to isolate them and concentrate on each one individually.)

So, at this stage, what are the major issues remaining, what are the next steps? The first issue is the bug I mentioned above, that not all music is available for Rock Band. The folks at Harmonix are great, and they’re putting out an unprecedented amount of DLC (I just had my 360 red ring, and when looking through the list of DLC when deciding what to re-authorize, a good 80 to 90 percent of it must have been Rock Band songs), but even so they’re clearly a bottleneck here. The solution to that, of course, is Rock Band Network; in the long run (and even the medium run) I expect that to be one of the most important video game developments from 2009.

And then there’s another variant of that problem: there does, in fact, exist music that is written for ensembles other than guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. This is, obviously, a quite open-ended problem (witness the Accordion Hero and Sousaphone Hero parodies), and it will take a long time to solve, but as a piano player, I would like to have keyboard support.

Finally, there’s the complaint that pressing colored buttons and hitting the strum bar isn’t very much like playing guitar. I don’t see this as an active problem (and I also note when it comes up that that isn’t the case for the new instruments in Rock Band), but it’s clearly an area where one can imagine improvement.

Which brings us to Rock Band 3. It attacks those two problems head on: I’ve been asking Harmonix employees in my twitter feed for keyboard support for a couple of years now, and not only do I have it, I have a couple of octaves of keyboard support, which is about as good as I can imagine right now! (And talking to people about Rock Band 3 over the last day or two, I’m not the only person out there who would like to put their piano lessons to use.) And they took the most unrealistic instrument, and completely overturned that: now, if you wish, you will be able to play Rock Band 3 on an honest to goodness electric guitar with full fingering charts. (They made incremental improvements on the realism of drums as well, but of course not as much improvement was needed there.)

And I’m looking forward to this more than any other video game news in ages. I’ll get a keyboard controller on launch, and dive into the deep end and see how well I can swim. I imagine that I’ll eventually dabble with pro mode on the guitar, too: I’m a reasonably good guitar player on Rock Band, and I think I’d get a lot more out of bumping up the realism on easy songs than from trying to master the most difficult songs on the current expert setting. I doubt I’ll dive into drums in the same way, though: I’m a much worse drum player, not even able to finish all drum songs on hard, and I imagine that I’ll be able to sink arbitrarily large amounts of time into guitar should I so choose. Which is actually another question that I’m wondering: just how much of my video game playing time is this game going to absorb in the year after it gets released?

So: what should we expect next from Harmonix? I imagine that there are enough big changes in Rock Band 3 that Rock Band 4 will end up being an incremental improvement similar to Rock Band 2; after that, though?

The above narrative points out two obvious areas for improvement. Harmonix has removed themselves as a major bottleneck for music availability, but while we’re getting a lot more content off of Rock Band Network than we could get before, there’s still a further flood of music out there that I want unleashed on the world; I’m not sure exactly what the next step is to enable further growth, but I am sure that next steps are out there. And the other is that we’ve gone from one instrument type (plus a minor variant) to three to four; we’re not done yet, and at some point we’re going to make a jump to “many”. Again, I don’t quite understand how that is going to happen (though a deep partnership with an external manufacturer, as they’ve done, is a good first step), but happen it should.

The other area of improvement that I’d like to see is for Harmonix to get platform independence. I’m now on my third Xbox 360; and even if that hardware weren’t seriously flawed, console lifecycles are only so long (though this one will be longer than normal, mercifully), and at this stage I fully expect to care much more about my musical investment than about the actual games for the console. To some extent, I’m resigned to losing most of that investment, but this is a problem that Harmonix (or somebody!) needs to solve eventually: we need to be able to move gamified songs from platform to platform the way we can move mp3s from platform to platform.

To that end, the most relevant parts of the recent announcements are the fact that all the new instruments have MIDI output ports, and that most of the existing DLC already contains symbol markings for use with the new drum kit. The point here is that this isn’t a brand new problem that Harmonix needs to solve. What we want is a way of representing music that is good enough to support learning to play it on real instruments (at least to the extent of telling if you’re basically playing the right notes at the right time), that is capable of degrading gracefully (as seen in the drum example above; I wonder whether Harmonix is already scoring keyboard parts in such a way that, eventually, we’ll be able to use Rock Band 3 and later content with an 88-key piano?), and that supports future instrument choices. And we need a platform-independent and more-or-less instrument-independent output format that can be matched up against said musical representation.

This, of course, isn’t rocket science: we’ve had perfectly suitable musical notation formats for hundreds of years now, and MIDI is (I assume, I’ve never looked into it) probably something that can do just fine on the output format representation. Also, the nice thing about this is that it gives a proof of concept that there is actually a natural stopping place to the feature creep here: we have known solutions that are sufficient to allow us to represent almost any piece of music in existence in a gamified format, which is what’s really important here. Heck, for all I know, their planned MIDI controller will already let us have most of that ability for free!

So, what’s the next big step? I don’t know for sure, of course, but it seems to me that the natural path forward is as follows (possible simultaneously, possibly in some order):

• Harmonix generalizes their music representation format to support arbitrary instruments, with whatever changes are necessary to support that in their authoring tools.
• Harmonix makes a full version of Rock Band available on a non-console platform, or probably on multiple non-console platforms. (I’m sure they’ve thought about launching their own dedicated device, but I don’t think this is particularly likely—they’re already moving away from hardware vertical integration, and I don’t think that a console would be enough of a match to their current strengths to help them more than it would hurt.)
• Harmonix opens their own game music store (think “iTunes store for Rock Band“, and eventually for all music), offering long-term persistence and portability of the music that you purchase through it.
• Harmonix, MTV, peripheral manufacturers, and actual sane forward-thinking record company executives all work together to make this a huge success, supplanting mp3s as the default format for music purchases going forward.

That last one is a bit of a stretch: sane, forward-thinking record company executives? And, of course, there are good reasons for record company executives to not want to give somebody too much exclusive control over key areas of their business. Certainly I would prefer to live in a world where this developed as an open standard that companies could freely share in; and quite possibly that’s the way that this will turn out. (Though, as is obvious, I’m enough of a Harmonix fanboy to be willing to give them a chance at being our benevolent musical overlords, at least in the short-to-medium term.)

But happen it will. Maybe I’m drinking too much of my own kool-aid, maybe being at GLS is causing me to see the potential for games everywhere. But really, how could it not happen? Having music come embedded with its own score is both obviously good and completely technologically feasible; using that embedded score for ludic and didactic purposes (and really, aren’t those one and the same in this instance?) is equally obviously good; and we are at the dawn of a golden age of gaming that makes this sort of transformation inevitable.

Another World‘s opening cut scene shows an experiment gone awry, with my character being transported to another world, where I got dropped into a pool of water.

At which point I died.

On my next attempt, I moved out of the water; after a bit of trial and error, I killed the slugs on the next screen, but the lion on the screen after that killed me. Repeatedly, in fact. Eventually, I decided that fighting wasn’t going to work, and moving forward wasn’t going to work; a process of elimination suggested that I should try moving back, which allowed me to get away from the lion using a handy vine.

Another World looks like an action game; it may be more of a puzzle game (in the text adventure tradition) than anything else, however. You have a limited set of options at any given moment; if you choose from them appropriately, you will advance, but doing so may require consciously avoiding the standard gameplay choices at any given moment.

Soon, I got captured, and escaped with a fellow prisoner. My combat options increased when I acquired a gun, as did the range of environmental possibilities; in particular, I soon ended up in a cage with a few branching possibilities. Going up didn’t seem right just yet; releasing the water looked promising, but shut off the possibility of going further down. So I went further down, destroyed a wall that, I assumed, would be relevant later, then backtracked, released the water, and headed up top. The changing checkpoint codes as I died along the way reinforced my belief that this was the right sequence of action.

Another World and Abe’s Oddysee have a lot in common. Both are platformers built up out of distinct screens; both use large sprites to further constrain the range of options; in both, you die a lot, but the puzzles are generally fair and frequently checkpointed.

My reactions to the two games are quite different, however. Abe’s got me actively angry; Another World was quietly wonderful. I think this is largely due to the tone: to me, Another World felt melancholy, while Abe’s had a certain offhand cruelty, a cruelty that extended out of the in-game scenario to the way that the game treated the player.

As I moved on, the game continued to discard tactics that I had mastered, and wove together new possibilities out of the same set of ingredients. I was proud of myself for noticing, in the palace, that one of the guards will raise his hands and hit a switch, lowering a door which enables you to change the outcome of a subsequent battle. But I was unhappy that, after I mastered that subsequent battle, I was apparently completely stuck.

Eventually, I resorted to a walkthrough, which told me that had to let a grenade (or, apparently, four grenades?) go through to blast a hole in the floor. I felt that two new ideas in the same checkpoint was a bit unfair, and several other VGC participants also got stuck there; still, if that’s the most unfair the game gets in terms of puzzle solving, then it’s a very fair game overall.

Jesse Schell defines a puzzle as “a game with a dominant strategy”, with the implication that “puzzles are just games that aren’t fun to replay”. Which Another World takes to its heart to a remarkable extent; I’m so used to games that are filled with repetitive combat for its own sake that it’s very refreshing to see a game that refines or discards mechanics as soon as you’ve proven that you’ve mastered them. This results in a quite short game, but I don’t mind that at all; instead, I wish more game designers had the courage to strip out padding, had the vision to be able to see padding in the first place.

By this point, I was almost done with the game. It threw a completely new mechanic in at the Arena, then had one last firefight; that firefight turned into a capstone experience, where the skills that I had developed earlier (especially in the area where I got stuck, ironically), after a bit of further polish, allowed me to reliably finish the firefight first slowly then quickly. Which led to a final confrontation where, instead of a traditional boss fight, you crawl painfully across the floor, with legs apparently broken. And then you and your companion escape, perhaps to freedom.

One of the arguments we had (well, I had!) on the VGC forums was to what extent the game was minimalist. I eventually decided that I didn’t know what the term “minimalist” meant, so I don’t have an opinion on that subject, but there are some related concepts that the game does touch on.

In terms of its gameplay construction, it is spare with the concepts that it allows, while being systematic with the ways in which it combines those concepts. And the gameplay itself carries the story forward, with very few cut scenes after the game gives you control initially.

Its visual style is rough and sparse, but with a strong aesthetic that still holds up well in today’s high-polygon-count world. It gives me a certain wabi-sabi feel (if I understand that term right, which I probably don’t!), with its transience and roughness.

But the game also fights against that wabi-sabi feel in one important way: while you are lonely in that you are stranded on a strange world, with only one companion whom you can’t talk to and who isn’t with you for much of the game, you’re never actually alone. Instead, the game moves you directly from struggle to struggle, sometimes environmental but usually struggling against actual living enemies.

Looking at that tension through the lens of my favorite analytical categories, some properties that might be relevant are Positive Space, Roughness, The Void, and Simplicity and Inner Calm. The game does well in terms of Roughness and Simplicity. (I’ll have to think more about the Inner Calm half of that last one.) And, on a geometric level design sense, there is quite a bit of Positive Space.

But on a more conceptual level, the Positive Space is missing, and there’s no sense of The Void. You’re constantly forced to interact with the game, and usually with living enemies within the game: it throws one puzzle after another at you, you’re never actively invited to rest, and the spaces between puzzles rarely invite contemplation.

Ueda is frequently cited as a designer who is influenced by Another World. And if my memories serve me well, Ico has somewhat of the same problem: the game world is wonderful, but far too often in it, if you stop to drink in the world, you’ll find yourself getting attacked. It wasn’t until Shadow of the Colossus that Ueda really broke away from this, with a recognition that this combination of exquisitely crafted puzzles together with magnificently desolate environments is best served by leaving huge amounts of space between those puzzles, letting the player disengage from the puzzles and letting the nature of the environments seep into the gameplay.

I haven’t done my usual gathering of links for Another World, but I certainly recommend the discussion of the game at the Vintage Game Club.

So: functionality. In the context of a blog, I suppose that means: does this blog talk about topics that you’re interested in, and have interesting / useful / provocative contributions to the discussion about those topics? I’ll mostly leave that to others to decide; certainly I wouldn’t blame anybody else for not being at all interested in what I have to say here! But I do try to dig a bit into whatever topic happens to interest me in the moment; if you happen to find my topic du jour interesting, maybe I’ll have something worthwhile to say. I’m sure I can do better in that regard, but I’m also sure I could do worse, under the (very) generous assumption that I’m speaking of a reader who shares my peculiar collection of concerns.

And openness. I try not to hoard my ideas, I’m happy to talk about them with other people and let them build on them or disagree with them. And I try to look at what others have written, too – I read a lot of blogs, I dig for blog posts on topics that I’m focusing on, I include references to them even if I can’t find ways to fit them into the main thrust of my discussion. Again, I’m sure that there’s room for improvement, but I’m not particularly concerned on this front either.

Habitability, however, is another matter entirely. In fact, part of the reason why I’m happily giving myself a pass on the previous two criteria is that I strongly suspect that my blog is about as uninhabitable as they come, at least for readers who don’t happen to be me! This blog is a record of my day to day obsessions: when I find something I’m interested in, I try to use this blog as a way to get a piece of my thoughts on the matter better defined to myself. But I’m not particularly concerned with presenting those thoughts in a fashion that’s going to fit well with anybody else’s thought patterns. Habitability doesn’t mean “reduced to a least common denominator”, and one thing that this blog has going for it in that regard is that it is very much inhabited, but I don’t think that it’s inhabited in a way that manifests core living structures that will resonate more broadly.

One of the directions to approach this from is to come up with a set of constraints, a set of patterns. Looking around, I see some other interesting experiments. Roger Travis has been talking about taking a bardic approach recently; I’m curious about that, but I don’t have a clear vision what it would be like. (If I were still teaching, though, I would be thinking very hard indeed about what he’s been doing.) I’m very impressed by what Duncan Fyfe has produced recently, but his approach wouldn’t work at all for me. Justin Keverne seems to be in the process of rethinking his blog; some of the seeds there really appeal to me.

And then there’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I’ve just reread for the first time in more than a decade, and which is fascinating both as a model and as a cautionary tale. As a model: the dialogues are wonderful, and are a form that I’ve loved for ages. As a cautionary tale: while I enjoy the non-dialogue parts of the book, I also suspect that a large part of the reason why they’re there is that Hofstadter can’t bear to not explain what he’s thinking about, so they’re really there for his sake more than the readers’ sake; this is something that I do All The Time. As a model: the pictures in the book are pretty wonderful, too.

(Presentation Zen pointed out rather forcefully the strengths of pictures as well. The blogger computer geek thing to do seems to be to start taking photography seriously; perhaps inspired by my daughter, though, I’d be more interested in drawing, were my “learning non-programming stuff” slot not taken up by Japanese. Still, having a camera in my pocket isn’t the worst thing in the world; and there are zillions of images out there on the web if I only take the time to think about how to use them.)

I suspect that I should take a lesson from both Justin and from Hofstadter and play around with length. I have enough experience with writing posts in the 1000-2000 word length; I should experiment with both much smaller and much larger pieces. (Possibly starting from the same basic material, but presenting it in either a suggestive or a well worked out approach, instead of typical blog pontificating.) And I should cast my net for presentation approaches more broadly: while linear written exposition is pretty deeply embedded into my brain, now more than ever it’s not the only approach worth considering.

I have a lot to think about in terms of presentation and habitability, that’s for sure. Though I should return to the question of functionality: if I’m considering writing something longer form, I do wonder what other people would be interested in reading about from me. Obviously it’s mostly my problem to figure out what I have that’s worth saying, but I am curious what suggestions and advice others have.

After more than five years of writing this (and a couple of years of Twitter usage), it feels quite odd to be thinking about writing something that won’t immediately be available via an RSS feed. Don’t get me wrong, this blog isn’t going anywhere, but I should carve out a quieter space to think and experiment, too.

The key concept here is that freedom to use software or hardware in ways that you choose isn’t just another feature that a piece of software or hardware may or may not have: it’s a separate and parallel class of good. And, for many people, it is a very strong class of good: there are a lot of people in my social circles who, given the presence of a free tool for a job, don’t seriously consider using a non-free tool at all. I never considered using non-free programming tools for years, for example, or using Windows instead of Linux.

That above example is for a particularly strong version of openness, namely freedom as used by the Free Software Foundation: the ability to not only use the software to produce whatever you want but to be able to modify it so you can expand its range of use. But openness is a continuum, and there are less extreme but still valuable positions along it: I remember when growing up reading about a compiler whose developer charged people for distributing software built by it, and this felt wrong to me at the time even though I never thought twice about the fact that I couldn’t get source code to the compiler. And I would also prefer to use a compression codec with a publicly available standard over one with a closed standard, even though the former might be just as expensive to use (e.g. because of patent licenses).

But I use non-free software a lot more than I used to; my use of non-free software got a big boost as my volume of video game playing increased, but I also use non-free software in many other areas as well. Video games give one example where free software loses so badly on the feature comparison as to not be worth considering, but that doesn’t apply to all the software I use: e.g. why do I use Tweetie as my Twitter client and Things as my list manager in the presence of many open source alternatives?

I think what’s going on for me is this: yes, features and freedom are both separate and important goods to me. But, where you have two dimensions for evaluation, you have the possibility of more than two dimensions, and a third dimension has started to come to the fore for me. I’m not sure exactly what to call it: at first I was thinking I’d use the term ‘beauty’, but that’s a bit stronger than what I mean. ‘Aesthetics’ isn’t a bad term, so maybe I’ll end up going with that, but for now, I’m leaning towards the term ‘habitability’. (Inspired by Richard Gabriel’s term ‘habitable code’, though he uses that to refer to the source code itself rather than the software or hardware involved; while I’m borrowing the adjective, I don’t claim that I am (or am not) using it in an analogous way.)

Basically, there is software that I feel happy to be sitting down and using, and there’s software that grates at me (sometimes only barely, sometimes quite violently) when I have to interact with it. I might be happy about the software because it does a particularly good job of meeting and even anticipating my needs; I might be happy about using the software because of a strong, well-thought-out vision that motivates it (even though that vision may entail removing features that, in the abstract, I’d want); I might be happy using the software because it’s a pleasure to look at. But, in all instances, the thought of using the software makes me happy; whereas there’s a bunch of software out there that I shy away from using, that runs the gamut from actively pissing me off to just not feeling right. I’m using the word ‘software’ here, but everything in this paragraph applies equally well to hardware. (And, in many prominent recent instances, to a mixture of software and hardware working well together.)

So this notion of habitable software is very important to me right now, equally so to functional software and open software. And, unfortunately, right now I’m having a particularly hard time right now finding instances where all three of these meet; this makes me sad.

Is this a new feeling for me? At first, I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure. I first started seriously programming doing non-application software from, say, 1987 to 1994. And, in that time period, open software was actually pretty awesome in terms of habitability: Unix was a great platform to be programming on, Emacs was a great editor, the GNU toolchain was very solid, Unix’s networkability was so much better than anything available for normal desktop use as to be beyond compare, and even X Windows was just fine, given the other alternatives. So you really could get all three of that trio at once; I’m no historian, but I think you could probably make a pretty good case that openness (and even freeness in the FSF sense) contributed actively to functionality and habitability in that case.

It’s a couple of decades later now, though; unfortunately, a lot of that world has stagnated in the interim. Unix is still a good foundation to build on (my favorite general-purpose computing platforms are all Unix-based), and its networking has flourished in ways that would have been hard to imagine at the time; Emacs and GCC and X Windows have all improved, but not nearly as much as I would have liked, however. If I were doing certain kinds of server development, I would find it acceptable (though still grating at times); otherwise, not so much. (Though I’m pretty sure I’ll always have a soft spot for Emacs!)

So the needs for a computing ecosystem has changed; I’ve changed too, though. Certainly playing video games has had a lot to do with my shift in viewpoint, both because they give examples where open alternatives aren’t at all competitive and because they give aesthetics a more central role. And not being on a student income means that it’s a lot easier for me to buy software and hardware than it once was.

But agile has played at least an important role in my shift as those factors. One reason is its emphasis on the ease and pleasure of working with the code itself (so I guess that habitable code analogy isn’t too far off): I value that in my programming, shouldn’t I value that in my programming environment more broadly? Also, the programming techniques that it suggests have also pulled me out of my old Emacs / C habitat: I want to use different programming languages (many of which Emacs supports badly), I want automated refactoring (good luck doing that in Emacs). (Though I should point out that much of what I want here is supported by open tools; they’re just different ones, and ones that come with their own set of habitability problems.) And, finally, agile insists on putting business and external design considerations at an equally important level to technical considerations when developing software; it’s no accident that the golden age I mentioned above was a golden age exactly for a community where the same people could judge both of those considerations well.

I could go further afield, too. I seem to be unable to go more than four or five blog posts in a row these days without mentioning Christopher Alexander; he’s convinced me that, to build spaces that you feel good living in, you need to take account of your environment as a whole, instead of using freedom as an excuse to do whatever the hell you want. And then there’s global warming: while I think that my house will remain habitable for the next several decades, untrammeled freedoms are putting habitability at risk in a very literal way.

So, at least in the computing arena, I’ll propose functionality, openness, and habitability as a trio of goods, the absence of any of which leaves me with a system that doesn’t feel right. I suspect I could get that trio to help me analyze other contexts, too.

I’d hoped that writing this would lead to my feeling more at ease. And, to some extent, it has: I’m happy enough with choices that I’ve made that involve selecting two out of those three criteria, in the absence of solutions that fit all three. But, having said that, I’m still not thrilled: it still doesn’t feel right for me to say that solutions that aren’t open are fine. What I would really like is for people working on open solutions, on free solutions (in computing arenas or more broadly) to have habitability front and center in their vision of the world they’re trying to build.

Freedom is great, but how we use that freedom is a choice: let’s choose to build something beautiful.

Many Facebook games (e.g. most or all entrants in the farm genre) could be considered sandbox games; and one of my most eye-opening experiences in spending time on Facebook is just how different those sandbox games can be from console sandbox games. Console sandbox games constantly give you very direct suggestions as to how to spend your time: yes, you can simply drive around San Andreas enjoying yourself, but there are always missions trying to force you to do something quite specific. Or you can drive around Paradise City just seeing where roads lead you, taking jumps, crashing into your friends; but there are at least ten more concrete ways that the game suggests you spend your time. And, in either case, there’s a distinct lack of sand with which to build castles: you can wander around the environment fairly freely, but your ability to actually shape that environment is quite limited.

In contrast, consider Social City, which I’ll use as an example both because it’s the Facebook sandbox game that I’ve played the most (though I wasn’t involved in any of the design discussions or anything) and because I think it’s a particularly good example of the genre. Sure, there are ways that the game suggests that you spend your time: you might want to build contracts in your factories in order to make you money, you might want to have people move into your city so that you can build more factories. And, when you dip into the store, you’ll discover that there are also leisure buildings that you can buy, in order to increase your citizens’ happiness, in order to allow more people to move in, in order to let you build more factories to make more money.

But that’s not really the point of the game: that’s a very bare-bones set of goals and mechanisms that the game presents you with, certainly not enough to hold the interest of somebody used to games with any real complexity to their mechanics. So, when leafing around in the store, you’ll inevitably start to think about considerations other than how much a building will help increase your populace: you start to think about whether that’s a type of building that you want to have in your city, which part of the city it belongs in, what other buildings you want to place near it.

One of the most charming aspects of Social City is the animations that each building has: you don’t just see a house, you see a house whose inhabitant is lounging in a hammock, mowing the lawn, playing with a bow and arrow. (And there are people walking around town on the sidewalks, too.) This helps reinforce the fantasy that you’re playing with a real city with real inhabitants, where your choice of buildings and building locations helps shape the city that they’re living in. And this directly affected how I built out my city: I made sure that the factories weren’t right next to the residential areas (especially the standalone houses), but I also made sure that both were close to places where people could go to grab a bite to eat. I made a central town square with the most important municipal buildings, I created both an upscale shopping district and a less upscale shopping district, and I’m building a water park / zoo / exercise area on the outskirts of town. From the point of view of the in-game numbers, this is all irrelevant—this isn’t Sim City, you can put buildings where you want and the game will behave the same—but it matters to me.

Or rather, it matters to us. As far as I can tell, Social City has taken the lead in the list of games that Playdom employees play with their kids, and Miranda was fascinated by it as soon as she saw it. So we’ve developed a ritual where I will spend the week earning money in the game but not spending it, and then on the weekend we’ll talk about how to spend that money, how we want to next evolve our city. I also really enjoy looking at other people’s cities, seeing how others have made different design choices than Miranda and I have and how their design choices have changed as they’ve built up their cities.

The upshot is a game that feels a lot more like playing with Lego than any console sandbox game ever did. (Your choices are quite a bit more restrictive than when playing with Lego bricks, but there’s more than enough variation that the cities of all of my twenty-odd friends who are playing the game look quite different from each other.) In fact, I’m wondering how the term “sandbox game” ever got used for games like Grand Theft Auto, given how little that series feels like a sandbox to me: the closest console analogy isn’t sandbox games, it’s games like Animal Crossing, though even that game is a good deal more structured than Social City. Returning to Friday’s discussion of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, a game like Social City is so much farther on the intrinsic side of the intrinsic/extrinsic motivator split than games for core gamers are as to make them almost incommensurable in that regard.

And, while I do think that Social City does a particularly good job of nourishing intrinsic motivators that its players might have, it’s far from unique in that regard. Much of the discussion of FarmVille on core gamers’ web sites focuses on the externally visible extrinsic motivators of the game’s gifts and wall posts; but when looking at dedicated FarmVille players’ farms, I’m sure they feel the desire to sculpt a habitable environment just as strongly as I do.

Give these games a try, and look beyond the traditional game mechanisms and motivator chains that they contain. You’ll learn something, and you may be surprised at the unexpected pleasures you’ll find in them.

The talk was all about how video games (and other sorts of games, too) are moving away from their traditional confines and are appearing in all sorts of surprising real-world settings. Given that I love games in general and video games in particular, one might expect me to find this super-exciting: I should see this as a way in which our culture could become even richer! (See, for example, this Jane McGonigal interview.) And the video game blogosphere might largely be expected to react the same way, too.

The talk did, indeed, get a huge amount of discussion in the blogosphere (I’ll include a bunch of links at the end of this post), but the tone of most of those articles wasn’t so positive: while people generally thought that it was a very good talk, they also thought that it was a very good talk about a potential dystopia. I suspect there are a few different reasons why the talk got that sort of reaction, but certainly one of the main reasons is the last part of Schell’s talk, in which he painted a world full of organizations trying to convince you to take actions based on receiving points. (And you don’t have to stretch to see this as a dystopia: in his GDC microtalk, Schell himself described that as being akin to Brave New World.)

Extrinsic Motivators

More broadly, much of the discussion focused on the problematic nature of external rewards. As a long time Alfie Kohn fan, I’m pretty dubious about external rewards (or “extrinsic motivators”), for many of the reasons that Jesper Juul gives.

Which leaves me conflicted: I love video games, I don’t like extrinsic motivators, but here we have a talk about video games penetrating broadly through society that is being read widely as linking the two! I don’t enjoy cognitive dissonance more than anybody else; what should I do to resolve this?

There are a few options here. Probably the most attractive is to say that games aren’t all about extrinsic motivators, that (for example) only bad games are. There’s probably some amount of truth to that, but less than I would have expected going in. Let’s set aside video games for the moment, and talk about my favorite game of any sort, namely go. This is a game that I think is an inexhaustible source of richness and depth, and even on a superficial level I think that the layout of stones on a go board in a good game has real beauty of its own. Yet, if I were given a go board and a set of go stones and told to make something beautiful, I wouldn’t be particularly likely to try to follow the rules of go to do so: I would only be likely to make go-like patterns on a go board if I wanted to win a go game. (Either a game I was playing right then, or a hypothetical game that I might play in the future that would be informed by my investigations on the go board now.)

So, while there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation in my desire to play go (love for beauty, love for problem solving, wonderment at the layers upon layers of higher-order concepts that emerge from such simple rules), there’s extrinsic motivation there, too: the winning conditions are one example, as is the fact that I play in tournaments and got excited when my AGA rating made it up to 1 dan and bummed when my rating slipped back to 1 kyu.

And, of course, this mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators within a single game isn’t exclusive to go. I’m growing increasingly tired of the combat in games where I’m primarily interested in the environmental or narrative hooks. So, I have an intrinsic motivation which certain aspects of the game satisfy (the stories, the cities), but the mechanics fulfilling that intrinsic motivation serve in turn as extrinsic motivators to get me through other aspects of the game (slogging through repetitive combat).

To make game designers’ jobs worse, the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators isn’t universal across their audience! If I’m playing a narrative FPS, I may feel that I’m slogging through the shooting because it’s the only way to progress the plot; an FPS fan, however, may be going to the kitchen to fetch something to eat during the cut scenes, waiting until he or she can get back to shooting stuff.

I’m not sure exactly what to make of all of this. I guess one lesson of the go example is that one level of extrinsic motivators is fine, even good: it can give you the structure to make something a game instead of an activity, and as long as accepting that structure opens up a range of experiences that satisfy your intrinsic motivation, great! But once you open up extrinsic motivators on top of extrinsic motivators, experiences get a good deal bleaker. My problem with most JRPGs isn’t just that I have to fight through battles to advance the plot, it’s also that I’m applying the same strategy over and over again in battles: so I’m only pressing the buttons out of the extrinsic motivation of getting through the battle, and I only want to get through the battle out the extrinsic motivation to advance the plot. (Which I am intrinsically motivated to do!) And of course it gets worse if games (as frequently is the case) add a third consecutive layer of extrinsic motivation: maybe I’m only going through battles to advance my level or to be able to buy new loot, which aren’t (for me) intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I’ll propose that as my definition of grind: three directly nested game mechanics that function as extrinsic motivators for me.

This desire to avoid consecutive extrinsic motivators almost sounds like my old friend Alternating Repetition, this time between extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, though I guess the analogy breaks down somewhat because we’re changing levels of scale while going down the motivation chain. (Also, I don’t see anything inherently bad about having consecutive layers of intrinsic motivators, if that makes sense in a game context.) And the main tool to get layers of intrinsic motivation is, I suspect, my recent obsession of Strong Centers: going back to the RPG example, make the battles strong enough to stand on their own (which seems to be the secret behind the appeal of Demon’s Souls), strengthen the appeal of exploration itself (Etrian Odyssey), make the cut scenes good enough that even people who are there for the fighting will be happy to watch them, make both fighting and narrative elements strong enough to appeal to people who come to the game for one of those are happy to stay for the other (Mass Effect 2, see Christina Norman’s GDC talk).

Achievements

The above discussion of extrinsic motivators considers them inside core video game gameplay; but many of the followups to Schell’s talk discussed extrinsic motivators outside of the core gameplay, typically using Xbox Live achievements as an example. (Almost always a negative one.)

And, indeed, achievements seemed to me unambiguously like extrinsic motivators when I first encountered them; now, though, I’m not so sure. Many achievements do seem to me to be extrinsic motivators: taking Mass Effect 2‘s achievements as an example, “Power Gamer” acts as an extrinsic motivator (though not one that’s been effective enough to get me to earn it!), and I spent a while thinking about how I would react to “Paramour” and “No One Left Behind” in that light. (I ended up deciding that I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn either of them, but then Thane won my heart and I made the right choices on the final mission so got them both after all.)

Other achievements, however, didn’t act that way for me. The story progress achievements were simple checkpoints from my point of view: there was never any real question as to whether or not I was going to make it through the whole game, so they just served as a bit of punctuation. (And added a bit of fun looking at my friends’ profiles and seeing how much faster than me they were going.)

And then there’s the combat achievements: these did affect my gameplay, but in general not in ways that I think of as extrinsic motivators. The clearest example here is “Tactician”: my character didn’t have any biotic powers, and I wouldn’t have thought to experiment with combining biotic powers if the achievement hadn’t been there. But it was there, and it served to open up my eyes to some new tactical possibilities that I hadn’t considered before. (And then I closed my eyes after experimenting with it a few times.) So that achievement served to make me aware of an area of the gameplay space that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise; to use an education analogy, it’s like the difference between a professor telling me that I have to study something to pass an exam (extrinsic motivation) and a mentor suggesting that I look into an area that I hadn’t studied before because it fits in with my interests. I don’t think that the majority of achievements act this way, but Mass Effect 2 certainly isn’t unique in that regard—I could post to examples in The Beatles: Rock Band and Burnout Paradise as well.

And, as with the earlier example of in-game extrinsic motivators, these aren’t clear objective categories: an achievement that serves as an extrinsic motivator for one person can serve as a neutrally-marked progress meter or mentoring for another person.

A great talk; I will repeat my exhortation to watch the video. The combination of extrinsic motivators and video games certainly gives a lot to think about; I hope I’ll be able to understand their interplay better in the future.

Other Writings

Some blog posts that other people have written about Schell’s talk:

• Sirlin on external rewards.
• Mitu Khandaker on the future of games.
• Annie Wright and Kirk Hamilton on too much for me to summarize in one sentence.
• Dan Lawrence on behaviourist game design.
• Jesper Juul on demotivation by external rewards.
• Jim Rossignol on taste.
• George Kokoris on achievements unlocked.
• Chris Breault on grinds.
• Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus on rewards.
• Ian Bogost on persuasive games.
• Ralph Koster on gameifying everything.
• Bryan of The Pretentious Gamer on convergence.
• Jay Bachhuber on “ludic century nonsense”.

We launched Tiki Resort last month, and it took me a few days to come to grips with it. I was dutifully doing what the game told me to—placing buildings, gathering coins, clicking on messes to clean them up, feeding my tourists—and leveling up apace. But I was starting to get a little bored—just why am I doing this again?

And then I upgraded one of my existing buildings (I can’t quite remember what, maybe turning the Art Stand into the Island Art Emporium), and I thought, “you know, that upgraded building looks kind of neat!” And then I upgraded another, and thought, “this one looks pretty neat, too!” By the time I’d upgraded my Mini Golf into a Putt Hut I was really quite curious about further upgrades to that building would look like; and now, when I look at the level 1 Waterslides and Carnival buildings, I don’t say “that’s a meh waterslide”, I say, “wow, I bet my resort is going to look awesome once those are at level 3!”

Though, even after that, my brain wasn’t quite at ease—these upgrades are just eye candy, right, their effect on gameplay is ultimately pretty minimal? At which point I had flashbacks to my experiences playing Burnout Paradise and reading other people fail to appreciate the game because of the direction in which they approached it. Yes, if you see Burnout Paradise as a race game, then billboards and smash gates seem like “the the obligatory inclusion of hidden collectables [that] make no sense in the context of Burnout [because they] reward stopping”. But when I stopped coming at Burnout Paradise from a race game perspective (and I’d never played the previous games, so I didn’t have the series’s legacy weighing on me), that completely stopped mattering—finding stuff to smash is cool, and the strategic planning required for billboards is a plus instead of a minus! And it’s the same for me with Tiki Resort—the traditional counters of levels, money, etc. are all well and good, but ultimately the reason why I’m enjoying the game is because I want to see what the buildings look like, and what the island as a whole will look like with all the buildings working together.

So this game turns out to be an ode to tech trees. And not tech trees in some sort of utilitarian sense of tools to develop your character to overcome external challenges: just tech trees that are neat to explore, where the branches and leaves are pleasant objects in their own right. In fact, playing Tiki Resort at the same time as I was playing Mass Effect 2 got me wondering: the latter game is also full of tech trees, in the form of your characters’ skills and the weapon/ship/armor/etc. upgrades that you can research. And yes, I dutifully researched those, but now I’m wondering: how much of my desire to do so had to do with the rest of the game play, and how much had to do with my just feeling compelled to follow tech trees? I liked the idea of upgrading my powers, but the truth is that I generally used the same power over and over again (Incinerate!), and upgrading those powers didn’t reveal any significant new aspects to them, they were just the same basic idea with slightly higher stats. (With a slight exception for their fourth levels.)

I blogged about combat fatigue recently, and I’ve also started to feel a sense of narrative fatigue. Not that I think that either combat or narrative are bad things: in particular, I have quite a bit of respect for games that are really focused on combat, and I’m happy to be swept along by a game that is more interactive cinema than anything else. But there are too many games that don’t know the virtues of restraint, that throw in gameplay devices because they are expected rather than because those devices strengthen the impact that the game is making. So it’s refreshing to see games that take a step back from such trappings, that take less prominent aspects of video games and focus on strengthening those. With the result that you end up with a game that just worries about using tech trees to build up a neat space (Tiki Resort; for a more extreme focus on cool tech trees, see GROW ver. 1), or a game that focuses on the joys of mapping (Small Worlds; it’s not a coincidence that I gave up on Etrian Odyssey as it was insisting on rubbing JRPG conventions into my face).

So hey, focus, let’s go with that as a virtue. Another thing to keep my eyes open for as I try to spend more time playing and talking about short games.

A couple of points that didn’t really fit into the flow above, but that I won’t find time to expand on elsewhere:

• The idea of having animals that ask you to pet them on quite frequent intervals (once a minute?) turns out to be a very effective mechanic to get you (or at least me) to not just leave a game open in a separate window to accumulate money but to return to it constantly. (And hence, presumably, get more and more invested into it; which petting virtual animals also fosters directly, of course.)
• For another example of a game with stuff that just looks cool, check out Social City. We only launched it yesterday, but I’m totally in love with all the animations.

I am a big Shenmue fan, to the extent that hearing Yakuza 2 compared to Shenmue made me nervous rather than pleased: I was fairly sure that I was going to be disappointed if I thought too much about that comparison. So I decided to keep that comparison out of my head as much as possible, to try to appreciate the newer game on its own merits.

Which, for a while, I managed to do. Yakuza 2 started off with cut scene after cut scene after cut scene (and why did the game need to load between cut scenes instead of streaming them seamlessly off disk? Were they not prerendered?), but the back story seemed interesting enough, so I was willing to give that a pass. I liked the plot just fine—an odd couple of gangster and cop, warring clans with an old wise man and a changing of the guards, past events coming back to bite you, and all the twists and turns that you’d hope for. The Japanese voice acting was rather good, and, as a bonus, helped my studies: I wouldn’t have wanted to play the game without subtitles, but I could pick up enough from listening to make me happy. (And also enough to notice that, in some situations, they picked different readings for names in the subtitles than were used in the voice acting; oops.) There’s a lot to do in the cities, and many of the side quests seemed pleasantly quirky. And Goro Majima is one of my favorite NPCs ever.

Despite which, the game started to go sour, at two turning points in particular. In the first, I was wandering all over town trying to trigger a cut scene so I could progress the main story line. I had no idea where to go, and ended up looking everywhere; eventually, I stumbled past a male host club, where I was more or less forced to take a job that I had no interest in, and that made no sense for me right then, given that I was in the company of a female cop. And, adding insult to injury, that side mission left a big green directional symbol on my map. I was all for quirky side missions when I started the game; but I wasn’t in the mood for one right then, I doubt I would have particularly enjoyed that one even in better situations, and I was actively annoyed by having the map tell me where to go to do something I didn’t want to do while refusing to tell me how to make progress in the actual story!

The second (much worse) one was when I was wandering around Osaka with Haruka, the main character’s daughter-figure. She was great: I loved the way she was all gangly arms and legs, the way she had to run to keep up but was full of energy and happy to be going anywhere as long as she was with you.

And then you ran across some creep from a talent agency; Haruka, being a sensible child, wanted nothing to do with him. I was willing to write this off as a tone-deaf sidequest, until it became clear that this wasn’t a sidequest at all: the game was going to insist on my meeting with said creep again, and, to my horror, to my character agreeing to sign up Haruka with him. Fortunately, she protested enough to get my character to back off of that, but really: is anybody who worked on this game a parent? When you are confronted by a creep, when your daughter clearly and repeatedly expresses no interest in having anything to do with said creep, then what you do is stay far far away; you do not sign your daughter over to said creep’s care, especially only a couple of hours after meeting him for the first time!

After that, whatever bloom was left on the rose had gone away for me. I played through the rest of the game (including another outing with your daughter, that managed to turn a potentially delightful interlude into a boring-though-mercifully-creep-free grind through the city waiting for a cut scene to trigger), and actually basically enjoyed it. But whatever magic others had seen in the game just wasn’t there for me.

And while I tried to keep the Shenmue comparisons out of my head when I started the game, they had come back in full force by this point. And my opinion on that matter is doubtlessly clear by now: Yakuza 2 is no Shenmue, and it is (perhaps even more strongly) no Shenmue II. Or at least it’s no match for my nine year old memories of Shenmue, but I’m fairly confident that, while the latter game may have warts that the haze of memory has softened, I would still find it far superior if I were to play it for the first time now.

Take the cities that you can wander around. I’m almost positive those in Yakuza 2 are significantly larger than those in the Shenmue games, though I’m not sure that they grew more than you’d expect from the general march of technology. But Yakuza 2‘s are much more homogeneous: the game presents you with sizeable chunks of two cities on opposite halves of Japan (which the game tries to emphasize with the plot and the Osakan dialect), yet it all has a much more homogenous feel than you get simply walking down the hill from Ryo Hazuki’s house to the local shopping district at the start of Shenmue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a consistent visual style where it fits, I certainly wouldn’t want change for the sake of change, but in the Shenmue series the changes in scenery were never forced, the game simply presented different regions that had naturally evolved differently in their different contexts. (Which we saw even more spectacularly in Shenmue II than in the first game.)

That’s the cities at a macro level, but, more importantly, Shenmue had Yakuza 2 beat at a micro level hands down. I’ll never forget the way Shenmue starts you off in a house where you can look at everything; it didn’t manage that level of loving modeling throughout the game, but it continued to have its share of places where you just wanted to stop and take a look around you. I never felt that way in Yakuza 2, and indeed I didn’t have the camera control much of the time to let me look around even if I’d wanted to!

This theme of less sprawling but richer experiences in Shenmue is present in the combat, as well. Yakuza 2 is a brawler; the fighting system is pleasant enough, but (despite all the leveling up options) nothing to write home about, as far as I was concerned. This shallowness doesn’t stop the game from insisting on having you fight all the time, however: that’s great in the sequences in the game where you have to go through enemies for a focused goal, but the last thing I want when wandering around a city and trying to drink it in is to be accosted by punks every block or two. (Yakuza 2‘s atmosphere may have a less complex flavor than some, but there’s still enough there to make it worth experiencing!) It’s the same sort of combat fatigue that I blogged about recently in the context of BioShock: games that have clearly put in a lot of effort into building up a world, but constantly jerk you out of it to beat up somebody.

If I’m remembering correctly, Shenmue didn’t have such random battles at all: if you wanted to wander around the city, you could do so, with interrupts driven much more naturally by the clock instead of by combat. (I may be over-romanticizing this in hindsight, judging from my notes at the time, but the use of forced street fights as a source of money in Yakuza 2 gave me a lot more respect for the job system in the Shenmue games.) And, on the flip side, the combat system in Shenmue was much richer than that in Yakuza 2: Shenmue contains a fully-fledged fighting system, so if you want to take the time to hone your combat art, that game will give you the means and space to do so.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Christopher Alexander analyses (hmm, I really should get around to reading the fourth volume of The Nature of Order, shouldn’t I?); I suspect that Shenmue would come out well in that regard. In comparison to Yakuza 2, it does much better with Levels of Scale (going down to smaller levels, in particular), which in turn leads to Strong Centers, and its gameplay has more Positive Space and Contrast, developing (especially in Shenmue II‘s final act) into The Void and Simplicity and Inner Calm. Is it time, perhaps, for me to replay those games, if I can get my Dreamcast to cooperate? I wonder if I could get other Vintage Game Club members to go along.

Other discussion of Yakuza 2 (including some linked to above); I only wish I could include an archive of the relevant Twitter chatter:

• Steve Gaynor’s segment on the 2008 Brainy Gamer Holiday Confab.
• Michael Abbott on “A cutscene offer you can’t refuse”.
• Mitch Krpata asks if it was the most overlooked game of 2008″.
• Duncan Fyfe on Osaka.
• Two from Daniel Primed: “The Cultural Dynamite” and “Institutional Knowledge and The Virtual Classroom”.
• And finally, Iroquois Pliskin labels Yakuza 2 “The Game About Nothing”.

At any rate, as soon as I stepped into the entry area to Rapture and heard a slightly scratchy rendition of Beyond the Sea, I was hooked. The musical selections really are wonderful—I was going to write that it’s the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps the most with my iPod, until I realized that was patently false, but it’s right up there, and it’s definitely the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps most with the music sitting on top of my piano. And the music is just one aspect of the wonderfully nostalgic world they’ve created: I love the industrial design, the signs and artifacts that are sprinkled about. My only quibble is that the sequences of rooms often didn’t seem to fit together as a coherent three-dimensional chunk, but I can’t think of a first-person shooter that’s handled that better.

Very nice gameplay, too: I don’t like FPSes in general, and I was a bit worried that I’d be paralyzed by the choice of different plasmids; the latter didn’t happen, though, and I rather enjoyed some of the alternative gameplay mechanisms. (I’m a sucker for picture taking as a game mechanism, and the hacking minigame was pleasant enough.) And I appreciated some of the thoughtful choices the game made, e.g. not allowing me to waste my film taking pictures of enemies whose research I’d already maxed out, instead of treating film as an ammo like any other.

I could go into more detail about all of that, but, as with so many other people, all I really want to talk about is the Little Sisters. When I first heard about them and saw pictures of them in the prerelease coverage of the game (back when I actually paid attention to prerelease coverage of games!), they freaked me out enough that I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game at all. I’m largely inured to video game violence, but for whatever reason (perhaps because I have a daughter myself, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time), those pictures really hit home, and I was not at all looking forward to playing through a game with such imagery in it.

I eventually came around, and I’m glad I did. But, with that as my initial impression of the game, the thought of harvesting Little Sisters never crossed my mind. In general, I’m not very good at appreciating “moral dilemmas” in video games (sorry, BioWare), because, given a choice, I can rarely imagine following one of the options. And this game would be an example, except that there’s a third, covert choice here.

Consider: I’ve been thrust into an extremely dangerous and extremely strange world. Almost everybody I meet seems to want to kill me; there’s a voice on the radio acting nice enough, but those I encounter in the flesh are rather less pleasant. And, in the middle of all of this, there are these strange little girls, with “Big Daddies” hulking nearby; neither of them wants to hurt me, the Big Daddies protect the girls, and the girls are evidently quite fond of the Big Daddies. (Or of “Mr. Bubbles”, as they call them.)

Given this, what kind of person would kill the Big Daddies? The main answer, I think, is a psychopath: either somebody who is so amoral as not to care, or so afflicted with a sort of white man’s burden megalomania as to think they can march in and set things to right. (Without doing any of the real work that is actually involved in looking after young children in even a normal environment, let alone a murderous one.) But somehow, in this game, killing their protectors and leaving the girls with nobody to guard and care for them in a place like Rapture is supposed to be the good choice?

I assume that the game designers had some uncomfortable thoughts along the same lines, because of the way they structured the first Little Sister encounter. In that one, the Big Daddy is already dead, and you have to save the Little Sister from a splicer yourself. After which, you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.

Given this, using the magic device Tenenbaum has given you that is supposed to cure the Little Sisters is horrifically irresponsible at best; and, even if you’re tempted to do so, not stopping when the girl cries out in horror is, well, beyond my powers to describe. I felt intensely uncomfortable, but of course the game doesn’t give you a chance to stop when she complains. (Incidentally, when rescuing Little Sisters here and over the course of the game, l Iearned something about how I act when I’m uncomfortable: every single time I rescued a Little Sister and heard those protests, I raised my left arm and scratched the back of my head. What a bizarre tic, I’m not sure I wanted to learn of its existence.) Stopping when confronted with the choice would have been conceivable, but I’m almost positive that the game wouldn’t have let me continue without doing something to the first Little Sister. (And, in the extremely unlikely case that it would have let me proceed, I’m also sure it wouldn’t have let me actually look after her.)

And, once you’ve rescued the first Little Sister, she thanks you, setting you on the slope to further evil: the next time you meet one, she’s with her Big Daddy, but you can rationalize (given all the other murder you’re committing in the game) killing her protector, because the end result is for her own good, right? (It is, of course, for your own good, but we’ll have to construct some sort of rationalization that goes beyond that.) Which I dutifully did because the game expected that of me—given that I wasn’t going to stop playing the game, I decided to go along with its design—but doing so broke my heart every time. (As did seeing a Big Daddy alone later on in that same level—in retrospect, watching a video, it wasn’t the Big Daddy protecting the first Little Sister I’d rescued, but that’s how I interpreted it at the time. Even if you accept that rescuing the Little Sisters is best for them, how can you justify killing their surrogate fathers while doing so?) Unlike with the first Little Sister I assume that it is possible to avoid killing any of the later Big Daddies; if I were more given to alternative playthrough styles, trying the game that way would be very high on my list.

A powerful game, and a very good one. Though also, in its own way a very depressing one: it’s one of the pinnacles of our art form, but it devotes most of its art to exploring adolescent Randian power fantasies instead of, say, exploring a topic like what it means to be a parent. (And that final movie shows just how paint-by-numbers the game designers’ basic approach in that area seems to be.) Sigh. Maybe I should come around to Chris Hyde’s point of view and turn more of my attention elsewhere.