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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’s a couple of weeks later, though, and I don’t seem to be stop playing; so I figure I might as well talk about it now while I have some slight chance of convincing y’all to join me in game and trade with me! (I could particularly use a good source of iron…)

So, what’s in the game? The basis is, of course, familiar since (before) FarmVille: in particular, building on your land to be able to produce is a big theme. There’s a wider range of types of production than in earlier games in the genre: Social City was where I first saw the population => money => happiness => population cycle, and Empires & Allies throws more into the mix. (I’m trying to remember how CityVille was in that regard: my guess is that it falls somewhere between Social City and Empires & Allies, and in particular it’s where I first saw government buildings in the role that they play here.) The relations between buildings are:

• Farms produce coins.
• Other production buildings let you convert coins into resources: wood, oil, and one kind of ore.
• Military buildings let you convert coins, oil, and (frequently) ore into military units.
• There’s a research building that lets you add powers to your military units.
• Buildings cost coins and wood to build; once you get to higher levels, they cost ore as well.
• Production buildings are unlocked through population; population buildings are unlocked through level.
• Your population is determined by your housing buildings. These also produce coins, but not as much coins as farms.
• Your production cap is determined by your government buildings. These are neighbor-gated, and also produce (decent) amounts of coins.
• The market lets you trade for forms of ore that you can’t produce yourself.

That’s a lot of building types! Unlike the Social City example above, it’s also not a cycle: instead, you have a population growth pattern that’s gated by neighbors and a military growth pattern that goes from farms through production buildings to military buildings. And, in both cases, ore plays a role, including ores that can most easily be acquired through trade.

The flip side of the variety of types of buildings: the functional importance of the different types of buildings means that there’s not much scope for personalization. When playing Social City, I really enjoyed designing my city; that level of personalization is completely absent here. (There’s not even the shop naming for personalization that CityVille had.) Which is fine, even good: it’s a different sort of game, with a different focus.

Back to that last building mentioned above: markets. I’ve seen them in other Facebook games before, certainly: Verdonia had them, for example (and I can’t imagine that that game’s implementation of markets was original to it, the game was quite derivative), City of Wonder added them eventually, and so forth. But ores in Empires & Allies give them a different feel: while you can trade lots of different resources in your markets, there’s one specific class of resources that you can get much more easily through markets than through anything else.

So ores are a Treasure Isle-style resource mechanic, but requiring a different kind of action than either simply visiting friends’ towns or having them actively give you gifts. Which turns out to work well for me: I like it more than Treasure Isle‘s mechanism (admittedly, I only played that game a little bit, and did so a long time after launch), and I like it more than unfocused markets. (Not that a game about markets couldn’t be cool; actually, given the employment of economists by Facebook game companies, I’m surprised there aren’t more such games, I was lobbying for more markets ever since the GDC 2010 Habbo Hotel talk…)

Though ores are also much more muted than Treasure Isle style exclusive goods, in that you can buy them for coins. It’s more expensive to do that than to get them from your friends, and it took me a while to discover that option, but it’s there.

In fact, I actually haven’t found anything yet that you need friends or hard cash (i.e. currency that you have to spend real money on) to get, though I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Most building games have used neighbor gating for expansions; in Empires & Allies, however, you buy expansions with coins and through a special item. You can get that special item from your friends, but you also get that special item from battles; so every ten battles that you win lets you get an expansion. (At least as of now, they may of course tweak the balance later; incidentally, the expansions are the CityVille-style “buy a chunk of land adjacent to your current territory” expansions as opposed to the previously popular “your territory expands by 1 on all four sides”.)

Another way in which games like this have used neighbor gating is in population growth. And here, you need to hire friends to run your government buildings. But even there, it’s not so simple: if you leave a post in a government building unstaffed for long enough, eventually an in-game character will fill that post. So yeah, it takes longer to expand if you don’t have friends and don’t spend hard cash, but it’s not prohibitive.

There is some amount of neighbor gating in combat: eventually, you run into battles that you need allies to help you fight in, and the proportion of such battles and the number of allies rises. So it would be difficult to play the game if you didn’t have any friends playing it at all; assuming you have a few, though, you’re as likely to not be able to fight more battles because you’ve run out of energy as because you’ve run out of friends for the day.

Speaking of combat: the style and use of combat in this game is new to me and kind of fun. It shows up on a screen that looks reminiscent of individual Advance Wars battles (though without the surrounding troop movement of that game), with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic underlying it. It turns out to be more simplified than it looks, however: at any give moment only one unit is attacking the other side, so you don’t have as many tactical possibilities as there might seem.

Still, there are definitely some tactical considerations beyond the obvious ones of making sure you’re on top on the rock-paper-scissors chain: figuring out how to weight your units once you’ve picked the overall mix, figuring out whether to put out older, less powerful units as sacrificial lambs or to only use newer units. And then there are power-ups which you can spend hard cash on; I have yet to need them, though, but maybe I’ll have to as the battles go on? (It looks like I’m about a third of the way through the currently available battles.) It ends up being a surprisingly pleasant form of combat, one which I’m enjoying more than in any Facebook RPG that I can think of. (Though, don’t get me wrong, this is clearly still a Facebook game, which I’m totally fine with.)

And, as I mentioned above, more powerful units require ores, bringing that mechanic into play. I also just encountered a different upgrade mechanism, involving blueprints that you can send to your friends; I think that it was just added to the game today, because I didn’t level up or unlock it in any other obvious way? I’m not sure, I’ll need to explore more.

Combat also turns into a friend mechanic in another way: you can both invade your friends and protect your friends from invasion! Which I haven’t done too much, but it sounds like a potentially good idea; my guess is that they also see that as a potentially significant source of revenue.

And there are other Zynga / Facebook standbys, which I think of as coming from FrontierVille. The game is pretty dooberiffic; normally, they annoy me, but for whatever reason I’m finding them fine in this game. Maybe that’s because I’ve found the money bonus for collecting them useful at times (you don’t have to click on them if you don’t want to, but you get a bonus if you click on a long sequence of them); but I think a big part of that is that it works well with the rhythm of combat, where you alternate between attacking enemies and collecting doobers, trying to space your doober collection such that you don’t have long enough gaps to miss out on the bonus.

And, also like FrontierVille, you always have four or five externally-given tasks to work on. (Though they don’t have the same narrative as in FrontierVille.) Which is great, it’s good to have the game pointing out reasonable actions that I could take, and nudging me to keep my economy reasonably level.

I think that’s everything. Well, doubtless not everything, but it’s a lot! Now that I’ve said all of that, I have two questions.

The first is: where is Zynga making their money from this game? (Or hoping to make their money.) It’s newly launched, so it’s possible that they simply aren’t focused on money now, but instead want to bump up the audience. Still, there’s only so much you can do to tweak the economy of a game in a money-making fashion without getting people mad, so I’d be a little surprised if they changed too many of the existing parameters in that regard. (Adding new money-focused mechanics wouldn’t surprise me at all, however.)

And, as I said above, I’ve been very surprised at how little gating there is, whether on neighbors or hard currency. There are lots of situations where other games would require me to pay money or spam my friends or do without where this game seems happy enough to let me progress through my in-game actions, possibly while waiting a bit.

So, of course, that’s part of the answer: as always, if you’re impatient, you’ll need to make money to progress faster. And it’s possible that will hit me at some point: e.g. a couple of minutes ago I took a break from writing and went back to the game to fight a couple of battles, and I would have fought a couple more if I hadn’t run out of friends that I could use as allies today. (And I imagine I’ll need more allies as I get further through the battle sequence.)

My guess is that they’re hoping/expecting combat between friends to be a big driver of currency: people want to level up their units to win battles, and maybe spend money to get special attacks or to revive troops. It’s typically thought that games with lots of player-versus-player combat make money disproportionately to their user base, so I imagine that’s a lot of the thinking here.

And it may be the case that, as I need more upgrades to fight harder battles, it will become harder and harder to earn them strictly through in-game actions. We’ll see.

The other question I have is: how much do I actually like the game? Clearly Zynga (and the industry as a whole, of course) is finding ways to throw more elements into their games in a not unpleasing fashion. I had a good time playing CityVille for a couple of weeks; eventually, though, I’d seen enough of the mechanics and wasn’t finding any hook in the game to make me want to keep on clicking to rehash those mechanics. (Similarly with Ravenwood Fair.)

And I’m sure I’ll hit a wall like that with Empires & Allies, too. Heck, for all I know I’ll hit a wall like that tomorrow: some day I’ll realize that I’ve spent too much time in the evening clicking or thinking about clicking, for no particular gain. In particular, I’m not finding the game to be intrinsically rewarding in the way that building my city in Social City was; and I also don’t like the core game play as much as I like the core game play in, say, Gardens of Time.

But I like the core game play somewhat, at least: the combat is pleasantly soothing in the way an easy puzzle game or form of solitaire can be. And the volume of other mechanics that the game provides adds up to something that is still keeping me going, too.

If you’re curious, give it a try, I’d be interested to see what my non-Facebook-game-playing friends think. And if you have access to iron ore, all the better, I’d like to buy it off of you.

I haven’t played enough FarmVille to be able to really back up that claim: my beliefs about that game mostly come from looking at others’ farms, and the impression of care and crafting that they give me. So I’m going to shift focus slightly and instead talk about Social City: it was another quite successful 2010 Facebook game, based on city construction rather than farm construction, and I played it (as well as its successor, City of Wonder) quite a bit last year. My guess is that a lot of what FarmVille players find attractive is similar to what I’m going to talk about in regards to Social City, but I could be off-base.

Social City

Social City is, as the name suggests, a city construction game. You’re given an isometric grid to build on; from the construction tab in the game, you can choose streets to form the networks of your city, buildings (residential, commercial, industrial) to lay along those streets, and decorations (trees, parks, etc.) to place between and behind those buildings.

That’s the “construction” part of “guided construction game”: as to “guided”, the game isn’t a complete sandbox. At a most basic level, the buildings come fully constructed: this isn’t Lego, you can’t create brick by brick. You also don’t begin with a blank slate: instead, the game gives you a starter town with a few streets and buildings already constructed, and while you can choose to tear it down completely if you desire, you’re more likely to use it as a base of your city’s growth, pruning and editing it as necessary. In addition, not all buildings are available at all times: the game has a level-up mechanic, so you start off with access to a relatively small set of buildings, gaining access to more and more as you progress. And you don’t necessarily have access to all the buildings that you have unlocked: industrial buildings become available by growing your town’s population, which you do with a mix of residential and commercial buildings, while residential buildings require money to purchase, which you earn from your industrial buildings. (There are also buildings that are available by spending real money and buildings you receive as gifts from other players.)

And, equally important, the buildings have character: again, Lego bricks they aren’t. The game presents a unified aesthetic, and a rather charming one at that. And it’s not a static city: the buildings come with animations (kids playing in yards, conveyor belts moving in factories), and pedestrians and cars move along your streets.

The result is a game that both Miranda and I thoroughly enjoyed. We started with the default town layout, and at first built out from it somewhat haphazardly. But fairly soon the different areas of our city took on different characters, so we moved buildings and placed buildings to emphasize those roles. We’d generally level up about once per week, so each weekend we’d have a handful of new buildings to consider, deciding where they’d best fit into our city, how they suggested we should evolve our city next. I gave a tour of my city on my other blog; we really enjoyed evolving the city to get it to that point.

Minecraft

That’s Social City; now, to Minecraft. Like Social City, you’re given a relatively coarse mesh to build on, this time made out of large 3D blocks rather than a two-dimensional grid. Like Social City, you have quite a bit of freedom as to what to do with that grid, but you are also presented with a starting layout (albeit a large-scale procedurally generated one) that strongly influences your construction. Like Social City, you have access to a relatively small collection of objects with which to build; furthermore, your choice of construction is influenced not only by aesthetic considerations but also by in-game mechanics (the ability to earn coins in Social City, to defend against mobs in Minecraft), albeit not to an overwhelming degree. And, in both cases, you have to earn your building material through menial tasks (clicking on buildings, mining): they both have a strong component of what Naomi Clark and Eric Zimmerman call “The Fantasy of Labor”.

And, again, the game has its own very strong aesthetic: the blocky pixel art style that forms the world, the (at times stunningly beautiful) landscapes that the game’s algorithm generates, the animals that wander through the world, the sunsets and sunrises, the music. This aesthetic very much influences the choices that I make when building in the game.

So, as with Social City, you end up with a game that both Miranda and I have sunk countless hours into, figuring out how we want to shape our respective worlds, starting from the canvas that the game gives us and putting more and more of our decisions into it. (Incidentally, if you’d like to join us, the VGHVI plays Minecraft together on the last Thursday of every month!)

A Continuum of Construction

I do not want to pretend that Social City and Minecraft are somehow the same game underneath: there are significant and substantial differences in the world-building that the two games enable. (In particular, Minecraft provides a vastly larger canvas to work upon.) There are many many people who enjoy one of those games without having the slightest desire to play the other one, and I would never want to second-guess their decisions. But when I look into why I enjoy both games, my motivations to play each of them have a lot in common.

That’s perhaps clearest when I contrast them to Lego. We have a big vat of Lego blocks sitting in the house; I never have a desire to pick them up and play with them. It’s just too much of a sandbox for me: I need the aesthetic structure that Social City and Minecraft provide to give me something to work with and to base my decisions around, I even prefer the gating effect that both games’ fantasy of labor restrictions provides to having all the building blocks available at hand. (Miranda frequently plays in multiplayer mode with block creation powers available, while I only do that on VGHVI nights; I can imagine eventually switching over to preferring that mode as I get more comfortable with my designs, but I’m not there yet.) We actually have also done quite a bit of Lego construction this year, but that was done entirely within the context of a prebuilt kit of the Taj Mahal: that was fabulous, but perhaps a bit too far in the prescriptive direction for me. (Or perhaps not, I really enjoyed it!)

Returning to FarmVille: video game blogs spent a lot of time bashing it last year, bashing both the game itself and the players who play the game. If you’re tempted to do that, and if you’re a Minecraft fan, though, ask yourself first: are you sure that your motivations are so different from those of FarmVille players? We all love the story of the indie making it big, and Minecraft is a phenomenal accomplishment in many ways; but there are many routes to the pleasures of creation that it affords.

For another take on the guided sandbox that Minecraft provides, I recommend “How Minecraft taught me to dream”, from the blog Reflections.

• I was making some changes to a third-party library that was already using mockito in its unit tests, so I decided to give it a try. And, after a half-day of experiences, I will tentatively declare myself to be a fan. My previous mocking experience was with jMock, and while jMock may work as well for code that was written in a GOOS style from the beginning, I really appreciated the fact that mockito didn’t insist on tracing every single application; its willingness to mock classes by default was useful in the context of the work I was doing as well. And I liked not having to go to the extra weight of subclassing Expectations in every single test. So I recommend that anybody programming in Java who is curious about mocking but is worried about what it will involve should give mockito a try: it’s remarkably light-weight and pleasant.
• I wanted to add a polling thread wrapper around a metrics class that I’d written, and rather than do that by hand, I decided to look into Java’s reflection / dynamic proxies facility. And wow, writing a dynamic proxy in Java is easy! Maybe it’s not quite as trivial as overloading method_missing, but it’s only a little bit more work than that: I had a proxy up and running in a handful of minutes, and it was doing everything I wanted only took an hour or so. (And the vast majority of my code was talking about threads and caching, which is exactly what I wanted it to be talking about.) So score one for Java.

Deep Realms

Deep Realms is Playdom’s most recent RPG. And it’s quite different from the vast majority of Facebook RPGs: most entries in the genre have little to explore and give you almost no control over your actions (other than player-vs-player combat): either you have the items necessary to perform an action or you don’t. Deep Realms, in contrast, is a dungeon crawler where you take more of an active role in exploring the terrain (similar to Treasure Isle in that regard), and where you’ve got some amount of customization in terms of weapons/armor, leveling up, and abilities. (Plus a bit of a plot, too.)

I’m not used to playing a Facebook game where I spend a bit of time calculating probabilities of different chains of attacks, but I sometimes do that when playing Deep Realms. (Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to, but the option is there.) And there’s an interesting gesture at an asynchronous party system, where you do better if you have friends playing the other four classes who send you gifts regularly; not exactly a rich party system, but better than the gifts in most games, I suppose. Certainly my first play session was rather interesting.

The pacing, however, doesn’t work for me at all. In the first session, they give you enough energy to make it through the first dungeon (which actually was almost too long); I’ve played it several times since then, however, and I haven’t made it to the end of the second dungeon yet. Which would be okay if I were enjoying the dungeon crawling itself a bit more than I am; as is, it’s okay, but, well, I’d rather be writing blog posts or something most of the time when I’m at a computer at home. I’d definitely be playing it more if I could dip into it several times during a day (clearly my former coworkers are playing it a ton, judging from the volume of gift requests I get), but that’s not how my Facebook game usage works now; and, even with that, I wish I made more progress during individual sessions. Also, the pricing is screwed up: I’m all for asking users to pay for your game, but Playdom is asking basically a buck a pop each time you want to extend your play session, and I’m not getting enough out of the play sessions to want to be doing that. (Playdom’s insistence on going through its own in-game currency doesn’t help either.)

I’m glad the game exists, and maybe with tuning I’ll like it more. Though even with that, who knows how many users it will attract: it doesn’t seem to be geared at the mainstream Facebook audience at all. (On which note, I appreciate its flaunting current Facebook convention in not having any space to decorate. Not that it’s avoided all Facebook conventions: it’s quite dooberiffic, and collections are there too.)

Gardens of Time

Gardens of Time is also a Playdom game, a hidden object one. Which I’m actually finding a surprising amount of fun! Hidden object games aren’t exactly the richest of genres; but they’re a perfectly pleasant way to spend a few minutes, this one has nice art, a couple of variants on the core gameplay, and well done hint and scoring systems. Unlike Deep Realms, also, they got the pacing just right: you can do six puzzles in a session, plus a few more if you have lots of friends playing the game, and that’s a perfectly nice bite-size chunk of gameplay. The per-puzzle friend leaderboards work well, and it’s also a game that Miranda and I enjoy playing together.

It does have a decorative space, which I have mixed feelings about. It makes sense in the context of the game to be decorating your own garden with items from those time period; and they use decoration as the gating factor for opening up new levels, which is probably better than having them opened by, say, some sort of direct point value mechanism. Or maybe not: the problem is that you can be in a situation where you like the way your garden looks but don’t have enough points to open up the next puzzle, so you end up stuffing your garden with decorations that you don’t want. So I’m not convinced that they’ve gotten that balance entirely right, but still, it’s not too obtrusive.

Or, of course, you can open up puzzles by paying for them; and one sixth of the puzzles can only be unlocked by paying for them. Which I actually think is great: there’s nothing special about those puzzles, so you’re not losing anything at all by giving them a pass; but if you do decide you want to unlock them, you can do so permanently for around a couple of bucks per puzzle, which seems eminently reasonable. (Or fifty cents for unlocking a puzzle that you don’t want to unlock by decoration, which is also fine.) My only gripe there is, again, Playdom’s insistence on inserting its own in-game currency in the middle: you can’t buy exactly what you want using Facebook credits, you have to instead spend too much money. I would be perfectly happy if Facebook were to prevent companies from doing that: as a game player, I far prefer having as few different layers of currency between myself and things that I want to buy.

In contrast Deep Realms, Gardens of Time is apparently quite popular, and I’m not at all surprised. (Of course, who knows how much ad spend is affecting that, but I’m sure Playdom isn’t spending ad money blindly.) Incidentally, Tami Baribeau wrote a post contrasting the two games as well.

Little Cave Hero

Little Cave Hero is by a company named Atakama Labs that I’d never heard of, and I think it’s totally charming. I like the pixelated art style, I like the way that it takes the same sort of tile-based dungeon exploration that Deep Realms and Treasure Isle have (without the combat of the former) but somehow manages to give it a more puzzle feel instead of a pure clicky grind feel. (And the pacing works better for me than Deep Realms: sessions are short, but you can clear half a dungeon in one, and I’m happy to do without the combat.) And I like the goals that the technology tree gives you, figuring out how to manage your resources to get better tools to let you explore more effectively. And the mayor in the game is mildly amusing, and if you’re feeling creative, there’s even a pixel art tool that you can use to build objects to decorate your own town with!

Right now, it only has a tiny userbase; not sure if they’re not advertising at all or if it’s not to the taste of most of Facebook’s audience or what. Hmm, looking at the developer’s home page, they also did Terranova—I was rather into that one until the crop spoilage got to me. And they did the iPhone version of Today I Die? Clearly I should be paying more attention to these guys. And of the games mentioned here, my guess is that this one is most to the taste of readers of my blog: please do give it a try (and send me a neighbor request in game!), small developers that are doing something a bit different deserve our support!

Eventually, though, I got bored (or perhaps overwhelmed) with those underground caves, so I decided to work on a house. I didn’t head outside to do that, however: the opening of my mine was at the base of a fairly large hill, so I decided to hollow out the space above the entrance into a room.

Since I was working above ground, I hit the side of the hill fairly soon, so I put in a window. And, as I continued to enlarge that room, I hit another side of the hill; following my Christopher Alexander fetish, I recognized this as Light on Two Sides of Every Room.

One of Christopher’s Alexander’s main points is that you shouldn’t design buildings in isolation, you shouldn’t design them abstractly: you should design them in context, you should design each building so that the area around it is made richer by the presence of that building. And one of the wonderful aspects of Minecraft is that it’s a building game that encourages such an approach. Yes, if you want, you can build in Minecraft as if you were working with Legos, assembling the blocks that you have at hand into whatever shapes you find pleasing. But one of the most amazing aspects of the game is the terrain that it generates: and a building that fits into that terrain and finds a way to fill a gap that is missing is much more powerful than a building that’s plunked down into a plain that you’ve artificially leveled.

Indeed, going through Alexander’s fifteen properties, we see many that have echoes in Minecraft. The walls of the house that you build to survive your first night are an excellent example of Boundaries. The wonderful overworld combined with the importance of mining (and with natural caves bringing space to the interior of the earth!) provide Deep Interlock and Ambiguity and Positive Space in a context of Contrast. The large blocks, in their own way, provide Roughness; the terrain is full of Good Shape, and not infrequently I turn a corner and am struck by a wonderful waterfall (or lavafall!), a single tree in just the right place, or a forest of trees filling a valley, any of which makes a Strong Center indeed. And the range from single blocks to trees to hills to mountains to the span from bedrock to the top of the sky has room for several Levels of Scale.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect Alexandrian space. There is room for several levels of scale, but the size of the blocks imposes a limit: the world may stretch on forever horizontally, but you only have 256 blocks of height to play with. And the context that Alexander wants you to place your buildings into isn’t defined only by the pre-existing shapes that are present: it’s the context of the people who will be using those buildings, people who are (pace the pleasures of multiplayer servers) almost entirely absent in Minecraft. Nonetheless, as much as I’ve enjoyed other construction games recently (Social City being the most prominent example), Minecraft does a much better job of providing context.

And it certainly does a good enough job of providing context to make me realize that I’m pretty bad at architecture! Take that picture above: one of the windows in question is at an angle (so it’s perhaps more light on one-and-a-half sides rather than two sides of a room), and the wall between the two is a much weaker center than a corner would be at that location. In retrospect, I was much too deferential to the existing shape of the hill when I hollowed out that room: I should have taken a slightly firmer touch in places, reshaping the walls to make the interior space more usable while not harming its outside appearance. I tried to do that some on the third floor, but that also led to problems: I ended up extending past the sides of the hill in a few areas, with the result that there are overhangs above the windows on the second floor, meaning that they didn’t provide as much light as they should have. And one side of the hill in question led into a natural arch; a wonderfully strong center in its own right, but again windows facing that arch didn’t provide enough light to make the adjacent rooms really livable.

Still, I got better at creating and enhancing centers as I proceeded up the hill. I’m rather fond of the way the third floor balcony turned out: the Deep Interlock and Ambiguity that it provides as a Boundary between the interior and exterior, the Level of Scale that it provides in relation to the larger interior room, and that sunset view is hard to beat. The stairs going up the outside of the hill from that balcony also provide a nice accent to the existing shape of the hill, and, going further up, there’s a turning set of stairs inside a large glass enclosure that provides an even bigger boundary area between inside and outside than the balcony did, while solving a somewhat thorny problem posed by the pre-existing geometry of the hillside and my third floor room. Up on the roof, I originally planted five trees before chopping down all but one of them, since its power as a Strong Center would more than make up for the absence of the other four.

There’s so much more to do, so much more for me to learn. I’ve hollowed out perhaps a quarter of that hill: how best to acknowledge the rest of it? And then, how can I move away from the crutch of using an existing hill to form the shell of my house: how best to build houses outside in the Minecraft landscape, at first hoping only to not mar the beauty of that landscape too much, but eventually finding ways in which I can make the landscape a bit more whole? And how to reconcile that with the part of me that likes digging corridors, that would enjoy nothing more than to lay down minecart tracks in a straight line all the way to the horizon?

I got the ultimate edition of Dragon Age: Origins, so I had access to all the DLC for that game. And, for better or for worse, I figured I’d just go along with my inertia and launch into the DLC immediately after finishing the full game. (Except for The Golems of Amgarrak: that one seems to be about something that I’d explicitly chosen not to do in the main game, so it would have felt jarring to do it as DLC.) I wasn’t planning to write about any of it, but after a couple of evenings, it became clear that Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is as long as many full games that I play, so I figure I should say something about it.

So: it’s more Dragon Age. In a different area of the map, one which is festooned with gear that is designed for characters in the level 20-30 range; quite a coincidence, that! You see some familiar faces, but not many (and in particular not my true love; incidentally, would it have been that much work for them to actually take note of that correctly when doing Awakening‘s final credits?); Anders piqued my interest enough that I’m looking forward to seeing him in Dragon Age 2, I rather liked Sigrun’s personality (though she does an awful job of filling the rogue slot), and I wish I’d spent more time with Justice.

And then there’s the plot. Which I was unimpressed by at the start: the Darkspawn menace is supposed to have been quelled for now, but we can’t cook up another similarly dire threat in short order, so we need an excuse for them to reappear. I know, let’s have them talk this time! And then it took a turn for the odd: the Mother and Children get added as another sort of weird Darkspawn enemy, which seems to be trying to take the game in a sort of horror direction, but not at all effectively. (The game kept on telling me how horrifying the Children are, but it sure didn’t feel that way.) The Broodmother bit in Origins hit similar themes, but in a way that hit me much harder.

So I was quite surprised to discover that, when I reached the last couple of hours of the game, I really rather liked the plot, in fact probably much more than the main threat aspect of the plot in Origins. The original game had an entirely cookie cutter main threat, and was cookie cutter in a way that’s politically problematic. We’re at war with an other, they want to destroy our way of life and slaughter us wholesale, and it’s okay to slaughter them wholesale both to return the favor and because they’re mindless drones acting at the behest of their leader. (And they look really different from us, too, which helps make the killing okay.)

That is a scenario that plays out over and over again in the real world. (It’s playing out now, certainly!) And, in the real world, it’s never that simple, even in the most extreme of cases, even where your enemy is doing genuinely horrific things. Yes, the game is a fantasy, yes I happily do a lot of things in games that are horrible in the real world. But still, it’s a lazy plot, in a game that isn’t so lazy in many other aspects.

And Awakening subverts that directly! It works within the constraint of plot continuity, and doesn’t present the Darkspawn as horribly misunderstood; but it does say that yeah, they probably shouldn’t be mindless brutes, so let’s work with that while leaving a certain amount of uncertainty in the situation. (As befits a nation that’s emerged from a horrible war.) Rather well done, as it turns out.

Which isn’t to say that I love everything about the plot in Awakening. I’m not thrilled with the pairing of the intelligent/wise father figure with the misguided and emotional mother figure; for that matter, I’m not that thrilled with the great leader trope at all! Still, I left the game impressed on balance; and playing it significantly increased the chance that I’ll play Dragon Age 2 sooner rather than later.

In general, I’m drawn to these more flexible games: I like the idea of shaping a character according to my playing style, according to the way I like to behave, even according to my idea of the sort of person that I am. Even in these more flexible games, though, classes are latent: not all combinations of choices are equally powerful, so if you search forums or wikis or gamefaqs, you’ll find recommended builds, giving you combinations of attributes that work best to, for example, allow you to do the most damage in the game, or absorb the most attacks, or heal your party members the most. (The presence of multiple members of your party encourages this sort of specialization.) You can ignore these, but you do so at your peril: you’ll have a hard time making it through the game on hard difficulty settings if you’re haphazard about the choices you make.

This focus on character construction is one of the ways in which role-playing games are adolescent games: they’re all about figuring out whom you want to be when you grow up. Which, like all great themes, actually spans all ages. Or maybe I’m stuck in adolescence, because I’m still trying to figure whom I want to be when I grow up!

And, just as I prefer more flexible approaches to building your character in role-playing games, so too do I prefer that when constructing my life. I’ve already changed classes once: while I don’t talk about it much here, I leveled up for years as a mathematician, eventually spending five years as a postdoc at Stanford. At which point I changed classes, becoming a programmer. (Fortunately, I’d leveled up that skill while growing up and during my undergraduate years.) One debate that I’ve had over the last few half-decade was whether I wanted to change classes again, and become a manager; I dabbled with that for a few years, though these days my general feeling is that I’m a better fit as a programmer. (Actually, my real feeling is that I’m a better fit as a member of an anarchist collective, where either nobody or everybody is a manager, but never mind that.)

But, of course, not all programmers are alike: and life is definitely the sort of game where you have to choose where to improve your abilities, you don’t have preset skills that you gain as you advance. (Outside of college curricula, at least! Which is one of the reasons why I don’t like them, I suppose.) I have a habit of going deep enough into some area to be able to do pretty well at it, and then switching over to something else rather than going all-in. (The exception, I guess, is agile: it’s both deep and broad enough that I haven’t yet gone all-in with agile, but I also haven’t stopped exploring further.) I switch domain areas fairly frequently: programmer tools, then streaming video, then video games, and now computer security. And, as a bonus, I don’t even go all-in on programming as a whole: yes, there are 208 posts on this blog tagged with ‘programming’, but there are 327 tagged with ‘video games’. (Similarly, I read a lot more novels than math books when I was a grad student. And, going back to my undergrad years, there’s the whole ‘Sanskrit major’ thing.)

That’s my life; what would games suggest will be the outcome? When I make a build like that in a role-playing game, it’s fun enough to play, but never really optimal for progressing in the game. So I’m pretty sure that, if you looked at the great strategy wiki of life, you wouldn’t find my particular career trajectory on the ‘recommended builds’ list. Which is something that I’ve been thinking about with this latest job change: in fact, that’s as good a way as any to thinking about the last parts of my recent “job search and narrative” post. As a result, I’m now focusing on a build that will let me do well with startups, that will present me as an agile server-side programmer who can deal with large amounts of data, and whose checkered past will make him ready to face with equanimity the sorts of surprises that happen frequently in startups. I’m still pretty far away from the recommended startup build—I’m 40 years old rather than 24, I’m not going to be putting in 60–80-hour work weeks—but there’s a certain strength and coherence to it.

The truth is, though, I’m better off not following a recommended build. A recommendation isn’t made in a void: and recommended builds are designed to let you progressing through the game as smoothly as possible. Games have metrics that you can use to measure that progress; life has metrics as well. You can choose which ones to pay attention to, which ones to ignore; and even if you are paying attention to a metric, you can choose how to respond to it. Returning to Dragon Age, that game has per-party member approval meters: you can try to raise them all as high as possible, you can try to raise a few specific ones as high as possible, you can even try to lower them all if you’re feeling particularly perverse! Or you can step away from the idea of controlling them, and instead see them as gauges reflecting your personality, reflecting your nature, reflecting your character. My build may have made certain battles tougher than they would have been otherwise (though, to be honest, it’s probably really my RPG-playing skills that are to blame for that), but I’m fine with that: I’m more interested in seeing my choice of actions reflected in the reactions of those around me and in the tales that unfold.

Which is a pretty good way to think about life as well. GDC just ended, and I can’t imagine a better way to have spent a week: stunning talks, I feel privileged to have been able to spend time with people as I did, and honored to have been able to play a part in facilitating one such meeting. And today I’ve been sitting around the house, working on my pro keys skills, having Miranda show off the underwater house she’s built in Minecraft, picking out tunes on my new guitar, hanging out with Liesl, being glad that Zippy can still make his way around, and I’ll read a few chapters of a Scala book when I go to bed. It’s a good life: if my character build has somehow led me here, it has more than done its job.

10:00am–11:00am: “City of Wonder: Postmortem”, by Troy Whitlock and Scott Jon Siegel

Actually, only Scott spoke, presumably because Troy is no longer at Playdom. (He left a week or two before I did.) At any rate, I was glad to see a postmortem of this game, it was one of my favorite social games from last year.

The game‘s original pitch: expand your city state, discover technologies, battle with armies, from the dawn of history to the present. Take the Social City engine, add in more choice and player-versus-player combat.

Scott thought the original pitch was a crazy idea, had little interest in working with it. Social City was genre-defining, which meant that it had spawned a lot of competition. And Studio 24 (the Playdom studio that he was part of) had previous experience with market saturation: that’s a big reason why Fish Friends failed.

Also, the pitch looked like a niche game; it wasn’t clear it would get the same nice demographic that Social City got. So why do it?

Reason 1: PvP + isometric city builders. Both of those factors do a good job of leading to item purchases. The former affects game mechanics (combat), but doesn’t affect customization. The latter has opposite problem: only aesthetic. Maybe you can merge the virtues: give a stat boost plus expression?

Reason 2: The challenge of making “hardcore” features appeal to casual players, let people do what interests them.

Social City had a good core loop: money, population, happiness: need to work on all three, leading to virtuous cycle. City of Wonder kept the same base mechanics, except it gated new buildings by progress along the technology tree instead of strictly by experience.

Also, the research / technology tree led to long arcs, longer-term goals. Leads to diversity of city appearance. But traditional tech trees look like spaghetti maze: definitely didn’t want that. So they made it much less intertwined: even that, though was potentially too overwhelming for casual players. So they left the full tech tree as a depth on demand feature, but presented a few choices through the main view, with advisors giving specific recommendations. (And, as a bonus, the advisors give the game more personality.)

Also wanted to bring across point of progressing through time, e.g. by giving a parade when you reach the Bronze Age. But in early playtests, players thought it was a stone age game, which not all players were as interested in. So they addressed the sense of progression in the loading screen, in splash text, and in having each age’s buildings having a distinctive look.

Title: Social Civ was its working title. They tested various names; City of Wonder consistently won. Scott didn’t like it – e.g. no use of “wonder” within the game. But they went with it; his current theory is that people like it because of a song lyric.

Embassies: they wanted a neighbor mechanic, and wanted to do that in a way that’s not just a one-time thing, but instead has a concrete ongoing effect on your own city.

PvP: provides a second trio of attributes for buildings, cultural / economic / military. It’s hard to do well on all three, so people could specialize in one or two. The combat outcome (and what played into it) is hard to explain; they iterated a lot on that screen. Emphasized differences between wins and losses, and reinforced distinction between different types of expeditions.

Legends were most fun part of development: enjoyed coming up with quotes (hat tip to Steve Meretzky).

Game as a whole was his favorite social game development experience. Havin said that:

What went right:

• Casual focus, or democratization is a better term – the iPod is an example of what they’re going for, letting user find any song in at most three button presses. So they made main game features accessible with minimal clicks; other features are optional, scalable.
• Iteration. Everywhere: e.g. the placement of buildings/roads in starting layout turned out to make a big difference. Supported via continuous integration, and always having a stable build available. Scrubbed the game every day: errors in text, glitches, feel of an aspect of gameplay, …  Started as 3-hour meeting, got shorter as game progressed.
• Amazing team, split between Mountain View and India.

What went wrong:

• Legends. So appealing that management encouraged them to double down with legends as a trading card concept. Sounded good, but trading card aspects were added in last minute, so not enough iteration: badly balanced, badly explained. (Most successful ones were promoted during pinch points.) Ultimately not sure if feature did more harm or good.
• Embassies. Added somewhat late; main issue they didn’t deal with at launch was “Embassytown”, where your city is cluttered with embassies. Thought it would only affect a few users, but affected many, especially your most engaged users. Eventually solved via multi-embassy buildings.
• PvP. Unexpected side effects of choices players could make, sometimes made players unhappy. No reward in attacking higher-level players: you know you’ll lose, or even if you won’t, there’s not a big reward. So don’t get the excitement of working towards big wins.

The game is still a live service. They recently released the first colony, and there’s room for more. Colonies let them grow the game, even adding new features (e.g. naval expeditions in the water colony) without hurting the core gameplay in the main colony.

11:15am–11:45am: “Humanities Unlocked: The Value of Liberal Arts for Your Game Design Program”, by Mia Consalvo

First, her slides:

She started with a word on advising: “advising itself can be problematic”. At her first job, she received signals that it wasn’t important. At her second job, it was easy to fall into rhetoric like “you only need to take four of these five areas”. Now at MIT: students like math / technology, hard to get them to take humanities.

What is the worth of the humanities? College costs a lot; what will you do with an English major? Humanities programs are getting cut. She’ll present four case studies showing how humanities courses are valuable for game design.

1) Philosophy

Mentioned Miguel Sicart, and a Project Horseshoe white paper on ethical issues.

Ethical theories: virtue ethics (good habits of character, but with balance); utilitarianism (look at consequences of action: are they more favorable or unfavorable (to everyone); duty theory (have specific foundational principles of obligation: e.g. stealing is wrong).

When playing games with good/evil split, players generally take he good side in the first playthrough: it’s easier, more natural, how they were trained. (Even when trying to be bad, players accidentally did good when playing on autopilot.) Why, exactly? Is the underlying theory duty-based? Is it the rules: the good guy always wins? More content: evil in games often means selfish, so you don’t get to do side quests?

Discussion of Zevran in Dragon Age: Origins: she thought she’d been being a good manager, but Zevran turned, she killed him. Then in Awakenings, she had a similar issue; this time, though, it was a character that she’d gone out of her way to cultivate. Ultimately, though, they disagreed about something important, no amount of convincing worked. Which annoyed her at first, but she rather respected the designer’s choice once she’d thought about it more.

2) Foreign languages

Western otaku: lead to interest in culture, languages. Many people took organized courses; some learned on their own, though. And then learned about Japanese people, culture, not just about their favorite anime/games. Almost everybody either had one to Japan or had plans to, almost always in study abroad context, not standard tourist stuff. So: “the cosmopolitan western otaku”.

Can even lead to business: e.g. Carpe Fulgur, who brought Recettear to the U.S., and were quite successful in doing so. Fan interest can open up new, viable markets.

3) Classics

Talked about Sophocles project from the GAMBIT lab at MIT. They had to figure out how to allow player agency while being true to the tragic ending. 

In general: there are a lot of stories out there, but we retell the same ones over and over again in games. How can we tell other sorts of stories? Classics have great source material.

4) Literature

Talks about Edith Wharton: read great example of characterization. Wouldn’t want that much text in games, but very much want characters who are such individuals. Also talked about roles in society: so much games can learn from that, too. (Not least “social games”.) How do we function as groups, as people?

1:45pm–2:45pm: “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges: How to Re-invent Reality Without Gamification”, by Jane McGonigal

I rather liked this talk. Or at least with a caveat: I didn’t take too many notes because it was going by so fast and because her slides are on Slideshare, so part of the talk turned into my nap. (I’m essentially incapable of going to a conference without napping through parts of one talk a day.) But I really like her emphasis on the positive aspects of what it could mean to bring games to a broader context, and her using the term “gameful” to refer to those positive aspects (emphasizing the intrinsic benefits of games, as opposed to “gamification”, which is generally used more for the extrinsic reward aspects of games). “You don’t need a badge when you have real power.”

3:00pm–4:00pm: “Intuition vs Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved”, by Laralyn McWilliams and Brenda Brathwaite

This was my favorite talk of GDC so far. I don’t think I’ll be able to give a good feel for that here, however; go to Brenda’s blog for the slides, but imagine that they’re delivered with even more character than in the slides.

But beyond that: it was just a super sensible talk: of course you want data when developing games, of course you need to develop and apply judgment to make best use of that data, of course there are minefields that you’ll encounter when navigating this. (Especially because of the culture clash of traditional game design with traditional web app design.) This is a message that still bears repeating over and over again, and we still need a great deal of compassion while figuring out how to move forward.

My notes are below, but I’m not sure there’s anything in them that you won’t get from the slides.

Collision of worlds: traditional game industry versus web apps. Could be great, or one side could consume the other, with bad results. Both worlds have a way of doing things, both think they are right.

Traditional game design: level 30. Social game: level 3. But social game success is undeniable. “Yay! Cake. Ooh! Money!” (Is the “real cake” that traditional game developers make even something that Facebook gamers even want to eat?) Brenda: to make a social game to me is harder than making a Wizardry game.

Both sides nervously hire people from the other side.

Game designers: “I just know it’s going to be fun.” Worked for Wizardry, but to people from the web space, it’s crazy not to ask users and try things out.

Traditional game design: jam shit in, rip shit out, until you find the fun. Clash with web space PMs: your idea of fun is nice, but I think X will be a better user experience, how do we really know? Any data?

MMO experience: sure, jam shit in, but start with shit that’s similar to what you’ve seen work in previous games. And shipping the game is just the start.

To traditional game designers, shipping an unfinished game is terrifying. It might be horrible; what’s worse, people might see a horrible it and love it! Intellectually, alpha testing makes sense; and maybe a couple of years ago you could have released quietly; these days, everybody will notice as soon as you launch.

“The business and Silicon Valley culture is the game.”

Numbers sometimes tell you what you already know. Even if not, though, they’re just symptoms. So: don’t leap immediately from numbers to solutions.

Creativity flourishes within constraints: metrics are one way of providing those constraints.

Don’t blindly follow metrics. Game design is the map and the plan; metrics is the weather report which may cause us to re-evaluate.

Success story one: accidentally released Ravenwood Fair with super easy numbers on various design parameters. To make an appropriate challenge, set numbers back; monetization plummeted. Turns out that players wanted a lot less challenge than Brenda expected; good thing they made that mistake and had metrics to help.

Success story two: Free Realms launched; play time was great, but players didn’t progress beyond level 1. Tried simple fixes, didn’t work. Eventually, observing players, found: camera was a problem, but more important, they were partying! Having a great time, they didn’t care about quests. Would have been hard to find root cause with metrics (according to Laralyn, at least), but very useful info going forward.

4:15pm–5:15pm: “Rapid-Fire Indies”, by ten speakers

Not much to say here: I’ve pretty much given up on trying to convey the experience of microtalks. A pretty good series of microtalks, though.

Chris Hecker: AAA Indie games: polished to perfection, clearly contains lots of love, highly anticipated before launch. First two obvious, talk about the latter.

Petri Purho: Didn’t say much, then played a music video.

Eddy Boxerman: Old devs: he’s turning 40. (Yay!)

David Hellman: Just pictures, but good ones.

Kyle Pulver: Game jams are awesome.

Chris DeLeon: Lots of 20-second bits, followed by Thoreau quotes

Andre Clark: How to be an Indie Punk: The Story of pOnd.

Markus Persson (Notch): Piracy. Favorite bit: the idea of a “lost sale” is the stupidest thing ever. Also: game development as a service. Maybe people who pirate this week will buy next week.

Scott Anderson: Using Technology for Gameplay Innovation. E.g. using shadow physics for gameplay. Inspirations: demo scene; creative coding; molecular gastronomy.

Anna Anthropy: The words we choose as labels define the limits of our discussion. With new tools, distribution methods, game development is available to anyone: “indie” needlessly carves out a group.

Sadly, I do not find either variant of Noby Noby Boy to be one of the most wonderful games of all time. I found the PS3 version strangely soothing, but I haven’t felt any pull to return to it. And the iPhone version didn’t manage that: you have a small screen with bad controls to stretch things (though the controls did improve once I discovered tapping to stick things), and with the addition of badly-done music library listening and clock watching modes. Some of the items that you can play with were worth a minute of fiddling; some weren’t.

On to Game Dev Story.

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.

• 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.

So, once I’d made it through the accumulated post-conference tasks, I looked at the last set of unit tests that I’d written. And, actually, it looked like they’d be even easier to tame than I thought: I’d already put in a legacy code barrier by writing the new functionality there as a static method, so I didn’t even have to instantiate an instance of the class that I was allegedly testing, just instances of the arguments to the method in question.

Looking more closely, it turned out that there was really only one argument that I needed to worry about. It was an instance of a concrete class that was a pain to instantiate without running through all of our Spring machinery: it created a static Memcache object, it had another static instance variable that was looking up a Spring-initialized bean (that eventually depended on grabbing some data configuration from a static data file), etc. I certainly know techniques for delaying static initialization, and thought about going down that path for a minute, but then I stopped myself and said: I want to start using jMock for the heavy lifting of instantiation, so I shouldn’t go that route at all!

That means that I need an interface instead of a concrete class; is that okay here? I looked at the test and the code under test, and they weren’t about that messy concrete class, I was just testing something that was using it in a not-very-deep manner. Given that, I didn’t see any reason why instantiating an interface instead would weaken my test. I didn’t have an interface handy, so I created one for the concrete class to implement; I thought for a couple of minutes about what it should look like before realizing that I didn’t actually care right then, what it needed to look like was (at first) enough to get the test in question to compile! That bit of test and product code called a grand total of two methods of the original class; I added those two methods to the interface, and looked up the jMock boilerplate for instantiating an instance of that interface; and poof, my tests were compiling, without any database-dependent code involved!

Of course, they weren’t passing yet: assertions were failing, and jMock was also informing me that mocked out methods were called. I looked a little more closely, and realized that one of the two methods in question was a setter that (in the context of running these tests) was only being called to set up the object so that the other method would return what I wanted. Which makes sense in a non-mock context, but in a mock context, you can just directly tell the method to return what you want. So I deleted that setter from the interface and from the test code, told the test’s Mockery to return some appropriate data when the other method was called, and ran the tests.

And they passed! Indeed, they passed so quickly that, at first, I assumed things had gone wrong: the compilation still took a few seconds, but once the tests started running, IntelliJ didn’t even have time to show me the listing of all of the tests that it was running before they all finished. But I did some poking around, adding assertion failures or commenting out lines of product code, and the tests were indeed all running, they were just running approximately 250 times as fast as they had been before.

Which was a huge success! And not only were the tests fast to run, they were also fast to write. I’d estimated that this would take a day or so; in fact, it took somewhere between half an hour and an hour for me to get this working, despite my complete prior lack of jMock experience. Admittedly, I’d lucked out by picking a clump of tests that was particularly easy to convert, but still: my tests were running hundreds of times faster after less than an hour of work! Amazing.

Flush from that success, I used jMock for the next feature that I was working on. That feature involved bringing some (actually pretty well written) legacy code under test, doing some replumbing to make it more extensible, and then extending it slightly. There were several more function arguments to deal with here, but all but one of them was already an interface. The one exception was the class that I’d just started to convert to an interface; so my first step when bringing each chunk of code under test was to try to replace the class with the interface when it showed up as an argument in that chunk of code, see what the compiler complained about, pull those methods up to the new interface, and repeat. (And if it got too thorny and if I was in a code branch that I wasn’t going to reach with my test, I’d just throw in a cast to silence the compiler.)

Then, once I’d gotten it to compile, I’d create a unit test that instantiated mock objects and called the method. This would immediately point out a calls that I needed to tell the Mockery to expect; that’s fine, I could iterate on that every 30 seconds, so even in the most complicated case, I had the test running in under five minutes, and passing for the right reason a minute after that. The upshot was that, within a few hours, I had all of the relevant code running with tests that were good enough to support the refactoring I wanted; a few hours later, the first refactoring was done, and I was in a good TDD flow for the first time since I’ve started my Java work on that project. A couple of days later I had the new functionality in place, running correctly in the first end-to-end try, with the total number of unit tests on the project increased by 50 percent or so, and with a structure in place so that will enable us to knock off a bunch of upcoming feature requests in an hour or two each.

I am, obviously, very pleased with the results, and very impressed with jMock: it’s amazing how much work it’s been saving me. So I’m a total convert to using it to tame legacy code; what I’m interested in next is how to use it, as Growing Object-Oriented Software suggests, to guide the development of new interfaces going forward. (It pulled out an interface for me in the code I was working with last week, but it was an ugly interface, serving more to point out warts in the existing structure than anything else.) Lots of fun, I look forward to the next step in that journey.

Plants vs. Zombies HD

I’d gone through the computer version of Plants vs. Zombies a month or two before buying the iPad. It was great, but using the touchpad was a bit frustrating at times, enough so that I couldn’t complete a few of the minigames that demanded fast mouse action.

The iPad, however, doesn’t have that problem, so I bought Plants vs. Zombies HD as soon as I got the device. And it too is great: even though I’d just been playing a different version of the game, I dived right back in, went through the story mode twice, finished all of the minigames, and earned all of the achievements except for 40 levels of endless zombies. (Liesl also replayed the game on the iPad.) It’s my preferred version of the game: while I slightly prefer the puzzle mix on the computer versions (in particular, the extra Zombies vs. Plants levels), that’s only a slight difference, and the better controls more than make up for it.

Flight Control HD

I figured I should go through some of the popular app store games, and Flight Control HD was my first choice there. After all, it sounded like a perfect match of control scheme to the device: what could be better than the iPad for a game where you’re tracing out landing routes for planes?

And, indeed, the controls are great. But the gameplay is great, too. For endless puzzle games like this, the big question is balance: how long will you be able to play while in the range where you’re feeling challenged, like things could go wrong at any moment, but where if you execute well you’ll survive the challenge. And Flight Control HD keeps me in the zone as well as any game I can think of: there’s only one gameplay mode where I feel I can play forever if I don’t screw up, while there aren’t any gameplay modes where I feel that it just gets too hard for me too fast. They also vary the tension nicely within the play session, sending planes at you in gradually rising/falling waves, so you don’t have the lack of breathing room of, say, Tetris.

I’m still picking up this game periodically to play it at odd moments, and I bet that I’ll be doing that a year from now. Liesl’s played it more than I have, and various guests (especially Liesl’s dad) have quite enjoyed it as well.

Angry Birds HD

Given my experiences with Flight Control HD, I thought I should try other popular iPad games, and Angry Birds HD was my next choice. And it’s charming enough, and was fun for the first few levels, but I got tired pretty quickly. It’s a physics-based puzzle game, but I never got the feeling that I’d had mastered, or even could master, the physics: changing my launch point by a pixel or two would significantly affect the outcome (in fact, I’m not convinced that there isn’t randomness even if you launch from the identical location), so rather than thinking about a level and experimenting until I found the correct approach, I would instead basically do the same thing over and over again, and eventually it would work.

It also gates levels very strongly: you can’t play a level until you’ve solved the preceding one. Which I think is a bad idea (I’d much rather have them gated by, say, the number of stars you’ve earned), though in practice it didn’t bother me too much because I didn’t end up getting stuck. That probably would have happened eventually, but I gave up on the game before I got to that point.

Nikoli Puzzle Games

I’ve been a fan of Nikoli’s books of puzzles for a while, so I was really excited to see them bring their puzzles to the iPhone. They still don’t have iPad-specific versions of their puzzles, but I’m including them here anyways, because they are much more pleasant to control on the larger screen. (Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t relish having larger puzzles on the iPad, even though that would mean smaller UI elements: 10×10 puzzles are nice but don’t give you enough to chew on.)

As of this writing, they’ve introduced three of their puzzle types: Akari, Shikaku, and Nurikabe, with a free version plus four paid versions of each. But that’s constantly changing: they seem to average releasing more puzzles about once a month. The three puzzle types they’ve chosen so far all work quite well with a touch interface; Shikaku’s controls are particularly soothing.

Piczle Lines

Piczle Lines is another iPhone puzzle game that controls noticeably better on the iPad. It’s not quite as pure as the Nikoli games (in particular, there are puzzles with multiple solutions), but the core puzzle game play is solid, and the slight seasoning of a story mode turns out to work well. I really wasn’t planning to start playing it now, given that I’m not done with Picross 3D yet, but I downloaded it on a lark and it’s managed to hook me fairly well. (And I think it’s the better of those two games…) Incidentally, it’s free with additional puzzle packs that you can purchase in-game (and that you can transfer across devices up to a limit of five or so); that strikes me as the correct model for this sort of thing, I hope Nikoli follows suit.

So that’s what I’ve been playing; any recommendations for what I should try next? I’m hoping soon to find time to use Frotz to play through some text adventures; I’m a bit surprised that it’s made it through Apple’s approval process (I thought downloading interpreted code violated their Terms of Service), but I’m certainly not complaining…

Which raises the question: how can we link the two? I ran into one possible answer while listening to an episode of This American Life this week, which started by discussing the concept of the “I Wish” song. (Also known as the “I Want” Song.)

This is the first song that the main character sings in a musical: it introduces the main character’s hopes and desires, hopes and desires that will motivate the entire rest of the show. And this sounds exactly like what I’m looking for, a perfect bridge from the initial experience to the entire rest of the show. (It doesn’t hurt that I’ve got musicals and video games on my mind recently, of course.)

So: how can we use this in video games? Not literally, of course (though actually, that would be awesome, I would totally play a video game that was a musical): in my previous analogy, musical numbers get translated into gameplay segments. Which means that the first real gameplay experience in a video game should be an “I Wish” segment.

What would that look like? Maybe that’s exactly what Randy Smith is getting at in his concept of the game-toy: you get to see the fun that’s lurking in the game right in the start of the game. But I think that alone isn’t enough, (especially in narrative games): the “I Wish” song isn’t a static experience, you need the seeds of the game’s development there as well, ideally both ludically and narratively. (Hmm, in musicals, does the “I Wish” Song contain the seeds of the musical development in the rest of the show?)

What games have done something like this? Metroid Prime might be an example; the only quibble I have there is that unlocking abilities is a core part of the game’s experience, and you don’t see that in the space frigate segment that leads off the game. The start of Ocarina of Time in another candidate: you learn about Link’s motivations, you see him take the first steps towards acquiring new powers. But where to stop it? If we include the Deku Tree dungeon, it’s a bit long; I suppose we could stop before then, given that he does acquire the sword and get frustrated by not being able to leave the village before then. Looking at games I’ve played more recently, MySims Agents is also a good candidate: at the start, you learn that you want to be a secret agent, you learn about the main villain, and you start solving puzzles.

Now if only you’d burst into song while doing so…

Earlier this summer, we went to see Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West. Which was quite the spectacle, but my first thought after it was over was “after this, I’d better not hear anybody ever complain about video game plots again!” Its plot was threadbare and ridiculous; I’ve certainly played video games with worse plots, but most of the narrative video games I’ve played this year did better, some of them significantly so.

The thing is, when judging an opera, that doesn’t matter! Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but really what I’m looking for in an opera plot is something that supports a string of scenes in which characters can break into song and make beautiful music together. I didn’t actually think The Girl of the Golden West was very good, but the plot had nothing to do with that: the plot served its role adequately, I simply didn’t like the music.

And then last weekend, we went to a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. Again, a threadbare and ludicrous plot; apparently P. G. Wodehouse worked on it, and there’s a certain similarity in tone, but its story doesn’t have anything approaching the richness of his books. But, again, that’s okay: the plot is simply an excuse for musical numbers (and, as an extra bonus, dance numbers!); in Anything Goes, unlike The Girl of the Golden West, those are stunning. (And, actually, the songs’ lyrics really are clever, so it’s not completely abandoning literary virtues.)

Which leads us to video games. If these well-respected art forms can use a threadbare narrative as a vehicle for glorious set pieces, why on earth shouldn’t we do the same? Take Professor Layton as an example: it has a plot, it’s a pretty silly one (though no worse than the ones in the works mentioned above), but the game’s designers manage to shoehorn the plot into an excuse to throw puzzle after puzzle at you. And the puzzles are awesome, and that awesomeness is enriched by the art work, the music, and even the plot that surrounds them.

I am not proposing this aspect of operas and musicals as a general model that all video games should follow: non-narrative video games are just as valid as non-narrative music is, and for that matter video games are so multifaceted that they’re entirely capable of learning from the virtues of any other art form. (We need more experimentation with the possibilities of video games, not less!) But I think it’s a useful counterpoint to the comparisons of video games to movies: consider thinking of narrative as a cord to string pearls along rather than as diamond that, while horribly flawed, nonetheless makes the rest of your game look tawdry.

Or, perhaps, give up on similes entirely: that’s a pretty bad one. But, if you follow me down this route, I have one last suggestion: consider the sorts of narratives that you do find in operas and musicals. There are certainly opera narratives that are as grandiose as any video game plot, the Ring being the most obvious example. But a lot of them are rather slight, quite aware of the supporting role they play, dancing lightly along with the music, with even tragedies not expecting the world to be consumed by their grief.

Shouldn’t more games do the same? Focus on your gameplay set pieces, get them right, and let the story skip along with them. And, while you’re at it, maybe consider following musical forms and make those set pieces rather shorter, too.

Mitch Krpata recently wrote a parody piece injecting Hydro Thunder into the “games as art” debate. The thing is, I played that game with friends last Thursday, and we all had a great time, because the game did such a good job of helping us focus on enjoying our play together in the context of the constraints that the game placed on us. And it did this while treating the context that surrounded that gameplay respectfully but not particularly seriously. So yes: art it is, and my world is richer because of it.

(Quick poll: are the pictures a good idea, a bad idea, a good idea in theory but I chose bad pictures, or something else?)

Despite all of that, very few people seem to have played the game: I heard about it through Michael Abbott, but the game’s only other appearance in my feed reader was in a (rather interesting) review by Christopher Williams. I would like to construct some sort of narrative out of this about how juvenile art doesn’t get its due, were it not for the uncomfortable fact that I actually don’t have much to say about the game myself. At first I thought that might be because it’s very good but no BioShock, and not quite a Mass Effect 2, either, but looking through the list of games I’ve recently played, that’s not the only issue going on here: I see games like Yakuza 2 on that list that are much worse than MySims Agents but that gave me something active to whine about.

That’s been happening to me a fair amount recently: the same thing happened with Plants vs. Zombies, for example. (Which is the only game that I can think of that I thought I was done with playing and then picked up again half a week after blogging about it; and my iPad purchase has spawned a third round of playing it!) Plants vs. Zombies was another game that didn’t spawn a lot of discussion on the blogosphere, but at least people seemed to be playing it: I’d see various throwaway comments about it on blogs, or offhand mentions in my Twitter feed.

Whereas I get the feeling that Michael is the only other person I know who has played this game at all. Which is a shame. Give it a try: it’s charming, it’s fun, and it knows when you’ve had your fill.