malvasia bianca

I haven’t been following the Twine scene too closely: in my experience, Twine games generally feel like hypertext, and hypertext isn’t something that I’m particularly interested in. Porpentine’s work is distinctive enough to make me take notice, but even her work isn’t entirely to my taste, though I’m leaning towards a belief that that’s more of a gap in my taste than anything else.

I just played Depression Quest, though, and: wow.

So: what’s the difference? Part is that it does feel like more of a game to me: the systems are much more overt than in most Twine works, with the three-part status reporting that the game gives you and with the feedback loop from that status to the choices that are available. I’m sure that contributed to me playing through the game three or four times, trying out different paths, seeing what the game’s model of the effects of actions on your mental health is.

In the abstract, I could imagine that that systems modeling might make this sort of game too bloodless or too prescriptive a presentation of a specific analytical point of view; but Depression Quest didn’t feel that way to me at all. A big part of that was the way that it presents you with a list of options and then crosses off some of them (crossing off a fair amount even at the beginning, more if your mental state gets worse, fewer if things start to improve); I though that was an incredibly effective communication tool, a way of saying that it’s not as simple as saying “pull yourself together and do X”, that when you’re in bad health you frequently can’t do that.

But I found the game effective for reasons other than systems modeling, too. I suspect my reaction to the game would have been a lot more muted without the music; and the interactions between people that it presented felt real to me, too.

Very glad I played it. It only takes around 10 minutes or so for a playthrough, if you’re tempted to give it a try yourself.

I recently watched a video about the System Shock and BioShock games, and I was surprised how nostalgic the System Shock footage made me. I’d been tentatively thinking that I should play through the entire BioShock series (I’ve only played through the first game in the series), but now I’m thinking I should start off with its two spiritual predecessors.

The first question that raises is: how to get them? System Shock 2 (which I’ve also never played) is available on Good Old Games, and runs on the Mac. The original one isn’t available there, but it’s not hard to find on abandonware sites, and it’s even possible that my old CD is still lying around the house somewhere; hopefully I can run it on DosBox? So that should be fine.

Or at least fine-ish. Partly because I have a mental block against playing games on computers; partly because getting old games to work is a black art that I have no experience with; but partly because I prefer not to isolate myself while playing games, which is what I was thinking I’d have to do to play those two games.

That’s not necessarily true, though: while the obvious place to play computer games on is the iMac that we have upstairs, we do have a MacBook downstairs. And, while the computer is slow and in part held together by duct tape (it’s from April 2009, and laptops do not age so gracefully), it should still be more than powerful enough to run games from the 90’s. So maybe I should play the System Shock games on the laptop?

But that raises control issues: I would be pretty surprised if the games were playable with the trackpad on my laptop. So I guess I should use a separate mouse (and potentially a separate keyboard, though skimming the manual it looks like it doesn’t want you to have a numeric keypad at least?) And then a keyboard tray for my lap with room to put a mouse / trackpad?

Though even that is isolating: I’ll be playing the game in the same room as Liesl, but I’ll still be in my own world. So I guess I should try hooking the computer up to the TV? Dealing with the fact that the laptop comes with a Mini-DVI port, which doesn’t have sound, so I’ll have a few more cables than I’d like, but whatever.

I dunno; it’s more fiddling than I’d like, both in terms of running the game at all and in terms of having it display in a manner that I would prefer. Still, maybe for System Shock it’s worth it…

I’ve been thinking about earning, spending, and saving money more than normal recently. Part of this is getting older in a young person’s industry while having my employment be more contingent than normal over the last year; part of it is the lure of riches that the startup dream dangles in front of you; part of it is planning to remodel our kitchen and being confronted with how expensive that can get. (Cabinets! People charge a lot for them!)

It’s weird to think about how much my salary has changed over the decades and how little effect that has had on my quality of life. I had a quite good stipend in grad school (heck, the fact that I got paid rather than paying, even though I didn’t have to teach at all in three of the four years of grad school, puts me way ahead of most people in most fields), but even so: my salary tripled when I moved to my postdoc. And I also had a quite good stipend for a postdoc, but even so: my salary doubled when I left academia. My salary has been climbing much more slowly since then, but those little gains have added up, it’s gone up by about half since my first industry job.

There’s been inflation in the almost-two-decades since I started grad school, of course, and the Boston metro area, while not cheap, isn’t as expensive as Silicon Valley to live in. I’ve been living with Liesl the whole time; her salary has also gone up but not as much as mine has. And there are three of us now, not two of us. Still, those are quite substantial gains even taking all of that into account.

And what quality of life improvements have I gotten out of all of those extra gains? Sometimes, honestly, it feels like I haven’t gotten any improvements. I mean, I watched my bank statements a lot closer back then than I do now, but still: I really wasn’t depriving myself. I had plenty of books to read and games to play (and significantly more time to read / play them); we went out to eat not infrequently and sometimes those were at pretty good restaurants; we went to Europe two or three times when I was in grad school. All of that is far past basic necessities, well into luxuries. And it’s not like I’ve added more luxuries on top of my life now: my list of things I enjoy that cost money basically boils down to art and food, and my ideal vacation remains spending a couple of weeks hanging out in Paris.

So, that raises the question: how are we managing to spend so much more money? I can’t realistically return to my grad school spending levels, sock away 90% of my salary, and only work one year out of ten; but I don’t have a good argument for why we can’t sock away, say, half of our salaries. (Or a good reason why redoing our kitchen is something that I should be happy to spend somewhere around two to three years of my grad school salary on; I love books and games and music, but I kind of doubt I’ve spent that much money on those pursuits across all of the last decade.) I’m pretty sure that there actually is a reason in the short term why we can’t save half our salaries; but maybe I should do the legwork to figure out what that reason is. And then, once we understand the situation better, Liesl, Miranda, and I can figure out ways to put caps on spending that will save us money without making us feel deprived.

And, as I said above: I’m getting older in a young person’s industry. So there’s also a worry at the back of my mind that I might not have a choice about needing to stop spending money. I don’t think that’s coming particularly soon, and I also hope that I’ll be able to slide into a part of the industry that’s less youth-focused if that becomes necessary, but you never know: there are a lot of people who lost a job in the recession and then got shut out of the industry.

Fortunately, it’s not like we’ve been spending all of our money: we’ve been maxing out our 401(k) contributions for years and saving a smallish but noticeable amount of money beyond that. And, while the 401(k) contributions don’t look like much on any individual year, they do add up; I surveyed the accounts a few months ago (which took a while, I should really consolidate my 401(k)s and 403(b)s from my various former employers at some point!), and I was surprised how much they added up to. Not nearly enough for me to be confident about retirement yet (and that in itself is an interesting problem: how should I model whether a give amount of money is enough to retire on?), but while I’m solidly into middle age by now, I’m not particularly close to a traditional retirement age, so that’s fine.

But finding ways to increase our savings rate would be good. (And then there’s college costs presumably showing up starting four years from now!) I did at least spend some time over the last month finding some investment options that I’m a little more confident in than what we had been doing, and we set up some automatic withdrawals into those investments that will eat up a decent portion of my last raise. So that’s a start; but there’s definitely room for improvement.

I don’t want to get obsessed with this; and I certainly don’t want to chase higher salaries in the hope that that will turn into later improvements in my life from increased savings. But I would like to increase my mindfulness in this area, instead of unthinkingly spending the money that comes in.

Like many other people, I switched to Feedly as my Google Reader replacement. The import worked well; as part of that process, in the “Uncategorized” category, I found dozens of blogs that hadn’t published for years.

I removed most of those subscriptions, but some of them I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of:

And I’m not sure that making access to the archives of those (in some cases deleted) blogs harder is entirely consistent with a vision of “Organizing the World’s Information”.

I wish I’d written about Proteus soon after playing it: it’s an amazing game, different in significant ways from almost every other game I’ve played, and while I don’t think I’d managed to come up with too many coherent thoughts articulating what I had to say, I suspect I had more at the time than I have now. We did talk about it as our VGHVI Symposium game this May, but it looks like that conversation is never going to be published as a podcast, so I can’t go back to listen to the discussion there to see what collective thoughts the game spawned, either.

Ah well; perhaps that feeling of loss is appropriate for the game’s wistful nature and presentation of irreversible change. At any rate, two fragments that stuck with me:

• The first time that the game really felt different to me was when I pressed the space bar and, rather than having that cause my character to jump, it caused my character to sit down. So: a game about pausing and drinking in your experiences; I spent a lot of time sitting down in the game.
• In my first playthrough, I was a bit rushed (we had to go to a concert), so I was trying to make it through the last season. But I couldn’t figure out what needed to happen to end the game, so I was running frantically around the island under the assumption that I just couldn’t see the spinning lights because of the cloud cover. And then I started floating away, my worries turned into wonder in one of the most transcendent sequences I’ve ever encountered in a game.

So: not much to say. Maybe, for a game like this, it’s more appropriate for me to just give pictures without commentary.

I really have fallen off of my blogging rhythm ever since getting back from vacation: the trip left me somewhat sleep-deprived, somewhat frazzled, and with a sequence of small “I finished a game” posts that I felt that I had to get out of the way. That combined to get me out of sync; I’ve still been taking notes about things that I want to write about, but I haven’t actually gotten around to writing about most of them, with the result that some of those ideas feel a little stale, and I’m not sure whether to write about them anyways to get them out of my head or to let them fester and continue to take up space with the hope that they will eventually decompose completely.

I was going to say that this post is a perfect example of that, because the events that triggered me to write about the topic took place during the first half of May, and enough has changed in that context that the details there really aren’t relevant. Except that, as I self-consciously typed the introductory paragraph, expecting that I would delete it (because, really, apologies at the start of blog posts do nothing for readers), I realized that that paragraph is actually a pretty good example of the topic in hand.

Namely: overwork and slack. Where, by “slack”, I don’t mean goofing off: I mean the idea popularized by Tom DeMarco’s book with that title of building in a bit of downtime / buffer into your work. This is, of course, hardly new to DeMarco: e.g. the lean folks are happy to present graphs showing response time going to pot as your utilization approaches 100%. Still, his book on the subject was important, and my memory is that it was rather good. (I should reread it!)

And a lack of slack was exactly where I found myself at work in early May. I’d gotten back from vacation, and immediately had to deal with a combination of digging out from two weeks of e-mail / change and dealing with end-of-quarter craziness. And the end-of-quarter craziness led directly into start-of-quarter planning overload, which unfortunately happened at the same time as my turn came up for two different periodic rotations.

The result was that I had no slack. In fact, it was worse than that: not only did I not have time to respond to all of the unusual requests coming in, I didn’t have time to do my basic normal “keep my head afloat from week to week” tasks, either. So the result was that I did a bare minimum of survival stuff and combined that with responding to a largely random subset of the unusual requests.

Which was not fun, though it didn’t suck too much, because the overload cleared out a week and a half later. What was amazing, though, was how it felt when it cleared out. All of a sudden, instead of feeling like my input queue was 125% of capacity, I felt like my input queue was 80% of capacity, and not only could I burn down my queue, I could spend more time thinking and working in a non-reactive manner. Which was great! I really felt like I was being a lot more effective than I had been when my input queue was overflowing. So I definitely want to try to hold onto that feeling, to work to maintain a buffer.

(Though to what extent I actually was more effective is subject to debate: since then, there’s been a mutual decision that my approach to planning and task assignment is a bad enough fit for my employer’s house style that I’m no longer a manager. I do think that’s mostly a fit issue, but it’s certainly true that I wasn’t working crisply enough in my preferred mode of operation to be able to push back against that fit difference.)

I’m still feeling the lack of slack at home, to some extent: a combination of recovering from vacation and having a little bit of work spill over into the rest of my life and then starting a major project. (Kitchen remodeling, whee.) And, of course, just having too much stuff on my lists. Fortunately, the way it plays out at home is rather different from the way it plays out at work: there’s not that much immovable stuff, so as long as food gets into the house and cooked, we’ll do okay. So this isn’t actively making me unhappy, it just means that I’m seeing a bit of a backlog building up in Things. Which is a useful feedback loop, I should think about what actions to take in response to it.

We went to Japan two and a half months ago, and I still haven’t gotten around to really blogging about the trip! Part of that is because I’ve been busy; most of that is because I’m not much of a travel blogger, I write about things I’ve been thinking about instead of places I’ve been to. But there is one place we went to on the trip that I wanted to blog about: the Ghibli Museum, specifically the museum’s Straw Hat Café. We saw a lot of wonderful buildings during the trip, but in its own way I think the cafe was the one that impressed me the most.

Going in, I was cautiously optimistic that I’d enjoy the cafe more than most museum cafes: as Hayao Miyazaki said in his hopes for the museum,

The cafe will be…
An important place for relaxation and enjoyment
A place that doesn’t underestimate the difficulties of running a museum cafe
A good cafe with a style all its own where running a cafe is taken seriously and done right

So the cafe was something that they were thinking about, at least, and I already had reason to believe that the museum was unusually thoughtfully designed. When we got up to the eating area, though, I was a little nonplussed: there was a fairly standard looking food stand with some tents that didn’t excite me. But after looking around a bit more, I saw the cafe, and I was a little surprised that there didn’t seem to be a line.

That was actually the first sign that the cafe was doing something unusual: observing it for a little while longer, there was a line, the line just didn’t look like the way I expected it to. There was a ring of seats near the entrance where people were waiting; one of the restaurant staff would emerge every few minutes, usher the next group in, and everybody would slide down a bit. People who were waiting were given menus to read, so they would be able to order quickly once they got inside; there were also a bunch of books lying around (mostly children’s books) for people to spend time with. So, basically, they transformed the probably inevitable wait time into a pleasant bit of relaxation; and from an organizational point of view, they used people’s time as efficiently as possible, and kept a steady trickle of people entering into the restaurant.

And after waiting for a bit, we made it into the restaurant ourselves; the first thing I was struck by was how light and how open it was. I didn’t take any pictures, unfortunately (they didn’t want you to take pictures inside the museum, and I didn’t think to ask if the cafe counted), so the only picture I have is this not very good scan from the museum catalog:

High ceilings, quite a bit of space between tables (they would have room to pack in a lot more people if they chose), wonderful light from above and from the sides. But varied ceilings, too: in that picture you can see them sloping down towards a boundary area in front of the kitchen, and the colorful tilework above the arch to the kitchen. There’s a fair amount of variation in the main seating area, too: from that picture it might look like the table sizes are relatively uniform, but in fact there are a range of tables over on the right to comfortably seat a range of parties.

And the attention to detail carried down to the dishes and tableware, too. The curry that I ordered was served on a plate with, if I’m remembering correctly, Totoros in a ring around the border counting off numbers. (Ah yes, it was the plate on the first and third pictures of this blog post.) But different orders had different plates; and everybody got a little flag in their meal with a Ghibli illustration on it. (They do Ghibli latte art, too.) More surprisingly to me, the different orders came with different specialized cutlery: it would have worked just as well if they’d set out a knife, fork, and spoon for everybody, but they instead took the occasion to signal to people that they’re paying attention to the specifics of your order.

Good food, too: significantly better than standard museum fare, quite possible one of the two or three best museum meals I’ve ever eaten. (The quality of the food on this trip was very high indeed: I don’t know that there was any one meal that was stupendous, but several were quite good, and there was only one restaurant out of the two weeks that we were there that we regretted having gone into, which is amazing.) Yes, they’re in a museum, but they’re taking care with their food, they treat both the food and the clientele with respect.

The very first goal that Miyazaki lists for the museum is that he wants “A museum that is interesting and which relaxes the soul”: based on the cafe, they absolutely succeeded in that. And the museum as a whole is wonderful: there are delightful architectural touches everywhere you turn.

I would love to see how Christopher Alexander would analyze the cafe. Just thumbing through A Pattern Language, I see several patterns which seem relevant: Intimacy Gradient, Indoor Sunlight, The Flow through Rooms, Sequence of Sitting Spaces, Light on Two Sides of Every Room, Eating Atmosphere (in spirit, I think, though details are different for restaurant eating), Ceiling Height Variety, The Shape of Indoor Space, Windows Overlooking Life, Half-Open Wall, Interior Windows, Open Shelves, Structure Follows Social Spaces. (And that’s just for the cafe; I can’t recall another public place I’ve been to that did so well with Secret Place or Child Caves.) But it’s not just the patterns: it’s this feeling of attention to detail, of how the elements of the space work together to harmonize with each other and to harmonize with the people and activities that give those elements reason to be.

The last book that I read on the trip was Alexander’s latest, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems. If I’d read it at the start instead of the end, I would have been tempted to go visit the Eishin Campus; that would have taken a fair amount of time, though, so maybe the way things turned out is just as well. That latter book turns out to be really more about social organization than architecture, anyways: I will be thinking about it for a long time, I suspect, but I’m not at all ready to write about it here yet, I think I need a few more years of observation informed by that book first.

One of the books I read over vacation was Object Thinking, by David West. I should probably reread it, I certainly don’t claim to understand it well yet or know to what extent I trust the ideas therein, but it’s the sort of melange that appeals to me.

The book doesn’t shy away from grand philosophical statements, including framing competing schools of software development as a clash between formalism and hermeneutics. It portrays formalism as, in general, the winner in western culture (and in particular in western programming); it says that a true “object thinking” style of object-oriented development is on the hermeneutics side of that split, and that most of what is presented as object-oriented development isn’t really worthy of the name.

So this isn’t just a question about the specifics of how you use a programming language: even within software development, it’s broader than that. The book takes an explicitly XP-centric approach here in its approach towards software development, seeing XP as squarely within the hermeneutics camp, and of course XP’s approach is significantly broader than a question of what object-oriented programming means to you. Actually, until reading this book, I hadn’t necessarily thought of an approach to objects as being foregrounded within XP; one strength of the book is that it makes Metaphor, the most mysterious (to me, at least) XP practice, a little more concrete, but of course Simple Design and TDD very much push you in a particular design direction, and for that matter Whole Team (including the Onsite Customer) help support certain conceptions of objects.

Having said that, the book also supports XP for pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with philosophical schools: one of its theses is that good software is likely to be produced most efficiently by good programmers, and one of the strengths of XP is that it gives you concrete techniques to practice that may improve your skill. So even if those techniques might in the abstract not be your favorite ones, the fact that they exist gives XP a leg up over a less focused approach towards improving your skill as a programmer. (Or improving your whole team’s skill together as programmers.)

The book doesn’t propose object thinking as an approach suitable for all programming. As it says,

Traditional approaches to software—and the formalist philosophy behind them—are quite possibly the best approach if you are working close to the machine—that is, you are working with device drivers or embedded software. Specific modules in business applications are appropriately designed with more formalism than most. One example is the module that calculates the balance of my bank account. A neural network, on the other hand, might be more hermeneutic and objectlike, in part because precision and accuracy are not expected of that kind of system.

It then presents an “applicability graph” opposing the “deterministic world” to the “natural-sociocultural world” and “comprehension” to “implementation”, saying that object thinking is suitable for the “comprehension / natural-sociocultural world” quadrant while the “computer science paradigm” is suitable for the “implementation / deterministic world” quadrant. I’m not entirely sure I buy those splits, but it does make me wonder: I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last decade working on aspects of server software that, if not deterministic, are at least not in the “natural-sociocultural world”, and while they’re not pure implementation, they’re also not about comprehending the real world.

So, by the book’s light, it makes sense for a lot of that work not to be pure object thinking. Indeed, a lot of times the software that I work on depends ultimately more on how large volumes of data move around than anything else. And if we follow the book’s grander narrative, it might also make sense that the programming worlds that I work in have fairly strong antibodies to some of the other XP practices, e.g. Whole Team or Collective Code Ownership. (Though some of the other XP practices get a lot more traction, in whole or in part.)

Still, a lot of the code I work on could be improved by better object design. And, all philosophical issues aside, the book seems like it’s potentially pointing in an interestingly productive direction? I wish the examples were more detailed, though: he makes pretty grand claims about the reduction in implementation time and number of classes that come from correct object thinking, and I didn’t get more than a hint of that from the actual code in the book.

Player of Games has always been my favorite Iain Banks novel, but I’ve never been sure how much of that is because it’s good and how much of that is because it presses my buttons. I like the Culture quite a bit as a universe, and I’m also pretty obsessed with games, so it’s only natural that I would gravitate towards a book that combines the two.

I reread the book this week, and it meant quite a bit more to me this time. The way Gurgeh is portrayed as not fitting into the Culture’s norms for gender and sexual behavior; but he fits somewhat better into traditional American norms. The way he finds aspects of Azadian culture somewhat intriguing, and slips a bit more into their point of view as he immerses himself in their language and their game.

But his point of view, his Culture background comes in as well: the game is explicit in this, in its requirement (at least in later rounds) that players register their philosophical premises. The link between your philosophical premises and your style of play is implicitly present in a lot of games that I play: most obviously in Android: Netrunner, but a philosophical approach is also there in, say, 7 Wonders or Race for the Galaxy. Heck, it’s even there in Ascension, in your choice of biasing towards combat or towards improved production, and it’s certainly lurking within go’s abstractions.

I don’t think it’s an excuse that the first examples that come to mind are board games, not video games. Video games do frequently foreground choices, but those choices generally have more of a class-based feel, in how you construct yourself and your powers. And that, to me, has less of a “personal philosophy” feel than the board game approach of choosing how to interact with systems that are global to the game. So, indeed, maybe Netrunner isn’t a good choice after all, or rather, if it is a good choice, it’s not one because of the surface choices (Corp versus Runner, factions within those two), it’s because of the web of underlying mechanics that everybody has an option of how they want to interact with it. Still, class-based mechanics are by no means divorced from philosophical premises, and some video games (e.g. the Civilization series) lend themselves just as strongly to a premise-based approach/analysis as board games do.

So: who you are. Who your people are. How well you fit within your people. And a systems approach to all of this. The Culture naturally lends itself to a systems approach, with multiple layers: the Minds are playing at a whole other level, with humans as pawns, albeit pawns with agency. You can think of that as a depressing depersonalization (and the Minds aren’t the only intelligences in the book treating people as pawns, we see lots of that in the Azad matches as well); you can think of that as a personalization of a Deming-style belief that individual performance is largely governed by the system that they work within. Which, of course, we see reflected within Azad, and all the other games that are played. (Deming also makes the point that you should understand normal variation within a system before looking at variation of individual behavior, which fits in well with a focus on games that are, in part, games of chance.)

This all comes together in that last game of Azad, where Gurgeh has to confront the fact that his play is suffused with his Culture background. Indeed, his play always has been throughout the series; generally, that’s been to his advantage, because it’s introduced a (literally) foreign element that his opponents had a hard time grappling with, but now it’s hurting him, because gameplay that is informed by habitual Culture behavior isn’t up for confronting the forceful violence of the Azadian empire.

This isn’t a sign that the Culture is weak, however; it’s a sign that the Culture has to behave differently (while still sticking to its core beliefs) when confronted with certain enemies. And so, with a shift towards the “Culture militant”, Gurgeh wins, though not without drama.

So: some clashes that are on the surface about something else are instead really clashes of philosophies, clashes of who you are at the core. And if the antagonists’ philosophies are different enough, you may have to shift the way you express your philosophy. (Hopefully not in a way in which you lose who you really are, something which the book perhaps doesn’t explore as much as it might.)

And if you do that well enough, and if you have enough skill at playing the game, you and your philosophy will end up being dominant. (And skill is very important: as the book says, if Azad had evolved before the Culture, the roles of victor and victim would quite possibly have been reversed, this isn’t manifest destiny at work.)

But, even if you win, that battle can drain you, can leave you empty. The very end of the book was the part that I found most unexpectedly personally moving: the way Gurgeh started falling into depression after his victory, how he wanted to do nothing other than sleep, sleep for years, sleep without dreams.

The book ends with a note of joy and optimism. But Gurgeh has a lot of self-reconstruction to do, too. I would like to think that, after that reconstruction, he’ll emerge with a richer life.

This year, I’ve been a little touchier about games than in the past. I’m tired of violence in games: yes, it’s a classic theme, rich in narrative possibilities; yes, it lends itself to a myriad of success/failure conditions that are rich in gameplay possibilities; but even so, does it have to be quite so dominant? (And generally so unreflectively dominant, to make matters worse.) And I’m tired of adolescent games: sure, the transition from childhood to adolescence is a great theme, but it gets old, and it especially gets old when that transition doesn’t lead to a struggle with the question of what it means to be grown up, but rather leads to becoming an all-powerful manchild who saves the world from an evil daddy figure while dominating it himself. (These two, of course, frequently unite: saving the world involves leaving an endless stream of corpses behind you, as it turns out.)

I seem to be particularly interested in unpacking that latter problem, as I realized when I found myself defending Catherine fairly vigorously in a VGHVI symposium a couple of months ago. Because yeah, there’s a lot to complain about in Catherine. Vincent is nobody’s idea of a role model: he may not be an all-powerful manchild (aside from one of the endings which is at least entertainingly self-aware in its presentation of the situation), but he is a hapless loser manchild, somebody whom I probably wouldn’t enjoy spending time with in real life, whom I probably wouldn’t enjoy reading about or watching a movie about. So this is not a character or a game that I would normally think of myself as defending. (At least on a thematic/narrative level; the block pushing puzzle aspect of it is a different matter.)

But I nonetheless was: it turns out that, right now, I’m surprisingly grateful, embarrassingly grateful even to games that present me with a narrative that doesn’t end up with me becoming all-powerful and saving the world. I mean, yes, Dragon Age II is a legitimately wonderful game, but should I be quite so grateful for the fact that you only save a city from a crazed demon lord instead of saving the entire freaking world from a crazed demon lord?

So it would seem that I need some space from current conventions. Which makes me wonder: what if we try to further stretch the distance from conventions? Saving the world is clearly overblown, but maybe my problem is as much with the “saving” part of that statement as with “the world”. Maybe games have a savior complex; maybe I have a savior complex and I’m uncomfortable with that aspect of myself. Maybe what I want right now are games that present a world around you and people around you that are interesting in their own right, that are worthy of respect in their own right, and that don’t need you to validate them, let alone save them?

Now, I realize that games traditionally have externally prescribed goals, and that one way to combine external goals with a single-player context (and one that includes a narrative framework) is to present you as trying to win over some parts of that external context for the benefit of both yourself and other parts of that external context. If we step too far away from that, we have, what, Proteus? Well, as it turns out, Proteus is a great game, and I’m much happier having spent time playing it than yet another save-the-world fantasy.

There are other ways to frame those externally prescribed goals, though; one of my favorites is that games are about systems understanding, and the goals are vehicles for the rules that give structure to the games’ systems. If you focus on the systems, though, goals are merely one way to approach those systems, and the systems themselves can present a world, a work that is worthy of approach and appreciation on its own terms, with no need for external validation.

That systems understanding approach itself can, of course, be problematic; but it can also be beautiful. And beautiful in ways that aren’t threatened by goals and show how goals can be presented in ways that have nothing to do with a savior complex: go is an example here.

So: I’d like games that are less about saving the world, aspiring to become all-powerful; in fact, I’m curious about games that step away from aspiration completely. Having said that, that’s just me right now, not a general statement about what other people should be interested in or even what past or future me should be interested in.

One of the reasons for this is the social context of how aspiration is frequently presented in games. The games I’m thinking of aren’t just adolescent fantasy: they’re a particular kind of adolescent fantasy, one that generally harmonizes well with boys who grow up in a world that, at least in part, tells them that they are special, that they can go on to do great things, where that latter is identified in part with dominating and showing their superiority to others.

Which, in its own way, was a big part of my adolescence: sure, I was a geeky kid, but I was in an environment that was rather supportive of that geekiness, and if we’re talking about dominance, I did extremely well at math contests. That latter skill led to a fair amount of other rewards; I’m certainly far from dominating the world, but my career has put me in a quite comfortable place.

And following narratives that reinforce certain aspects of that, or for that matter that tell me that I’m still a failure because I didn’t dominate the world, gets kind of tired after a while: I’d like to learn from something different. And, worse, these aspirational savior narratives seem to resonate with some aspects of a culture around games (and around internet technology enthusiasm in general) that can be pretty horrible at times: an ideological fervor to demonstrate that you are Right, that those who have come to a different conclusion from you are Wrong and must be crushed under the weight of your righteousness.

If I’d had different aspirations growing up, or less support for my aspirations, though, my response to aspirational games might will be different. In that case, a game that spoke to my aspirations could turn into a beacon of hope; certainly there seem like a lot of games out there these days that have the potential to be that.

I dunno. I guess, having written this, I’m really not against aspiration in games. I am still against being a savior in games, at least to the extent that that others whom you are saving.

More than either of those, though, I’m actively for games that quietly observe the world around you. Games that don’t focus on the world as a vehicle for your actions on it: games that focus on the world as something in its own right, games that focus on multi-way relationships involving you and others, even games that focus on understanding yourself without a builtin assumption that that understanding naturally leads to adulation. Or games that set aside the world, removing that external narrative largely or entirely to instead carve narrative out of interactions within the mechanics of the game.

Fortunately, there are a lot of games out there that present a world that welcomes observation, now that I’m calming down enough to notice them.

If I’d played Trauma before Dominique Pamplemousse, I’d probably have ended up writing the same blog post, just about a different game. Because Trauma is also a very good game, and one that impresses me in a way that I wish I didn’t find so out-of-the-ordinary: it’s one person’s singular vision, it’s very compelling, it’s well done as a game, it made me sit up and take notice. Which is great and all that, but it’s kind of odd that seeing those characteristics in a game surprises me in a way that seeing them in a book or an album wouldn’t; not sure how much of the oddness is in me and how much of the oddness is in the environment.

Of course, once you get past the above (and past their shared point-and-click adventure nature), the two games have significant differences: Trauma is more experiential, has a more oblique meaning, doesn’t have the same sort of plot. There’s not the same musical focus, but there’s a photographic focus, which quietly works well. And I liked the gentle formalism of the four endings of the four levels. (I wonder why more games don’t do that sort of formalism? Or do they, and I’m just not thinking of examples?)

Trauma was the last game I played on vacation, and one of the best. So now I’m almost done with my backlog! I still have some non-game posts to write, though; those will take longer. And I’ve finished one game since returning, namely Proteus, which I’m still coming to terms with. Still, I’m getting closer to being able to return to my normal rhythms; feels nice.

I’d been a little curious about Versu ever since it came out, and a talk I heard at GDC this year did nothing to reduce my enthusiasm. So I figured I’d try it out on the plane ride to Japan.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my plan: when I downloaded the game, I realized that it wouldn’t play without a network connection. Now, maybe there’s a good reason for this: maybe the game does more computation than my iPad could handle. Or maybe Linden Labs didn’t think twice about doing it that way: that’s the way they do things. Or maybe they did think twice, but they decided it was best from a maintainability/portability point of view. Or maybe they have some economic reason for doing it that way. Maybe there’s even a reason why it’s better for users, I just can’t think of one.

Who knows; at any rate, not what I expected. And, to be honest, I felt a little bit like I was getting my own Sim City experience. My mood wasn’t helped when, a week later, I was playing the game, and I lost half an hour of play time because it couldn’t sync with the server on one turn. (Yes, I realize that text adventures have been training me for decades to save regularly, but surely that’s a bug, not a feature, especially in iPad games?)

Server interactions aside, what did I think about Versu? I’m glad to have spent a few hours with it: I went through all four scenarios multiple times. But I can’t say I felt too satisfied after that.

Not sure what’s going on there. Maybe it felt like a tech demo? Maybe the themes of the stories didn’t work for me? Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood? Maybe the mechanics need to evolve a bit more? Maybe I prefer either explicit narrative or else sandbox mechanics, whereas this middle ground of exploring a pre-existing narrative space doesn’t work as well for me?

Hard to say; and I certainly won’t swear off playing more stories that use the Versu machinery in the future. But I won’t spend time waiting for stories more to my taste to come along, either.

The iPad version of Mirror’s Edge seemed like a pleasant enough game: mostly good enough mechanics (albeit not ones that particularly excited me), good level design. I played through it once and then went through the first few levels again trying to get speed runs.

Having said that, there was one mechanic that I didn’t like at all: the people shooting at you. I didn’t enjoy it from a gameplay point of view, but, honestly, mostly it just bugged me. I’m getting more sensitive to violence these days, and if the game had avoided guns entirely, that would have been an active plus; it didn’t, though, instead having most levels full of people shooting at you.

And, to make matters worse, the enemies had a bark of “shoot to kill”. Which they manifestly weren’t doing: you got slowed down a bit by their shots, but you could absorb a lot of bullets before you died. (And no, your character wasn’t presented as having superhuman skills in that regard.) And I don’t think that the enemies were all crack shots who had the control to knick you while lying about your intentions: that’s not the way guns work, that’s not the way games work.

It’s just lazy game design. They got rid of half the gun violence, they didn’t figure out how to get rid of the rest, and they didn’t own that decision: you’re the same bullet sponge we see over and over again, just an asymmetric one. Having to listen to an annoying bark.

More options, please?

It’s been a month since I got back from Japan, and I still haven’t written about my trip here! Which isn’t a sign that it wasn’t a great trip—it was, I’m very glad we went. That silence is instead more a sign that I’m not a travel blogger; it’s also a sign that I’ve been busy recently. (That busyness I probably will blog about in a bit.)

But I did at least want to write about the trip in the context of learning Japanese. As I mentioned before, I started taking Japanese lessons a couple of months before we left. And that turned out to be a great idea: partly because of the content of the lessons, partly as calibration of what I could and couldn’t do, but mostly because of a mental shift it triggered. It made the question of speaking Japanese a much more real one, so it flipped a switch in my brain where, even before leaving the house, I’d find myself thinking about how I would say something in Japanese.

And, as it turned out in the trip: yes, I can speak Japanese! Not well, and not comfortably: I do a lot better in France or Germany. But well enough to make myself known whenever we needed that to happen, well enough that people I spoke to didn’t generally answer me in English, well enough that we never had any serious problems.

Essentially all of this speaking was in specific, focused situations: generally some sort of business transaction or ordering dinner or whatever. (And actually my reading practice came in handy as often as my speaking practice.) There was a grand total of one instance over the two weeks when I carried out an actual conversation, and a lot of vocal fumbling happened in general. But still: the point was for us to have fun and enjoy the trip, not to give me immersion practice. (And one conversation is more than zero conversations, after all.)

So: yay for language study, yay for us being able to relax and enjoy ourselves halfway around the world! And yay for lessons, too. Despite which I haven’t continued the lessons since I came back. In fact, they stopped a few weeks before I left: my teacher was selling her house, so she had to cancel several weeks in a row because she was holding open houses. And I was glad to have that couple of hours of my weekend back, as it turns out.

But I do want to change my approach because of this experience. To spend more time thinking about how to form sentences, not just reading them. Maybe not to spend more time on Japanese during the weekends (though that’s not out of the question), but at least spend more time on it during the week. (After all, reading a chapter of Hikaru no Go is a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend twenty or thirty minutes if I happen to have a bit of time between when I get home and when we’re making dinner.)

Or at least I want to tweak my approach: there’s a lot that I won’t change. (Because, after all: it seems to have worked!) Above all, just keep on going: I’m not going to make nearly the sort of progress that I would if I were immersing myself in the language, but if I just keep on working smartly at it, I’ll keep on getting better.

I can’t say that I understood Starbloom. It’s nice enough to look at and to listen to; there’s a bit of gameplay there, but that gameplay didn’t grab me in terms of the game’s explicit goals. (Either in thinking about how to approach those goals or in the mechanics of carrying out that approach.) Which maybe means that I should think about Starbloom as a toy, with implicit goals (make the music sound how you would like it to?), but I couldn’t find a way to approach it in that direction that worked for me.

I dunno. Probably I’m missing something; but probably it’s also just not for me.

When I first heard about Dominique Pamplemousse (or, to use its full title, Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!”), it sounded charming: what’s not to like about a claymation musical adventure game? Even so, I was blown away how much I cared about the finished product. And I wasn’t the only one: as soon as I showed a bit of it to Miranda, she immediately started nagging me to be able to play through the whole thing—I hadn’t previously realized how much of a bagpipe fan she apparently is—and Liesl had a good time with it as well.

I’m having a little bit of a hard time articulating why the game had such an impact on me, though. (Aside from its general awesomeness, of course.) I think that maybe what’s going on is that I unconsciously pigeonholed it in advance as probably being a little too far on the skeletal DIY side of things. Which is an asshole thing to say, and I realize that I’m looking stupid by typing it: over the last year, the zinester scene has been as much where the action is as any place else in game development. (Not that Dominique Pamplemouusse is necessarily a zinester game, or for that matter isn’t, I’m not up enough on that sort of distinction to say.) Still, I have my biases, and for better or for worse I still mostly play games from traditional game studios. Don’t get me wrong: I was expecting to genuinely enjoy the game, but still, I figured I’d play through it but that I’d then go back to more traditional games where I would feel more at home, or where I would at least enjoy the increased polish of the experience. (Well, actually, I’d go back to playing Rocksmith all the time, but never mind that.)

And then I started playing the game: charming decor, but also low-rent, a room whose walls are built out of corrugated cardboard. And shot in black-and-white: what’s up with that? At any rate, ten seconds in, I had something that I was still managing to slot into my prejudices. Those prejudices may have lasted for another ten or twenty seconds, but no longer, because I started listening to the music, to the singing. And, let me tell you: I love the music in this game. It’s well crafted, it’s a lot of fun to listen to, Deirdra does a great job performing it (I assume she did all the composing, singing, and playing herself, though I could be wrong), it’s witty, it works great in a game context (which requires a choice of responses to be sung over a scene’s background music).

And the music is also very much its own thing: a Deirdra Kiai production. But being its own thing doesn’t make that music free from referent: just turning it on, you hear scratching sounds over the soundtrack, imitating a record player. (Or before turning it on, there’s the game’s subtitle!) And this combines with the black-and-white visuals and the detective setting to make the low-rent nature of the production (Deirdra raised $9950 for it on Indiegogo, so not no-rent but also very much not a lot of cash to work with as game production budgets go) into an affirmative choice. (And one that actively reinforces the narrative of the game, which starts off with the protagonist worrying about being kicked out of their office because they couldn’t scrape up enough money to pay the rent.) I could add on to the examples of this sort of active affirmative choice: the characters in the game are claymation figures for example, so they don’t even have polygons, but if they did, there wouldn’t be a lot of polygons in them or rich textures on them; but those claymation figures have as much visual personality as any character in any game that I can think of.

So, throughout the aesthetics and the traditional presentational aspects of the game, you’ll find ample evidence to bemoan the AAA rush towards more and more photorealistic graphics: not because the latter is more expensive, but because the latter is worse. Not that the big-budget games don’t have their own charms, but still: here’s a one-person game that I would rather watch and that I would rather listen to, and setting that aside, creative monocultures are never healthy.

And it’s not just the music and visuals that are great about this game. It’s a very solid adventure game indeed: I enjoyed figuring things out, I also enjoyed not getting frustrated (three of us played it, and one of us got a little stuck in one place in the game), I enjoyed the length of the game and every moment of the time I spent with it. So: yay for game design. But also yay for narrative that goes beyond what’s necessary for game design, and that does so in a way that’s mercifully free from the save-the-world bombast that is so dominant today: it’s a personal narrative, a narrative that contains sharp commentary on economic issues, on gender issues, on issues of choice and freedom and interpersonal ties, approaching all of these issues from multiple directions.

So: more like this please. Where by “like this” I don’t mean “stop-motion claymation musical adventure games” (though if I could trade a video game scene dominated by first-person shooters for one dominated by musical adventure games, I would do that in a heartbeat): I mean games that show a craftsperson and an artist working at top form to give me something new.

On which note, it’s actually a little ridiculous that fact about this game is such a breath of fresh air. If I read a novel by an author showing me things I’d never seen before, been swept away by an album from a band that I’d never heard of before hitting play, I would be pleased and surprised by the details of the artwork, but I wouldn’t spend time calling out the fact that such things exist at all. After all, that’s the great thing about art: it lets one or a handful of people show something new about the world to other people. At least in many other media it does; in games, though, something (cultural hegemony? studio culture? studio sizes? cost structures?) puts barriers in the way of that.

Or at least there have been barriers over the last decade or two. (Or maybe it’s just my own blinders: I obviously have them, it’s becoming more and more likely to me that I’m not looking for great games in the right places.) It’s gotten a lot better over the last year, though. And right now I’m not sure I can point to a game that does a better job than Dominique Pamplemousse at showing one path forward.

One of the better talks I went to at the first GDC I attended was by Randy Smith, so I was curious about the studio he co-founded. Unfortunately, their first game didn’t grab me; their second game, Waking Mars, sounded like it might have mechanics that were a bit more to my taste, so while it never quite managed to bubble to the top of my stack, I was happy to give it a shot when I was on vacation and only had an iPad to play games on.

And I liked Waking Mars quite a bit more than Spider. Mostly on the level of mechanics: a pleasant set of plants, animals, and substances to investigate. The gates to make it past each level weren’t particularly difficult, but that’s the way I prefer things: I can poke around trying to figure out what’s going on without being too stressed. And there was one interaction of mechanics that surprised me, the way the plant that changes terrain types plays out. I also appreciated the non-violent nature of the mechanics: I’ve gotten a lot more sensitive to that over the last year or so, so I was glad to be helping aliens instead of shooting them.

I liked it more than Spider more on a narrative level, too: having a mansion that invites you to figure out its history sounded potentially interesting, but in practice I wanted more narrative hand-holding than that game provided. (I’m curious how I’ll feel about Gone Home when it comes out.) Waking Mars had people (and robots) talking, an alien mystery to try to figure out, and enough questions unanswered about that alien mystery to leave some room for the player to insert their perspective.

So: pleasant game. Not enough to vault the studio to the top of my must-play list, or anything: I enjoyed the mechanics, but I don’t think there’s huge depth there for me to keep on digging into.

It was also watching my internal snobbishness play out: the images for your character and for the cut-scene discussions were well drawn, but without a lot of presentation beyond that; that worked great for the cut scenes, but something was unexpected for me about the animation of your character’s movements in game. Which I wouldn’t even mention were it not for my playing Dominique Pamplemousse shortly thereafter: that game was more aggressively lo-fi, but in a way that felt a little more coherent? Still, I wasn’t at all actively put off by Waking Mars in this regard, it was just an interesting data point in how small studios pick and choose where to put their energy.

I played The Dreamhold on the plane ride to Japan. I guess these days the genre label that the game fits within (or the mechanics label—I’m not entirely at peace with how the term “genre” is used with games) is “parser-based interactive fiction”? Which is something I played a lot when I was growing up; not so much these days, though I still considered myself basically favorably inclined to the mechanic.

After playing The Dreamhold, though, I’m not so sure. Not that it wasn’t a good game: it was well written, it showed snippets of a potentially rather fascinating world, and the puzzles seemed well done. (It’s designed as an introductory game, for what that’s worth.) But I just wasn’t feeling it: I ran into some difficulties, I got annoyed, I asked for hints.

Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, I’m not sure. But I don’t think it was just my mood: I’m not sure in what contexts now I would prefer to play parser-based IF over games that went in a different direction: the puzzles in parser-based IF have a particular obtuseness that, these days, seems gratuitous.

Of course, parser-based IF has changed a lot over the last three decades. For example, I hear that there’s a fair amount of it out there that doesn’t depend on puzzles: maybe I should spend time investigating that? Though there are so many other text-based IF platforms these days, I’d be curious what the parser brings in a non-puzzle context over, say, Twine.

“Should” is a funny word, though. I don’t play that many games these days, and I generally play a game because there’s something specific that’s drawing me to it. That means that investigating the current state of the art of a mechanic is unlikely to be enough of a hook on its own, even if it’s a mechanic that I’m very nostalgic about.

Though maybe I’ll play more parser-based IF for the same reason (or at least one of the reasons) why I played The Dreamhold: when I’m on vacation, I have time on planes and during downtime during days and nights to play games, and I only have my iPad with me. Probably just as well to have time to experiment a bit and broaden my horizons; and it’s a platform that works well with text.

Who knows; we’ll see.

While I was on vacation, I only played iPad games; I’ll write a post about each of them, but they were mostly short, so I don’t always have a lot to say.

Hundreds is a good example. (Though actually I really played it during GDC.) It’s a puzzle game; I’d heard good things about it when it came out, but it didn’t work for me. The game’s core mechanism just didn’t grab me: you wait until circles aren’t near other circles, then you touch them so they grow, and you stop when other circles get closer. You can try to arrange things so that you’re likely to have more time to grow the circles; but you don’t have much direct control, so you spend a fair amount of time waiting. Which leads to frustration, which leads to pushing boundaries, which leads to messing up and having to start the level over.

The game adds mechanisms as you go along, but they didn’t make the game feel richer; and, in fact, sometimes they made the game more annoying, because some of the mechanisms create active setbacks. And then there are these unrelated word puzzles to unlock; I did the first few, but when I hit a roadblock I didn’t feel like figuring more out.

I guess I went through a third of the puzzles? Certainly not half of them. It wasn’t as actively unpleasant as I may be making it seem here, but I’m definitely glad I stopped when I did, and the basic mechanism never clicked.

I don’t normally blog about Flash games or Twine games that I play (for no particularly thought-through reason), but I was thinking I should make an exception for Grow Maze: it’s wonderful and it’s as long as some iOS games that I’ve played recently that do fall into the bucket of “games I blog about”. Before I got around to writing that post, though, the 11th anniversary of EYEZMAZE came along, so I decided to expand the scope.

Because: the EYEZMAZE games are amazing: I’m not sure that there’s a game designer who works by himself whose work I enjoy more. (I really wish he would do a Kickstarter or something that would let him devote more time to his games!) They are fun, they are charming, they have a mechanical and stylistic consistency that underpins all eleven years of his work. (Actually, I don’t know if “his” is the appropriate pronoun: the designer’s name is ON, but even finding that takes a bit of poking around, I’m not sure of the designer’s gender.)

The first EYEZMAZE game that I played was Grow Cube, and it made enough of an impression that I still remember where I heard about it. And it’s still a great introduction to his work, because it’s wonderfully charming and an excellent example of his favorite mechanic. The mechanic that Grow Cube uses (and that maybe half to two thirds of his games focus on) is of elements that you can add in various orders, and that level up more or less depending on the order in which you add them. And the leveling up gets more and more alive, with hidden secrets popping out: if you manage to find the sequence to get all of the elements leveled up, you end up with a wonderfully animated small world that’s just bursting with charm and secrets.

I think the mechanic is a surprisingly good one (in particular, there’s more game play there than it seems – I remember keeping notes on the experiments I’d run while trying to find out the complete sequence for one of his games), though it wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without the charm of the world he built. For the first half of his career, he experimented with that mechanic over and over again; I always enjoyed it, but I was starting to wonder what else he could do.

But, as I played more of his games, I also started to appreciate his repeated design elements. This started to hit me when I played Grow ver. 1: that uses a much simpler mechanic (though one that remains focused on growth, and that retains all the charm of his more elaborate games), but there’s one path in particular that made me take notice, because it shows the development of an underground world full of secret chambers that are a backstage version of bits of his other games. That brings out the consistency of his games (it’s not just thematic and mechanical consistency, but judicious use of characters and items that link the games without being repetitive), and it does that while bringing one aspect of his thematic consistency to the fore, the idea that everything is part of a living, growing world with riches lying just beneath the surface (of the ground, of shapes and objects and creatures and people) working away and waiting to burst forth if you do coax it out.

Fairly soon after that, he came out with a game that was a significant break from his tradition: Dwarf Complete. (There’s an iOS version if you prefer.) It was contract work, and perhaps because of that it has a noticeably different art style; still charming, though. And noticeably different mechanics: you move around instead of just selecting items, there are a wide range of puzzles to work on. So: he’s definitely not a one-trick pony.

Since then, the games have slowed down; sometimes, he’s returned to the original mechanic, sometimes he’s branched out more. His latest game, Grow Maze, is a lovely example of where’s he’s come: it’s similar in many ways to Dwarf Complete, in that it’s exploration based with a wide range of puzzles, and takes a decent amount of time to go through. But it’s as charming as ever, and touches back enough to some of his familiar design elements and ideas of evolution to reassure you that yes, this is an Eyezmaze game.

ON has made so many games that I cherish; I only wish that he could devote himself exclusively to game creation. But still: once every year or so, my feed reader tells me that he’s published something new, and that’s a wonderful present to receive.

And now I think I’ll go and play through Grow Cube again. Or maybe Grow RPG?