malvasia bianca

I tend to think of agile as a way of thinking about programming that’s very supportive of individuals, their quirks, desires, and autonomy. As I’ve been tossing some of the ideas behind this post around in my head, though, I’m not entirely sure why I have that attitude. Certainly the lean pillar of Respect for People sounds very well aligned with autonomy, as is the Agile Manifesto’s valuing of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; and, looking through the eXtreme Programming practices, Collective Ownership (“anyone can change any code anywhere in the system at any time”) sounds like it supports autonomy, and the 40-Hour Week acknowledges that our selves are richer than what is visible at work, with work not being allowed to dominate.

But there are a lot of other XP practices, and a lot of them are about following rules: Coding Standards, Pair Programming, TDD. And, while lean’s idea of Respect for People isn’t at all a sham (it’s a deep-seated belief that everybody has valuable ideas to contribute and should have the power to, for example, stop production lines), lean also codifies that knowledge in the form of checklists that all team members follow to help them (get them?) to work as efficiently as possible.

In retrospect, I think that a lot of what is going on in my attitude is that many of the agile practices happen to be ways that I enjoy working. This meant that I was likely to interpret them as supportive of individuality, but quite possibly a better read is that many of them happened to be aligned with my individuality, and people with different tastes could just as reasonably seeing them as suppressing their individuality.

So: am I completely wrong? Should I more correctly interpret the XP practices, for example, as dicta from above that suppress individuality? I don’t think that’s true, either. For one thing, I rarely get that feeling from agile thought leaders. They may be uncompromising on what XP means, and say that, if you’re not following the practices, you’re not doing XP, and that you might learn something new if you put down your individuality and followed those practices. There’s an important difference, however, between saying that they believe XP practices are a productive starting point and saying that everybody should blindly follow those practices, and those same thought leaders will often say in the very next sentence that, once you’ve given the strict practices a real try, you should next evolve it to better fit your needs and circumstances. (Where those circumstances very much include the individuals on your team, not just your business and technical context.) In fact, many people say that retrospectives are the single most important agile practice!

Or take Scrum, the agile methodology whose name is, in my experience, invoked in the widest variety of contexts. Part of Scrum’s popularity is due, I think, to its lack of dictates about what to do, which many companies interpret as thinking that it fits well into their pre-existing practices. But, if those pre-existing practices include top-down command-and-control direction from management, then they might want to look at Scrum more carefully: the Scrum Guide doesn’t acknowledge managers at all, with the only roles being the Product Owner, the Development Team, and the Scrum Master. And yes, many people interpret the Scrum Master as being a manager; but the guide characterizes the Scrum Master as being “a servant-leader for the Scrum Team”, with removing impediments a key role and giving orders not. (And a manager isn’t hidden on the Development Team, either: “Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the person; there are no exceptions to this rule”.)

So no, agile isn’t top down, it doesn’t suppress individuality. But it doesn’t give unfettered reign to individuality, either: returning to the manifesto, we see individuals joined at the hip with interactions, the word “team” is everywhere in Scrum, and people working in a Lean organization are very far from free agents. If I were to pick one value for agile, “communication” would be a good choice: most of the XP practices are about improving communication directly or indirectly, as are practices from other agile methodologies. (I haven’t mentioned Kanban yet, but it’s all about clear signaling of your current state, needs, impediments, and priorities.) And you can’t communicate if you’re on your own!

And that communication flows everywhere. Maybe that’s where agile’s acceptance of individuality comes in: if communication is going to flow through people, then it has to accept that those people are, well, people, each with their own individual effect on (contribution to!) that information flow. In particular, a top-down, command-and-control organization hinders communication: yes, messages that look clear are broadcast, but they’re only sent in one direction, and the more top down you are, the harder it is to check whether that communication has even been heard as you intended it to be heard, let alone to learn from mismatches between how it is interpreted and how the intent was.

And this, in turn, leads to the question of team size. In a team of one, a world where everybody is a free agent, meaningful communication can’t exist: there’s nobody to speak to who really matters. But if the team gets too large, you have the opposite problem: you can say that everybody’s voice matters, but if there are too many of those voices, then you can’t hear them. So: a large enough team to allow for a range of meaningful interactions, but a small enough team where everybody knows everybody else as an individual.

This small team size works well with many of the other core agile values and practices, too. Over the last year, I’ve gotten a much more visceral appreciation of the importance of retrospectives than I ever had before; and one of the things I’m really feeling there is that, to experiment well, you need a large enough group to give meaningful reinforcement to your experiment but a small enough group that new ideas can come to the fore and can be played with. Sure, if you have a twenty-person team, then sometimes all twenty people need to do something in the same way, but you’ll learn a lot more quickly if there are five-person groups that can come up with ideas, try them out, modify or discard them, and come up with ways of working that work well for their context and, perhaps, for the larger group as well. Or take the servant leadership that scrum recommends: maybe you can command a team of twenty, but serving twenty people? Not so easy.

I refer to myself at times as an anarchist. I’m actually not familiar enough with anarchist literature and philosophy to know how accurate that label is, but it’s definitely the case that I don’t like other people giving me orders, and I don’t feel comfortable giving other people orders either. (Though I’m sure there’s some amount of self-delusion in the latter—the various people who have reported to me over the years probably have a more jaundiced view of me in that regard, and I’m certainly not shy about my opinions.) But, while I’m far from an expert on what the word “anarchist” really means, I am fairly sure that the stereotype that “no rulers means people do whatever they want” is, at best, a very partial view of the philosophy. Instead, you’ll often find anarchist paired with other words like “collective” or “syndicalism”, words that say that, at its core, anarchism is concerned with forming groups, with organization, with people coming together. (Returning to agile: agile is in large part about choosing your priorities, but that choice is ever so much richer if it’s done as part of a group!)

And, of course, in so many situations this kind of non-hierarchical organization is accepted and natural: when hanging out with friends, when forging a marriage. Some companies seem to pull it off, too—it’s no coincidence that multiple friends forwarded me links to the Valve Employee Handbook, and their website proudly proclaims that they’ve been “boss-free since 1996”. They’ve certainly been successful with that strategy, as has Semco. Though that’s a pretty small list of success stories; who knows whether that means that those companies are the vanguard of a new way of working (democracy was once a new idea even outside of the workplace, after all) or a sign that that approach will rarely work in business contexts.

Fortunately, I don’t need to answer that question. But I am learning something about myself, that I like to be in situations where I’m working closely with a handful of peers. And I’m learning something about agile, too: the focus on agile teams really means something, both in terms of team size (neither too large nor too small) and in terms of being empowered groups of empowered individuals.

I’m working on trying to get the 60-second achievement for Hyper Hexagonest mode in Super Hexagon; for a while, I’ve had the feeling that 60 seconds is achievable with my current skill level (and that my current skill level isn’t increasing particularly quickly), I just need to have a lucky run where my guesses and reflexes hold up enough times in a row. (For what it’s worth, my current high score is 48.43 seconds; I’ve broken 40 seconds maybe 10 times?)

Which raises the question: how often would I expect to have such a lucky run? Unlike the other Super Hexagon modes, that question feels relatively tractable to calculate for Hyper Hexagonest. You get the same collection of patterns throughout that mode (at last as far I’ve pushed it, I assume that changes at 60 seconds), and it doesn’t seem to speed up at all (except maybe right at the beginning). There are one or two visual distractions it adds (e.g. sometimes the screen zooms in and out); I’m not sure if those happen at regular times or are part of the patterns, but I don’t think that happens more as the time progresses. So, for all I know, there’s a fixed percentage that I’ll pass each pattern, and (assuming we don’t believe in hot hands or nerves), we should be able to map my chances of reaching a given time with an exponential curve.

And, of course, the exponent matters: if, say, I reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 5 times, then I should reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 125 times (clearly not the case!), or if I reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 20 times, then I should reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 800 times (plausible, and holds out enough hope that I should keep going). But if I only reach 20 seconds in 1 out of 40 times, then I’d only reach 60 seconds in 1 out of 64,000 times, and I should just cut my losses now.

So I recorded my times on 200 tries. Here’s the raw data, in case anybody wants to play around with it; the numbers are my time in seconds, rounded down to the nearest second. If we group it in 10-second chunks (where 10–20 includes 10 seconds but doesn’t include 20), then we have:

• 0–10 seconds: 110 runs
• 10–20 seconds: 55 runs
• 20–30 seconds: 22 runs
• 30–40 seconds: 8 runs
• 40–50 seconds: 5 runs
• >50 seconds: no runs

It looks like the numbers are getting cut by a little more than half every 10 seconds; if we take the first 10 seconds as the best indicator of the decay factor, then my chances of reaching a given time get multiplied by .45 every 10 seconds. That would lead to a prediction of

• >10 seconds: 90.0 runs predicted, 90 runs actual
• >20 seconds: 40.5 runs predicted, 35 runs actual
• >30 seconds: 18.2 runs predicted, 13 runs actual
• >40 seconds: 8.2 runs predicted, 5 runs actual
• >50 seconds: 3.7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual
• >60 seconds: 1.7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual

That’s clearly not right: all the predictions except for the first one are high. So I guess that means that the jump from 0 to 10 seconds is easier than the subsequent jumps.

If I look at the other ratios to calculate how much my chances are of reaching 10 seconds, then I get actually a surprisingly consistent answer:

• (>10 seconds) / (>0 seconds) = 90 / 200 = .45
• (>20 seconds) / (>10 seconds) = 35 / 90 = .39
• (>30 seconds) / (>20 seconds) = 13 / 35 = .37
• (>40 seconds) / (>30 seconds) = 5 / 13 = .38
• (>50 seconds) / (>40 seconds) = 0 / 5 = .0

The first of those is unexpectedly high and the last is really really low, but the middle are consistent. (Honestly, way too consistent given the sample sizes.) And maybe we can explain the last with nerves and the first with a slow ramp-up? If we assume that I’ll reach 10 seconds in 45% of my attempts and that I’ll reach the next 10 second mark in 38% of my attempts for times after 10 seconds, then that predicts that, out of 200 tries, I’ll reach:

• >10 seconds: 90.0 runs predicted, 90 runs actual
• >20 seconds: 34.2 runs predicted, 35 runs actual
• >30 seconds: 13.0 runs predicted, 13 runs actual
• >40 seconds: 4.9 runs predicted, 5 runs actual
• >50 seconds: 1.9 runs predicted, 0 runs actual
• >60 seconds: .7 runs predicted, 0 runs actual

Obviously I’m cooking the books somewhat to make those first four predictions look good. Still, this is enough to suggest to me that I should keep on plugging away: assuming that the game doesn’t suddenly get harder at 45 seconds (which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given my observed performance), then I should reach 60 seconds after a few hundred more attempts. (One out of every 280 attempts, if the above formula holds.) And that I am willing to try; if the numbers were suggesting it would take a few tens of thousands of attempts, then I’d be a lot more dubious about the wisdom of that attempt.

Update: And, of course, later on this afternoon, I did in fact break 60 seconds; I didn’t count, but maybe it took another 30 tries or so? So my belief that that goal was in reach, and that it was mostly a matter of luck as to when I’d get there, turned out to be correct.

I basically spent one long afternoon playing Rock Band Blitz. I went through all the songs, unlocked all the power-ups, earned three quarters of the achievements, challenged a few friends, completed some of the goals from the Facebook app. So: a long afternoon, and a pleasant one!

But, after that afternoon, I didn’t really feel like coming back. The friend challenge mechanic left me a little uneasy: with the game as it launched, you couldn’t use even two power-ups, let alone three, at once on most of your playthroughs for a single song. So this meant that you had to grind to put yourself in a position to win challenges; and, to make matters worse, you couldn’t even really experiment with pairs of powerups to try to hone your strategies without seeing your coin collection dwindle. (They tweaked the costs and rewards a couple of weeks later, so I suspect that now the second problem has completely disappeared and that the first problem has mostly gone away in practical terms.)

It’s not like I have that many friends who would be likely to play the game enough for the competition to be a long-term draw, though; so, for me, what really matters is the single-player gameplay, both on its own terms and as a musical experience. I’m honestly not sure what I think about the gameplay on its own terms: I imagine that there’s a reasonable amount for me to sink my teeth into if I’d like to, especially experimenting with different powerup combos, but there are enough games around that I have to spend my time playing that I don’t really see why I should spend my time here. And the musical connection really didn’t work for me: with only two lanes, melody goes out the window, so you’re left with rhythm gameplay that maybe makes a little bit of musical sense for drums but almost none for the other instruments. To make matters worse, switching between tracks got in the way of my enjoyment of the music: I was never following changes in what I was paying attention to, I was instead getting jerked out of the music.

So, as a game: not unpleasant, but not something I wanted to spend more than one long afternoon with. (I did come back and put another hour into it, but that only confirmed my suspicion.) Basically: I couldn’t think of a situation where I’d prefer to play Rock Band Blitz instead of Rock Band 3. Fortunately, the Rock Band Blitz songs are all exportable to Rock Band 3, and a 25-song pack for 15 bucks sounds pretty good.

And, indeed, it is more than pretty good. As a basic collection of songs, it’s solid but not exceptional. What is exceptional is two aspects of the songs: while I enjoyed them fine on guitar and keys, many of the songs were flat-out great on vocal harmonies, and twenty-four out of the twenty-five songs include harmonies. So, if you enjoy singing harmonies, it’s a great deal. The second aspect that’s exceptional is the one song that didn’t come with vocal harmonies, namely Give It Away. That song was included on Rock Band 2, but wasn’t exportable due to some sort of licensing restriction. Which was a shame, because the rest of Blood Sugar Sex Magik was available as DLC; so it had been impossible to play the whole album in game unless you went back to Rock Band 2. And I really appreciate Harmonix for going out of their way to make that album whole again: no surprise that the company cares about their players, given how they keep on putting out DLC week after week, but yay for them.

I was a postdoc in the Stanford math department for five years, from 1998 to 2003. I had a very pleasant time there, and had many pleasant interactions with my fellow department members; I’m glad that I ultimately left academia, but that’s purely because of me being a misfit.

Part of that being a misfit is that I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I should have actually doing math. I spent some of my time helping raise my daughter and playing video games (the latter not at work, of course; for the former, Miranda actually did hang out in my office a lot during the first two years of her life), and reading random books. I was still reading a fair amount of sociology of science books at the time; I dimly recall having fairly pleasant conversations about the topic with my fellow department members over lunch, but conversations with a modernist flavor that’s familiar to any reader of We Have Never Been Modern. This was fairly soon after the Sokal affair; that paper fit neatly into a narrative that was in the air, where mathematicians and hard scientists write papers full of gibberish that is incomprehensible to outsiders because that’s the only way to express our deep understanding of complex truths, while humanists and soft scientists write papers full of gibberish that is incomprehensible to outsiders in an attempt to cover up the vacuousness of what they’re saying. Those conversations weren’t generally mean, or as lacking in respect as I’m making them out to be here, but there was an asymmetry in the undertone.

The other thing that I spent a lot of time (far too much time, if you’re a postdoc in a research-focused school—teaching really isn’t what schools like Stanford are about) is thinking about teaching, which led to me running my courses in eccentric ways. The department was actually quite accepting of my eccentricity—I don’t know if anybody noticed the one time that I gave three quarters of my students an A in an intro course instead of weeding most of them out, but if anybody noticed, nobody brought it up to me—and while I was clearly an outlier within the department, my recollection was that I generally had pleasant conversations on teaching with other department members. (They were happy to let me stick around teaching calculus for a couple of years after my first postdoc expired, which I’m very grateful for.)

And there was a fair amount of surprisingly broad conversation about math teaching in the air. California had recently published a new set of standards (you can still see many of them on the California Content Standards page, look for the ones with the late-1990’s dates); and the math standards in particular had led to a fair amount of contention. I was curious about this (mostly because of my own interests, but also because they might be shaping the schools that my daughter would eventually enter), so I read through the various different standards; as I recall, the math standards seemed to me to be the most innocuous (standard skills-based stuff, noticeably but not offensively overstuffed), while the science ones were starting to get offensively overstuffed, the social studies were outright jingoistic, and if I wanted to design a curriculum to make somebody hate reading and writing, I’m not sure I could have done a better job than the English standards. Though maybe I’m being a bit hypocritical saying this, given my sniping above: I don’t have any expertise in childhood education, so I’m not the right person to criticize!

I think what was going on with the math standards was that they tapped into a real cultural discomfort with math teaching. The general context of the math wars was whether math teaching should focus on having kids be able to accurately carry out algorithms or whether they should focus on having kids develop a holistic understanding of concepts. Neither side thought that the other goal was bad: everybody would agree that algorithms should ideally lead to understanding of the concepts underlying them, while if you claim to have a holistic understanding of multiplication but can’t calculate seventeen times thirty-six, you’re just deluding yourself. But there was quite a lot of heat as to which side you could start on.

From my point of view, the heat was actually mostly in one direction: the algorithms folks were engaging in shameless fear-mongering about the conceptual approach. If I recall correctly, there was one local lady who went around to various local school board meetings telling people how, if their schools took a conceptual approach to teaching mathematics, then colleges wouldn’t accept their kids, which she based on some almost completely trumped-up claims about discussions with admissions departments. My take on this, on the other hand, was that the algorithms approach had been ruling the scene since basically forever, and it had a remarkable capacity for producing people who are actually traumatized by mathematics. That is not a term that I use lightly, and I recognize that, as forms of trauma go, math education trauma is relatively benign; it is, however, the case that, when I tell people that I’m a mathematician, the response is quite regularly for the person I’m speaking to to tell me unprompted how they’re a failure at mathematics. (With many variants; a quite common one is for people to say when they felt that they stopped being good at mathematics, e.g. “I was good at mathematics through calculus, but then linear algebra kicked my butt.”) I don’t believe any other field of study gets nearly the same tenor of response, and the situation is fucked up enough that, from the time I showed up in California until the time when Miranda was maybe in third grade, I actively avoided telling people I met outside of Stanford that I was a mathematician. (And of course now it doesn’t generally come up because I don’t work as a mathematician.) So, from my perspective, the results of the algorithmic approach towards teaching mathematics were Not Good, and it was high time to try something else.

The reason why I bring this up in a context of a discussion of the Stanford math department is that at least two members of the Stanford math department were involved in the production of the California state standards. My memory says three members, but when I look at the standard itself, the names that I recognize are James Milgram and Gunnar Carlsson, so I guess it was only two. The core of their involvement was before I showed up in the department (the standards have a 1997 date, and I was still in grad school then); and, in general, I think the idea of professional mathematicians being involved in the production of standards is a laudable idea, because they have specialized knowledge that will inform what is valuable for students to know, including subtle linkages between different areas.

It’s not, of course, the only specialized knowledge that is useful when writing a standard for teaching mathematics. I would like actual math teachers to be heavily involved in the production of such documents, as well as education professors who are up to date on the research for what educational approaches currently seem to give the best approach. And my impression (based admittedly on scanty evidence) is that this did not happen on the California math standards: that there was quite a lot of politicization in the composition of who participated in the committee and what voices were listened to, based on philosophical beliefs on what approach would work that weren’t supported by research.

I interacted with Gunnar Carlsson not infrequently during my time at Stanford (and worked part-time at a startup he cofounded during a few months when I wasn’t teaching), and all my memories of that interaction were pleasant: in particular, I’m sure his motives for devoting considerable amounts of time to the California math standards were public-spirited, trying to lend the help of his professional expertise without a particular didactic axe to grind. I spent much less time interacting with James Milgram; I’m sure his motives were also public-spirited, but I’m fairly sure that he did have an axe to grind, an axe that wasn’t backed up by his professional expertise.

Which brings us to the person whose name gives the title to this blog post, Jo Boaler. I assume we met during some sort of new faculty event in 1998; and we talked several times about math teaching over the years. I really enjoyed those conversations (and reading her first book), and found them very useful in thinking through some of the approaches I was trying to take in my course design. When I went further along that path, trying to turn what I was thinking about into an attempt to gather substantial data, she helped me with methodological advice and convinced a couple of her grad students to donate time to me interviewing some of the students who were taking my class. And I’m embarrassed that I didn’t do a real job of following through on that; though less embarrassed than I would be, because it was only by doing that that I started to realize just how much work it is to turn observations into real data that you can begin to draw conclusions from. (Mathematicians have it much easier in that respect in the relatively cut-and-dry nature of our proofs; though of course mathematics has its own significant difficulties because that cut-and-dried nature means that we’ve been able to dig very deep over the centuries into areas where our approach works.)

She mentioned conversations that she had had with Milgram. I dropped into his office once or twice because of that (and rarely ran into him in other contexts around the department, we traveled in different circles there); I don’t recall probing too deeply, but those conversations were consistent with Jo’s description of his behavior. I got the impression that my approach towards mathematics teaching was quite different to Milgram’s approach, that our opinions of mathematics teachers were also quite different, and that there wasn’t much point in having further conversations in that area.

I lost touch with Jo Boaler after my first three years at Stanford—she was busy, I was going in different directions. And of course, I’ve been out of academia for more than nine years by now. I was pleased to see her name show up recently in my twitter feed; I was sad to learn that the reason for that appearance was that she was starting a social media offensive campaign against Milgram (and Wayne Bishop, a math professor from elsewhere). According to Jo’s report of the situation, Milgram and Bishop have been trying to destroy her professional career; if a quarter of what Jo says there is accurate, then Milgram and Bishop’s behavior is, at the least, shameful.

Of course, I’m an outsider, so I can’t talk about the nuances of what happened first hand. But what Jo describes is consistent with what I saw: a strong ideological dislike for certain didactic approaches which translates into a lack of respect for people who aren’t aligned with scientists laying down the truth from high: a lack of respect for people who come to other conclusions, a lack of respect for professors who work in other fields, a lack of respect for people who are actually doing the day-to-day work of the teaching that is under discussion! There are strong structural undercurrents pulling in those directions in math departments all over the country (along with reinforcing undercurrents: Jo doesn’t call out gender issues in her web page, but they’re all over the place in science departments, and for that matter in Silicon Valley in general, as I’ve seen repeatedly in my post-Stanford career); a lot of the time, people work to fight those undercurrents and at least maintain a basic level of professional respect, but not always.

So: maybe Milgram and Bishop are right. But to believe that, I’ll have to believe that I should take the word of a couple of people who have never published peer-reviewed mathematics education research over somebody who has built a career on that, over the word of multiple departments that have given Jo Boaler research appointments over the years, over the word of a committee set up to investigate exactly that question. And you can make a consistent worldview out of that, if it’s the direction you choose to go in: it’s a world view that leads to statements like the one Bishop apparently made that schools of educations should be “nuked”. (That sort of lack of respect for math ed research by people who haven’t done any math ed research is depressingly common, though most people who hold such a view are more polite about it than that.)

It’s not a worldview that I hold, though. And I’m very glad Jo Boaler is showing the strength to fight against it.

At Agile Open Northern California 2012, I led a session titled “Worries as Inventory: Bug Trackers, Lean, and GTD”. I put up my notes on the conference wiki, but I’m reproducing them here for archival purposes as well. Many thanks to the people who participated in the session, they did a wonderful job of getting something concrete out of the vague idea I had going into it.

Session participants: David Carlton (session organizer); Jeff Isenberg; Brad Neiman; Super Aaron.

We started with a brief discussion of GTD. GTD’s main point: if there’s something you’re worried that you’ll forget about or won’t do, then:

1. Get it out of your head by writing it down.
2. Decide explicitly whether to do it now or to not do it now.

This is similar to the ways in which some people use bug trackers (JIRA, Bugzilla, etc.): if there’s a bug, a feature request, etc., then file it in a bug tracker.

The problem with filing all of that is that it creates inventory; and, as lean teaches us, inventory has a cost. Here, it’s a cost in terms of causing people to spend time interacting with the bug tracker, worrying about the large numbers of bugs assigned to them, etc. Can we find approaches towards minimizing those costs while keeping the benefits of GTD’s approach?

GTD suggests keeping a list of things you’re not going to do. This is good – it avoids having them get in your way most of the time. But it’s bad because those items can still show up at inopportune times, e.g. when doing searches. So it could be hard to find those items when you want them but not when you don’t? We discussed filtering as a possible approach.

One way to avoid one source of excess worry here is to never assign tasks to people in advance: just leave those entries as unassigned. Create a next task queue, tell people to pull items off of that queue, and only then to assign those items to themselves. This avoids the problem of having dozens / hundreds of items assigned to individuals.

Aaron suggested having the team pull work into the sprint, creating a bucket in Jira at the start of a sprint. In his context, there’s only one team. Jeff is working in a multi-team situation; his Jira instance has a custom field to indicate the scrum team. Jeff says that PMs have a psychological need to assign a feature to somebody when coming up with it; this is okay as long as they assign that feature to a team instead of an individual.

We also talked about bugs that are found in a sprint. In general, we liked the idea of having the tester add a comment to the story bug, talk to the developer, and reopen that story bug – don’t open a new bug unless you’re making an explicit choice to defer fixing the defect until a future sprint. One antipattern that this can run into is when testers are evaluated based on the number of bugs they file; don’t do that! The goal for everybody should be to have tasks flow smoothly through the system; ideally, you’d have early QA/dev communication that leads to defects not even being introduced in the first place.

With this, we felt like we had a pretty good handle on Jira queues downstream of product management; but it can lead to PMs having hundreds of feature requests on their queues.

For the queue immediately upstream of dev, we suggested having a WIP limit (about two sprints’ worth), with a definition of ‘Ready’ required for something to be in this queue. But what about items further out than that? If they’re on a list, that presence is distracting; if they’re not on a list, that absence is also distracting!

GTD suggests that it should be on some list; whose list should it be on, and where is that list? The list should be owned by product management; we weren’t sure the list should be in Jira, maybe Jira is tactical, not strategic.

The next question: how often should we review that list? E.g. is the GTD notion of a weekly review relevant? In general, we felt that, the more distant a feature is, the less detail we should use to specify it, and the least frequently we should review it. Value stream maps could help here: we want to remove rework loops, and that applies both right before releasing stories (rework loops involving dev / QA / customer) and right at the start of the value stream (rework loops involving customers / PMs / dev).

We had the question of to what extent the weekly review is a psychological need? The tentative answer that we had was that, if you have queue review patterns that you trust, then you can relax that – so if you work on, say, 2 week iterations, then review the queue every two weeks instead of every week. (Focusing your attention on a time period twice the sprint length, 4 weeks in this example.) Though weekends are also a good subconscious reset period, so there’s something to be said for weekly reviews; reviewing more often than that probably isn’t too helpful.

And add in reviews at a slower cadence that are more strategic: think about your overall feature roadmap at a monthly or quarterly cadence, perhaps. And about your set of products quarterly or annually.

I went to PSL last month; it was a great experience, and the only reason why I haven’t blogged about it here is that there was so much to think about that I haven’t managed to wrap my brain around it. (Well, that’s not the only reason: I’ve been distracted. But it’s the main reason!)

One bit I wanted to mention, though, was something that happened on the last full day of the workshop. That day, we were split into two groups, and each group was told to design a 60-minute delegation-based simulation for the other group to work through. And both groups got a lot from both designing their simulation and carrying out the other team’s simulation; but, from where I sat, it seemed like the other group accomplished both tasks more smoothly than our group. (In fact, our group didn’t manage to reach the desired end goal of the other team’s simulation at all!)

I’m sure there are a lot of factors that played into that, but listening to the other team report out how their design went and watching them carry out our simulation, it seemed like one important success factor for them was their use of set-based design. Our group went through a fairly traditional brainstorming and culling process; that led to us having a single choice earlier than the other group (in both halves: a choice of simulation topic and a choice of topic for our solution to their simulation), which sounds good. In contrast, their group picked three possible choices fairly early on, and dived into those; they then met again, showed all three preliminary solutions to the full team, rejected one and split that team’s members into the other two choices (with also some cross-pollination of ideas between the surviving choices), and dived into those. It wasn’t until close to the end (probably two-thirds of the allotted solution time in the situation I observed) that they’d decided what solution to go with.

But, by the time they’d decided on that solution, it had gone through a lot of refinement. They didn’t just have an agreement that it was the best idea to go with: they had a good feel for how it would work in practice, and knew where to focus their remaining time. So they could spend the remaining third of their time really focusing on refining the last issues. In contrast, the group that I was part of probably got to a consensus on the desired solution faster, but when we had that consensus, that was all we had: we didn’t have any sort of real feel for what the solution would concretely entail. So we had a lot of discovery to do; in fact, it could have been the case (though, fortunately, it wasn’t the case in our examples) that part of that discovery would have been a realization that the solution that we’d agreed to was unworkable in practice.

A very interesting experience. I’d run into set-based design in the lean literature several years ago, and I was willing to believe intellectually that it could lead to faster solutions than a single-threaded approach. But I’d never seen it put into action that way; I’ll certainly have to look for occasions to try it out in software projects.

My favorite cookie recipe (and my favorite cookie dough recipe!). Invented by Liesl’s friend Elizabeth Winchell.

Betsy Cookies

2 sticks butter
1 c. white sugar
3/4 c. brown sugar
2 eggs
2-3 Tbsp. vanilla
2 c. flour
1/4 c. cocoa
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 Tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1 package chocolate chips

Cream the butter then work in the sugars. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth.

Mix together the dry ingredients then gradually blend them into the butter mixture. Add chips. If dough is dry, add a little water.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit: 8-10 minutes for cookies, a little less than 20 minutes for pan cookies. (In a 9×13 inch pan.) Or just eat it raw…

Like I said yesterday, we’re in a surprising heyday for match 3 variants. Of the variants I’ve played recently, I like Triple Town quite a bit more than 10000000: I get the feeling that there’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, in the way that it invites me to plot out strategies that take advantage of rare items drops while not being screwed up by them when they don’t fit into my plan.

Despite that, though, I gave it up fairly quickly—I’m not sure I’ve played through ten rounds of the game. The problem is that there’s almost too much depth, or perhaps that it takes too long to unfold: I haven’t timed it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a round takes 30 minutes or more. (And that’s with me just not being that good at the game yet—my individual turns will speed up as I get better, but I expect the fact that I’ll be making more of them to balance that out.) And, while there’s no hidden state, there’s enough advance planning going on that I find it difficult to put down the game in the middle of a round and then pick it up again the next day.

The result is a game that doesn’t fit very well into the rhythms of my play sessions: it’s structured more like a pick-up-and-play game that I’d like to be able to fit into small pieces of down time in evenings/weekends (with, of course, occasional longer bouts), the way I have with Ascension, but instead I feel I have to schedule time for it the way I would a narrative game. (Or the way I used to schedule time for go; but while Triple Town is a very good game, I’m pretty sure it’s no go.) And my brain resists doing that.

So I stopped playing it. I wish things had worked out differently, but they didn’t.

10000000 is one of the many match 3 variants to have popped up over the last few years, along with Puzzle Quest (and its sequels) and Triple Town. Like those other games, it’s surprisingly good, but it’s the weakest of the trio: the gameplay doesn’t have nearly the conceptual depth of Triple Town, and the RPG trappings don’t add to either the gameplay or the game length the way they do for Puzzle Quest. 10000000‘s schtick isn’t so much its RPG trappings as its Cannabalt-esque leanings; that’s a genre I don’t enjoy as much, and like the last game I played in that genre, Jetpack Joyride, I went through several hours spread over maybe three days where I played a fair amount of 10000000, and then I had no trouble stopping when the leveling up motivation stopped.

Still, those were good hours. And I liked the length of individual bouts more than I did in other Cannabalt-esque games. Liesl is still playing 10000000; it wouldn’t surprise me if I were also to pick it up occasionally in stray moments over the next few months.

I have basically nothing to say about Puzzle Agent 2 HD. It’s like the first Puzzle Agent, which in turn is like a somewhat less charming and noticeably shorter Professor Layton: a strong lineage, and a pleasant way to have spent five hours or so, but not something which has shaped my thinking in any particular way.

I really liked the original Ascension, but I got tired of its first expansion a lot more quickly. I assumed the second thing would happen with its second expansion, Storm of Souls, but I think I may have played the new iteration almost as much as the original.

It introduces two new mechanics: certain monsters turn into cards you can play later for a one-time benefit, and most of the time there’s an active event which slightly modifies the current game and gives you a changing benefit for defeating a constantly available three-point monster. I won’t say that I wish either of these mechanisms had been in the original game—the original game’s purity is a real advantage—but they gave me something new to think about in the game, expanding my search space in an interesting way.

The new cards also worked well for me. At first, I was somewhat nonplussed by the new Mechana constructs—I found them hard to get to work together. I did figure out how to get them to work together eventually, though, and the increased difficulty of that is a good thing, because if you could load up on Mechana constructs in the earlier iterations, you were fairly unstoppable. The new Lifebound heroes worked well, enough so that I would at least consider whether I wanted to focus on a Lifebound strategy if I saw multiple Lifebound cards on the board (and, when you could pull it off, a Lifebound strategy would really dominate); and a couple of the new constructs turned into interesting strategies of their own if you could grab them early. The upshot was that I felt I had more choices both for my initial strategy and for my tactics as the game progressed; happiness all around.

I’ve been walking to work ever since I started working at Playdom three years ago. In fact, that’s part of why I took that job: I saw Steve Meretsky on a panel at GDC 2009, looked up the web page for the company he was working at, and found that it was located a little more than a mile away from my house. I wasn’t looking for a job right then, but when a recruiter gave me a call a few months later and mentioned Playdom, I thought I should give them a try.

Walking was a change for me: though I’d walked a fair amount when living in Cambridge/Somerville, I took the bus to work when I first moved to the Bay Area. (Generally reading books in the process.) When I left Stanford, though, that wasn’t an option, so I had to drive to work at Kealia; I switched my commute entertainment over to going through my CD collection. Sun bought Kealia, and eventually my group had to move to Sun’s Dumbarton Bridge campus; that wasn’t any easier to get to through public transportation, so I kept on driving.

At some point during my Sun years, I started jogging a few evenings a week: my doctor suggested I should take care of myself better, and I had to admit that sitting in a chair all day probably wasn’t the best idea. Which gave me still more time to listen to music; at some point, though, I made it through my CD collection (which was large but finite), and switched over to podcasts. Music podcasts, programming podcasts, literary podcasts, video game podcasts; the most important, though, was JapanesePod101, whose back episodes I steadily worked my way through. I didn’t listen to that one so much when I was driving—I needed to be able to stop to pay attention to it and to read through the notes—but it was my favorite when I was jogging, or when I was grocery shopping. (When we first moved out here, Liesl and I always shopped together, and then Miranda joined us when she came on the scene; these days, though, I do that myself, though the staff at the Milk Pail still regularly asks about Miranda.)

When I started working at Playdom, I could have continued driving, turning my commute from a 20-minute commute into a 5-minute one. But that would have cut down on my podcast listening time; I didn’t want that, and driving such a short distance didn’t feel right to me. So I walked instead. Though not all of my podcast time was so sacrosanct: I decided that forty minutes of walking five days a week was a reasonable amonut of exercise, and I’d never really enjoyed jogging, so I gradually let that slide. (It helped that I’d caught up with my backlog of JapanesePod101 episodes by then.)

Disney bought Playdom, I started looking for other jobs. Generally jobs that didn’t require driving, though several would have required taking the train: in fact, I came very close to accepting a job located near the Caltrain terminus in San Francisco. But I was very happy to find a job I liked that kept me in downtown Mountain View; the company moved a few months later, but that just turned a 20-minute walk into a 25-minute walk, which was perfectly fine.

About a year ago, two years after I started walking to work, something changed. Circumstances occasionally require me to drive to work, and one week I did that twice. The first day was fine; the second morning, though, I was bouncing off the walls. I ended up going for a 45-minute walk, and I was fine after that: my body had been telling my brain that it was missing something. This wasn’t an isolated experience; these days, I even worry a bit when driving to work one day a week.

It’s not just my body’s attitude to these walks that has changed. A few years ago, I paid a lot of attention to the podcasts I was listening to, in particular making sure that I was focusing on whatever point of Japanese grammar was the focus of that episode. These days, though, my mind wanders a lot more as I walk—sometimes, something I’m listening to will catch my fancy, but if nothing does, that’s perfectly fine.

Though saying that my mind is wandering isn’t quite right, either. I got into a rhythm where my subconscious would be thinking about something, then it would bubble up into my conscious brain while I was walking to and from work and I’d refine what I thought on the matter, then I’d type out and copy edit the results on my blog over the evening, then my subconscious would be free to think about something else. My blog had become an important, external part of my brain; walking had turned into a key tool in unlocking that. Really, while I’m glad that y’all are reading this, and I hope that you derive some amount of pleasure from doing so, my blog’s main purpose is to keep my subconscious from getting stuck.

Which makes situations where that cycle doesn’t work all the more frustrating. I’m fairly open in what I talk about on this blog: these days, if there’s something I’m thinking about that only affects me, I’ll just talk about it here. Great for games; social situations, though, I’m not always so comfortable talking about in public. Which is a pity, because those are often the most interesting situations to think about! And the thorniest to grapple with; I could use help from my external brain to deal with them. Maybe I should keep a private diary for stuff like that; as is, I get stuck thinking about them going to and from work for a week or two, and eventually my brain spins off a few tangentially-related blog posts, gives up, and starts thinking about something else.

This problem seems like it’s been getting worse over the last year. I don’t think that’s true, though: I would imagine that situations that I don’t feel comfortable blogging about have appeared fairly regularly since this blog began. Maybe the difference is that walking helps getting that out of my subconscious and into my conscious mind: so I know I could blog about it, I’m just choosing not to.

Stepping back a bit: my learning is getting interrupted, but it’s getting interrupted at a late enough state that the possibility of learning is at the forefront of my mind. That’s been happening in other contexts, too: situations where the potential for learning is clear, but where my plan for that learning gets blocked.

There, perhaps, my wounds are self-inflicted, and the answer is to go meta. Yes, I have an experiment I’d like to run, I’m just not able to build the consensus that I need to run that experiment. That doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from the situation, however: it’s only a problem if I’m too rigid about the path through which I want the learning to occur. Instead, the fact that I can’t build consensus is itself a learning opportunity; if I can switch my brain over to uncovering what happened there, then that’s great.

Interesting times.

Some articles I ran across while thinking about this:

• Your Desk Is Making You Stupid, by Jessica Stillman.
• The Virtues of Daydreaming, by Jonah Lehrer.
• Is Productivity Killing Your Creativity?, by Jay Fields.
• Keep the channel open, by Nicola Griffith.

I enjoyed Plague Inc., as did Liesl; nice concept (play a disease trying to exterminate the world), pleasant enough to figure out the underlying systems (which is good, since there’s not much else going on), and the different disease types are a good mechanic to let the designers vary the systems. I put several hours into it, a fact about which I have no complaints.

So, of course, I’m going to point out ways in which the game is amateurish. None of these make it a bad game, they’re just ways in which the game feels different from the sorts of console games I usually play.

• The map is just barely larger than the iPad screen: so you scroll around, but that scrolling is pointless.
• Except the scrolling is necessary: the map takes up the entire screen, so some parts of the map are under control objects. (E.g. the pause button.) So I started every game by scrolling to the side a bit so that, if I had to click on an event in Russia, I’d be able to do so.
• The control objects that interfere with interactions with game events are all at the top of the screen. So why not just make the map start half an inch down? Especially because the bottom inch of the map is taken up by the area surrounding the Antarctic, so it doesn’t actually have any countries to click on.
• The map is a real picture of the earth, with only the faintest of lines drawn on it to separate countries. Or rather, to separate groups of countries, because they (sensibly) frequently combined adjacent small countries. The faintness of these lines makes it very hard to tell how many countries there are in a region, or to reliably click on all of those countries to see which are infected.
• You have to click on events to gather DNA. Well, you don’t have to, but you won’t get as much DNA as you don’t. So they’re basically doobers, about which I have mixed feelings: they give you something to do, but they add no interesting decisions to the game, and occasionally you miss them if you turn up the speed of the game.
• I thought I missed them even more often than that, because it wasn’t clear to me if the doober expiration time paused while a popup was on screen. (And popups are typically triggered by events that also lead to doobers.) I think that, actually, the expiration time does pause in that situation, but clicks on doobers while a popup is on screen still register, it’s just that the doober doesn’t disappear until you’ve closed the popup. The result is that I would close the popup, see a doober disappear, and not know if I’d gotten it or not.
• There are seven (six? I don’t have the game open as I’m typing this) disease types available. By far the hardest is the third disease type (Fungus), and the second type is easier than the first; if I were a cynical type, I would think that unusual difficulty curve was a ploy to get people to pay for unlocking all the disease types (which I would actually be okay with, the price is entirely reasonable), but I think it’s more likely that they just didn’t spend much time worrying about balance that way.
• The different disease types don’t, unfortunately, vary the strategy in particularly interesting ways: I ended up adopting the same basic strategy on all of them, with only minor variants.

Don’t get me wrong: I really did enjoy playing the game, I’m quite happy to have bought it. The above flaws are real, I think, but they’re all minor.

What to say about Child of Eden? It’s an awful lot like Rez, which I also had very little to say about. The graphics are better; mostly, that’s good, and leads to a bit more surface to attach thoughts to (e.g. in the game’s pairing of mechanical objects with passion). But there’s nothing like the mystical splendor of Rez‘s fifth level, and the realism in the movie at the start of Child of Eden was jarring. There’s one new gameplay mechanic (a non-lock-on shooting mechanism that’s largely used against projectiles); doesn’t add much, in my view.

The story is a bit more explicit than in Rez; I guess that’s a good thing, but only marginally? And I’m really not sure what to say about the game’s use of the euphemism “purification” for killing your enemies: surely they’re not unaware of the historical contexts in which those concepts have been linked, but if there’s some sort of commentary intended here, it’s buried more deeply than I can see it.

And then there’s the idea that it’s a music game. Which, I’m realizing, really doesn’t work for me. Part of what’s going on there is that the musical style isn’t one that I enjoy; but that’s not all of it. One symptom of the mismatch here are the bonuses you get by locking on to eight enemies and then timing your shot with the music: that’s not something I turned out to be likely to do unconsciously, the music is neither enough in the foreground nor providing enough guidance for me to be playing along with it without realizing. (And, when I do realize, I still don’t particularly want to play along with it!)

I’m still glad the game exists, I’m glad to have played it. But there’s something that I would like to be able to find in Child of Eden that I’m having a hard time seeing.

I’ve been going through the songs in Rock Band 3 on Expert Pro Guitar for seven months now; it’s been an interesting journey. At the start of that period, I could feel my way around a guitar and play basic chords, but I wasn’t nearly as comfortable as I’d like; to be honest, that’s arguably still a correct description, just from a position where my standards have raised significantly!

I wasn’t sure exactly how I would approach the songs on Expert—maybe I’d find a few to dive into, really mastering them, and skip the rest? The problem with that is that it’s hard to know which ones to dive into without giving them a try, so I’ve been going through all the songs in order of difficulty. And I actually bought Pro Guitar upgrades for a bunch of DLC, so I probably have a good thirty or forty songs that aren’t on disc: lots of songs to go through. (117, I find, as I turn on my console.)

The first phase of my Expert playthrough, going through Tier 0 and Tier 1, was solidifying my basic skills. I Love Rock and Roll and I Wanna Be Sedated were all about power chords. (Well, mostly about power chords: the former also was tremolo practice, and there’s a solo that I should sit down and work on at some point.) Yoshimi was about strumming and getting confident playing an F chord: a song that I had an embarrassing amount of difficulty with when I saw it on Hard, but which is much easier now. (From the DLC, Have You Ever Seen the Rain had the same benefits.) Outer Space was barre chord practice: my hand hurt a lot the first time I played it! There were other songs, but those ones stuck out to me as focusing on basic techniques that I really wanted to master; so I got into a pattern where I would start each session playing through those five before trying the next batch of new songs, and I’d frequently play through snippets of them (e.g. Yoshimi’s basic chord progression) outside of game when I got home from work.

After going through each new song muted a few times, I’d also try it plugged in. That was occasionally eye-opening, more frequently humbling, but almost always a lot of fun. And when returning to my old favorites at the start of each session, I’d always play them plugged in: much more important to hear what I’m doing than to get a good score in game.

I kept on expecting to run into a brick wall, but the game continued its remarkable streak of preparing me excellently for the next song through the previous songs that I’d learned, rarely forcing me to do too much new at once. So I made it from Tier 0 to Tier 1 to Tier 2; and, when I hit Tier 3, much to my surprise, I found that the songs were noticeably more complicated but I was keeping up and in fact enjoying them more than I’d enjoyed the easier songs. So my practice songs shifted: Working for the Weekend; More than a Feeling; Subdivisions; Viva La Resistance; Something Bigger, Something Brighter; Combat Baby; Good Girl. All Tier 3/4; all super fun to play (the Pro Guitar DLC really is great), and also all instructive. By now, I was working on picking out arpeggiated sequences and on slightly less basic chords and chord progressions; I have no idea how many times I’ve picked out the start of More Than a Feeling (I go through that all the time out of game as well), but it’s a lot.

When I hit Tier 4, finally the wall started to appear. I got three stars on all of the on-disc content at that level (though I failed to do that on one piece of Tier 4 DLC), but it was dicey at times. Last weekend was my first attempt at Tier 5, and I can already tell that that’s going to be a real challenge, that I’m not going to manage three stars everywhere there. Even the chordal bits are significantly harder, but the solos are also getting longer and more flamboyant, and I’m not prepared for that at all.

So I’m running up against my limits. But, as the game has made abundantly clear, one’s limits change with practice; the difference is that I no longer have an obvious next step handed to me by the game, so I have to think about what I should work on next. (What I need to learn, what I enjoy.) Some thoughts:

• My foundation is a lot more solid than it once was, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. So I don’t want to let up on those basic chords: I need my hand to just jump to the right place.
• My recent work on playing through arpeggiated bits has paid off: my right hand is significantly more agile than it was six months ago. But it’s still got a long, long way to go before I’m really comfortable skipping from string to string.
• Solos frighten me; I have to deal with that. My scales need to be rock solid, I need to be a lot better at translating from my ears to my fingers (I’m still much much better at both of those aspects of playing on a violin than on a guitar, even though my only violin experience was three years of middle-school orchestra almost three decades ago), and there’s lots of work for me to do on flips and trills.
• I need to increase my chord repertoire: the same basic set of ten or so chords stops being enough at some point.

That’s one set of skills that I need to work on: they’re all variants of putting my fingers in the places where the game wants them to be. But, of course, this is music that we’re talking about, so there’s a whole other set of skills: I don’t want to just be playing the right note, I want it to sound good. (Dan Apczynski gave me some very useful tips to that end a week and a half ago.) Most of that is being more nuanced in what I do with my hands, but I also need to learn the variety of sounds tat the instrument is capable of: I’ve spent almost no time trying out different settings on my amp, I don’t have any pedals. I was thinking that I might want to buy a better guitar soon, but now I’m planning to hold off: I’m not sure yet I can tell a good guitar apart from a bad guitar yet.

And then there are aspects of my background as somebody with classical training on keyboard instruments that Rock Band 3 reinforces but that make me a bad rock guitarist. I’m used to a basic expectation when approaching a piece of music that the desired set of keys to be playing at any given time is fixed; on a guitar, though, you have options for which string to play a given note on, and there are many chord variants to choose from in a given situation. So, while I still have a lot to learn from trying to follow the game’s orders, I need to start becoming open to options beyond that.

I’ll keep on going for a bit longer in Tier 5, but I’m not going to fight the brick wall when I hit it; and, when I hit that wall, I’m going to start over again on the easiest songs. This time, though, I’m really going to try to be selective about what songs I play; and my goal isn’t going to be to get three stars on them, my goal is going to be to really learn them. To get them sounding as good as possible when plugged in; to experiment with the different amp settings to see which works best for which song (or for which parts of each song, I should get a pedal or two to let me change sounds mid-song); to learn some basic solos and work up from there; to memorize full songs (and probably to sing along with them more once I get comfortable with them); and to start experimenting with how to perform songs once I’ve memorized them.

That’s a lot to work on; probably too much for me to work on at once, and, honestly, I like playing through lots of different songs, I’m not sure how well I’ll maintain my resolve to focus on individual songs. I’ll do a better job, though; maybe a more realistic match to my temperament is one new song a week plus a fair amount of review? I can easily imagine spending a year going through songs that way; hopefully, by the end of that year, I’ll be a lot better at guitar and be a lot more comfortable at learning without the game’s crutch.

Fun times; rewarding times. I continue to be grateful to Harmonix both for having created the game and for continuing to support it through DLC.

In the media I interact with, there’s a lot of killing. In games, it’s especially prominent, because killing is frequently used as a core mechanic for non-narrative reasons. (That’s not the only reason for the prominence of killing in games, of course: the desire of many games to appeal to an extremely skewed view of adolescent males feeds into this as well.) But it’s there in movies, in books, in television as well: sometimes with real narrative impact, more often just as part of the scenery.

The main television show that I’m watching now is the second Avatar series, Legend of Korra. I’m not sure, but I don’t think there’s been a single death so far in the series; of course, it’s designed to include children in its audience, so it’s not surprising that death isn’t a particularly prominent event, but in the original series, deaths certainly occurred, albeit generally presented in an antiseptic fashion.

What does happen in Legend of Korra is that characters have their power to bend removed from them. This only happened once (I believe) in the original series; if you want, you could see that as a response to the need to focus on the defeat of the key enemy in the series without wanting to focus on death, but you could also see it as a statement that killing is wrong, as a humane alternative to the death penalty even in response to the most serious of crimes.

In Korra, however, removal of bending takes on a rather different nature. It’s much more frequent, and it’s done by a character who is marked as evil instead of a character who is marked as good. So it’s not a sign of compassion: it’s a desire to terrorize.

But what’s interesting to me is the way that I experience removal of bending differently from death. Considered in the abstract, removing bending is not nearly as bad: the victim still lives on, and unlike a character who is physically maimed, the victim is a priori no worse off than most of the people who live in that world. (As the show makes a point of saying!) But I shuddered when I saw it happen to side characters whom I’d never seen before and will never see again, I was afraid whenever Korra and her companions were threatened with it, and when it happened to somebody I cared about in the episode I watched most recently (the next-to-last episode of season one), I, well, wow.

What’s going on there? Part of it is the lack of finality. Killing somebody is horrible, no question, and I would be devastated if to somebody dear to me were killed. But if I were killed, I wouldn’t be around to be devastated, and if it happened to somebody more distant to me, their absence would mean that I wasn’t regularly confronted by the reality of the situation. Whereas if somebody suffers a horror and are still present, then they’re a constant reminder of that horror, forcing you to empathize not just with their loved ones but with them.

And empathy plays at the situation in another way. If I were to list aspects of myself that I care about, that make me me, there wouldn’t be a single physical characteristic on that list, they’d all be mental characteristics. I can’t hurl fireballs at you with the powers of my mind, but I’m pretty damn good at math and am a much better programmer than most. I won’t say that those abilities are particularly important or good in any moral sense, and I don’t think they’re why, for example, Liesl loves me, but still: if they went away, I would have quite a bit of readjustment to do.

Maybe I like the wrong sort of art, but I don’t see nearly as many examples of this sort of empathy for the loss suffered by survivors of violence in that art. It’s there sometimes (the threat is certainly present in Among Others), but too often when it shows up, it turns out in a way that I don’t find as effective. In games, loss of powers occasionally shows up as a mechanic, but it’s always in a context where that loss is marked as temporary: see Metroid Prime, for example. In many art forms, rape is one canonical form of violence that leaves survivors; that’s tied up with so many other aspects of our society that it’s not going to have the same sort of abstract power that removing bending in Korra does. Of course, in the strongest art, that leads to it being significantly more powerful, but, a lot of the time, it seems to me to be used in ways that are rather less respectful of the reality of that violence towards its victims.

I do wonder if the verbal association between bending and being bent is intentional. Is Korra a parable against the evils of the gay cure charlatans? A statement of how fundamental our sexuality is to us? A celebration of how fabulous humanity can be? A covert conservative statement of fear against gay power? Probably not…

I’m curious where Korra will go with this. Will it decide that it’s gone too far, and end up restoring everybody’s bending power? Will it refuse to compromise, and dwell on the horrors of having a key part of your self taken away, turning that into a parable of the evils of absolute power, even if those powers are ones we associate with the avatar? Will it take a middle route, turning it into a narrative of strength and redemption without restoring powers? (I can’t imagine the character whose bending was removed in that most recent episode responding by wallowing in self-pity, or indeed not remaining a force of power.)

And yeah, the abstract nature of the violence committed does remove some of the potential power of the artistic statement here. But still: it’s a children’s television show, there’s only so far it can go in confronting you with horror! (Hmm, though Grave of the Fireflies gives lie to that.) And, given that constraint, I’m very impressed with what they’ve done: making you face real issues, react with real feelings, and doing that not just in this context but in many others.

I was really excited to play Ni No Kuni DS for three reasons: 1) Studio Ghibli; 2) the book; 3) to improve my Japanese. And, when I started, I was happy for all reasons: the packaging was better than anything I’ve seen in decades, the Japanese in the manual and the game was at a level where I could figure out most of it without having to pull out a dictionary too often, and the visuals in the opening scenes were pure Ghibli.

They weren’t the only Ghibli touches, either: the initial music, while no where near as good as the best Ghibli music, did have that feel at times, as did the initial setup in the plot. Though the plot was a warning sign: one specific way in which the game reminded me of Ghibli was getting parents out of the way right in the start. And they did that in a particularly callous way: the father wasn’t there to begin with, and the mother died saving her son (the main character) right at the start. (With the hope of resurrection, giving her an extra utilitarian role as a motivator.) And I’m not comfortable with that instrumental use of women solely to provide motivation for the hero; Ghibli has more than enough of my respect (and more than enough fondness for female characters, the fact that the hero is male instead of female is unusual) for that not to be a deal breaker, but I also think that Ghibli at its best would have handled that plot aspect better.

Still: the visuals were pure Ghibli. And I was in love with the game for the first couple of hours: I felt like I was exploring the inside of a Ghibli movie. It wasn’t just the Ghibli aspects that I liked, either: I liked pulling out the book to figure out how to cast a spell, the dual world conceit worked well, and I hoped that the need to cast magic outside of battle was a sign that the game might have a Golden Sun feel.

After a couple of hours, I hit my first dungeon and started having to fight. It wasn’t too bad, though; standard JRPG stuff, but the battles were over quickly. Or rather, standard JRPG stuff with a bit of Pokemon influence: there are creatures called Imagines that help you, and while I’d only seen one or two at that point, the book made it clear that there were dozens more to come.

Then I hit the first city. (Or rather, the first city in the second world, the magical world.) That I enjoyed as well: another well-done world to explore, a requirement to go back to the first world to accomplish a task, a mechanic about restoring parts of people’s psyche. All good stuff. Yes, there were also people with random tasks to accomplish, and another dungeon to go to, but still, on the balance I was quite enjoying myself.

Unfortunately, the balance shifted. I spent less time in cities, more time in dungeons, and more time in the overworld; the latter two had respawning wandering monsters, which I do not enjoy at all. (Fortunately, they are visible, at least as long as you’re not traveling by ship.) The dungeons were okay, but not great; the cities started to be more routine, with more time spent on routine quests and less time traveling back to the first world or meeting new characters. (Some of that was probably my fault, too: I wasn’t spending as much time puzzling out the language by this point as I had been at the start of the game. But I’m fairly confident that the game’s plot isn’t deathless.)

We got a few more mechanics, but they weren’t ones I enjoyed: one mechanic was a way to capture wandering monsters (because what I really want out of RPGs is not to have to choose three of my eight party members to be active, I instead want to choose three out of a hundred?), and another was an item crafting mechanism. Great if you’re a completionist; not great if you’re, well, a Ghibli fan. Also, my hopes of a Golden Sun influence were dashed: you very rarely had opportunities to use magic outside of battle/healing, and in fact those opportunities were rare enough that I didn’t think of using magic when it might have been helpful.

I stuck with the game for more than twenty-five hours. But stopping was absolutely the right move: that session lasted for about an hour and a half, I’d only spent a couple of minutes of it reading Japanese, maybe five minutes enjoying thinking about a dungeon, and the rest either fighting battles that I didn’t enjoy or trying to avoid those same battles. Not good.

I’m sure that, if the game had been in English, I would have enjoyed it somewhat more; my guess is that I would have finished it, though I could be wrong about that, and I wouldn’t have felt great about finishing it. But for those of you looking for a Ghibli movie in game form: this is not that game, though it will seem like it at the start. And, to the extent that it’s like a Ghibli movie, it’s not like a good one: the movie that it reminds me most of is The Cat Returns, except without the wonderful theme song. I’m glad I bought it; I’m glad I stopped playing it; and I’m not planning to play the PS3 version when it comes out in the U.S.

I don’t think my blogging norms really require me to blog about Rez HD: it’s a remake of a game I’ve played before, and a remake that doesn’t stray from the original as far as I can remember. So I’m really replaying a game, not playing a game for the first time, and as such it doesn’t inherently require comment. Still, it’s been a while since I played the original, long enough ago that I didn’t blog about it here, so a post wouldn’t be out of place.

Though it would be nice if I had something to say about the game! And the truth is: I don’t. I enjoyed playing it, I’m glad to have replayed it, and I’m glad that it exists purely because of how different it is from almost every other game out there. If I were trying to write a review, I would find something descriptive to say, but that’s not my goal in blogging; and the game’s distinctive qualities don’t fit into analytical categories that I’m at all comfortable with.

Should I talk about the fifth level, perhaps? The evolutionary narrative that it brings out? The way that evolutionary narrative positions the imagery from the first four levels as the culmination of a transhumanist narrative? (Or perhaps rather: flags that transhumanist imagery as explicitly posthumanist.) How does the repeated Dune quote fit into that viewpoint, if at all? (I would be tempted to reread that book to see, but I think I’ve read it enough times that doing so again wouldn’t make anything about the game particularly obvious.) Are the enemies in the last level more likely to be modeled on organic shapes than enemies in the previous levels? Are there worms in the previous levels? I don’t think there’s anything non-superficial going on with the worms, but I could be wrong.

And then there’s the final boss fight. A fight that I don’t feel at all comfortable with at the start, when I’m told by somebody afraid that I shouldn’t come closer. But soon enough I’m being asked to help her; and I think I am, but at the end of the credits I learn that she’s still trapped within. If the game were less abstract, I might try to unpack the gender politics there; it’s abstract, enough, though, that I’ll give that a miss beyond acknowledging my discomfort at a couple of different levels. (The way that it ties in to the evolutionary theme also contributes to my willingness to give it a pass, I suppose.)

I don’t want to say that the game is all about the last level; and I like the architectural imagery of all the bosses, I like the vehicular imagery of various of the enemies. Is that the Tron fan in me, or are both pulling on some sort of deeper reservoir? Or maybe it’s not very deep, it’s just that vehicles are a natural way to represent something that’s both artificial and active, buildings are a natural way to represent artificial space.

I dunno. Child of Eden is up next, maybe that game will illuminate this one in retrospect. And I fully support the existence of games that are short, mysterious, and enjoyable.

For a game that impressed me as much as Journey did, I’ve had a surprisingly hard time getting around to writing my wrap-up post for the game. Most of this is because of my Orsay Games post: it said so much that I wanted to say about Journey that I wasn’t sure for a while if there was anything left about the game in my brain. Still, I have my traditions to uphold, so here we are.

Though, before talking about Journey: could I have written that Orsay Games post if I hadn’t just played Journey? And to what extent do I think the ideas there are broadly applicable to a wide spectrum of games? I’m honestly not sure what the answer is to either of those questions. Looking at other games I’ve played recently: Mass Effect 3 gets some of its strength from its episodic nature; but I have a hard time locating the wandering around within either the ship or the Citadel within that analytic framework, and I also have a hard time convincing myself that the game would be stronger with that wandering pruned. Though, comparing it to the other RPG I’ve been going through recently, its pruning is a big part of the reason why I like Mass Effect 3 so much more than Ni No Kuni DS. Rock Band 3 and Ascension strike me as simply different kinds of games that aren’t profitably viewed through that lens. I was going to say the same thing about Jetpack Joyride, but upon reflection maybe it’s a rather good example: a single sufficiently chaotic screenshot of that game gives a rather good idea of what the experience is. And then there’s Rez HD: I would like to say that it’s also a rather good example, but I’m not sure I’m convinced of that—in particular, how do I unify the main part of each level with the boss in that level within the context of a single painting? Hard to say. (Hmm, I guess the answer there is: don’t, just use two paintings for each level instead.)

Maybe I’m being too literal with the idea from that post, though. Is it important that we be able to crystallize each section of a game in the form of a picture, or would a more general form of snapshotting be equally acceptable? My first reaction is that there’s nothing sacred about pictures in that regard; and, while games’ visual nature gives pictures certain advantages, I can imagine a song or a poem capturing the essence of a section of a game. It does bother me, though, that those examples don’t capture the interactive nature of what makes games special. I was going to say that they’re not dynamic in the way that games are, but that’s not the issue: what made the best painting examples work so well is that they were snapshots of a scene that contained dynamics, that contained unfolding of events, within them. But that’s only a certain kind of dynamics, a kind of dynamics most common in narrative games: it’s no coincidence that I’m having a particularly hard time mapping this concept to Ascension, because I can’t imagine a picture that would represent the implicit possibility space in a game that I’ve played a thousand times.

So: Journey. Did I mention yet that I’m having a hard time writing about Journey? Taking another tangential approach to the game, I’ve been playing through all of thatgamecompany‘s games, prompted by a recent VGHVI podcast. (We also did a podcast devoted to Journey.) Journey and Flower have a lot in common: the space of the visual aesthetic choices (though not the details), the episodic nature, the depths of the next-to-last episode followed by the heights of the final episode, the hints at a cyclic structure, the hints at meaning while leaving a fair amount for the player to put together, the inter-episode scenes that leave additional framing questions for the player, the way in which they avoid most aspects of gaminess while leaving one or two traditional game elements in place. Journey feels more composed to me, more precise; in many ways, it feels more powerful to me, but replaying both of them, there’s something about Flower that I’m fonder of. Maybe it’s just that the organic nature of the environment pulls at me in ways that the desert, while beautiful, doesn’t; and while Journey‘s interstitial tapestries give me more to puzzle about, in their own way Flower‘s interstitial city scenes are as beautiful (and perhaps more alive?) than anything else in either game. They’re quite the pair; flOw I don’t have as much to say about, and while lovely in its own way, it doesn’t have a tenth the ambition of the other two.

What certainly does set Journey apart from Flower is its multiplayer. Just considered in isolation, I’m not convinced that I prefer my multiplayer moments in Journey to my single-player moments: I had some truly wonderful shared experiences, but the introvert in me just wanted to be left alone at times to explore. Hmm, though, thinking back on it: wonderful really is the word, in particular the feeling of being mentored I got in my second playthrough and the worries that I had about the pressures of mentoring in my third playthrough. So, to me, what’s important about Journey‘s multiplayer is not so much how it made me feel compared to the single-player experience in Flower: it’s how it made me feel compared to the multiplayer in every other game I’ve ever played. (C.f. Scott Juster’s take on seeing the best in other gamers.) I don’t think I’m up for thinking too hard about exactly what lessons to take from Journey‘s multiplayer; but if I were designing a multiplayer game of my own, I would be taking copious notes, and I hope (though I’m not particularly optimistic) that some bits of the interaction model here will make their presence known in other games in upcoming years.

I bought my PS3 to play Flower; three years later, I have another game to play on the console. Which seems like a bit of a waste of money when I write it like that; but those games are quite the pair.

With the release of Journey, we decided to have a VGHVI conversation about all of thatgamecompany‘s games. I’d never played the PS3 version of flOw (though I did play the Flash version when it came out), so I figured I’d take this as an opportunity to remedy that gap.

And it certainly wasn’t what I expected. I had a vague memory of what the Flash version was like, but my most recent thatgamecompany memory was of Journey, and I’d played Flower as well a few years back. The later two games have a lot in common; I’d remembered flOw‘s graphics as being quite a bit more simple (in a rather lovely way), but I was expecting the feel of the game to be somewhat similar to its successors.

It really wasn’t, though. In fact my first reaction was that the game didn’t make me feel very good playing it, and in particular didn’t make me feel very good about myself. The former was because of the sense of fear that I had after getting a bit into the game: I ran into a couple of levels in a row that were full of creatures that I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I ended up skirting around the edges, hoping that I’d find the red “descend a level” creature before those big creatures attacked me. And the latter was caused by the aggressive playstyle that the game allows: you can choose to be a sort of vegetarian, only eating relatively sedentary creatures that don’t seem to be eating anything else (and in particular won’t attack back), but you can also try to eat the creatures that are trying to eat you. Which, on its own, wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s also a cannibalism subtext where you can try to eat the same kinds of creatures as yourself.

Which I dutifully did: a large part of the game seems to be about exploring systems, and how to eat what (and what the effects of that consumption are) is the big system to explore. And the game’s major philosophical theme seems to be the circle of life (c.f. the capitalized ‘O’ in the game’s name); in general, that circle is a bit larger (the game is divided up into large stages where you play different life forms, and frequently you’ll be threatened by a life form in one stage and get to play that life form in the next stage), but the mathematician in me appreciates the degenerate case of a very tight circle of life where you’re eating yourself, or at least somebody that looks just like you. So yes, I explored those themes by having one playthrough where I tried to eat everything else that was available; at first, it felt creepy, then I became numb, then my numbness felt creepy.

I really wonder what I would have felt about flOw if I’d played before Flower. Because I play many other games that are filled with killing, including killing people of the same species as yourself; I’m starting to question that a little bit more, but in general I’m content enough with that, and I don’t think that flOw is asking me to do anything worse than what other games ask me to do? My guess is that I wouldn’t have noticed anything odd about flOw if I’d played it when the PS3 version first came out: maybe the feeling of fear would still have been there (I dimly recall that being present in the Flash version), but I wouldn’t have found that as surprising, and I expect I wouldn’t have thought that the omnipresence of death in the game was anything worth remarking about. Compared to its successors, though, it’s much more of distinction. (And not the only one: I mentioned the art style above, and in general the game’s style is quite a bit more abstract; it’s also quite a bit gamier than either Flower or Journey, with systems much more on the surface.)

I’m glad to have played flOw: the art style is lovely, the systems have enough to them to be worth a couple of hours of my time, and I’m finding my disquiet at the game to be interesting in its own right. But I’m glad thatgamecompany went in a different direction with their later releases, and I’m finding more to think about in their later games than in their first offering.