malvasia bianca

When my copy of Rock Band 3 showed up, I immediately tried out its pro keys mode. I’m used to playing piano, and reading piano music; but the game instead gives you a visual representation of (a section of) a keyboard, divided into regions by color. So I had to constantly think about where I was placing my fingers, moving my gaze back and forth between the screen and the keyboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are enough posts on this blog (this will be number 1144) that I’ve long since lost track of them. For most of them, that’s fine (actually, for most of them, forgetting is probably an act of mercy), but there are some posts that capture ideas that I still refer to occasionally, and I’m sure there are other posts that I would be happy to refer to if I remembered they existed.

So I was thinking it’s time for me to go back through the blog archives, to see what I uncover. I’m curious, though, are there blog posts that y’all would recommend that I include in any sort of “greatest hits” survey? If so, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a comment on this post. Don’t bother with digging up the specific blog post if you don’t feel like it: if you just list the topic, I should be able to dig up the post in question.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP has the distinction of being the most disappointing game I’ve played in ages. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, and rather liked the visual style. The problem is, though, that I didn’t like the writing style or the musical style, and the former of those in particular rubbed me the wrong way.

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

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

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

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

I’ve been playing through a bunch of Billy Joel songs this month in Rock Band, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Mostly repeated chords and chord progressions, but they’re interesting enough chord progressions for me to have fun playing them, and there’s a fair amount of melody interspersed throughout the songs as well.

One song that stood out, however, was She’s Always A Woman. It’s full of chords and chord progressions, to be sure; but the chords are all arpeggiated, and the chord changes are relatively frequent. That (combined with the fact that the game only has you playing with your right hand, so you don’t have the grounding of the bass part) means that, while the chordal structure of the piece is on display, it’s hidden a little bit more than in the other pieces: you can feel it in your hands, but there’s an extra layer of artistry masking it.

I’d been looking for a finger picking piece to learn on the guitar, and I found a good candidate last week: a really lovely arrangement of 風の丘 (Kaze no Oka, which means something like Windy Hill) from Kiki’s Delivery Service. It’s everything that I was looking for: not just lovely to listen to, it also has distinct melody and bass lines, with arpeggiation relating the two.

These two pieces are both somewhat similar, with arpeggiation hiding underlying chordal structure. In 風の丘, you have the added benefit of the bass line grounding you, but the flip side is that the arpeggios aren’t as worked out and there are more purely melodic bits, so on the whole the structure is a bit more hidden.

Or maybe it’s just as obvious but I’m simply a much worse guitar player than piano player (that last part is unquestionably true), so my hands aren’t nearly as good at seeing the structure that’s there? Certainly it’s the case that trying to memorize 風の丘 is like pulling teeth: I’ll play a couple of measures, and by the time I’m done with the second measure I’ll have completely forgotten the notes that began the first one. Or at least that’s the case if I’m approaching the song as a collection of notes: if I can find a chord that’s a decent match for a half-measure, then I have a chance at being able to remember that half-measure the next time I play it.

Only a chance, though: I’m very bad at translating melodic relations between notes into places to put my finger on a guitar, frequently not even choosing the correct string. Also, for me, every guitar chord is an island, I just don’t have common chord progressions ingrained into my hands yet. I’m amazed at how much more easily I can pick out melodies on a violin than on a guitar: the technical challenge should be very similar indeed, and I’m certainly not a good violinist, but apparently those middle school orchestra years stuck with me more than I realized?

Anyways: programming. One of my favorite parts of programming is refactoring; which is a good thing, because I seem to unable to not spend a lot of time reworking legacy code! When it’s going well, refactoring can be magical, with latent the latent structure of the code being teased into visibility by your fingers.

And when I was playing She’s Always A Woman, my main thought was: why isn’t programming like this for me more often? That reaction is certainly a sign that I should step up my game more, really dive whole-heartedly into code and see what I can learn from reworking it.

I’m not sure that this is analogy between musical structure and programming structure is a particularly good one, but if we run with it, where does it lead us? One of the interesting things about She’s Always A Woman is that the structure isn’t completely obvious: there’s an extra level of arpeggiation on top of the chords. Should I try to imitate that while programming, getting close enough to the core structures so that they provide a solid foundation for my code, while masking them with an extra layer of artistry?

Or maybe I’m wrong in fixating on chords: maybe the arpeggiation itself should be thought of as an extra layer of structure, increasing the structural richness of the piece rather than hiding it? I’m fairly sure that my difficulties with 風の丘 support this interpretation, because while figuring out the best chord to match each half-measure has been a huge help, it’s clearly only a first step. In particular, the fact that I’m not comfortable with melody on the guitar, that I can’t play through scale after scale, is a significant hindrance.

Also, returning to chords: it’s not just chords that are important, it’s chord progressions, relationships between chords. Abstracting a bit, what this is pointing out is that patterns alone aren’t sufficient, you really want a pattern language to relate them.

(And: dissonance! Glorious, wonderful dissonance!)

Having written this, I still don’t know how much to make of this analogy, though the response I got from the eight-tweet version of this blog post suggests that I’m not the only person who is drawn to both sides of this discussion. Be that as it may, the next steps are clear: dive into the details, on both the musical side (memorizing 風の丘!) and the programming side, and I’ll be a better person when I come out the other end.

And I should listen to my hands.

I’ve already talked about the puzzle gameplay in Catherine; what about the rest of the game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine seems to mostly attract interest for reasons related to its narrative, but of course you spend most of your time with the game shoving blocks around in the puzzle mode. I went through it on Normal which, generally speaking, meant: quite difficult. So I failed a lot, but with persistence, I made it through each level; and I enjoyed the process enough to generally consider the difficulty (and indeed the very presence) of the puzzle gameplay a feature, not a bug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m surprised that I don’t seem to have blogged about it here yet, but I’ve been curious about the barefoot running movement for a while. (Prompted by reading Born to Run, among other things.) My first experiment was with huaraches made by Invisible Shoes: once my feet got used to them (which took a couple of weeks), I really liked the thin soles.

What I didn’t like was having to fiddle with the laces all the time; and what I really didn’t like was having the laces break on me. (I’m just glad it didn’t happen while I was at a conference!) I could have repaired that, of course, but I figured I should try something else. So next in line was a pair of Nike Frees.

Which were, frankly, awful. They may have reasonably flexible soles, but the soles were thick and didn’t even begin to approach a barefoot street feel. And they were super skinny (even though I’d gone up a size), so my feet always felt slightly cramped, with my toes never having time to expand.

I stuck with those through the winter, but over the spring I decided to change; this time, I went with the RunAmoc Lite line from Soft Star Shoes. I got the model with the 2mm soles, and they’re really wonderful: a great feel, just enough protection from the ground, lots of room around the toes so your feet never feel constricted, but (unlike the Invisible Shoes huaraches) they stay on your feet without your having to think about them. They look a little odd, but not as odd as Vibram FiveFingers. (They use Vibram soles, incidentally; also, they’ve since added another line that looks a little less odd.)

The one down side is that I’m not sure how sturdy the soles are: after maybe two months, there was noticeable wear where my feet struck the ground, which is way too early. I’ve had them for four months now, though, and they’re still holding up, so I’m hoping they’ll last long enough? I’ll probably experiment with the 5mm sole next time, though — maybe that will be enough more durable while still maintaining a decent feel? Or maybe I’ll just break out the duct tape and try to nurse these ones along; I like them enough more than anything else I’ve worn to be willing to replace them a couple of times a year if that’s what I have to do.

I was pleasantly surprised by the original Puzzle Quest; I enjoyed Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, but not as much. Given that, I assumed that I’d eventually play Puzzle Quest 2, but I’m also not surprised that it took me a little while to get around to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I woke up this morning in a musical but frenzied mood; so, as soon as the rest of the household emerged, I sat down at the piano to play (and, in places, sing) through a Billy Joel collection that I bought yesterday. I’d been full of energy this week, so next I decided to work some of that off by playing some Rock Band drums; after I’d gone through an hour or so of drums, I switched over to vocals, and Liesl and I went through ten or so songs in vocal harmonies mode. And, of course, I need to put in my pro guitar practice, so I worked on that for a couple of hours this afternoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We used to be a two-dog household, but our older dog, Yosha, died a few years ago. (Has it been five years? Wow.) Which was (quite) tough on Zippy for the first month or so, but he got used to the new state of affairs, and went back to his general good albeit mere mood. (And of course he never stopped being an extremely sweet dog.)

But Zippy was only three and a half years younger than Yosha; he’s 17 years old now, and while small dogs can live a long time, it’s not at all surprising that he’s showing his age.

Which, actually, he’s been doing for a couple of years now. He was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease; not a complete shock, Liesl’s mom had a dog who came down with that, so we were aware of the existence of the disease. And, fortunately, the vet noticed it early, and the medicine helped a lot, so he’s been quite stable.

Still, it’s meant that he has stiff legs, and is achier than he used to be. And it’s not the only way in which his body is falling apart: he’s almost completely blind from cataracts, and there’s a lot more poop and pee around than there used to be. He’s bearing up remarkably well, though, given all of his ailments: it was quite clear when Yosha wasn’t enjoying life any more, and Zippy isn’t at that place yet, he’s still happy to be around every morning.

I do wonder how much longer that’s going to last, though. His aches had been mostly under control as long as he ate his glucosamine tablet every day; these days, though, he always wakes up during the middle of the night, and while some of that might just be restlessness (or overheating or wanting a drink of water or needing to pee), frequently it’s achiness. In fact, it’s been about two months since I’ve slept through the night: Liesl is a sound sleeper, whereas I’ll wake up if Zippy makes any noise at all, so I end up spending a lot of time cuddling with him. (And playing video games, there’s a reason why my recent game play is more heavily weighted towards the iPad than it had been…)

So right now it’s a lot like having a baby in the house, and a slightly colicky one at that: a lot less sleep, a lot more cleaning up messes. Which is much better than the alternative: like I said, he’s happy to greet each day, he just doesn’t move a whole bunch and wants a lot of cuddling. And fortunately my coworkers are quite understanding about the not-infrequent days when I’ve been up for hours in the middle of the night and become completely unable to program part way through the afternoon.

And I’m very glad for the time that we have left with Zippy, however long that turns out to be.

I had the pleasure of appearing on the Experience Points Podcast this week. Kirk Hamilton and Dan Apczynski were also guests, which made it the most participants in any EXP podcast; at 1:15, I suspect it’s also the longest. (I guess we all like to talk.)

The topic of the podcast was music games, which of course largely means Rock Band 3. And it was super fun to record! I apologize for the one bit at the end where I go off on a complete tangent: you can tell that my brain was working on that Apple post and decided to shoehorn it in there even though it was almost completely inappropriate to do so. Sometimes my brain does odd things…

A few years ago, I was spurred by the book Good Calories, Bad Calories to worry less about fat and to cut down on some of my carb excesses. And, in general, I was happy enough with the results, but it hadn’t had a huge impact on my life after the first year or so. (Especially since I stopped packing lunches once I rejoined startup life…)

A few months ago, though, some people on a mailing list that I participate in (including the author of the gnolls.org blog) started sharing their experiences with paleo diets, and in particular a few people reported somewhat remarkable results from cutting down on non-rice grain consumption. The author of that blog recommended the book Perfect Health Diet (and its companion blog), so I gave that a read.

Which was quite interesting. A lot of it meshed nicely with what I’d been trying a few years back: in particular, they agree that many fats are just fine, and that many carbohydrates are bad. A lot of the details differ, however: the Perfect Health folks don’t think that it’s good to avoid all carbohydrates, they focus more on specific ones (non-rice grains, fructose, probably others that I’m forgetting) but not all. (In particular, they don’t have much truck with glycemic index, and prefer white rice to brown rice, claiming that the latter can leach nutrients.) Also, there are some other details: they don’t like a lot of standard vegetable oils (though they’re fine with olive oil), but quite like some less common ones, most notably coconut oil.

Spurred by that, I decided to cut down a bit more on my wheat consumption. (Though I’m certainly not going to give up bread entirely, I like it too much!) Which raised the question: what to do about breakfast, if my previous habit of oatmeal wasn’t recommended? At first, I alternated between eggs and bacon or salmon (if I had time), plain yoghurt and fruit (if I had less time), and reheating leftovers. But then a funny thing happened (which other people had predicted): I found myself feeling a lot less hungry in general in the mornings! Before, I would eat a full breakfast and feel like I wanted to start snacking again at around 11am; these days, though, I’m fine not eating anything until lunch time, and in fact on two days at Defcon I didn’t eat anything until around 2pm and felt great. (Which was convenient, there weren’t great food options and the mediocre ones were crowded.)

Also, I’m finding myself feeling full more often. Which is one of the big points of gnolls.org: your body has a feeling for what nutrients you need, and if you feed it the right stuff, you just won’t feel as hungry. The idea of paying attention to signals your body is sending makes a lot of sense to me; and if those signals mean that I’m not eating as much because I’m not feeling as hungry, I’m willing to take that as a sign that I’m doing something right!

I’m not planning to go all-out paleo—like I said, I like (good) bread too much! But it’s also great to not have to worry about eating breakfast, and to not feel hungry as often, so I do think I’ll stick with these changes, and possibly go further with them than I have been.

I don’t normally blog about current events stuff here: that’s just not the kind of blog that this is, and that’s not exactly a niche in desperate need of filling on the internet. But, to somebody in the tech industry who lives in the same town as Google’s home office (they’re about a mile and a half down the road from me) and not much farther away from Apple’s and HP’s, and who is fascinated with technology and with disruption, there’s really only one response to the events of the week before last. So I figure I’ll write something about it here; and maybe some of the details might be of interest to some of my game-focused readers who haven’t been following this whole soap opera so closely.

One of my favorite blogs of the last year or so (is it two years old now? Wow) is Asymco. It’s written by Horace Dediu, a former Nokia analyst who is very interested in disruption (in the Clayton Christensen sense) in the mobile space. If you read that blog, you’ll see posts week after week slicing and dicing the data in different, interesting ways, all leading to the same story: the incumbent phone makers’ share of the profits in the industry has plummeted by a shocking extent, their revenue share is also in a dramatic decline, and their unit sales aren’t nearly as hot as it once was. Here’s a sample post (albeit with a somewhat less intelligible graph than he normally has): Apple is capturing most of the profits in the mobile phone space, and more than half the revenue.

Of course, the iPhone isn’t the only story there, in two different ways. One is that the iPhone isn’t the only source of disruption in the phone market: Android is also helping eat traditional phone vendors’ lunch. And the other is that it’s not the only way in which Apple’s business success is remarkable: going back to traditional spaces, Apple is capturing a proportion of the profit in the traditional computer space that’s completely out of line with their proportion of sales, and the iPad has singlehandedly created a new tablet market, a market with no other serious contenders and one that is eating into traditional computers’ market shares.

Which is pretty amazing: a single instance of disruption like that would be enough to make people sit up and take notice, but two back to back is really something. And it certainly makes people wonder what’s going on there: in particular, how much is Apple’s integrated hardware/software approach making a difference? (There’s also their increasing design for manufacturing expertise and their sales channels; I won’t talk about them much other than to note that the old story of Apple products being too expensive is quite out of date, with Apple maintaining healthy profit margins on the iPad while other competitors are unable to undercut them on price while maintaining any sort of decent manufacturing quality.)

In the phone operating system space (not yet in the tablet space, though maybe that will change), Google is of course their main competitor. And it’s a bloody, bloody battle, especially around patents. Not just between Apple and Google—Microsoft is making a quite credible amount of money off of patent licensing agreements with Android device manufacturers—but between Apple and Google it’s particularly bloody, because Apple has no apparent desire to license their patents: they’re trying to prevent distribution of competitors’ devices entirely.

This is, of course, a lousy thing: it’s bad for consumers, it’s bad for programmers, it’s bad for innovation. It is, however, fascinating to watch, and here my favorite source of information is the FOSS Patents blog. Its author, Florian Mueller, does a wonderful job of keeping track of all the various lawsuits in this area, both digging up primary documents and providing well-informed commentary. (And it’s not just about the Apple-Google fight, e.g. he covers the Lodsys patent battles better than anybody, and Google is also under heavy heavy attack from Oracle.)

Patents seem to clearly be an area where Apple is much better prepared to work than Google is: Google, to me, seems to be giving off an aura of not, at its core, believing that anybody would take software patents seriously. I’ve been shocked at how vulnerable they seem to be to Oracle’s attack, and when your Chief Legal Officer is made to look stupid on Twitter by Microsoft’s general counsel, you really are not doing a very good job fighting your battles.

Both of these stories led to Google’s announcement a week and a half ago of their plan to purchase Motorola Mobility. The big question there is: how does this fit into the above narratives? Is it a patent play, is it an integration play, is it both, does Google even have a clear plan for the acquisition? (In general, acquisitions do badly for the acquiring company, so the default assumption should be that this one won’t turn out well…)

The early coverage assumed that this was all about the patents: that with Motorola’s patents, finally Google would be able to defend themselves against Apple. The problem with that is that Apple was already going on the offensive against Motorola: so why should we assume that those patents will succeed in defending Android against Apple more broadly?

But if it’s an integration play, then that directly attacks Google’s main selling point of being a level playing field that all vendors can pick up and use on equal terms. There were already chinks in that the idealistic version of that story—Google didn’t release the Honeycomb source code, and the Skyhook fight makes it clear that Google will use their muscle to shut out third-party replacement of their components. But if Google turns into a major Android phone manufacturer, that story will be in tatters: maybe Samsung and HTC will stay strong Google partners, but my guess is that they’ll become a lot happier about adopting Windows Phone 7 and/or that we’ll see long-lived Android forks that evolve away from interoperability with the trunk.

I hope somebody at Google has a good answer to this, because I want there to be as many strong competitors in the mobile operating system space as possible—I certainly don’t trust Apple to behave themselves without frequent pushback!—but at least at first the Motorola deal seemed very rushed, especially for a 12.5 billion dollar acquisition. (With a 2.5 billion dollar kill fee, an amount that is shockingly high and suggests that Google didn’t have the upper hand in negotiations at all.)

So that’s the first half of the week; the second half of the week, however, brought the news that HP was not only stopping WebOS development (which was one of the few other plausible contenders, and probably the most plausible integrated stack play), but they were exiting the consumer PC business entirely! And in their announcement, they admitted that competition from tablets was a big part of the latter decision: basically, they were saying that they don’t know how to build a tablet that’s competitive in price and quality with the iPad, and that they (the largest computer manufacturer in the world!) also don’t know how to keep their profit margins on non-tablet PCs high enough for it to be worthwhile to stay in that business.

This is a classic disruption story: a new entrant has come in and redefined the bottom of the market in such a way that incumbents don’t have a good response; those incumbents, in turn, flee upmarket, which will help in the short term but who knows for how long. (With the extremely unusual twist that the new entrant isn’t new at all.) I was surprised when IBM sold off their laptop business to Lenovo a few years ago, but it looks like a great move in retrospect, getting out of the business while they could still sell it for a reasonable value while reinventing themselves as a service business. HP’s move seems a lot more desperate, though, and neither their Palm nor (I assume) their Compaq acquisitions have turned out at all well. Which puts quite a spin on the ten billion dollar acquisition of Autonomy that they announced the very same day; maybe that acquisition will do better, but personally I would not bet on that. (It does seem, however, that selling printer ink for thousands of dollars a gallon is still a good business to be in.)

But it’s one thing to read about classic disruption stories; it’s another thing to see them play out right in front of you in real time, involving three huge companies each of which is located a few miles away from your house. Definitely time to bring out the popcorn.

And, if WebOS is no longer a contender, Android is unable to produce competitive tablets (and is in for somewhat stormier weather in general), and Microsoft is insisting that desktop OSes are suitable for tablets, where is the iPad competition going to come from? My best guess right now is Amazon, but the way they’re treating developers in their app store (making Apple look good!) has me a lot less excited about that prospect than I once was. I really hope somebody succeeds, though, the idea of a monoculture doesn’t make me happy at all.

And, as it turns out, the news in this area didn’t end with HP’s dramatic shift out of the PC industry, which was when I’d started thinking about this post: the next week brought the sad announcement that Steve Jobs was retiring from Apple for health reasons. What I am most curious about in that regard is to what extent Apple has managed to successfully formalize their thought patterns. They’ve apparently been trying to do that over the last few years; I’m a big Toyota fan, and one of the ways in which Toyota impresses me the most is the extent to which they’ve built up a long-lasting company culture.

If Apple has been self-aware enough to do the same thing, then maybe the iPad isn’t the last great disruption to come out of there; and if others can learn about their culture the way others have learned about Toyota’s, then maybe that can transform design for the industry as a whole. Though the Toyota analogy suggests an alternate outcome: even if outsiders do learn about their culture, the vast majority of outsiders are unlikely to be able to learn enough from those lessons to really make a difference…

I finished Ghost Trick a few days ago, and I haven’t figured out what to say about it. I certainly enjoyed it: good puzzles, and I only went to Gamefaqs once (though I narrowly missed going a second time), which certainly isn’t always the case with puzzle/adventure games. I rarely had to do laborious exhaustive searches of the possibility space the way I did in the Ace Attorney games (which were made by the same team), and I never had to do the same sort of “wander through the map trying to trigger the next event” that I had to do rather too often in that series.

Which is largely because Ghost Trick‘s maps are much more constrained! That’s not a bad thing, though: the flip side is that the game is divided into much smaller chunks, fitting into a single, more fluid story. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Ace Attorney games’ approach, either—they generally did a rather good job of uniting hints from the different cases to create a rather powerful conclusion in the final case of each game in the series—but I enjoyed the sustained narrative that Ghost Trick provided.

Come to think of it, that more level, sustained approach showed up in the characters as well. There was nothing like the heights of eccentricity found in the Ace Attorney games, but I did care about the characters and enjoyed working with them. The character you play is the weakest of the bunch, and the final reveal wasn’t particularly convincing (especially in contrast with Missile’s temperament), but that’s okay: it’s natural for the character you play in a game to be a bit of an empty vessel.

I don’t think I’m going to end up with the same long-lasting fondness for the game as I have for the Ace Attorney games. But that series is long in the tooth, and I’m glad the team tried out something a little different; I’d be perfectly happy for Ghost Trick to be a one-off, but I’d probably play a sequel if one were eventually released. I’m certainly quite happy to have played it; and I’m happy that it didn’t overstay its welcome, either.

I was impressed enough by Randy Smith’s GDC 2009 talk “Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface” that I’ve made a point to go to his talks the last two years as well; and I quite liked his 2010 talk “Increasing Our Reach: Designing to Grab and Retain Players” as well. Because of that, I’d always planned to get around to playing Spider, but it never quite bubbled up to the top of my stack.

Part of that was because I was dubious about playing it on the iPhone; the iPad is a much more pleasant gaming platform however, and fortunately his studio released an iPad version of the game. But I was too busy playing Minecraft until recently to dive into other games (at least most other games, I somehow found time to play a fair amount of Flight Control HD), but now that that addiction has abated, I’ve been finding more time for smaller games. (It didn’t hurt that my dog has been waking me up in the middle of the night recently, leaving me with some chunks of time that are well suited for non-narrative games on handheld devices.)

And I was optimistic that Spider might fit in with some of my current theoretical concerns. Playing lots of Minecraft, Rock Band 3, and board games over the last year has gotten me away from thinking of video games as narrative devices by default, and given me a lot more respect for focusing on a small set of mechanics. (Which can, of course, lead to quite a rich narrative in its own way!) I love Flight Control HD, and a big part of that is how well the mechanics work on the device; drawing spiderwebs sounds like it has the potential for the same sort of mechanical goodness. And if you combine that with rather lovely artwork and hints of a story to puzzle out, what’s not to like?

But I just couldn’t get into it. The web-drawing mechanic is okay, but not something I enjoyed enough to want to focus on mastering it; also, there’s just enough distance between you and the controls for it not to feel seamless the way Flight Control HD does. I like the game’s artwork, but when I was going through it the first time, I was focused on making it through the levels instead of taking the time to try to figure out what was going on, and I’m not motivated enough to go through the levels a second time with story in mind. Smith likes achievements as a vehicle to promote depth on demand, and the achievements did get me to try some goals and play styles that I might not have otherwise attempted; I enjoyed that, but not enough to keep on trying different techniques once I’d gone through the levels once. I dipped briefly into the other game modes, but my heart just wasn’t in it, so I put them aside quite quickly.

Which all left me a bit sad: I wanted to like the game more than I did, and the mechanics and story are good enough that I can imagine willing myself into liking them. (The art I don’t have to will myself into liking, it is quite nice.) At first I thought I might not have given it a fair shake by playing much of it while sleep-deprived at night; for the last couple of nights, though, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest 2, and I’ve been loving that. And that’s another game focused on mechanics with a thinner (though more explicit) narrative veneer available; the difference, though, is that I’m really enjoying the mechanics, figuring out how to mix the details of gem combat with spell usage. And I’ve been playing a good amount of Ascension as well; no narrative there, but I’m enjoying the mechanics.

Still, I’m happy to have played Spider, and I’m happy to be quickly going through a game instead of being mired in the same games for month. On to something else now, though, a bit earlier than I expected!

At work, we went to Def Con last week; my first time there, an interesting experience. (Also my first time in Las Vegas; unsurprisingly, it’s not my sort of city.) I enjoyed just wandering around the conference, and several of the talks were quite good; my favorite was SSL and the Future of Authenticity, by Moxie Marlinspike.

He started off with a history lesson, talking about the Comodo breakin and about the origins of SSL. (He managed to track down the person who designed the SSL protocol, who hasn’t been active for a decade and a half.)

SSL has worked quite well from a security and integrity point of view, but the whole security trust model is quite threadbare by now: there are 650 organizations worldwide that can sign certificates (and the cost to become such an organization isn’t prohibitive if you’re a criminal enterprise of decent scale); that means that lots and lots of people are in a position to be able to run man-in-the-middle attacks. (Which were a theoretical possibility in 1995, but are quite real these days.) And even if all of those organizations are well-meaning, do you really trust their internal security measures? (He gave an example of one registrar that had their private key accessible for more than a year from a directory on their web site.)

So what do you do if you don’t trust one of those certificate authorities? Right now, your options aren’t great: you can, say, remove Comodo from your browser’s list of trusted certificates, but if you do that, you’ll cut yourself off from all web sites that have a certificate signed by them, which is apparently somewhere around a fifth of all web sites. Or you can imagine replacing the distributed certificate authority power with a more centralized one, e.g. one where each root TLD has signing power over certificates associated to its domain; but lots of people in both the US and China wouldn’t want their government involved in signing certificates, and what about supposedly international TLDs?

And then there’s the whole issue of self-signed certificates: right now, if you just want to secure communication and don’t want to get a browser warning, you have to fork over money to a third party, and the benefit that you get for this is increasingly dubious. (This is a problem that annoys me every single day, because my iPhone can’t remember an exception for a certificate I generated myself.)

The core issue here is that we want “trust agility”. Users should be able to decide whom they trust with certification, and be able to revoke that trust and any time. Right now, sadly, our system has low trust agility: the point is that there are three parties involved, namely the user, the site in question, and the authority certifying the site; currently, the site choses the authority, so removing that choice from the user.

(At this point, he digressed to talk a bit about the ability that DNSSEC provides to put your SSL information in your DNS record: this reduces trust agility still further, by eliminating the possibility of removing an untrusted authority from your trust database.)

The basic idea to solve this that he presented is that of “perspectives”. When you get a certificate from a site that you want to talk to, don’t ask that site for the authority to use to authenticate the certificate. Instead, ask a third party (a “notary”) to also get the certificate from that site: if they get the same certificate that you do, then either you’re dealing with the correct certificate or the man in the middle attack is in between the site and both you and the notary!

This has some flaws: something about not applying to all communications that I didn’t understand, privacy (the notary knows whom you’re talking to), and notary lag (caching problems, basically). So he proposed a tweaked version, namely “convergence”.

Convergence takes this perspectives notion and modifies it in a few ways:

• You send a certificate with the notary request; if the certificate doesn’t match the notary’s cached version, then the notary can check again before sending an inappropriate mismatch response.
• Have the client cache certificates, to improve both performance and privacy.
• Have the client talk to multiple notaries, e.g. allowing you to implement voting behavior and to configure specific notaries for different domains.
• For any communication, proxy the notary request through one of the notaries: that notary doesn’t know which site you want info about, and the notaries that actually receive the request don’t know who asked for the information, preserving privacy.

There are still some problems (Citibank has multiple certs for the same host; captive portals present a chicken-and-egg problem), but they seem workable. And I really like the fact that it removes certificate authorities from the loop entirely, treating self-signed certificates no differently from externally-signed certificates. (And if you wanted I imagine that you could modify the voting behavior to allow externally-signed certs to get an extra vote, or something.)

He’s published source code for a notary server and a Firefox plugin. It definitely seems worth a try, and is a useful reminder that I’m depending more than I’m comfortable with on closed systems: I’d like to run this on my phone, and I can’t. There are reasons why I’ve moved away from open systems over the last few years, but that move still makes me sad, and I’m losing as well as gaining in that trade.

So: Minecraft. I’m in the habit of writing here about each game that I finish, and I have indeed finished Minecraft. By which I don’t, of course, mean, that I’ve actually finished Minecraft, because it’s not the sort of game that has an end: I’ve merely stopped playing it. At least for the time being, for a few weeks at least, I imagine that when the adventure update comes out, I’ll give it a try. And there’s of course the VGHVI Minecraft nights on the last Thursday of every month.

But I have met the criteria for writing a summary post here. What to say, though? I’ve written about it quite a bit in my diaries on my other blog, and I’ve written a couple of posts here about it that I’m rather fond of; the Playable Characters folks were even kind enough to let me blather on about the game on their podcast. Given all of that, I’m not sure what I have left to say about the game?

I suppose one answer is to talk about why I’m stopping playing the game, and how I feel about that. And how I feel about that is: conflicted. Minecraft is a wonderful, wonderful game, no doubt about it. I’m looking at a wall full of video games, and it’s helped me tap into my creativity in a way that none of the rest of them have; it has a lovely, wistful aesthetic; it’s quite well balanced; and I will very much miss planning out the next steps in my design with my daughter and look forward to continuing to talk to her about the (much more elaborate!) designs that she continues to create in the game.

In fact, I have nothing negative to say about the game. But: to those of us who have drunk its nectar, it’s not so much a game as a lifestyle. Even that would be fine, indeed wonderful, were it not for the fact that the other game I’m playing right now, Rock Band 3, is also a lifestyle. I’ve been playing both of them for months now, which means that, for those same months, I have had time to do very little other game playing. And, while I have zero complaints about how I’ve spent those months, it is time to move on to something else. And I’ve recently come to the end of a project in Minecraft, while my current project in Rock Band 3 still has months, even years to go (not so crazy when you realize I’ve been playing one Rock Band game or another for about three and a half years straight!), and could in its own way end up even more rewarding than Minecraft has been.

So: Rock Band 3 stays, Minecraft goes. And, in the short term, I’ll probably binge a bit on other recent(ish) games: right now Ghost Trick, perhaps next Catherine, Sword and Sworcery, Bastion, From Dust, Child of Eden (paired with Rez HD?), Dragon Age 2, Okamiden, Portal 2. Or, if I go a bit older: Spider HD, BioShock 2, the Half Life 2 episodes, World of Goo.

I certainly won’t play through all of those; I’ll play through some, though, until I feel more sated. I should find more time to play board games, too: last year we’d gotten into a nice habit of playing them regularly on weekends, and while we’ve fallen out of that, it’s a habit that I miss. And maybe a carefully selected non-gaming project or two: it’s been a little while since I’ve done substantial non-work programming, for example.

Good times. Looking back, it seems that I’ve been playing Minecraft since at least the beginning of 2011; and quite a year it’s been.

So: I’ve been playing pro guitar mode in Rock Band 3 a fair amount over the last few months. And it’s great, and I’m even learning a little bit about how to play rock guitar!

The thing is, rock guitar is not the only type of guitar that I like to play: as Jordan will attest, there is another kind of song that I like to play on the guitar, and it’s called “Alice’s Restaurant”. Which, sadly, will never come to Rock Band 3, because the controller doesn’t work well with finger picking.

While that is unfortunate, I don’t have to limit my guitar playing to video game situations. It is, however, conceivable that there might be other songs that I might enjoy playing almost as much as Alice’s Restaurant, so I should consider broadening my repertoire a bit. Which raises the question: why do I like playing Alice’s Restaurant?

I think finger picking is part of the answer: not that strumming chords is a bad idea, but I like putting my individual fingers to work as well. Experimenting a bit, though, I don’t think it’s the entire answer: picking out arpeggios is pleasant enough, but not quite the same. I think what I really like about Alice’s Restaurant is the independent musical lines, picking out both (a stripped down version of) the melody and a bass line.

So what I’m really looking for are other pieces I can learn with (at least?) two voices. I’m not fussy about the details: clearly melody plus bass is fine, but two equal voices in counterpoint would also be great. (Heck, I might enjoy that more, given the nature of my musical background.)

Suggestions?

Some tangentially related notes on recent experiences reading books:

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

When talking about upgrading memory to Rails 3.0, I mentioned that I’d had trouble testing a bit of the unobtrusive JavaScript code. Specifically, I had a file answer.js.erb that contained the following:

$('answer').update("<%= escape_javascript(render :partial =>
'answer', :object => @item) %>");

and I wanted to take apart the HTML returned by that render :partial section.

I eventually came up with a solution that I’m happy with, so I’ll mention it here in case anybody else runs into the same problem and ends up here via Googling.

The partial in question contained a p element with class qa; let’s assume that it’s body is supposed to be text_to_assert_on. Then here’s the test that I ended up with:

  def unescape_javascript(escaped)
    escaped.gsub("\\'", "'").gsub("\\\"", "\"").gsub("\\n", "\n").
      gsub("\\\\", "\\").gsub("<\\/", "</")
  end

  def assert_encoded_update(body, element_to_update)
    assert_not_nil(/\$\('(.*)'\)\.update\("(.*)"\);/ =~ body)
    assert_equal(element_to_update, $1)
    yield(HTML::Document.new(unescape_javascript($2)).root)
  end

  def test_get_answer
    get :index
    post :answer, :format => 'js', :item => @one.id

    assert_encoded_update(response.body, "answer") do |replacement|
      assert_select(replacement, "p.qa", "text_to_assert_on")
    end
  end

I don’t claim that this is perfect (there are probably more cases that unescape_javascript should handle), but it worked well for my purpose.