malvasia bianca

(Disclaimer: I in no way speak for Playdom.)

There’s a certain strain in the criticism of social game development that has always sounded bizarre to me, and I think I’ve finally understood why. It’s really a two-fold strain: on the one hand, it complains about the metrics-driven approach to game development that social game studios typically take, and on the other hand, it complains about the focus that social game developers typically have on how exactly they’re going to make money. With these two hands frequently united in an allegation that all that social game makers care about is whether a feature increases or decreases revenue.

These complaints were so foreign to me that I ignored their existence for quite some time, until some smart people that I have quite a lot of respect for caused me to realize that yes, many people really do have that point of view, and it was one that I should take seriously. And, once I started taking it seriously, I realized that it’s actually a completely natural point of view! I like making analogies on this blog; and if I replace video games by, say, books or music, then the idea of a metrics-based approach and a business focus would sound pretty weird/unpleasant to me, too. So what I’d discovered was that I had a pretty big blind spot in that area myself; where did it come from?

The answer that I’ve come to is that it’s because I’ve spent the last seven or so years immersed in agile software development; and a metrics-based approach and a business focus both fit into agile quite naturally. One of agile’s key tenets is that you should have a precise notion of what ‘done’ means: agile recommends this in your tight coding loops, with TDD; it recommends this at longer-term levels, with acceptance criteria for stories. And a metrics-based approach fits into that point of view very well, helping to extend the importance of ‘done’ from the programming side to the product owner side: it encourages the product owner to also have green bars of their own that their feature prioritization process is trying to attain, it encourages them to come up with formal criteria that they’re trying to satisfy.

Furthermore, looking at metrics is a way of paying attention to what your customers (and potential customers) are actually doing. And this, too, is firmly established within agile: XP has a “Customer” role, with a strong suggestion that that person be an actual customer of the product. This, of course, doesn’t make sense in all circumstances, but even when it doesn’t, similar ideas appear: e.g. Toyota famously sent its designers of their first minivans and first Lexus models to live with their target customer base.

So, the upshot is: paying close attention to customer-focused metrics makes a lot of sense from an agile viewpoint. Indeed, not doing so when such metrics are easily available (as is the case for web-based software) would be rather odd.

That’s the metrics side of this puzzlement; what about the business focus? A business focus is, honestly, something that I couldn’t have cared less about when I was younger—I was all set out to be an ivory-tower academic—but here too, agile was an awakening for me. Take the Customer concept I mentioned above: that person may not be an actual customer, but she’s definitely somebody with the business goals firmly in mind. This business/engineering collaboration is firmly established within agile: the business side sets the priorities, the engineering side takes charge of getting those priorities done. And both work together to proceed in an iterative approach, to deliver business value as quickly as possible and to discover actual (not hypothetical) business value as quickly as possible, allowing them to sculpt the product’s goals to meet business needs.

And this, it turns out, is pretty fascinating. It’s especially fascinating for me because of my personal history: I worked on the same product for several years before joining Playdom, and it was never a business success. Some of that is the fault of engineering execution (for which I shoulder as much blame as anybody), but a fair chunk of that is that we never managed to find a way to engage the market that allowed our engineering strategy to work. And that wasn’t because people thinking about the business side of the product were stupid, or made obviously bad choices: it’s because it’s a really hard problem to solve. So, from that point of view, working at Playdom is a huge relief: I can frequently point to something that I worked on last week that is making money for us this week, and that feels great.

So: agile has trained me to like metrics, agile has trained me to take a business focus. But where does that leave art, where does that leave craft?

Here, too, we run into a blind spot of mine: I wouldn’t normally think of those (especially metrics) as being in any way antithetical to art or craft. The reason for that again, of course, being agile: it has strong statements in favor of the craft of programming, paired with quite a lot of explicit guidance to that end. My favorite agile practice is TDD, and craftsmanship is right there on an equal footing with measuring your results: yes, you have to come up with a metric (“red”), but you also have to make your code look good (“refactor”). And lean also has an extremely strong craft focus.

It is, of course, the case that working to satisfy metrics and business concerns puts a constraint on your choices. But this isn’t inherently antithetical to art or craft: in general, I think that constraints are as likely to help art as they are to hurt it.

So, that’s where my blind spots in this area come from: my recent background means that certain questions that are natural to others just aren’t questions that I’d be likely to think of. At least if I’m primed to be in an agile mindset by being in a programming context; as I said above, I’d be quite likely to raise those complaints in, say, a literary context. Which raises the question: which is the best model to consider here?

And, to that, my best answer is “it depends”. If you’re driven to create games that come out of your experiences and vision, if you couldn’t care less what most people think or whether or not you make money, then I will in all sincerity say that that’s wonderful. (On which note, everybody please chip in some money for Jordan Magnuson’s Game Trekking project!) Even when doing so, you may find the occasional metric useful—see this report of how dramatically differently users may approach our games from what we expect for an example of why—but you may not.

But, for better or for worse, most video games take rather more work to produce than most books. So I personally would not be comfortable working on a project that multiple people depended on for their livelihood without a hard look at business considerations. (Heck, forget “multiple people”: I wouldn’t be comfortable working on a project that I depended on for my livelihood without a hard look at business considerations.) I don’t care about business considerations at all when writing this blog; I care about them a lot when working.

Our art form will become better the more tools there are in our bag. Being aware of tensions is great; treating tensions as creating separate worlds, not so much.

Puzzle Agent HD is a thoroughly delightful game. The obvious comparison is to the Professor Layton: like that game, it’s full of quite good puzzles, like that game, it has a distinctive graphical style which works rather well. (Slightly less charming than Layton‘s style, and the delightful music is completely missing; but Layton is special, not everything has to live up to it.) And it definitely supports my belief that the iPad is an excellent gaming device: I’d rather play the game on the iPad than either a smaller touchscreen device or a larger non-touchscreen device

It’s quite a bit shorter than Professor Layton; I suspect it took me around three hours, though I wasn’t timing myself. Which, as it turns out, is just fine: in fact, it was a great break from the longer game that I’m playing right now, and it didn’t even think about starting to get tedious. Definitely more evidence that I should start seeking out shorter games: if there’s a game I’m curious about, and if it’s short, then why not just grab it right then and finish it over the next couple of evenings? It ended with a cliffhanger, and that’s fine: if Telltale can pop out episodes of this every few months, I’ll happily buy them every few months. (I hope the simplicity of the graphical style will help them keep up a frequent delivery schedule; I hope the game sells enough to support further episodes.) And it’s certainly gotten me curious about trying more of Telltale’s games.

Picross DS was an amazing game: I sunk hours and hours into it, I suspect that there were individual puzzles that I sunk more than an hour into. So I was really looking forward to Picross 3D.

Sadly (and ironically!), it’s only a shadow of its predecessor. The extra dimension should have added more possibilities to the puzzles; instead, as far as I can tell, every single puzzle in the game is solvable via a straightforward strategy of looking at a single numbered line in isolation, coloring/removing blocks based on the number on that line (taking into account whether it’s circled/squared or not, of course), changing lines, and repeating the process. In particular, you never have to consider interactions between lines, which you had to do all the time in the 2D incarnation. I say “as far as I can tell” both because I might have made a mistake on a puzzle I solved and because I gave up in boredom halfway through the “hard” puzzles; maybe there’s something more interesting waiting at the end, but, if so, they waited far too long to show it.

The interface isn’t great, either. It’s not that hard to accidentally delete a block you didn’t intend to; if you do so, there’s no way to undo that, so you have to either start the puzzle over from scratch or forgo the pleasure of solving the puzzle honestly. And, in what I assume is an attempt to compensate for the triviality of the puzzles, they have a prominent timer; I don’t mind that as an occasional variant, but not as a constant presence.

Fortunately, there are several good puzzle games available for the iPhone/iPad, so I’m not feeling puzzle-starved. But I wish this one had turned out differently.

I was expecting to spend a fair amount of time playing games on my iPod Touch / iPhone, but that never really happened: I rarely found myself in a situation where it was my only game-playing device available, and, for me, games on it didn’t manage to compete against games on other devices. With my iPad, however, it’s a different story: I’ve only had for a few months, but I’ve already done significantly more game playing on it than I did on the smaller devices. And I’m really optimistic about the future: as well as traditional console-style video games, you’ll discover below that I’m finding it a great device for puzzles, and we’re also seeing board games show up for it. So I figured it was time to do a roundup of what I’ve been playing on the device.

Plants vs. Zombies HD

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

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

Flight Control HD

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

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

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

Angry Birds HD

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

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

Nikoli Puzzle Games

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

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

Piczle Lines

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

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

Since I started working at Playdom, I’ve been getting occasional e-mails from friends who play traditional video games (or “core video games”, as they’re frequently called these days). The authors of these e-mails haven’t been impressed by the social games that they’ve played; so, given that I mostly blog about core games and my tastes and theirs have a lot of overlap, they’re wondering what I see in social games.

I’m afraid that my answers to that haven’t always been very satisfactory; but it’s a good question, so I’ll take a stab at answering it in a more public forum. The main reason why I’m interested in social games is because I want to better understand the possibilities of this art form that I love. The potential design space for video games is staggeringly vast: video games can borrow at length from books, from music, from visual arts, from drama, from traditional games. And those are just facets of what’s possible in video games: once you start mixing those are forms together, you have possibilities far beyond what I can imagine.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the part of the game industry whose products I’ve been spending the most time enjoying over the last decade has been doing a particularly good job at exploring those possibilities. Instead, it’s been going into the same (sub-)genres more and more deeply; there’s virtue to that as well (indeed, it’s produced some masterpieces), but I felt I should be consciously spending more of my time looking elsewhere.

So I should spend time elsewhere; and, fortunately, there are a lot of candidates. But one lens to look through is this: the core game industry is refining its products more and more to appeal to its best customers. This is a scenario that is ripe for disruption: find a cheaper analogue of the same technology, find a group of potential customers that doesn’t care about what your best customers care about and whose (different!) desires can be satisfied with that cheaper technology, and make something for them. Given that there are a lot of people out there who don’t care about core video games, and whose reasons for not caring don’t have anything to do with the graphics being insufficiently photorealistic, we have a potential match for this tactic.

And social games are an excellent example of that strategy. I work on Sorority Life, a game that’s laughably low-tech compared to modern console games (its front-end is almost entirely written in JavaScript), yet almost three times as many people played it last month as purchased a game from the top 10 in the July NPD console software list. And Sorority Life, while a quite successful game, isn’t one of the top 25 Facebook games ranked by number of users.

This suggests to me that social games could be a great source of new areas in the design space for me to learn from. Tens or hundreds of millions of newcomers have been generous enough to donate their time to an art form that I love; if I could listen to them, if I could understand better what they’re finding in social games that they’re not finding in core games, then I’d really learn something.

Note that I’m not saying that social games are better because they’re more popular. I have nothing against popularity, and I’m certainly always happy when we have an uptick in the number of Sorority Life users, but there are a lot of niche works in other art forms that I love, and games are no different. What I am saying is that I believe that social games are a reasonable candidate to discover new areas for game design; I’d be quite happy if that exploration eventually led to a flourishing of niches instead of a few winners. I think that it’s good for the total gaming audience to be as large as possible, in much the same way that I think it’s good if everybody can find books that they love and music that they love, and I don’t think that’s going to happen if we stick with core video games, but I’d just as soon not have that audience all be playing the same thing.

So: I need to listen to social gamers and to social games. For better or for worse, however, listening to people (and games!) is hard. And I find it especially hard when I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in a related but different space, because it’s far too easy for me to view the new space through the lens of the old space, causing me to see too much of the new space as inferior copies of the old space and to miss its own particular virtues. The result is that I’ve done a pretty bad job of learning what I could from social games, and of communicating that to you; for this I apologize. (I will share one thing I’ve learned, however. It seems to me that a lot of popular social games are usefully thought of as toys instead of just as games: they have a lot to give when looked at that way.)

To summarize: I want to learn about new areas of the game design space, I think that listening to social gamers and social games could be a good way for me to learn, but that’s hard. Which leads to the second reason why I’m writing this post, and that reason is purely selfish: I could use all of your help in figuring this out. And, for better or for worse, a lot of the discussion of social games that I read in blogs isn’t particularly helpful in that quest. There’s no particular reason that any of you should be motivated to help me, and I’m happy to shoulder a lot of the blame through my lack of communication, but still, it can be frustrating.

What really set me off was a note by Danc (of Lost Garden fame) bemoaning similar discussion of social games; I don’t have a URL for his note, unfortunately, but I’ve quoted it in full on my linkblog.

If you follow that link, you will discover that he does not mince words. And in particular, the following bit of his rant really hit home for me:

People who play different types of games are not in face brain damaged wards of the state that must be protected from evil. Your mom is likely an intelligent adult capable of making rational decisions. You don’t need to ‘protect’ her. Where is your respect for people other than yourself?

Because, the day before reading Danc’s note, I came across a post on social games on a (pretty good) blog I read. (I won’t link to it here because I don’t want to single it out as a particularly bad example of the genre: it instead seems depressingly normal to me.) The author of that post, after the traditional slagging on social games, felt that he had to make the point that he didn’t think of social game players as “losers”, and also clarified that he didn’t think that “fools” and “suckers” were appropriate adjectives. Instead, he settled on “victims” as the mot juste.

And if that’s the range of adjectives that my corner of the blogosphere considers using for social game players, then that makes me sad. I’m with Danc: to me, that reads profoundly disrespectfully, and I’ll join him in suggesting that you instead start from a baseline of thinking of social game players as “intelligent adult[s] capable of making rational decisions”. I believe that for multiple reasons, not least of which is a selfish one: when I think of others in dismissive terms, I’m shutting myself off from learning, while if I can open myself up and maintain an appreciative attitude, I get more out of my interactions. (And yes, I am aware of the irony of the fact that I’m not serving as a good role model of that behavior in this section; please help me develop the wisdom to handle this better.)

When I was first thinking about writing this post, I was going to more or less end it here, but then another social games post spread through my Twitter feed. Except this one was a report on a talk by a social game designer; and my first reaction there was “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” (That’s my problem in a nutshell: I have many friends on both the social and core sides of the game space, and ever since this year’s GDC, there have been a lot of excuses for the two sides to become enemies.) So yes, I should clarify: there are people in the social game space who act like asses. This is not unique to the social games space (Bobby Kotick comes to mind), but it’s there, and there are probably aspects of the gold rush mentality that bring it out a little more strongly here than in more established game areas.

But I don’t want to throw that speaker under the bus, either, or pretend that he’s so different from me. Because I can understand where he’s coming from pretty much in everything he says, and in fact I think that the specific recommendations he makes in the “seven biblical sins” part of that article are all reasonable design decisions. They’re not the only reasonable design decisions, but I suspect you could follow any or even all of them and still have a game that’s genuinely satisfying; indeed, I think scrupulously avoiding them could be as likely to lead to an unsatisfying game as following them would. (And I think it’s a good idea for games to be profitable, too, which is another key point in his talk, though obviously that has a more direct effect on me than on many of my readers.)

I could, however, be wrong. (And I’d certainly be happy to discuss those design decisions in the comments, if any of you think that my point of view is crazy but that I’m perhaps not completely beyond hope.) On which note, I’ll return to my selfishness from above: it would be really helpful if I could have all of your help to understand how to improve social games, to find their best characteristics while avoiding their worst. But, as a fallible human being, it’s hard for me to learn as much as I could from you if, when I read your posts, I get the feeling that you wouldn’t like social games no matter what they did, unless they were to change so much as to fit back into the core game design space. Unfortunately, when I read posts written in that sort of tone, my brain starts disengaging; I can work against that, but it’s not easy.

So please, write your posts with compassion. And I will repeat again, I could use a lot of help in this: y’all have a lot to say, and you’ve collectively seen a much larger area of the game design space than I have or ever will. So whatever you have to give, I will accept gratefully. I just might not seem super-grateful at all times, if you hit on one of my triggers.

In fact, I’ll make one specific request: a lot of my game blogger Facebook friends have been playing Cow Clicker recently. That game isn’t a great example of a social game: it’s a satire (or a travesty) of the genre, its design is missing some very important traditional aspects of the genre, and what’s there is very stripped down. (Incidentally, if you’re looking for something more firmly centered in the genre to try out, Playdom just released City of Wonder, and while it’s too early to know if the game has legs, I’m totally charmed by it so far.) But, as satires go, Cow Clicker is quite well done, and several of you have been playing it for a week or two. So: when you listen to the game, is it telling you anything that you didn’t know when you started playing it? (My experience playing the game has surprised me in one way; I’ll blog about that later.) I’d love to read a series of experience reports of the game.

Or, if you’re not interested, that’s fine too! There’s no reason at all why your interests and motivations should match mine, and I’d much rather read you talk about what you’re interested in.

At GDC this year, Randy Smith recommended that game developers provide a “game-toy” as their players’ initial experience with their game: strong, juicy affordances with low pressure. Which is great advice, but is of course not all that you need: as Smith also comments, we want players to be able to enjoy the game for the long term so he recommends adding “depth on demand”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Rosenberg has recently been making a case that web sites (news sites, at least, but I think the argument applies more broadly) should make the revision history of stories public. Which makes sense to me, and to enough other people that a Post Revision Display WordPress plugin is now available.

Which I’ve just turned on, as an experiment, so you’ll see a little “Post Revisions” note at the bottom of my blog posts. At least for the time being; I almost never revise my posts once I hit the ‘publish’ button, so it’s mostly noise. I fiddled with the styling to make it pretty inconspicuous, but I’m still not convinced it’s pulling its weight; so don’t be shocked if you come back a month from now and those messages are gone. Here’s an example of a post where I actually made changes, if you’re curious what that looks like.

At any rate, it seems like a clearly good idea in general; hopefully it will catch on enough to get incorporated into WordPress proper, at which point theme makers will find ways to present that information in a less obtrusive fashion. Actually, right now it would probably be fine if I could get it to go after the publication date; taking a look, that seems not brain-dead easy, but maybe I’ll be able to find a way to do that without too much patching.

For better or for worse, I only rarely replay video games. When I start a game, I almost always make it all the way through the game; but once I’ve done so, my brain decides that it’s happy and that I should move on to something else. And constraints on my time are such that there’s always no end of candidates for that something else, either.

Still, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with my unrelenting march: I reread books not infrequently, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be doing the same thing with games. Part of my hope in co-founding the Vintage Game Club was that it would give me an excuse to revisit old favorites; it did so with Majora’s Mask, to mixed results. And more recently, we chose Killer 7, which I’d been pleasantly bemused by on its original release. So: how would this return go?

Wonderfully, as it turns out, as was clear as soon as I began. Or even before I began: as soon as I heard the creepy laugh on selecting the options screen when loading the game, I knew I’d returned to the right place. I’d remembered something about the gameplay, the mood, the graphics, but I’d forgotten how well the game uses sound: to set a mood, to support gameplay, to reinforce repeated events. (I’m strangely fond of the squeak of fingers sliding across guitar strings when turning in soul shells at the Vinculum Gate.)

And then I started to play the game, with its quite idiosyncratic control style. But this time, it seemed like the most natural control style in the world. Between the time Killer 7 was originally published and now, I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion (most notably around Resident Evil 5) of the horror genre, in particular how, by taking on first person shooter characteristics, it has lost much of its power. Killer 7 isn’t solely a horror game, but it draws much of its power from that wellspring, and restrictions on movement and camera work very well with the game’s mood of uncertainty.

The graphics, of course, continue to delight. They haven’t aged in the intervening half-decade since the game’s release; meanwhile, so much of the rest of the industry continues to march towards a banal realism. (Or, perhaps, a banal hyper-macho fantasy of realism: tree-trunk-like arms laced with bulging veins are even less to my taste.) We do admittedly see increasingly frequent retro nods in games; that’s a pleasant change-up, but rarely leads to the sort of self-confidence we see in Killer 7, to a game that knows what it is doing and has its own vision (visions!) that it places before us. (We see a similar self-confidence in the gameplay elements that the game chooses for us: nods to traditional action and puzzle solving, but it’s done solely to the extent that the game finds it useful for building its mood and gaining strength from a conversation with those traditions.)

Or at least I assume the game knows what it is doing; to be honest, I had no idea what is going on in terms of plot through much of the game. I’d tentatively been working under the hypothesis that the plot was more there for impressionistic purposes than because there’s a real narrative underpinning it, and I was just fine with that; Target 05, however, makes it clear that there’s a story lurking in the game if you want to dig it out, and Target 06 makes it clear that you should also look at the game in terms of recurring archetypes. (Which the repeated sound cues and the repeated level construction atoms—most notably the Vinculum gate, but also aspects such as the odd engravings—also reinforce.) I assume that I’ll replay this game again in another half-decade or so; I hope that, when I do so, I remember enough about writing this post that I’ll look up enough of the narrative details online in advance to be able to piece together more of the game’s backstory and its cross-sensory themes.

Because, to be honest, I still don’t get the feeling that I understand this game at all. I am convinced that it’s a wonderful game, indeed that it’s one of the pinnacles of our art, but I don’t think I’m more than beginning to understand why that is or what it’s doing, to put my belief in words that any of my readers are likely to find convincing. Which, in its own way, is also cause for joy: if I can make progress down that path of understanding, I’ll have accomplished something.

One of my favorite video game groups is the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, spearheaded by Roger Travis; in particular, I always look forward to the weekly VGHVI gaming nights. (Usually on Thursdays, though other nights are possible as well.)

We’d been coordinating our events through a Ning site; unfortunately, Ning has now decided to charge $20/month for the privilege of organizing events, which we thought was a bit much. So we’ve decided to move the VGHVI planning over to a blog, located at vghvi.org.

So, if you’re interested in VGHVI events, please make sure that you’re subscribed there! (Or through one of the other ways that we publicize events.) And, if you’re not aware of VGHVI events, consider joining us! We’re doing a simultaneous play of Mass Effect this Thursday; it’s a really interesting way to experience a single player game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I promised a post on why I created my linkblog, but then I forgot to talk about it in my recent Reeder post. The primary trigger was in fact my increased iPad usage: I find it annoying to read others’ link roundup posts on the iPad/iPhone, and it’s also a bit of a pain to write that sort of post on the iPad.

But there are a couple of lurking issues behind this change, too. Link roundup posts make it harder for me to save one particular link for later perusal; or, from a philosophical point of view, I don’t have a URI that I can use to refer to the link recommendation. (This is the main thing that bothers me with Twitter’s new retweet feature, too.) Also, I don’t want the link roundup posts to overwhelm this blog, but that has led to batching, which leads to a wealth of problems, so I’d rather eliminate that bit of Work in Progress.

So a separate linkblog seemed like the way to go. And Tumblr seemed easy to use, and I like the way it encourages building off of others’ recommendations while preserving recommendation history. (In other words, it nicely avoids the URI problem mentioned above.) And I’m certainly happy with it so far; I wish it had a native iPad client, and I wish that Reeder added Tumblr to its list of link forwarding locations, but neither of those is a serious problem.

This week’s excitement has been that Disney announced on Tuesday that they are buying Playdom. Which I’m pretty happy about! I wouldn’t have minded if we’d tried to go it alone, but that’s a hard path to follow; and, if we’re going to be acquired by somebody, Disney’s a great choice. I was worried that we might be acquired by a game company: one of the reasons why I was happy to join Playdom was that I thought traditional game companies were ripe for Innovator’s Dilemma-style disruption, and being acquired by a traditional game company could squelch that. Being acquired by a well-established company could also have the potential danger that they might see us as a branding opportunity more than anything else, but Disney hasn’t shoved their branding into Club Penguin, so I’m pretty optimistic that they won’t do that with us. And I’m not against Disney branding, either: while I hope it won’t dominate all of our games, Disney certainly has many brands which would work well with many of our game mechanics, and I certainly don’t think that every one of our games has to be a unique flower.

So: yay! I’m looking forward to how things turn out; with the acquisition and some other recent events, I think we’ve got quite a bit of momentum.

As I mentioned before, I love using my iPad as an RSS reader, and in particular I think Reeder is a great program. I liked it enough that I figured I might as well download the iPhone version, and I gave it a try when I was recently visiting my parents.

And I enjoyed using it. Some of the reasons for that were obvious: I only sporadically had wifi access during that trip, and the cell data access was quite slow. So having a device in my pocket with a program that would cache RSS feed content and images was obviously useful. (Incidentally: if you don’t have a strong reason to do otherwise, can you all please make sure that your RSS feeds include full text? I promise I’ll still visit your web site occasionally.) But some of the reasons for that were less obvious: even when we got home, I found myself using Reeder on my phone at odd moments, and, to my surprise, I found that I preferred going through RSS feeds on Reeder on my phone than through Google Reader on my laptop.

Which is pretty weird! In general, I think of Google Reader as a pretty good program—not as nice as Reeder, but pleasant enough to use—and while the iPhone’s screen is fine for what it is, it’s far too small to be ideal for serious reading. So what’s going on there?

I’m not sure that the issue is with Google Reader itself so much as with my manner of using it: on Google Reader, I generally use RSS feeds simply as a navigation aid to getting to the articles on the web sites in question, while when using Reeder, especially in a low-bandwidth environment, I ended up staying on the RSS feed most of the time. And the truth turns out to be: most people’s web sites give a less pleasant environment for reading the articles on them than a good RSS reader can provide.

So: why is that? Some of it is because most of us are awful at design. (And yes, I freely include myself in that category.) I will be happy if I never again see a website with tiny text, with columns that are 200 characters wide, with a white font on a black background. (Well, almost never: just don’t do those things unless you have a specific reason for it.)

Some of it is the whiplash of having every blog look different. When going through feeds in my old manner, my eyes would be confronted with a slightly different look every ten seconds; in retrospect, I’d discounted the mental load that that places on me.

Some of it is the amount of superfluous content on web pages. My blog is quite stripped down compared to most, but even so I’m now wondering: just what purpose is that right column serving? It’s there because it’s the sort of thing that a blog is supposed to have, but I suspect that, in 99% of the visits to this blog, it’s pure noise. I’ll have to think about it a bit more, but don’t be shocked if, a month from now, I’ve switched to a one-column layout, with the current sidebar content banished to separate pages that are linked to from the footer.

And a big portion of it is optimizing for a specific device, and for a device that’s the size of a book or (in the case of my phone) smaller. Which related to some issues that I struggled with the last time I changed this blog’s theme: at the time, my feeling was that different people have different preferences (in terms of font size, browser window size, etc.), so I should, for example, have the font size specified as 100% of the browser default instead of a fixed size.

But I had a hard time getting that to look nice on the different browsers I used and, poking around at different web pages, I wasn’t convinced that changing my own browser defaults would have improved my browsing experience. So I ended up changing to a fixed 14px, and I’ve been happy with the results. And the main reason why I was at peace with that philosophically was that I’m surrounded by thousands of books, and I’m just fine with the fact that they are laid out by a professional who has a good idea what leads to a readable book, and who has made decisions based on that knowledge.

And it’s the same thing with Reeder. The iPad is about the size of a hardcover book; so, when reading text on it, I’d like that text to be laid out in a manner that would be suitable for reading in a book. And Reeder does a decent job of that, with results that are much more soothing than a typical web page. I’m not against some amount of customization—e.g. it wouldn’t shock me if I started to prefer reading large-type books at some point in my life—but I don’t want unlimited personal customization of the appearance of text that I’m reading, and I certainly don’t want every article that I read to look different. (Imagine if a newspaper did that! It would be a nightmare.)

The iPhone isn’t, of course, the size of a normal book; but the main problem that I have with text on the web isn’t that it’s too narrow, it’s that it’s too wide. It’s no coincidence that large-format print forms such as magazines and newspapers generally use a multicolumn format; in fact, the iPhone’s screen is almost exactly as wide as the columns that my local newspaper uses. (Maybe I should change my screen at work to have a vertical orientation instead of a horizontal orientation? I continue to be skeptical of the current fetishization of 16:9 display ratios.)

The wild west of the web has many wonderful aspects, as does the fact that I have thousands of monitors to choose from when deciding what to plug into my computer. But there are form factors and designs that have stood the test of time over the centuries; I should spend a bit more time listening to their virtues.

For reasons which I’ll explain later, I’ve decided to discontinue my occasional link roundups here, and instead put individual links on a linkblog at links.malvasiabianca.org/. So subscribe to that if you like that sort of thing, and don’t if you don’t!

I decided to go with Tumblr, for what it’s worth; the bit of poking that I did suggested that it’s deservedly popular. Though I still don’t have a good feel for how well it will integrate into link discovery on the iPhone/iPad; I’ve got the app installed, I guess I’ll find out soon enough…

A couple of months ago, I was poking around and noticed that online backup options were rather cheaper than I’d thought. Amazon S3 is 15 cents / month / GB; that, unfortunately, has a bit of an impedance mismatch with my previous backup-via-ssh strategy. But my home directory on my home server is only a few GB, small enough to fit into the smallest Rackspace Cloud Server configuration; so, for $11/month, I could have a backup that would be ready to go live without too much work if my home server crashed, which seemed like an eminently reasonable price to me.

So I put “set up a cloud server backup” on my next action list, where it languished for several weeks. But, this weekend, Miranda was out of town with her grandparents, leaving me with a bit more free time than normal, so I figured I’d take the time to set it up. And, within 15 minutes, I had a new server to play with.

At which point I went to write down some notes on the process in the reference folder on my home server; strangely, though, my ssh connection had hung. I went upstairs and noted that it was unresponsive; I rebooted it, but two minutes later, it had crashed again. Oops.

Fortunately, I did have a previous backup strategy in place; it wasn’t quite complete, but I hoped that it was pretty good. And my experience this weekend has shown that, yes, it really was pretty good. (Protip: rsync’s –exclude-from flag skips all matching files, not just matching files at the top level of the directory hierarchy you’re backing up.) It was remarkably easy to get most of my files transferred over there (nice to be transferring gigabytes of files between two computers with good internet connections instead of over a connection including home wifi and Comcast); I had my share of moments wondering what was going on when dealing with Apache configurations, but all in all I had the new server serving all of my sites approximately 24 hours after the old one died, despite sleeping in most of the morning and having friends over for bridge and dinner.

I’m still fiddling with details here and there, but I think the new server is almost completely working. I was always planning to bump up the server’s memory usage if I had to use it for real, but I was surprised at how well it was holding up with only 256MB of memory; even so, I thought the better part of valor was to bump it up to 512MB, and the oom-killer reared its head several times today despite that. I’ve played around with Apache and Passenger configurations this evening, hoping that I’ll still be able to fit under that memory limit: Miranda and I are the only people who use the Rails application running there, so I certainly don’t need many Passenger processes, and this blog and my other web sites certainly aren’t very popular, either. So, if I can stick with 512MB, that would be great; if I have to bump it up to 1GB, I’ll grumble a bit but will live with it, given that it’s cheaper than buying a physical server and that I’m sure prices will fall. (My home server had 2GB of memory, and the prices for such configurations are expensive enough to make me think twice, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to avoid that.) Also, one nice aspect of running in the cloud is that, if I inadvertently post something popular here and notice it quickly enough, I can beef up my server for a week with only a few minutes of downtime and only paying the extra money for that time period.

So, while I wish that my home server hadn’t died quite so soon (at the very least, lasting another 24 hours would have been nice), all in all I’m happy with how things have worked out. It’s nice to be reassured that my sysadmin skills haven’t atrophied too terribly, I’m sure future guests will appreciate not having to listen to that machine’s fans, and I’m quite pleased with my Rackspace experience so far.

I don’t intend to do too much iPad blogging here, but a few experiences we’ve had recently:

• Liesl’s dad visited us last month, and spent quite a lot of time playing with the iPad. He probably spent more time playing Flight Control HD than anything else, but he also clearly enjoyed using it for web surfing, and being able to hand it over to us to show us something he’d found. He doesn’t (I’m fairly sure) have a laptop, but he’s now thinking about getting an iPad.
• Earlier this month the three of us spent a week at my parent’s house. I did bring along one of the laptops this time, but it never left my suitcase. This was also the first time I’ve turned on the 3G on the iPad, which was useful given that my parents don’t have WiFi. (But less useful than it could have been—I only had edge speeds in their cottage.)
• Just now, Liesl’s mom and Liesl’s mom’s husband were visiting us. They’re planning to do a fair amount of traveling now that they’re retired, and were thinking of getting a laptop to take along with them; but they put the iPad through its paces and now seem to be leaning in that direction.

I’m now assuming that we’ll change from a two-laptop house to a one-laptop house once this laptop dies. (Though I’m also assuming that I’ll get a desktop machine to replace some of this laptop’s uses.) The iPad is just a lot nicer for most uses.

I had two questions when I started playing the Edgeworth game: how would the role reversal of playing as a prosecutor work, and how would the transition from viewing static screens to walking around environments work? And the answer to both was the same: less of a change than you’d think, but that’s okay.

Or at least mostly okay. In the earlier games, your responsibility as a defense attorney wasn’t to prove that there was reasonable doubt as to whether the defendant had committed the crime: you instead had to prove that some other specific person must have committed it. Given that, you’d think that acting as a prosecutor would be a piece of cake: you’d just have to build up a not-hopelessly threadbare case, and you’d be set. Which would, I suppose, lead to a morally and ludicly unsatisfying game, so the designers took a different path: the investigations didn’t take place in courtrooms, but instead took place in other settings where there was another prosecutor present, typically one with more power than Edgeworth, and who wanted to railroad somebody whom Edgeworth was on the side of. So it ended up with Edgeworth switching roles, acting more like a defense attorney.

Which, on one level, was a bit unsatisfying: if they’d found a way to pull it off, I would have preferred a bigger break. But I’m not exactly sure how they could have pulled off a real role reversal within the game’s legal system while leaving the protagonist sympathetic. And Edgeworth did do more ferreting out corruption than I remember Phoenix Wright doing, so from that point of view he did show prosecutorial virtues.

The mechanics looked a little more different, but ultimately ended up being functionally quite similar to those in the earlier games as well. Instead of switching back and forth between a half-dozen or so different areas in the city gathering evidence, you’d move around one or, occasionally, two rooms, looking at different items in the rooms, with key items (e.g. a murder victim’s body) expanding into a view that looked very similar to the views in the previous game. And, rather than having at most one NPC to talk to in each area, you had several NPCs to talk to, all in the same room. So the upshot is that you had about the same amount of stuff to look at, the same number of people to talk to, but there was less mindless clicking to go from place to place, and almost none of the hoping that you’d somehow triggered an action in location A by performing an unrelated action in location B.

Another key aspect of the design of games in the series is how it presents a search space for you to navigate in when finding the correct next action. The designers have continued to stay away from the very large single search space that largely characterized the second and third games, which helps reduce the frustration when you’re stuck and doing an exhaustive search; and they’ve continued their practice of introducing a separate search space in the form of a new mechanic, this time in the form of logical deductions based on separate pieces of evidence. Which, I thought, worked rather well: the new mechanic is a natural one (we’ve all been frustrated when playing the earlier games that we can’t just point out connections that are staring us in our face), and the search space for the new mechanic is always small enough that you never get stuck. So, yay for progressive refinement: I won’t say that this is hugely superior to the way the mechanics of earlier games played out, but it’s certainly no worse, and is a pleasant change of pace while leaving the series’s core game mechanics solidly in place.

And then there are the characters: as always, it’s nice to visit old friends. Edgeworth has certainly learned the lessons of the first characters; Gumshoe’s vulnerabilities show a bit more than before. Most interesting to me, actually, was the portrayal of Franziska von Karma: you see her as a tough but vulnerable young teenager, you see her as older and having learned a few lessons. (And, of course, you see her whip over and over again.)

The upshot is a game that fits rather more strongly within the existing contours of the Ace Attorney series than I expected. But I like those contours, and I like the different angles on those contours that tweaks to the series continue to provide. We’re five games into the series, and it’s still very much on my must-buy list; there aren’t too many other series that I can say that about.

Not a lot has been written about this game, but I did enjoy Harry Milonas’s musical take on it. And this Edgeworth/von Karma anime music video is rather charming…

• Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer.
• Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.)
• Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.)
• Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.)

• For all of you Plato fans out there:

  (Via here and now.)

• Four interesting clothes posts at Geek Feminism.
• In case you were wondering what a very small gyroscope looks like. (Via Daring Fireball.)
• Major game publishers allowing a fan sequel? Wow.

David Wiley’s talk at GLS got me feeling a little guilty about the lack of copyright license on this blog. Not, to be sure, about the terms that the blog was therefore licensed under but about the fact that the terms were implicit in the first place. Copyright law is horribly flawed these days, with works remaining under copyright far longer than is useful “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (indeed, it’s not even clear if copyright lasts “for limited Times” at all these days), and orphan works are a serious problem. So the last thing I want to do is to go with that default by inertia: if I really think that other people shouldn’t copy what I’ve written for seventy years after I die, the least I can do is to explicitly say so somewhere.

So: I should pick a copyright license. But which one? Wiley talked about how licenses allowing further modification were useful to him and the schools that he worked with; as somebody who has been hanging out with free software types for a couple of decades, I would be leaning that way anyways. The Creative Commons folks have by far the most mindshare in that area, so I went over to their license chooser and poked around a bit.

Ultimately, though, I didn’t go with any of the licenses that the chooser generates. The chooser asks questions about under what conditions you don’t want people sharing your work; and I couldn’t think of any reason to prevent sharing at all. The truth of the matter is that I have a hard time imagining anybody wanting to use what I’ve written here under situations that aren’t covered by fair use; but, in the unlikely situation that they did, I don’t see how I would be hurt by their doing so. Also, watching how free software has progressed over the last couple of decades has changed my opinions: I certainly respect the GPL, for example, but I’ve seen enough situations where it discourages contribution and use of software licensed under it that I wouldn’t use it for a software project I was starting.

I ended up going with the license with the simplest intent possible: the Creative Commons Zero license, which is an attempt to put this blog into the public domain. I won’t promise to use it for everything I write in the future—I can imagine writing something longer-form where I would find additional protections valuable, for example—but I don’t see a downside for it here.

So: if you want to shamelessly rip me off, have at it! I wouldn’t mind an e-mail if you do so, but you’d be completely within your rights to not even do that, and that’s okay.

And, to my blog readers who are writing blogs of their own: please consider placing a license on your blog. I wouldn’t recommend that everybody use as permissive a license as I have, but I hope that you’ll consider using a license that allows some amount of redistribution and even modification, for the reasons that Wiley gave in his talk. (The various Creative Commons licenses give a wide range of options to that end.) If you don’t feel comfortable doing so, that’s fine, too: indeed, if you, unlike me, are in a position where you’d actually lose something from others redistributing your works, I salute you! But the question of how you’d like others to be able to use your writings is, given the defaults presented by current copyright laws, an important one.

I had a great time at GDC this year, with one exception: halfway through the conference, my back started really hurting. My laptop isn’t that heavy, but it’s heavy enough, and something about the way it was sitting in my backpack put more strain on my muscles than they wanted. So I decided that, the next time I went to a conference, it would be with an iPad instead of a laptop; I wasn’t expecting that to be quite so soon, but I decided on a lark to go to GLS this month.

My verdict: absolutely the right choice. Everything that I expected to work well did in fact work well; several things worked better than expected, and there was one complete surprise. And that was without my reading books on it: as I shift to electronic books, I expect its advantage to grow.

The advantages started when I was packing. Normally, whenever I’m going on a trip, I stuff my backpack full of books and electronics. This time, my backpack weighed at most half of what it normally does on a trip: lighter electronics and, even though I didn’t end up taking advantage of it, the availability of electronic books meant that I didn’t have to worry about potentially running out of reading to material. (JIT reduces queues.)

And then, when I was on the plane, I was reading a (paper) copy of The Progressive, noticed some bits that might deserve quoting, and I remembered the WordPress app’s offline mode; so I decided to draft a blog post right there. I was still getting used to the iPad keyboard, but it worked just fine; and the smaller size of the iPad compared to a laptop meant that it was easier to use in cramped airport quarters.

In fact, that was the major issue that this trip resolved for me: the iPad is a fully capable machine for writing blog posts, as evidenced by the fact that I wrote almost 6500 words of blog posts on the trip. I did bring a wireless keyboard in my suitcase, but 4000 of those words were written on the iPad’s software keyboard, and it would have been fine if I hadn’t had the physical keyboard at all. (Incidentally, the WordPress app is somewhat buggy; it’s obviously very useful for offline work, but for online work, I ended up using the regular web interface as often as not, once I learned that you can use two-finger scrolling to scroll panes in it.)

For gaming, the iPad worked great, better than the iPhone ever has for me. The Nikoli iPhone apps control rather better when blown up in size (though I still very much hope Nikoli produces iPad-native versions with larger puzzles), and Plants vs Zombies HD and Flight Control HD are both lots of fun. The platform is obviously very young, and I don’t get the impression that there are a huge number of other games on it that I would enjoy as much as those ones, but for me, the larger real estate is making a big difference, and I imagine that many game developers feel the same way.

And it also worked well as an e-mail reading machine—I checked my work e-mail periodically during the conference, and I could make it through a couple hundred e-mails pretty quickly. (I occasionally wished for an undo button there, though.) And, as I’ve already noted, it works shockingly well as an RSS reader. In both of those cases, the main lesson was: hold the iPad vertically, with only one item at a time visible, and you’ll really be able to focus.

I bought the 3G model, but I ended up not activating a 3G subscription, because both my hotel and the conference had good Wifi. Still, that’s an advantage that the iPad has over my laptop; there were times on vacation last summer that I wished I had 3G on my laptop, and it may well come in handy this summer’s vacation, too.

So: a great choice. Which, incidentally, I wasn’t the only one making: during sessions I frequently was sitting at a table with three iPad users and two or three laptop users. Maybe I was at non-representative sessions, but it felt to me like there were actually more iPads at the conference than Windows laptops, which I never would have expected.

(And, after I hit publish on this post, I will turn off this computer and spend the rest of the evening using my iPad instead. Well, actually, I’ll probably sneak in some time playing Edgy too…)