malvasia bianca

When Michael reviewed MySims Agents, I knew I had to get it for my daughter for Christmas, and my hopes for the game weren’t misplaced: it looks both fun and charming, she loved it, my wife blazed right through it, and I’ll give it a spin as soon as I’m done with Mass Effect 2.

But it’s also thrown me for a bit of a loop, because it’s undeniably a juvenile game, in the same way that, to pick a random example, Comet in Moominland is a juvenile book. Which is absolutely fine, even delightful—I read ten books by Madeline L’Engle during the last month alone, so I’m certainly not one to shy away from books intended more for my daughter than myself! But I’ve studiously avoided thinking about video games in those terms, avoided trying to distinguish between games intended for kids and games (e.g. Wii Sports) that are accessible to a wide audience but not targeted specifically at kids.

The main reason why I’ve avoided classifying games in that fashion is because I see that classification made far too often around me, in the context of polemics that I disagree with; it’s usually used to support claims that I consider both wrong and boring, leading me to head in the other direction when I run across such discussions. But given the existence of MySims Agents and the usefulness I find in the distinction for books, it’s time for me to take another look at the idea of juvenile games.

For example: are the Mario games juvenile games? What about the Zelda games? Honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss here. The Mario games certainly have something in common with juvenile literature, in that they’re quite happy to not locate themselves in the real world—see the aforementioned Moomintroll series for a delightful literary example. I’m loath to make too much of this particular distinction, though: aside from the existence of many many fantasy and science fiction novels for adults, I tend to think that the insistence of the importance of the fantastic/realist distinction in adult literature is more of a bug than a feature, and a bug that’s localized to my particular location in space and time at that.

And juvenile novels are written in a language that kids can read, and frequently features child protagonists. But I’m loath to make too much of those distinctions, either: we don’t have to use fancy words to prove how adult we are, and surely we can all enjoy books that feature protagonists that differ from us in one way or another? So, while I can come up with ways to tell that a books isn’t juvenile literature (because of the style of language, because of sex, because of certain other topics), I found it surprisingly difficult to come up with a positive and non-banal description of what it means for a book to be juvenile literature. And that carries over to video games as well: to return to my examples above, I still don’t know if the Mario games are juvenile games or not. (And I am apparently not alone; though, if I had to come down one way or another, I suppose my gut would agree with Stephen Totilo’s in labeling the series as juvenile. It’s less clear to me than MySims Agents, though: in the latter, having kids acting out adult roles in a non-realistic context is a marker.)

The other series I mentioned, though, is a different case: the Zelda games are, at their core, adolescent games. Not in the sense that adults or children wouldn’t enjoy them, but in the sense that they’re about boys growing up (literally, in the case of Ocarina), forced to be men a little earlier than they’d like to, but rising to the occasion, finding out who they really are, finding unexpected depths inside themselves. As with juvenile books, I want to emphasize: this is in no sense a criticism, I love bildungsromans enough to have copies of most of Herman Hesse’s books on my shelf in both German and English. (And one could claim that I’m still trying to figure out what it is that I want to be when I grow up!) But a coming of age story is, to me, a strong indicator of adolescent literature.

And it’s one that you’ll find all over the place in video games, present in a deep structural sense. In every role-playing game, your character starts out weak, but becomes more and more competent over the course of the game, with his or her capabilities consciously guided through your choices. And these elements are popular enough to have gotten grafted onto other genres—BioShock, for example takes RPG elements and melds then with an FPS core foundation.

And, of course, BioShock is an adolescent game in other ways—its core conflict comes down to, basically, “Son, do this. No, dad, you can’t tell me what to do! Yes, son, I can! No, dad, you can’t!” This is repeated with a second father figure, just in case you didn’t get it the first time; if that’s not a sign of a game about adolescence, I don’t know what is.

Actually, BioShock grabs me in this context for a second reason: Andrew Ryan’s “these are my toys, and if you don’t like that, I’m going to take my forest and go home” speech. I was going to say that that’s not just adolescent, it brings us back to our “juvenile games” theme, but, actually, most kids I know wouldn’t behave that way, either; it’s using the term “childish” instead in the sense of an anti-child prejudice that adults bring out when discussing aspects of their own behavior that they’d prefer to ignore.

Which brings me, in turn, to another context in which the word “adolescent” has come up recently in video game criticism, namely Heather Chaplin’s GDC 2009 rant. I didn’t attend it in person, but I have listened to the audio, and in general I think she’s spot on. She’s not using the term adolescent in the positive sense of growth, of figuring out who we are: instead, her complaints are with game designers and players who are childish in the sense of my previous paragraph, who refuse to grow up and take on real responsibilities, who are instead mired in “guy culture” despite being grown men, who “fear responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery”. And, as she continues, “when you’re talking about culture makers, this is a problem.” Indeed.

(And, just in case you might think that her concerns about the omnipresence of guy culture in game design are overblown: the very next speaker in the rant, when needing to fill some time while fiddling with his computer, decides to joke about blow jobs. And yes, I realize that the GDC rant panels are situations where one might reasonably say things that you wouldn’t say in the more polite sessions in the conference, but he wasn’t doing this for any sort of polemical or oratorical reason, he just thought that such joking was a great way to spend time in a professional conference; and the next two voices we heard after him, both also male, thought that this was a good enough idea that they both took the joke and ran with it. Really, guys, what the fuck?)

Returning to my previous themes: while I have a hard time carving out distinguishing characteristics of juvenile literature, I have an easier time carving out distinguishing characteristics of adult literature. Heather’s list of guy culture fears gives some candidates; parenting is one candidate that I’ll nominate from my own life, as is moving beyond romance and the initial falling in love and instead making a life with your partner through thick and thin, through excitement and banality. And these are, in general, sorely absent in video games, or present only in a distorted form. (I just finished Yakuza 2, and the one bit of hands-on parenting in that game rang horribly false.)

There are, perhaps, glimmers, of hope—I hear that Dragon Age: Origins handles relationships in a more nuanced fashion, and there’s always Jason Rohrer to give me hope. (In that same GDC rant panel, Clint Hocking warned that AAA game makers were having their butts kicked by indie game makers, which is all to the good.) But there’s an awful lot of adolescent guy culture to make our way out of, first.

And of course, as with my discussion of the term “childish”: the examples that Heather gave of responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery aren’t things that real adolescents avoid in general, or even that children avoid in general. They struggle with the weight of those terms, as we all do, but frequently that struggle is done positively, rather than by running away from them, or hollowing out a facade behind them. (As we see in every game that blows up a bildungsroman plot into a chosen hero saving the world; I love the Zelda series to pieces, but it bears little relation to the way responsibility plays out in my own life.)

In fact, in juvenile and adolescent literature, these concepts (especially responsibility and intellectual discovery) are often front and center. So maybe that’s a more positive way to look at the appearance of overtly juvenile games? Maybe overtly juvenile games will have a harder time pretending that they’re grown up because they have a big hero who can order other people around or kill them if those others don’t obey, and will instead have to confront responsibility in a more honest fashion? Maybe (I write just after having learned that our neighbors of six and a half years, who are closer to Miranda than anybody outside of her mother and myself, are moving to Cyprus in a week) replacing the romance subplot of your favorite RPG with the poignancy of your neighbor moving away in Animal Crossing is the first step towards a real treatment of intimacy?

Something to hope for; something to open my eyes and look for.

• Interesting discussion of female video game characters. (Via @Brinstar.)
• Amazing high-speed photography. (Via @ashalynd)
• Criticizing games without playing them. (Though, in the case of Train, I can think of one way to reduce the chance of that happening…)
• And here’s another one on the theme of unhelpful criticism.
• @kateri_t finally has a blog! Or at least a single blog post, hope she continues…
• I am a sucker for this kind of “use your body differently” article. (Via Giles Bowkett.)
• Turning learning Office into a game! (See also Danc’s princess rescuing application post.)
• Very interesting post on Nintendo’s strategy: points out how they avoid sequels (on a single game system), and combine this with nailing it the first time, with shocking results.

I recently replayed BioShock‘s first couple of hours as part of a VGHVI gaming session. And I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting those scenes with the perspective that I’d gained playing through the game, and gaining new insights by listening to the other participants.

But I was also sad, especially in the initial bathysphere descent. That descent is a wonderful reveal, a magical view of the city. And it’s teeming with life; much of that life is aquatic, but there are buildings glowing with lights, it looks (a few flickering neon signs aside) very much like a vibrant, functioning city.

And then you arrive, and find that matters have taken a turn for the worse; soon enough, you’re in traditional FPS mode, where everything is trying to kill you, and you’re trying to kill everything. Which, on second viewing, raised the question: with such pervasive violence, how on earth would a city under the sea continue functioning at all? Where is the power to the lights coming from, who is fixing the leaks?

I think the game largely sidesteps those questions (though, if I’m remembering correctly, we do see some Big Daddies outside doing maintenance, adding yet another twist to your slaughtering them), and I don’t claim to have answers to how the game could have been designed to avoid that. (FPSes are a known design space to work within, after all.) But I would have liked to see the game try to answer those questions, and answer them not in the form of audio diaries but in the way the gameplay was structured.

On a similar note, somebody on Twitter (whom I won’t identify here since she keeps her tweets private) commented that she wished Ico had no combat at all. And I’m sure that Shadow of the Colossus would have been much less powerful if you’d had to fight enemies while traveling between colossi instead of just being free to soak in the landscape.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against combat in games per se (though it does sound like I should try out the new Silent Hill game)—genres that focus exclusively on that (fighting games, multiplayer FPSes) have a quite pleasant singularity of purpose. But as a game starts to move away from its combat, trying instead to get me hooked on its atmosphere and the worldbuilding, I wish I could actually spend my time having the world soak in, to play with where the world came from, where it’s going, how it works. Which means, among other things, less violence or even no violence.

So it is time, I think, for the mechanics / world-building scale to tilt the other way. And I hope that, when it tilts back, the genre will have found a wider range of mechanics in the process.

A couple of pieces of Vintage Game Club-related news:

• We’ve just started a playthrough of BioShock; we’ll follow this up with a playthrough of BioShock 2 when the sequel launches.
• The less-than-vintage nature of those games accurately suggests that we’re considering changes; we’ve opened up a discussion thread where we welcome your suggestions.

Various recent events have strongly suggested to me that I should broaden the range of games that I play. Which will, presumably, in turn broaden the range of games that I write about here.

And this, in turn, poses a bit of a problem. I imagine that I’ll be spending more time with short games than I currently do; and I’m frequently at a bit of a loss when writing about shorter games. When writing about longer games, I have some rules to guide me: only write about what specifically interests me, and don’t write something because I’m unconsciously following a review model. (I still break that last rule a lot, alas.)

At times the results are better, sometimes the results are worse; but at least I generally manage to pull off something that I’m not to embarrassed about. If I’m playing a game for ten hours, probably something will catch my eye, and I’ll be able to link that to something else that I’ve been thinking about. If I’m playing a game for five minutes, though, that may well not happen.

And, of course, if it really doesn’t happen, that’s fine: I try to write about every larger-scale game that I play, but I’ve already passed over many Flash and Facebook games in silence, and I will continue to do so if nothing about them catches my eye. The harder case, though, is what to do about games for which something does catch my eye, but where I’m having a harder time putting that something into a broader context. I’m really not sure what to do in such situations; maybe I’ll experiment with a more impressionistic approach, but I’m not sure I can pull that off well.

Also, some of the reasons for consciously avoiding review tropes won’t necessarily hold in this case. In particular, if I’m playing a game from a traditional publisher, I can be quite confident that it’s easy to find many other people who have done a much better job than I could of giving a general overview of the game. Whereas, for smaller games, it’s not so clear to me that that’s the case. (Though that could have more to do with the tunnel vision in my choice of sites to read than anything else.) Having written that, it’s not clear to me that that it’s important to give an overview of such games: if a game is a click away in your browser, and only takes ten minutes to finish, then there’s not much point in my writing anything beyond what will get appropriate readers to click on that link, aside from my personal perspective.

(One thing I will certainly try to avoid doing in the future is apologizing when I don’t feel I’m writing well about a game. I should either write or not write; either is fine, but there’s no point doing the one and acting like I should be doing the other.)

I’m looking forward to this. And, unusually for me, I’m kind of wishing that I had a Windows PC to broaden my choice of possible games. (I have a VirtualBox installation, but it has some serious sound problems and can’t run recent games.) I’m not wishing that enough to actually go out and get one, but I may well set up Boot Camp on the next Mac I buy.

Every year brings with it its collection of lists of top N games; I mostly enjoy reading them, though I have misgivings about their existence, but I’m not very well positioned to create one myself.

This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: while part of me finds that sort of ranking ridiculous, at least the passage of time gives some amount of distance. And there’s also the pleasure of being reminded of an old friend that you haven’t thought about for a while.

But I don’t really want to write one of those, either, for various reasons. Instead, I’ll present you with a different list, or rather three different lists. I’m not going to say anything about the games here, though many of them are good candidates for me to replay and say more about in the future. I’m sure there are many other games created over the decade that are as good or better than these, and even other games that I’ve played over the decade that are as good or better; there are not, however, other games that I’ve played that have grabbed me in such a deep and direct fashion.

First: games that have lodged into my soul. These are games where I shudder when I see them, that filter up from my brain at unexpected moments.

• Passage
• Shenmue
• Shenmue II
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Killer 7
• Majora’s Mask
• Flower

Next, games that delight: games that bring a smile to my face just thinking of them.

• Katamari Damacy
• Space Channel 5
• Okami
• Grow Cube

And finally, a trio of games that, in their own ways, try to push onto both of the above lists.

• Animal Crossing
• Rez
• Jet Grind Radio

I’m really not sure what to say about Noby Noby Boy. Coming in, I was aware that it’s more of a toy than a game, that you have to make your own goals. Which I did (and, eventually spent some time trying out the goals associated to the game’s trophies), which was pleasant enough, but ultimately not particularly fulfilling.

At least making and accomplishing the goals wasn’t. The process of trying to accomplish them was more satisfying, however, in its own way. Even when you’re trying to accomplish something in Noby Noby Boy, you’re not really doing much: you’re holding the two thumbsticks in opposite directions while stretching, or you’re waiting for people to jump on your back, or you’re eating with one end and, optionally, pooping out the other end. And it turns out that this rather soothing: I’d realize that I’d spent the last ten minutes doing almost nothing, but in a way that made me feel better rather than worse.

A peculiar toy. And, with it, I have now finished (or “finished”) two games for the PS3, for which I spent a grant total of fifteen dollars. Just another 46 games to go, and I’ll have spent as much on games as I spent on the PS3 itself! (Actually, I have bought a couple of on-disc games because of VGHVI multiplayer nights, but never mind that…)

Not too many blog posts written about the game, but there’s a rather interesting Experience Points podcast on the topic.

• A cross-game comparison of play incentives. (Really via @smgrimes, though Twitter wants me to credit @john_carter.)
• Journalistic objectivity. Time for me to reread Manufacturing Consent?
• Massively collaborative mathematics.
• Game design as government.
• We The Giants.

• Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and comics.

  (Via 37 Signals.)

• Going West. (Via Dubious Quality.)
• Omohide is going through all of the Studio Ghibli movies, for those of you who want to read about the less-famous ones.

I was intending for BioShock to be one of the first games I played on my 360 but, well, one thing after another came up, and it took me a couple of years to get around to the game. In the mean time, it has garnered some amount of discussion, so I’m fairly sure I won’t have anything particularly novel to say on the subject, but that’s never stopped me before…

At any rate, as soon as I stepped into the entry area to Rapture and heard a slightly scratchy rendition of Beyond the Sea, I was hooked. The musical selections really are wonderful—I was going to write that it’s the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps the most with my iPod, until I realized that was patently false, but it’s right up there, and it’s definitely the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps most with the music sitting on top of my piano. And the music is just one aspect of the wonderfully nostalgic world they’ve created: I love the industrial design, the signs and artifacts that are sprinkled about. My only quibble is that the sequences of rooms often didn’t seem to fit together as a coherent three-dimensional chunk, but I can’t think of a first-person shooter that’s handled that better.

Very nice gameplay, too: I don’t like FPSes in general, and I was a bit worried that I’d be paralyzed by the choice of different plasmids; the latter didn’t happen, though, and I rather enjoyed some of the alternative gameplay mechanisms. (I’m a sucker for picture taking as a game mechanism, and the hacking minigame was pleasant enough.) And I appreciated some of the thoughtful choices the game made, e.g. not allowing me to waste my film taking pictures of enemies whose research I’d already maxed out, instead of treating film as an ammo like any other.

I could go into more detail about all of that, but, as with so many other people, all I really want to talk about is the Little Sisters. When I first heard about them and saw pictures of them in the prerelease coverage of the game (back when I actually paid attention to prerelease coverage of games!), they freaked me out enough that I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game at all. I’m largely inured to video game violence, but for whatever reason (perhaps because I have a daughter myself, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time), those pictures really hit home, and I was not at all looking forward to playing through a game with such imagery in it.

I eventually came around, and I’m glad I did. But, with that as my initial impression of the game, the thought of harvesting Little Sisters never crossed my mind. In general, I’m not very good at appreciating “moral dilemmas” in video games (sorry, BioWare), because, given a choice, I can rarely imagine following one of the options. And this game would be an example, except that there’s a third, covert choice here.

Consider: I’ve been thrust into an extremely dangerous and extremely strange world. Almost everybody I meet seems to want to kill me; there’s a voice on the radio acting nice enough, but those I encounter in the flesh are rather less pleasant. And, in the middle of all of this, there are these strange little girls, with “Big Daddies” hulking nearby; neither of them wants to hurt me, the Big Daddies protect the girls, and the girls are evidently quite fond of the Big Daddies. (Or of “Mr. Bubbles”, as they call them.)

Given this, what kind of person would kill the Big Daddies? The main answer, I think, is a psychopath: either somebody who is so amoral as not to care, or so afflicted with a sort of white man’s burden megalomania as to think they can march in and set things to right. (Without doing any of the real work that is actually involved in looking after young children in even a normal environment, let alone a murderous one.) But somehow, in this game, killing their protectors and leaving the girls with nobody to guard and care for them in a place like Rapture is supposed to be the good choice?

I assume that the game designers had some uncomfortable thoughts along the same lines, because of the way they structured the first Little Sister encounter. In that one, the Big Daddy is already dead, and you have to save the Little Sister from a splicer yourself. After which, you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.

Given this, using the magic device Tenenbaum has given you that is supposed to cure the Little Sisters is horrifically irresponsible at best; and, even if you’re tempted to do so, not stopping when the girl cries out in horror is, well, beyond my powers to describe. I felt intensely uncomfortable, but of course the game doesn’t give you a chance to stop when she complains. (Incidentally, when rescuing Little Sisters here and over the course of the game, l Iearned something about how I act when I’m uncomfortable: every single time I rescued a Little Sister and heard those protests, I raised my left arm and scratched the back of my head. What a bizarre tic, I’m not sure I wanted to learn of its existence.) Stopping when confronted with the choice would have been conceivable, but I’m almost positive that the game wouldn’t have let me continue without doing something to the first Little Sister. (And, in the extremely unlikely case that it would have let me proceed, I’m also sure it wouldn’t have let me actually look after her.)

And, once you’ve rescued the first Little Sister, she thanks you, setting you on the slope to further evil: the next time you meet one, she’s with her Big Daddy, but you can rationalize (given all the other murder you’re committing in the game) killing her protector, because the end result is for her own good, right? (It is, of course, for your own good, but we’ll have to construct some sort of rationalization that goes beyond that.) Which I dutifully did because the game expected that of me—given that I wasn’t going to stop playing the game, I decided to go along with its design—but doing so broke my heart every time. (As did seeing a Big Daddy alone later on in that same level—in retrospect, watching a video, it wasn’t the Big Daddy protecting the first Little Sister I’d rescued, but that’s how I interpreted it at the time. Even if you accept that rescuing the Little Sisters is best for them, how can you justify killing their surrogate fathers while doing so?) Unlike with the first Little Sister I assume that it is possible to avoid killing any of the later Big Daddies; if I were more given to alternative playthrough styles, trying the game that way would be very high on my list.

A powerful game, and a very good one. Though also, in its own way a very depressing one: it’s one of the pinnacles of our art form, but it devotes most of its art to exploring adolescent Randian power fantasies instead of, say, exploring a topic like what it means to be a parent. (And that final movie shows just how paint-by-numbers the game designers’ basic approach in that area seems to be.) Sigh. Maybe I should come around to Chris Hyde’s point of view and turn more of my attention elsewhere.

(First, a few notes: 1) I have a conflict of interest with respect to the game I’m discussing here. I haven’t worked on it and I don’t have any particular inside information about anything I’m speculating about here, else I’d have to be rather more careful about what I write, but obviously I want it to succeed. 2) Normally, games don’t have a canonical URL to refer to, so I link to a page I create for them in my database. Facebook games (and Flash games, for that matter) do have a URL, but, after some reflection, I am going to maintain the same practice, in order to maintain my automatic game-to-blog back references and to avoid treating them in a non-parallel and potentially second-class manner. I will add the link to the game on the database page, though, so if you want to play them, two clicks will get you to the right place. 3) Facebook games change a lot more quickly than disc-based games, so anything that I say here could be inaccurate by the time you read this. In fact, with the magic of A/B testing, the game that I see could be a significantly different game from the game that you see, even if we’re playing at the same time!)

We launched a couple of games last week: Wild Ones is a social networking take on Worms, while Tiki Farm is our latest entry into the farm genre. And they’re both a lot of fun, go play them! (And send me lots of goo gun ammo…) I want to talk about Tiki Farm in particular for a while, because it’s managed to work its way into my brain in ways that I didn’t expect. (Aside from its theme song, which I find myself whistling at random moments…)

In typical competing farm games, the main constraint (assuming your goal is to level up and accumulate in-game cash) is the player’s time: you can plow or plant all you want, so as long as you’re willing to put in the time to return to your farm to harvest the crops, you can make quite a bit of in-game money. Actually, that’s not quite true: FarmVille puts a limit on the size of your farm unless which you can only expand by having many friends playing the game or by paying its publisher real money (not in-game money); that’s a pretty clever idea from a virality / profit point of view, but it’s still a fairly coarse-grained cap. (Though, I should add, one which emphasizes that the main constraint is the player’s time: do you really want to spend the time to regularly plow and harvest 60 plots? And of course withering crops are another way in which the player’s time is emphasized as a constraint.)

In contrast, the primary constraint in Tiki Farm is the number of plots available: you start off with only ten or so plots available, and you only get access to two more plots each level. Which left me a bit nonplussed at first—that’s kind of a lame artificial constraint, no?—but as I made it through the initial levels, my opinion of that feature changed. For one thing, I found that not having to worry about picking the size (in terms of plots) of my farm relaxed me: a whole set of conscious and subconscious worries went away. (It’s similar, perhaps to the way I relaxed and started enjoying Deus Ex a lot more once I hit the ammo caps.)

But, for another thing, having such a clear constraint focused my game play in a way that it’s not always focused in other similar games. As the Theory of Constraints teaches us, having a constraint isn’t a bad thing: assuming that your constraint is a sensible one, you can use it to focus your actions, by subordinating the rest of your system to that constraint. What that means in Tiki Farm is that you want to use your other resources in such a way that your primary constraint is being used at its maximum capacity. In other words: you always want to be growing something in those plots.

Which is easy enough to accomplish: the in-game currency (shells) is plentiful enough that you shouldn’t be in serious danger of not being able to buy seeds. In particular, you can sell any crop for more than you paid for it, so as long as you make the habit of replanting as soon as you harvest, you’ll be fine. At which point the question becomes: how frequently do you want to return to the game? Once you’ve made that choice, it’s pretty obvious which crop to choose (yams during my initial burst of power-leveling in the game), and you can get a nice little economy going, periodically earning enough excess profit to let you buy other items to decorate your island.

Or so I thought, until the first time when I wanted to do a purchase that would last me overnight. I’d been planting yams (a 15 minute crop); I wanted to shift to a longer timespan crop, and the obvious candidate was taro root (an 8-hour crop). The problem is that yams sell for 23 shells each, while taro root costs 45 shells; I’d get enough higher profit for taro root to be a better choice overnight, but I couldn’t afford to fill my plots with taro root based on the sales I’d just made! (It didn’t help that I’d recently sunk some of my profits into a very stylish cocktail chair.)

So, basically, working strictly on a throughput basis wasn’t good enough: a changing time investment mix led to a changing crop mix led to a changing fixed cost investment mix. In lean terms: I’d been concentrating on muda (waste, in the form of excess inventory of shells), but all of a sudden I needed to worry about mura (unevenness) instead! To be concrete, it’s a lot easier to plan a straightforward Tiki Farm economy if I’m going to play once a day at the same time (just pick a good 1-day crop and stick to it) than if I’m going to play multiple times during the day and (of course) not play at all while I’m sleeping.

An interesting lean lesson there; I still want to spend some time analyzing the economy to figure out the tradeoffs between inventory, throughput, and time. But without such a clear constraint, I’m not sure these issues would have arisen in a fashion that grabbed me so much.

Though, of course, the constraint isn’t as clear as I’m painting it. For one thing, you use plots to grow crops that you plant from seed; you can also buy trees, however, which bear fruit indefinitely after you plant them. So, in effect, a tree is a plot that you can purchase and that’s particularly inflexible; if you want to grow your economy as quickly as possible, you should siphon off your profits towards trees.

And that’s only if you’re playing solo. If you’re playing with friends, you can give each other gifts; a basic question there is, are trees better gifts or seeds? If somebody gives you a seed, it’s pure profit when it grows, so if you have enough friends giving you seeds, the amount of shells you can make increases vastly. But trees give you shells in perpetuity, so they’re probably still a win in the long-term; then again, you have a fixed island size as a hard constraint, so it’s conceivable that the time scales in question are long enough that trees aren’t as big a win as I think they are. (I certainly won’t turn up my nose at either sort of gift from my friends!)

And, while plot size is a major constraint, it’s not fixed: the number of plots does increase as you level up. This suggests another potential win for seeds: they give you opportunities to get experience points more quickly, earning you more plots. I should actually take the time to understand experience point opportunities better: in particular, do all seeds give you the same XP, or does it vary with the seeds? And, again, the social nature of the game increases the complexity here: for a while, a significant component of my leveling up was spending time clearing bugs off of my friends’ farms.

Speaking of which just what are the implications of helping others’ farms? As far as I can tell, opportunities to help others’ farms in FarmVille are largely artificial (I never see raccoons on my own farm); is that true for Tiki Farm, too, or does clearing bugs off of a friends’ farm have a real effect? If it does, it’s a double-edged one: on the one hand, I’m helping their crops grow faster; but, on the other hand, I’m depriving them of the opportunity to earn XP from clearing their own bugs. I kind of hope that clearing bugs is a real effect; if so, we have a much gentler version of the crop-stealing mechanics that are apparently present in Chinese farming games.

Fun stuff; I hope the game does well, there’s more there than meets the eye. Incidentally, if you’re not already my friend on Facebook, please send me a friends request; just identify yourself as a blog reader if you’re not sure that I know who you are. Or, alternatively, don’t send me a friends request: the only items I post on Facebook are stuff forwarded from my Twitter feed plus Facebook-game-related stuff. So if you want to see the Facebook game items or if you don’t use Twitter, then Facebook is the place to go; otherwise, you’re better off just sticking with following me on Twitter. (If you want my microblogging at all!)

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who contributed to Michael’s and my efforts to gather money to fly Ben to GDC. We raised $935.50 from 40 contributions by the deadline, and a couple other people chipped in right after the widget closed to bring us up to the $1100 goal, making the effort a rousing success.

I am extraordinarily grateful to all of you who contributed; it was a wonderful sign of what this community means to all of us, and I’m sure that Ben will more than repay the trust that you have placed in him. I’m very much looking forward to meeting him in person (along with any of my other blog readers who will be there; I registered for GDC myself earlier this week!) and reading his articles that will come out of this.

I just got called for survey purposes (about the economy, health care, and the like); I thought that it was a bit odd when they asked me if I was a blogger (not just a journalist), but hey, maybe that’s the new best standard? And they seemed happy enough when I said that I generally blog about entertainment topics. At any rate, I was willing to devote five minutes of my time to the cause of statistics.

Or at least I was until I heard the first question: “do you think the country is basically going in the right direction or do you think things are going pretty seriously off track?” Yeah, survey purposes, right.

Time to go e-mail my various representatives, I think, just to provide a bit of a nudge in the direction I want?

Update: I have been convinced by some of my commentors that, at the very least, the title of this post is inappropriate.

I try to write a blog post after every game that I finish playing (or, in this case, take a temporary break from playing), but really: what more do I have to say about Rock Band 2? As Bill Harris put it, it’s “more of a lifestyle than a game”, and it’s a lifestyle that I’ve discussed enough here. Well, actually, I probably haven’t discussed it enough here, but thoughts are fleeting at times, and I’m not coming up with further inspiration at the moment.

If there’s a game I’ve played more this decade, though, I don’t know what it is.

One of my biggest surprises when learning Haskell has been how my typical test-driven development steps fail: it’s easy to write a couple of tests and get them to pass gracelessly, but surprisingly quickly I run into a test that I can’t get to pass without actually being smart, forcing me to make a leap that’s uncomfortably large from my previous position.

I ran into a situation like that last night, and I decided to try to take that big step apart; here’s what I ended up with. The problem in question was exercise 3 on page 84: it told me to print out the first word of each line of its input. My first two tests were as follows:

firstWordsTests =
    TestList["empty" ~: "" @=? firstWords "",
             "one line" ~: "first\n" @=? firstWords "first words\n"]

which I got passing with this implementation:

firstWords "" = ""
firstWords line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

The third test was where I ran into trouble, though:

firstWordsTests =
    TestList["empty" ~: "" @=? firstWords "",
             "one line" ~: "first\n" @=? firstWords "first words\n",
             "two lines" ~: "one\ntwo\n" @=?
                         firstWords "one line\ntwo lines\n"]]

How can I write a pattern which will match the third case? Not at all clear to me, but at least it points out the direction I’m going in: I want to add lines to the test cases until some sort of looping construct falls out. Given that, let’s try to refactor against one red bar in a way that brings out the decomposition into lines that’s latent here.

Fortunately, Haskell has a function lines that transforms a string into a list of the lines making up that string; let’s rewrite firstWords to use it. The smallest step that I managed to come up with to do so was this:

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [] = ""
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [line] = head (words line) ++ "\n"

Which is a larger step than I’m comfortable with, but at least it’s small enough conceptually that I don’t feel like I’ve leapt into the unknown. I’m not sure what to call this sort of transformation—maybe “Insert Intermediate List”?

(Incidentally, the observant reader will note that this transformation isn’t a refactoring: it preserves the red and green bars, but the nature of the red bar goes from an unexpected result to an exception being thrown. That’s okay with me; what I’m doing is still useful as an implementation pattern. Hmm, maybe I should try writing these transformations up in an Alexandrian style?)

And, after that step, it’s now obvious how to get my test to pass:

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [] = ""
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [line] = head (words line) ++ "\n"
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (line1 : line2 : []) =
        (head (words line1) ++ "\n") ++ (head (words line2) ++ "\n")

At this point, we have some obvious code duplication; Extract Method turns it into

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [] = ""
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [line] = firstWordLine line
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (line1 : line2 : []) =
        firstWordLine line1 ++ firstWordLine line2
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

At which point it’s pretty obvious that we’re doing something quite similar to all elements on the list, so we want to transform this into a map plus a subsequent operation. And, in fact, the subsequent operation is concatenating all of the list elements together; keeping that in mind, we do an Insert Intermediate List on the third case, giving us:

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [] = ""
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [line] = firstWordLine line
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (line1 : line2 : []) =
        concat [firstWordLine line1, firstWordLine line2]
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

That makes the structure clear for the third branch, and also makes it obvious that we can write the first two branches the same way:

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [] = concat []
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray [line] = concat [firstWordLine line]
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (line1 : line2 : []) =
        concat [firstWordLine line1, firstWordLine line2]
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

So now we have our map operation:

firstWords input = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray (lines input) where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray lines = concat (map firstWordLine lines)
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

(These last three steps seem like they should all go together: Extract Identical List Operation?)

Now the code is looking nice (and, in addition, would pass more tests should we choose to write them), and the challenge turns towards expressing it as tersely and clearly as possible. First, Replace Unaltered Parameter with Composition to get:

firstWords = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray . lines where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray lines = concat (map firstWordLine lines)
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

Do it again (throwing a bit of currying into the mix):

firstWords = concatFirstWordsOfLineArray . lines where
    concatFirstWordsOfLineArray = concat . (map firstWordLine)
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

And, by now, concatFirstWordsOfLineArray clearly isn’t pulling its weight, so we Inline Method:

firstWords = (concat . (map firstWordLine) . lines) where
    firstWordLine line = head (words line) ++ "\n"

I still want to make this shorter, which in Haskell land frequently seems to mean using Replace Unaltered Parameter with Composition; to that end, we rewrite the latter definition as

firstWords = concat . (map firstWordLine) . lines where
    firstWordLine line = (++ "\n") . (head (words line))

That lets us turn it into:

firstWords = concat . (map firstWordLine) . lines where
    firstWordLine = (++ "\n") . head . words

at which point we can Inline Method again, and get:

firstWords = concat . (map ((++ "\n") . head . words)) . lines

Which is short, but you have to think a little bit as to what it means; what I’d like to do is find a way to get the unlines function in there, which is a function that takes a list of strings and concatenates them with newlines between. The next step in that direction is to realize that map distributes over function composition; so we Distribute Map, giving us

firstWords = concat . (map (++ "\n")) . (map (head . words)) . lines

and, indeed, the first half of that is exactly unlines:

firstWords = unlines . (map (head . words)) . lines

Phew! The code is now about as terse as I can think of while passing those three tests, and it passes several other new tests that I might think of to boot. And, as a bonus, this version is clearer than any of its predecessors: we split the input into a list of lines (lines), then we grab the first word out of each of those lines (map (head . words)), then we smoosh all of those lines back together (unlines). Though, as Bryan pointed out to me, I forgot to write one test (which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader), but getting the code to pass that last test was a lot easier in this form than it would have been in forms further up the blog page. (Bryan also had some suggestions for how I might use QuickCheck instead of HUnit to test this, which I hope to be able to follow up over the coming months.)

If this sounds interesting (or if it sounds bizarre but if the idea of learning Haskell sounds interesting despite my peculiar approach), it’s not too late to join the reading group: none of us are moving at a very fast pace, so it shouldn’t be much trouble for a newcomer to catch up.

• How to lose an argument online.
• I’d been thinking for a while that ‘hardcore’ was only useful as a term in a polemic I had no interest in making.
• Three false constraints on game design challenges.
• I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I won’t be able to avoid playing Dragon Age. (But I’ll hold off until after Mass Effect 2…)
• A nice flash game puzzle concept. (Via Chewing Pixels.)
• I had no idea that the roots of integer polynomials made such an interesting picture.
• Ben has made a book out of his Permadeath saga, and it’s wonderful to read.
• A pleasantly sensible list of teamwork skills. (Via @DavidChilcott.)
• Canadian Football fans are kind of weird. (Via @TimBray.)
• The downside of geek social cues. (Via @martinfowler, though Twitter is insisting that I instead credit @sylvanstargazer.)
• I continue to be a 37 Signals fan. (Via @dhh, unsurprisingly.)
• Google has a public DNS server now? That could be useful. (Via @therealfitz.)

I don’t have a lot to say about Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box—it’s a great game (my wife and I both blew through it in a few days, and Miranda also zoomed through most of it), but it adds essentially nothing to the formula created by its predecessor.

One thing that struck me: when you launch the game from a save, it gives you a little cut scene that brings you back into the game world by reminding you what you’ve just done and where you’re going. A nice touch, one that games could adopt more, though perhaps it’s better suited to 2D games than 3D games.

There hasn’t been much blogged about the game, but I did run into a few posts: from the Experience Points Blog, Jorge Albor gives us a review and Scott Juster discusses the main character and the game’s linearity; Chas of Boldstate talks about how the tea-drinking minigame has changed his life.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the Big Surf Island expansion expansion to Burnout Paradise got me appreciating the game in a rather more visceral way than I had before then: all the different gameplay options crammed together in one small package hooked me on the game fairly seriously. So I decided to go back and give the main game more of a try, both for fun and to see if I could make sense of it all.

It’s a rather open-ended game; I could potentially keep on playing it indefinitely, but right now I’m playing too many open-ended games rather than too few. (Until a couple of weeks ago, the only games I had in progress were Burnout Paradise, Rock Band 2, and The Beatles: Rock Band, which could easily work together to use up all of my free game-playing time for half a year if I let them.) So I knew that I had to set goals for my Burnout play: clearly I should try to get a Burnout license, but equally clearly I shouldn’t try to get an Elite license, and I should probably throw in some more exploratory goals as well.

While earning my Burnout license, I put a heavy emphasis on burning routes, because I hadn’t completed almost any of them. (In fact, when I started my recent round of play, I’d only unlocked five or so cars from the original game.) And I’m really glad I did: for one thing, on a pure gameplay level, I enjoy them more than the traditional race events. And collecting stuff is always nice, too. But it also game me a feel for the different cars: in particular, doing a road rage event in the higher licenses with an early trick car is a completely different feel from doing that same event with a good aggression car. (And getting a takedown rampage is very satisfying indeed!) I still like to use a good trick car most of the time, and I haven’t yet found much use for speed cars, but I’m glad to have been exposed to the variety.

So that worked well to get me more familiar with the different events and with the different cars. But I wanted to spend time exploring the environment as well: to that end, I decided to try to get 100% completion on Big Surf Island, and to do all the time road rules.

The former brought home the difference between the different discovery objectives. The smash gates are everywhere, giving you lots of little rewards, but finding the last few can be a bit annoying; not too annoying, though, it turns out. (The small size of the island may have helped.) The jumps are much fewer in number; the plus side is that they’re a lot of fun to do, but the down side is that there’s no visual clue as to whether or not you’ve already completed a jump. (Fortunately, I ended up completing all the Big Surf Island jumps while looking for other stuff.) And the billboards are by far the most satisfying of the three: they’re obvious enough that you can locate them all without too much work (though it didn’t hurt that I had Miranda as a spotter while I was driving around), but once you’ve found one, it can take several minutes to figure out the proper approach to it, and a couple more minutes to actually pull off your jump at the correct speed and angle. Which, in the wrong situation, could be frustrating, but somehow that never happened to me.

So finishing Big Surf Island was great. (And unlocking toy cars was a nice bonus!) But I still wanted to delve into the layout of the main game a bit more deeply; doing the time road routes on every road seemed like the best vehicle for that, since it would force me to cross every road on the map.

Which I would normally have assumed that I would already have done, if there weren’t several counters that proved to me otherwise. At this point, I’d done close to a hundred missions, and spent several hours just wandering around during VGHVI multiplayer nights: the map wasn’t that large, surely I’d driven all over it by then, except perhaps for a few cleverly hidden crannies? But no: I hadn’t yet found all the events, even though they’re all located at intersections; I hadn’t found a couple of the drive-throughs; and there was even a car park somewhere that I hadn’t found. (That last still boggles my mind: there aren’t that many, they’re all right there in the city, but I still didn’t find the last one until I had something like 15 road rules left to earn.)

This is an area of the game’s design that I came to appreciate more and more. When you first start playing the game, the events seem somewhat random: you can trigger an event by pulling up to any of over 100 intersections in the city, many of them have you driving to another location, and my initial assumption was that the ending locations were distributed in much the same way that the starting locations were. This turns out not to be the case, though I didn’t realize that until I had put quite a bit of time into the game: in fact, there are only eight final destinations.

One benefit of this is pretty straightforward: the map and its wealth of alternate routes can be overwhelming at first. And having a fixed list of destinations helps you get a grasp on this: you may be starting at a relatively random location (or you may not be—for all I know, the starting locations for events with a fixed destination may be carefully chosen as well), but it doesn’t take too much driving along towards the destination before you start funneling onto a familiar route, which you become more and more familiar with as you play more of the game.

But there’s a flip side to that funneling: there are various routes that are almost never going to be natural paths to take to get to those eight destinations. And this, in turn, leaves surprisingly large areas of the map that you’re less likely to have explored; even with some amount of wandering on your own, you’ll still have several lurking gaps on your map.

And the process of becoming aware of those gaps is brilliant: rather than the game designers overtly telling you what you’ve done and what you haven’t, they simultaneously give you counters that you can use to measure how much is unexplored (events / drive-throughs found) and a game play mechanism that lets you keep track of those areas one by one if you take the effort to do so (time road rules). Also note that ticking off the latter requires you to complete a task, not just to be present in that location: this not only made the ticking off more interesting than it would have been otherwise but also served as a further masking effect, hiding the fact that there were locations to tick off (as opposed to actions to tick off that happened to be at those locations) until I’d put quite a bit of time into the game.

The result is the most subtly unfolding open-world game I’ve ever seen: on the one hand, the entire map is open right from the start (no bridges to magically get repaired), on the other hand you’re always finding that there are more areas for you to explore than you realized, and on the third hand you’re given gentle guidance in that exploration, you’re not just dropped in a world with a map that you can’t even color in yourself and told to have fun.

So the time road rules were quietly awesome from a game construction point of view; as a bonus, they were quite a bit of fun as well. I particularly liked the range of times (sub-10-seconds all the way to 2-minutes-plus) and of difficulty levels. Also, doing the road rules (and driving back if I spotted something interesting) revealed that the exploration discoverables were distributed in a fair manner across the map: in particular, without making an exhaustive effort to search them out, I’ve gone through all the smash gates in a couple of the map regions, and 391 of the 400 in the game overall.

A great game, and I could easily keep on playing for quite a bit longer: I’m so close on the discoverables that it’s very tempting to finish them off (and I know I would have a lot of fun on the billboards), there are still quite a few more burning routes for me to do, and doing some googling while writing this blog post reminds me that there’s bike-specific content that I haven’t done. But there are quite a few games out there that I really want to play, starting with the sequel to last year’s game-of-the-year. So I’m giving the game a pause for now, stopping to collect my thoughts one more time.

Incidentally, as part of the prep work for this blog post, I searched for what other bloggers had said about Burnout Paradise. There’s a fair amount of good stuff, and I’ll include links to what I turned up at the bottom of this post, but there’s one particular dialogue that interested me. Mitch Krpata posted a trio of posts on the subject; he and Michael Abbott then discussed the game on a podcast episode. And reading/listening to them, my first reaction was: how can a couple of people whose opinions I generally respect a lot be so wrong on this game? They treat it as a racing game with open-world elements grafted on in a faddish and misguided manner; Mitch, for example, goes on about how the inclusion of “hidden collectables” (the smash gates, billboards, etc.) is “obligatory inclusion” of items which are “anithetical to the Burnout ideal” (because they “reward stopping”) and “worse still, … [don’t] actually have an impact on gameplay.”

That last quote in particular reveals the lens that Mitch was looking at the game through, equating gameplay with races. In fact, though, there’s quite a lot more gameplay that you can do; the list that I came up with is as follows:

• Races.
• Road rage events.
• Stunt runs.
• Mixtures between the above, e.g. marked man events.
• Online variants of the above.
• Unlocking cars, via three different mechanisms.
• Discovering objects/actions strategically placed through the game. (Smash gates, jumps, drive-throughs, car parks.)
• Discovering billboards and figure out how to smash them.
• Systematically exploring all the roads in the game.
• Showtime mode.
• Objective-based online gameplay.
• Exploring sandbox areas of the map that are particularly well suited to a specific style of play.
• Just drive around the map seeing what there is to see.

That’s a lot of stuff to do; and I personally found each item in that list to be rewarding on its own merits, rather than to be judged solely as to how it helps or fails to help another row in the list.

But, having said that, and assuming you accept my claim that Michael and Mitch were coming at the game from a needlessly limiting perspective, I think their having done so is fairly reasonable. I don’t know if Mitch changed his mind on the game, but Michael did a complete about-face on it: it just took him four months to reach that point. And, while it’s hard for me to reach back into my memories of first playing the game, I’m fairly sure that I started off with opinions a lot closer to Mitch’s than to my current state of mind: while I’d never played a Burnout game before, I’d played a bunch of racing games, so the events were what I focused on, and the races were my priority within those events.

And it took me quite a while to get over that; I doubt, if Big Surf Island hadn’t come along, that I would have chosen to invest the time in the game that I needed to get to where I appreciated the range of what it offered for me. Maybe somebody without prior racing game experience (or somebody who had racing game experience but didn’t like them) would be more open to the gameplay possibilities than I was; but I suspect that Michael and I aren’t alone among traditional gamers in needing time to see what’s there in front of us. (In fact, here’s another example!)

Doing something new is hard for developers, and helping players appreciate those new aspects is doubly hard; I’m grateful to Criterion for the work they’ve put in changing the game and making it easier to appreciate the variety that is there. And, while I’m taking a break from the game now, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in a month or three, I find myself taking a spin through downtown Paradise City again trying to find all the billboards, smash gates, and jumps, or taking the bikes for a more serious rice, or trying to improve my stunt run scores.

Some posts that other people have written on the game; my apologies for not touching on most of them:

• The three articles by Mitch Krpata and the two Brainy Gamer podcast episodes that I mentioned above.
• N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo devoted a Vs. Mode to the game
• Iroquois Pliskin of Versus CluClu Land on how BP simultaneously solves problems that open-world games have and problems that racing games have.
• Sean Beanland of Finding the Fun also took a while to get hooked on the game; he returned later with a discussion of how the game handles difficulty.
• Bonnie Ruberg of Heroine Sheik calls it “a driving game for girls”.
• Matthew Gallant of The Quixotic Engineer on Restarting, Downtime, and Variety.
• Jebus of Noise Tanks! on Criterion’s continued support for the game; Michael Abbott also lauded Criterion for this.
• Nelson Minar on in-game advertising; remember the Obama ads?
• Chris Dahlen of Save the Robot talks about The Empty Streets of Paradise City.

I would like to thank everybody who has contributed so far to our effort to fly Ben to GDC; it’s been a week, and we’re halfway there! ($557.50 out of $1100, as of this writing, to be specific.) Of course, the flip side is that we still have over five hundred dollars to go; we’ll find the money somehow, but it would be easier if we had more contributions.

So I have two requests. First: if you were planning to donate but hadn’t gotten around to doing so, please let this serve as a reminder. Second: if you have already donated, could you please publicize this somehow? (E.g. by mentioning it on twitter.) We’d really appreciate it. And, again, thanks to everybody who has donated already or who is prompted by this to do so.

• Gerald Weinberg is, sadly, in poor health.

• Never tried doing Rock Band vocals this way… (Takes 15 seconds or so to actually start.)

  (Via @dan_schmidt.)

• R.I.P., Brother Blue. (Via @scottros.)
• The difference between motion and action. (Via @harlan_knight.)
• An unforeseen design problem. (Via @shawnr.)
• Nice perspective on slow programming languages.
• Glad to see non-Miyazaki Ghibli getting some love.
• Some great pictures on here. (Via Dubious Quality.)

I’m sure that most of the readers of my blog are familiar with Ben Abraham. He’s been a key figure in the video game blogging community for the last couple of years, both through his own blog (most recently with his permadeath series) and his tireless participation in discussions in other blogs and fora (I’ve certainly enjoyed his Vintage Game Club contributions). Earlier this year, he founded Critical Distance, not to act as a home for his own writings but to highlight others’ writings, to enrich our discussions by making us aware of thoughts and works that we would otherwise have missed.

I had a great time earlier this year in the heady mix of conversations and ideas that is the Game Developer’s Conference; but, during and after that time, I kept wishing that Ben had been there, because I really would have liked to hear his perspective on the event, to hear about what he would have dug up that I missed in all the hubbub. And, chatting with Michael Abbott recently, I found that he felt the same way.

So Michael and I have decided to draft Ben to serve as a sort of roving reporter for GDC! And in a happy turn of events, Gamasutra has graciously consented to arrange for him to have access to the event: as part of the agreement that is allowing them to publish Ben’s This Week in Videogame Blogging series, they are kindly providing a GDC 2010 all-access entry pass for Ben.

Which gets the major hurdle out of the way; but there remains a rather large ocean between Ben and GDC. And this is where I would like to enlist your assistance, because intercontinental plane flights aren’t cheap. If you’ve appreciated Ben’s nurturing of our community the way I have, please use the widget below to help defray his plane flight expenses. If you’ll chip in the price of the last video game you bought, we’ll easily be able to pay for his plane flight; if that’s too much, smaller amounts are also welcome. All the money we gather will go directly to Ben’s GDC expenses (except for the credit card processing fees that PayPal deducts); I’d also appreciate people putting this widget on their blog (click on its ‘Copy’ tab), or publicizing this on twitter.

We thank you in advance for all of your help.

(Edit: The values the widget gives below are broken; in fact, rather frustratingly, as I type this it shows less money having been contributed now than it was showing this afternoon! Thanks for those of you who have contributed so far; we’re up to $160 as I type this, which is certainly an encouraging start!)

(Edit 2: Chipin seems to be doing something wrong with their caching headers, or something, because emptying the cache seems to fix the issue. We’re up to $428 now! (now = morning of 11/19))

(Side note: the widget is acting a little funny; there’s normally a 5-minute delay before its total gets updated, but I’m still waiting on one contribution to show up. I’ve got an e-mail in to ChipIn’s support; in the mean time, rest assured that, if you’ve clicked on the widget and told PayPal to send money, it goes directly into a PayPal account I’ve set up for this purpose, whether or not the widget updates properly.)