malvasia bianca

What web sites should I be reading if I want to learn about iPhone / iPod Touch games? There are an awful lot of games for the platform already, with a pretty staggering variety, and the web sites that I’m reading now are generally more focused on the traditional console space. So I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of interesting games that I’m completely unaware of and that there are many more to come.

Incidentally, thanks to all of you who chimed in with twitter client recommendations—I’ve downloaded the clients that you recommended and am planning to cycle through them over the next week or two.

Searching for others’ blog posts about Persona 3 got me exposed to the different kinds of posts people write about games. And I was surprised about the extent to which my search clarified my feelings about what kinds of posts I like.

Generally, the posts fell into a few different categories; I could break them down in a few different ways, but one (not all-inclusive) taxonomy is:

1. “I’ve just started playing this game, here are a few initial reactions.”
2. Reviews.
3. Focused approaches to some theme in the context of the game.

I cherished each example of the third variety that I came across: they invariably got me thinking about the game in a way that I hadn’t before, taught me something new about the game. Unfortunately, they were few and far between. Posts of the first variety, which were much more common, didn’t have a similar impact, but they did at least get me to smile: we’ve all been in that position many times where we’ve just started to play a game, we’re excited by it, and we need to tell somebody about it.

What I wasn’t expecting was my reaction to reviews (which were also quite common): I was generally annoyed by them! This is, I realize, completely unfair: for one thing, that’s what the delete key (or the back button) is for, and for another thing, I simply wasn’t the intended audience for reviews. I’d just finished playing the game, after all, while reviews are targeted at people who are thinking of purchasing the game. Having said that, the more reviews I read (or skimmed, to be honest), the more I wondered why reviews are so common in blogs, who their target audience is, and in what cases I would find them useful. Clearly a lot of people are putting in a fair amount of effort into crafting reviews; to what extent should I follow their lead?

My tentative conclusion to that last question: I should actively avoid writing reviews. I suspect that the reason why so many video game bloggers write them is that we’ve all been exposed to mainstream video game web sites, and reviews are all over the place on those sites. And they’re great there: most of the time, in fact, I think that’s the only useful purpose for mainstream game sites. Clearly other bloggers have spent as much time reading mainstream reviews as I do, because their reviews follow a similar pattern: they lead you through the game play, they talk about “traditional” criteria such as the quality of the graphics or the difficulty or the price, they discuss the plot enough to give you something of a feel for the game while studiously avoiding spoilers.

There are two problems with this approach, though. One is that it tends to give a flat feel to such posts: they follow a relatively narrow template, and, unless the author is rather careful, this means that such posts will feel like a checklist at times. The second problem is that there are a lot of other people out there, including many professional sites, who are following a similar template to you: this means that, by writing traditional review posts, you’re swimming in a red ocean. Concretely, it will probably be the case that anybody reading your review who is actually in the review audience will already have read at least one review for that game from a mainstream site; what are you giving such readers that they won’t have already gotten from that mainstream site?

In my experience, the answer is: not much. Which raises the question of what a poor video game blogger (your humble narrator, for example) is supposed to actually do? Posts of the first variety are pleasant but not particularly satisfying. Posts of the third variety are great, no question about it; I personally however rarely have the energy to write posts like that.

Fortunately, the above taxonomy isn’t inclusive: at the very least, there are hybrids of those three types. Going back to my earlier complaint about reviews: there are two reasons why they almost always feel flat. One is that the author feels compelled to write about certain things that are “supposed” to write about but doesn’t really feel strongly about, so those areas are lacking in energy. The other is that the author feels compelled to not delve in depth into whatever minor aspect happened to have particularly captured her fancy, because that would lead to an unbalanced-reading review.

If, however, we’ve decided that the traditional review structure isn’t, in of itself, a good thing to follow, the latter criticism loses all of its potency, as does the former compulsion. Which leads to the following recommendation, turning both of those points on their head:

1. Write as much as you want about what speaks to you.
2. Don’t write anything at all about what doesn’t speak to you.
3. If the results look weird, if you can’t imagine anybody other than close personal friends being interested in what you are saying, you’re on the right track.

For one thing, you’re simply more likely to write well if you’re writing about something that interests you than if you’re not. You may worry that not many people are interested in what interests you; motivated writing will make up for that to a surprising extent, but even when it fails, consider whom you’re competing against in your search for readers. If you do traditional reviews, you have to compete with thousands of sites, many of which are written by people who have written a hundred times as many reviews as you have, and you’ll have to work extremely hard and be extremely lucky to do a better job than they do. Whereas if you follow your own nose, you’ll have a much smaller potential readership, but a single post that strikes a chord with people who didn’t even know they resonated like that can go a long way. (And, ironically, the more you stay away from a traditional review format, the more you’ll influence others to buy the games you’re passionate about: I know the reasons why I’m interested in, say, Yakuza 2 have nothing to do with reviews that I’ve read of the game and everything to do with little scenes from the game that people felt like they just had to talk about.)

Which looks like it’s leading us back to the third category in my taxonomy above, and if that’s where you end up, great: I’m sure the world needs the definitive post on Shadow of the Colossus furry porn, or whatever topic happens to float your boat. But if you, like me, don’t usually end up quite that focused, that’s fine too: there’s nothing wrong with a hybrid between the first two categories, with a discussion of a game that dives into a few aspects of the game that happened to interest you while studiously ignoring large (or small!) swaths of it.

Michael Abbott recently posted about spoilers, taking the point of view that we should get over our fear of them. When he wrote that, I was largely inclined to agree with him, but I didn’t really understand why: thinking about the issues in this post has clarified that for me. The best pro-spoiler argument (or anti-anti-spoiler argument, I’m not saying spoilers are actively good) isn’t that we should try to imitate discussions of works in other genres, or that we should take a comprehensive approach to games. It’s that we should write about what interests us, that we should write about topics that we have something to say about; the main thing that we would accomplish by putting spoilers off limits is to make our discussion artificially less rich, and why would we want to do that? (See also Michael’s post today about how spending too much time on “games as art” is similarly unproductive compared to personal interpretations of experiences with games.)

So: follow your nose, write about what you’re passionate about, don’t write about what you’re not passionate about, and we’ll all be richer for it.

I’ve recently been reading Bruno Latour‘s Politics of Nature, and have been struck by how well various agile practices fit into his framework. So I want to try to explain his framework (again!), and to explore how agile practices might fit in.

His book begins as a reaction against the split between nature and society, the split between facts and values. He sees in this split a misplaced polemicism: if, for example, these two worlds are separated by a vast gulf, then how is it that scientists, as members of society, manage (quite successfully!) to understand the workings of nature? In place of this split (the “old bicameralism”), Latour proposes a new split (the “new bicameralism”), between the “power to take into account” and the “power to arrange in rank order”.

This isn’t to say that Latour finds the old bicameralism to be completely useless: in particular, he uses both bicameralisms at once to create four quadrants, leading to four requirements, which are, in (temporal) order, “perplexity”, “consultation”, “hierarchy”, and “institution”. The first and last are related to the concept of nature from the old bicameralism, while the middle two are related to society; in the new bicameralism, the first two form the power to take into account, while the last two form the power to arrange in rank order.

To these four requirements, Latour adds two further functions: the separation of powers actively maintains the new bicameralism, the scenarization of the totality works to unify the resulting collective. Finally, the seventh function is the power to follow up, which reminds us that this is an ongoing process rather than a one-time activity that will analyze the world once and for all.

To make these seven functions more concrete, Latour discusses each of them in the context of various professions (scientists, politicians, economists, moralists, administrators); some professions are more associated with one side or the other of the old bicameralism, while some straddle the boundary. I’ll devote one section to each of the functions, giving a brief explanation of that function, a summary of how each of those professions contributes to that function, and ending with a discussion of how that function might be viewed in an agile context.

The Requirement of Perplexity

The first requirement is the requirement of perplexity, also known as the requirement of external reality. It says that “you shall not simplify the number of propositions to be taken into account in the discussion” (p. 109); or “First, the number of candidate entities must not be arbitrarily reduced in the interests of facility or convenience. In other words, nothing must stifle too quickly the perplexity into which the agents find themselves plunged, owing to the emergence of new beings.” (p. 110) In the old bicameralism, it was part of the notion of nature, while in the new bicameralism, it is part of the power to take into account.

Scientists bring to this requirement their remarkable ability to create speech prostheses: they’re wonderfully capable of creating instruments that allow us to be perplexed by the behavior of entities (or candidate propositions, if you like) whose existence we didn’t even suspect a few years prior. Politicians bring their sense of danger to this requirement: if they ignore the wrong people, the wrong facts, they may find themselves out of a job and disgraced before they know it. Economists are particularly sensitive to attachments between humans and nonhumans, increasing the ties between the two as a result. Moralists continually go outside the collective, actively attempting to ensure that those previously excluded have their say. And administrators can keep track of external reality over long periods of time, enabling us to be perplexed by phenomena that we might otherwise miss.

In an agile context, the first thing that the requirement of perplexity brings to mind is tests. An unexpected red bar is a wonderful example of perplexity, a reminder that our intentions of what the software should do aren’t always matched by reality. Like scientists, agilists go out of their way to build pervasive networks of speech prostheses in the form of comprehensive automated test suites. Though there is more to testing than automated tests: perhaps recent discussions of exploratory testing in the community are a reminder of the role of moralists, that we should actively look for the excluded.

Like politicians, agilists also have to have a sense of danger: if what we implement isn’t what potential users want, then we’ll be out of a job. The Customer role is our main defense here: like tests, Customers are a speech prosthesis, this time speaking for humans rather than nonhumans.

The Requirement of Consultation

The second requirement is the requirement of consultation, also known as the requirement of relevance. It says that “You shall make sure that the number of voices that participate in the articulation of propositions is not arbitrarily short-circuited.” (p. 109) Alternatively, “the number of those which participate in this process of perplexing must not itself be limited too quickly or too arbitrarily. The discussion would of course be accelerated, but its outcome would become too easy. It would lack broader consultation, the only form capable of verifying the importance and the qualification of the new entities. On the contrary, it is necessary to make sure that reliable witnesses, assured opinions, credible spokespersons have been summoned up, thanks to a long effort of investigation and provocation (in the etymological sense of “production of voices”).” (p. 110) In the old bicameralism, it was part of the notion of society, while in the new bicameralism, is is part of the power to take into account.

Scientists consult their colleagues through a process of peer review, and ease this consultation through descriptions of their experiments that are precise enough to be replicable. Politicians can really shine here, discussing matters with a whole range of people and groups who might be affected my the matter at hand. Economists can use their practice of attaching a value to interactions to smoke out stakeholders that might be ignored otherwise. Moralists can make sure that the people who are affected by a problem get to chime in, instead of leaving decisions solely up to the traditional powers that be. And administrators help ensure appropriate consultation by verifying the credentials of those wishing to participate.

And agilists? Certainly having a Customer make the business decisions is a big step up from, say, having engineers make those decisions. Of course, you don’t want the business side to go so far as to make decisions without appropriately consulting the engineering side; to that end, having the engineering team in charge of primarily technical decisions is probably consistent with this requirement. In general, I think collective code ownership is aligned with this requirement as well: given that database changes affect everybody working with the data, for example, you don’t want to give a DBA magical powers over them. And retrospectives give a forum where the whole team can be consulted on areas that matter to all of them.

Having said that, I’m not entirely comfortable that the agile role of a Customer does adequate justice to the requirement of perplexity. There are a lot of people outside the engineering team who will be affected by non-engineering design decisions; putting all of them behind a single Customer point of decision doesn’t fit the requirement of relevance, to me. I’m not saying that having a single Customer decision maker is bad—this requirement doesn’t mean that everybody has to have a direct say in every decision, just that they have to be consulted—but there’s a whole lot of consulting that has to go on behind the Customer’s decisions to fit this requirement. And agile is neutral on that: a non-consulting Customer is just as consistent with agile practices than a broadly-consulting one.

The Requirement of Hierarchy

The third requirement is the requirement of hierarchy, also known as the requirement of publicity. It says that “you shall discuss the compatibility of new propositions with those which are already instituted, in such a way as to maintain them all in the same common world that will give them their legitimate place” (p. 109), or that “no new entity can be accepted in the common world without concern for its compatibility with those which already have their place there. It is forbidden, for example, to banish all the secondary qualities by an ultimatum, on the pretext that one already possesses the primary qualities that have become, without due process, the only ingredients of the common world. An explicit work of hierarchization through compromise and accommodation makes it possible to take in, as it were, the novelty of the beings that the work of taking into account would risk multiplying.” (p. 110) In the old bicameralism, it was part of the notion of society, while in the new bicameralism, is is part of the power to arrange in rank order.

The example that Latour gives of this requirement for scientists is their ability to come up with potential compromises through innovations: pig organs might give a way around some of the moral concerns pitting human transplant recipients against their potential donors. If I’m understanding the requirement correctly, scientists also have examples within their own discipline: if you’re trying to overthrow an existing theory, you have to treat the phenomena that it can explain with appropriate respect. Politicians satisfy this requirement in a more straightforward method: they must always compromise in order to get bills passed, to have the government continue to run. Economists can make a whole range of phenomena commensurable, by discussing them in financial terms. The very process of moralizing involves establishing a hierarchy, making judgments of how entities fit into a common framework. And administrators have recorded the previous hierarchization decisions, giving us the framework to enable us to discuss the new hierarchization.

The first agile example that comes to mind here is the existence of your test suite, thought of as regression tests: that’s a very stark example of new entities having to show concern for existing entities. They don’t mean that the world is rigid, that existing features can never change; but if you want to make a change, you’ll have a red bar which you’ll have to explicitly decide how to turn green again. I suspect that the notion that the Customer decides business issues while developers decide engineering issues is consistent with this requirement; certainly the idea that you have a single linearly-ordered stack of incoming stories to implement is. Perhaps Kent Beck’s rules of simple design could also be seen through this prism?

The Requirement of Institution

The fourth requirement is the requirement of institution, also known as the requirement of closure. It says that “Once the propositions have been instituted, you shall no longer question their legitimate presence at the heart of collective life” (p. 109), or that “once the discussion is closed and a hierarchy established, the discussion must not be reopened, and one must be able to use the obvious presence of these states of the world as indisputable premises for all the reasoning to come. Without this requirement of institution, the discussion would never come to an end, and one would never succeed in knowing in what common, self-evident, certain world collective life ought to take place.” (p. 111) In the old bicameralism, it was part of the notion of “fact”; in the new bicameralism, it’s part of the power to arrange in rank order.

Scientists are very good at instituting propositions, at reaching a consensus on a theory and then building upon it. Politicians institute the results of their work in the form of laws; they are willing to bring closure by making enemies instead of trying to keep everybody their friend. Economists document the results of their deliberations in the form of measurements and calculations which can be used to make further decisions. Moralists, perhaps, help us understand the boundaries of institution through their concern for those who are left on the outside. And administrators ensure that the procedures are followed so that the institution happens according to due process.

Agilists have a few tools in this regard. The Scrum notion that you can’t add anything to a sprint once it’s begun is a form of closure, as is the existence of a Customer who has final say on business matters. The existence of an acceptance test suite that isn’t allowed to go red is a manifestation of institution. And agile teams generally have a specific process that they follow (perhaps one of the standard processes combined with local adaptations); that process, together with the idea that you can only alter it through an explicit process (retrospectives, typically) also brings closure to discussions of what to do, instituting the results.

Separation of Powers

The first four functions led us through the process of constructing the collective, leading through the quadrants that were formed by analyzing candidate propositions both through the old bicameralism (facts versus values) and the new bicameralism (the power to take into account and the power to arrange in rank order). The fifth function focuses explicitly on this new bicameralism: it is the separation of powers, “the maintenance of the separation or shuttle between the power to take into account and the power to put in order.” (p. 137)

Scientists bring to this function their tradition of autonomy: you can’t ignore something because it’s not part of the current version of the collective. The very notion of separation of powers comes from the political tradition. Economists are a bit harder to analyze in these terms; Latour’s claim is that their extreme simplifications of attachments between entities helps preserve this separation of powers, but I don’t completely understand his argument. Moralists emphasize the relation between the two houses by concentrating on the shuttle between them rather than the separation: decisions made in the ordering will have effects that we’ll have to take into account. And administrators will be unable to effectively coordinate activities and ensure that proper procedures are followed unless they keep track of which actions are within the one house, which within the other.

Agilists have several rhythms that, I think, fit well into this separation. Perhaps the red bar could be thought of as within the power to take into account, refactoring could be thought of as arranging in rank ordering, and the green bar is the shuttle from the first house to the second? Frequent releases are part of the shuttle from the second house back to the first. I mentioned the Scrum notion that you can’t add anything to an iteration once it’s begun back with the forth requirement (that of closure), but perhaps it fits better here, as part of the separation of powers? At first I thought that the customer / engineering split was part of this separation of powers, but now I’m dubious about that: it’s a separation of powers, certainly, but I don’t think it’s this one, because I don’t think either the Customer or the developers fit in one or the other of the houses.

Scenarization of the Totality

The sixth function is that of scenarization of the totality: “instead of starting from an already-constituted unity (nature or society), the various skills (of the sciences, politics, government, and so on) propose scenarios of unification that are all provisional and that the reconsideration of the collective will quickly make obsolete”. (pp. 248–249)

Scientists package all their individual findings into grand theories, grand narratives, happily rewriting past discoveries into a new narrative structure based on their latest understanding. Politicians are at their most effective when using a narrative that resonates with as many people as possible. Economists provide a scenario for the collective through their model of interactions, through what that model takes into account and what it excludes. Moralists I have a harder time with; my first inclination is that their grand moral statements provide scenarios, but Latour suggests that I’m misreading the intent of this function, giving them instead a role similar to their role in the requirement of closure, as a sort of loyal opposition to the very idea. And unless I’m missing something, Latour doesn’t even propose a role for administrators in this sixth function.

For agilists, that most obscure XP practice of Metaphor is doubtless relevant here. I suspect that refactoring as a whole is: for example, ensuring that each relevant concept lives in one and only one place in the code is a miniature bit of scenarization here. And I suspect that there’s a gap here in agile practices on the Customer side: an effective scenarization is an essential part in presenting your product to its buyers and users, as is the ability to change scenarios as the product evolves.

The Power to Follow up

The seventh and last function is the power to follow up. The journey through the first four requirements isn’t a one-time thing, leading to a collective that has reached its final form. Instead, the resulting collective is a provisional construct, and those placed outside the collective at the end (“enemies”) are there to perplex us, kicking off a new round in which they are candidate members of the perspective at the end of the next cycle.

Scientists bring to this the notion of a research front: the end of one experiment and its analysis suggests many more candidate experiments to carry out. Politicians bring an awareness of changing power relationships: the slogans that got them to power may be as likely to disgrace them two years later. Economists continuously measure the health of a system, its booms and busts and the shifts from one area of the economy to another. Moralists are always on the lookout for areas where we aren’t living up to our ideals, are seeking to represent those who have been previously excluded. And administrators bring continuity to this whole process, making sure that we follow up according to our protocols.

For agilists, this power is embodied in the concept of the iteration or, more generally, the various cycles (minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week) that pervade an agile product. We know as well as anybody that all decisions are provisional: the code that we write to get a test to pass this minute may look quite different fifteen minutes later after we’ve gotten another five tests to pass. The candidate features that have been excluded from this sprint may well be added to the next sprint; alternatively, our experiences over the course of this sprint may bring new candidate features to the fore that we hadn’t dreamed of a day ago. The composition of the collective is constantly in flux: the release that users are using today will differ, perhaps subtly and perhaps remarkably, from the release that they’ll use next month, next week, or at times even an hour from now.

This power is also at the core of the agile desire for clean code. We know that we’ll be going through this process many more times; we want to make sure that our pace through this process doesn’t slow, that our power to follow up doesn’t weaken. More subtly, the agile obsession with the notion of “done” plays into this power: we want to know when we’re following up and when we’re going through the various requirements, and the sharp boundary of doneness is an essential tool in that regard.

Final Thoughts

Looking back through the previous sections, in general I think agile comes off pretty well. Our tests serve us well right at the start, by giving us speech prostheses to detect entities that would otherwise be hidden within the software, and they also assist with the requirements of hierarchy and institution. And our appreciation of the power of iteration is an excellent embodiment of the power to follow up.

There are gaps, however. In particular, I think we’re weaker than we could be when it comes to the requirement of consultation: having genuine customer involvement is much better than having developers make business decisions on their own, and having the developers use velocity as a metric to inform the pace of development is much better than having a product manager try to decide both what goes into the product and the date at which the product will be released. But the idea that a single Customer makes all business decisions is a mockery of the notion of consultation, of seeking out appropriate spokespeople; while nothing forbids the Customer from consulting appropriately, surely we could give more assistance in that regard?

Looking through the examples that Latour gives from other professions, I wonder what agile could learn from them. I think we’ve done a reasonable job at learning from scientists, and even from some of the other professions (e.g. our focus on a few key metrics has something to do with the virtues that economists bring to this enterprise), but not from all of them. In particular, I suspect that digging into the contributions of politicians would be fruitful: like politicians, we have to win a contest by successfully navigating the desires of various interest groups (both internal and internal), so perhaps we should pay more attention to their skills.

As always, I suspect that lean has much to teach us. The single Product Owner doesn’t bother me in the way that the single Customer does, because the Product Owner’s role is symmetric across business and engineering. Set-based development is one answer to the requirement of consultation: it helps ensure that we don’t cut off discussion prematurely. Going to the gemba comes straight out of that requirement: if you’re perplexed about something, go to where that something exists, consulting with both humans and nonhumans who are located there.

It is definitely time for me to buy a new iPod: when driving to the airport, it took me five tries to reset the old one after it locked up, because I couldn’t get the buttons to engage. Given the frequency with which my old one locks up, that will become untenable almost immediately.

Which means that a 16GB iPod Touch is in my near future. So: anybody with an iPhone or a Touch that has a Twitter client that they like? Or, for that matter, one that they dislike? In either case, why?

Update (March 17, 2009): I’ve picked a winner, namely Tweetie.

I’d heard a lot about Persona 3 over the last year, and was torn: on the one hand, it sounded both good and interestingly different, but on the other hand, people reported it as taking 70-100 hours to finish. So it kept on never quite making it to the top of the list to play: I could never convince myself that I’d rather play it instead of another set of five or so games.

Then fate intervened in the form of my Xbox dying in December, a month where I had eleven days off from work between Christmas and New Year’s and no Vintage Game Club games to play. Which turned Persona 3 from a potential serious roadblock in my gameplay schedule into just what I needed to fill a major void! And I wasn’t disappointed in my expectations: it’s a quite different game from others that I’ve played, in ways that I still haven’t wrapped my brain around.

Take its basic genre category: it’s a JRPG. I’m used to thinking of the physical layout in JRPGs as consisting of cities, overworld, and dungeons. Right from the beginning, though Persona 3 avoids that: you do spend time wandering around in the sorts of buildings that you’d find in a traditional JRPG city, but you don’t really wander around in the city as a whole. Instead, the game teleports you from place to place, and you’re teleported under the game’s control at least as frequently as you’re teleported under your control. When you wake up, you don’t get to wander around: you get shown a view of your room, and then get teleported to school. The computer then controls most of your school experience until school gets out (including whether or not you’ll see the inside of any classrooms or get to interact with people during lunch), and occasionally the computer even keeps control after that. I’m used to JRPGs scripting aspects of your experience and removing interactivity via cut scenes; this form of jumping you from place to place with short interactive pieces between was new to me, however. And you see this right at the start of the game: while you do have control of the character reasonably often during the intro, you don’t have enough freedom to actually get to a save point more frequently than every thirty minutes! Fortunately, that aspect of the game calms down a bit, so later on you can save reasonably frequently.

I’m not the only person who found this somewhat jarring, but it actually works quite well: the game is about story, about interactions set in the social framework of a regular school day. So this style of shepherding you from potential interaction to potential interaction puts that front and center: it’s not about you exploring a city and moving on to the next one (with, of course, some sort of overarching save-the-world plot in the background), it’s about the rhythms of your daily life in that same city over the course of most of a year. (Still with an overarching save-the-world plot in the background, though!)

So: the traditional JRPG city model doesn’t really fit this game very well. What about the overworld? That one doesn’t fit so much, either: Tartarus, the dungeon in the game, is located in your school, so you don’t have to travel to get there, and in fact the game just teleports you there on nights when you decide to go there. So there’s no need for an overworld, you just go straight from city to dungeon and back.

At which point another framework starts to make a lot more sense, that of the Roguelike game. There’s just one dungeon in the game, with hundreds of levels; the levels are even randomly generated, which is a time-honored tradition in that genre. And having a city on the top of the dungeon (or bottom, in this case) isn’t unheard of in that tradition: it was there in one of the earliest Roguelikes that I played, Wizardry, and it was there in the most recent Roguelike that I played, Etrian Odyssey. Note also that, in both of those examples, you couldn’t actually wander around the city to explore it: instead, you could simply select which building to go into, to interact with people. So maybe what we have here is a Roguelike game, albeit one with an unusually well-developed city part of the game?

That’s not the most comfortable fit either, though. I said that the game has one dungeon, Tartarus; but, every month, you have a boss fight, and those boss fights don’t happen in Tartarus. Instead, they happen in some other part of the city, and it’s never a part that’s accessible during the normal wandering around during the day. And there’s typically a bit (though not a lot) of wandering around and fighting minor enemies before you get to the boss. So maybe those monthly encounters are the dungeons (albeit pleasantly compressed ones), and Tartarus is the overworld (albeit a reflexive one that only leads back to the same city)?

Ultimately, I don’t think either of these is a perfect fit, or even a particularly good one: the game has noticeable Roguelike aspects, and noticeable traditional JRPG layout aspects, but it’s neither one nor the other, nor even a hybrid of the two. It may be a hybrid of the two plus the dating sim; that is, for better or for worse, a genre that I haven’t played very much, but the rhythms of the game remind me as much of Harvest Moon as of any other game that I’ve played.

Another way in which it interestingly differs from traditional JRPGs: the level-up system. Traditional JRPGs have a dual level-up structure: you level up your personal stats, you level up your equipment. Both of those are present here, but there are others as well: you acquire new Personas, you level up your personal non-combat-related stats. (Nice to be able to become a charismatic badass genius; haven’t quite reached that in real life, alas.) And there are two further leveling up systems around Personas: you can level up individual Personas, and you can also level up your ability to fuse new Personas.

Which sounds like a lot: having typed that paragraph, I’m kind of amazed that the perfectionist part of my brain didn’t freeze up when confronted with all of this. As near as I can remember, though, I only started to do that right at the beginning (wait, fusing Personas means I’ll lose them? How will I ever get another Orpheus?), but I quickly got over it.

In fact, in retrospect, the game’s pacing and uncovering of its rules was kind of remarkable. At the start of the game, I was treating it like a normal JRPG: following the plot, going where I was supposed to be going, fighting pretty often. Then the social links started to appear; I only had access to a few, so I followed those along, and managed to max out one of them fairly quickly. (The Old Couple in the used bookstore.) As traditional in a JRPG, more characters started to appear, and the game occasionally gave me interludes outside of the main city; at about this time, I started getting annoyed with the dungeon crawling and with having to level up an increasingly large cast of characters. A bit of experimenting showed that I could do fine only going into Tartarus four times a month (and perhaps could have done okay with even fewer than that), though, which wasn’t too bad.

And then more social links appeared, and I started working to more actively increase my social stats. And I realized that some of the social links, the girlfriend ones, were special, so I successfully wooed Chihiro. By which point I felt that I understood the mechanisms of the game fairly well, but I was enjoying the story (not so much the main plot as the unfolding of new social links) that I could happily enough power my way through to the end, maxing out most of the social links along the way; in particular, I finished Mitsuru’s social link on, if I’m remembering correctly, the next-to-last day.

So yeah, it’s 70 hours long, and I’m not super-eager to play another game of that length; I won’t swear that I’ll never play Persona 4, but I’ve got a lot of other games I’d rather play first. But it’s a surprisingly pleasant 70 hours: it kept me going throughout, and even though the mechanics felt routine enough after around the halfway point, the social links (Bebe!) kept me going enough that I was happy to put in a couple of hours most weeknights and more than that on weekends. (Fortunately, I didn’t mind Miranda watching most of the game.) In fact, despite its length, it could have been a lot more bloated: you could have had to walk everywhere, you could have had to sit through irrelevant classroom events, you could have had to manually control all the fighting. (I imagine I would have found it a lot worse if I’d played it on a level other than Easy, and you would have been treated to a rant about instant-kill attacks coupled with lack of access to save points.)

Having said that: 70 hours? And thanking a game for not requiring me to manually control the fighting is pretty backwards: if the fighting is generally straightforward enough that I want the computer to do it for me, maybe the game should do me a favor and not have me fight as much at all? Maybe the game would have been stronger with Tartarus entirely removed, just restricting the fighting to the boss battles? (On which note I should really play the new Prince of Persia, shouldn’t I?) But, actually, the mechanics of fighting with your Personas was kind of fun, and you need to be trained in that a bit before getting dumped into the boss battles. And fusing Personas has its charms, though (for me) not as much as the game expected. Maybe a shorter Tartarus?

I liked the social links, but there were a lot of them; maybe that could have been toned down? Though I wouldn’t want to have them thrown away, either, that’s good content, and I would have been frustrated if I couldn’t have made it all the way through most of them. I’m almost wondering if I wouldn’t prefer a game that focused exclusively on the stories in the social links, and that was a lot shorter, designed in such a way (with more connections between the different links and between the links and the main plot) that you really wanted to play it multiple times?

Hard to say. That would be a different game, and really would be more dating simish instead of an RPG; after playing through this one, I’d be curious to play a good game like that (any recommendations?), but I don’t know if I’d like it as much. There are so many different things thrown into Persona‘s melting pot; I’m loathe to make judgments about how the game would have turned out if that mixture had been different, had been more concentrated or purer.

Some interesting Persona 3 web pages:

• Leigh Alexander on Building a better RPG and the game’s protagonist; she wrote several more pieces on the game, so search her blog if you’re interested.
• Philip Miner on the gun, which I seem to have completely avoided mentioning somehow; see also Penny Arcade’s take on that subject.
• Unangbangkay had a two-part series on the tarot imagery. Gee, I didn’t talk about that either, did I? Like I said, there’s a lot of stuff crammed into the game.
• Two imaginings of thoughts of the characters. (They use ‘Minato’ as the name of the protagonist, by the way.)
• The second half of this Brainy Gamer Podcast episode is all about the game.

My iPod Nano has served me well over the last few years (though I could live without its habit of freezing on me after syncing), but it seems to be reaching the end of its life span. The menu button had been slightly iffy for a while, but not enough to be a real annoyance; over the last few weeks, however, the center button has stopped working reliably, and that’s much more of a pain. So I think it’s time to look for a replacement; I’ve spent enough money this month that I’ll hold off for now, but I see a visit to the Apple store in my future next month.

Which raises the question: which model do I want? There are a lot of things I like about the Nano, but I’m getting more drawn to the Touch. Twitter is a big draw here—it’s very unfortunate that, for example, when I’m playing a game and Liesl or Miranda is using the laptop, I can’t tweet my brilliant insights. And it seems to be exploding as a game platform: the latest First Wall Rebate episode was devoted to the game Ruben & Lullaby for the platform, for example, and while I’m not sure whether or not I want to play that specific game, I definitely want to have access to a platform where games like that exist.

Given that, the only reason for me to get a Nano over a Touch would be if the Touch were difficult to carry everywhere with me: it has to live in my pocket, or in my hand if I’m out jogging. I tried on a colleague’s iPhone for size, though, and I’m pretty confident that the iPod Touch will be sufficiently portable for my needs.

Storage is another question. My last Nano was 8GB, which was fine; then again, storage usage always increases over time, and I’ll need to leave room for applications. So I’ll certainly want at least 16GB; at first, I was thinking that 32GB would be an even better idea, but, browsing through the app store, I was unable to find any apps that took up more than 100MB of space, and most of them were a tenth or even a hundredth that size. Given that, a 16GB model should have room to spare even if I throw in a hundred apps on top o my current music/podcast collection (which is very unlikely), and I don’t envision myself watching movies on it, so there doesn’t seem to be much reason to go with 32GB.

Anything else I should worry about? I’m still not sure what to do about cases, or indeed whether to get one at all: I’m not too worried about it getting scratched, since it wouldn’t live in the same pocket as my keys or anything else metal, but a colleague pointed out that I might need to worry about dropping it. So maybe I’ll get a case; I haven’t made up my mind one way or another, and am open to recommendations on the subject.

Anything else I’m missing? I’ll post again asking for application recommendations once I actually have it, but feel free to stick in suggestions for that here, too.

There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book:

Can you be too organized? Not in the pristine sense of how I define the word. If things aren’t where they should be, and accessible as you need them, you’re simply not organized enough. If you have created structural systems that are unduly complicated and that cause you to have difficulty in accessing what’s required, when it’s required, you are also disorganized. (Making It All Work, p. 133.)

I was going through my drawers and ran across some old passports; I thought that people who know what I look like now might find them amusing.

My passport photos from 1981 and 1988:

It’s a good thing that that last passport was only valid for five years, because towards the end of traveling on it, I didn’t look anything like that picture: I had glasses again, long hair, and a beard, though the beard perhaps wasn’t quite as bushy as it is now. For reference, here’s a 2006 picture of me that’s still pretty accurate. (It’s not a passport photo, passports have security measures that mean that they don’t scan well these days.)

I’m planning to go to the Game Developer’s Conference next month, if for no other reason than to hang out with some other bloggers; the early registration deadline is approaching, so I’m trying to figure out what the best option is. Possibilities I’m considering:

• Don’t actually attend at all: just drive up on Thursday evening to have dinner with people.
• The Expo Pass: I’d be able to go for some or all of Wednesday-Friday, but wouldn’t have access to most of the talks.
• The Main Conference Pass: Full access Wednesday-Friday, including lots of talks but not the summits / tutorials on Monday and Tuesday.
• The All Access Pass: No end of options from Monday-Friday.

Advice, especially from those who have been there before? If any of you are planning to attend, which days are you planning to be there?

(And no, I’m not a game developer. I don’t have any immediate plans to become one—I like my current job—but I’m somewhat curious about what the field is like on the inside as well as the outside.)

I finished Spore quite some time ago, but I’ve been putting off blogging about it: it’s a hard game for me to wrap my brain around. Still, a month is long enough to procrastinate, so I suppose I should say something now.

I’ll begin from the point of view of a traditional video game player playing a traditional video game: it’s a sequence of five tangentially-related stages, each essentially an independent game. The first four are short versions of games we’ve seen before; one slightly notable aspect of those stages is that, in each of them, you have a choice between a peaceful strategy and a violent strategy. I chose the peaceful strategy in all the stages, which worked fine; this was a pleasant change of pace, since (for example) each new iteration of Civilization promises that this time I’ll be able to conquer the world through the magnetic force of my personality, yet I always have to resort to sending tanks all over the continent. So I was glad to see a game where a peaceful strategy actually works! Still, ultimately, it’s four rather slight games with only tenuous links between them.

The fifth stage, Space, is quite a bit more satisfying, again from a traditional gamer point of view. You start on a planet in the middle of an entire galaxy; you explore other star systems, colonize planets, meet with other species, do lots of trading (with your colonies and other species), do lots of missions (for your colonies or other species’ colonies), look for artifacts, build up your economic production, fight against pirates or other species, and so forth. I had quite a lot of fun at first: as I’ve mentioned before, I’m happy to do random missions, and the initial missions in the Space stage did a fine job of introducing me to the range of gameplay options. (A much much larger range in this stage than in the others.) There was a well-done medal system to help track my progress and give me goals (and unlockable tools) to strive for, too.

After a while, though, it started getting boring. I was doing the same things over and over again; my home world had run out of missions other than “start a war”, and other worlds were sending me on fairly repetitive quests; and it seemed like every time I started doing something, I got called to one planet or another to save it from pirate attacks. At about that time, I ran into a Vorpal Bunny Ranch post which crystallized some of those problems: in particular, why did I have to fight so frequently in this stage when I’d been able to avoid it in the other stages?

With that in mind, I decided to give the game one last try; I also decided that, since I was getting bored with the missions but I still thought the idea of exploring an entire galaxy was pretty neat, that I’d just do the latter. I’d been told that I should try to figure out what was going on in the center of the galaxy, so I took my ship and started heading in that direction.

And that turned out to be quite a bit more fun. The game stopped bothering me with crises, letting me make it a good 50 star systems or so along before I got called back for some emergency. I ran into dozens of new races, found several artifacts, found my first special galactic formations, and in general had a pleasant time. And my ship had the “return ticket” special ability; this meant that, when an emergency came up, I could immediately zap back to my home world.

That was enough to jolt me out of my lethargy with the game. I went on several more journeys like that, in the process earning the ability to fly through wormholes so I could make it even farther down into the galaxy. This trip also got me more interested in commerce, so when I got tired of exploration (the 500th planet you see really isn’t that different from the 400th), I switched over to figuring out how to make more money, including terraforming planets to build colonies (which I hadn’t done much at all before). This increased range of potential activities kept me happy for a few more weekends, and by the time I was getting bored with that, I was close enough to maxing out my ship that I just needed one afternoon’s work to buff it up enough to make it to the center of the galaxy.

The center of the galaxy was pretty unsatisfying, actually, but I’d been warned so I wasn’t surprised. Even with that bad taste in my mouth, I’d had enough pleasant times in the Space stage to be reasonably pleased with the game, though it was clearly time for me to move on.

Which is all well and dandy, but it doesn’t add up to a reason for such procrastination on blogging about it. (The fact that I had to devote most of my spare time to Persona 3 in order to finish that game in less than half a year had something to do with my procrastination, of course.) So far, I’ve come up with two answers for the question of why the above explanation wasn’t enough for me.

The first answer: the above is how I play Spore as a video game. Miranda, however, has spent as much time with the game as I have, and her experiences were quite different. She made it through the first two stages, but I don’t believe she’s finished the third stage; what my description above leaves out is all the creators that the game has, and that’s where she’s spent most of her time.

My best guess is that Spore shows itself off at its best when seen not as a video game but as a video toy. While there is a reasonable amount of traditional gameplay in the game, there are also ten or so creators, which you can use to create an extremely wide range of creatures, buildings, and vehicles. Just playing through the Space stage of the game, I was extremely impressed by the huge variety of alien species, buildings, vehicles that I encountered; and if you’re inclined to mess around with that sort of thing, you can spend hour after hour creating new material for the game. (The creature creator is particularly impressive, but all the creators are quite strong.) For better or for worse, I wasn’t inclined to do so: I enjoyed using the creators when I was forced to do so to advance at various stages of the games, but it was always a side show for me, I never dipped into them when I didn’t have to do so. For all I know, though, I would have enjoyed the game more had I spent more time in the creators: in particular the creators for the early stages gave you quite a bit more options and decisions to make than the actual gameplay in those stages did.

The second reason why the game is still sticking in my head is what the creator stages imply. Take the creature creator as an example: while of course the game designers put in huge amounts of work in creating the basic framework and in creating the various body parts, once that work is done, people could literally create millions more creatures themselves, creatures of extremely high quality. And these creatures aren’t just 3-D statues: they can walk, they can dance, they can brandish implements, baby creatures can imitate adult creatures in a quite charming fashion.

A lot of the coverage of this aspect of the game has focused on the user-generated content side, on how the game’s creators can leverage staggering amounts of content produced by the community. Which is all well and good, but I’m at least as interested in what the game allows professional content creators to do. I’ve touched on this before: basically, if you refine your content creation tools to the extent that end users can produce the same levels that the game’s creators can produce, then even the game’s creators become much more productive; once you start taking those same tools and sharing them across games, licensing them to third parties, the potential productivity gains are enormous.

In this particular instance, I assume that’s all theoretical benefit rather than actual benefit, though who knows what EA has in mind. But I’m hoping that tools like this will evolve and move into the mainstream: just as now, if you want to draw a collection of polygons on screen, you can offload that work to pre-existing software and hardware, just as programmers don’t have to always rewrite their physics models from scratch, so too I’m hoping that, in the future, if you want to populate a world with items, with creatures, you’ll be able to do so with tools like those in Spore. I’m hoping that, a decade from now, somebody with the ambition to create another Shenmue won’t have to spend 70 million dollars to do so: that a single person will be able to, say, create the character models for such game in a couple of weeks of hard work using evolved versions of these tools (or the various other avatar creation tools out there); that they’ll be able to create the environments through a combination of procedural city generation, buildings chosen from a communally developed repository, and hand-crafting key areas; that they’ll be able to leverage interaction engines to generate much of the action in the street scenes, while still being able to script key interactions by hand.

I don’t want to equate pretty / more realistic / bigger with better. But I will say that, all other things being equal, simpler is better: there’s rarely anything to be won by drawing every single pixel through hand-crafted assembly code. I want game authors to be able to put their creative thinking where it really matters: if the details of internal anatomy is important to your game, then using an evolved version of Spore‘s creature creator isn’t a good idea, but if not, then why not leverage it? Conveying your vision for what a game should be is hard enough; the more authors can focus on that vision, the richer we all are.

• This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects.
• The examples just get funnier and funnier.
• Very interesting take on GlaDOS.
• I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had four basic tastes.
• The Big Picture is alway great, but these ones are just amazing.
• The jParallax demonstration is way cool. (Via Burningbird.)

Our friend Scott came over last night, and we spent the evening playing Rock Band 2; Miranda was, unfortunately, away at an overnight field trip, so we didn’t have a full band, but we did at least throw drums into the RB2 mix for the first time.

Lots of fun was had by all. Scott continued to do a quite respectable job on the drums—I think this was only his second time playing them, but he handled Normal with no problems and started dipping into Hard. I did find that the drums interfered with my guitar playing occasionally during the tricky bits, though: they’re pretty loud, and sometimes the rhythm of his playing interfered with the rhythm of my playing. Maybe we should have solved that by turning up the volume; eventually I found another solution, namely picking up the drum sticks myself and letting Scott play guitar. Which had both good and bad aspects: good in that my skills hadn’t slipped, I was still able to do most of the songs on Hard (and tried a few easy ones on Expert), but bad in that there remain significant holes in the basic mechanics of my drum playing. In particular, I’m definitely doing something wrong with my left hand (my best guess is that I’m double-tapping), because I would fall out of streaks even though everything sounded good to me. (And Scott had given convincing evidence that it’s not a problem with the hardware, since he’d gotten noticeably longer streaks than I’d managed.) Also, my leg started aching after a while, so I’m fairly sure that I need to work on my motion there.

Liesl was doing quite well on the bass, and she started trying out Hard difficulty instead of Normal. Some of the fast songs got to be a bit much for her on that level; I’m sure she’ll get used to it, but I’m also thinking the guitar she was using (the RB1 one) probably has something to do with those problems, because I know I can’t play fast songs on that guitar anywhere near as well as I can on the GH3 guitar. Maybe I’ll go and buy a RB2 guitar one of these days? If it works well, I could use it myself and let Liesl use the GH3 guitar, since I would like to have a guitar that I can stand playing that has the solo buttons on it. Hmm, looking at the Amazon page for the guitar, it claims that they’ve improved the overdrive detection; I notice Liesl sometimes has difficulty activating that, so maybe that would be another reason to change guitars.

I am certainly looking forward to reprising the experience, hopefully with Miranda included. Playing the drums wasn’t quite enough of a nudge to knock me off of the guitar before I’ve gone rather farther with it, but it was a welcome reminder of how much fun the drums can be. Including how infuriating they can be: my brain (or leg) freezes up in situations where I wouldn’t break a sweat on the guitar, so I imagine there are several quite welcome feelings of accomplishment awaiting me as I make it past various skill plateaus.

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original):

If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, in the other contamination by civilization: the barbarian sees barbarians everywhere, the civilized being sees civilized beings everywhere. According to these two figures of speech, the danger changes meaning: whereas (external) barbarians threaten (internal) barbarians with destruction, (external) civilized beings threaten (internal) civilized beings with new requirements. We might thus say about the power to follow up that it “defends civilization,” provided that we no longer define civilization, as modernism did, by a position on the ladder of progress (there is no more ladder, and no more progress), but instead by the civility with which a collective allows itself to be disturbed by those whom it has nevertheless explicitly rejected.

I like the linking of civilization with (externally-directed) civility there.

A note about the asterisk: Latour uses various words/phrases in unusual ways in this book, and always marks them with asterisks. Mostly I leave the asterisks out when quoting, but I decided to leave that one in here, lest you get misled by what he means by “enemy”. In the context of this book, an enemy is somebody whom you have decided that, for the time being, isn’t part of your group, but there’s no notion of either hostility or a permanent split here: enemies are respected, and your enemy today may well be your friend tomorrow. Fans of iterative development may think of enemies as customer requests that you’ve decided not to implement in this iteration: that doesn’t mean that they’re bad or unreasonable or anything, and you may well implement them next iteration, you just haven’t done so yet.

What the heck, I’ll throw in the prior paragraph, too:

Depending on the strength of the power to follow up, a given collective will thus find itself interated into two quite different regimes: it will be defined either as a fortress under assault by barbarians, or else as a collective surrounded by excluded entities that are on the path toward appeal. In the first case, the enemies will have shifted into insignificance, into inarticulateness, and will have become barbarians in the etymological sense, producing inaudible gibberish; in the second case, the enemies will be combated as future allies and will remain capable of worrying the entire collective with the mere thought of their provisional exclusion. There are no barbarians other than those who believe they have definitively found the words to define themselves The logos is not a clear and distinct speech that would be opposed to the incomprehensible babblings of the others, but the speech impediment* that is catching its breath, starting over—in other words, that is seeking its words through a trial.

And with speech impediments come speech prostheses; to go back to our agile analogy above, an acceptance test might be an example of a speech prosthesis that is a key tool in turning an “enemy” feature request into a civilized member of the collective.

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original):

As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins to profit differently from the passage of time. Unlike the other forms of historicity that preceded it, it can confide the questions it has been unable to answer today to the restarting, tomorrow, of the process of composition. It need not claim that the things it does not know at time t are nonexistent, irrational, and definitively outdated, but only that they are provisionally excluded beings on the path toward appeal, and that it will find these beings in any event on its way to t + 1, since it will never be rid of them. In other words, it no longer uses any of the three labels that the moderns have always used up to now to characterize their development: the struggle against archaism, the front of modernization, the utopia of a radiant future. It is required to devote itself to a meticulous triage of the possible worlds, of the cosmograms, always to be begun anew. Irreversibility has changed direction: it no longer finds itself in the abolished past, but in the future to be recommenced.

Let us retain from the sciences the word “experiment,” to characterize the movement through which every collective passes in this way from a past state to a future state, from good sense to common sense. Public life has striven up to now to imitate Science and to await the salvation of reason: Why would it not try to imitate the sciences a bit by borrowing the experimentation that is incontestably their greatest invention? An experiment, as etymology attests rather well, consists in “passing through” a trial and “coming out of it” in order to draw its lessons. It thus offers an intermediary between knowledge and ignorance. It defines itself not by the knowledge that is available at the start, but by the quality of the learning curve that has made it possible to pass through a trial and to know a little more about it. Experiments, as any researcher worthy of the name knows quite well, are difficult, uncertain, risky, and never allow recourse to reliable witnesses who would be available from a catalog, as it were. They can fail; they are difficult to reproduce; they depend on instruments. A bad experiment is not one that fails, but one from which the researcher has drawn no lesson that will help prepare the next experiment. A good experiment is not one that offers some definitive knowledge, but one that has allowed the researcher to trace the critical path along which it will be necessary to pass so that the following iteration will not be carried out in vain.

I’d been playing Rock Band with Miranda (my daughter) since we got it, but Liesl (my wife) had been resisting. She was clearly somewhat interested in the game—she would sometimes get caught singing along in the background—but somehow we never managed to pull her in.

But I kept asking; I tried not to be annoying about it, but when I felt like playing it, I would ask both Liesl and Miranda if either of them felt like joining in before jumping in solo. And finally, last week, Liesl accepted an invitation.

I kind of expected her to start with vocals, because of the aforementioned singing, but she decided to play bass instead. She’s been doing quite a solid job, too, quickly starting to earn bass grooves.

And, just a few days later, she seems quite solidly hooked: I’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band 2 over the last week, but I’ve almost never had to play alone, and as often as not she’s the one inviting me to play instead of the other way around. In fact, her band has caught up to Miranda’s band already: all of North America is open to us, and while we haven’t yet gotten a plane with her band, that battle has been available for some time, she just wants to explore some of the other songs that are available before diving into that.

Yesterday, for the first time, all three of us played together; we just need a drummer and we’ll have a full band! (Fortunately, our friend Scott was doing a decent job on the drums when he tried out the game over Thanksgiving.) We all had a good time, and the game is even more fun with three people than it is with two. A little bit safer, too: all of us were playing at difficulty levels where occasionally we’d hit a song that was a bit beyond one of us, but with two other people to save us, we didn’t have to worry about it.

The huge amount of content is finally starting to hit home, too: I really do think that it’s beating down my completionist tendencies, even without my having dipped into the DLC options. Everywhere we turn, there are new songs to play; and, as often as not, when given random songs, old friends from the first game show up. (Or enemies: I like Brainpower a lot, but the triplets kill me most of the time! Good thing I’m playing with a couple of my closest friends to save me…) These days, it feels it more like my iPod on shuffle mode: everywhere I turn, I’ll be listening to something different, and frequently something I haven’t heard in a while.

I’ve stuck with guitar ever since I started on the second game; I really should give the other instruments a try again. (I did do the first bass challenge; I was surprised how much fun bass was, and also learned that switching to up strokes is a reasonable way to give my hand a break during songs with a lot of fast notes.) Probably not just yet, though: I want to get farther both with Liesl’s band and with the challenges before switching instruments.

And I should try it online. Maybe we can do it for the next VGHVI play session, once Roger’s Xbox gets fixed?

This is one of Miranda’s favorites, and a couple of her classmates have started coveting her leftovers; at the request of one of those classmates’ mothers, here it is. (It’s really easy, too!) From the excellent Elephant Walk Cookbook.

The original recipe says that boneless sirloin is also acceptable, but I prefer flank. If you don’t have mushroom soy sauce around, don’t sweat it, regular will do fine. Do get a decent kind of lettuce, though: I doubt this would work well with iceberg.

Loc Lac, from The Elephant Walk Cookbook

Ingredients:

7 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons mushroom soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons black pepper
1 1/2 pounds flank steak, cut into 1 1/2 inch squares
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 head green leaf lettuce, separated into leaves, washed and drained
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon water
A loaf / baguette of good bread

Instructions:

Combine the garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and 1 teaspoon of the black pepper in a bowl. Add the beef and stir to coat. Set aside for 30 minutes.

Heat the oil in a skillet over high heat. Saute the beef until medium-rare, 3-4 minutes.

Combine the lime juice, water, and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper in a small bowl. Slice the bread. Use the lettuce to pick up the beef, use the lime juice mixture as a dipping sauce, use the bread to mop up juices.

The Vintage Game Club is returning from its holiday break; as its fourth game, we’ve chosen Beyond Good & Evil. This is the first game that we’ve chosen that I’ve actually played all the way through; I’m curious to see what the experience of replaying a game in company will be.

I’m also curious about the game for another reason: while I enjoyed the game, I wasn’t particularly blown away by it: it was a well-made Zelda clone, but didn’t particularly excite me beyond that. So I’d like to see where all the love for the game comes from: many people speak very highly of it, and I’m
hoping that, with them to guide me along, I’ll appreciate it more this time.

Please join in if you’re at all curious; I think this will be a good VGC game to start with, since it’s neither excessively long nor excessively frustrating. And even if I’m not yet a big fan of the game, it has an interesting enough story and setting. And it was published on all of the consoles of the previous generation, as well as on PC, so it should be widely available.

I was just looking over at my shelf of games; here are the non-downloadable games I currently own for the Wii:

• Super Mario Galaxy
• Animal Crossing
• Boom Blox
• Endless Ocean
• Rayman Raving Rabbids
• Super Smash Bros
• No More Heroes
• Super Paper Mario
• Wii Sports
• Wii Play
• Zack & Wiki
• Metroid Prime 3
• Zelda
• Super Monkey Ball
• Elebits

Which struck me for a couple reasons. For one, I didn’t realize I had that many Wii games: like most traditional gamers, a lot of Wii games aren’t really aimed at me, but I seem to buy (and usually quite enjoy) a Wii game about every other month. (Full disclosure, I haven’t played Endless Ocean—I bought it for Miranda, though I plan to get around to it myself—and I gave up on Super Monkey Ball very quickly, far preferring the first iteration of the series.)

But the real surprise was how widespread those games are. There are 15 games on that list, but they’re all in fairly different genres. I don’t think that’s happened to me with any other console: I’ll have multiple FPSes, or multiple RPGs, or multiple platformers, or multiple racing games, or something. The closest you get to that here is Boom Blox, Rayman, Wii Play, and Super Monkey Ball, which all have multiplayer minigame aspects, but to me those games are all noticeably separated in the design space from each other. Hmm, and Elebits and Metroid are both first-person games, but different from both a traditional FPS and from each other.

Not sure what to make of this. I think that part of what’s going on is that publishers other than Nintendo are only taking baby steps on the platform (except perhaps for minigames, witness the end of the previous paragraph), and Nintendo isn’t repeating itself on the console yet. And I’m sure a lot of what’s going on is just coincidence, just a fluke of my current tastes.

One meme that’s been floating around in my twitter feed recently (and elsewhere, e.g. it got mentioned in the holiday Confab): there are a lot of us who like being part of a conversation about video games, who like talking with others about whatever game we’re just playing or just finished. But we don’t manage to do this nearly as often as we like, and to the extent that we do manage this, it drives us to unhealthy behavior. So: what can we do about this? Heck, I’ll be selfish: what can I do to improve the quality of my life in this regard?

I’ve mentioned before that I find the fact that many game web sites are focused on new or, still worse, unreleased games to be actively harmful. And after writing that post, I’ve altered my behavior accordingly: I visit mainstream game websites much less than I did before (and, to the extent that I visit them, I skim rather than read), I spend much less time thinking about unreleased games, and I try to entirely avoid blogging/twittering about unreleased games. The effects have been all to the good: I feel less hype-driven, I’ve freed up a noticeable amount of time, and I’ve found much more satisfying ways to use that time. (Reading more thoughtful video game blogs, playing games instead of reading about them, or doing stuff that’s completely unrelated to video games!) So I now consider the issue of excess discussion of unreleased games to be a solved problem: such discussion is clearly unhealthy, nobody’s forcing me to pay attention to it, and once I open my eyes a bit, enough of the world agrees with me to keep me quite busy reading the interesting things they have to say. It wouldn’t surprise me if this obsession with the future will wane even on mainstream sites as the medium matures: coverage of other art forms isn’t, as far as I can tell, nearly as obsessed with works that don’t actually exist yet.

Discussion of newly released games is a harder problem, though. Part of what’s in play here is the urge to follow shiny new objects; I don’t consider that particularly healthy, either, and while I do have that tendency, I have a question I can ask myself that helps me avoid its excesses. But that’s not all that’s going on: we all want to be part of a community, part of a conversation. And one difference that video games have from books: the multiplayer aspect means that we all want to play together, too! And, unfortunately, by far the easiest way to synchronize on that is to all play the newest games.

Which I do at times, though less frequently than I once did. But it has real negative consequences: being caught up in the hype means we don’t chew our food, we don’t maintain a critical distance.

So: what do do about it? Part of the solution is, I think, to come up with other mechanisms for synchronizing gameplay, mechanisms that allow us to play older games and have a bit more wiggle room than release dates allow. On the solo game side, that’s how the Vintage Game Club came to be. On the multiplayer side, I’ve enjoyed the VGHVI play sessions, though they have yet to catch on in a big way. (Multiple dying Xboxes haven’t helped; timezone and platform differences also contributed. I didn’t realize that anybody owned Rock Band 2 on the PS3!)

But I’m coming to realize that, as much as I like synchronized playthrough and discussions, it’s missing something important. Compare this to other media: I never have the feeling that I can’t talk to other people about the books or movies or music that I’m interested in. And, while the multiplayer aspect of games isn’t particularly relevant to those media (with the potential exception of music), the “synchronized playthrough” aspect is; yet, while I’m aware that book clubs exist, I’ve never joined one, and have no particular desire to do so. (Though, to be fair, I very much enjoyed reading math books together with my fellow grad students.)

Basically, while I get excited whenever I find that somebody else cares about a book or author that I also care about, I don’t feel any particular need for us to be reading the same book at the same time. In fact, it can be almost more fun to come across a discussion written years ago about one of my favorite books! And there’s certainly no end of discussion of my favorite games out there, even discussion of those games by my favorite game bloggers; I just need to find it, and find it at the right time. (When I’m playing the game in question, when I’ve just finished the game in question and am about to blog on the topic.)

My first experiment with this was in my post on No More Heroes. I asked on twitter for recommendations of interesting reading on the game; Matthew Gallant was kind enough to get me started, and clicking through links led me to a list of references that Dan Bruno had gathered.

And reading those links was tons of fun! I’m tentatively planning to do this from now on in my posts of final thoughts of games: I enjoyed the reading, and some other people seem to have found the collection of links that I came up with to be a good idea. (And, as I said above, I sure was glad that Dan had done that before I thought of it!)

The nice thing about this solution is that I can implement it myself. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it when other people point me at interesting discussions, but I should be able to dig up some posts myself in a pinch. In particular, searching within Google Reader should help a lot, especially with the aid of judicious tagging of feeds.

Having said that, though, I’ll encourage other people to do the same: if you’re writing about a game, consider sticking a list of links in there somewhere, even if those links don’t contain thoughts that you’re responding to directly. If somebody was interested in doing this in a more centralized matter, whether via a simple blog aggregator (Planet Brainysphere?), a wiki, a voting mechanism, or just a comprehensive hand-edited website, I’d be curious about that, too. But I’m not sure that’s necessary, or even particularly useful: a bunch of uncoordinated individual contributions should work just fine.

I am optimistic. The last year was a great one for gaming blogs; I fully expect next year to be much better.

Some experiences from my recent reading:

• My recent Christopher Alexander reading made me wonder: what are the centers in this blog? Am I nurturing them properly?
• Seth Godin’s Tribes got me thinking: I see other bloggers out there leading tribes, and I quite enjoy being part of one of them. To what extent, however, do I want to try to actually lead one?
• The theme of Goldratt’s The Choice is that “any real life situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is actually, once understood, embarrassingly simple.” (p. 9) Is he right? How should I apply that to my life?

All somewhat different points, but all suggesting that I should consider paying a bit more attention to unity than I have in the past. In fact, sometimes I marvel at the fact that anybody reads this blog at all: I think most people come here because they’ve encountered me in some sort of topic-specific forum, but then they’re immediately confronted by a lot of other posts on completely different topics.

Let’s start with the first point: just what are the centers of this blog? There are a bunch of categories over there on the right side; I don’t think they give a particularly accurate idea of what the blog is about, though. Off the top of my head, I’m probably focusing on three areas right now: video games, agile (or lean), and a category which I’ll tentatively label “personal improvement” (of which this post is an example). In the past, there were some number of non-agile-specific programming posts on this blog, but I don’t think that’s been a big focus of this blog for the last year or so.

At least that’s what I think off the top of my head – does it match reality? Looking at my front page as I write this, my previous 20 posts contain: 11 on games, 3 on agile, 1 on improvement, 3 other/miscellaneous, and 2 from AYE that could either go in agile or improvement. So: right now, I’m blogging a lot about video games, no big surprise, but some on those other areas as well. And going through a few more pages of my history gives a fairly similar picture.

Looking at the categories I’m currently using, there are several areas there that don’t fall into any of those three buckets; none of them cry out to be included as a possible fourth bucket, however, with the possible exception of computers/programming. One other thing I notice when looking at the list of categories: I don’t have a category for personal improvement. I should probably fix that, rather than labeling those posts as “General”. (Or maybe get rid of categories entirely: do they serve any useful purpose?)

(Another random observation: I get the feeling, though it’s not particularly backed up by evidence, that many of my readers actually find my personal improvement posts the most interesting, or at least the ones that are most likely to lead to comments. Not sure what to make of that.)

In some sense, actually, I’m tempted to say that this blog has two themes instead of three. There’s a straightforward enough chain computers/programming/agile/lean; to me, though, agile and lean are about figuring how to work better as much as about a particular set of approaches, and so I’m comfortable in sticking “personal improvement” at the end of that chain. (See e.g. applications of lean to buying books or to my driving habits.) So perhaps, in some sense, that chain is a single theme, though the two ends are quite distant from each other.

I would be hard-pressed, however, to extend that chain to include video games: it’s not a coincidence that I like both computers and video games, but I don’t think the computer posts on this blog are in any significant way like the video game posts on this blog. Hmm, maybe I should get a job at some point programming video games? Any interesting Bay Area game companies that are doing agile? (Note to coworkers: no, this is NOT a sign that I’m about to quit my current job, don’t worry!)

There is another theme that includes both part of the above chain and video games, however, though it’s a theme that doesn’t come out particularly strongly in the blog: it includes the well-crafted code aspects of agile as well as video games, music, food, (fiction) books. It’s something about beauty, or craft, or art: I’m not sure how to name the concept that’s lurking behind it.

And that concept, in turn, does link to the personal improvement idea at the end of the earlier chain: both parts are about having a rich, satisfying life. Who knows, maybe that’s the theme of this blog, to the extend that there is one? But it’s an extremely personal theme: I wouldn’t expect anybody else who is looking for a way to lead a satisfying life to find my blog particularly useful toward that end. If a few posts happen to give others ideas, that’s great, but I’m sure most won’t. Still, it does give me hope that there’s some kind of underlying coherence waiting to be brought out here. And it does fit in well with the one way in which this blog has been unquestionably effective, in helping me think through whatever matters are on top of my mind, and to do so while bringing together different areas that interest me. (I can at least be confident this blog is the place to go if you want to read posts mixing Shadow of the Colossus with Christopher Alexander!)

Hmm, we seem to have wandered quite far away from the topic of Alexandrian centers in the blog, haven’t we? At first, to be honest, I wasn’t sure that that concept was at all applicable here: one would never raise the question of what the centers are in one’s diary, and this blog has a similar function to a diary for me. (Which raises another possibility: should I come up with another forum for more focused writing?) Still, I’m willing to consider this blog as a living structure, and as such there’s something to be said for thinking about what structures are present within it, whether latent or on the surface.

Not too much more that I want to say about that right now, though I really should spend more time thinking about the smaller centers, not just the larger ones. To move on to the next experience: do I want to lead a tribe? I think that now the answer is clear: I’m happy enough to lead micro-tribes in some contexts, but this blog is far too personally idiosyncratic to serve well in such a vein, unless I somehow manage to come up with a grand synthesis that puts this all together into a compelling package. And I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

So: on to the third point. Should I take Goldratt seriously, and try to find the sincerity inherent in my situation? But what situation? Something about this blog? My life in general? His techniques work best when you have a problem to solve, a situation you’re unhappy with; I suppose the next step if I want to go that route is to identify such a situation, and see if I can construct a current reality tree for it that has some useful suggestions.

Which isn’t a bad idea, and probably would have been a useful way for me to spend a day or two of my holiday break. Not something that I’m up for this evening, though, and this blog post is long enough as is.